But all this, it seems, More did not realize. And, had he realized it, he could have done but little. He was too removed from the “mob” to speak their tongue, too far from them to share their feeling, too alien for his words to gain a foothold in the crannies of their being.
The mob that killed More had made More, and all others of his kind. The despised mob had fought his battles on the field of war and on the field of industry. For the one they killed they had nurtured thousands. Inchoate and all but inarticulate, in this mob is the divine stuff out of which shall be formed the master-people to come, when once they decide to fight their own war instead of that of their task-masters.
Nothing, not even conventional virtue, is so provincial as conventional vice; and the desire to bewilder the middle classes is itself middle-class.—Arthur Symonds.
Ante-Bellum Russia
Alexander S. Kaun
The effects that the European War will have—and is having already—on the internal conditions in Russia are merely conjecturable, considering the fact that since the first week in August we have had no sterling news from the embroiled countries. I believe that a study of the pre-war situation in Russia, of her recent moods and aspirations, will enable us to venture a guess or two as to the potential results of the present imbroglio. The forthcoming is by no means an attempt to exhaust the problem: it is barely a bird’s-eye view of contemporary Russian reality as reflected in life and literature.
I
In a recent article an eminent Russian publicist thus characterizes the modern literature of his native land:
It is quite clear: With the death of Tolstoy our literature also expired. Not orphaned, bereaved; it died, came to an end, perished....
In fact, what does our modern literature teach us? It positively preaches all the instincts, the complete “credo” of the bestialized criminal. Self-despite, sacrilege, sexual licentiousness, political mutiny, commendation of crime, hooliganish all-negation, stalest individualism, morals of an outlaw, the ideology of fratricide-Cain, the codex of an apache and Jack-the-Ripper.