Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/96

 72 all freshness and charm, have disappeared. No spontaneity is left. Inspiration is replaced by calculation, and the search after the beautiful, when it occurs—and this is very rare—fails to reach art, and only attains to artifice. Not a line revealing a touch of emotion, or that depth of feeling which might atone for superficiality of thought. No poem at all—and yet this is the epoch of Chaucer and Villon, of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Not an attempt at scientific or philosophical inquiry, though in Italy the birth of Galileo is near, and the coming of Bacon, in England, of Montaigne, in France. And the epoch of Shakespeare and Cervantes, of Giordano Bruno and Descartes, of Robert Estienne and Du Cange, is just about to open. Even close by, in Poland—though that neighbour country is nearing the downward slope of an irreparable decadence—the sixteenth century can show a pleiad of artists and thinkers. a political literature which is prodigiously fertile, at all events, and one writer of genius, Rej. The language is formed, style is shortly to reach perfection in the sermons of Skarga. Batory is soon to carry about his printing-press even on his campaigns in the heart of Muscovy. In Russia the art of typography, like every other art, is as yet unborn. Printing in the Russian language does exist, indeed, or shortly will, but the printers are at Cracow, at Venice, at Cettigné, at Tübingen, at Prague, at Vilna. When they come to Moscow the people will try to kill them, and their house will be burnt down. And what could they print if they were here? Books of hours, psalters, Bibles. Up to the end of the sixteenth century there will scarcely be any change in the repertory; the only works proving some independent thought will be called 'The Articles of the True Faith' (Tübingen, 1562), 'Short Tales for Sundays and Feast-days' (Tübingen, 1562), 'Of the Justification of Man before God' (Niéswiéz, in Lithuania, 1562).

There is the popular poetry, indeed, but except in the field of history, soon to reflect the mighty personality of the Terrible, and bear witness to the new impulse the national genius received from him, even this poetry subsists on the legacy of the ancient Russia of the days of Kiev.

Literary activity posterior to the destruction of the old Russian Empire was manifested, in the first half of the sixteenth century, in two works, which between them summed up all the acquired knowledge and current ideas of the nation, the whole of its intellectual possessions. One of these, finished in 1552, but begun in 1529, is an encyclopedia; the other, which, by its conception and its composition, hails from an already remote past, takes the form of a household book. This is the celebrated Domostroï, which is balanced, on the other side, by the 'Tchetï-Minei' of the Metropolitan Macarius. These 'Tchetï-