With the great name of Pushkin at the head of the list, the Russians consider the romantic period as the crowning point of their intellectual glory. I once agreed with them, but have had two mo- tives for changing my opinion.
In the first place, it would be quite useless to discuss works which we could not quote from ; for the Russian poets have never been and never will be translated. The life and beauty of a lyric poem is in its arrangement of words and its rhythm ; this beauty cannot be transferred into a foreign form. I once read a very admirable and exact Russian translation of Alfred de Musset's " Nights " ; it produced the same sensation as when we look upon a beautiful corpse ; the soul had fled, like the divine essence which was the life of those charming verses.
The task is yet more difficult when you attempt to transfer an idea from the most poetical lan- guage in Europe into one which possesses the least of that quality. Certain verses of Pushkin and Lermontof are the finest I know in any language. But in the fragment of French prose they are transferred into, you glean but a com- monplace thought. Many have tried, and many more will continue to try to translate them, but the result is not worth the effort. Besides, it does not seem to me that this romantic poetry expresses what is most typical of the Russian spirit. By giving poetry the first rank
