In Lermontov there is nothing slovenly; but there is a great deal that is flat and sullen. But if one reviews the great amount of work he produced in his short life, one is struck, not by its variety, as in the case of Pushkin,--it is, on the contrary, limited and monotonous in subject,--but by his authentic lyrical inspiration, by the strength, the intensity, the concentration of his genius, the richness of his imagination, the wealth of his palette, his gorgeous colouring and the high level of his strong square musical verse. And perhaps more than by anything else, one is struck by the blend in his nature and his work which has just been discussed, of romantic imagination and stern reality, of soaring thought and earthly common-sense, as though we had before us the temperament of a Thackeray with the wings of a Shelley. Lermontov is certainly, whichever way you take him, one of the most astonishing figures, and certainly the greatest purely lyrical _Erscheinung_ in Russian literature. With the death of Lermontov in 1841, the springtide of national song that began in the reign of Alexander I comes to an end; for the only poet he left behind him did not survive him long. This was his contemporary KOLTSOV (1809-42), the greatest of Russian folk-poets. The son of a cattle-dealer, after a fitful and short-lived primary education at the district school of Voronezh, he adopted his father's trade, and by a sheer accident a cultivated young man of Moscow came across him and his verses, and raised funds for their publication. Koltsov's verse paints peasant life as it is, without any sentimentality or rhetoric; it is described from the inside, and not from the outside. This is the great difference between Koltsov and other popular poets who came later. Moreover, he caught and reproduced the true _Volkston_ in his lyrics, so that they are indistinguishable in accent from real folk-poetry. Koltsov sings of the woods, and the rustling rye, of harvest time and sowing; the song of the love-sick girl reaping; the lonely grave; the vague dreams and desires of the peasant's heart. His pictures have the dignity and truth of Jean François Millet, and his "lyrical cry" is as authentic as that of Burns. His more literary poems are like Burns' English poems compared with his work in the Scots. But he died the year after Lermontov, of consumption, and with his death the curtain was rung down on the first act of Russian literature. When it was next rung up, it was on the age of prose. CHAPTER IV THE AGE OF PROSE