to make all men happy, virtuous, refined, and poetical,
led in reality to exile and the scaffold! The pleasant dream was at an
end, and the fashionable world, giving up its former habits, took to
harmless occupations--card-playing, dissipation, and the reading of
French light literature. "The French quadrille," as a writer of the time
tersely expresses it, "has taken the place of Adam Smith."

When the storm had passed, the life of the salons began anew, but it was
very different from what it had been. There was no longer any talk about
political economy, theology, popular education, administrative abuses,
social and political reforms. Everything that had any relation to
politics in the wider sense of the term was by tacit consent avoided.
Discussions there were as of old, but they were now confined to literary
topics, theories of art, and similar innocent subjects.

This indifference or positive repugnance to philosophy and political
science, strengthened and prolonged by the repressive system of
administration adopted by Nicholas, was of course fatal to the
many-sided intellectual activity which had flourished during the
preceding reign, but it was by no means unfavourable to the cultivation
of imaginative literature. On the contrary, by excluding those practical
interests which tend to disturb artistic production and to engross the
attention of the public, it fostered what was called in the phraseology
of that time "the pure-hearted worship of the Muses." We need not,
therefore, be surprised to find that the reign of Nicholas, which
is commonly and not unjustly described as an epoch of social and
intellectual stagnation, may be called in a certain sense the Golden Age
of Russian literature.

Already in the preceding reign the struggle between the Classical and
the Romantic school--between the adherents of traditional aesthetic
principles and the partisans of untrammelled poetic inspiration--which
was being carried on in Western Europe, was reflected in Russia. A group
of young men belonging to the aristocratic society of St. Petersburg
embraced with enthusiasm the new doctrines, and declared war against
"classicism," under which term they understood all that was antiquated,
dry, and pedantic. Discarding the stately, lumbering, unwieldy periods
which had hitherto been in fashion, they wrote a light, elastic,
vigorous style, and formed a literary society for the express purpose of
ridiculing the most approved classi