the police is but the instrument in the hands of what Prince Ourousov once called the “dark forces” which stand behind the Government, and who make it so difficult for people to govern Russia. Again, the same author tells a story of a revolutionary student who betrays his companions because, when he is interviewed by the police inspector he loses his nerve. He is not otherwise a coward; but he is afraid of _people_. The police inspector, he says, was as civil as a dentist to his comrades, but him he hectored and bullied, feeling instinctively that he would give way, and he did. He shoots himself: he is not afraid of doing that. In a letter he writes before killing himself he explains that he is not in the least afraid of death or of danger; but that in the presence of people he loses his head, and he attributes the fact to his having been soaked in the atmosphere of the stagnant generation of his parents, from whose influence he never escaped. These writers afford us an infinite number of sidelights on the subtleties, the contradictions, the curious contrasts which the political events bring to light--in fact on human nature, which is the same everywhere, but which under the stress and pressure of untoward violence is sharply revealed to us as though by lightning. Then, of course, the very existence of conflicting parties, ideals, opinions and aims gives the writer endless “copy” and an unbounded field of dramatic material. The Dreyfus case divided France into two camps and split up families. Much more powerful, then, must be the political question in Russia, where it is not merely abstract but concrete; not merely platonic, but full of living passion, where any day a Conservative statesman may learn that his son or his daughter has blown up one of his colleagues, or a revolutionary girl may ascertain that her betrothed has denounced her comrades to the police. In this domain vistas are opened on to endless “conflicts of wills,” the most rewarding stuff for drama. All this does not make for stagnation, and it is impossible to sum up the characteristics of modern Russian literature better than in the following words, which Kouprin puts into the mouth of the student (in a story to which I alluded above) who shot himself. He is talking of the schoolboy of the present generation, and what he says of the schoolboy applies equally well to the new generation, its literature, and all that belongs to it. “I am convinced that the schoolboy of the sixth form to-day in the presence of all the Kings of Europe, in any throne room you please, would fiercely and clearly--and even somewhat rudely--declare the claims of _his party_. He is, it is true, almost absurd, this premature schoolboy; but there is in him a sacred respect for his own joyful, proud, and free ego, for that very thing which the spiritual poverty and the cowardly morals of our parents extirpated in us, who belong to the former generation.” THE RUSSIAN STAGE