take a bit of sheer description--

    "Pâle comme l'amour, et de pleurs arrosée,
    La nuit aux pieds d'argent descend dans la rosée."

You never find the Russian poet impersonating nature like this, and
creating from objects such as the "yellow bees in the ivy bloom" forms
more real than living man. The objects themselves suffice. Lermontov
sang of disappointed love over and over again, but never did he create
a single image such as--

    "Elle aurait aimé, si l'orgueil
    Pareil à la lampe inutile
    Qu'on allume près d'un cercueil,
    N'eut veillé sur son coeur stérile."

In his descriptive work he is more like Byron; but Byron was far less
romantic and far less imaginative than Lermontov, although he invented
Byronism, and shattered the crumbling walls of the eighteenth century
that surrounded the city of romance, and dallied with romantic themes
in his youth. All his best work, the finest passages of _Childe
Harold_, and the whole of _Don Juan_, were slices of his own life and
observation, _choses vues_; he never created a single character that
was not a reflection of himself; and he never entered into the city
whose walls he had stormed, and where he had planted his flag.

This does not mean that Lermontov is inferior to the Western romantic
poets. It simply means that the Russian poet is--and one might add
the Russian poets are--different. And, indeed, it is this very
difference,--what he did with this peculiar realistic paste in his
composition,--that constitutes his unique excellence. So far from its
being a vice, he made it into his especial virtue. Lermontov
sometimes, in presenting a situation and writing a poem on a fact,
presents that situation and that fact without exaggeration, emphasis,
adornment, imagery, metaphor, or fancy of any kind, in the language of
everyday life, and at the same time he achieves poetry. This was
Wordsworth's ideal, and he fulfilled it.

A case in point is his long poem on the Oprichnik, which has been
mentioned; and some of the most striking examples of this unadorned
and realistic writing are to be found in his lyrics. In the
"Testament," for example, where a wounded officer gives his last
instructions to his friend who is going home on leave--

    "I want to be alone with you,
      A moment quite alone.
    The minutes left to me are few,
      They say I'll soon be gone.
    And you'll be going home on leave,
    Then say ... but why? I do believe
    There's not a soul, who'll greatly care
    To hear about me over there.

    And yet if some one asks you there,
      Let us suppose they do--
    Tell them a bullet hit me here,
      The chest,--and it went through.
    And say I died and for the Tsar,
    And say what fools the doctors are;--
    And that I shook you by the hand,
    And thought about my native land.

    My father and my mother, too!
      They may be dead by now;
    To tell the truth, it wouldn't do
      To grieve them anyhow.
    If one of them is living, say
    I'm bad at writing home, and they
    Have sent us to the front, you see,--
    And that they needn't wait for me.

    We had a neighbour, as you know,
      And you remember I
    And she ... How very long ago
      It is we said good-bye!
    She won't ask after me, nor care,
    But tell her ev'rything, don't spare
    Her empty heart; and let her cry;--
    To her it doesn't signify."

The language is the language of ordinary everyday conversation. Every
word the officer says might have been said by him in ordinary life,
and there is not a note that jars; the speech is the living speech of
conversation without being slang: and the result is a poignant piece
of poetry. Another perhaps still more beautiful and touching example
is the cradle-song which a mother sings to a Cossack baby, in which
again every word has the native savour and homeliness of a Cossack
woman's speech, and every feeling expressed is one that she would have
felt. A third example is "Borodino," an account of the famous battle
told by a veteran, as a veteran would tell it. Lermontov's fishes
never talk like big whales.

All Russian poets have this gift of reality of conception and
simplicity of treatment in a greater or a lesser degree; perhaps none
has it in such a supreme degree as Lermontov. The difference between
Pushkin's style and Lermontov's is that, when you read Pushkin, you
think: "How perfectly and how simply that is said! How in the world
did he do it?" You admire the "magic hand of chance." In reading
Lermontov at his simplest and best, you do not think about the style
at all, you simply respond to what is said, and the style escapes
notice in its absolute appropriateness. Thus, what Matthew Arnold said
about Byron and Wordsworth is true about Lermontov--there are moments
when Nature takes the pen from his hand and writes for him.

In Lermontov there is nothing slovenly; but there is a great deal that
is flat and sullen. But if one reviews the great amount of work he
produced in his short life, one is struck, not by its variety, as in
the case of Pushkin,--it is, on the contrary, limited and monotonous
in subject,--but by his authentic lyrical inspiration, by the
strength, the intensity, the concentration of his genius, the richness
of his imagination, the wealth of his palette, his gorgeous colouring
and the high level of his strong square musical verse. And perhaps
more than by anything else, one is struck by the blend in his nature
and his work which has just been discussed, of romantic imagination
and stern reality, of soaring thought and earthly common-sense, as
though we had before us the temperament of a Thackeray with the wings
of a Shelley. Lermontov is certainly, whichever way you take him, one
of the most astonishing figures, and certainly the greatest purely
lyrical _Erscheinung_ in Russian literature.

With the death of Lermontov in 1841, the springtide of national song
that began in the reign of Alexander I comes to an end; for the only
poet he left behind him did not survive him long. This was his
contemporary KOLTSOV (1809-42), the greatest of Russian folk-poets.
The son of a cattle-dealer, after a fitful and short-lived primary
education at the district school of Voronezh, he adopted his father's
trade, and by a sheer accident a cultivated young man of Moscow came
across him and his verses, and raised funds for their publication.

Koltsov's verse paints peasant life as it is, without any
sentimentality or rhetoric; it is described from the inside, and not
from the outside. This is the great difference between Koltsov and
other popular poets who came later. Moreover, he caught and
reproduced the true _Volkston_ in his lyrics, so that they are
indistinguishable in accent from real folk-poetry. Koltsov sings of
the woods, and the rustling rye, of harvest time and sowing; the song
of the love-sick girl reaping; the lonely grave; the vague dreams and
desires of the peasant's heart. His pictures have the dignity and
truth of Jean François Millet, and his "lyrical cry" is as authentic
as that of Burns. His more literary poems are like Burns' English
poems compared with his work in the Scots. But he died the year after
Lermontov, of consumption, and with his death the curtain was rung
down on the first act of Russian literature. When it was next rung up,
it was on the age of prose.

CHAPTER IV

THE AGE OF PROSE

When the curtain again rose on Russian literature it was on an era of
prose; and the leading protagonist of that era, both by his works of
fiction and his dramatic work, was NICHOLAS GOGOL [1809-52]. It is
true that in the thirties Russia began to produce home-made novels. In
Pushkin's story _The Queen of Spades_, when somebody asks the old
Countess if she wishes to read a Russian novel, she says "A Russian
novel? Are there any?" This stage had been passed; but the novels and
the plays that were produced at this time until the advent of Gogol
have been--deservedly for the greater part--forgotten. And, just as
Lermontov was the successor of Pushkin in the domain of poetry, so in
the domain of satire Gogol was the successor of Griboyedov; and in
creating a national work he was the heir of Pushkin.

Gogol was a Little Russian. He was born in 1809 near Poltava, in the
Cossack country, and was brought up by his grandfather, a Cossack; but
he left the Ukraine and settled in 1829 in St. Petersburg, where he
obtained a place in a Government office. After an unsuccessful attempt
to go on the stage, and a brief career as tutor, he was given a
professorship of History; but he failed here also, and finally turned
to literature. The publication of his first efforts gained him the
acquaintance of the literary men of the day, and he became the friend
of Pushkin, who proved a valuable friend, adviser, and critic, and
urged him to write on the life of the people. He lived in St.
Petersburg from 1829 to 1836; and it was perhaps home-sickness which
inspired him to write his Little Russian sketches--_Evenings on a Farm
on the Dikanka_,--which appeared in 1832, followed by _Mirgorod_, a
second series, in 1834.

Gogol's temperament was romantic. He had a great deal of the dreamer
in him, a touch of the eerie, a delight in the supernatural, an impish
fancy that reminds one sometimes of Hoffmann and sometimes of R. L.
Stevenson, as well as a deep religious vein which was later on to
dominate and oust all his other qualities. But, just as we find in the
Russian poets a curious mixture of romanticism and realism, of
imagination and common-sense, so in Gogol, side by side with his
imaginative gifts, which were great, there is a realism based on
minute observation. In addition to this, and tempering his penetrating
observation, he had a rich streak of humour, a many-sided humour,
ranging from laughter holding both its sides, to a delicate and half
melancholy chuckle, and in his later work to biting irony.

In the very first story of his first book, "The Fair of Sorochinetz,"
we are plunged into an atmosphere that smells of Russia in a way that
no other Russian book has ever yet savoured of the soil. We are
plunged into the South, on a blazing noonday, when the corn is
standing in sheaves and wheat is being sold at the fair; and the fair,
with its noise, its smell and its colour, rises before us as vividly
as Normandy leaps out of the pages of Maupassant, or Scotland from the
pages of Stevenson. And just as Andrew Lang once said that probably
only a Scotsman, and a Lowland Scotsman, could know how true to life
the characters in _Kidnapped_ were, so it is probable that only a
Russian, and indeed a Little Russian, appreciates to the full how true
to life are the people, the talk, and the ambient air in the tales of
Gogol. And then we at once get that hint of the supernatural which
runs like a scarlet thread through all these stories; the rumour that
the _Red Jacket_ has been observed in the fair; and the _Red Jacket_,
so the gossips say, belongs to a little Devil, who being turned out of
Hell as a punishment for some misdemeanour--probably a good
intention--established himself in a neighbouring barn, and from
home-sickness took to drink, and drank away all his substance; so that
he was obliged to pawn his red jacket for a year to a Jew, who sold it
before the year was out, whereupon the buyer, recognizing its unholy
origin, cut it up into bits and threw it away, after which the Devil
appeared in the shape of a pig every year at the fair to find the
pieces. It is on this Red Jacket that the story turns.

In this first volume, the supernatural plays a predominant part
throughout; the stories tell of water-nymphs, the Devil, who steals
the moon, witches, magicians, and men who traffic with the Evil One
and lose their souls. In the second series, _Mirgorod_, realism comes
to the fore in the stories of "The Old-Fashioned Landowners" and "The
Quarrel of the Two Ivans." These two stories contain between them the
sum and epitome of the whole of one side of Gogol's genius, the
realistic side. In the one story, "The Old-Fashioned Landowners," we
get the gentle good humour which tells the charming tale of a South
Russian Philemon and Baucis, their hospitality and kindliness, and the
loneliness of Philemon when Baucis is taken away, told with the art of
La Fontaine, and with many touches that remind one of Dickens. The
other story, "The Quarrel of the Two Ivans," who are bosom friends and
quarrel over nothing, and are, after years, on the verge of making it
up when the mere mention of the word "goose" which caused the quarrel
sets alight to it once more and irrevocably, is in Gogol's richest
farcical vein, with just a touch of melancholy.

And in the same volume, two _nouvelles_, _Tarass Bulba_ and _Viy_, sum
up between them the whole of the other side of Gogol's genius. _Tarass
Bulba_, a short historical novel, with its incomparably vivid picture
of Cossack life, is Gogol's masterpiece in the epic vein. It is as
strong and as direct as a Border ballad. _Viy_, which tells of a
witch, is the most creepy and imaginative of his supernatural stories.

Later, he published two more collections of stories: _Arabesques_
(1834) and _Tales_ (1836). In these, poetry, witches, water-nymphs,
magicians, devils, and epic adventure are all left behind. The element
of the fantastic still subsists, as in the "Portrait," and of the
grotesque, as in the story of the major who loses his nose, which
becomes a separate personality, and wanders about the town. But his
blend of realism and humour comes out strongly in the story of "The
Carriage," and his blend of realism and pathos still more strongly in
the story of "The Overcoat," the story of a minor public servant who
is always shivering and whose dream it is to have a warm overcoat.
After years of privation he saves enough money to buy one, and on the
first day he wears it, it is stolen. He dies of melancholia, and his
ghost haunts the streets. This story is the only begetter of the large
army of pathetic figures of failure that crowd the pages of Russian
literature.

While Gogol had been writing and publishing these tales, he had also
been steadily writing for the stage; but here the great difficulty and
obstacle was the Censorship, which was almost as severe as it was in
England at the end of the reign of Edward VII. But, by a curious
paradox, the play, which you would have expected the Censorship to
forbid before all other plays, _The Revisor_, or _Inspector-General_,
was performed. This was owing to the direct intervention of the
Emperor. _The Revisor_ is the second comic masterpiece of the Russian
stage. The plot was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. The officials of an
obscure country town hear the startling news that a Government
Inspector is arriving incognito to investigate their affairs. A
traveller from St. Petersburg--a fine natural liar--is taken for the
Inspector, plays up to the part, and gets away just before the arrival
of the real Inspector, which is the end of the play. The play is a
satire on the Russian bureaucracy. Almost every single character in it
is dishonest; and the empty-headed, and irrelevant hero, with his
magnificent talent for easy lying, is a masterly creation. The play
at once became a classic, and retains all its vitality and comic force
to-day. There is no play which draws a larger audience on holidays in
St. Petersburg and Moscow.

After the production of _The Revisor_, Gogol left Russia for ever and
settled in Rome. He had in his mind a work of great importance on
which he had already been working for some time. This was his _Dead
Souls_, his most ambitious work, and his masterpiece. It was Pushkin
who gave him the idea of the book. The hero of the book, Chichikov,
conceives a brilliant idea. Every landlord possessed so many serfs,
called "souls." A revision took place every ten years, and the
landlord had to pay for poll-tax on the "souls" who had died during
that period. Nobody looked at the lists between the periods of
revision. Chichikov's idea was to take over the dead souls from the
landlord, who would, of course, be delighted to be rid of the
fictitious property and the real tax, to register his purchases, and
then to mortgage at a bank at St. Petersburg or Moscow, the "souls,"
which he represented as being in some place in the Crimea, and thus
make money enough to buy "souls" of his own. The book tells of the
adventures of Chichikov as he travels over Russia in search of dead
"souls," and is, like Mr. Pickwick's adventures, an Odyssey,
introducing us to every kind and manner of man and woman. The book was
to be divided in three parts. The first part appeared in 1842. Gogol
went on working at the second and third parts until 1852, when he
died. He twice threw the second part of the work into the fire when it
was finished; so that all we possess is the first part, and the second
part printed from an incomplete manuscript. The second part was
certainly finished when he destroyed it, and it is probable that the
third part was sketched. He had intended in the second part to work
out the moral regeneration of Chichikov, and to give to the world his
complete message. Persecuted by a dream he was unable to realize and
an ambition which he was not able to fulfil, Gogol was driven inwards,
and his natural religious feeling grew more intense and made him into
an ascetic and a recluse. This break in the middle of his career is
characteristic of Russia. Tolstoy, of course, furnishes the most
typical example of the same thing. But it is a common Russian
characteristic for men midway in a successful career to turn aside
from it altogether, and seek consolation in the things which are not
of this world.

Gogol's _Dead Souls_ made a deep impression upon educated Russia. It
pleased the enthusiasts for Western Europe by its reality, its
artistic conception and execution, and by its social ideas; and it
pleased the Slavophile Conservatives by its truth to life, and by its
smell of Russia. When the first chapter was read aloud to Pushkin, he
said, when Gogol had finished: "God, what a sad country Russia is!"
And it is certainly true, that amusing as the book is, inexpressibly
comic as so many of the scenes are, Gogol does not flatter his country
or his countrymen; and when Russians read it at the time it appeared,
many must have been tempted to murmur "_doux pays!_"--as they would,
indeed, now, were a writer with the genius of a Gogol to appear and
describe the adventures of a modern Chichikov; for, though
circumstances may be entirely different, although there are no more
"souls" to be bought or sold, Chichikov is still alive--and as Gogol
said, there was probably not one of his readers who after an honest
self-examination, would not wonder if he had not something of
Chichikov in him, and who if he were to meet an acquaintance at that
moment, would not nudge his companion and say: "There goes Chichikov."
"And who and what is Chichikov?" The answer is: "A scoundrel." But
such an entertaining scoundrel, so abject, so shameless, so utterly
devoid of self-respect, such a magnificent liar, so plausible an
impostor, so ingenious a cheat, that he rises from scoundrelism almost
to greatness.

There is, indeed, something of the greatness of Falstaff in this
trafficker of dead "souls." His baseness is almost sublime. He in any
case merits a place in the gallery of humanity's typical and human
rascals, where Falstaff, Tartuffe, Pecksniff, and Count Fosco reign.
He has the great saving merit of being human; nor can he be accused of
hypocrisy. His coachman, Selifan, who got drunk with every "decent
man," is worthy of the creator of Sam Weller. But what distinguishes
Gogol in his _Dead Souls_ from the great satirists of other nations,
and his satire from the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift, for instance, is
that, after laying bare to the bones the rascality of his hero, he
turns round on his audience and tells them that there is no cause for
indignation; Chichikov is only a victim of a ruling passion--gain;
perhaps, indeed, in the chill existence of a Chichikov, there may be
something which will one day cause us to humble ourselves on our knees
and in the dust before the Divine Wisdom. His irony is lined with
indulgence; his sleepless observation is tempered by fundamental
charity. He sees what is mean and common clearer than any one, but he
does not infer from it that life, or mankind, or the world is common
or mean. He infers the opposite. He puts Chichikov no lower morally
than he would put Napoleon, Harpagon, or Don Juan--all of them victims
of a ruling passion, and all of them great by reason of it--for
Chichikov is also great in rascality, just as Harpagon was great in
avarice, and Don Juan great in profligacy. And this large charity
blent with biting irony is again peculiarly Russian.

_Dead Souls_ is a deeper book than any of Gogol's early work. It is
deep in the same way as _Don Quixote_ is deep; and like _Don Quixote_
it makes boys laugh, young men think, and old men weep. Apart from
its philosophy and ideas, _Dead Souls_ had a great influence on
Russian literature as a work of art. Just as Pushkin set Russian
poetry free from the high-flown and the conventional, so did Gogol set
Russian fiction free from the dominion of the grand style. He carried
Pushkin's work--the work which Pushkin had accomplished in verse and
adumbrated in prose--much further; and by depicting ordinary life, and
by writing a novel without any love interest, with a Chichikov for a
hero, he created Russian realism. He described what he saw without
flattery and without exaggeration, but with the masterly touch, the
instinctive economy, the sense of selection of a great artist.

This, at the time it was done, was a revolution. Nobody then would
have dreamed it possible to write a play or a novel without a
love-motive; and just as Pushkin revealed to Russia that there was
such a thing as Russian landscape, Gogol again, going one better,
revealed the fascination, the secret and incomprehensible power that
lay in the flat monotony of the Russian country, and the inexhaustible
source of humour, absurdity, irony, quaintness, farce, comedy in the
everyday life of the ordinary people. So that, however much his
contemporaries might differ as to the merits or demerits, the harm or
the beneficence, of his work, he left his nation with permanent and
classic models of prose and fiction and stories, just as Pushkin had
bequeathed to them permanent models of verse.

Gogol wrote no more fiction after _Dead Souls_. In 1847 _Passages from
a Correspondence with a Friend_ was published, which created a
sensation, because in the book Gogol preached submission to the
Government, both spiritual and temporal. The Western enthusiasts and
the Liberals in general were highly disgusted. One can understand
their disgust; it is less easy to understand their surprise; for Gogol
had never pretended to be a Liberal. He showed up the evils of
Bureaucracy and the follies and weaknesses of Bureaucrats, because
they were there, just as he showed up the stinginess of misers and the
obstinacy of old women. But it is quite as easy for a Conservative to
do this as it is for a Liberal, and quite as easy for an orthodox
believer as for an atheist. But Gogol's contemporaries had not
realized the tempest that had been raging for a long time in Gogol's
soul, and which he kept to himself. He had always been religious, and
now he became exclusively religious; he made a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land; he spent his substance in charity, especially to poor students;
and he lived in asceticism until he died, at the age of forty-three.
What a waste, one is tempted to say--and how often one is tempted to
say this in the annals of Russian literature--and yet, one wonders!

What we possess of the second part of _Dead Souls_ is in Gogol's best
vein, and of course one cannot help bitterly regretting that the rest
was destroyed or possibly never written; but one wonders whether, had
he not had within him the intensity of feeling which led him
ultimately to renounce art, he would have been the artist that he was;
whether he would have been capable of creating so many-coloured a
world of characters, and whether the soil out of which those works
grew was not in reality the kind of soil out of which religious
renunciation was at last bound to flower. However that may be, Gogol
left behind him a rich inheritance. He is one of the great humorists
of European literature, and whoever gives England a really fine
translation of his work, will do his country a service. Mérimée places
Gogol among the best _English_ humorists. His humour and his pathos
were closely allied; but there is no acidity in his irony. His work
may sometimes sadden you, but (as in the case of Krylov's two pigeons)
it will never bore you, and it will never leave you with a feeling of
stale disgust or a taste as of sharp alum, for his work is based on
charity, and it has in its form and accent the precious gift of charm.
Gogol is an author who will always be loved even as much as he is
admired, and his stories are a boon to the young; to many a Russian
boy and girl the golden gates of romance have been opened by Gogol,
the destroyer of Russian romanticism, the inaugurator of Russian
realism.

Side by side with fiction, another element grew up in this age of
prose, namely criticism. Karamzin in the twenties had been the first
to introduce literary criticism, and critical appreciations of
Pushkin's work appeared from time to time in the _European Messenger_.
PRINCE VYAZEMSKY, whose literary activity lasted from 1808-78, was a
critic as well as a poet and a satirist, a fine example of the type of
great Russian nobles so frequent in Russian books, who were not only
saturated with culture but enriched literature with their work, and
carried on the tradition of cool, clear wit, clean expression, and
winged phrase that we find in Griboyedov. POLEVOY, a self-educated man
of humble extraction, was the first professional journalist, and
created the tradition of violent and fiery polemics, which has lasted
till this day in Russian journalism. But the real founder of Russian
æsthetic, literary, and journalistic criticism was BELINSKY
(1811-1847).

Like Polevoy, he was of humble extraction and almost entirely
self-educated. He lived in want and poverty and ill-health. His life
was a long battle against every kind of difficulty and obstacle; his
literary production was more than hampered by the Censorship, but his
influence was far-reaching and deep. He created Russian criticism, and
after passing through several phases--a German phase of Hegelian
philosophy, Gallophobia, enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Goethe and for
objective art, a French phase of enthusiasm for art as practised in
France, ended finally in a didactic phase of which the watchword was
that Life was more important than Art.

The first blossoms of the new generation of writers, Goncharov,
Dostoyevsky, Herzen, and others, grew up under his encouragement. He
expounded Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Griboyedov, Zhukovsky and the
writers of the past. His judgments have remained authoritative; but
some of his final judgments, which were unshaken for generations, such
as for instance his estimates of Pushkin and Lermontov, were much
biassed and coloured by his didacticism. He burnt what he had adored
in the case of Gogol, who, like Pushkin, became for him too much of an
artist, and not enough of a social reformer. Whatever phase Belinsky
went through, he was passionate, impulsive, and violent, incapable of
being objective, or of doing justice to an opponent, or of seeing two
sides to a question. He was a polemical and fanatical knight errant,
the prophet and propagandist of Western influence, the bitter enemy of
the Slavophiles.

The didactic stamp which he gave to Russian æsthetic and literary
criticism has remained on it ever since, and differentiates it from
the literary and æsthetic criticism of the rest of Europe, not only
from that school of criticism which wrote and writes exclusively under
the banner of "Art for Art's Sake," but from those Western critics who
championed the importance of moral ideas in literature, just as
ardently as he did himself, and who deprecated the theory of Art for
Art's sake just as strongly. Thus it is that, from the beginning of
Russian criticism down to the present day, a truly objective criticism
scarcely exists in Russian literature. Æsthetic criticism becomes a
political weapon. "Are you in my camp?" if so, you are a good writer.
"Are you in my opponent's camp?" then your god-gifted genius is mere
dross.

The reason of this has been luminously stated by Professor Brückner:
"To the intelligent Russian, without a free press, without the liberty
of assembly, without the right to free expression of opinion,
literature became the last refuge of freedom of thought, the only
means of propagating higher ideas. He expected of his country's
literature not merely æsthetic recreation; he placed it at the service
of his aspirations.... Hence the striking partiality, nay unfairness,
displayed by the Russians towards the most perfect works of their own
literature, when they did not respond to the aims or expectations of
their party or their day." And speaking of the criticism that was
produced after 1855, he says: "This criticism is often, in spite of
all its giftedness, its ardour and fire, only a mockery of all
criticism. The work only serves as an example on which to hang the
critics' own views.... This is no reproach; we simply state the fact,
and fully recognize the necessity and usefulness of the method. With a
backward society, ... this criticism was a means which was sanctified
by the end, the spreading of free opinions.... Unhappily, Russian
literary criticism has remained till to-day almost solely
journalistic, _i. e._ didactic and partisan. See how even now it
treats the most interesting, exceptional, and mighty of all Russians,
Dostoyevsky, merely because he does not fit into the Radical mould!
How unjust it has been towards others! How it has extolled to the
clouds the representatives of its own camp!" I quote Professor
Brückner, lest I should be myself suspected of being partial in this
question. The question, perhaps, may admit of further expansion. It
is not that the Russian critics were merely convinced it was
all-important that art should have ideas at the roots of it, and had
no patience with a merely shallow æstheticism. They went further; the
ideas had to be of one kind. A definite political tendency had to be
discerned; and if the critic disagreed with that political tendency,
then no amount of qualities--not artistic excellence, form, skill,
style, not even genius, inspiration, depth, feeling, philosophy--were
recognized.

Herein lies the great difference between Russian and Western critics,
between Sainte-Beuve and Belinsky; between Matthew Arnold and his
Russian contemporaries. Matthew Arnold defined the highest poetry as
being a criticism of life; but that would not have prevented him from
doing justice either to a poet so polemical as Byron, or to a poet so
completely unpolitical, so sheerly æsthetic as Keats; to Lord
Beaconsfield as a novelist, to Mr. Morley or Lord Acton as historians,
because their "tendency" or their "politics" were different from his
own. The most biassed of English or French critics is broad-minded
compared to a Russian critic. Had Keats been a Russian poet, Belinsky
would have swept him away with contempt; Wordsworth would have been
condemned as reactionary; and Swinburne's politics alone would have
been taken into consideration. At the present day, almost ten years
after Professor Brückner wrote his _History of Russian Literature_, now
that the press is more or less free, save for occasional pin-pricks,
now that literary output is in any case unfettered, and the stage freer
than it is in England, the same criticism still applies. Russian
literary criticism is still journalistic. There are and there always
have been brilliant exceptions, of course, two of the most notable of
which are VOLYNSKY and MEREZHKOVSKY; but as a rule the political camp
to which the writer belongs is the all-important question; and I know
cases of Russian politicians who have been known to refuse to write,
even in foreign reviews, because they disapproved of the "tendency" of
those reviews, the tendency being non-existent--as is generally the
case with English reviews,--and the review harbouring opinions of every
shade and tendency. You would think that narrow-mindedness could no
further go than to refuse to let your work appear in an impartial
organ, lest in that same organ an opinion opposed to your own might
appear also. But the cause of this is the same now as it used to be,
namely that, in spite of there being a greater measure of freedom in
Russia, political liberty does not yet exist. Liberty of assembly does
not exist; liberty of conscience only partially exists; the press is
annoyed and hampered by restrictions; and the great majority of Russian
writers are still engaged in fighting for these things, and therefore
still ready to sacrifice fairness for the greater end,--the achievement
of political freedom.

Thus criticism in Russia became a question of camps, and the question
arises, what were these camps? From the dawn of the age of pure
literature, Russia was divided into two great camps: The Slavophiles
and the Propagandists of Western Ideas.

The trend towards the West began with the influence of Joseph Le
Maistre and the St. Petersburg Jesuits. In 1836, CHAADAEV, an
ex-guardsman who had served in the Russian campaign in France and
travelled a great deal in Western Europe, and who shared Joseph Le
Maistre's theory that Russia had suffered by her isolation from the
West and through the influence of the former Byzantine Empire,
published the first of his _Lettres sur la Philosophie de l'Histoire_
in the _Telescope_ of Moscow. This letter came like a bomb-shell. He
glorified the tradition and continuity of the Catholic world. He said
that Russia existed, as it were, outside of time, without the
tradition either of the Orient or of the Occident, and that the
universal culture of the human race had not touched it. "The
atmosphere of the West produces ideas of duty, law, justice, order; we
have given nothing to the world and taken nothing from it; ... we have
not contributed anything to the progress of humanity, and we have
disfigured everything we have taken from that progress. Hostile
circumstances have alienated us from the general trend in which the
social idea of Christianity grew up; thus we ought to revise our
faith, and begin our education over again on another basis." The
expression of these incontrovertible sentiments resulted in the exile
of the editor of the _Telescope_, the dismissal of the Censor, and in
the official declaration of Chaadaev's insanity, who was put under
medical supervision for a year.

Chaadaev made disciples who went further than he did, PRINCESS
VOLKONSKY, the authoress of a notable book on the Orthodox Church, and
PRINCE GAGARIN, who both became Catholics. This was one branch of
Westernism. Another branch, to which Belinsky belonged, had no
Catholic leanings, but sought for salvation in socialism and atheism.
The most important figure in this branch is ALEXANDER HERZEN
(1812-1870). His real name was Yakovlev; his father, a wealthy
nobleman, married in Germany, but did not legalize his marriage in
Russia, so his children took their mother's name.

Herzen's career belongs rather to the history of Russia than to the
history of Russian literature; were it not that, besides being one of
the greatest and most influential personalities of his time, he was a
great memoir-writer. He began, after a mathematical training at the
University, with fiction, of which the best example is a novel _Who is
to Blame?_ which paints the _génie sans portefeuille_ of the period
that Turgenev was so fond of depicting. Herzen was exiled on account
of his oral propaganda, first to Perm, and then to Vyatka. In 1847, he
left Russia for ever, and lived abroad for the rest of his life, at
first in Paris, and afterwards in London, where he edited a newspaper
called _The Bell_.

Herzen was a Socialist. Western Europe he considered to be played out.
He looked upon Socialism as a new religion and a new form of
Christianity, which would be to the new world what Christianity had
been to the old. The Russian peasants would play the part of the
Invasion of the Barbarians; and the functions of the State would be
taken over by the Russian Communes on a basis of voluntary and mutual
agreement--the principle of the Commune, of sharing all possessions in
common, being so near the fundamental principle of Christianity.

"A thinking Russian," he wrote, "is the most independent being in the
world. What can stop him? Consideration for the past? But what is the
starting-point of modern Russian history if it be not a total negation
of nationalism and tradition?... What do we care, disinherited minors
that we are, for the duties you have inherited? Can your worn-out
morality satisfy us? Your morality which is neither Christian nor
human, which is used only in copybooks and for the ritual of the
law?" Again: "We are free because we begin with our own liberation; we
are independent; we have nothing to lose or to honour. A Russian will
never be a protestant, or follow the _juste milieu_ ... our
civilization is external, our corrupt morals quite crude."

The great point Herzen was always making was that Russia had escaped
the baleful tradition of Western Europe, and the hereditary infection
of Western corruption. Thus, in his disenchantment with Western
society and his enthusiasm for the communal ownership of land, he was
at one with the Slavophiles; where he differed from them was in
accepting certain Western ideas, and in thinking that a new order of
things, a new heaven and earth, could be created by a social
revolution, which should be carried out by the Slavs. His
influence--he was one of the precursors of Nihilism, for the seed he
sowed, falling on the peculiar soil where it fell, produced the
whirlwind as a harvest--belongs to history. What belongs to literature
are his memoirs, _My Past and my Thoughts_ (_Byloe i Dumy_), which
were written between 1852 and 1855. These memoirs of everyday life
and encounters with all sorts and conditions of extraordinary men are
in their subject-matter as exciting as a novel, and, in their style,
on a level with the masterpieces of Russian prose, through their
subtle psychology, interest, wit, and artistic form.

Herzen lived to see his ideas bearing fruit in the one way which of
all others he would have sought to avoid, namely in "militancy" and
terrorism. When in 1866, an attempt was made by Karakozov to
assassinate Alexander II, and Herzen wrote an article repudiating all
political assassinations as barbarous, the revolutionary parties
solemnly denounced him and his newspaper. _The Bell_, which had
already lost its popularity owing to Herzen's pro-Polish sympathies in
1863, ceased to have any circulation. Thus he lived to see his vast
hopes shattered, the seed he had sown bearing a fruit he distrusted,
his dreams of regeneration burst like a bubble, his ideals exploited
by unscrupulous criminals. He died in 1870, leaving a name which is as
great in Russian literature as it is remarkable in Russian history.

Turning now to the _Slavophiles_, their idea was that Russia was
already in possession of the best possible institutions,--orthodoxy,
autocracy, and communal ownership, and that the West had everything to
learn from Russia. They pointed to the evils arising from the feudal
and aristocratic state, the system of primogeniture in the West, the
higher legal status of women in Russia, and the superiority of a
communal system, which leads naturally to a Consultative National
Assembly with unanimous decisions, over the parliaments and party
systems of the West.

The leader of the Slavophiles was HOMYAKOV, a man of great culture; a
dialectician, a poet, and an impassioned defender of orthodoxy. The
best of his lyrics, which are inspired by a profound love of his
country and belief in it, have great depth of feeling. Besides
Homyakov, there were other poets, such as TYUTCHEV and IVAN AKSAKOV.
Just as the camp of Reform produced in Herzen a supreme writer of
memoirs, that of the Slavophiles also produced a unique memoir writer
in the SERGE AKSAKOV, the father of the poet (1791-1859), who
published his _Family Chronicle_ in 1856, and who describes the life
of the end of the eighteenth century, and the age of Alexander. This
book, one of the most valuable historical documents in Russian, and a
priceless collection of biographical portraits, is also a gem of
Russian prose, exact in its observation, picturesque and perfectly
balanced in its diction.

Aksakov remembered with unclouded distinctness exactly what he had
seen in his childhood, which he spent in the district of Orenburg. He
paints the portraits of his grandfather and his great-aunt. We see
every detail of the life of a backwoodsman of the days of Catherine
II. We see the noble of those days, simple and rustic in his habits as
a peasant, almost entirely unlettered, and yet a gentleman through and
through, unswerving in maintaining the standard of morals and
traditions which he considers due to his ancient lineage. We see every
hour of the day of his life in the country; we hear all the details of
the family life, the marriage of his son, the domestic troubles of his
sister.

What strikes one most, perhaps, besides the contrast between the
primitive simplicity of the habits and manners of the life described,
and the astoundingly gentlemanlike feelings of the man who leads this
quiet and rustic life in remote and backward conditions, is that there
is not a hint or suspicion of anything antiquated in the sentiments
and opinions we see at play. The story of Aksakov's grandfather might
be that of any country gentleman in any country, at any epoch, making
allowances for a certain difference in manners and customs and
conditions which were peculiar to the epoch in question, the existence
of serfdom, for instance--although here, too, the feeling with regard
to manners described is startlingly like the ideal of good manners of
any epoch, although the _mœurs_ are sometimes different. The story
is as vivid and as interesting as that of any novel, as that of the
novels of Russian writers of genius, and it has the additional value
of being true. And yet we never feel that Aksakov has a thought of
compiling a historical document for the sake of its historical
interest. He is making history unawares, just as Monsieur Jourdain
talked prose without knowing it; and, whether he was aware of it or
not, he wrote perfect prose. No more perfect piece of prose writing
exists. The style flows on like a limpid river; there is nothing
superfluous, and not a hesitating touch. It is impossible to put down
the narrative after once beginning it, and I have heard of children
who read it like a fairy-tale. One has the sensation, in reading it,
of being told a story by some enchanting nurse, who, when the usual
question, "Is it true?" is put to her, could truthfully answer, "Yes,
it is true." The pictures of nature, the portraits of the people, all
the good and all the bad of the good and the bad old times pass before
one with epic simplicity and the magic of a fairy-tale. One is
spellbound by the charm, the dignity, the good-nature, the gentle,
easy accent of the speaker, in whom one feels convinced not only that
there was nothing common nor mean, but to whom nothing was common or
mean, who was a gentleman by character as well as by lineage, one of
God's as well as one of Russia's nobility.

There is no book in Russian which, for its entrancing interest as well
as for its historical value, so richly deserves translation into
English; only such a translation should be made by a stylist--that is,
by a man who knows how to speak and write his mother tongue
perspicuously and simply.

CHAPTER V

THE EPOCH OF REFORM

For seven years after the death of Belinsky in 1848, all literary
development ceased. This period was the darkest hour before the dawn
of the second great renascence of Russian literature. Criticism was
practically non-existent; the Slavophiles were forbidden to write; the
Westernizers were exiled. An increased severity of censorship, an
extreme suspicion and drastic measures on the part of the Government
were brought about by the fears which the Paris revolution of 1848 had
caused. The Westernizers felt the effects of this as much as the
Slavophiles; a group of young literary men, schoolmasters and
officers, the Petrashevtsy, called after their leader, a Foreign
Office official PETRASHEVSKY, met together on Fridays and debated on
abstract subjects; they discussed the emancipation of the serfs, read
Fourier and Lamennais, and considered the establishment of a secret
press: the scheme of a popular propaganda was thought of, but nothing
had got beyond talk--and the whole thing was in reality only
talk--when the society was discovered by the police and its members
were punished with the utmost severity. Twenty-one of them were
condemned to death, among whom was Dostoyevsky, who, being on the army
list, was accused of treason. They were reprieved on the scaffold;
some sent into penal servitude in Siberia, and some into the army.
This marked one of the darkest hours in the history of Russian
literature. And from this date until 1855, complete stagnation
reigned. In 1855 the Emperor Nicholas died during the Crimean War; and
with the accession of his son Alexander II, a new era dawned on
Russian literature, the Era of the Great Reforms. The Crimean War and
the reforms which followed it--the emancipation of the serfs, the
creation of a new judicial system, and the foundation of local
self-government--stabbed the Russian soul into life, relieved it of
its gag, produced a great outburst of literature which enlarged and
enriched the literature of the world, and gave to the world three of
its greatest novelists: Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky.

IVAN TURGENEV (1816-83), whose name is of Tartar origin, came of an
old family which had frequently distinguished itself in the annals of
Russian literature by a fearless outspokenness. He began his literary
career by writing verse (1843); but, like Maupassant, he soon
understood that verse was not his true vehicle, and in 1847 gave up
writing verse altogether; in that year he published in _The
Contemporary_ his first sketch of peasant life, _Khor and Kalinych_,
which afterwards formed part of his _Sportsman's Sketches_,
twenty-four of which he collected and published in 1852. The
Government rendered Turgenev the same service as it had done to
Pushkin, in exiling him to his own country estate for two years. When,
after the two years, this forced exile came to an end, he went into
another kind of exile of his own accord; he lived at first at Baden,
and then in Paris, and only reappeared in Russia from time to time;
this accounts for the fact that, although Turgenev belongs
chronologically to the epoch of the great reforms, the Russia which he
paints was really more like the Russia before that epoch; and when he
tried to paint the Russia that was contemporary to him his work gave
rise to much controversy.

His _Rudin_ was published in 1856, _The Nest of Gentlefolk_ in 1859,
_On the Eve_ in 1860, _Fathers and Sons_ in 1862, _Smoke_ in 1867.
Turgenev did for Russian literature what Byron did for English
literature; he led the genius of Russia on a pilgrimage throughout all
Europe. And in Europe his work reaped a glorious harvest of praise.
Flaubert was astounded by him, George Sand looked up to him as to a
Master, Taine spoke of his work as being the finest artistic
production since Sophocles. In Turgenev's work, Europe not only
discovered Turgenev, but it discovered Russia, the simplicity and the
naturalness of the Russian character; and this came as a revelation.
For the first time, Europe came across the Russian woman whom Pushkin
was the first to paint; for the first time Europe came into contact
with the Russian soul; and it was the sharpness of this revelation
which accounts for the fact of Turgenev having received in the West an
even greater meed of praise than he was perhaps entitled to.

In Russia, Turgenev attained almost instant popularity. His
_Sportsman's Sketches_ made him known, and his _Nest of Gentlefolk_
made him not only famous but universally popular. In 1862 the
publication of his masterpiece _Fathers and Sons_ dealt his reputation
a blow. The revolutionary elements in Russia regarded his hero,
Bazarov, as a calumny and a libel; whereas the reactionary elements in
Russia looked upon _Fathers and Sons_ as a glorification of Nihilism.
Thus he satisfied nobody. He fell between two stools. This, perhaps,
could only happen in Russia to this extent; and for the same reason as
that which made Russian criticism didactic. The conflicting elements
of Russian society were so terribly in earnest in fighting their
cause, that any one whom they did not regard as definitely for them
was at once considered an enemy, and an impartial delineation of any
character concerned in the political struggle was bound to displease
both parties. If a novelist drew a Nihilist, he must either be a hero
or a scoundrel, if either the revolutionaries or the reactionaries
were to be pleased. If in England the militant suffragists suddenly
had a huge mass of educated opinion behind them and a still larger
mass of educated public opinion against them, and some one were to
draw in a novel an impartial picture of a suffragette, the same thing
would happen. On a small scale, as far as the suffragettes are
concerned, it has happened in the case of Mr. Wells. But, if
Turgenev's popularity suffered a shock in Russia from which it with
difficulty recovered, in Western Europe it went on increasing.
Especially in England, Turgenev became the idol of all that was
eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a hall-mark of good taste.

In Russia, Turgenev's work recovered from the unpopularity caused by
his _Fathers and Sons_ when Nihilism became a thing of the past, and
revolution took an entirely different shape; but, with the growing up
of new generations, his popularity suffered in a different way and for
different reasons. A new element came into Russian literature with
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and later with Gorky, and Turgenev's work began
to seem thin and artificial beside the creations of these stronger
writers; but in Russia, where Turgenev's work has the advantage of
being read in the original, it had an asset which ensured it a
permanent and safe harbour, above and beyond the fluctuations of
literary taste, the strife of political parties, and the conflict of
social ideals; and that was its art, its poetry, its style, which
ensured it a lasting and imperishable niche among the great classics
of Russian literature. And there it stands now. Turgenev's work in
Russia is no longer disputed or a subject of dispute. It is taken for
granted; and, whatever the younger generation will read and admire,
they will always read and admire Turgenev first. His work is a
necessary part of the intellectual baggage of any educated man and,
especially, of the educated adolescent.

The position of Tennyson in England offers in a sense a parallel to
that of Turgenev in Russia. Tennyson, like Turgenev, enjoyed during
his lifetime not only the popularity of the masses, but the
appreciation of all that was most eclectic in the country. Then a
reaction set in. Now I believe the young generation think nothing of
Tennyson at all. And yet nothing is so sure as his permanent place in
English literature; and that permanent place is secured to him by his
incomparable diction. So it is with Turgenev. One cannot expect the
younger generation to be wildly excited about Turgenev's ideas,
characters, and problems. They belong to an epoch which is dead. At
the same time, one cannot help thinking that the most advanced of the
symbolist writers would not have been sorry had he happened by chance
to write _Bezhin Meadow_ and the _Poems in Prose_. Just so one cannot
help thinking that the most modern of our poets, had he by accident
written _The Revenge_ or _Tears, Idle Tears_, would not have thrown
them in the fire!

There is, indeed, something in common between Tennyson and Turgenev.
They both have something mid-Victorian in them. They are both idyllic,
and both of them landscape-lovers and lords of language. They neither
of them had any very striking message to preach; they both of them
seem to halt, except on rare occasions, on the threshold of passion;
they both of them have a rare stamp of nobility; and in both of them
there is an element of banality. They both seem to a certain extent to
be shut off from the world by the trees of old parks, where cultivated
people are enjoying the air and the flowers and the shade, and where
between the tall trees you get glimpses of silvery landscapes and
limpid waters, and soft music comes from the gliding boat. Of course,
there is more than this in Turgenev, but this is the main impression.

Pathos he has, of the finest, and passion he describes beautifully
from the outside, making you feel its existence, but not convincing
you that he felt it himself; but on the other hand what an artist he
is! How beautifully his pictures are painted; and how rich he is in
poetic feeling!

Turgenev is above all things a poet. He carried on the work of
Pushkin, and he did for Russian prose what Pushkin did for Russian
poetry; he created imperishable models of style. His language has the
same limpidity and absence of any blur that we find in Pushkin's work.
His women have the same crystal radiance, transparent simplicity, and
unaffected strength; his pictures of peasant life, and his country
episodes have the same truth to nature; as an artist he had a severe
sense of proportion, a perfect purity of outline, and an absolute
harmony between the thought and the expression. Now that modern Europe
and England have just begun to discover Dostoyevsky, it is possible
that a reaction will set in to the detriment of Turgenev. Indeed, to a
certain extent this reaction has set in in Western Europe, as M.
Haumant, one of Turgenev's ablest critics and biographers, pointed out
not long ago. And, as the majority of Englishmen have not the
advantage of reading him in the original, they will be unchecked in
this reaction, if it comes about, by their appreciation of what is
perhaps most durable in his work. Yet to translate Turgenev
adequately, it would require an English poet gifted with a sense of
form and of words as rare as that of Turgenev himself. However this
may be, there is no doubt about the importance of Turgenev in the
history of Russian literature, whatever the future generations in
Russia or in Europe may think of his work. He was a great novelist
besides being a great poet. Certainly he never surpassed his early
_Sportsman's Sketches_ in freshness of inspiration and the perfection
of artistic execution.

His _Bezhin Meadow_, where the children tell each other bogey stories
in the evening, is a gem with which no other European literature has
anything to compare. _The Singers_, _Death_, and many others are
likewise incomparable. _The Nest of Gentlefolk_, to which Turgenev
owed his great popularity, is quite perfect of its kind, with its
gallery of portraits going back to the eighteenth century and to the
period of Alexander I; its lovable, human hero Lavretsky, and Liza, a
fit descendant of Pushkin's Tatiana, radiant as a star. All Turgenev's
characters are alive; but, with the exception of his women and the
hero of _Fathers and Sons_, they are alive in bookland rather than in
real life.

George Meredith's characters, for instance, are alive, but they belong
to a land or rather a planet of his own making, and we should never
recognize Sir Willoughby Patterne in the street, but we do meet women
sometimes who remind us of Clara Middleton and Carinthia Jane. The
same is true with regard to Turgenev, although it is not another
planet he created, but a special atmosphere and epoch to which his
books exclusively belong, and which some critics say never existed at
all. That is of no consequence. It exists for us in his work.

But perhaps what gave rise to accusations of unreality and caricature
against Turgenev's characters, apart from the intenser reality of
Tolstoy's creations, by comparison with which Turgenev's suffered, was
that Turgenev, while professing to describe the present, and while
believing that he was describing the present, was in reality painting
an epoch that was already dead. _Rudin_, _Smoke_, and _On the Eve_
have suffered more from the passage of time. _Rudin_ is a pathetic
picture of the type that Turgenev was so fond of depicting, the _génie
sans portefeuille_, a latter-day Hamlet who can only unpack his heart
with words, and with his eloquence persuade others to believe in him,
and succeed even in persuading himself to believe in himself, until
the moment for action comes, when he breaks down. The subjects of
_Smoke_ and _Spring Waters_ are almost identical; but, whereas _Spring
Waters_ is one of the most poetical of Turgenev's achievements,
_Smoke_ seems to-day the most banal, and almost to deserve Tolstoy's
criticism: "In _Smoke_ there is hardly any love of anything, and very
little pity; there is only love of light and playful adultery; and
therefore the poetry of that novel is repulsive." _On the Eve_, which
tells of a Bulgarian on the eve of the liberation of his country,
suffers from being written at a time when real Russians were hard at
work at that very task; and it was on this account that the novel
found little favour in Russia, as the fiction paled beside the
reality.

It was followed by Turgenev's masterpiece, for which time can only
heighten one's admiration. _Fathers and Sons_ is as beautifully
constructed as a drama of Sophocles; the events move inevitably to a
tragic close. There is not a touch of banality from beginning to end,
and not an unnecessary word; the portraits of the old father and
mother, the young Kirsanov, and all the minor characters are perfect;
and amidst the trivial crowd, Bazarov stands out like Lucifer, the
strongest--the only strong character--that Turgenev created, the first
Nihilist--for if Turgenev was not the first to invent the word, he was
the first to apply it in this sense.

Bazarov is the incarnation of the Lucifer type that recurs again and
again in Russian history and fiction, in sharp contrast to the meek
humble type of Ivan Durak. Lermontov's Pechorin was in some respects
an anticipation of Bazarov; so were the many Russian rebels. He is
the man who denies, to whom art is a silly toy, who detests
abstractions, knowledge, and the love of Nature; he believes in
nothing; he bows to nothing; he can break, but he cannot bend; he does
break, and that is the tragedy, but, breaking, he retains his
invincible pride, and

    "not cowardly he puts off his helmet,"

and he dies "valiantly vanquished."

In the pages which describe his death Turgenev reaches the high-water
mark of his art, his moving quality, his power, his reserve. For manly
pathos they rank among the greatest scenes in literature, stronger
than the death of Colonel Newcome and the best of Thackeray. Among
English novelists it is, perhaps, only Meredith who has struck such
strong, piercing chords, nobler than anything in Daudet or Maupassant,
more reserved than anything in Victor Hugo, and worthy of the great
poets, of the tragic pathos of Goethe and Dante. The character of
Bazarov, as has been said, created a sensation and endless
controversy. The revolutionaries thought him a caricature and a libel,
the reactionaries a scandalous glorification of the Devil; and
impartial men such as Dostoyevsky, who knew the revolutionaries at
first hand, thought the type unreal. It is possible that Bazarov was
not like the Nihilists of the sixties; but in any case as a figure in
fiction, whatever the fact may be, he lives and will continue to live.

In _Virgin Soil_, Turgenev attempted to paint the underground
revolutionary movement; here, in the opinion of all Russian judges, he
failed. The revolutionaries considered their portraits here more
unreal than that of Bazarov; the Conservatives were grossly
caricatured; the hero Nezhdanov was a type of a past world, another
Rudin, and not in the least like--so those who knew them tell us--the
revolutionaries of the day. Solomin, the energetic character in the
book, was considered as unreal as Nezhdanov. The wife of the
reactionary Sipyagin is a _pastiche_ of the female characters of that
type in his other books; cleverly drawn, but a completely conventional
book character. The redeeming feature in the book is Mariana, the
heroine, one of Turgenev's finest ideal women; and it is full, of
course, of gems of descriptive writing. The book was a complete
failure, and after this Turgenev went back to writing short stories.
The result was a great disappointment to Turgenev, who had thought
that, by writing a novel dealing with actual life, he would please and
reconcile all parties. To this later epoch belong his matchless _Poems
in Prose_, one of the latest melodies he sounded, a melody played on
one string of the lyre, but whose sweetness contained the essence of
all his music.

Turgenev's work has a historic as well as an artistic value. He
painted the Russian gentry, and the type of gentry that was
disappearing, as no one else has done. His landscape painting has been
dwelt on; one ought, perhaps, to add that, beautiful as it is, it
still belongs to the region of conventional landscape painting; his
landscape is the orthodox Russian landscape, and is that of the age of
Pushkin, in which no bird except a nightingale is mentioned, no flower
except a rose. This convention was not really broken in prose until
the advent of Gorky.

Reviewing Turgenev's work as a whole, any one who goes back to his
books after a time, and after a course of more modern and rougher,
stormier literature, will, I think, be surprised at its excellence
and perhaps be inclined to heave a deep sigh of relief. Some of it
will appear conventional; he will notice a faint atmosphere of
rose-water; he will feel, if he has been reading the moderns, as a
traveller feels who, after an exciting but painful journey, through
dangerous ways and unpleasant surroundings, suddenly enters a cool
garden, where fountains sob between dark cypresses, and swans float
majestically on artificial lakes. There is an aroma of syringa in the
air; the pleasaunce is artistically laid out, and full of fragrant
flowers. But he will not despise that garden for its elegance and its
tranquil seclusion, for its trees cast large shadows; the nightingale
sings in its thickets, the moon silvers the calm statues, and the
sound of music on the waters goes to the heart. Turgenev reminds one
of a certain kind of music, beautiful in form, not too passionate and
yet full of emotion, Schumann's music, for instance; if Pushkin is the
Mozart of Russian literature, Turgenev is the Schumann; not amongst
the very greatest, but still a poet, full of inspired lyrical feeling;
and a great, a classic artist, the prose Virgil of Russian literature.

What Turgenev did for the country gentry, GONCHAROV (1812-91) did for
the St. Petersburg gentry. The greater part of his work deals with the
forties. Goncharov, a noble (_dvoryanin_) by education, and according
to his own account by descent, though according to another account he
was of merchant extraction, entered the Government service, and then
went round the world in a frigate, a journey which he described in
letters. Of his three novels, _The Everyday Story_, _Oblomov_, and
_The Landslip_, _Oblomov_ is the most famous: in it he created a type
which became immortal; and Oblomov has passed into the Russian
language just as Tartuffe has passed into the French language, or
Pecksniff into the English language. A chapter of the book appeared in
1849, and the whole novel in 1859.

Oblomov is the incarnation of what in Russia is called _Halatnost_,
which means the propensity to live in dressing-gown and slippers. It
is told of Krylov, who was an Oblomov of real life, and who spent most
of his time lying on a sofa, that one day somebody pointed out to him
that the nail on which a picture was hanging just over the sofa on
which he was lying, was loose, and that the picture would probably
fall on his head. "No," said Krylov, not getting up, "the picture will
fall just beyond the sofa. I know the angle." The apathy of Oblomov,
although to the outward eye it resembles this mere physical inertness,
is subtly different. Krylov's apathy was the laziness of a man whose
brain brought forth concrete fruits; and who feels neither the
inclination nor the need of any other exercise, either physical or
intellectual. Oblomov's apathy is that of a brain seething with the
burning desires of a _vie intime_, which all comes to nothing owing to
a kind of spiritual paralysis, "une infirmité morale." It is true he
finds it difficult to put on his socks, still more to get up, when he
is awake, impossible to change his rooms although the ceiling is
falling to bits, and impossible not to lie on the sofa most of the
day; but the reason of this obstinate inertia is not mere physical
disinclination, it is the result of a mixture of seething and
simmering aspirations, indefinite disillusions and apprehensions, that
elude the grasp of the will. Oblomov is really the victim of a dream,
of an aspiration, of an ideal as bright and mobile as a
will-o'-the-wisp, as elusive as thistledown, which refuses to
materialize.

The tragedy of the book lies in the effort he makes to rise from his
slough of apathy, or rather the effort his friends encourage him to
make. Oblomov's heart is made of pure gold; his soul is of transparent
crystal; there is not a base flaw in the paste of his composition; yet
his will is sapped, not by words, words, words, but by the inability
to formulate the shadows of his inner life. His friend is an energetic
German-Russian. He introduces Oblomov to a charming girl, and together
they conspire to drag him from his apathy. The girl, Olga, at first
succeeds; she falls in love with him, and he with her; he wants to
marry her, but he cannot take the necessary step of arranging his
affairs in a manner which would make that marriage possible; and
gradually he falls back into a new stage of apathy worse than the
first; she realizes the hopelessness of the situation, and they agree
to separate. She marries the energetic friend, and Oblomov sinks into
the comforts of a purely negative life of complete inaction and
seclusion, watched over by a devoted housekeeper, whom he ultimately
marries.

The extraordinary subtlety of the psychology of this study lies, as
well as in other things, in the way in which we feel that Olga is not
really happy with her excellent husband; he is the man whom she
respects; but Oblomov is the man whom she loves, till the end; and she
would give worlds to respect him too if he would only give her the
chance. Oblomov often defends his stagnation, while realizing only too
well what a misfortune it is; and we sometimes feel that he is not
altogether wrong. The chapter that tells of his dream in which his
past life and childhood arise before him in a haze of serene laziness
is one of the masterpieces of Russian prose. The book is terribly
real, and almost intolerably sad.

Goncharov's third and last novel deals with the life of a landed
proprietor on the Volga, and its main idea is the contrast between the
old generation before the reforms and the new generation of Alexander
II's day--a paler _Fathers and Sons_.

To go back to criticism, the name of BAKUNIN, the apostle of
destruction and the incarnation of Russian Nihilism, belongs to
history; that of GRIGORIEV must be mentioned as founding a school of
thought which preached the union of arts with the national soil; he
exercised a strong influence over Dostoyevsky. KATKOV, whose influence
was at one time immense, originally belonged to the circle of Herzen
and Bakunin; he became a professor of philosophy, but was driven from
his chair in the reaction of '48, and, being banished from erudition,
he took up a journalistic career and became the Editor of the _Moscow
News_. He was a Slavophile, and when the rising in Poland broke out,
he headed the great wave of nationalist feeling which passed over the
country at that time; he doubled the number of his subscribers, and
dealt a death-blow to Herzen's _Bell_. After 1866, he headed
reactionary journalism and became a Nationalist of the narrowest kind;
but he was of a higher calibre than the Nationalists of later days.
Slavophile critics of another kind were STRAKHOV and DANILEVSKY, like
Dostoyevsky, disciples of Grigoriev, who preached the last word of
Slavophilism and were opposed to all foreign innovations.

On the Radical side the leaders were CHERNYSHEVSKY, DOBROLYUBOV and
PISAREV. Chernyshevsky, who translated John Stuart Mill, and
published a treatise on the æsthetic relations of art and reality,
served a sentence of seven years' hard labour and of twenty years'
exile. His criticism--socialist propaganda, and an attack on all
metaphysics--does not belong to literature, but his novel _Shto
dielat_--"What is to be done?"--had an immense influence on his
generation. It deals with Nihilism. Dobrolyubov, who died when he was
twenty-four, belonged to the same realistic school. His main theory
was that Russian literature is dominated by Oblomov; that Chatsky,
Pechorin, and Rudin are all Oblomovs. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov
followed Chernyshevsky in his realistic philosophy, in his rejection
of metaphysics, in his theory that beauty is to be sought in life
only, and that the sole duty of art is to help to illustrate life.
Pisarev recognized that Turgenev's Bazarov was a picture of himself,
and he was pleased with the portrait. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov
died young.

VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV (1853-1900), critic as well as poet, moral
philosopher, and theologian, is one of the most interesting figures in
Russian literature. What is most remarkable about him, and what makes
him stand out, a radiant exception in Russian criticism, is his
absolute independence. He belonged to no camp; he was a slave to no
party cry; utterly unselfish, his sole aim was to seek after the truth
for the sake of truth, and to proclaim it. In an age of positivism, he
was a believing Christian, and the dream of his life was a union of
the Eastern and Western Churches. He deals with this idea in a book
which he wrote in French and published in Paris: _L'Église Russe et
l'Église Universelle_. He admired the older Slavophiles, but he
severely attacked the Nationalists, such as Katkov. His range of
subjects was great, and his style was brilliant; like many great
thinkers, he was far ahead of his time, and in his criticism of the
_Intelligentsia_ anticipated some tendencies, which have become
visible since the revolution of 1905. He reminds one at times of Mr.
A. J. Balfour, and even of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, with whose
"orthodoxy" he would have much sympathy; and he deals with questions
such as Woman's Suffrage in a way which exactly fits the present day.
He never became a Catholic, holding that the Eastern Church _qua_
Church had never been cut off from the West, and that only one
definite schism had been condemned; but he believed in the necessity
of a universal Church. He was the first intellectual Russian to point
out to a generation which took atheism as a matter of course that they
were possibly inferior instead of superior to religion. He believed in
Russia; he had nothing against the Slavophile theory that Russia had a
divine mission; only he wished to see that mission divinely performed.
He believed in the East of Christ, and not in that of Xerxes. He died
in 1900, before he had finished his _Magnum Opus_, a work on moral
philosophy written on a religious basis. He preached self-effacement;
pity towards one's fellow men; and reverence towards the supernatural.
His whole work is a defence of moral principles, written with the soul
of a poet, the knowledge of a scholar, and the brilliance of a
dialectician. It is only lately that his books have gained the
appreciation which they deserve; they are certainly more in harmony
with the present generation than with that of the sixties and the
seventies. His _Three Conversations_ has been translated into English.
Vladimir Soloviev stands in a niche of his own, isolated from the
crowd by his own originality, his brilliance, and his prematurity; he
was _intempestivus_.

To the same epoch belong four other important writers, each occupying
a place apart from the current stream of literary or political
influences: one because he was a satirist, one because he wrote for
the stage, and the two others because one impartially, and the other
bitterly, dared to criticize the Radicals.

MICHAEL SALTYKOV (1826-89), who wrote under the name of Shchedrin,
holds a unique place in Russian literature, not only because he is a
writer of genius, but because he is one of the world's great
satirists. Unlike Russian satirists before him, Krylov, Gogol, and
Griboyedov, good-humoured irony or sharp rapier thrusts of wit do not
suffice him; he has in himself the _saeva indignatio_, and he
expresses it with all the concentrated spite that he can muster, which
is all the more deadly from being used with perfect control. His work
is bulky, and fills eleven thick volumes; some of it is quite out of
date and at the present day almost unintelligible; but all that deals
with the fundamental essentials of the Russian character, and not with
the passing episodes of the day, has the freshness of immortality. At
the outset of his career, he was banished to Vyatka, where he remained
from 1848-56, an exile, which gave him a rich store of priceless
material. His experiences appeared in his _Sketches of Provincial
Life_ in 1886-7.

He describes the good old times and the officials of the good old
times, with diabolic malice and with an unequalled eye for the
ironical, the comic, the topsy-turvy, and the true; and while he is as
observant as Gogol, he is as bitter as Swift. He puts his characters
on the stage and makes them relate their experiences; thus we hear how
the collector of the dues manages to combine the maximum amount of
robbery with the minimum amount of inconvenience. In his pictures of
prison life, the prisoners tell their own stories, sometimes with
unaffected frankness, sometimes with startling cynicism, and sometimes
the story is obscured by a whole heap of lies. The prisoners are of
different classes; one is an ex-official who states that he was a
statistician who got into trouble over his figures; wishing to levy
dues on a peasant's property, he had demanded the number, not of
their bee-hives, but of their bees, and wrote in his list: "The
peasant Sidorov possesses two horses, three cows, nine sheep, one
calf, and thirty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven bees."
Unfortunately he was betrayed by the police inspector.

Saltykov's satire deals entirely with the middle class, the high
officials, the average official, and the minor public servants; and
his best-known work, and one that has not aged any more than Swift has
aged, is his _History of a City according to the original documents_.

In this he tells of the city of _Glupov_, _Fool-City_, where the
people were such fools that they were not content until they found
some one to rule them who was stupider than they were themselves. The
various phases Russia had gone through are touched off; the mania for
regulations, the formalism, the official red-tape, the persecution of
independent thought, and the oppression of original thinkers and
writers; the ultimate ideal is that introduced by the last ruler of
Glupov (the history lasts from 1731 to 1826), of turning the country
into barracks and reducing every one and everything to one level--in
which the régime of the period of Nicholas I is satirized; until in
the final picture, as fine in its way as Pope's close of the
_Dunciad_, the stream rises, and refusing to be stopped by the dam,
carries everything away. The style parodies that of the ancient
chroniclers; and its chief intent lies not in the satirizing of any
particular events or person, but in the shafts of light, sometimes
bitter, and sometimes inexpressibly droll, it throws on the Russian
system of administration and on the Russian character.

In his _Pompaduri_, Saltykov dissects and vivisects the higher
official,--the big-wig,--and in his sketches from the "Domain of
Moderation and Accuracy," he writes, in little, the epic of the minor
public servant--the man who is never heard of, who is included in the
term of "the rest," but who, nevertheless, is a cogwheel in the
machinery, without which the big-wigs cannot act or execute. No more
supreme piece of art than this piece of satire exists. The typical
minor official is drawn in all the variations of his miserable and
pitiable species, and in all the phases of his ignoble and sometimes
tragical career, with a pen dipped in scorn and stinging malice, not
unblent with a grave pity, which always exists in the work of the
greatest satirists--"Peace to all such, but there was one ..." for
instance--and wielded with terrible certainty of touch. This epic of
the _Molchalins_ of life--the typical officials who cease to be
men--was the story of a great part of the Russian population; and in
its essence, a great deal of it remains true to-day, while all of it
remains artistically enjoyable.

Saltykov continued to write during the whole of his long life. His
field of satire ranges from the days before serfdom to the epoch of
the reforms, extends to the days of the Russo-Turkish War, and passes
the frontier into the West. It is impossible here even to name all his
works; but there is one, written in the decline of his life, which has
a solid historical as well as a rich and varied artistic interest.
This is his _Poshenkhonskaya Starina_; it is practically the history
of his childhood, his upbringing, and the state of affairs which
existed at that time, the life lived by his parents and their
neighbours, the landed proprietors and their serfs. With amazing
impartiality, without exaggeration, and yet with evidences of deep
feeling and passionate indignation, all the more striking from being
both rare and expressed with reserve, he paints on a large and crowded
canvas the life of the masters and their serfs. A long gallery of men
and women is opened to one; tragedy, comedy, farce, all are here--in
fact, life--life as it was then in a remote corner of the country.
Here Saltykov's spite and malice give way to higher strokes of tragic
irony and pity; and the work has dignity as well as power In the bulk
of Saltykov's early work there is much dross, much venom, and much
ephemeral tinsel that has faded; the stuff of this book is stern and
enduring; its subject-matter would not lose a particle of interest in
translation. The Russians have been ungrateful towards Saltykov, and
have been inclined to neglect his work, the lasting element of which
is one of the most original, precious, and remarkable possessions of
Russian literature.

The complement of Saltykov is LESKOV (or, as he originally called
himself, _Stebnitsky_). The character of his work, its reception by
the reading public on the one hand, and by the professional critics on
the other, is one of the most striking object-lessons in the history
of Russian literature and Russian literary criticism. Leskov has been
long ago recognized by educated Russia as a writer of the first rank;
what is best in his work, which is bulky and unequal, has the
unmistakable hall-mark of the classics; he is with Gogol and Saltykov,
and the novelists of the first rank. Educated Russia is fully aware of
this. Nobody disputes Leskov his place, nor denies him his supreme
artistic talent, his humour, his vividness, his colour, his satire,
the depth of his feeling, the richness of his invention. In spite of
this, there is no Russian writer who has so acutely suffered from the
didactic and partisan quality of Russian criticism.

His literary career began in 1860. Like Saltykov, he paints the period
of transition that followed the epoch of the great Reforms. In spite
of this, as late as 1902, no critical biography, no serious work of
criticism, had been devoted to his books. All Russia had read him, but
literary criticism had ignored him. It is as if English literary
criticism had ignored Dickens until 1900.

The reason of this neglect is not far to seek. Saltykov was an
independent thinker; he belonged to no literary or political camp; he
criticized the partisans of both camps with equal courage; and the
partisans could not and did not forgive him. Like Saltykov, Leskov saw
what was going on in Russia; with penetrating insight and observation
he realized the evils of the old order; like Saltykov, he was filled
with indignation, and perhaps to a greater degree than Saltykov, he
was filled with pity. But, whereas Saltykov's work was purely
destructive--an onslaught of brooms in the Augean stables--Leskov
begins where Saltykov ends. Like Saltykov and like Gogol before him,
the old order inspires him with laughter, sometimes with bitter
laughter, at the absurdities of the old régime and its results; but he
does not confine himself to destructive irony and sapping satire. With
PISEMSKY, another writer of first-class talent, of the same epoch,
Leskov was the first Russian novelist--Griboyedov had already
anticipated such criticism in _Gore ot Uma_, in his delineation of
Chatsky,--to have the courage to criticize the reformers, the men of
the new epoch; and his criticism was not only negative but creative;
he realized that everything must be "reformed altogether." He then
asked himself whether the new men, who were engaged in the task of
reform, were equal to their task. He came to the conclusion not only
that they were inadequate, but that they were setting about the
business the wrong way, and he had the courage to say so. He was the
first Russian novelist to say he disbelieved in Liberals, although he
believed in Liberalism; and this was a sentiment which no Liberal in
Russia could admit then, and one which they can scarcely admit now.

His criticism of the Liberals was creative, and not negative, in this:
that, instead of confining himself to pointing out their weakness and
the mistaken course they were taking, he did his best to point out the
right path. Dostoyevsky was likewise subjected to the same ostracism.
Turgenev suffered from it; but the genius of Dostoyevsky and the art
of Turgenev overstepped the limits of all barriers and frontiers.
Europe acclaimed them. Leskov's criticism being more local, the
ostracism, although powerless to prevent the popularity of his work in
Russia, succeeded for a time in keeping him from the notice of
Western Europe. This barrier is now being broken down. One of Leskov's
masterpieces, _The Sealed Angel_, was lately translated into English;
but he is one of the most difficult authors to translate because he is
one of the most native.

A far bitterer and more pessimistic note is heard in the work of
Pisemsky. He attacks the new democracy mercilessly, and not from any
predilection towards the old. His most important work, _The Troubled
Sea_ (1862), was a terrific onslaught on Radical Russia; and Pisemsky
paid the same price for his pessimistic analysis as Leskov did for his
impartiality, namely social ostracism.

The work of OSTROVSKY (1823-86) belongs to the history of the Stage,
to which he brought slices of real life from the middle class; the
townsmen, the minor public servants, merchants great and small, and
rogues, a _milieu_ which he had observed in his youth, his father
having been an attorney to a Moscow merchant. Ostrovsky may be called
the founder of modern Russian realistic comedy and drama. In spite of
the epoch at which his plays were written (the fifties and the
sixties), there is not a trace of _Scribisme_, no tricks, no effective
exits or curtains; he thus anticipated the form of the quite modern
drama by about seventy years. His plays hold the stage now in Russia,
and form part of the stock repertories every season. They give,
moreover, just the same lifelike impression whether read or seen
acted; and they are as interesting from a literary as they are from a
historical or dramatic point of view, interesting because they are
intensely national, and as Russian as beer is English.

This brief summary of the epoch would be still more incomplete than it
is without the mention of yet another novelist, GRIGOROVICH. Although
on a lower level of art and creative power than Pisemsky and Leskov,
he was the pioneer in Russian literature of peasant literature. He
anticipated Turgenev's _Sportsman's Sketches_, and for the first time
made Russian readers cry with sympathy over the annals of the peasant.
Like Turgenev, he was a great landscape painter. In his "Fishermen" he
paints the peasant and the artisan's life, and in his "Country Roads"
he gives a picture of the good old times--replete with rich humour,
and in sharp contrast to Saltykov's sunless and trenchant etching of
the same period. Humour, the pathos of the poor, landscape--these are
his chief qualities.

CHAPTER VI

TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY

With TOLSTOY and DOSTOYEVSKY, we come not only to the two great
pillars of modern Russian literature which tower above all others like
two colossal statues in the desert, but to two of the greatest figures
in the literature of the world. Russia has not given the world a
universal poet, a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Goethe, or a Molière; for
Pushkin, consummate artist and inspired poet as he was, lacks that
peculiar greatness which conquers all demarcations of frontier and
difference of language, and produces work which becomes a part of the
universal inheritance of all nations; but Russia has given us two
prose-writers whose work has done this very thing. And between them
they sum up in themselves the whole of the Russian soul, and almost
the whole of the Russian character; I say almost the whole of the
Russian _character_, because although between them they sum up all
that is greatest, deepest, and all that is weakest in the Russian
_soul_, there is perhaps one element of the Russian _character_,
which, although they understood it well enough, their genius forbade
them to possess. If you take as ingredients Peter the Great,
Dostoyevsky's Mwyshkin--the idiot, the pure fool who is wiser than the
wise--and the hero of Gogol's _Revisor_, Hlestyakov the liar and
wind-bag, you can, I think, out of these elements, reconstitute any
Russian who has ever lived. That is to say, you will find that every
single Russian is compounded either of one or more of these elements.

For instance, mix Peter the Great with a sufficient dose of
Hlestyakov, and you get Boris Godunov and Bakunin; leave the Peter the
Great element unmixed, and you get Bazarov, and many of Gorky's
heroes; mix it slightly with Hlestyakov, and you get Lermontov; let
the Hlestyakov element predominate, and you get Griboyedov's
Molchalin; let the Mwyshkin element predominate, with a dose of
Hlestyakov, and you get Father Gapon; let it predominate without the
dose of Hlestyakov, and you get Oblomov; mix it with a dose of Peter
the Great, you get Herzen, Chatsky; and so on. Mix all the elements
equally, and you get Onegin, the average man. I do not mean that there
are necessarily all these elements in every Russian, but that you will
meet with no Russian in whom there is not to be found either one or
more than one of them.

Now, in Tolstoy, the Peter the Great element dominates, with a dose of
Mwyshkin, and a vast but unsuccessful aspiration towards the complete
characteristics of Mwyshkin; while in Dostoyevsky the Mwyshkin
predominates, blent with a fiery streak of Peter the Great; but in
neither of them is there a touch of Hlestyakov. In Russia, it
constantly happens that a man in any class, be he a soldier, sailor,
tinker, tailor, rich man, poor man, plough-boy, or thief, will
suddenly leave his profession and avocation and set out on the search
for God and for truth. These men are called _Bogoiskateli_, Seekers
after God. The one fact that the whole world knows about Tolstoy is
that, in the midst of his great and glorious artistic career, he
suddenly abjured literature and art, denounced worldly possessions,
and said that truth was to be found in working like a peasant, and
thus created a sect of Tolstoyists. The world then blamed him for
inconsistency because he went on writing, and lived as before, with
his family and in his own home. But in reality there was no
inconsistency, because there was in reality no break. Tolstoy had been
a _Bogoiskatel_, a seeker after truth and God all his life; it was
only the manner of his search which had changed; but the quest itself
remained unchanged; he was unable, owing to family ties, to push his
premises to their logical conclusion until just before his death; but
push them to their logical conclusion he did at the last, and he died,
as we know, on the road to a monastery.

Tolstoy's manner of search was extraordinary, extraordinary because he
was provided for it with the eyes of an eagle which enabled him to see
through everything; and, as he took nothing for granted from the day
he began his career until the day he died, he was always subjecting
people, objects, ideas, to the searchlight of his vision, and testing
them to see whether they were true or not; moreover, he was gifted
with the power of describing what he saw during this long journey
through the world of fact and the world of ideas, whether it were the
general or the particular, the mass or the detail, the vision, the
panorama, the crowd, the portrait or the miniature, with the strong
simplicity of a Homer, and the colour and reality of a Velasquez. This
made him one of the world's greatest writers, and the world's greatest
artist in narrative fiction. Another peculiarity of his search was
that he pursued it with eagle eyes, but with blinkers.

In 1877 Dostoyevsky wrote: "In spite of his colossal artistic talent,
Tolstoy is one of those Russian minds which only see that which is
right before their eyes, and thus press towards that point. They have
not the power of turning their necks to the right or to the left to
see what lies on one side; to do this, they would have to turn with
their whole bodies. If they do turn, they will quite probably maintain
the exact opposite of what they have been hitherto professing; for
they are rigidly honest." It is this search carried on by eyes of
unsurpassed penetration between blinkers, by a man who every now and
then did turn his whole body, which accounts for the many apparent
changes and contradictions of Tolstoy's career.

Another source of contradiction was that by temperament the Lucifer
element predominated in him, and the ideal he was for ever seeking was
the humility of Mwyshkin, the pure fool, an ideal which he could not
reach, because he could not sufficiently humble himself. Thus when
death overtook him he was engaged on his last and his greatest voyage
of discovery; and there is something solemn and great about his having
met with death at a small railway station.

Tolstoy's works are a long record of this search, and of the memories
and experiences which he gathered on the way. There is not a detail,
not a phase of feeling, not a shade or mood in his spiritual life that
he has not told us of in his works. In his _Childhood, Boyhood and
Youth_, he re-creates his own childhood, boyhood and youth, not always
exactly as it happened in reality; there is _Dichtung_ as well as
_Wahrheit_; but the _Dichtung_ is as true as the _Wahrheit_, because
his aim was to recreate the impressions he had received from his early
surroundings. Moreover, the searchlight of his eyes even then fell
mercilessly upon everything that was unreal, sham and conventional.

As soon as he had finished with his youth, he turned to the life of a
grown-up man in _The Morning of a Landowner_, and told how he tried to
live a landowner's life, and how nothing but dissatisfaction came of
it. He escapes to the Caucasus, and seeks regeneration, and the result
of the search here is a masterpiece, _The Cossacks_. He goes back to
the world, and takes part in the Crimean war; he describes what he saw
in a battery; his eagle eye lays bare the _splendeurs et misères_ of
war more truthfully perhaps than a writer on war has ever done, but
less sympathetically than Alfred de Vigny--the difference being that
Alfred de Vigny is innately modest, and that Tolstoy, as he wrote
himself, at the beginning of the war, "had no modesty."

After the Crimean war, he plunges again into the world and travels
abroad; and on his return to Russia, he settles down at Yasnaya
Polyana and marries. The hero of his novel _Domestic Happiness_
appears to have found his heart's desire in marriage and country life.
It was then that he wrote _War and Peace_, which he began to publish
in 1865. He always had the idea of writing a story on the Decembrist
movement, and _War and Peace_ was perhaps the preface to that
unwritten work, for it ends when that movement was beginning. In _War
and Peace_, he gave the world a modern prose epic, which did not
suffer from the drawback that spoils most historical novels, namely,
that of being obviously false, because it was founded on his own
recollection of his parents' memories. He gives us what we feel to be
the very truth; for the first time in an historical novel, instead of
saying "this is very likely true," or "what a wonderful work of
artistic reconstruction," we feel that we were ourselves there; that
we knew those people; that they are a part of our very own past. He
paints a whole generation of people; and in Pierre Bezukhov, the new
landmarks of his own search are described. Among many other episodes,
there is nowhere in literature such a true and charming picture of
family life as that of the Rostovs, and nowhere a more vital and
charming personality than Natasha; a creation as living as Pushkin's
Tatiana, and alive with a reality even more convincing than Turgenev's
pictures of women, since she is alive with a different kind of life;
the difference being that while you have read in Turgenev's books
about noble and exquisite women, you are not sure whether you have
not known Natasha yourself and in your own life; you are not sure she
does not belong to the borderland of your own past in which dreams and
reality are mingled. _War and Peace_ eclipses all other historical
novels; it has all Stendhal's reality, and all Zola's power of dealing
with crowds and masses. Take, for instance, a masterpiece such as
Flaubert's _Salammbô_; it may and very likely does take away your
breath by the splendour of its language, its colour, and its art, but
you never feel that, even in a dream, you had taken part in the life
which is painted there. The only bit of unreality in _War and Peace_
is the figure of Napoleon, to whom Tolstoy was deliberately unfair.
Another impression which Tolstoy gives us in _War and Peace_ is that
man is in reality always the same, and that changes of manners are not
more important than changes in fashions of clothes. That is why it is
not extravagant to mention _Salammbô_ in this connection. One feels
that, if Tolstoy had written a novel about ancient Rome, we should
have known a score of patricians, senators, scribblers, clients,
parasites, matrons, courtesans, better even than we know Cicero from
his letters; we should not only feel that we _know_ Cicero, but that
we had actually known him. This very task--namely, that of
reconstituting a page out of Pagan history--was later to be attempted
by Merezhkovsky; but brilliant as his work is, he only at times and by
flashes attains to Tolstoy's power of convincing.

_Anna Karenina_ appeared in 1875-76. And here Tolstoy, with the touch
of a Velasquez and upon a huge canvas, paints the contemporary life of
the upper classes in St. Petersburg and in the country. Levin, the
hero, is himself. Here, again, the truth to nature and the reality is
so intense and vivid that a reader unacquainted with Russia will in
reading the book probably not think of Russia at all, but will imagine
the story has taken place in his own country, whatever that may be. He
shows you everything from the inside, as well as from the outside. You
feel, in the picture of the races, what Anna is feeling in looking on,
and what Vronsky is feeling in riding. And with what reality, what
incomparable skill the gradual dawn of Anna's love for Vronsky is
described; how painfully real is her pompous and excellent husband;
and how every incident in her love affair, her visit to her child, her
appearance at the opera, when, after having left her husband, she
defies the world, her gradual growing irritability, down to the final
catastrophe, bears on it the stamp of something which must have
happened just in that very way and no other.

But, as far as Tolstoy's own development is concerned, Levin is the
most interesting figure in the book. This character is another
landmark in Tolstoy's search after truth; he is constantly putting
accepted ideas to the test; he is haunted by the fear of sudden death,
not the physical fear of death in itself, but the fear that in the
face of death the whole of life may be meaningless; a peasant opens a
new door for him and furnishes him with a solution to the problem--to
live for one's soul: life no longer seems meaningless.

Thus Levin marks the stage in Tolstoy's evolution of his abandoning
materialism and of seeking for the truth in the Church. But the Church
does not satisfy him. He rejects its dogmas and its ritual; he turns
to the Gospel, but far from accepting it, he revises it. He comes to
the conclusion that Christianity as it has been taught is mere
madness, and that the Church is a superfluous anachronism. Thus
another change comes about, which is generally regarded as _the_
change cutting Tolstoy's life in half; in reality it is only a fresh
right-about-turn of a man who is searching for truth in blinkers. In
his _Confession_, he says: "I grew to hate myself; and now all has
become clear." He came to believe that property was the source of all
evil; he desired literally to give up all he had. This he was not able
to do. It was not that he shrank from the sacrifice at the last; but
that circumstances and family ties were too strong for him. But his
final flight from home in the last days of his life shows that the
desire had never left him.

Art was also subjected to his new standards and found wanting, both in
his own work and in that of others. Shakespeare and Beethoven were
summarily disposed of; his own masterpieces he pronounced to be
worthless. This more than anything shows the pride of the man. He
could admire no one, not even himself. He scorned the gifts which were
given him, and the greatest gifts of the greatest men. But this
landmark of Tolstoy's evolution, his turning his back on the Church,
and on his work, is a landmark in Russian history as well as in
Russian art. For far less than this Russian thinkers and writers of
high position had been imprisoned and exiled. Nobody dared to touch
Tolstoy. He fearlessly attacked all constituted authority, both
spiritual and temporal, in an epoch of reaction, and such was his
prestige that official Russia raised no finger. His authority was too
great, and this is perhaps the first great victory of the liberty of
individual thought over official tyranny in Russia. There had been
martyrs in plenty before, but no conquerors.

After _Anna Karenina_, Tolstoy, who gave up literature for a time, but
for a time only, nevertheless continued to write; at first he only
wrote stories for children and theological and polemical pamphlets;
but in 1886 he published the terribly powerful peasant drama: _The
Powers of Darkness_. Later came the _Kreutzer Sonata_, the _Death of
Ivan Ilitch_, and _Resurrection_. Here the hero Nehludov is a lifeless
phantom of Tolstoy himself; the episodes and details have the reality
of his early work, so has Maslova, the heroine; but in the squalor
and misery of the prisons he shows no precious balms of humanity and
love, as Dostoyevsky did; and the book has neither the sweep and epic
swing of _War and Peace_, nor the satisfying completeness of _Anna
Karenina_. Since his death, some posthumous works have been published,
among them a novel, and a play: _The Living Corpse_. He died, as he
had lived, still searching, and perhaps at the end he found the object
of his quest.

Tolstoy, even more than Pushkin, was rooted to the soil; all that is
not of the soil--anything mystic or supernatural--was totally alien to
him. He was the oak which could not bend; and being, as he was, the
king of realistic fiction, an unsurpassed painter of pictures,
portraits, men and things, a penetrating analyst of the human heart, a
genius cast in a colossal mould, his work, both by its substance and
its artistic power, exercised an influence beyond his own country,
affected all European nations, and gives him a place among the great
creators of the world. Tolstoy was not a rebel but a heretic, a
heretic not only to religion and the Church, but in philosophy,
opinions, art, and even in food; but what the world will remember of
him are not his heretical theories but his faithful practice, which is
orthodox in its obedience to the highest canons, orthodox as Homer and
Shakespeare are orthodox, and like theirs, one of the greatest earthly
examples of the normal and the sane.

To say that DOSTOYEVSKY is the antithesis to Tolstoy, and the second
great pillar of Russian prose literature, will surprise nobody now.
Had one been writing ten years ago, the expression of such an opinion
would have met with an incredulous smile amongst the majority of
English readers of Russian literature, for Dostoyevsky was practically
unknown save for his _Crime and Punishment_, and to have compared him
with Turgenev would have seemed sacrilegious. Now when Dostoyevsky is
one of the shibboleths of our _intelligentsia_, one can boldly say,
without fear of being misunderstood, that, as a creator and a force in
literature, Dostoyevsky is in another plane than that of Turgenev, and
as far greater than him as Leonardo da Vinci is greater than Vandyke,
or as Wagner is greater than Gounod, while some Russians consider him
even infinitely greater than Tolstoy. Let us say he is his equal and
complement. He is in any case, in almost every respect, his
antithesis. Tolstoy was the incarnation of health, and is above all
things and pre-eminently the painter of the sane and the earthly.
Dostoyevsky was an epileptic, the painter of the abnormal, of
criminals, madmen, degenerates, mystics. Tolstoy led an even,
uneventful life, spending the greater part of it in his own country
house, in the midst of a large family. Dostoyevsky was condemned to
death, served a sentence of four years' hard labour in a convict
settlement in Siberia, and besides this spent six years in exile; when
he returned and started a newspaper, it was prohibited by the
Censorship; a second newspaper which he started came to grief; he
underwent financial ruin; his first wife, his brother, and his best
friend died; he was driven abroad by debt, harassed by the authorities
on the one hand, and attacked by the liberals on the other; abused and
misunderstood, almost starving and never well, working under
overwhelming difficulties, always pressed for time, and ill requited
for his toil. That was Dostoyevsky's life.

Tolstoy was a heretic; at first a materialist, and then a seeker after
a religion of his own; Dostoyevsky was a practising believer, a
vehement apostle of orthodoxy, and died fortified by the Sacraments of
the Church. Tolstoy with his broad unreligious opinions was
narrow-minded. Dostoyevsky with his definite religious opinions was
the most broad-minded man who ever lived. Tolstoy hated the
supernatural, and was alien to all mysticism. Dostoyevsky seems to get
nearer to the unknown, to what lies beyond the flesh, than any other
writer. In Tolstoy, the Peter the Great element of the Russian
character predominated; in Dostoyevsky that of Mwyshkin, the pure
fool. Tolstoy could never submit and humble himself. Submission and
humility and resignation are the keynotes and mainsprings of
Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy despised art, and paid no homage to any of the
great names of literature; and this was not only after the so-called
change. As early as 1862, he said that Pushkin and Beethoven could not
please because of their absolute beauty. Dostoyevsky was catholic and
cosmopolitan, and admired the literature of foreign countries--Racine
as well as Shakespeare, Corneille as well as Schiller. The essence of
Tolstoy is a magnificent intolerance. The essence of Dostoyevsky is
sweet reasonableness. Tolstoy dreamed of giving up all he had to the
poor, and of living like a peasant; Dostoyevsky had to share the hard
labour of the lowest class of criminals. Tolstoy theorized on the
distribution of food; but Dostoyevsky was fed like a beggar. Tolstoy
wrote in affluence and at leisure, and re-wrote his books; Dostoyevsky
worked like a literary hack for his daily bread, ever pressed for time
and ever in crying need of money.

These contrasts are not made in disparagement of Tolstoy, but merely
to point out the difference between the two men and between their
circumstances. Tolstoy wrote about himself from the beginning of his
career to the end; nearly all his work is autobiographical, and he
almost always depicts himself in all his books. We know nothing of
Dostoyevsky from his books. He was an altruist, and he loved others
better than himself.

Dostoyevsky's first book, _Poor Folk_, published in 1846, is a
descendant of Gogol's story _The Cloak_, and bears the influence, to a
slight extent, of Gogol. In this, the story of a minor public servant
battling against want, and finding a ray of light in corresponding
with a girl also in poor circumstances, but who ultimately marries a
rich middle-aged man, we already get all Dostoyevsky's peculiar
sweetness; what Stevenson called his "lovely goodness," his almost
intolerable pathos, his love of the disinherited and of the failures
of life. His next book, _Letters from a Dead House_, has a far more
universal interest. It is the record of his prison experiences, which
is of priceless value, not only on account of its radiant moral
beauty, its perpetual discovery of the soul of goodness in things
evil, its human fraternity, its complete absence of egotism and pose,
and its thrilling human interest, but also on account of the light it
throws on the Russian character, the Russian poor, and the Russian
peasant.

In 1866 came _Crime and Punishment_, which brought Dostoyevsky fame.
This book, Dostoyevsky's _Macbeth_, is so well known in the French and
English translations that it hardly needs any comment. Dostoyevsky
never wrote anything more tremendous than the portrayal of the anguish
that seethes in the soul of Raskolnikov, after he has killed the old
woman, "mechanically forced," as Professor Brückner says, "into
performing the act, as if he had gone too near machinery in motion,
had been caught by a bit of his clothing and cut to pieces." And not
only is one held spellbound by every shifting hope, fear, and doubt,
and each new pang that Raskolnikov experiences, but the souls of all
the subsidiary characters in the book are revealed to us just as
clearly: the Marmeladov family, the honest Razumikhin, the police
inspector, and the atmosphere of the submerged tenth in St.
Petersburg--the steaming smell of the city in the summer. There is an
episode when Raskolnikov kneels before Sonia, the prostitute, and says
to her: "It is not before you I am kneeling, but before all the
suffering of mankind." That is what Dostoyevsky does himself in this
and in all his books; but in none of them is the suffering of all
mankind conjured up before us in more living colours, and in none of
them is his act of homage in kneeling before it more impressive.

This book was written before the words "psychological novel" had been
invented; but how all the psychological novels which were written
years later by Bourget and others pale before this record written in
blood and tears! _Crime and Punishment_ was followed by _The Idiot_
(1868). The idiot is Mwyshkin, who has been alluded to already, the
wise fool, an epileptic, in whom irony and arrogance and egoism have
been annihilated; and whose very simplicity causes him to pass
unscathed through a den of evil, a world of liars, scoundrels, and
thieves, none of whom can escape the influence of his radiant
personality. He is the same with every one he meets, and with his
unsuspicious sincerity he combines the intuition of utter goodness, so
that he can see through people and read their minds. In this
character, Dostoyevsky has put all his sweetness; it is not a portrait
of himself, but it is a portrait of what he would have liked to be,
and reflects all that is best in him. In contrast to Mwyshkin,
Rogozhin, the merchant, is the incarnation of undisciplined passion,
who ends by killing the thing he loves, Nastasia, also a creature of
unbridled impulses,--because he feels that he can never really and
fully possess her. The catastrophe, the description of the night after
Rogozhin has killed Nastasia, is like nothing else in literature;
lifelike in detail and immense, in the way in which it makes you
listen at the keyhole of the soul, immense with the immensity of a
great revelation. The minor characters in the book are also all of
them remarkable; one of them, the General's wife, Madame Epanchin, has
an indescribable and playful charm.

_The Idiot_ was followed by _The Possessed_, or _Devils_, printed in
1871-72, called thus after the Devils in the Gospel of St. Luke, that
left the possessed man and went into the swine; the Devils in the book
are the hangers-on of Nihilism between 1862 and 1869. The book
anticipated the future, and in it Dostoyevsky created characters who
were identically the same, and committed identically the same crimes,
as men who actually lived many years later in 1871, and later still.
The whole book turns on the exploitation by an unscrupulous,
ingenious, and iron-willed knave of the various weaknesses of a crowd
of idealist dupes and disciples. One of them is a decadent, one of
them is one of those idealists "whom any strong idea strikes all of a
sudden and annihilates his will, sometimes for ever"; one of them is a
maniac whose single idea is the production of the Superman which he
thinks will come, when it will be immaterial to a man whether he lives
or dies, and when he will be prepared to kill himself not out of fear
but in order to kill fear. That man will be God. Not the God-man, but
the Man-God. The plan of the unscrupulous leader, Peter Verkhovensky,
who was founded on Nechaev, a Nihilist of real life, is to create
disorder, and amid the disorder to seize the authority; he imagines a
central committee of which he pretends to be the representative,
organizes a small local committee, and persuades his dupes that a
network of similar small committees exist all over Russia; his aim
being to create them gradually, by persuading people in every plot of
fresh ground that they exist everywhere else.

Thus the idea of the book was to show that the strength of Nihilism
lay, not in high dogmas and theories held by a large and
well-organized society, but in the strength of the will of one or two
men reacting on the weaker herd and exploiting the strength, the
weakness, and the one-sidedness of its ideals, a herd which was
necessarily weak owing to that very one-sidedness. In order to bind
his disciples with a permanent bond, Verkhovensky exploits the _idée
fixe_ of suicide and the superman, which is held by one of his dupes,
to induce him to commit a crime before he kills himself, and thus make
away with another member of the committee who is represented as being
a spy. Once this is done, the whole committee will be jointly
responsible, and bound to him by the ties of blood and fear. But
Verkhovensky is not the hero of the book. The hero is Stavrogin, whom
Verkhovensky regards as his trump card, because of the strength of his
character, which leads him to commit the most outrageous
extravagances, and at the same time to remain as cold as ice; but
Verkhovensky's whole design is shattered on Stavrogin's character, all
the murders already mentioned are committed, the whole scheme comes to
nothing, the conspirators are discovered, and Peter escapes abroad.

When _Devils_ appeared in 1871, it was looked upon as a gross
exaggeration, but real life in subsequent years was to produce
characters and events of the same kind, which were more startling than
Dostoyevsky's fiction. The book is the least well-constructed of
Dostoyevsky's; the narrative is disconnected, and the events,
incidents, and characters so crowded together, that the general effect
is confused; on the other hand, it contains isolated scenes which
Dostoyevsky never surpassed; and in its strength and in its
limitations it is perhaps his most characteristic work.

From 1873-80 Dostoyevsky went back to journalism, and wrote his _Diary
of a Writer_, in which he commented on current events. In 1880, he
united all conflicting and hostile parties and shades of public
opinion, by the speech he made at the unveiling of Pushkin's memorial,
in one common bond of enthusiasm. At the end of the seventies, he
returned to a work already begun, _The Brothers Karamazov_, which,
although it remains the longest of his books, was never finished. It
is the story of three brothers, Dimitri, Ivan, and Alyosha; their
father is a cynical sensualist. The eldest brother is an
undisciplined, passionate character, who expiates his passions by
suffering; the second brother is a materialist, the tragedy of whose
inner life forms a greater part of the book; the third brother,
Alyosha, is a lover of humanity, and a believer in God and man. He
seeks a monastery, but his spiritual father sends him out into the
world, to live and to suffer. He is to go through the furnace of the
world and experience many trials; for the microbe of lust that is in
his family is dormant in him also. The book was called the _History of
a Great Sinner_, and the sinner was to be Alyosha. But Dostoyevsky
died before this part of the subject is even approached.

He died in January 1881; the crowds of men and women of all sorts and
conditions of life that attended his funeral, and the extent and the
sincerity of the grief manifested, gave it an almost mythical
greatness. The people gave him a funeral such as few kings or heroes
have ever had. Without fear of controversy or contradiction one can
now say that Dostoyevsky's place in Russian literature is at the top,
equal and in the opinion of some superior to that of Tolstoy in
greatness. He is also one of the greatest writers the world has ever
produced, not because, like Tolstoy, he saw life steadily and saw it
whole, and painted it with the supreme and easy art of a Velasquez;
nor because, like Turgenev, he wove exquisite pictures into musical
words. Dostoyevsky was not an artist; his work is shapeless; his books
are like quarries where granite and dross, gold and ore are mingled.
He paid no attention to style, and yet so strong and vital is his
spoken word that when the Moscow Art Theatre put some scenes in _The
Brothers Karamazov_ and _Devils_ on the stage, they found they could
not alter one single syllable; and sometimes his words have a power
beyond that of words, a power that only music has. There are pages
where Dostoyevsky expresses the anguish of the soul in the same manner
as Wagner expressed the delirium of dying Tristram. I should indeed
put the matter the other way round, and say that in the last act of
Tristram, Wagner is as great as Dostoyevsky. But Dostoyevsky is great
because of the divine message he gives, not didactically, not by
sermons, but by the goodness that emanates, like a precious balm, from
the characters he creates; because more than any other books in the
world his books reflect not only the teaching and the charity, but the
accent and the divine aura of love that is in the Gospels.

"I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom,
conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that
addresses your spirit, just as if both had passed through the grave,
and we stood at God's feet, equal--as we are!" These words, spoken by
Charlotte Brontë's _Jane Eyre_, express what Dostoyevsky's books do.
His spirit addresses our spirit. "Be no man's judge; humble love is a
terrible power which effects more than violence. Only active love can
bring out faith. Love men, and do not be afraid of their sins; love
man in his sin; love all the creatures of God, and pray God to make
you cheerful. Be cheerful as children and as the birds." This was
Father Zosima's advice to Alyosha. And that is the gist of
Dostoyevsky's message to mankind. "Life," Father Zosima also says to
Alyosha, "will bring you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on
account of them, and you will bless life and cause others to bless
it." Here we have the whole secret of Dostoyevsky's greatness. He
blessed life, and he caused others to bless it.

It is objected that his characters are abnormal; that he deals with
the diseased, with epileptics, neurasthenics, criminals, sensualists,
madmen; but it is just this very fact which gives so much strength and
value to the blessing he gave to life; it is owing to this fact that
he causes others to bless life; because he was cast in the nethermost
circle of life's inferno; he was thrown together with the refuse of
humanity, with the worst of men and with the most unfortunate; he saw
the human soul on the rack, and he saw the vilest diseases that
afflict the human soul; he faced the evil without fear or blinkers;
and there, in the inferno, in the dust and ashes, he recognized the
print of divine footsteps and the fragrance of goodness; he cried from
the abyss: "Hosanna to the Lord, for He is just!" and he blessed life.
It is true that his characters are taken almost entirely from the
_Despised and Rejected_, as one of his books was called, and often
from the ranks of the abnormal; but when a great writer wishes to
reveal the greatest adventures and the deepest experiences which the
soul of man can undergo, it is in vain for him to take the normal
type; it has no adventures. The adventures of the soul of Fortinbras
would be of no help to mankind; but the adventures of Hamlet are of
help to mankind, and the adventures of Don Quixote; and neither Don
Quixote nor Hamlet are normal types.

Dostoyevsky wrote the tragedy of life and of the soul, and to do this
he chose circumstances as terrific as those which unhinged the reason
of King Lear, shook that of Hamlet, and made Œdipus blind himself.
His books resemble Greek tragedies by the magnitude of the spiritual
adventures they set forth; they are unlike Greek Tragedies in the
Christian charity and the faith and the hope which goes out of them;
they inspire the reader with courage, never with despair, although
Dostoyevsky, face to face with the last extremities of evil, never
seeks to hide it or to shun it, but merely to search for the soul of
goodness in it. He did not search in vain, and just as, when he was on
his way to Siberia, a conversation he had with a fellow-prisoner
inspired that fellow-prisoner with the feeling that he could go on
living and even face penal servitude, so do Dostoyevsky's books come
to mankind as a message of hope from a radiant country. That is what
constitutes his peculiar greatness.

CHAPTER VII

THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY

The fifties, the sixties, and the seventies were, all over Europe, the
epoch of Parnassian poetry. In England, Tennyson was pouring out his
"fervent and faultless melodies," Matthew Arnold was playing his
plaintive harp, and the Pre-Raphaelites were weaving their tapestried
dreams; in France, Gautier was carving his cameos, Banville's
Harlequins and Columbines were dancing on a Watteau-like stage in the
silver twilight of Corot, Baudelaire was at work on his sombre bronze,
Sully-Prudhomme twanged his ivory lyre, and Leconte de Lisle was
issuing his golden coinage. It was, in poetry, the epoch of art for
art's sake.

Russian poetry did not escape the universal tendency; but in Russia
everything was conspiring to put poetry, and especially that kind of
poetry, in the shade. In the first place, events of great magnitude
were happening--the wide reforms, the emancipation of the serfs, the
growth of Nihilism, which was the product of the disillusion at the
result of the reforms: in the second place, criticism under the
influence of Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and Dobrolyubov was entirely
realistic and positivist, preaching not art for life's sake only, but
the absolute futility of poetry; and, in the third place, work of the
supremest kind was being done in narrative fiction; in the fourth
place, no prophet-poet was forthcoming whose genius was great enough
to voice national aspirations. All this tended to put poetry in the
shade, especially as such poets as did exist were, with one notable
exception, Parnassians, whose talent dwelt aloof from the turbid
stream of life, and who sought to express the adventures of their
souls, which were emotional and artistic, either in dreamy music or in
exquisite shapes and colours. This neglect of verse lasted right up
until the end of the seventies. When, however, in the eighties, the
wave of political crisis reached its climax and, after the
assassination of Alexander II, rolled back into a sea of stagnant
reaction, the poets, who had been hitherto neglected, and quietly
singing all the while, were discovered once more, and the shares in
poetry continued to rise as time went on; thus the poets of the
sixties reaped their due meed of appreciation.

A proof of how widespread and deep this neglect was is that TYUTCHEV,
whose work attracted no attention whatever until 1854, and met with no
wide appreciation until a great deal later, was four years younger
than Pushkin, and a man of thirty when Goethe died. He went on living
until 1873, and can be called the first of the Parnassians.
Politically, he was a Slavophile, and sang the "resignation" and
"long-suffering" of the Russian people, which he preferred to the
stiff-neckedness of the West. But the value of his work lies less in
his Slavophile aspirations than in its depth of thought and lyrical
feeling, in the contrast between the gloomy forebodings of his
imagination and the sunlike images he gives of nature. His verse is
like a spring day, dark with ominous thunderclouds, out of which a
rainbow and a shaft of sunlight fall on a dewy orchard and light it
with a silvery smile. His verse is, on the one hand, full of
foreboding and terror at the fate of man and the shadow of
nothingness, and, on the other hand, it twitters like a bird over the
freshness and sunshine of spring. He sings the spring again and again,
and no Russian poet has ever sung the glory, the mystery, the wonder,
and the terror of night as he has done; his whole work is compounded
of glowing pictures of nature and a world of longing and of
unutterable dreams.

The dreamy dominion of the Parnassian age, on whose threshold Tyutchev
stood, was to be disturbed by the notes of a harsher and stronger
music.

NEKRASOV (1821-77), Russia's "sternest painter," and certainly one of
her best, drew his inspiration direct from life, and sang the
sufferings, the joys, and the life of the people. He is a Russian
Crabbe; nature and man are his subjects, but nature as the friend and
foe of man, as a factor, the most important factor in man's life, and
not as an ideal storehouse from which a Shelley can draw forms more
real than living man, nurslings of immortality, or a Wordsworth reap
harvests of the inward eye. He called his muse the "Muse of Vengeance
and of Grief." He is an uncompromising realist, like Crabbe, and
idealizes nothing in his pictures of the peasant's life. Like Crabbe,
he has a deep note of pathos, and a keen but not so minute an eye for
landscape.

On the other hand, he at times attains to imaginative sublimity in his
descriptions, as, for instance, in his poem called _The Red-nosed
Frost_, where King Frost approaches a peasant widow who is at work in
the winter forest, and freezes her to death. As Daria is gradually
freezing to death, the frost comes to her like a warrior; and his
semblance and attributes are drawn in a series of splendid stanzas. He
sings to her of his riches that no profusion can decrease, and of his
kingdom of silver and diamonds and pearls: then, as she freezes, she
dreams of a hot summer's day, and of the rye harvest and of the
familiar songs--

    "Away with the song she is soaring,
      She surrenders herself to its stream,
    In the world there is no such sweet singing
      As that which we hear in a dream."

His longest and most ambitious work was a kind of popular epic, _Who
is Happy in Russia?_ written in short lines which have the popular
ring and accent. Some peasants start on a pilgrimage to find out who
is happy in Russia. They fly on a magic carpet, and interview
representatives of the different classes of society, the pope, the
landowner, the peasant woman, each new interview producing a whole
series of stories, sometimes idyllic and sometimes tragic, and all
showing their genius as intimate pictures of various phases of Russian
life. Here, again, the analogy with Crabbe suggests itself, for
Nekrasov's tales, taking into consideration the difference between the
two countries, have a marked affinity, both in their subject matter,
their variety, their stern realism, their pathos, their bitterness,
and their observation of nature, with Crabbe's stories in verse.

Two of Nekrasov's long poems tell the story in the form of
reminiscence,--and here again the naturalness and appropriateness of
the diction is perfect,--of the Russian women, Princess Volkonsky and
Princess Trubetzkoy, who followed their husbands, condemned to penal
servitude for taking part in the Decembrist rising, to Siberia. Here,
again, Nekrasov strikes a note of deep and poignant pathos, all the
more poignant from the absolute simplicity with which the tales are
told. Nekrasov towers among the Parnassians of the time and has only
one rival, whom we shall describe presently.

The Parnassians are represented by three poets, MAIKOV (1821-97), FET
(1820-98), and POLONSKY (1820-98), all three of whom began to write
about the same time, in 1840; none of these three poets was didactic,
and all three remained aloof from political or social questions.

Maikov is attracted by classical themes, by Italy and also by old
ballads, but his strength lies in his plastic form, his colour, and
his pictures of Russian landscape; he writes, for instance, an
exquisite reminiscence of a day's fishing when he was a boy.

The quality of Fet's muse, in contrast to Maikov's concrete
plasticity, is illusiveness; his lyrics express intangible dreams and
impressions; delicate tints and shadows tremble and flit across his