time took
any interest in public affairs or foreign politics. The acts of the
Government which were watched most attentively were the promotions in
the service and the conferring of decorations. The publication of a
new tale by Zagoskin or Marlinski--two writers now well-nigh
forgotten--seemed of much greater importance than any amount of
legislation, and such events as the French Revolution of 1830 paled
before the publication of a new poem by Pushkin.

The Transcendental philosophy, which in Germany went hand in hand with
the Romantic literature, found likewise a faint reflection in Russia. A
number of young professors and students in Moscow, who had become
ardent admirers of German literature, passed from the works of Schiller,
Goethe, and Hoffmann to the writing of Schelling and Hegel. Trained in
the Romantic school, these young philosophers found at first a special
charm in Schelling's mystical system, teeming with hazy poetical
metaphors, and presenting a misty grandiose picture of the universe;
but gradually they felt the want of some logical basis for their
speculations, and Hegel became their favourite. Gallantly they struggled
with the uncouth terminology and epigrammatic paradoxes of the great
thinker, and strove to force their way through the intricate mazes of
his logical formulae. With the ardour of neophytes they looked at every
phenomenon--even the most trivial incident of common life--from the
philosophical point of view, talked day and night about principles,
ideas, subjectivity, Weltauffassung, and similar abstract entities,
and habitually attacked the "hydra of unphilosophy" by analysing the
phenomena presented and relegating the ingredient elements to the
recognised categories. In ordinary life they were men of quiet, grave,
contemplative demeanour, but their faces could flush and their blood
boil when they discussed the all-important question, whether it is
possible to pass logically from Pure Being through Nonentity to the
conception of Development and Definite Existence!

We know how in Western Europe Romanticism and Transcendentalism,
in their various forms, sank into oblivion, and were replaced by a
literature which had a closer connection with ordinary prosaic wants and
plain everyday life. The educated public became weary of the Romantic
writers, who were always "sighing like a furnace," delighting in
solitude, cold eternity, and moonshine, deluging the world with their
heart-gushings, and