ould not have prevented him from
doing justice either to a poet so polemical as Byron, or to a poet so
completely unpolitical, so sheerly aesthetic as Keats; to Lord
Beaconsfield as a novelist, to Mr. Morley or Lord Acton as historians,
because their "tendency" or their "politics" were different from his
own. The most biassed of English or French critics is broad-minded
compared to a Russian critic. Had Keats been a Russian poet, Belinsky
would have swept him away with contempt; Wordsworth would have been
condemned as reactionary; and Swinburne's politics alone would have
been taken into consideration. At the present day, almost ten years
after Professor Brueckner wrote his _History of Russian Literature_, now
that the press is more or less free, save for occasional pin-pricks,
now that literary output is in any case unfettered, and the stage freer
than it is in England, the same criticism still applies. Russian
literary criticism is still journalistic. There are and there always
have been brilliant exceptions, of course, two of the most notable of
which are VOLYNSKY and MEREZHKOVSKY; but as a rule the political camp
to which the writer belongs is the all-important question; and I know
cases of Russian politicians who have been known to refuse to write,
even in foreign reviews, because they disapproved of the "tendency" of
those reviews, the tendency being non-existent--as is generally the
case with English reviews,--and the review harbouring opinions of every
shade and tendency. You would think that narrow-mindedness could no
further go than to refuse to let your work appear in an impartial
organ, lest in that same organ an opinion opposed to your own might
appear also. But the cause of this is the same now as it used to be,
namely that, in spite of there being a greater measure of freedom in
Russia, political liberty does not yet exist. Liberty of assembly does
not exist; liberty of conscience only partially exists; the press is
annoyed and hampered by restrictions; and the great majority of Russian
writers are still engaged in fighting for these things, and therefore
still ready to sacrifice fairness for the greater end,--the achievement
of political freedom.

Thus criticism in Russia became a question of camps, and the question
arises, what were these camps? From the dawn of the age of pure
literature, Russia was divided into two great camps: The Slavophiles
and the Propagandists of Western Ideas.

The trend towar