books of to-day. And it is worth remembering that when Tolstoi was a
young man, his aunt advised him to have an intrigue with a married
woman, for the added polish and ease it would give to his manners,
just as an American mother sends her boy to dancing-school.


Finally, in reading the works of Tolstoi, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Gorki,
Chekhov, Andreev, and others, what is the general impression produced
on the mind of a foreigner? It is one of intense gloom. Of all the
dark books in fiction, no works sound such depths of suffering and
despair as are fathomed by the Russians. Many English readers used to
say that the novels of George Eliot were "profoundly sad,"--it became
almost a hackneyed phrase. Her stories are rollicking comedies
compared with the awful shadow cast by the literature of the Slavs.
Suffering is the heritage of the Russian race; their history is
steeped in blood and tears, their present condition seems intolerably
painful, and the future is an impenetrable cloud. In the life of the
peasants there is of course fun and laughter, as there is in every
human life; but at the root there is suffering, not the loud protest
of the Anglo-Saxon labourer, whose very loudness is a witness to his
vitality--but passive, fatalistic, apathetic misery. Life has been
often defined, but never in a more depressing fashion than by the
peasant in Gorki's novel, who asks quietly:--

"What does the word Life mean to us? A feast? No. Work? No. A battle?
Oh, no!! For us Life is something merely tiresome, dull,--a kind of
heavy burden. In carrying it we sigh with weariness and complain of
its weight. Do we really love Life! The Love of Life! The very words
sound strange to our ears! We love only our dreams of the future--and
this love is Platonic, with no hope of fruition."