"The Village Procession," preserved in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow--the finest collection of the master's works--is not gloomy like the mournful song of the "Barge-towers," nor exuberant with serf arrogance and vitality like the Cossack camp, but a fragment of the colorless Russian national life as it really is, a sorrowful human document for the thoughtful observer alone. Tattered muzhiks in fur coats are carrying on poles a heavy sacred image, and behind them crowds the village populace with flags and crucifixes. I will not again emphasize how masterfully everything is noted here, from the gold border of the sacred image to the last bit of dusty sunshine on the village street. Absolute mastery is self-evident in Ryepin's work. We are again attracted in this picture by the great intensity of mood. What harmony there is in it--the mounted gendarme who pitilessly strikes with his knout into the peasant group to make room for the priests and the local officials; the half-idiotic, greasy sexton; the well-fed, bearded priest; the crowd of the abandoned, the crippled, and the maimed, the brutalized peasants, the old women. A long procession of folly, brutality, official darkness, ignorance; a chapter from the might of darkness; the crucifix misused as an aid to the knout, a symbol of the Russian régime that could not be held up to scorn more passionately by any demagogue; and yet only a street-scene which would hardly strike the Moscow merchant when strolling in the gallery of a Sunday, because of its freedom from any "tendency." Then comes a work of an entirely different character, a tragedy of Shakespearean force, a painting that is red on red. Ivan the Terrible holds in his arms the son he has just stricken to death with his heavy staff. It is a horrible scene from which one turns because of the almost unbearable misery depicted there, and yet you return to it again and again. So great is the conception, so wonderful the insight, so incomparable the technique. The madman, whom a nation of slaves endures as its master, is at last overtaken by Nemesis, and he is truly an object for pity as he crouches on the ground with the body of his dying son in his arms. He would stanch the blood that is streaming from the gaping wound to the red carpet. He kisses the hair where but a moment before his club had struck. The tears flow from his horrified eyes, and their terror is augmented, for at this last and perhaps first caress of the terrible father a happy smile plays on the face of the dying son. He had killed his son! Nothing can save him! He the Czar of Moscow, the master of the Kremlin, can do nothing. He draws his son to himself, presses him to his breast, to his lips. What had he done in his anger, that anger so often a source of joy to him when he struck others less near to him and for which he had been lauded by his servile courtiers, since the Czar must be stern, a terrible and unrelenting master?