calling on the heavens and the earth to stand aghast
at their Promethean agonising or their Wertherean despair. Healthy
human nature revolted against the poetical enthusiasts who had lost
the faculty of seeing things in their natural light, and who constantly
indulged in that morbid self-analysis which is fatal to genuine feeling
and vigorous action. And in this healthy reaction the philosophers fared
no better than the poets, with whom, indeed, they had much in common.
Shutting their eyes to the visible world around them, they had busied
themselves with burrowing in the mysterious depths of Absolute Being,
grappling with the ego and the non-ego, constructing the great
world, visible and invisible, out of their own puny internal
self-consciousness, endeavouring to appropriate all departments of human
thought, and imparting to every subject they touched the dryness and
rigidity of an algebraical formula. Gradually men with real human
sympathies began to perceive that from all this philosophical turmoil
little real advantage was to be derived. It became only too evident
that the philosophers were perfectly reconciled with all the evil in the
world, provided it did not contradict their theories; that they were men
of the same type as the physician in Moliere's comedy, whose chief care
was that his patients should die selon les ordonnances de la medicine.

In Russia the reaction first appeared in the aesthetic literature. Its
first influential representative was Gogol (b. 1808, d. 1852), who may
be called, in a certain sense, the Russian Dickens. A minute comparison
of those two great humourists would perhaps show as many points of
contrast as of similarity, but there is a strong superficial resemblance
between them. They both possessed an inexhaustible supply of broad
humour and an imagination of singular vividness. Both had the power of
seeing the ridiculous side of common things, and the talent of producing
caricatures that had a wonderful semblance of reality. A little calm
reflection would suffice to show that the characters presented are for
the most part psychological impossibilities; but on first making their
acquaintance we are so struck with one or two life-like characteristics
and various little details dexterously introduced, and at the same time
we are so carried away by the overflowing fun of the narrative, that we
have neither time nor inclination to use our critical faculties. In a
very short time Gogol's fam