the mysterious sect of doves and describes the collapse of the young scholar who turns to them for mystical development, only to become ensnared in their meshes. He tries to escape, but the sectarians in their blind fanaticism follow him and kill him rather than have him do so. Peterburg has as its hero Ableukhov, a direct descendant of the Khan Ab-Lei, a cold and menacing bureaucrat of the old régime. Shishfarne and Enfarshish, the Persian, hold up a constant menace to Russia, and the brazen statue of Peter the Great gallops to the rescue of his threatened city exactly as in The Copper Rider of Pushkin a century before. The thesis is placed boldly in this novel: Is the Asia of Christ or the Asia of Genghis Khan to conquer in Russia? Whichever wins, the victory is Asiatic. Others of the Bolshevik poets are as outspoken in their orientation. Mariengof calls upon the hordes of Asia to sweep into Europe to take vengeance on the conquerors of Stenka Razin and Pugachev, two of the foremost peasant leaders in the struggle against the introduction of Western ideas into Russia. Oryeshin in Revolt glories in the darkcheeked Chinese hordes swarming through the Urals to deal vengeance on a decadent civilization, and he boldly declares that in the new world the blessing is to be awarded to the Kirghiz nomads of the steppes.

We cannot discuss here the source of many of Dostoyevsky's ideas. In many cases they are to be sought among the simple peasantry and the sectarian leaders of Russian dissent rather than in higher spheres of society and learning. These sides of the Russian people had been carefully obscured and derided by the Westerners. Russian literature served a long apprenticeship under Byelinsky and his followers who had sought to transplant Western culture and aspirations and acclimate them in Russia. In the days when it was a civic duty which every educated man owed his country to read the latest novel on social problems, Dostoyevsky with his passionate criticisms was an anomaly. His spiritual message and his fierce attacks on socialists and radicals cut strangely across the prevailing fashion. Pisemsky, far less daring, had been punished with ostracism, and The Troubled Sea represents the radicals as futile rather than evil. Even Turgenev never recovered from the ill-will

which he had gained in return for Fathers and Children and Virgin Soil. He was regarded as a traitor to the cause of liberty, and this sad fate, together with his increasing illness, silenced his pen. Not so with Dostoyevsky. Whether he were attacking revolutionists or defending his pitiful creatures, he went his way embittered perhaps, but never bending before the storm, and he triumphed.

It was a bitter day for the Russian intelligentsia when they saw the success of their inveterate foe. They had welcomed his early works, Poor Folk and The Oppressed and Humiliated; they had used the Memoirs from a Dead House as material for the study of Siberian prisons, but the later works were slighted. Even in histories of Russian literature prepared in English they could not judge calmly. Kropotkin in his Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature heaps on Dostoyevsky enough denunciation to break a lesser author. He regards him as utterly unreadable save for some passages marked by sympathy for the poor. Bruckner more impartially acknowledges his power, but sneers at his grovelling before Byzantine orthodoxy and Mongolian autocracy. He tries to show that Dostoyevsky, the deep psychologist, could not depict the upper types of revolutionists, although he could plunge into the abysses of the hearts and souls of the most abnormal. Tolstoy is said to have judged him by his pre-Siberian works. In the words of Vyekhi, one of the publications of the symbolists, the intelligentsia hated to acknowledge him, but ultimately they were brought to accept him whom they had scorned.

Dostoyevsky was accepted by all classes of Russians and by world literature. More than that, the Neo-romantic period which followed him was essentially a period of post-Dostoyevsky literature. The adherents of the old schools carried on a strong propaganda against the new, stronger perhaps than in any other country, for it was a struggle not merely between two schools of art but between art and politics. Even to-day it is possible to find educated Russians who berate all literature which has not an intensely practical bearing, and prefer an author of indictment literature to a greater master who regards his art as art. Nevertheless, the triumph of Dostoyevsky was so complete that he

may be said to have given the keynote of the period since 1880. Certainly, hi works contain most of the chords which have been struck since that time. Despised and impoverished as he was in life, his spirit may now feel content, as he realizes his growing influence and the overshadowing control which he has exercised over modern Russian literature.

CLARENCE AUGUSTUS MANNING.

Columbia University.

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND AMERICAN

LETTERS TO-DA

Half a century ago Matthew Arnold a famous passage in Essays in Criticism sought to lay hold of the cause of our disappointment in the literature of that brief, splendid, idealistic wave, commonly known as the Romantic Movement, from which our present literature plainly derives :—

"It has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it in fact something premature; and that from this cause its productions are doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And this prematureness comes from its having proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient material to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and variety."

With this prematureness, Arnold went on to contrast the widely diffused and securely held spiritual wealth of the great ages, such as the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles and the England of Shakespeare. In such ages, he points out, the creative power of the writer was inspired and nourished by a current of "fresh thought, intelligent and alive", in which he found his materials ready to hand.

When it was written, this diagnosis of the Romantic Movement was plausible: to-day it is conclusive. It is plain now that the Romantic Movement was premature and insubstantial; that it is not enough to become aware, as the romantics did, of the boundlessness of life and the delights of the emancipated imagination; that in proportion as the human soul annexes territory, the need of genuine conquest-of governance-is increasingly imperative. In the welter in which things now toss,

fewer and fewer are seeking a wider welter, more and more are seeking for some principle of control.

The premature Romantic Movement soon gave place to the Victorian Interlude, in which common-sense rejected the caprices of the romantic outlook, without being able, however, to establish a firm reality instead. Mid-Victorianism was Romanticism compromising and becoming respectable. Then, in Swinburne, Morris, and others, came a revival of the enthusiasm of the first quarter of the century, and finally the prettiness and naughtiness of the fin de siècle. The twentieth century, thus far, has made no contribution, except that involved in working out, in an eager, radical spirit, what was implicit in the art and thought of the nineteenth century.

All these phenomena have been equally observable in American letters. Poe was our type of the premature, insubstantial romantic. In the great period of New England, an anæmic Transcendentalism showed the effects of the Puritan starvation of the imagination: the lesser men went up in the air, the greater, aware that they "did not know enough", studied rapturously and became critical rather than creative. The central figure in that motley crew of hungry idealists was Emerson. If it was he who drafted America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence", as we have been saying ever since Holmes said it; it was he, also, it is important to remember, who showed impressively that independence meant, not a rejection of Europe and the past, nor yet imitation, but assimilation of them. What would Emerson have been without Europe and the past -without Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shakespeare and Bacon and Milton; above all, Plato and Jesus? New England had a current of ideas, an abundance of "fresh thought, intelligent and alive", partly set in motion by Emerson and partly setting him in motion-Emerson, the most important writer in prose in the nineteenth century, in Arnold's judgment. But it was the capricious side of Emerson, his idiosyncratic, "follow-yourgenius" side, his German Transcendental rather than his Platonic, that most powerfully attracted his contemporaries and successors, including Whitman. The Transcendental current of ideas-the only effective current in mid-century America-was already sub