evil; and the reward of the pursuit of Meons is not happiness but ecstasy, an inextricable fusion of joy in the pursuit and sorrow in the certainty of failure. Death is terrible, inevitably; the aim of life is to meet it willingly, as the ultimate sacrifice, the vanishing-point in the sacred ecstasy of pursuit.

Minsky wrote a play to prove his thesis; but it must be confessed that he is a better philosopher than playwright. Alma, his heroine, belongs to a new breed of women; she is an erotomaniac 'revenging the harem past.' She excites desire without satisfying it. Caught in her own toils at last, she sets out in pursuit of the Meon of self-abnegation. She restores her lovers to their lawful wives, breaking up her cherished necklace of their wedding-rings, marries the father of her child, and condemns him to. a life of monastic chastity. She establishes a baby farm, where all the children are inextricably mixed up in a 'general post' of nurses with the lights out, to the end that she may never know which is her own. Having conquered her connubial and maternal instincts, she establishes a hospital for the most offensive lepers in fiction, catches their malady by kissing them at Easter-another conquest of herselfand is poisoned by Veta, her æsthete sister, in order that she may 'die beautiful.' Veta wishes to take poison too: 'I love you too much to survive you.' 'Do not vex me with such idle words as love in these sacred minutes,' says the dying heroine; 'let us contemplate freedom.' She still repents the momentary lapse that drove her forth in pursuit of the Meon. Yet she is proud of her total achievement: 'I was weak, but I was the first to fight for freedom. Stronger folk will follow; be one of them!' The play is priggish; the characters are detestable, all egoists, especially in their renunciations; the author's want of humour blinds him to the abysses of laughter over which he sends his personages climbing with solemn faces-one can fancy the Stage Society holding their sides over it some rollicking Sunday night-but, for all that, it is a great document, a monument of sincere and deeply thought conviction, and it cannot be neglected in any survey of the modern Russian drama.

Very different in kind is the achievement of Sologub, the greatest of the decadents. He has humour, dignity Vol. 217.-No. 432.

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and charm; he is a perfect master of dramatic form; and the full rich music of poetry runs through all his work. He has written plays in many kinds; classical, as 'The Gifts of the Wise Bees,' the story of Laodamia and Protesilaus; historical, as 'The Triumph of Death,' the legend of Berthe au Grand Pied; and 'Vanka the Seneschal and the Page Jehan,' an ironical contrast of the Russian and the Romantic ways of making love; a modern drawing-room piece, 'Love,' his only failure; and a fairy fantasy, 'Night Dances,' Since first he dedicated himself, in an early poem, 'to the Devil and the power of black vice,' Sologub has lived apart from his kind in a mental solitude further removed from us than any hermitage in the mountains; not indeed serving the Devil, as he vowed and his disciples boast, but rapt in the quest of an unearthly beauty only dimly adumbrated in the corrupt fabric of the material world. For him the phenomenal order is all evil, fantastic, contradictory. The only Real is the Ideal. The object of life is to perish in striving after the impossible. Nothing is good in the world we know but love and death; for the rest, it is only a squalid net, in which ideas flash a moment and escape through the meshes. Even love is no more than a shadow, an image of love for the woman who was never yet created.

'Night Dances,' founded on a Russian variant of Grimm's 'Zertanzte Schuhe,' illustrates his creed clearly, and as gaily as can be done. The stage rises before us in three tiers; at the top sit the Kings and Princes; at the bottom the noblemen; the twelve Princesses file in between them from the orchestra; and we of the audience are the common people looking on from the darkness of the courtyard. It is a Poet who wagers his head to discover where the Princesses spend their nights. In the second act, the Poet's vigil, sleep wooes him in the charming form of a ballet of Dreams that ask to be taken into bed; even an appealing little nightmare begs for shelter. One of the Princesses tempts him in vain with pretended love from his pretended sleep. In his cap invisibility he follows the sisters below to the Underground Kingdom-it had to be a Poet, for only a Poet can follow them into the world of ideal beauty *-and sees them

of

* Johnson, in Tchebotarevskaya's collection: About Theodore Sologub,' 1911.

execute dances, as he afterwards relates, 'in the style of the famous Isadora Duncan, to the music of great composers of various nationalities and periods.' In giving him the golden cup, the King of the Underworld bids him 'seek me without wearying and lock my sadness in your breast. Earthly flowers are only made of taffeta, diadems of tinsel. Do not worship the evil daylight world, but read what is written on this cup: Love me.' When the hole in the floor is bricked up-for this was in the beginning of things, when first we were cut off from the ideal world-the weeping Princesses bid the Poet cherish the cup and flower, and hand them down to future generations.

We catch something of the unearthly beauty of the Underground World from this last inheritor of the cup and flower as we listen to him; for he is undoubtedly a 'master of the magic of obedient words,' as he has himself declared, not too modestly, in a much laughed-at Preface; and he subdues his hearers to his music, whether it be the mocking irony of 'Vanka the Seneschal' or the holy calm of Persephone in 'The Gifts of the Wise Bees.' The imagination is arrested by recurrent felicities of phrase and vision. 'What is it that you pity?' Pluto reproves Persephone, melted by the lot of the dead Protesilaus-not a shade merely, but a shadow that glides along the wall.' Many tears have been shed for him; 'more than one deep cup has the Father of Tears already filled; many a bed of flowers has he watered with them in the misty fields of Elysium.' The living Laodamia, thinking of her husband in Troas, says: 'I will walk with naked feet, and feel the earth quake beneath my soles with the distant thunder of the chariots." Or again, picturing the fall of night: And on the mountain road the last gleaming dust is laid that sprang in bright scuds beneath the feet of his chariot-horses.' Enchantment

hangs about the house where lovers lie at dawn; 'everything is silent; even the wind glides by without shaking the curtain of the door.' His groups of women coming and going are always delicious-the twelve Princesses, scornfully rebellious, threading to their places; Laodamia's guests, stooping one by one, with a hand on the doorpost, to take off their sandals; two of them adjusting their chitons at sunrise and prattling scandal as they set

out for home after a night of Dionysian riot in the gardens.

Sologub's plays have met with no success in Russia. When Meyerhold produced 'Vanka the Seneschal' at the Alexandrynsky Theatre, the stalls sat in uneasy bewilderment, and the gallery expressed its considered judgment by hooting and whistling down keys. But, as the famous Preface says, 'he smiles and passes on, drawing his black cloak about him; and She goes with him, the Serpent-eyed.'

Of the other decadents less need be said. They group themselves about the Scorpion,' the Gryphon,' the 'Briarbush,' Shipovnik, and one or two other publishing houses. Among the foreigners whose influence they acknowledge are Poe, d'Annunzio, Verlaine, Maeterlinck, Shelley, Oscar Wilde and Beardsley. One cannot pass over Balinont without mention, because he has a considerable reputation as a poet in his own country. But his play, Three Blossomings,' is poor, stilted stuff. Stripped of their Arcadian trappings, the characters are no more than a group of dismal minor poets spouting their unpublished poems, in which the clouds, the moon, the birds, the sun and the evening star pace a weary round, grinding out phrases at the mill of symbolism. In Act I everything is yellow, in Act II red, in Act III blue:

Helen of Troy, as a

Heaven only knows what it means! type of the Ewigweibliche,' appears in different aspects and disguises; she is frigid; her lovers are torrid, incandescent. Her first prétendu falls into the water in

It was Meyerhold himself, Régisseur of the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg, who took me by the hand, when I stood, a stranger, lost in the wilderness of modern Russian plays, and showed me the way to the pleasant valleys and fruitful trees, to the hiding-places where the 'Scorpion,' the 'Gryphon,' and other such gentle creatures lurked. He sketched me an outline of the development of the Russian drama, directed my reading, and drew me an ingenious pedigree of literary consanguinity. I have not altogether confined myself within the boundaries he proposed; and he is by no means to be held responsible for the judgments passed in this article.

trying to pick her a lily. He's drowned. I knew it!' she murmurs, unruffled, as the curtain falls. In the end she is talked to death by a bore disguised as a major poet in a frock coat.

Zinovyeva-Annibal, a woman, is chiefly remarkable for a very virile plainness of speech. Her Tuneful Ass' (1907) is a fantasia on Midsummer Night's Dream,' in which the crystalline innocence of Shakespeare's poetry is stained with garish orgiastic purple. On croit voir Glisser sur une fleur une longue limace.' 'Rings' (1909), a hardly more reputable affair at bottom, is veiled in certain diaphanous decencies. It is the story of two twin souls, husband and wife, torn asunder by volcanic passions for irrelevant people, and converging at last on the Meon of love, through suffering, in death. All the characters suffer from acute neurasthenia, and, in this country, would be consigned to Parkhurst or Bedlam.

Kuzmin is a decadent only in the sense of one who departs from tradition. He has a delicate irony and the light hand of a Frenchman-a rare gift among the Russians; Osip Dymof has it too. Kuzmin is seen at his best in plays that have the air of being ingenuous narratives of early and medieval Christians, with angels who explain things between the acts, and all the apparatus of the miracle-play; fresh bottlings, in reality, of the Rabelaisian vintage so finely clarified by Anatole France. Such is The Comedy of Eudoxia of Heliopolis, or the Converted Courtesan.' Reclaimed by a devout neighbour from her evil ways, Eudoxia takes the veil, and is, of course, at once made abbess of her convent. When the handsome and wealthy Philostratus pursues her, bearing gifts, she piously bids him take orders in the neighbouring monastery. In this way you will often see me at a distance. We shall look on the same sky and clouds; and, when the evening star rises, I shall pray for you and you will think of me.' On these terms Philostratus becomes a monk; and, as the Anatolian angel says in conclusion: The ways of God are mysterious; we cannot know the end.'

Blok holds a position all his own. It is a slender pipe that he plays on, and he often plays it out of tune; he is

* M. Kuzmin, 'Comedies.' St Petersburg: 'pa, 1908.