! the pity of it all. The moral dyspepsia
that overtook Carlyle in middle life was the result of a lean,
spoiled, half-starved youth; the moral dyspepsia that seized the soul
of the wonderful Tolstoy was the outcome of a riotous youth, a youth
overflowing with the "joy of life." Ibsen, like Carlyle, battled in
his early days with poverty; but his message--if you will have a
definite message (Oh, these literal, unimaginative folk of the
Gradgrind sort, who would wring from the dumb mysterious beauty of
nature definite meanings--as if sheer existence itself is not its own
glorious vindication!)--may be a hopeful one. The individual is all in
all; he is the evangel of the future; his belief is buoyant and
Northern; whereas Tolstoy's sour outlook, his constant girding at the
vanities of life (after he had, Solomon-like, tasted of them to the
full) is Eastern; his is the Oriental fatalism, the hopeless doctrine
of determinism. He discovers a new sin every day. Better one hour of
Nietzsche's dancing madness than a cycle of Tolstoy's pessimistic
renunciations. And all his ethical propaganda does not shake in the
least our conviction of the truth and grandeur of Tolstoy's art.

Of the disciples the son of Tolstoy, Count Ilya, tells us in no
uncertain accents:

My father had good reason for saying that the "Tolstoyites" were to
him the most incomprehensible sect and the furthest removed from his
way of thinking that he had ever come across. "I shall soon be dead,"
he sadly predicted, "and people will say that Tolstoy taught men to
plough and reap and make boots; while the chief thing that I have been
trying so hard to say all my life, the thing I believe in the most
important of all, they will forget."

IV

THE YOUNGER CHOIR

Let us believe that Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dostoievsky,
Turgenieff, and Tolstoy are classics. As long as Russian, sonorous and
beautiful tongue, is spoken, they will never die. And their
successors? What is the actual condition of Russian literature at the
present time? It is the bare truth to say that a period of stagnation
set in during the decade after Turgenieff's death. Emigration carried
with it the best brains of the land. We need not dwell upon the
publicists, nor yet stir the muddy stream of agitation. It has been
the misfortune of Russian literary men to be involved in dangerous
political schisms and revolutionary mo