There is, indeed, something of the greatness of Falstaff in this trafficker of dead "souls." His baseness is almost sublime. He in any case merits a place in the gallery of humanity's typical and human rascals, where Falstaff, Tartuffe, Pecksniff, and Count Fosco reign. He has the great saving merit of being human; nor can he be accused of hypocrisy. His coachman, Selifan, who got drunk with every "decent man," is worthy of the creator of Sam Weller. But what distinguishes Gogol in his _Dead Souls_ from the great satirists of other nations, and his satire from the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift, for instance, is that, after laying bare to the bones the rascality of his hero, he turns round on his audience and tells them that there is no cause for indignation; Chichikov is only a victim of a ruling passion--gain; perhaps, indeed, in the chill existence of a Chichikov, there may be something which will one day cause us to humble ourselves on our knees and in the dust before the Divine Wisdom. His irony is lined with indulgence; his sleepless observation is tempered by fundamental charity. He sees what is mean and common clearer than any one, but he does not infer from it that life, or mankind, or the world is common or mean. He infers the opposite. He puts Chichikov no lower morally than he would put Napoleon, Harpagon, or Don Juan--all of them victims of a ruling passion, and all of them great by reason of it--for Chichikov is also great in rascality, just as Harpagon was great in avarice, and Don Juan great in profligacy. And this large charity blent with biting irony is again peculiarly Russian. _Dead Souls_ is a deeper book than any of Gogol's early work. It is deep in the same way as _Don Quixote_ is deep; and like _Don Quixote_ it makes boys laugh, young men think, and old men weep. Apart from its philosophy and ideas, _Dead Souls_ had a great influence on Russian literature as a work of art. Just as Pushkin set Russian poetry free from the high-flown and the conventional, so did Gogol set Russian fiction free from the dominion of the grand style. He carried Pushkin's work--the work which Pushkin had accomplished in verse and adumbrated in prose--much further; and by depicting ordinary life, and by writing a novel without any love interest, with a Chichikov for a hero, he created Russian realism. He described what he saw without flattery and without exaggeration, but with the masterly touch, the instinctive economy, the sense of selection of a great artist.