"Everywhere is pity, everywhere humanity, except among the police, in the state, and in an autocracy." What guilt can these good little folk have committed--looking there so kindly at a child that cooingly feeds the doves--that they should be torn from their native hearth and be sent to the icy deserts of Siberia? The young father--perhaps he went among the people teaching that a farmer was a man as well as the policeman (pristav). And one thinks with a shudder of the two thousand political convicts of the year before that were sent into the department of Irkutsk.... Such is the Russian genre. It is full of references, but is never a mere illustration of some tendency or other. The painter does not make the solution of his problem easy, and does not speculate on the cooperative comprehension of the observer, who is satisfied if he finds his thoughts indicated. No, such a Russian genre picture is perfect in the characteristic of the heads, in perspective, in the distribution of light and atmosphere. The purely picturesque, to be sure, is more evident in the landscape. And in this the Russians do astonishing work. They have the eye of the child of nature for the peculiarities of the landscape--an eye which we in the West must train again. What west European writer could have been in a position to write nature studies like Leo Tolstoï's _Cossacks_, or like the "Hay Harvest" from _Anna Karenina_? And one might also ask, What west European has so studied the forest like Schischkin, the sea like Aiwasowsky, the river and the wind like Levitan? There is a picture of Schischkin's in the Tretyakov Gallery, "Morning in the Pine Forest." A family of bears busy themselves about an enormous fallen, splintered pine. Everything is alive; the comical little brown fellows are quite as true to nature as the moss in the foreground and the veil of mist before the trees in the background. Strange to say, Schischkin is stronger in his etchings than in his oil-paintings, the colors of which are always a little too dry. But his etchings, which I could enjoy in their first prints, thanks to the goodness of the senator Reutern in St. Petersburg, are real treasures in sentiment and character. He is, if one may express it so, the psychologist of the trees. A tree on the dunes is a whole tragedy from the lives of the pines.