Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume V).djvu/321

Rh sorts of compromises—both material and moral. The new had 'begun ill,' the old had lost all power; ignorance jostled up against dishonesty; the whole agrarian organisation was shaken and unstable as quagmire bog, and only one great word, 'freedom,' was wafted like the breath of God over the waters. Patience was needed before all things, and a patience not passive, but active, persistent, not without tact and cunning at times. . . . For Litvinov, in his frame of mind, it was doubly hard. He had but little will to live left in him. . . . Where was he to get the will to labour and take trouble? But a year passed, after it another passed, the third was beginning. The mighty idea was being realised by degrees, was passing into flesh and blood, the young shoot had sprung up from the scattered seed, and its foes, both open and secret, could not stamp it out now. Litvinov himself, though he had ended by giving up the greater part of his land to the peasants on the half-profit system, that 's to say, by returning to the wretched primitive methods, had yet succeeded in doing something; he had restored the factory, set up a tiny farm with five free hired labourers—he had had at different times fully forty—and had paid his principal private debts. . . . And his spirit had gained strength; he had begun to be like the old