f art, Merezhkovsky can only see a lack of general
culture. Finally, the sort of life he led toward the end of his days
came only "from the desire to know and taste the pleasure of
simplicity in all its subtleties." "The admirable Epicurus," says
Merezhkovsky, "that joyous sage, who, in the very center of Athens,
cultivated with his own hands a tiny garden, and taught men not to
believe in any human or divine chimeras, but to be contented with
the simple happiness that can be given by a single sunbeam, a
flower, a sup of water from an earthen cup, or the summer time,
would recognize in Tolstoy his faithful disciple, the only one,
perhaps, who survives in this barbaric silence, where American
comfort, a mixture of effeminacy and indigence, has made one forget
the real purpose of life...."

In writing these lines, Merezhkovsky must have forgotten that
Tolstoy, in proclaiming his ideas on religion and humanity, prepared
himself, not for Epicurean pleasures, but for seclusion in one of
the terrible dungeons of a Russian monastery (now in disuse) under
the persecutions of a temporal and secular authority, and it was not
his fault that, by a sort of miracle, he escaped this fate.

Dostoyevsky's life is the exact opposite of Tolstoy's. The story of
Dostoyevsky's terrible existence is probably known. Born in an
alms-house, he never ceased to suffer, and to love.... It is hard to
think of two people more absolutely different than Tolstoy and
Dostoyevsky. But Merezhkovsky loves violent contrasts; in the sharp
difference between these two writers, he sees the permanent union of
two controlling ideas of the Russian Renaissance and the imminence
of a final sympathy, symbolic of a concluding harmony.

* * * * *

We have, by turns, studied Merezhkovsky as a poet, a novelist, and a
critic. The greatest merit of his literary personality rests in the
perfect art with which he calls up the past.

But Merezhkovsky is not only an artist. As we have noted, his
novels have, as their end, one of the greatest contradictions of
human life,--the synthesis of the voluptuous representations of the
religion of classical antiquity and the moral principles of
Christianity. It is, therefore, natural to ask whether he has in
any way approached his goal and just where he sees the salvation of
humanity, the present situation of which seems to him desperate.
The answer to this question can be found in his book, "Ham
Tr