re and there, a Protestant wooden cross,
half rotted; or a Catholic one of iron, all rusted, and no one pays
any attention to them." What purity and nobility remains can
manifest itself only in certain scattered individuals, in such great
hermits as Nietzsche, Ibsen, Flaubert, Goethe in his old age; they
are like deep artesian wells which prove that, beneath the arid
earth there is still some flowing water. There is nothing of this
sort in Russia. Although backward from the point of view of progress
and politics, this country produced the "intellectuals" who form
something unique in our present civilization: in essence, they are
anti-bourgeois. "The positivism which the Russian 'intellectuals'
have adopted by way of imitation is rejected by their feelings,
their conscience, and their will; it is an artificial monument that
is set up in their minds only."

Merezhkovsky, then, has reason for thinking that the social
renovation of Christianity will be accomplished in Russia. And as
this work is the especial concern of the clergy, Merezhkovsky, who
several years ago was present at a meeting where the Russian priests
affirmed their desire to free themselves from the yoke of their
religious and secular chiefs, proposed to accomplish this great
mission. "It is indispensable," he says, "for the Russian Church to
untie the knots that bind it to the decayed forms of the autocracy,
to unite itself to the 'intellectuals' and to take an active part in
the struggle for the great political and social deliverance of
Russia. The Church should not think of its own liberty at present,
but of martyrdom."

We will not criticize these, perhaps illusory, ideas and previsions
of Merezhkovsky. Russian life has become an enigma; who knows to
what moral crisis the social conscience may be led by the present
political crisis? Merezhkovsky's Olympian aesthetics have made him a
foreigner in Russian literature. Yet as soon as the tempest burst
forth, certain familiar traits showed themselves, traits common to
the best Russian writers and to the general spirit of Russian
literature. In his absolute, and even exaggerated, distaste for
"bourgeoisisme," and his desire for an ideal, he is a legitimate son
of this literature. The nature of his ideas is in harmony with those
we have already found in Tolstoy, with his gospel of Christian
anarchism, in Dostoyevsky, with his ideas about the "omni-humanity"
of the Russian spirit, in Vladimir Solovyev, with h