“Russia” (he writes), “I see you from the beautiful ‘far away’ where I am. Everything in you is miserable, disordered and inhospitable. There are no emphatic miracles of Nature to startle the eye, graced with equally startling miracles of art. There are no towns with high, many-windowed castles perched on the top of crags; there are no picturesque trees, no ivy-covered houses beside the ceaseless thunder and foam of waterfalls. One never strains one’s neck back to look at the piled-up rocky crags soaring endlessly into the sky. There never shines, through dark and broken arches overgrown with grapes, ivy, and a million wild roses,--there never shines, I say, from afar the eternal line of gleaming mountains standing out against transparent and silver skies. Everything in you is open and desert and level; like dots, your squatting towns lie almost unobserved in the midst of the plains. There is nothing to flatter or to charm the eye. What then is the secret and incomprehensible power which lies hidden in you? Why does your aching melancholy song, which wanders throughout the length and breadth of you, from sea to sea, sound and echo unceasingly in one’s ears? What is there in this song? What is there that calls and sobs and captures the heart? What are the sounds which hurt as they kiss, pierce my very inmost soul and flood my heart? Russia, what do you want of me? What inexplicable bond is there between you and me?” Gogol does not answer the question, and if he cannot put his finger on the secret it would be difficult for any one else to do so. But although he does not answer the question directly, he does so indirectly by his works. Any one who reads Gogol’s early stories, even _Dead Souls_, will understand the inexplicable fascination hidden in a country which seems at first sight so devoid of outward and superficial attraction, and in a people whose defects are so obvious and unconcealed. The charm of Russian life lies in its essential goodness of heart, and in its absence of hypocrisy, and it is owing to this absence of hypocrisy that the faults of the Russian character are so easy to detect. It is for this reason that in Gogol’s realistic and satirical work, as in _The Inspector_ and _Dead Souls_, the characters startle the foreign observer by their frank and almost universal dishonesty. The truth is that they do not take the trouble to conceal their shortcomings; they are indulgent to the failings of others, and not only expect but know that they will find their own faults treated with similar indulgence. Faults, failings, and vices which in Western Europe would be regarded with uncompromising censure and merciless blame, meet in Russia either with pity or good-humoured indulgence.