triviality of life, to share all the dullness of the mediocre type of man, to make perceptible the infinitely unimportant class of persons who would otherwise not be seen at all. That is my special gift." He could not have more accurately described himself. But do we not find this same power in Tolstoi ? And Gogol both understood and appreciated at its full worth the feeling of active brotherhood, of pity for the sufferers, which animates the writings of Tolstoi and Dostoïevsky. In another of his letters, he says that "the national characteristic of the Russian is his pity for the fallen."

Nicholas Vassiliévitch, prematurely ill and despondent, was not able to finish the last part of his Ames Mortes. His creative power was exhausted when he was three and thirty, and he died, obscurely enough, in 1892, suffering from the nervous exaltation which seems to be the inevitable end of the Russian writers. His genius had opened new channels to Russian literature, and his successors hastened to take advantage of their new liberty. More fortunate than he, they made for themselves a recognised position in Europe on literature, but they did not forget to acknowledge that what we should most admire in their work they inherited from Gogol, and it is only just that this should be remembered.

It was a magnificent outburst of talent, such as is rarely to be found in the history of literature. These men, who were to give a voice to silent Russia, were all of the same age; they all began to write during the years immediately following the disturbances which shook Europe in 1848. During the quarter century which they made glorious, their country became one of the most active centres of intellectual and artistic vitality. Most of them were nurtured in the German spirit of Hegel, some imbibing it directly in the German universities, as Tourguéneff did, and others owing their inspiration to the Hegelian propaganda of the critic Biélinsky. The revolutionary and socialist movement of 1848, repressed in the empire of Czar Nicolas, was transformed into an outbreak of literary talent. The conditions imposed upon the Russian society of that period forbade the utilisation of talent in historical or philosophical research, as well as in political oratory or journalism:

only one method of expression was left, that of romantic fiction. All these writers applied their powers to writing national and realistic novels; restricted to this one form of activity, they enlarged its scope until they could pour into it all their ideas, all their aspirations, all their dreams. And the Russian novel thus became the great stream into which flowed all the springs which in a country less oppressed, supply more varied currents of human activity. The novel has been for modern Russia what the chansons de geste and the fabliaux werc for medieval France; occupying the place now taken by the pulpit and the platform, the theatre and the newspaper. It contained the whole national spirit. Its social importance, its extraordinary influence, would be incomprehensible if one lost sight of this explanation. The indirect result of political absolutism, the only immediate effect of the agitation of 1848, it thrived with the abnormal vigour of one organ in a paralysed body, which nourishes itself at the expense of all the others. It absorbed all the forces which were simultaneously developed in the minds of Gontcharoff, of Pissemsky, of Tourguéneff, of Dostoïevsky, and of Tolstoi.

When the reign of Alexandre II. began, in 1855, Gontcharoff and Pissemsky seemed destined to be chief among the heirs of Gogol. Gontcharoff's Oblomoff embodied, in a type which has since become proverbial, certain defects of the Russian character; its indolence, its carelessness, its fatalistic indifference. This book, by its exact observation of environments, and its psychological analysis, showed an altogether new point of view. Ivan Gontcharoff retained these same qualities in his other works, Simple Histoire and le Précipice; but the great success of Oblomoff was not repeated; these later works lacked colour and variety, there was a certain monotony in their accumulation of detail. Pissemsky gave us a much better picture of the social disorders of the day; on the morrow of Nicolas I.'s reign he rendered more vividly than did Gontcharoff the vacillations of national opinion. The Tourbillon, Mille Ames, and Les Faiseurs, are the best pictures of the middle classes which have ever been painted. Yet Pissemsky lacked (in this respect resembling too closely the

French realists) that power of communicating sympathy which was soon to be displayed by other writers, the broad and superior view of the people he studied. Novelists more passionate and more philosophical took the first rank.

Tourguéneff came first, his pre-eminence already established by his Récits d'un Chasseur. This collection of minute pictures of peasant life, published immediately after the events of 1848, did more than all the political and philosophical discussions toward effecting the emancipation of the serfs, doing for them what Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for the blacks. In his tales we hear the chant of the Russian soil, the murmur of a few unhappy souls. The writer brings us to the heart of his native land, and then retires from the scene and leaves us face to face with the country. Why do the very springs of life seem to have been broken in all his characters ? Whence comes this miasma which hangs over the Russian fields? The author leaves it to the reader to answer, to judge for himself. Russia saw with horror her own thraldom in Tourguéneff's mirror; she shuddered; in a moment the writer became famous, and the cause he pleaded was half won. He gained the hearts of all readers by his exquisite short stories conceived in the same spirit, by novels of sentiment like La Nichée de Gentilshommes, which owes its unfading charm to the discretion and sobriety with which its writer employed his materials. He interested intelligent men because he reduced to order the chaos of confused ideas which befogged Russian thought, after the rude upheaval of emancipation. In Rudine, he analysed the want of will-power, the absence of moral individuality with which he reproached his contemporaries when he said-lightly yet cruelly: "We Russians have nothing of our own but the samovar, and it is not certain that we invented that." In Pères et Fils he sounded the impassable abyss which had 'opened between the last generation of the slavery and the generation which dated from 1860; and he was the first to diagnose the evil which was to corrode this later period; the horror to which he gave the name of nihilism. In Fumée he followed the progress of this social malady, and in Terres Vierges he described its violent manifestations.

Tourguéneff did not equal Tolstoi either in knowledge of the human mind, nor in his influence upon it; but he yields to no one in the divination of the fine shades of sentiment which are found in the passions, and he is superior to all his rivals in the vigour of his plastic genius. A constant reader of French, he was subjected to the intellectual discipline of the French literary schools, and he is the only Russian writer whose style fully satisfies the exigencies of a delicate taste: the one supreme artist of his race.

The short stories of this inimitable writer led M. Taine to say that no one, since the Greeks, had cut a literary cameo in such bold relief, and in such rigorous perfection of form. This was also the opinion of some of the English critics, if I may rely upon the verdict of the Athenæum published on the occasion of Tourguéneff's death in 1883: "Europe has been unanimous in according to Tourguéneff the first rank in contemporary literature."

The reputation of Ivan Tourguéneff has nevertheless suffered an eclipse during these last twenty years. He is not so much read in Russia as he was. He seems to have been pushed aside in favour of Tolstoi and of Dostoïevsky. His popularity has been affected by the growing exclusiveness of Russian taste, which seems, during the period named, to have been so proud of the newly developed Russian individuality that it turned away from the suggestion of any foreign influence. The new generations applied the epithet “occidental" to the writer who adhered to the classic rules of French art. It was said that Tourguéneff, long a resident of France, no longer knew his own country. It is true that his latest writings show his ardent love for Russia; but they show, too, a cutting criticism of the Slavophiles, to whose party he had never belonged, and this was accounted unpardonable. He was reproached for his jests at the expense of what he called "the Russia-leather school of literature" and of that patriotic infatuation which he summed up when he said that "in Russia two and two make four, and make four with greater boldness than elsewhere." When he occasionally returned to St. Petersburg or to Moscow he no longer received the enthusiastic ovations of the younger generation, for his rivals had won their hearts. He was

greatly wounded by this desertion. I saw him when he was dying in Paris, and it seemed as if all the tides of life and passion had swirled through his grand head, with its dishevelled white hairs and its proud movements, suggesting the wounded lion. By the irony of Fate he was at this moment completing his last work under the title Désespoir. In this book he said his last word about the Russian character, which he had studied so thoroughly for forty years.

The eclipse of which I have spoken will not prove to be a permanent one. In Russia as in the West he will again be placed in the first rank by the verdict of posterity, and remembered as the teller of tales who knew so surely the path to our hearts, the consummate artist who satisfies the intelligence by the Attic eurythmy of his masterpieces and who enchants Russian ears by the music of his prose.

We find nothing of this in Dostoïevsky. His is not an acquired art; it is the result of a tempestuous nature, a morbid intensity of thought which overwhelms the reader. In 1848, when he was only twenty years of age, he was implicated in the Pétrachevsky plot, and was exiled to Siberia, where he spent four years among the convicts. When the amnesty freed him from his chains he brought back to the world that harrowing description, La Maison des Morts, rendered all the more tragic by the tone of resignation and of sweetness which pervades this extraordinary memoir. The novels which followed-Humiliés et Offensés, Crime et Châtiment, and L'Idiot—are the chapters of a mystic and fraternal gospel, in which the sympathetic observer seems to glorify every aspect of life of the unhappy, even their vices and the disorders of their minds. And this, not from the point of view of the Romantic School, for the sake of the pictorial value of vice and misery, but because the "religion of human suffering is indulgent to everything that is unlovely."

He, too, made a study of Nihilism, when he wrote Les Possédés and Les Frères Karamazoff; he lived the Nihilist's life in a nightmare evoked by the epileptic disorder of his imagination. He took possession of his readers' souls by his hallucinations, filled

VOL. XIX.