e dream.

Compared even with Musset and Victor Hugo, how much nearer the earth
Lermontov is than either of them! Victor Hugo dealt with just the
same themes; but in Lermontov, the most splendid painter of mountains
imaginable, you never hear

"Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne,"

and you know that it will never drive the Russian poet to frenzy. On
the other hand, you never get Victor Hugo's extravagance and
absurdities. Or take Musset; Musset dealt with romantic themes _si
quis alius_; but when he deals with a subject like Don Juan, which of
all subjects belonged to the age of Pushkin and Lermontov, he writes
lines like these--

"Faible, et, comme le lierre, ayant besoin d'autrui;
Et ne le cachant pas, et suspendant son ame,
Comme un luth eolien, aux levres de la nuit."

Here again we are confronted with a different kind of imagination. Or
take a bit of sheer description--

"Pale comme l'amour, et de pleurs arrosee,
La nuit aux pieds d'argent descend dans la rosee."

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 aime, si l'orgueil
Pareil a la lampe inutile
Qu'on allume pres d'un cercueil,
N'eut veille sur son coeur sterile."

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