How perfect is the form of the novel! Rudin's sudden appearance at Darya Mihailovna's house, from the void, his brief, brilliant scintillation, his disappearance beyond the horizon like a falling star, while the little circle he has quitted returns to its quiet settled round, and is knitted closer, by and by, in two marriages. In the final chapters Turgenev gives a wonderful feeling of the stormy horizon of life in his glimpses of Rudin's restless wanderings, of his pathetic series of failures, of his useless death in a hopeless cause on a Paris barricade. It is now the genius of Turgenev's heart that speaks, the head in absolute unison with the heart. For Turgenev's creative judgment, infinitely just, infinitely tender, is a court of appeal from all hard, worldly arraignments. All that has been shown us of Rudin's Utopianism, of the "something lacking" in his character and outlook is true. But it is not the whole truth. In Lezhnyov's final words, "Rudin has faith, Rudin has honesty. He has enthusiasm, the most precious quality in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable and indifferent and slothful." That is the point. The Rudins, the idealists of the "'forties," were the yeast in the dough of Russian fatalism and the nation's stagnation. For one idealist there were a thousand lethargic, acquiescent minds, clinging to the rock of personal interest, staking nothing, but all subservient to the forces of official despotism or worldly power. In Rudin burned clear the light of humane, generous ideals, of the fire of the love of truth. Most of the intellectual seed he scattered fell by the wayside or was swallowed up in the morass of Russia's social distress and mass impotence. But, in Lezhnyov's words: "I say again, that is not Rudin's fault, and it is his fate--a cruel and unhappy fate--for which we cannot blame him." And when we survey the figures of that gloomy reign of Nicholas, when "a merciless Imperialism repressed the least sign of intellectuality," it was the Rudins who breathed on and passed on that living seed of fire to the younger generation. It is to be remarked that not a line, not a detail in the social picture seems to have faded. The picture by its truth and art is timeless in its plastic grace, like a Tanagra group, or a Velasquez portrait. Nothing, indeed, can be added or taken away from the masterpiece. V "A HOUSE OF GENTLEFOLK" CHAPTER V "A HOUSE OF GENTLEFOLK"