fication for the special end in view, or precisely because his mind was untutored and unsophisticated and therefore unspoiled, makes no difference for the point in hand. The fact remains that a Russian writer could no more help seeing life and action exactly as they were, and then depicting them as he saw them, than a Greek could help expressing himself in art with a wonderful sense of proportion.
Add to these traits the Russian's innate emotionality and you have the basis of the all-pervading humanity of Russian Literature as a whole, its teaching mission, or "pity" as it has often been called, which must not be confounded with didacticism. A comparison of the works of the modern Russian writers with the realistic productions of their French rivals will make the matter quite clear. The Frenchmen, in developing their negative characters, and following up the succession of their psychological states with the minutest details, give one the impression of delivering a prosecuting-attorney's speech in court; they have no sympathy with their characters of non-heroic stamp, they bring up all those wonderfully wrought out protocol minutiæ only the more effectively to draw a crushing verdict from their readers.
To the Russian authors, on the other hand, the famous Une of Terence — Homo sum : humani nihil a me alienum puto — " I am a man : I deem nothing human foreign to me " —
is the principle par excellence; it is their chief and moving spirit. People with weak wills, with high-strung nerves, affected by the many other maladies of the day, are not looked down upon, but evoke the heart-felt pity of the author, who sees in them but incomplete portions of human beings as designed by their Creator, members of society crippled by the vagaries of the private, social, and political life of our times. It is this quality that made Gogol consider that the greatest merit of his work consisted in the fact that "he surveyed all this hugely
