of classic anthologies. To the night of his un-
fortunate death Zola believed himself a natu-
ralist, though his books never escape the taint
of melodrama.

The naturalism of the Russians is in a differ-
ent key. Gogol, the inimitable Gogol, wrote
Dead Souls, and Russia had conquered the
kingdom once ruled by Fielding. If Château-
briand was the father of modern French prose,
as Goethe asserted, from Gogol stemmed all the
great modern Russians: Dostoïevsky, Turgenev,
Stchendrin, Tolstoy, Gorky; and the last seems
nearer the first than either Turgenev or Tolstoy.
He is hardly ten years old artistically, yet his
name is known from Siberia to the Sandwich
Islands. He is read more in a day than Kipling
is in a year, and, compared to Kipling, he is as
flint to chalk, a man carved from the hardest
granite.

A revolutionary, inasmuch as he deliberately
disowns, in his most characteristic work, all
the devices of literature, of rhetoric, of literary
architecture, he is at his worst in prolonged
narrative, such as Foma Gordyeeff. And
when he philosophizes he is long-winded. It
is in the short tale with a simple setting that
Gorky knows how to stir us. A strip of sea
beach, the sky a hot azure, the water green as
grass, two or three men and women, and we are
given a tragedy in miniature. Or the steppes,
sullen and brown, stretch before us to the setting
sun; a few tramps talk at random, night falls.

-270-