Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/345

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RUSSIAN LITERATURE

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and Tolstoy, and Bourget, Maupassant, James, Howells, Hauptmann, and D'Annunzio, to name but a few of a host, have clearly shown or expressly acknowledged their indebtedness to the Russian literary masters.

It is idle and perniciously misleading therefore to assert that Russian Literature has nothing original in it (as has been done in a curiously biased "History of Russian Literature," by K. Waliszewski, 1900), for "does it detract a whit from the quality of the magnificent ruby, when we are told that the element of which it is formed is a colored variety of corundum or alumina," actually the most abundant of the earths?

As for the future of Russian Literature, it of course is in the lap of the gods along with the future of Russia.

In order to avoid the perils of prophecy and to let a non-Russian, who is more competent in that sphere, pronounce upon the question of Russia's future, I shall conclude with these words of Havelock Ellis:—

"Russia at the present time is a vast laboratory for the experimental manufacture of the greatest European and Asiatic nation, fated to mold, as much probably as any nation, the future of the world. Such a process is always going on everywhere at some stage of acuteness, but in the rest of Europe the formative stage in the growth of peoples has long gone by, and while it lasted there were few or none able and competent to observe it. In Russia we see the process in its most acute form. This enormous birthrate, this death-rate so enormous as sometimes to equal the births, this creation of human beings on so vast a scale and the testing and proving of them in the most trying of climates—in this great experimental operation Nature is, on the whole, still left to attain her own results in her own way. In such an acute and destructive process of natural selection, not only are the weakest lost, but a certain number of human failures are necessarily left. Thus there are neurotic and degenerate elements in all classes of society, though, as the comparative harmlessness of Russian criminality and the

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