" then your god-gifted genius is mere
dross.

The reason of this has been luminously stated by Professor Brueckner:
"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 aesthetic 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
Brueckner, 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 aestheticism. 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 w