before the public in dangerous but not much esteemed performances. If the financial depression is destined to disappear, there can be little doubt that the majority of these signs of demoralization will also disappear. There are in this country, as everywhere else, real degenerates, people who have weakened their brains and moral faculties by drink, debauch, overwork, or persons who have inherited mental debility. There are also among us, we regret to say, an alarming number of destitute people who have been driven into mental derangement by those terrible pangs that misery inflicts. But all these degenerates care as little for Tolstoi’s novels as they do for Rossetti’s or Burne Jones’s pictures. Though English circumstances are vastly different from continental, there can be no doubt that the causes which have rendered Tolstoi’s novels popular are the same here as in other countries. The scientific atheists have introduced into literature a materialist, selfish, sceptical, pessimistic, and cynical tone which was tolerated by the public for a long time. On the continent they had Zola and his wretched imitators, whose books found their way among us, while England has produced a crop of neurotic storytellers, playwrights, and versifiers, made up for the most part of masculine women and effeminate men, who have exploited to the utmost the atheistic vein. The noble spirit which atheism was to bring to the front somehow did not take to literature, and the reading classes of the world began to miss those pure joys which reading used to afford them. The books of the day offended their religious feelings, their sense of decency, their loftiest conceptions of the world, and their self-esteem, without amusing them. The whole literature of fiction had become stilted, and the morbid and pessimistic authors departed so widely from nature and evinced so many signs of utter insincerity that the reading world longed to be face to face with a man who spoke his innermost thoughts. The world was therefore ready for a new departure in literature. What wonder then that Tolstoi’s works were well received. They bore witness to consummate ability, a close study of human nature. They presented a true picture of social Russia. They afforded an insight into the Russian mind. His readers experienced the intellectual treat offered by few books,—that of feeling the presence of a master-mind, and of following the thoughts of a thoroughly sincere writer, free from the cheap ready-made materialist philosophy—a man who devotes both his life and his work, with almost superhuman energy, to the regeneration of his race. CHAPTER VII _THE REAL IBSEN_