ten more dear to him
than his father or mother, were his nurse and the other
servants,--simple people, who took care of him and gave him the
pleasures of his youthful existence. Before he entered the local
government school, he had been impregnated with goodness and popular
poetry, drawn from stories, legends, and tales to which he had been
an ardent listener. We find the great Pushkin dedicating his most
pathetic verses to his old nurse, and we often see him inspired by
the most humble people. In this way, to the theoretic democracy
imported from Europe is united, in the case of the Russian author, a
treasure of ardent personal recollections; democracy is not for him
an abstract love of the people, but a real affection, a tenderness
made up of lasting reminiscences which he feels deeply.

This then was the mental state of the most intelligent part of this
Russian nobility, which showed itself a pioneer of the ideas of
progress in literature and life. There were even singular political
manifestations produced. Rostopchin said: "In France the shoemakers
want to become noble; while here, the nobles would like to turn
shoemakers." But, in spite of all, the greater part of this caste,
with its essential conservative instincts, was nothing more than an
inert mass, without initiative, and incapable even of defending its
own interests except by the aid of the government.

Rostopchin did not suspect the profound truth of his capricious
saying.

This truth burst forth in all its strength about 1870, the time of
the great reforms undertaken by Alexander II, when the interests of
the people were, for the first time, the order of the day. It was
at this period that a great deal of studying was being done with
great enthusiasm and that a general infatuation for folklore and for
a "union with the masses" was being shown. The desire to become
"simplified," that is to say to have all people live the same kind
of life, the appearance of a type, celebrated under the sarcastic
name of "noble penitent" (meaning the titled man who is ashamed of
his privileged position as if it were a humiliating and infamous
thing), the politico-socialistic ideology of the first Slavophiles,
still half conservative, but wholly democratic; all these things
were the results of the manifestations which astonished Rostopchin
and made the more intelligent class of Russians fraternize more with
the masses. In our day, this tendency has been eloquently
illust