This spirit, but without the Anglo-Saxon hardness, is the spirit of Russian realism. It has all the photographic accuracy, the preocupation with all types of life that distinguishes French realism; but the preoccupation with the divine, the mystical turning away from the things of this world, is also present. The sympathy of Gogol is intensified to painfulness in Dostoevsky and is apotheosized into a new religion of renunciation in Tolstoy. And because (in contrast to the French) the Russians "disentangled themselves from these excesses, and like the English gave realism a superior beauty moved by the same moral spirit of a compassion cleansed of all impurities and glorified by the spirit of the gospels"--because of this De Vogüe regards Russian realistic literature as the one force that can rejuvenate the literary art of the European nations. The author writes with the authority of long study and gives us a sufficient basis for what we must now do ourselves--namely, read comtemporary Russian literature and ask ourselves what it tells us; whether or not it tells us that Christian realism is a contradiction in terms. LLEWELLYN JONES. A Drama of the Two Generations _Nowadays: A Contemporaneous Comedy in Three Acts_, by George Middleton. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.] Some little theatre company ought to send eight of its members on tour through all the smaller cities of the country in _Nowadays_. It would be the most effective way in the world to awaken the people of those slumbering places to the really amazing revolutions in contemporary life--and incidentally in the contemporary theatre. For one thing, it shows how parents and children are gradually bridging the foolish gulf between the generations--the gulf that Shaw has called the degrading objection of youth to age; for another, it reflects the extraordinary renaissance that has come to our theatre since the first visit of the Irish Players. Mr. Middleton takes a typical small-town family--a father, mother, son, and daughter--and leads them through a domestic crisis that has probably been the sad lot of most modern families. The daughter, like all proper young women, has an ambition: she wants to be a sculptor. The mother understands, having had similar longings before she married a man who made it his business to suppress them. The father refuses to listen to the daughter's idea, and tells her that if she goes to New York it will be without his help. But she goes; and the play opens with her first visit home. The son, a weakling without ability of any sort except to spend money and sow wild oats, has also left home; but he has managed to live very comfortably because of a monthly allowance from his father. The justice of the situation harks back to the antique theory that even a weak boy has more right to the splendors of the world than a girl of any type.