surface of a broad stream--as in this case--and where, nevertheless, the landscape is treated merely as the background? And again, where is the action of twelve men wearily plodding onward, drawing with rhythmic step the boat against the stream, seized more forcibly, more suggestively than in this plaintive song of the Russian people's soul? The youth of barely twenty-four years had at one leap placed himself at the head of all contemporary artists. Analogies between him and the artistic career and method of Leo Tolstoï force themselves on us again and again. Tolstoï's _Sketches from the Caucasus_, _Sevastopol_, _Cossacks_, are his early works, yet they are the most wonderful that the entire prose of all literature can show. And so it is in this lifelike picture of a twenty-four-year-old youth. Had we no other work of his than the "Barge-towers," we should yet see in him a great master. It is but necessary to look at the feet of these twelve wretched toilers to realize with wonder the characterization, the full measure of which is given only to genius. How they strain against the ground and almost dig into the rock! How the bodies are bent forward in the broad belt that holds the tow-line! What an old, sad melody is this to which these bare-footed men keep step as they struggle up along the stream? In all his barefoot stories of the ancient sorrow of the steppe children, Gorki has not painted with greater insight. A sorrowful picture for all its sunshine, and the more sorrowful because no tendency is made evident. It means seeing, seeing with the eyes and with the heart, and, therefore, it is art.