Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/334

320 We all sing dolefully. A dismal whine A Russian's song is, ever know it ; Begins : "Your health !" a funeral dirge in fine. Though Muse and Maid sing mournfully, I like their plaintive melody."

Clearly, as has been said, "the Russians are radicals in everything, in faith and infidelity, in love and hate, in sub- mission and rebellion."

In analyzing "De Rerum Natura" Professor Mackail states that with Lucretius "the joy and glory of his art come second to his passionate love of truth, and the deep moral purport of what he believes to be the one true message for mankind. . . . His mission ... is that light of truth which is "clearer than the beams of the sun or the shining shafts of day."

"A Roman aristocrat, living among a highly cultivated society, Lucretius had been yet endowed by nature with the primitive in- stincts of the savage. He sees the ordinary processes of everyday life — weaving, carpentry, metal-working, even such specialized forms of manual art as the polishing of the surface of marble — with the fresh eye of one who sees them all for the first time. Nothing is to him indistinct through familiarity. In virtue of this absolute clearness of vision it costs him no effort to throw himself back into prehistoric conditions and the wild life of the earliest men."

Almost two thousand years after Lucretius, history has repeated itself in the case of the Russian writers. They have brought to their task the same passionate love of truth and the savage's clearness of vision in approaching the phenomena of human life they chose to deal with; qualities just as pre- cious in their way as the ancient Greek's Forschungsgeist — the craang for investigation (if this free rendering may be pardoned), and his unfailing sense of artistic proportion.

This is what made Russian authors realists Kar Uoxnv, what gave Russia a naturalist school in Literature decades before anybody in Western Europe had ever thought of realism or naturalism. "Whether it was due to his superior quali-