modern writers, priggish on paper but coldly cynical in their souls and in
life. I do not know which has bad taste--the Greeks who were not ashamed to
describe love as it really is in beautiful nature, or the readers of
Gaboriau, Marlitz, Pierre Bobo. [Footnote: P. D. Boborykin.] Like the
problems of non-resistance to evil, of free will, etc., this question can
only be settled in the future. We can only refer to it, but are not
competent to decide it. Reference to Turgenev and Tolstoy--who avoided the
"muck heap"--does not throw light on the question. Their fastidiousness
does not prove anything; why, before them there was a generation of writers
who regarded as dirty not only accounts of "the dregs and scum," but even
descriptions of peasants and of officials below the rank of titular
councillor. Besides, one period, however brilliant, does not entitle us to
draw conclusions in favour of this or that literary tendency. Reference to
the demoralizing effects of the literary tendency we are discussing does
not decide the question either. Everything in this world is relative and
approximate. There are people who can be demoralized even by children's
books, and who read with particular pleasure the piquant passages in the
Psalms and in Solomon's Proverbs, while there are others who become only
the purer from closer knowledge of the filthy side of life. Political and
social writers, lawyers, and doctors who are initiated into all the
mysteries of human sinfulness are not reputed to be immoral; realistic
writers are often more moral than archimandrites. And, finally, no
literature can outdo real life in its cynicism, a wineglassful won't make a
man drunk when he has already emptied a barrel.

2. That the world swarms with "dregs and scum" is perfectly true. Human
nature is imperfect, and it would therefore be strange to see none but
righteous ones on earth. But to think that the duty of literature is to
unearth the pearl from the refuse heap means to reject literature itself.
"Artistic" literature is only "art" in so far as it paints life as it