ade Oedipus blind himself.
His books resemble Greek tragedies by the magnitude of the spiritual
adventures they set forth; they are unlike Greek Tragedies in the
Christian charity and the faith and the hope which goes out of them;
they inspire the reader with courage, never with despair, although
Dostoyevsky, face to face with the last extremities of evil, never
seeks to hide it or to shun it, but merely to search for the soul of
goodness in it. He did not search in vain, and just as, when he was on
his way to Siberia, a conversation he had with a fellow-prisoner
inspired that fellow-prisoner with the feeling that he could go on
living and even face penal servitude, so do Dostoyevsky's books come
to mankind as a message of hope from a radiant country. That is what
constitutes his peculiar greatness.

CHAPTER VII

THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY

The fifties, the sixties, and the seventies were, all over Europe, the
epoch of Parnassian poetry. In England, Tennyson was pouring out his
"fervent and faultless melodies," Matthew Arnold was playing his
plaintive harp, and the Pre-Raphaelites were weaving their tapestried
dreams; in France, Gautier was carving his cameos, Banville's
Harlequins and Columbines were dancing on a Watteau-like stage in the
silver twilight of Corot, Baudelaire was at work on his sombre bronze,
Sully-Prudhomme twanged his ivory lyre, and Leconte de Lisle was
issuing his golden coinage. It was, in poetry, the epoch of art for
art's sake.

Russian poetry did not escape the universal tendency; but in Russia
everything was conspiring to put poetry, and especially that kind of
poetry, in the shade. In the first place, events of great magnitude
were happening--the wide reforms, the emancipation of the serfs, the
growth of Nihilism, which was the product of the disillusion at the
result of the reforms: in the second place, criticism under the
influence of Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and Dobrolyubov was entirely
realistic and positivist, preaching not art for life's sake only, but
the absolute futility of poetry; and, in the third place, work of the
supremest kind was being done in narrative fiction; in the fourth
place, no prophet-poet was forthcoming whose genius was great enough
to voice national aspirations. All this tended to put poetry in the
shade, especially as such poets as did exist were, with one notable
exception, Parnassians, whose talent dwelt aloof from the turbid
stream of life, and who so