The book created a sensation, and raised a storm of abuse. Some of the prominent Liberals were displeased. It was, of course, easy for them to attack Gogol; for here, they said, was the man who had, more than any other, satirised and discredited the Russian Government and Russian administration, coming forward as an apostle of orthodoxy and officialdom. The intellectual world scorned him as a mystic, and considered the matter settled; but if the word “mystic” had the significance which these people seem to have attached to it, then Gogol was not a mystic. There was nothing extravagant or uncommon in his religion. He gave up writing, and devoted himself to religion and good works; but this does not constitute what the intellectuals seem to have meant by mysticism. Mysticism with them was equivalent to madness. If, on the other hand, we mean by mysticism the transcendent common sense which recognises a Divine order of things, and the reality of an invisible world, then Gogol was a mystic. Therefore, when Gogol ceased to write stories, he no more _became_ a mystic than did Pascal when he ceased going into society, or than Racine did when he ceased to write plays. In the other sense of the word he was a mystic all his life; so was Racine. At the age of thirty-three his creative faculties had dried up, and at the age of forty-three, in February 1852, he died of typhoid fever. The place of Gogol in Russian literature is a very high one. Prosper Mérimée places him among the best _English_ humorists. Gogol’s European reputation is less great than it should be, because his subject-matter is more remote. But of all the Russian prose writers of the last century, Gogol is perhaps the most national. His work smells of the soil of Russia; there is nothing imitative or foreign about it. When he published _The Inspector_, the motto which he appended to it was: “If your mouth is crooked, don’t blame the looking-glass.” He was a great humorist. He was also a great satirist. He was a penetrating but not a pitiless observer; in his fun and his humour, there is often a note of sadness, an accent of pathos, and a tinge of wistful melancholy. His pathos and his laughter are closely allied one to another, but in his sadness there is neither bitterness nor gloom; there is no shadow of the powers of darkness, no breath of the icy terror which blows through the works of Tolstoy; there is no hint of the emptiness and the void, or of a fear of them. There is nothing akin to despair. For his whole outlook on life is based on faith in Providence, and the whole of his morality consists in Christian charity, and in submission to the Divine. In one of his lectures, Gogol, speaking of Pushkin, singles out, as one of the qualities of Russian literature, the pity for all who are unfortunate. This, he says, is a truly Russian characteristic.