engine-driver, old Bezsemenof's former ward and present boarder. Nil is the new man, the type of the future; oldfashioned folk would call him proud, rude, ungrateful and rather stupid. What does it matter? He is strong and young, self-reliant, jovial; he loves work, and he hasn't a nerve in him; above all, he has no hesitations, no academic dubieties. Pola, the Birdcatcher's daughter, is chatting with Tatyana about the hero of a novel they have been reading together:

'POLA. I couldn't love a man like that; a man ought to know what he has got to do in life.

'TATYANA. Does Nil know?

'POLA. Yes, he knows; he is only unkind to bad people. 'TATYANA. Who is good? who is bad?

'POLA. Nil knows!'

Clever Nil! Clever Gorky! Life is such an easy problem to everyone but the fools called philosophers. The Birdcatcher flies to the public-house to escape the Bezsemenofs: 'In the public-house it is gay; in the publichouse it is simple.' Strong and confident people who know whither they are going-that is the essential thing in Gorky's plays, for 'even the blackbeetle knows whither he is crawling'; people who can lead the rest to the Golden Age; rough, blunt, good-natured folk, as a rule, like great St Bernard dogs. Our business is to make ready for the new generation that is to supplant us; to bridge the chasm, in Nietzschean terms, for the Overmen.

There are strong men of different alloys in all Gorky's plays; strong women, too, busy at first in seeking strong men for mates; but, as time went on and disillusion grew with the pioneers that the democracy had sent before them into the middle class (see in particular Villa-folk,' 1903, and Children of the Sun,' 1904), the strong men were gradually ousted by the strong women, careful mothers providing for the future. The Golden Age had receded a little as we advanced towards it; and 'who is so fit as mothers to provide for the future?' 'In Vassa Zheleznova' (1911) the wheel has gone full turn, and men are nowhere. Vassa's husband is dying. Her eldest son, Paul, is neurotic and deformed; her second is fat and silly; her daughter and daughter-in-law are robust, purposeful young women, both unfaithful to their

husbands; the daughter has borne healthy children to her lover. The path of a Gorkian strong mother is plain. She forges a convenient will, bundles the cripple into a monastery, his brother into the gutter; gets the housemaid to murder a superfluous brother-in-law who claims a share; and settles down, with a clear conscience and the well-deserving air of a tired Atlas, to carve out a future for her bastard grandchildren. Quite shocking, according to any moral or criminal code hitherto discovered, but definite and downright, demanding an answer; and withal excellent art, informed by that breath of life which dull critics call technique.

Finding that the strong-faced man had really no concise plans for the Millennium, the Russians left Gorky, much as the peasants in Ivan the Fool' left the Devil, when he climbed a tower and made a speech, instead of showing them how to work with their heads. Russia has lived through many new hopes since those which Gorky raised retired with him to Capri. Is the disappointment of Gorky's hopes a particular case, or is it only one more instance of a constant element in human life? Even while he is in hot pursuit of some immediate end, man hears a little ironical voice reminding him that hope, after all, is usually deceived. We may get what we covet, but it often proves as empty as Rosamund's jars. Society always has the illusion of progress; yet, in looking back over the period behind us, we always find ourselves cheated of the essence of what our fathers set themselves to achieve.

That is the thought at the bottom of all Tchekhof's plays. Disillusion is his constant theme, the theme of 'The Seagull,' of Ivanof,' of 'Uncle Vanya,' 'The Three Sisters,' and 'The Cherry Orchard.' That is why his plays will never go out of date. The various hopes that others paint are transitory, disproved by subsequent experience; but disillusion is constant and irrefragable. The Cherry Orchard' (1904), under the symbol of the sale of an estate, describes the decay of the old economic order and the triumph of the new. How hopeful they are, the heralds of the new age, and how incompetent to realise it! Every scene echoes with the disappointment of the great hopes cherished by the preceding generation. What, after all, has come of the emancipation of the serfs, the

increase of wealth, the spread of education? An Epikhodof, a Yasha, a Lopakhin. It is more than a picture of his own times; it is a picture of the nothingness of hope in all countries and all ages.

Tchekhof has painted disillusion with a melancholy grace that makes it seem more beautiful than achievement. He has developed the Turgenef tradition-an old house full of cultivated people, not far from a small countrytown; summer-time; a student, a sick squire, a pretty wife whose youth is slipping from her unenjoyed; a visitor or so from the great world of Petersburg or Moscow; languid action; an occasional storm of nerves; sighs and yawns, and a sprinkling of soliloquy. The stage, the little scene where the actors appear, is the ante-chamber of a whole world. A fourth wall indeed! As if three wretched screens enclosed the drama! We see his personages only as they pass; we hear only fragments of their talk; but we catch the inward rhythm and music of their lives. A play by Tchekhof is a reverie, not a coarse concatenation of events. He has profoundly influenced the method of the Russian stage. To name only the great, the plays which Gorky wrote in his first years of disillusion-Villa Folk' (1903), 'Barbarians' (1906), and 'Enemies' (1906)—are openly Tchekhovian. 'The Lower Depths' (1902), essentially a 'discussion' disguised as naturalism, has all the Tchekhovian centrifugality'; what we see is only a pool in a restlessly flowing stream. Properly produced, the play should show us all vagrant Russia passing by, sordid and yellow, obscurely fumbling in bundles, climbing up to rest, or down again to the road. But, for the most part, Gorky's dramaturgy is rough, dogged, revengeful stuff, inspired by quite other ideas than those of Tchekhof. The discord on the piano which ends Petits Bourgeois' is characteristic both of the similarity and of the difference between the two men.*

Perpetually disappointed in its hopes, mankind has always solaced itself with the notion of a different age to come, in which all hopes shall be fulfilled. There is hardly a play of Tchekhof's but some character in it

* According to a writer in the 'Novoye Vremya,' September 30 (o.s.), 1911, Tolstoy himself was influenced by Tchekhof; and his 'Corpse' was inspired partly by dislike for the matter of Tchekhof's Uncle Vanya,' partly by admiration for its methods.

pictures the wonderful age that will arrive in two or three hundred years.' Did he mean it literally? or is it an image of the continual striving of mankind, which may, after all, be in itself an end? In one of his letters he puts it 'tens of thousands of years' ahead. There is little substance in a hope so elastic. Others see it

through a haze of symbolism. Tchirikof, for instance, in his verse-drama, 'The Red Lights' (1907), pictures it as a distant country beyond the hills on which the sun never sets (not a very recondite image this, by the by, but Tchirikof is more eloquent than inventive); and just at the exciting moment, when the slaves, having forged their fetters into swords, are brandishing them amid thunder and lightning on the mountain-tops and shouting to the Wicked Rich to come on, the red lights flash out across the plain, showing that the old man from the Land of the Free (can it be Gorky?) has found out the way.

With some, still more remotely, it is not only in a different land that the Golden Age is to be enjoyed; it is an altogether different race of men that is to enjoy it. Tchulkof, in his 'Taigá'* (1907) says that a new people will come from the forest'; they will have blue eyes shining with incomprehensible light; the beating of their hearts will be like music; they will free the world. In Brusof's play, The Earth, scenes of the future ' (1907), men will all perish as the sun shines into their abode-in that last time they live in a great building, hermetically sealed, to save the remnant of undissipated air-only the Earth will remain, and certain half-mythical creatures that are alleged, vaguely, to live 'in other halls.' It all happens in a dismal age, long after the Utopias have fulfilled themselves and passed away. The general habitation is of boundless extent, geometrically grandiose and wearisome in design. Human beings are all equal; all their needs are equally supplied. Labouring in the bowels of the earth, great engines minister a drearily consistent store of air and light and water. But at last the engines are beginning to creak, the water is failing, the lamps are going out; the air will soon be exhausted, and mankind must perish. All the differences of opinion which divide men grow sharper and sharper; they search

• 'The Taiga,' a drama, by George Tchulkof. St Petersburg: 'npai, 1907.

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more keenly to know the aim of life and how best to be true to it. Nevatl, the adventurous young sage-they all have strange Mexican-sounding names-has climbed to the roof and seen the sun, a thing unknown for many generations, except by the pictures of the Old Masters. He calls his fellow-citizens forth to enjoy the light of day again: We have covered the earth with paving-stones and shut out the sky with roofs'; 'torn from the earth we die like uprooted flowers.' Against him stands the mystic Teotl and his Order of Liberators, who are in love, voluptuously in love, with darkness and death; it is their declared purpose to free their fellow-men from the disgrace of life and restore them to the One.' They meet in dark cellars and plot assassination. All faithful members of the Order abhor the notion of raising the roof and letting in the sunshine and fresh air-the citizens still suppose that there is air without-they detest the notion of new life and vigour. But the mass of the people wish to be freed from the vapid half-life that they lead, to be restored to the sun and to the earth. The spirit of the last of the witches appears to Teotl and reveals to him, in a fine imaginative speech, that the raising of the roof will destroy those who inhabit the dwelling. Mankind has ended its task, and it must perish. What is undone will be accomplished by other spirits in other worlds.' Amid universal joy and expectation the roof is raised. Then they realise that it is the end. They perish as the sun shines in. A youth cries joyfully:

'We are not the last. There are other halls. There true mankind lives. To them is entrusted the life of the Earth. We are a branch cut off. Let us perish; the Earth lives!'

People from the Yakut forest; men in other halls; spirits that dwell in other worlds! What sort of satisfaction is this for humanity that wants to enjoy the Promised Land itself? If Brusof's and Tchulkof's Golden Ages are fantastic and unreal, what of Tchirikof's? What of Tchekhof's? What of Gorky's and Tolstoy's for the matter of that? However solid they seemed to their sponsors, one begins to question the value of their assurance. The hopes that all these writers hold out, the counsels they give, vary according to the several natures