of their individual inspiration; but the yearning and the discontent that demanded those hopes and counsels of them were the same for all; they were stirred by the same impulses as the rest of their generation. Gorky and Tolstoy thought it was a desire for change in the order of society: but that was only their particular way of interpreting a far more general dissatisfaction. Through all the plays of the last generation in Russia runs the same cry for liberty, for emancipation; not for political emancipation-the lack of a share in the Sovereign power weighs very little on the individualbut for emancipation from every sort of restraint, for an ideal and impossible freedom. The impulse is fundamentally aimless and unconstructive. Even in Gorky, as we have seen, the positive programme remains wholly undefined. 'I do not know what I shall do,' says Zina, the new young woman; 'I only know that I shall do nothing as you do it.' Tossing about in the grasp of this blind instinct, the characters in these plays cry out: 'Let us go away from here'; to-morrow we will leave this place and begin a new life'; 'fling the household keys down the well and go where your eyes look, to all the four winds.' In some new place, in some new surroundings, they hope to find rest from the aimless discontent that gnaws them.

While our Western playwrights, confined within the boundaries of the attainable, wage a heavy-handed polemic with social institutions and conventions, the Russians are at grips with the deepest cravings of their inward nature. While our Hervieus and Brieux are railing at unjust marriage-laws, the Russians are crying out against the bonds of love itself.

"You are my God only till the dawn," cries an errant wife to her lover; at dawn you must vanish even as this enchanted night itself. By the light of day, two dingy strangers, we should be like the rest, slaves strangled in the coils of life."

It is rebellion against the fundamental conditions of man's destiny. Rising higher and higher in the scale of evolution, man finds himself still a slave to some

* In Yartsef's 'Up at the Convent,' 1905.

unknown ironical will; in apprehension so like a God, he finds himself still subject to the humiliation of his animal part. What satisfaction for his grievance can he derive from Tolstoy's pastoral paradise or Gorky's industrial millennium ? These things have only a symbolical value.

'The waves rock on the bosom of the ocean, the corn swings in the wind, the caravans go by, the dust flies, cities fall to ruin; but my eyes, which nothing can turn away, gaze for ever beyond the visible towards unattainable horizons.'

The lesser ideals that man sets before him cannot quench his desire to reach those unattainable horizons; they can only mark the way he means to travel, and so stand as symbols and images of his longing for what is beyond them.

From the perpetual disappointment of hope arises a mystical view-something which may be truly described as a religious doctrine, akin to Platonism-that the Ideal will never be reached; that man is doomed always to struggle towards perfection and never to attain it; that perfect happiness is only an abstraction, a thing dimly guessed, pieced together from hints and momentary experiences. The philosophy of the unattainable was first explicitly stated by Minsky, in his book of essays, 'By the Light of Conscience; meditations on the aim of life' (1890). The whole purpose of life, he declares, is the pursuit of Meons (un ovтa) or non-existent ends, in the full knowledge of their unattainability. This is the law of all existence, spiritual and material; and only by understanding it can we reconcile the contradictions of life. Ideals' can be attained-they are only directions in the phenomenal order; but a Meon is negative; it is a vanishing-point; it cannot be reached in the phenomenal. The soul, seeking the perfection of self-realisation and foiled in the attainment of it by material satisfaction which leads only to disgust, turns inward to achieve it by the mortification of desire. To eradicate all one's desires is impossible, for desire is life itself; it is impossible to realise one's personality by destroying it; the end is a Meon. Pure happiness is unthinkable; all existence is a mixture of good and

* Flaubert, quoted in Zaitsef's 'Fidelity.'

evil; and the reward of the pursuit of Meons is not happiness but ecstasy, an inextricable fusion of joy in the pursuit and sorrow in the certainty of failure. Death is terrible, inevitably; the aim of life is to meet it willingly, as the ultimate sacrifice, the vanishing-point in the sacred ecstasy of pursuit.

Minsky wrote a play to prove his thesis; but it must be confessed that he is a better philosopher than playwright. Alma, his heroine, belongs to a new breed of women; she is an erotomaniac 'revenging the harem past.' She excites desire without satisfying it. Caught in her own toils at last, she sets out in pursuit of the Meon of self-abnegation. She restores her lovers to their lawful wives, breaking up her cherished necklace of their wedding-rings, marries the father of her child, and condemns him to a life of monastic chastity. She establishes a baby farm, where all the children are inextricably mixed up in a 'general post' of nurses with the lights out, to the end that she may never know which is her own. Having conquered her connubial and maternal instincts, she establishes a hospital for the most offensive lepers in fiction, catches their malady by kissing them at Easter-another conquest of herself— and is poisoned by Veta, her æsthete sister, in order that she may die beautiful.' Veta wishes to take poison too: 'I love you too much to survive you.' 'Do not vex me with such idle words as love in these sacred minutes,' says the dying heroine; 'let us contemplate freedom.' She still repents the momentary lapse that drove her forth in pursuit of the Meon. Yet she is proud of her total achievement: I was weak, but I was the first to fight for freedom. Stronger folk will follow; be one of them!' The play is priggish; the characters are detestable, all egoists, especially in their renunciations; the author's want of humour blinds him to the abysses of laughter over which he sends his personages climbing with solemn faces-one can fancy the Stage Society holding their sides over it some rollicking Sunday night-but, for all that, it is a great document, a monument of sincere and deeply thought conviction, and it cannot be neglected in any survey of the modern Russian drama.

Very different in kind is the achievement of Sologub, the greatest of the decadents. He has humour, dignity Vol. 217.-No. 432,

D

and charm; he is a perfect master of dramatic form; and the full rich music of poetry runs through all his work. He has written plays in many kinds; classical, as 'The Gifts of the Wise Bees,' the story of Laodamia and Protesilaus; historical, as The Triumph of Death,' the legend of Berthe au Grand Pied; and 'Vanka the Seneschal and the Page Jehan,' an ironical contrast of the Russian and the Romantic ways of making love; a modern drawing-room piece, 'Love,' his only failure; and a fairy fantasy, 'Night Dances.' Since first he dedicated himself, in an early poem, 'to the Devil and the power of black vice,' Sologub has lived apart from his kind in a mental solitude further removed from us than any hermitage in the mountains; not indeed serving the Devil, as he vowed and his disciples boast, but rapt in the quest of an unearthly beauty only dimly adumbrated in the corrupt fabric of the material world. For him the phenomenal order is all evil, fantastic, contradictory. The only Real is the Ideal. The object of life is to perish in striving after the impossible. Nothing is good in the world we know but love and death; for the rest, it is only a squalid net, in which ideas flash a moment and escape through the meshes. Even love is no more than a shadow, an image of love for the woman who was never yet created.

Night Dances,' founded on a Russian variant of Grimm's 'Zertanzte Schuhe,' illustrates his creed clearly, and as gaily as can be done. The stage rises before us in three tiers; at the top sit the Kings and Princes; at the bottom the noblemen; the twelve Princesses file in between them from the orchestra; and we of the audience are the common people looking on from the darkness of the courtyard. It is a Poet who wagers his head to discover where the Princesses spend their nights. In the second act, the Poet's vigil, sleep wooes him in the charming form of a ballet of Dreams that ask to be taken into bed; even an appealing little nightmare begs for shelter. One of the Princesses tempts him in vain with pretended love from his pretended sleep. In his cap of invisibility he follows the sisters below to the Underground Kingdom-it had to be a Poet, for only a Poet can follow them into the world of ideal beauty *-and sees them

* Johnson, in Tchebotarevskaya's collection: About Theodore Sologub,' 1911.

execute dances, as he afterwards relates, 'in the style of the famous Isadora Duncan, to the music of great composers of various nationalities and periods.' In giving him the golden cup, the King of the Underworld bids him 'seek me without wearying and lock my sadness in your breast. Earthly flowers are only made of taffeta, diadems of tinsel. Do not worship the evil daylight world, but read what is written on this cup: Love me.' When the hole in the floor is bricked up-for this was in the beginning of things, when first we were cut off from the ideal world-the weeping Princesses bid the Poet cherish the cup and flower, and hand them down to future generations.

We catch something of the unearthly beauty of the Underground World from this last inheritor of the cup and flower as we listen to him; for he is undoubtedly a 'master of the magic of obedient words,' as he has himself declared, not too modestly, in a much laughed-at Preface; and he subdues his hearers to his music, whether it be the mocking irony of Vanka the Seneschal' or the holy calm of Persephone in 'The Gifts of the Wise Bees,' The imagination is arrested by recurrent felicities of phrase and vision. What is it that you pity?' Pluto reproves Persephone, melted by the lot of the dead Protesilaus-not a shade merely, but 'a shadow that glides along the wall.' Many tears have been shed for him; 'more than one deep cup has the Father of Tears already filled; many a bed of flowers has he watered with them in the misty fields of Elysium.' The living Laodamia, thinking of her husband in Troas, says: 'I will walk with naked feet, and feel the earth quake beneath my soles with the distant thunder of the chariots.' Or again, picturing the fall of night: 'And on the mountain road the last gleaming dust is laid that sprang in bright scuds beneath the feet of his chariot-horses.' Enchantment

hangs about the house where lovers lie at dawn; 'everything is silent; even the wind glides by without shaking the curtain of the door.' His groups of women coming and going are always delicious-the twelve Princesses, scornfully rebellious, threading to their places; Laodamia's guests, stooping one by one, with a hand on the doorpost, to take off their sandals; two of them adjusting their chitons at sunrise and prattling scandal as they set