Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/45

Rh and the literature that would not damage the morals of the former is deadly to the latter. The spirit of mockery in the Parisian throws off the germs of their theatre and their fiction. I have seen in a Parisian theatre men, their wives, and their families laughing unrestrainedly at a piece, that if exhibited before an American audience would simply disgust some, and make others morbidly attentive. This kind of literature, comic or tragic, disseminated as it everywhere is among impulsive and passionate Russian readers, has been anything but morally healthful. One might as rationally go about and poison wells. And the Russian youth are sophisticated to a degree that seems to us almost startling. In 1903, a newspaper in Russia sent out thousands of blanks to high school boys and girls all over the country, to discover what books constituted their favourite reading. Among native authors, Tolstoi was first, closely followed by Gorki; among foreign writers, Guy de Maupassant was the most popular! The constant reading of Maupassant by boys and girls of fifteen and sixteen years, already emancipated from the domination of religious ideas, can hardly be morally hygienic. And to-day, in many families all over the Western world, Hygiene has taken the place of God.

Russian novelists have given us again and again pictures of typical society women who are