Recent Literature

THE second volume of Mr. Forster’s Life of Dickens is not so interesting as the first. It does not reach the period of Dickens’s separation from his wife, and it gives no facts of his vie intime to compare in effect with those already related of his childhood. On the other hand, it has all the disagreeable qualities of the first volume : it is even more bragging in tone, feeble and wandering in analysis, and comical in criticism. It tells the story of Dickens’s life from 1842 to 1852,— a period of great literary activity and of varied experiences ; for during these years the American Notes, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Christmas Carol, The Chimes, Pictures from Italy, Dombey and Son, and David Copperfield were written, and the author spent much time abroad, residing at Genoa for a year, then for a long time in Switzerland, and then at Paris.

In 1842 he had just returned from America, and was busy with those Notes in which he stated as mildly as he could his displeasure with this Republic, but which our exacting population of that day refused to find lenient. It seems all a very droll business to us, who are so much wiser than our fathers, but perhaps we should not have liked it ourselves. We do not like the patronizing letter which he writes to Mr. Forster in 1868 from America: “ I see great changes for the better socially. Politically, no. England governed by the Marylebone vestry, and England as she would be after years of such governing, is what I make of that.” We do not like it, but we do not care much about it, and our predecessors cared a great deal. That is the difference. Still, great as was the clamor the ill-advised Americans of that day made over the Notes, Dickens amusingly exaggerated it; he really thought that the whole course of business and pleasure upon this continent was suspended in order to let the public rage about his book. But it is plain that he always felt himself an object of universal and unceasing interest: he wrote his books as we celebrate our Fourths, with the eyes of the world upon him. As to us poor Americans, he never changed his mind about us; he never liked us ; and it is a pity that we cannot get over that vice of wanting other people to like us. There are some forty millions of us now; is it not enough if we like each other ? It is impossible that a man should like any nation besides his own ; the best he can do is to like here and there a person in it. Dickens did this, and so docs his biographer after him. Mr. Forster thinks there is no higher type than the accomplished and genial American, just as we think there is nobody so charming as the thoroughly agreeable Englishman, though even he has his little foible : for example, he does not exist. But it was not merely his dislike that the Americans of old complained of in Charles Dickens ; it was his unfairness, his giving only the truth that told against them, and his downright misrepresentations. Who shall say if they were right ? Some things in this book support their side. Dickens pretends that he met five Americans on a Genoese steamer, and one of them called out, “ Why, I 'm blarmed if it ain’t Dickens ! ” and having introduced the others all round, added, “ Personally, you and my fellow-countrymen can fix it pleasant, I do expectuatc.” Honest Mr. Forster sets down this frantic rubbish, and seems to believe that it reports the parlance of the American people. We can well imagine, however, that Dickens found the Italians much smoother and more agreeable than he found us, and that he felt it the greatest injustice to call the Swiss “ the Americans of the Continent,” for they saluted people whom they met very politely. It must be owned that in point of manners we are perhaps the least successful people on earth, and to be ranked with none but the English.

Beyond the superficial observations of Italian life which afterwards took more perfect form in Pictures from Italy, Dickens’s letters from Genoa contain little but the usual extravagant statements of hisown conditions of mind, his achievements, and his purposes. Something prodigious, or horrible, or enormous, or petrifying, or terrible, or magnificent, or astounding in a superlative degree happens to him so often, that at last it becomes fatiguing. The letters throughout the book are nearly always to Mr. Forster ; as if Mr. Forster did not like to connect any other name with Dickens’s. It is true that he quotes some passages of the letters to President Felton from Mr. Fields’s Yesterdays with Authors, and these are so much better than any written to himself that one wishes his biographer had cast about him a little to see if he could not discover some other correspondent of Dickens. Though the letters given are not easy reading, though their fun seems often pitilessly forced, and their seriousness of the blackest midnight hue, and their fervor of the very red hottest, they are extremely useful in possessing us fully with an idea of the pressure under which Dickens felt, joked, wept, wrote, lived. His whole existence was a prolonged storm and stress, and the wonder is, not that he died so young, but that he lived to be so old. This pressure told upon his quality. A man of unquestionable genius, his material, at its finest, was never of the finest. The melodramatic was his notion of the dramatic, the eloquent was his idea of the poetic ; his humor was burlesque ; his pathos was never too deep for tears. It seems that he could not like anything better, if we are to judge from his estimate of Hawthorne’s matchless romance: “I finished the Scarlet Letter yesterday. It falls off sadly, after that fine opening scene. The psychological part of the story is very much overdone, and not truly done, I think. Their suddenness of meeting and agreeing to go away together, after all those years, is very poor. Mr. Chillingworth ditto. The child out of nature altogether. And Mr. Dimmesdale never could have begotten her.” This failure to understand the subtle perfection of art so far above his is all the more sadly amusing when one thinks, in connection with it, of the shapelessness of his own plots, the unnaturalness of his situations, the crudity of his treatment of characters similar to those he censures. Indeed, when you go back to the most popular of the Dickens romances, you marvel at the effect the earlier books had upon the generation in which they were written, and question whether there is not some witchery in the mere warmth and novelty of a young author’s book that makes it captivating to his contemporaries. In this biography you read with amazement the letters of Lord Jeffrey, in which the old reviewer bewails himself over little Nell and Paul Dombey. Does any peer of the realm now shed tears for their fate ? Dickens, full of his Chimes, came all the way from Italy in midwinter to read it to Carlyle, Forster, Jerrold, and other intimate friends, and made them cry ; but he could hardly do that with any literary company now if he came back from the dead. And is it then all a fashion only ?

The tireless industry of Dickens continued throughout the years recorded in this volume, but he performed no such feat as the simultaneous production of Pickwick, Nickleby, and Oliver Twist Yet he wrote always with the printer at his heels, and in one of his letters he tells how it startled him to hear, in a stationer’s shop, a lady inquire for a certain number of David Copperfield when he had just bought the paper to write it. His literary history is very fully given, and amidst much that is not important there is a great deal that is very interesting. His method of publication was adverse to any exactness of plot ; and as he wrote from month to month his romances took shape from the suggestions and exigencies of the passing time. It is easy to see how he padded when he could not otherwise fill out the due number of pages ; in some of his books, as The Old Curiosity Shop, he wholly changed his plan, and in Our Mutual Friend it is hard to believe that he had any plan. For this reason we are not persuaded, in the matter of Mr. Cruikshank’s claim to have suggested the idea of Oliver Twist, that Mr. Forster has all the truth upon his side. Doubtless the artist claims too much in saying that he furnished the principal characters and scenes, and implying that the letter-press merely illustrated his pictures ; but it is not at all improbable that Dickens, who was then writing Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby, as well as Oliver Twist, may really have changed his plot after poring over a series of sketches in the artist’s portfolio. The letter of Dickens, which Mr. Forster prints with so much emphasis, he merely declares at the time of writing that he had just seen “ a majority of the plates for the first time.” Nobody will ever believe that Mr. Cruikshank originated Oliver Twist; but Dr. Mackenzie’s statement of the matter was so far within the range of possibility, that, after all but calling him a liar, it seems a grudging reparation for Mr. Forster to say that he is not guilty of “ the worst part of the fable.” But, then, graciousness is not a characteristic of this odd biography, in which the unamiable traits of the biographer combine with the unamiable traits of his subject to give the book as disagreeable a tone as a book ever had. We behold in one case a high-pressure egotist, living in a world pervaded by himself, eager for gain, and dismayed by smaller profits than he expected, suspicious of those whom he dealt with in business, relentless in his own interests, a dreadful machine capable of walking ten miles every day and writing a chapter of fiction, quoting himself continually, and behaving himself generally in a manner to be wearisome to the flesh and spirit of all other men ; and, on the other hand, we have a jealous and greedy intimate of his who insists upon representing him solely from his own personal and epistolary knowledge. But we feel sure that this is a false view of Charles Dickens. The letters to Mr. Forster are of less value than his other letters, because they have the stamp of an exaggerated and exacting friendship on them; they are all of the operatic pitch ; and latterly they appear to have been written with a consciousness that they were some day to be used as literary material. It is not credible that these letters alone were accessible to the biographer, and it is strange that he seldom or never gives any reminiscences of Dickens besides his own. The closest friend cannot see the whole character of any man ; but this biography seems to be written upon the contrary theory, and it renders another life of Dickens necessary. It must always remain as a most entertaining mass of material, but there could be no greater misfortune to Charles Dickens’s memory than that it should be permanently accepted as his history.

— The reader who is curious to note the difference between a tragedy written by a man of great talent and one by a man of great genius should compare Joseph Noirel’s Revenge (which we noticed last month) and the Liza of Turgénieff. The first is a book of singular power and of fascinating interest: it thrills you by its masterly management of the strangest facts and situations, its audacious subjection, not merely of improbabilities, but impossibilities to its effects. The other is — life ; nothing more, nothing less; and though life altogether foreign to our own, yet unmistakably real. Everything is unaffected and unstrained. Here is not so much of the artificer as even his style : this author never calls on you to admire how well he does a thing; he only makes you wonder at the truth and value of the thing when it is done. He seems the most self-forgetful of the story-telling tribe, and he is no more enamored of his creations than of himself; he pets none of them ; he upbraids none; you like them or hate them for what they are ; it does not seem to be his affair. It is hard to reconcile the sense of this artistic impartiality with one’s sense of the deep moral earnestness of the author’s books : he is profoundly serious in behalf of what is just and good, even when he appears most impassive in respect to his characters ; one feels the presence, not only of a great genius, but a clear conscience in his work. His earnestness scarcely permits him the play of humor ; his wit is pitiless irony or cutting sarcasm.

Liza is the story of Fedor Ivanovich Lavretsky, whose handsome wife is, after his discovery of her unfaithfulness, left to lead the life that pleases her at Paris, at Baden, and elsewhere, while he goes back to Russia. He has had a strange and unnaturally secluded childhood ; his wife was the first woman of his own rank that he had met, and he loved her ; now that is past; but though he is a man who has suffered greatly, it is not a ruined life that he brings home, for he is a man of sense as well as strong affections. Lizaveta Mikhailovna is his distant relation, a young girl of nineteen when he comes to live on his estate near the town where her family resides. She is of a pure, high, religious nature, sensitively conscientious, and of a reserved and thoughtful temperament. Before either is aware they are in love. A paper comes to Lavretsky with the announcement of his wife’s death ; and he shows it to Liza. That night they meet by accident in her mother’s garden, and are surprised into the acknowledgment of their love. It is a moment of rapture to him and of doubt and trouble to her ; and the next night Lavretsky’s wife, who is not dead, returns. Then all is over; he rids himself of her, but Liza goes into a convent; old friends die, children grow up into men and women ; Lavretsky’s wife leads her old life in Paris ; Lavretsky becomes forty-five ; Liza remains in her convent; and that is the way the story ends.

The action scarcely begins till the story is two thirds told; all that precedes is devoted to the work of accounting for the characters and placing them and their ancestors and kindred, by a series of scenes, anecdotes, and descriptions, fully before you. In the mean time you come to know also a great deal of Russian life in general, though apparently no study of it has been made for your instruction : you Russianize, as you read, till you wish to address your acquaintances by their Christian names and patronymics. But suddenly, at a certain point, the threads which seemed to lie so loose in the author’s hand are drawn closer and closer, till the interest is of the most intense degree. Everything that went before, tells : the effect of character, passion, situation, deepens and deepens ; as the climax approaches, the light touches with which the tragedy is darkened are added one after one, till it appears impossible that you should bear more ; then the whole work stands complete before you in its transcendent, hopeless pathos. It is sorrow that commands your reverence as well as your pity; Liza is so good, Lavretsky so worthy of happiness, that you can make their grief your own without losing your self-respect.

It is hard to say which of the numerous personages is best painted, and fortunately it is not necessary ; it is enough that they are all done with consummate art, consummate naturalness. The same is to be said of the different scenes, unless, indeed, we single out the evening at the house of Liza’s mother, when Lavretsky’s wife has returned to be pardoned, as she calls it, and flatters the selfish sentimental old woman into a belief in her repentance, and flirts with Liza’s rejected lover Panshine, and makes fun of all of them without their knowing it, and so rides home with the old gossiping Gedeonovsky.

“ Panshine bowed gravely to all the party ; afterwards, as he stood on the steps after seeing Varvara into her carriage, he gave her hand a gentle pressure, and exclaimed, as she drove away, ‘ Au revoir !’ Gedeonovsky sat by her side in the carriage, and all the way home she amused herself by putting the tip of her little foot, as if by accident, on his foot. He felt abashed and tried to make her complimentary speeches, She tittered and made eyes at him when the light from the streetlamps shone into the carriage. The waltz she had played rang in her ears and excited her. Wherever she might be she had only to imagine a ball-room and a blaze of light, and swift circling round to the sound of music, and her heart would burn within her, her eyes would glow with a strange lustre, a smile would wander around her lips, a kind of bacchanalian grace would seem to diffuse itself over her whole body. When they arrived at her house, Varvara lightly bounded from the carriage, as only a lionne could bound, turned towards Gedeonovsky, and suddenly burst out laughing in his face. ‘ A charming creature,’ thought the councillor of state, as he made his way home to his lodgings, where his servant was waiting for him with a bottle of opodeldoc. ‘ It’s as well that I’m a steady man — But why did she laugh ? ’ ”

This scene is perfect in its way, and yet we are not sure that it is finer than some closing passages of the drama, wherein Lavretsky, long years after the ruin of his hopes, returns to the house of Liza’s mother, and finds it full of gay young people, the friends and relations of her younger brother and sister, who have grown up and married. All the old people are dead.

“ ‘ Won’t you go into the garden ? ’ said Kalitine, addressing Lavretsky. ‘ It is very pleasant now, although we have neglected it a little.’

“ Lavretsky went into the garden, and the first thing he saw there was that very bench on which he and Liza had once passed a few happy moments, — moments that never repeated themselves. It had grown black and warped, but still he recognized it, and that feeling took possession of his heart which is unequalled as well for sweetness as for bitterness, — the feeling of lively regret for vanished youth, for once familiar happiness.'

“ He walked by the side of the young people along the alleys. The lime-trees looked older than before, having grown a little taller during the last eight years and casting a denser shade. All the underwood, also, had grown higher, and the raspberry-bushes had spread vigorously, and the hazel copse was thickly tangled. From every side exhaled a fresh odor from the forest and the wood, from the grass and the lilacs.

“ ‘ What a capital place for a game at Puss in the Corner ! ’ suddenly cried Lenochka, as they entered upon a small grassy lawn surrounded by lime-trees. ‘ There are just five of us.’

“ ‘ But have you forgotten Fedor Ivanovich ? ’ asked her brother ; ‘ or is it yourself you have not counted ? ’

“ Lenochka blushed a little.

“But Lavretsky returned to the house, went into the dining-room, approached the piano, and touched one of the notes. It responded with a faint but clear sound, and a shudder thrilled his heart within him. With that note began the inspired melody, by means of which, on that most happy night long ago, Lemn, the dead Lemn, had thrown him into such raptures. Then Lavretsky passed into the drawingroom, and did not leave it for a long time.

“ In that room, in which he had seen Liza so often, her image floated more distinctly before him ; the traces of her presence seemed to make themselves felt around him there. But his sorrow of her loss became painful and crushing; it bore with it none of the tranquillity which death inspires. Liza was still living somewhere, far away and lost to sight. He thought of her as he had known her in actual life ; he could not recognize the girl he used to love in that pale, dim, ghostly form, halfhidden in a nun’s dark robe and surrounded by waving clouds of incense.

“Nor would Lavretsky have been able to recognize himself, if he could have looked at himself as he in fancy was looking at Liza. In the course of those eight years his life had attained its final crisis, — that crisis which many people never experience, but without which no man can be sure of maintaining his principles firm to the last. He had really given up thinking about his own happiness, about what would conduce to his own interests. He had become calm, and—why should we conceal the truth? — he had aged; and that not in face alone or frame, but he had aged in mind; for, indeed, not only is it difficult, but it is even hazardous to do what some people speak of, — to preserve the heart young in bodily old age.”

Is not this exquisitely, penetratingly sad in its simple truthfulness ?

— To the essays on The Origin of FolkLore, The Descent of Fire, Were-Wolves and Swan-Maidens, Light and Darkness, Myths cf the Barbaric World, and the Primeval Chost World, which we have had the pleasure of giving our readers in these pages, Mr. Fiske has added an excellent review of Gladstone’s Juventus Mundi, in the delightful book which he has just published with the title of Myths and MythMakers. We use the glowing adjective after due reflection, for no colder word could express the charm of studies which lack none of the graver merits. It seems to have been Mr. Fiske’s “mission” as a lecturer on Cosmic Philosophy to take the recent opinions and researches of the metaphysicians, the philologists, and the other unalluring scholars, and by original criticism and analysis make them and their subjects as attractive as if he were some mere popularizer of philosophy and science, and not one of the most thorough, sincere, and cautious of inquirers. With the capacity for profound research and the power of critical consideration, he has a singular grace of style and an art of clear and simple statement which will not let the most indifferent refuse knowledge of the topics treated. In such a field as the discussion of old fables and superstitions affords, we have not only to admire Mr. Fiske for the charm of his manner, but for the justice and honesty of his method. He may he right, or he may be wrong, but he is neither by prejudice ; every opinion is a conclusion from facts industriously sought out and conscientiously examined. It is an easy thing to make an entertaining book on such a subject. You have only to collect from very accessible authorities a sufficient number of tales and anecdotes, and garnish the result with the speculations of wellknown philosophers and poets. But it is hardly necessary to say that this has not been the light labor of Mr. Fiske, though what he gives us is so pleasant and is offered with so much ease. A continuous purpose runs through his apparently desultory essays, and while he is entertaining us with heroes and demons, clouds and sunshine, were-wolves and fairies, monsters, dreams, and ghosts, it is his effort to show the essential unity of all myths in origin, and to prove that this origin is the instinctive tendency of the childlike primeval man to endow inanimate nature with his own dimly understood attributes. He believes that myths are the first efforts of the human imagination, and not decayed religions or systems of faith. This, very thinly stated, is Mr. Fiske’s theory, which he founds rather upon the results cf psychological inquiry into the mental habits of savages than upon purely philological research. But a full idea of his theory is to be gained only by perusal of his book, — a pastime in which the reader will find himself sufficiently instructed and interested, even if he gains no idea of a general theory at all.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.<FNREF>*</FNREF>

— Gradually the French book-lists are beginning to resume the fulness which they had before the war, and the reader can now find much to read beside the stories of the campaigns and the apologies of unfortunate generals, which have been almost the only books, or rather the most interesting ones, that have appeared during the last eighteen months. To-day we have before us a volume by Victor Cherbuliez, not, we are sorry to say, another story, but a collection of essays, Études de littérature et d'art, which will be found more entertaining than very many novels. The literary essays are three in number : one on Lessing ; one on Strauss, the author of the Life of Jesus ; and the third is entitled Les Poètes militants. These have all appeared in the Revue. The most interesting is that upon Lessing; it goes without saying that it is well written, and more than this, it gives in a comparatively short space as good a picture of the man, and more especially of the nature, importance, and merits of the various divisions of his work, as one can find. Perhaps the most interesting section is that in which Lessing’s Dramaturgie is discussed, for at the present date the controversy with Goetze has lost its claim to general interest, and seems but a small affair compared with some of the theological quarrels which this century has seen ; and the Laocoön, too, valuable as it was in its day, and still is, concerns itself with what was a greater novelty a hundred years ago than it is now when, we reap the good fruit it created in the discussion and criticism of works of art. As Cherbuliez says, “ A petty man of to-day is more of a philosopher on many points than was a great man born in 1729.”But philosophy has still a large field open to it, and the sun has yet to rise upon a generation of English or German speaking people intelligently admiring the classical French tragedy; we say intelligently, in order to rule out the now almost forgotten pseudoclassical fervor of the Germans against which Lessing fought so bitterly and so successfully. As Schopenhauer said, to be sure about pictures and statues which are acknowledged masterpieces, — but it is true mutatis mutandis of books as well, we should comport ourselves before them as before the great ones of the earth, we should stand in respectful silence waiting for them to speak to us. If it be answered that life is at the best but short, and that art is nowhere longer than in these plays, we might argue that whatever has been called good by competent persons should be read with a certain faith, not, of course, with blind superstition, but without the frivolity which we are all very ready to show to the French classical tragedy. Any one who contented himself with judging of Shakespeare’s merits as a tragedian by his geographical accuracy in putting seaports in Bohemia, we should think deserving of death at the stake ; we should hold him as but little better than the eminent Jedediah Buxton, a young mathematical wonder nf the last century, who, being taken to see Garrick act in one of Shakespeare’s plays, brought home with him no impression of the play nor of the actors, but the total sum, made in his head, of all the words spoken that evening upon the stage. Is it not our duty to ourselves to try to find out the beauty which has been so keenly felt by a nation so sensitive to various merits as the French? But without beating the air, more from a feeling of abstract justice than from any passionate admiration for, say Corneille’s Cinna, we would warmly commend this essay of which we were speaking as containing a very good statement of the matter as it stood before Lessing and his contemporaries. The question will never arise again in just that shape; but, for one way of looking at it, it is worth while seeing one case in which criticism was able to produce good results. In speaking of Lessing’s own plays, Cherbuliez shows the same intelligence and appreciation as in the other part of the essay. For example, in discussing Emilia Galotti, he quotes one of Emilia’s last speeches : “ O father, I am made of flesh and blood like any other woman. My senses are senses. I can answer for nothing.’ And goes on, “ Ah, madam, generally women do not see their failings so long beforehand. Goethe pretends that in the bottom of your heart you love the prince ; if he is right, you do not long for death ; if he is wrong, what do you fear? And think of this: your sad end will distress us because you are so amiable, but we are here at the theatre, we are expecting a real tragedy ; where will be the grandeur of the spectacle ? Virginia bedews with her blood the altar of liberty ; Rome has trembled with horror and with hope ; this fertile blood is going to give it its franchise, its tribunes, and its pride ; but when you shall have fallen beneath the knife, there will be no change in the world’s destiny, and the thoughtful spectator will go home saying, ‘The old Odoardo committed a crime in order that in history there should be one less woman’s fall. In fact, have we had our money’s worth ? ’ ”

The essay on Strauss, although interesting and instructive, seems to us to be much less valuable, still it will be found to be very well worth reading. The third essay, Les Poètes militants, treats of a number of versemakers who set themselves the task of being poetical about the recent war. They fall easy victims to Cherbuliez’s criticisms. Among others he speaks of Geibel, who has done some good work, reminding one, however, of what a German Tennyson might be. But even he was so patriotic as to wish das Welschthum auszumerzen in Glauben, Wort und That, — a wish that Cherbuliez does not share. The rest of the volume contains some letters on that salon of 1872. They are charming reading. Every French writer seems to be obliged to win his spurs in some artistic criticism, and it is generally well done, but we have not space to quote from them.

— Another well - known man, who has written a new book, is M. Edmond About, and his book is entitled Alsace. It contains his contributions, written to the Soir, from the lost French provinces. One does not need to be Prince Bismarck to find the book distasteful. And worse than that, it is, we regret to say, rather dull. Not that he had an enlivening subject for a French writer or for any writer for the matter of that, but there is too much expression given to his own melancholy, which was well-grounded enough, but is of less interest to the world at large. He tells us many very sad stories of the sufferings he saw, of the general distress which the war and the annexation of their province brought upon the Alsatians, and many stories of the clumsiness of the Germans and of the patriotism of the French as shown by their ingenious insults to the Germans. Then, too, one’s sympathy for the people is lessened when one reads that part of their sufferings is due to the alleged absence of the pocket-handkerchief among the Vandal hordes who have conquered them, and to the fact that in the hotels walking about is dangerous at night because the shoes of the officers, being placed outside of the door, block up the passageways. We are also told that when the Germans entered Strasburg they were surprised to find the cathedral standing, and that they said, “ What, did n’t we do it any more harm ? ” Every one can judge for himself of the value of a book which so confounds seriousness with a petty credulity and undignified abuse as childish as making faces at a national enemy. At the end is the account of M. About’s arrest, which will be forgotten by a careless world that only worships success, before it is by him who languished in the German dungeons.

— Instead of saying as we did last month that the new edition of Gogol’s Tarass Boulba was announced, we should have said that it had appeared. It is a fierce picture of the bloody wars of the Cossacks in the sixteenth century. Tarass Boulba is the father of two sons, whom he takes to the military head-quarters as soon as they return from their schooling. Soon, by his influence, war is declared against Poland, or, at least, war is made against it, and a Polish city is blockaded by the Cossack troops; the younger son enters the city secretly, out of love for a Polish woman, and turns traitor to the Cossack cause. In a sortie he is slain by his father; the other son is taken prisoner by the Poles, and put to death by torture in the sight of the father, who has stolen into the city to see his son die. But Tarass avenges himself by devastating half of Poland ; finally, however, he, too, succumbs and dies at the stake, firm to the last. As a powerful sketch of the period it describes, this novel will be found as interesting as it is unpeaceful. Gogol tells the story as if he were a bard singing some old battle. Readers of Turgénieff will read this novel with interest as one of the few novels in Russian literature before he wrote.