VGOGOL (1809-1852)

"When, thirsting for eternal knowledge,He keenly followed through the mistThe caravans of wandering planetsThrown into vastness; when he listâ€”The happy first-born of creationâ€”To voice of Faith and Love, and knewNo doubt or hatred; and there wasNo threat of ages fruitless, dreary,Awaiting him in even rows ..."

Now an outcast:

"He planted sin without enjoyance;His art has never met contest,Has quickly lost its charm and zest,And has become a mere annoyance."

We follow him in his exile over the world through the Caucasus to Gruzia:

"A blissful, brilliant nook of Earth!'Mid stately ancient pillared ruins,Relucent, gurgling rivulets runAnd ripple over motley pebbles;Between them, rose-trees where the birdsSing love-songs, while the ivy girdsThe stems, and crowns the foliage-templesOf green chinÃ ra; and the herdsOf timid red-deer seek the boonOf mountain eaves in sultry noon;And sparkling life, and rustling leaves,And hum of voices hundred-toned,The sweetly breathing thousand plants,Voluptuous heat of skies sun-laden,Caressive dew of gorgeous night,And starsâ€”as clear as eyes of maiden,As glance of GrÃ¹zian maiden bright!But all this brilliancy of NatureAwoke not in the Demon's soulA moment's joy, nor tender feeling."

We are now introduced to the heroine, TamÃ ra, whose wedding feast is being prepared:

"Amid her friends, the whole day longTamÃ ra spent in play and song.The sun, behind a far-off mountain,Is half set in a sea of gold.The maidens in a round are sittingAnd, to a lilting tune they're singingThey clap in time. TamÃ ra takesHer tambourine, and nimbly shakesIt o'er her head; with fleeting motionNow trips it lighter than a bird,Now holds a-sudden in her dance,And casts a shining, roguish glanceFrom underneath the jealous lashes;Her eyebrow curves in coy expression,Her lithesome shape does swift incline,And o'er the carpet slides and flashesHer little foot of form divine....The Demon did behold her.... RaptureAnd awe possessed him: and at onceThe silent desert of his spiritRang suddenly with joyful tones;And once again the sacred grandeurOf Love and Good and Beauty shoneWithin his soul....He felt a sadness strangely newâ€”As if the overwhelming showerOf feelings rang with words he knew.Was this a sign of renovation?Gone were the words of dread temptation,His mind no more in guile adept.Will he forget his past?... But GodWould never grant him this relief,Nor he forgetfulness accept."

TamÃ ra's bridegroom-elect is foully done to death on his way to the wedding. The bride, fallen on her bed, sobs with a lorn and piteous feeling until she suddenly hears a voice of magic sweetness urging her to cease.

"'Forsooth, the destiny of mortals,Believe me, angel upon earth'" (sings the voice),"'Is notâ€”not for a single momentOf thy dear child-like sorrow worth!'"

He beseeches her to listen to his pleas:

"'As soon as night throws silky veilingO'er Caucasus, and all the worldGrows still and fairy-like, bewitchedBy Nature's magic wand and word;As soon as zephyrs flutter shylyAcross the faded grass, and gailyFlies out of it the lurking bird;As soon as under vine and maizeThe flowers of night find dew, and raiseUnfolding petals with relief:As soon as from behind the mountainsThe golden crescent glides, and stealsA glance upon thee furtivelyâ€”I shall fly down each night to thee,Shall guard till dawn thy virgin slumber,And on thy lashes dreams of amberI'll waft, to woo them prettily....'"

We are not surprised that fire began to flow along the maiden's veins as she listened to so exquisite a speech.She decides to enter a nunnery to avoid both marriage and the hellish spirit that assails her in dreams. The Devil follows:

"But, filled with fear of sanctity,He dared not boldly force an entranceAnd violate the sanctuary.Then for a moment was he fainTo give up his hell-dark device."

He catches a glimpse of the glimmering lamplight in TamÃ ra's window and hears a song in the far distance, a song for earth in heaven born and nourished.

"Had, then, an angel flown in secretTo meet him as his friend of yore,To sing the byegone joys they cherished,And soothe the sufferings he bore?Then first the Demon knew he loved;Knew how he yearned and longed for love.In sudden fear, he thought to fly ...But in that first, heart-rending anguishHis wing was stayedâ€”he had no power!And, marvel! from his veilÃ¨d eyeThere dropped a tear.... This very hourThere lieth by TamÃ ra's towerA stone burnt through by flame-like tearâ€”Inhuman tear: a sign for aye!..."

As he entered he was met by the guardian angel of the fair sinner, who reproaches the Demon, and bids him begone.

"The Demon's faceLit up with smile of proud derision,His look flashed jealousy and scorn,And in his soul again awakenedThe former hatred's poisonous thorn."

The guardian angel departs and the Demon is left victor of the field to plead his cause. In answer to TamÃ ra's question, "'But who art thou? Who?... Answer me,'" he replies:

"'I'm he whose voice has made thee listenThroughout the midnight's calm and rest;Whose thoughts have reached thee like a whisper,Whose vision through thy dreams would glisten,Whose sadness thou hast dimly guessed....I am the lord of understandingAnd freedom: I am Nature's foe,The world's despair, and Heaven's woe.Yet at thy feet I worship thee!...I love thee: I'm thy slave to-day....What is eternity without thee?My boundless realm, when I am lonely?'"

TamÃ ra then asks him why he loves her, to which he replies:

"'Why do I, fair? I do not know.Since first the earthly world began,In my mind's eye imprinted everThine image seemed to fill the ether,And through eternity it ran.In Paradise the glorious yearsWere lacking only thy creation.Oh, if thou couldst but comprehendThe bitterness of my existenceThrough dreary ages' dread consistence....Oft through the rack and tempest raging,I rushed at midnight levin-clad,In fruitless hope of e'er assuagingMy aching heart's revolt and dread,To kill the pain of mind's regret,The ne'er forgotten to forget.'"

TamÃ ra is gradually won to listen to his passionate pleading.

"'Whoe'er thou art, my friend so mystic,I list to thee against my will.I know my peace is lost for ever;But thou art suffering, and neverI could forget thee suffering still.But if thy words are false and cunning,But if thou plannest a deceit ...Have mercy. What's to thee this conquest?What counts my soul in thy conceit?Oh, give thy oath, thy sacred vow:Thou seestâ€”I fail and suffer nowâ€”Thou seest a woman's tender dreams!...But fear grows less ... To me it seemsThou understand'st and knowest all....Swear on thy oath, give me a tokenThat sin and wrong thou wilt renounce.'"

The Demon vows fidelity:

"'I swear by dawn of the creation,By the decay of earthly sooth,By the disgrace of crime and evil,And by the triumph of the truth.I swear by flashing hopes of conquest,I swear by bitter pains of fall,I swear by having met with thee,And by the threat of losing all; ...I swear by Hell, I swear by Heaven,I swear by sacredness, by thee,Thy latest look my soul enslaving,Thy first and guileless tear for me;By breath from lips so pure and ireless,Thy silky tresses' wave and shine,I swear by suffering, elation,And by my love for thee, divine....But here's my offer; all my powerI bring to thee, my sanctuary!I seek thy love, I need its blessing;Thou wilt obtain eternityFor one short moment. Trust my greatnessIn love, and wrath, and equity.I, free and wilful Son of Ether,Shall take thee high above the stars,And thou shalt be the Queen of Nature,My foremost love, eternal treasure,Whom nothing equals or debars!...Crowds of ethereal fairy-maidensWill wait, thy every wish to meet.The crown which Evening Star is wearingI'll tear from her, and crown thy head;I'll take the dew from evening flowersTo shine on it in diamonds' stead;I'll take a sunset ray of scarlet,And gird thee with its ribbon light;I'll saturate the air around theeWith purest fragrance of the night.A never-dying magic musicWill charm thine ears by fall and swell.I'll build a palace out of turquoiseAnd pearls and gold for thee to dwell;I'll search for thee the depth of ocean;I'll get all riches from the stars;I'll give thee every earthly treasureâ€”But love me ...'Closely o'er her bending,He gently touched TamÃ ra's tremblingLips with his lips burning like fire,Words overwhelming with temptationWere to her pleading his reply....The evil spirit was the victor ...But poison of his touch inflictedA fatal blow on child-like breast,An agonising shriek, through restAnd silence of the hour, broke ..."

The guardian angel returns and banishes the Demon.

"Then at the spirit of TemptationAn austere glance the Angel bent:The conquered Demon cursed his longings,His maddening dreams where love had shone;And once again he stood relentless,In scornful arrogance, and dauntless,Amidst the Universeâ€”alone."

Comment on such a poem is needless. I have done my part if I have induced you by my brief extracts to go back to the original and read the whole of it for yourselves.

Nicholas Gogol was born in 1809 near PoltÃ va and brought up in affluence by a Cossack grandmother: at school he did but little work, but devoted himself with enthusiasm to drawing and the theatre. In 1829 he obtained a Government office in Petrograd. He then tried the stage, schoolmastering, and obtained a Professorship of History; failing in all these, he turned to literature. His first fruits brought him to the notice of the famous literary men of his day, and he became a friend of Pushkin, who proved invaluable as critic and adviser.

For seven years he lived in Petrograd, and during this period began his sketches of Little Russianâ€”that is, of South Russianâ€”life inEvenings on a Farm on the DikankaandMirgorod. Little Russia differs from Great Russia in having scattered whitewashed houses in place of the regular streets of the villages of Great Russia: separate little farms surrounded by charming little gardens. It is specially attractive in its more genial climate, warm nights, its musical language, the beauty of its people, their picturesque dress and its lyrical songs. There is, too, more freedom in the relations between young men and young girls; there is none of that seclusion of the women which we meet with in Great Russia. The Little Russians have also preserved numerous traditions and epic poems from the time when they were free Cossacks, fighting against the Poles in the north and the Turks in the south. In Gogol we see a merging of the Great and the Little, for though Little by birth and breeding, he yet wrote in the language of Pushkin and LÃ¨rmontov. From his very first days we feel the richness of his laughter and the whimsical, Puck-like vein of wit which is characteristically Little Russian. It was only later that we feel the unseen tears behind the laughter.

In these we find that quality which we immediately associate with his name, a realism based upon meticulousobservation, but merged into it and permeating his whole work is an eerie romanticism, a delight in the supernatural and a deep religious vein which afterwards dominated all the other qualities. His humour is rich and many-sided, ranging from the broad and farcical to a delicate and half melancholy, and later to an almost Swiftean irony.

Right from the beginning we plunge into an atmosphere that brings us at a bound into the very heart of Russia as no other writer has been able to do. In his first stories we hear of water-nymphs, the devil, witches, magicians; in the second,Mirgorod, we find him feeling his way towards realism.The Quarrel of the Two Ivansis simply the story of two friends who quarrel over nothing and are just on the point of reconciliation, years after, when the mere mention of the word "goose," which was the prime cause of the quarrel, sets them off again, this time irrevocably. It is in this volume that we come acrossTaras Bulba, now published in the Everyman Edition, a short historical novel in which Cossack life is inimitably set down.

Later inArabesquesand theTaleshe leaves the supernatural altogether, and we get such a story asThe Overcoat, in which a minor public servant who is always shivering dreams of the day when he can achieve his ambition of owning a warm overcoat. After years of poverty and striving he manages to save 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. It sets one thinking at once of that host of failures which exercise so queer a fascination over all later Russian novelists, particularly Dostoievsky.

Interspersed between the stories came the plays. One has to remember in this connection the exceptionally severe censorship of the stage. It is a matter of no little surprise to us on readingThe Inspector-Generalto think that such a play should ever have been licensed in such a country. 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. An ordinary traveller from Petrogradâ€”an intrepid liarâ€”is mistaken for the Inspector and plays up to his part until the arrival of the real one, when he manages to effect his escape.

As a satire on Russian bureaucracy the play has no rival: nearly every character is dishonest, and it is a delight to see them all taken in by the empty-headed hero with his fluent lying. Of all plays which can count on drawing big houses at holiday-time in Russia this stands easily first. It became a classic as soon as it was produced and it is as irresistible in its appeal now as it was when it was written.

Gogol now left Russia and settled in Rome, never to return to his native country.

It was here that he produced his masterpiece,Dead Souls, the great comic work of all Russia. Again it was Pushkin who gave him the idea. The hero of the book, Chichikov, conceives a brilliant idea. Every landlord possessed so many serfs, called "souls." Every ten years a revision took place and the landlord had to pay poll-tax on all the "souls" who had died in that period. Between the periods no one inspected the lists. Chichikov's idea was to take over the dead souls from the landlord, who would, of course, be delighted to get out of the tax by this means; Chichikov would then register his purchases and then mortgage the souls at the rate of three hundred roubles each at a bank in Petrograd or Moscow, representing that they were in some corner of the Crimea, and so make enough money to buy live "souls" of his own.

The book is simply the odyssey of Chichikov all over Russia in his search for these souls: it gives infinite scope to the author, for he can bring in every type of man and woman that he knows. The book was to be divided into three parts, the first of which appeared in 1842: he went on working at the other two parts until 1852, when he died. He twice threw the second part of his work into the fire when it was finished, so we are left with a complete first part and an incomplete second. The third part was probably only sketched. In the second part he meant to show us the moral regeneration of Chichikov: apparently he could not bring himself to believe that he had done this adequately, and he came to be more and more of an ascetic and a recluse as the years passed.

So here once more we get that extraordinary "break" in mid-flight which is so peculiar a characteristic of all Russian writers.

The book made an immediate and lasting impression upon the country. It pleased some by its reality, its artistry and its social ideas; it pleased the Slavophils by its truth to life and its smell of Russia. When Gogol read the first chapter to his master, Pushkin, the latter remarked: "God! what a sad country Russia is!"â€”a queer comment, you may think, for the most humorous book that Russia has produced. But the truth is that, comic as the best chapters are, Gogol refuses to flatter either his country or the people who inhabit it, and in Chichikov, just as in OblÃ²mov, most readers find themselves wondering whether after all there is not a good deal of the character there portrayed in themselves, some such scoundrelly ideas, at any rate in embryo. But Chichikov is so shameless, so entertaining, so magnificent a liar, so plausible, so ingenious, in a word, so Falstaffian that he enchants us all. He is always human and the least of a hypocrite imaginable.

In fact Gogol goes further than most satirists in other countries and having laid bare his baseness, turns round and tells us that we have no cause to be angry with him: Chichikov is, after all, only the victim of circumstances, of the ruling passion of gain: like all his countrymen, he is indulgent and charitable: he cannot be brought to condemn. He sees the mean and the common, but he does not conclude from that that life is either of these. Rather does he infer the opposite. Chichikov is great just as Napoleon was great, the victim of a ruling passion and great by reason of it. Our minds immediately turn to Dostoievsky once more, toCrime and Punishment, where the chief character tries to be the victim of a ruling passion, not this time of rascality, but fails.

Dead Soulsis not unlikeDon Quixote. It has the same depth: it makes boys laugh, young men think and old men weep.

Its influence was as great on its merits taken as a work of art as on its other sides of philosophy and ideas. Gogol for ever liberated fiction from the grand style. By writing a novel without any love interest, with such a rascal as Chichikov for hero, he created Russian realism. There is no exaggeration, no caricature; there is the instinctive economy, the sense of selection of the true artist.

Just as Pushkin showed his countrymen that there wassuch a thing as Russian landscape, so Gogol showed them what an inexhaustible mine of humour, absurdity, irony and quaintness lay in the ordinary life of ordinary people.

In 1847Passages from a Correspondence with a Friendwas published, which changed the opinions of many of his followers from worship to disgust, for he there preached a lesson of abject humility and submission to the Government in matters both temporal and spiritual.

He had shown up the evils of Bureaucracy, his enemies said, therefore it was inconsistent in him not to resist the powers, but he had shown up the evils of misers, the obstinacy of old women, and many other things: he had never pretended to be a Liberal.

His bent lay in the direction of devotion: he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, spending all his money in charity and his time in religious study. There are those who lament that by reason of this we have lost much rich humour, but it may at least be open to question whether we should have possessed so rich a legacy as he has left us had it not been for that very intensity of feeling which caused him to renounce his art, an art which he looked upon as a torch-bearer indicating a higher ideal of living.

While others expended their energies in spreading political ideals in their novels, Gogol was content to give the social element in Russian its prominent and dominating position. He is the living proof, if proof were needed, that realism does not connote a mere anatomy of society, a dwelling upon revolting details, a love of defying convention by fluttering over cesspools and bringing to light, the hidden lower things of life. True Realism does not mean Zola, but Gogolâ€”an all-round view of humanity as it is not seen through the smoked glasses of the romancer nor the microscope of the moral scientist.

In Edward Garnett's admirable book on Turgenev Conrad lays his finger with unerring accuracy on the crux of the whole problem with regard to him when he says that we are apt to belittle a consummate artist who is quiet when we compare him with a Titanic, restless genius like Dostoievsky. It is like comparing Jane Austen with Victor Hugo. Incidentally Mr Garnett's book loses much of its value owing to his repeated endeavour to show Turgenev's superiority over Dostoievsky.

As a matter of fact, there is no comparison possible.

Turgenev came of noble birth and began by writing verse, but soon found his propermÃ©tierin prose.

For two years he was exiled to his country estate for his quite harmless defence of Gogol. After this term was over he left Russia for Baden and Paris, which accounts to some extent for his aloofness from the problems which perturbed his countrymen, and makes him more a Cosmopolitan than National, like Dostoievsky. His five great novels,RÃºdin,The Nest of Gentlefolk,On the Eve,Fathers and SonsandSmoke, all appeared in the eleven years between 1856 and 1867 and he was at once appraised by all European critics, who discovered in him Russia for the first time, and the Russian woman in particular. His popularity at home was impaired on the publication ofFathers and Sons, because the revolutionaries saw in Bazarov, the hero, only calumny and a libel, whereas the reactionary party looked on the book as a glorification of Nihilism. Thus he fell between two stools. In Europe, however, he gained larger and larger audiences, until an admiration for his work became the hall-mark of good taste.

But to-day Turgenev holds his own even in his own country, for his exquisite style, the majesty of his poetry and the sureness of his characterisation. Baring finds a parallel to Turgenev in this country in Tennyson, in thatthey are both Mid-Victorian, both shut off from the world by the trees of old parks; but Major Baring, as it seems to me, is fair to neither genius.

For Turgenev has an amazing insight into men's motives and actions which we do not commonly associate with those who are shut off from the world.

RÃºdin is a picture of a type that peculiarly appealed to Turgenev, the Hamlet type of man who can only unpack his heart with words, but breaks down when he is asked to translate his theories into action: he is passionately devoted to Liberty in his eloquent talk and makes Natasha, the daughter of the house in which he is staying, fall madly in love with him and persuade herself that she is ready to fly with him, but he, whose love is more that of the intellect than the heart, fails her and tells her to submit.

He is eventually killed in '48 on a barricade in Paris. In the epilogue we get his character beautifully unfolded to us.

"'I know him well,' continued LÃ©zhneff, 'I am aware of his faults. They are the more conspicuous because he is not to be regarded on a small scale.'

"'His is a character of genius!' cried BassÃstoff.

"'Genius very likely he has!' replied LÃ©zhneff, 'but as for character ... That's just his misfortune: there's no force of character in him.... But I want to speak of what is good, of what is rare in him. He has enthusiasm; and, believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to any one who will wake us up and warm us! It is high time! Do you remember, SÃ¡sha, once when I was talking to you about him, I blamed him for coldness? I was right, and wrong too, then. The coldness is in his bloodâ€”that is not his faultâ€”and not in his head. He is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people's expense, not like a swindler, but like a child.... Yes; no doubt he will die somewhere in poverty and want; but are we to throw stones at him for that? He never does anything himself precisely, he has no vital force, no blood; but who has the right to say that he has not been of use,that his words have not scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom Nature has not denied, as she has to him, powers for action, and the faculty of carrying out their own ideas? Indeed, I myself, to begin with, have gained all that I have from him. SÃ¡sha knows what RÃºdin did for me in my youth. I also maintained, I recollect, that RÃºdin's words could not produce an effect on men; but I was speaking then of men like myself, at my present age, of men who have already lived and been broken in by life. One false note in a man's eloquence, and the whole harmony is spoiled for us; but a young man's ear, happily, is not so over-fine, not so trained. If the substance of what he hears seems fine to him, what does he care about the intonation? The intonation he will supply for himself!'

"'Bravo, bravo!' cried BassÃstoff, 'that is justly spoken! And as regards RÃºdin's influence, I swear to you, that man not only knows how to move you, he lifts you up; he does not let you stand still, he stirs you to the depths and sets you on fire!'"

InA Nobleman's Retreatwe find a man, LavrÃ¨tsiy by name, separated from his wife, who meets a good, honest girl, by name Liza: they fall in love with one another: for a moment they are led to believe that his wife is dead, but she reappears and Liza goes to a convent.

But it is in the next two novels,On the EveandFathers and Sons, that we see Turgenev at his best.

On the Eveis a deep and penetrating diagnosis of the destinies of the Russia of the fifties.

The central figure of the novel is Elena, who comes near to being the most completely successful heroine in all fiction. We know her through and through, and she is, as are all Turgenev's heroines, well worth knowing. "Her strength of will, her serious, courageous, proud soul, her capacity for passion, all the play of her delicate idealistic nature troubled by the contradictions, aspirations, and unhappiness that the dawn of love brings to her, all this is conveyed to us by the simplest and the most consummate art." Her confession (in her diary) of her discovery that she loved the Bulgarian Insarov is in itself an amazing revelation of the working of a young girl's heart. Every side of her nature is shown us. We see her from her father's point of view, which is contemptuous; from hermother's, which is that of affectionate bewilderment; from one of her lovers (Shubin's), which is petulantly critical; from another of her lovers (Bevsenyev's), which is halfhearted enthralment; from Insarov's, which recognises her greatness of soul and sincerity of purpose.

Turgenev's magnificent clear-sightedness never manifests itself so sustainedly as in this book. Not only does each of the characters breathe and move and live from the first page, but politically too the author precisely hits off with his pen the Russian temperament. Of all the great Russian writers he is the least diffuse, the most of an artist. He is, after all, as he himself confessed, not so much a Russian as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of Europe, and it is his mission to stand aloof and describe with absolute impartiality the various types that come before his eye without seeking to make his puppets conform to his own ideas or using them as a peg on which to hang a thesis of his own.

The foundation of his art lies in his portraits of women. Pure, virginal, heroic, self-sacrificing, boundless in their love and devotion to a man or cause, they form a gallery worthy to be set by the side of Shakespeare's and Meredith's heroines. They are very flesh and blood, very woman, and yet altogether fascinating, adorable, steadfast, superbly endowed with all the gifts that make for nobility of soul.

Over the creation of these Turgenev showed himself to be deeply sensitive, responsive to all that is best in the feminine mind, of shrewd insight, unfailingly generous, absolutely sane and level-headed. So perfect is his sense of balance, so consummate his artistry, that his work has been unduly depreciated by some critics: they do not easily forgive perfection of form, absolute harmony of style, a sense of proportion so exquisitely poised as his.

He reminds us again of Meredith in his highly intellectual conception as in his portraits of women. He became almost uncannily prophetic in his utterances about the educated classes and their ideals.

He is so interested in characterisation that he needs no incidents to show the growth of his characters: indeed we are almost taken aback by such a dramatic situationas that of the drunken German being thrown into the lake by Insarov. We feel that the play of character upon character is enough, without fortuitous circumstances of this sort ... but there is never anything repulsively inartistic in his work.

He is melancholy, and there is a strain of sadness throughout all Turgenev's work, but he is restrained: he never gives way to his emotions. He loves mankind even though he is clear-sighted with regard to his failings. As a philosopher he sees no reason to trust in man nor to think much of him: particularly does he lament the absence of men in Russia.

"'O great philosopher of the Russian world!' says Shubin to Uvar Ivanovitch, 'every word of yours is worth its weight in gold, and it's not to me but to you a statue ought to be raised, and I would undertake it. There, as you are lying now, in that pose: one doesn't know which is uppermost in it, sloth or strength!...

"'We have no one yet, no men, look where you will. Everywhereâ€”either small fry, nibblers, Hamlets on a small scale, self-absorbed, or darkness and subterranean chaos, or idle babblers and wooden sticks. Or else they are like this: they study themselves to the most shameful detail and are for ever feeling the pulse of every sensation and reporting to themselves: "That's what I feel, that's what I think." A useful, rational occupation! When will our time be? When will men be born among us?'"

This is not the man to flatter where praise is not deserved. He rather realises than idealises, and that is why it is so exhilarating and refreshing to come into contact with his women, for we can be sure that he paints as he sees and not as he would wish to see. He believes in his women and makes us believe in them. Stranger still is the discovery that he always draws from life. "I ought to confess," he once wrote, "that I never attempted to create a type without having, not an idea, but a living person, on whom the various elements were harmonised together, to work from. I have always needed some groundwork on which I could tread firmly." To such purpose did he do this inFathers and Sonsthat he roused hostility of so savage a nature that he never afterwardsbecame popular in Russia during his lifetime. On the other hand, "I received congratulations," he said, "almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies. This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach me. I knew very well I had carried out honestly the type I had sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively with sympathy."

The type which he here speaks of is, of course, the Nihilist, Bazarov. His readers were swayed by party passion and consequently were unable to accept the portrait as a work of art. The fast-increasing antipathy between the old and new made the reactionaries, who hailed in this novel the picture of the insidious revolutionary ideas current in young Russia, ironically congratulate the former champion of Liberalism on his penetration and honesty in unmasking the Nihilist: the younger generation saw only a caricature of itself. "The whole ground of the misunderstanding," wrote Turgenev, "lay in the fact that the type of Bazarov had not time to pass through the usual phases. At the very moment of his appearance the author attacked him. It was a new method as well as a new type I introduced.... The reader is easily thrown into perplexity when the author does not show clear sympathy or antipathy to his own child. The reader readily gets angry.... After all, books exist to entertain."

And what is Bazarov? Let us listen again to Turgenev: "I dreamed of a sombre, savage and great figure, only half emerged from barbarism, strong, mÃ©chant, and honest, and nevertheless doomed to perish because it is always in advance of the future."

Mr Garnett calls him the bare mind of Science first applied to politics. His watchword is not "Negation," as all his critics averred, but Reality.

His creator, whose first and last words to young writers was, "You need truth, remorseless truth, as regards your own sensations," was driven to confess that he shared all Bazarov's convictions except those on Art. He stands at the dividing-line between the religion of the Past which is Faith and that of the future which is Science. His savage egoism is necessary if he is to break away from all the old laws and customs that men held sacred. His aversion from Art and Poetry is simply due to his refusal to be hoodwinkedby glamour. The Englishman sees in him merely the quintessence of bad form, bad taste, bad manners and colossal conceit, but in reality he stands for Humanity awakened from age-old superstitions, Aggression, destroyed in his destroying: he must needs stand alone, and delights in doing so. Despising honour, success, public opinion, he allows nothing, not even love, to come between him and his fixity of purpose.

He towers above all the other people in the novel. If there still remain any who have so far held out against the fascination and consummate mastery of Turgenev, I would ask them to turn again to the twenty-seventh chapter ofFathers and Sonsand read aloud the account of Bazarov's last hours. Anything more poignant, more simple and yet more effective than the last scene of the parents at the grave does not exist: there Turgenev in one stroke epitomises the infinite aspiration, the eternal insignificance of the life of man.

So quietly does the artist work that hasty readers fail to realise his greatness after the storm and stress of Dostoievsky or the titanic canvases of Tolstoy: he lacked exuberance: his men are, Hamlet-like, unable to make mouths at the invisible event, ineffectual, their native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thoughtâ€”it is left to his women to be independent, to know their own minds, to be courageous, pure, crystal-clear, simple, strong, no longer mere sexual incidents in a man's life, but helping companions. In his love of language and his power of making us breathe the air of his landscapes he affords an interesting parallel to Tennyson: we find an echo of him in Elena's diary: "To be good is not enough: to do goodâ€”yes, that is the great thing in life."

But where he is most himself and most a genius is in his wonderful capacity for making his characters all reveal themselves in the ordinary details of daily life.

Goncharov is important from the English point of view through one book alone. But this novel,OblÃ²mov, far transcends in value many far more famous books that we should do better to leave unread until we have appreciated this most Russian of the Russian works of art.

OblÃ²mov, the hero of the novel, is a nobleman whose main characteristic is lack of initiative, due primarily to the indolence caused by riches.

"'From my earliest childhood,'" OblÃ²mov asks, "'have I myself ever put on my socks?'"

We see him first in his lodgings in Petrograd in bed: he is too lazy to get up. Not that he lacked interest in life.

"The joy of higher inspirations was accessible to him," Goncharov writes; "the miseries of mankind were not strange to him. Sometimes he cried bitterly in the depths of his heart about human sorrows. He felt unnamed, unknown sufferings and sadness, and a desire of going somewhere far awayâ€”probably into that world towards which his friend Stoltz had tried to take him in his younger days. Sweet tears would then flow upon his cheeks. It would also happen that he would himself feel hatred towards human vices, towards deceit, towards the evil which is spread all over the world; and he would then feel the desire to show mankind its diseases. Thoughts would then burn within him, rolling in his head like waves in the sea; they would grow into decisions which would make all his blood boil; his muscles would be ready to move, his sinews would be strained, intentions would be on the point of transforming themselves into decisions.... Moved by a moral force, he would rapidly change over and over again his position in his bed; with a fixed stare he would half lift himself from it, move his hand, look about with inspired eyes ... the inspiration would seem ready to realise itself, to transform itself into an act of heroism, and then,what miracles, what admirable results might one not expect from so great an effort! Butâ€”the morning would pass away, the shades of evening would take the place of the broad daylight, and with them the strained forces of Oblomoff would incline towards restâ€”the storms in his soul would subsideâ€”his head would shake off the worrying thoughtsâ€”his blood would circulate more slowly in his veinsâ€”and Oblomoff would slowly turn over, and recline on his back; looking sadly through his window upon the sky, following sadly with his eyes the sun which was setting gloriously behind the neighbouring houseâ€”and how many times had he thus followed with his eyes that sunset!"

His landlord wishes him to change his lodgings while his rooms are put into repair. He is terrified at the prospect of going through the trouble of moving.

Later he meets a young girl called Olga, in some ways curiously reminiscent of Turgenev's heroines. She devotes herself to the cause of curing OblÃ²mov, with whom she falls in love, of his laziness. She tries by every means in her power to rouse him to exert himself in art and literature. At first she seems to succeed: they are about to marry: but his slackness comes over him again; he cannot even take the first necessary steps.

He sinks back into his life of dressing gown and slippers in spite of Olga's splendid efforts to make a man of him. In the end she is compelled to give up the struggle to reform him, and in a parting scene which is as good as anything I know of its kind she describes the sort of life they would lead if she acquiesced in his desires.

"He fell to musing over the words: 'Now or never!' As he listened inwardly to this despairing appeal of reason and will-power, he consciously weighed the little will-power that was left to him, whither he would carry it, into what he would put that paltry remnant. After having pondered over it painfully, he seized the pen, dragged a book out of the corner, and in one hour wanted to read, write, and think all that he had neglected to read, write, and think in ten years. What was he to do now? To go ahead, or to remain? This OblÃ²mov question was of more import to him than Hamlet's. To go aheadâ€”that would mean at once doffing his comfortable dressing gown, not only from the shoulders, but from the soul and mind; together withthe cobweb on the walls to sweep away the cobweb from the eyes, and regain eyesight! What first step should be made for this? Where begin? 'I do not knowâ€”I cannotâ€”no, I am begging the question, I do know, andâ€”â€” And here is Stoltz by my side; he will tell me. What will he tell me? "In a week," he will say, "you must sketch a detailed instruction for your plenipotentiary and send him into the village. Get your OblÃ²movka mortgaged, buy some more land, send a plan of new buildings, give up your house, procure a passport, and go abroad for six months, to get rid of your surplus fat, to throw off the weight, to refresh the soul with the atmosphere of which you have dreamed long ago with your friend, to live without a dressing gown, without Zakhar and Tarantev, to put on your own socks and take off your own boots, sleep only at night, travel where all travel, on railroads, steamboats, and thenâ€”â€” Then to settle in OblÃ²movka, to find out what sowing and threshing is, why peasants are poor or well-to-do, walk over the fields, go to elections, to the factory, to the mill, the docks. At the same time you are to read newspapers, books, and become excited why the English have sent a warship to the Eastâ€”â€”" That's what he will say! That's what is meant by going ahead, and thus it is to be all my life! Farewell, poetical ideal of life! That is some kind of a blacksmith shop, not life! There is in it an eternal fire, hammering, heat, dinâ€”â€” But when is one to live? Would it not be better to stay? To stay means to put on a shirt over all, to hear the patter of Zakhar's feet as he jumps down from his couch, to dine with Tarantev, to think less about anything, never to finish theVoyage to Africa, to grow peacefully old in these chambers, at the house of Tarantev's lady friend.'

"'Now or never!' 'To be or not to be!' OblÃ²mov was about to rise from his chair, but his foot did not at once find its way into the slipper, and he sat down again."

The publication of this novel in 1859 produced an instantaneous effect: everyone in Russia who read it recognised something of himself in OblÃ²mov, and felt the disease of OblÃ²movism in his veins.

It is to miss out quite one of the major characteristics of the nation to discount this inertia which pervades every side of life. It is universal in that it expresses ultra-conservativefights to preserve old customs: OblÃ²mov is remarkable for his inability to put up any sort of resistance to anything; he is frightened of everything, even of love: love is disquieting, restless.

There have been many OblÃ²movs in real life among even great Russian writers, though it seems paradoxical to think that any man who achieves fame could ever be preternaturally lazy. Krylov is a case in point.

This poet spent most of his days lying on a sofa: one day somebody pointed out to him that the nail on which a picture was hanging just over the sofa was loose, and that the picture would probably fall on his head. "No," said Krylov, "the picture will fall just beyond the sofa. I know the angle."

It must not be forgotten that OblÃ²mov was in all respects save one entirely excellent: he had a heart of gold, a chaste mind and clear soul: it was just that his will was sapped: Olga, even after her marriage with her really splendid husband, continued to love OblÃ²mov till the end. It was simply that he had forfeited her respect.

Quite one of the most remarkable things about Dostoievsky is his complete antithesis to Tolstoy in everything. Tolstoy is healthy, Dostoievsky epileptic. Tolstoy's life was strangely uneventful; Dostoievsky was condemned to death after a youth spent in poverty and misery: he endured four years' hard labour, six years in exile; he was for ever on the verge of financial ruin; his wife, his brother and his best friend all died within a very short time of one another; he was attacked and harassed on all sides; he wrote under the very worst possible conditions, starving, ill and pressed for time. Tolstoy was a heretic and a materialist; Dostoievsky was a devout believer in Christianity; and a mystic. Tolstoy was narrow, while Dostoievsky was one of the most broadminded men who ever lived. Tolstoy hated the supernatural. Dostoievsky lived as Blake did among the unknown, and seemed to regard this world only as fantastic and unreal. Tolstoy was eaten up with pride; Dostoievsky preached and practised a humility almost Christ-like. Tolstoy hated and did not understand Art; Dostoievsky was superbly Catholic and cosmopolitan in his tastes. Tolstoy was characterised by a magnificent intolerance, Dostoievsky by a sweet reasonableness. Tolstoy dreamt of giving all to the poor, and did nothing, while Dostoievsky shared every moment of his life with the lowest criminals: and finally Tolstoy was purposely autobiographical from start to finish, whereas from Dostoievsky we learn nothing whatever from his books. He was as objective as Shakespeare. He does not care to talk about himself. This does not mean that he does not reveal himself in his books. He does, and Christ-like indeed is the character that emanates as the result ... but he does not see himself in all his main characters as Tolstoy does. His sufferings did not make him cynical or cruel; once when a gushing young lady accosted him with "Gazing at you I can traceyour suffering," he replied: "What suffering?" He drew but little on his personal experiences. He was passionately Slavophil, and therefore opposed in that to Turgenev, whose genius none the less he perceived and revered.

He was the son of a staff-surgeon and a tradesman's daughter, born in a charity hospital at Moscow, brought up in the direst penury. He was, like Goldsmith, quite thriftless, and unable to realise the value of money. Of a confiding nature and withal kindly, he was at the mercy of all those who found it worth while to take advantage of him. Tolstoy, as you will remember, was thrifty and domestic, while Dostoievsky was profuse and a houseless vagabond. Yet another point of divergence. Tolstoy thinks that he hates money, but money loves him. Dostoievsky thinks that he loves money, and money flees from him. As MerejkÃ²vski so neatly puts it, all worldly advantages in Tolstoy are centripetal, in Dostoievsky centrifugal. Tolstoy was careful in spite of the apparent passionateness of his impulses never to overstep the mark; Dostoievsky was for ever giving rein to irregularities and vices: Middleton Murry suggests that he gave way to these on purpose to show his oneness with man in a world to which he could never accustom himself. His first novel,Poor Folk, was a prodigious success, which made the failure of the second,The Double, all the more terrible to him. From this time his literary career became a life-long and desperate struggle to re-establish himself in the good graces of his fellow-countrymen. Having allied himself about this time with the Petrachevsky circle of socialists and Slavophils, he was one evening led to declaim Pushkin'sOde on the Abolition of Serfdom, and in the discussion that followed is said to have declared that if reform could only come through insurrection, "Then insurrection let it be." This was enough to lead to his arrest, and on 22nd December 1849 he was taken with twenty-one others to the scaffold to be executed. All the prisoners were stripped to their shirts in twenty-one degrees of frost and the death sentence was read out. They were then bound in threes to stakes and prepared themselves for death. Suddenly they were unbound and informed that the Tsar had commuted the penalty of death to that of hard labour. But the strain had been too much. From this moment Dostoievskylooks back on a world that he had so nearly left that he could never quite believe that he belonged to it. His four years in Siberia is turned to magnificent use, as we see inThe House of The Dead, where we see criminals behave exactly as English Public School boys: we never regard them as miscreants, always as unfortunate victims of adverse circumstances. After these terrible times were over he served for three years as a private soldier and was promoted to be an officer. He turned his back on Socialism because of its materialism and atheistic tendency. He had only joined this section of the community because his nature ever made him seek out what was most difficult, disastrous, hard and terrible. During his imprisonment his epilepsy became more pronounced and his fits recurred with alarming frequency. But there was something lofty and jubilant, a sort of religious revelation which he experienced when the sacred sickness was on him that coloured all the rest of his life.

Then suddenly it was as if something had been rent asunder before him, an unwonted inward light dawned upon his soul, he says in one of his descriptions. Again we are led to a comparison with Tolstoy, for whom with his superb animal vitality the light of death is thrown on life from without, whereas for Dostoievsky the revealing light comes from within. Life and death are one to him; to Tolstoy they are in eternal antagonism.

The former with the eyes of the spirit world looks on life from a footing which to those who live seems death, while the latter looks at death from within the house of life with the eyes of this world.

From his earliest youth Dostoievsky was an omnivorous reader, revelling in and appreciating not only Homer, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Schiller and Hoffmann, but also all the great French classics of the seventeenth century: throughout his life he kept alive his passion for universal culture. He is at once that most curious anomaly, the most Russian of the Russians, and yet the greatest cosmopolitan, and herein once more shows his complete difference from Tolstoy, who, trying to become cosmopolitan, ended by living more completely limited by place and time and nationality than almost any other writer we know. The enthusiasm for the distant simply did not exist for him:every fibre and root in him is fixed in the present. He visited Italy and brought therefrom no impressions. He is unable to appreciate either Ã†schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Wagner or Beethoven. He even comes to regard all his own work as bad art, with the exception of two tales which are easily his weakest. He was never a man of letters as Dostoievsky was. All his life he was ashamed of literature, while Dostoievsky loved it. He was proud of his calling and counted it high and sacred, though he valued his creations in terms of cash.

"Many a time," he writes, "the beginning of a chapter of a novel was already at the printer's and being set up while the end was still in my brain and had to be ready without fail next day. Work out of sheer want has crushed and eaten me up."

He complains that Turgenev, who has two thousand serfs, gets a hundred and fifty pounds, while he, needy as he was, got only thirty-eight pounds. "Poverty forces me to hurry, and so, of course, spoils my work." Endlessg rows of figures and accounts, interspersed with desperate entreaties for help, fill all his letters.

He edited a paper, theVremya, which met with some success and promised a regular income. Without warning the periodical was prohibited by the censor for publishing a quite harmless article on Poland. Undaunted, he started another venture, theEpocha, which incurred the wrath not only of the Government but also of the Liberal party. It was at this time that his brother Michael, his dearest friend Grigoviev, and his first wife, Maria, all died.

"And here I am left all alone," he writes, "and I feel simply broken. I have, literally, nothing left to live for." TheEpochafailed, its editor became temporarily insolvent, having debts amounting to one thousand four hundred pounds in bills and seven hundred pounds in debts of honour. He starts feverishly on a novel to begin to pay the load off. In the end, to avoid the debtors' prison, he is forced to fly the country. He spent four years of incredible extremes of want abroad, pawning even his "last linen" to keep going.

"They expect literature of me now," he moans. "Why, how can I write at all? I walk about and tear my hairand cannot sleep of nights. They point to Turgenev and Goncharov. Let them see the state in which I have to work."

And yet in spite of all this he takes a pride in his work, recasting cherished chapters again and again, burning what failed to satisfy him, starting afresh times without number. His attacks were in the meantime on the increase and he worked with ever greater difficulty. In spite of all he never lost heart. It is impossible to imagine circumstances which would have crushed him.

"I can bear everything, any suffering, if I can only keep on saying to myself, 'I live: I am in a thousand torments, but I live. I am on the pillar, but I exist. I see the sun, or I do not see the sun, but I know that it is. And to know that there is a sun, that is life enough.'"

And it is at this time (1865-1869), misunderstood by his readers, harassed by creditors, overwhelmed by the deaths of his nearest and dearest, in solitude, poverty and sickness, that he wroteCrime and Punishment,The IdiotandThe Possessed, and even plannedThe Brothers Karamazov.

He was not merely a man of letters, he is a true hero of literature, as heroic as any warrior or martyr. He fathomed the most dangerous and criminal depths of the human heart, especially the passion of love in all its manifestations. At one end of his gamut he touches the highest, most spiritual passion bordering on religious enthusiasm in Alyosha Karamazov, at the other that of the evil insect, "the she-spider who devours her own mate," in Smerdyakov, Ivan, Dmitri, Fedor.

At times he descends to depths which can only be accounted for as autobiographical fragments. As he himself confesses:

"At times I suddenly plunged into a sombre, subterranean, despicable debauchery. My squalid passions were keen, glowing with morbid irritability. I felt an unwholesome thirst for violent moral contrasts, and so I demeaned myself to animality. I indulged in it by night, secretly, fearfully, foully, with a shame that never left me, even at the most degrading moments. I carried in my soul the love of secretiveness: I was terribly afraid that I should be seen, met, recognised."

Sexual passion appears with him at times a cruel, coarse, even animal force, but never unnatural or perverted.

To Tolstoy the greatest of human sins is the infringement of conjugal fidelity. On the other hand, we hear self-condemnation on the lips of Dostoievsky in the words, "Live decently I cannot."

He gave way to the vice of gambling, and begs for loans with as much absence of self-respect as his own creation, Marmelador. Tolstoy, who also lost heavily at the tables, is able to pull himself up sharp, give up playing and live with the greatest frugality on sixteen shillings a month. He never lost his sense of proportion. Dostoievsky never had any.

"'Everywhere and in everything I go to extremes: all my life I have overshot the mark.'"

The life of Tolstoy was a pure and virgin water of a spring, that of Dostoievsky is the upgush of fire from elemental depths, mixed with lava, ashes, smoke and sulphur.

When his child dies, Dostoievsky, utterly self-forgetting, loves the child of his flesh, not according to the flesh, but the spirit, as a separate, eternal, irreplacable personality.

"But where is Sonia? I want Sonia."

On 26th January 1881 he died, leaving it to future generations to understand and appreciate the greatness of his genius. And what is the message that he leaves for us to pick up?

"'Love all God's creationâ€”every grain of sand,'" says Zossima, "'every leaf, every ray of God, you should love. Love animals, love plants, love everything. Love everything, and you will arrive at God's secret in things.'"

Every one of his characters shows the conflict of heroic will: he concentrates all the artistic powers of his delineation into his dialogues, which are as fine as Tolstoy's are feeble. All Tolstoy's characters talk so alike that if we did not know who was speaking we should not be able to distinguish them at all by the language, whereas as soon as the first words are uttered in a novel of Dostoievsky we realise at once who it is that is talking. Hence Dostoievsky has no need to describe the appearance of his characters, for by their peculiar form of language and tones of voices they lay themselves bare before us. With Tolstoy we hear because we see; with Dostoievsky we see because we hear.

Then, too, we lose all sense of time in Dostoievsky: in the events of a single day he can make us feel that we have lived through Ã¦ons.

Added to this is the strange ethereal quality that marks out his characters from the normal. In Tolstoy we feel that the air is rare; we cannot breathe; it is the stage of calm before the storm: in Dostoievsky we feel the reviving freshness and the freedom of the storm itself.

Of one of Tolstoy's characters we read that "she does not condescend to be clever." Tolstoy seems himself to overlook the existence of the human mind altogether: Dostoievsky is pre-eminently a master of the mental rapier of feeling; he may lack many valuable qualities, but one never doubts his intelligence; all his characters are clever men first and foremost. Dostoievsky shows us how, contrary to popular opinion, abstract thought may be passionate: all passions and misdeeds in his work are the natural outcome of dialectic. Life is a tragedy to those who feel. And his characters feel deeply because they think deeply. They suffer endlessly because they deliberate endlessly: they dare to will because they dare to think. And the subject of their thought? In the main, God. They are all "God-tortured." This insatiable religious thirst is one of the most remarkable traits of the Russian spirit: when two or more Russians meet they immediately begin to discuss the immortality of the soul.

Most uncompromising of the realists, he yet ventures into depths hitherto undreamt of and unplumbed.

He seems to dwell with morbid intensity on hysterical women, sensualists, deformed creatures, idiots ... there is scarcely a healthy man or woman among his gallery of portraits. In Tolstoy there is scarcely one which does not emanate strength, physical perfection and complete self-control. Of a truth in Dostoievsky by his sickness we are healed. There is a sickness unto life, and this is the sickness that he depicts for us.

"What matter if it be a morbid state?" he writes. "What difference can it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation, when remembered and examined in the healthy state, proves to be in the highest degree harmony and beauty; and gives an unheard of and undreamed of feeling of completion, ofbalance, of satisfaction, and exultant prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life?"

This is all of a piece with the theory that great pain alone is the final emancipator of the soul. In other words, where Tolstoy has to content himself with the fame of a mere artist, Dostoievsky can look forward to recognition as a prophet.

Another point of divergence presents itself when we try to glean a picture of Moscow or Petrograd from these two writers. In Tolstoy we have only the country, the land, the dark, primitive soul of Russia, whereas in Dostoievsky we actually realise the towns in which he lays his action. And yet of these he draws such a picture that they become strangely fantastic and bizarre.

"I am dreadfully fond of realism in Art," he confessed, "when, so to speak, it is carried to the fantastic. What can be more fantastic and unexpected than reality? What most people call fantastic is, in my eyes, often the very essence of the real."

This is true not merely of places, but of people. When Svidrigailov seems to be most fantastic, then he becomes most real.

The demon Smerdyakov inThe Brothers Karamazovpines for solidity, corporal reality, call it what you will. In almost the very words quoted above from Dostoievsky himself the Demon makes his confession.

"'I am dreadfully fond of realismâ€”realism, so to speak, carried to the fantastic. What most people call fantastic to me forms the very essence of the real, and therefore I love your earthly realism. Here with you everything is marked out, here are formulas and geometry, but with us all is a matter of indefinite equations. On earth I become superstitious. I accept all your habits here: I have got to like going to the tradesmen's baths, and I like steaming in company with tradesmen and priests. My dream is to be incarnated, but finally, irrevocably, and therefore in some fat eighteen-stone tradesman's wife, and to believe in all that she believes.'"

As it is, he is in a state of metaphysical ennuiâ€”magnificently bored. Eternity may after all be something by no means vast. Say a neglected village Turkish bathroom, with musty cobwebs in all its corners. Dostoievsky isalways trying to probe into the unknown: his Demon really tries to explain his point of view.

"'I swear by all that is holy I wished to join the choir and cry with them all "Hosanna," there already escaped, there already broke from my breast ...

"'I am very sentimental, you know, and artistically susceptible. But common-senseâ€”my most unfortunate qualityâ€”kept me within due limits, and I let the moment pass. For what, I asked myself at the time, what would have resulted after my "Hosanna"? That instant all would have come to a standstill in the world, and no events would have taken place. And so, simply from a sense of duty and my social position, I was forced to suppress in myself the good impulse and stick to villainy. Someone else takes all the honour of doing good to himself, and I am left only the bad for my share. I know, of course, there is a secret there, but they will not reveal it to me at any price, because, forsooth, if I found out the actual facts I should break out into a "Hosanna" and instantly the indispensable minus quantity would vanish. Reason would begin to reign all over the earth, and with it, of course, there would be an end of everything. But as long as this does not happen, as long as the secret is kept, there exist for me two truths, one up yonder, Theris, which is quite unknown to me, and another which is mine. And it is still unknown which will be the purer of the two.'"

Samuel Butler in a note calledAn Apology for the Devilsays: "It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books." After readingThe Brothers Karamazovwe may take leave to doubt Butler's aphorism. There are certainly occasions in Dostoievsky's books where the Devil has taken the pen out of the writer's hand and made a distinctly fine case for his side.

That he came nearer than most great thinkers to a solution of the mystery of life which is nearly Christian does not alter the fact that he faced the issue bravely and tried not to square his reason with his beliefs, but to evolve from his reason and experience a sound religion. And what is that religion? Ivan, the embodiment of pure intellect, finds that he cannot accept the world as God has made it. That any innocent child should have to suffermakes any question of future recompense intolerable. It is not that he does not accept God, he most respectfully hands back his ticket. No reward, calculable or incalculable, can obliterate needless suffering.

Father Zossima, on the other hand, says to Alyosha: "'Life 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.'" That is the secret of Dostoievsky's greatness. Paradoxical as it may sound, out of the mud and filth, from a world full of the diseased and mad he extracts sweetness and light, good cheer and reasonableness.

In spite of the inferno in which he lived, stricken by poverty, crime and disease, he yet blessed life and caused others to bless it: he loved humanity: his charity was boundless, his good-nature omnipotent. "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 be not afraid of their sins, love man in his sin: be cheerful as the children and as the birds."

The Russian thought which shall renew humanity finds its ultimate and perfect expression in Dostoievsky. In spite of incoherence and an amazing formlessness, talk and description so unending that it takes us longer to read them than it actually took the characters to live through the events described ... in spite of a million petty artistic mistakes we are yet carried off our feet by him; there have, we feel, been greater artists but very few greater men. "It is not before you I am kneeling," says Raskolnikov to Sonia, "but before all the suffering of mankind," and this might be taken as the text of all his work.

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