poem into a bad one." He produced a
beautiful work; but he also did what all other translators of Homer
have done; he took the Homer out and left the Zhukovsky, and with it
something sentimental, elegiac, and didactic.

Zhukovsky's greatest service to Russian literature consisted in his
exploding the superstition that the literature of France was the only
literature that counted, and introducing literary Russia to the poets
of England and Germany rather than of France. But apart from this, he
is the first and best translator in European literature, for what
Krylov did with some of La Fontaine's fables, he did for all the
literature he touched--he re-created it in Russian, and made it his
own. In his translation of Gray's _Elegy_, for instance, he not only
translates the poet's meaning into musical verse, but he conveys the
intangible atmosphere of dreamy landscape, and the poignant accent
which makes that poem the natural language of grief. It is
characteristic of him that, thirty-seven years after he translated the
poem, he visited Stoke Poges, re-read Gray's _Elegy_ there, and made
another translation, which is still more faithful than the first.

The Russian language was by this time purified from all outward
excrescences, released from the bondage of convention and the
pseudo-classical, open to all outside influences, and only waiting,
like a ready-tuned instrument, on which Krylov and Zhukovsky had
already sounded sweet notes and deep tones, and which Karamzin had
proved to be a magnificent vehicle for musical and perspicuous prose,
for a poet of genius to come and sound it from its lowest note to the
top of its compass, for there was indeed much music and excellent
voice to be plucked from it. At the appointed hour the man came. It
was PUSHKIN. He arrived at a time when a battle of words was raging
between the so-called classical and romantic schools. The
pseudo-classical, with all its mythological machinery and conventional
apparatus, was totally alien to Russia, and a direct and slavish
imitation of the French. On the other hand, the utmost confusion
reigned as to what constituted romanticism. To each single writer it
meant a different thing: "Enfoncez Racine," and the unities, in one
case; or ghosts, ballads, legends, local colour in another; or the
defiance of morality and society in another. Zhukovsky, in introducing
German romanticism into Russia, paved the way for its death, and for
the death of all exoti