ll of trouble.

She is all things. She rewards herself and punishes herself, and in
herself rejoices and is distressed. She is rough and gentle, loving and
terrible, powerless and almighty. In her everything is always present.
Past or Future she knows not. The Present is her Eternity. She is kind.
I praise her with all her works. She is wise and still. No one can force
her to explain herself, or frighten her into a gift that she does not
give willingly. She is crafty, but for a good end; and it is best not to
notice her cunning.

NIKOLAI VASILIEVITCH GOGOL

(1809-1852)

BY ISABEL F. HAPGOOD

[Illustration: NIKOLAI GOGOL]

Gogol has been called the "father of modern Russian realism," and he has
been credited with the creation of all the types which we meet in the
great novelists who followed him. This is in great measure true,
especially so far as the male characters are concerned. The germs at
least, if not the condensed characterization in full, are recognizable
in Gogol's famous novel 'Dead Souls,' his Little-Russian stories 'Tales
from a Farm-House near Dikanka' and 'Mirgorod,' and his comedy 'The
Inspector,' which still holds the stage.

It was precisely because of his genius in seizing the national types
that the poet Pushkin, one of Gogol's earliest and warmest admirers,
gave to him the plans of 'Dead Souls' and 'The Inspector,' which he had
intended to make use of himself. That he became the "father of Russian
realism" was due not only to his own genius, but to the epoch in which
he lived, though he solved the problem for himself quite independently
of the Continental literatures which were undergoing the same process of
transformation from romanticism to realism. For, nearly a hundred years
before Gogol and his foreign contemporaries of the forties--the
pioneers, in their respective countries, of the new literature--won the
public, Europe had been living a sort of modern epic. In imitation of
the ancient epics, writers portrayed heroes of gigantic powers in every
direction, and set them in a framework of exceptional crises which
aroused their powerful emotions in the cause of right, or their
superhuman conflict with masterful persons or overwhelming woes. But the
daily experience of those who suffered from the manifold miseries of
battle and invasion in this modern epic epoch, made it impossible for
them to disregard longer the claim on their sympathies of the common
things and people of their w