Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/98

 quality in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to any one who will wake us up and warm us! . . . He is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people's expense, not like a swindler, but like a child. . . . He never does anything himself precisely, he has no vital force, no blood; but who has the right to say that he has not been of use? that his words have not scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom nature has not denied, as she has to him, powers for action, and the faculty of carrying out their own ideas? . . . I drink to the health of Rudin! I drink to the comrade of my best years, I drink to youth, to its hopes, its endeavours, its faith, and its purity, to all that our hearts beat for at twenty; we have known, and shall know, nothing better than that in life. . . . I drink to that golden time, — to the health of Rudin!"

It is plain that the speaker is something of a Rudin himself.

The next novel, A House of Gentlefolk, is, with the possible exception of Fathers and Children, Turgenev's masterpiece. I know of no novel which gives a richer return for repeated re-readings. As the title implies, this book deals, not with an exciting