read. Yet very few classics really satished him. It was only after considerable hesitation that he allowed that that incomparable master of style, Pushkin, for instance, deserved the name of a classic at all, and even then Tolstoi was never tired of accusing the author of “Eugene Onyegin” of an excessive lightness of touch and a tendency to sacrifice truth and even intelligibility to brilliant and dramatic effects. Goethe, too, was never one of his favourites. “Righteous God!” he cried, with an emphasis that was anything but profane, “Goethe always forgets morality in his pursuit of beauty, and without the former the latter is worth nothing.” In 1870 he began to study Greek and would read nothing else. Xenophon greatly pleased him, but he was still more delighted with Homer. “How glad I am that God has given me the humour for it,” he writes to a friend; “I am convinced that of all the truly beautiful, the simply beautiful which the human mind has produced, I hitherto knew nothing.” Of his own literary work he was still very proud, and yet his complacency was not without a tinge of self-contempt. In 1876 he wrote to a friend, “I continue under the delusion that what I am writing is very important, although I know that within a month the remembrance of it will be on my conscience. Sometimes I feel myself to be as a God from whom nothing is concealed, and at other times I am as stupid as a brute beast.” It pleased him to reflect that he was already numbered amongst the greatest of Russian writers, and it is certain that from 1880 onwards he was without a rival in the national literature. In the fifties Turgenev had
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