Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/41

Rh powerful drama, The Jews, the scene of animated discussion that takes place on the stage is a perfect picture of what is happening in hundreds of Russian towns every night. An admirable description of a typical Russian conversation is given by Turgenev, in Virgin Soil:--

"Like the first flakes of snow, swiftly whirling, crossing and recrossing in the still mild air of autumn, words began flying, tumbling, jostling against one another in the heated atmosphere of Golushkin's dining-room--words of all sorts--progress, government, literature; the taxation question, the church question, the Roman question, the law-court question; classicism, realism, nihilism, communism; international, clerical, liberal, capital; administration, organisation, association, and even crystallisation! It was just this uproar which seemed to arouse Golushkin to enthusiasm; the real gist of the matter seemed to consist in this, for him."

The Anglo-Saxon is content to allow ideas that are inconsistent and irreconcilable to get along together as best they may in his mind, in order that he may somehow get something done. Not so the Russian. Dr. Johnson, who settled Berkeleian idealism by kicking a stone, and the problem of free