Ivory Apes and Peacocks Part 2

Perhaps "freedom" is the reason.

And what would this critic have said of the De Profundis of Maxim Gorky? Are there still darker depths to be explored? Little wonder Mr.

Robertson calls Kipling's "the art of a great talent with a cheap culture and a flashy environment." Therefore, to talk of such distinctions as realism and romance is sheer waste of time. It is but a recrudescence of the old cla.s.sic _vs._ romantic conflict. Stendhal has written that a cla.s.sicist is a dead romanticist. It still holds good. But here in America, "the colourless shadow land of fiction," is there no tragedy in Gilead for souls not supine? Some years ago Mr.

James Lane Allen, who cannot be accused of any hankerings after the flesh-pots of Zola, made an energetic protest against what he denominated the "feminine principle" in our fiction. He did not mean the books written by women--in sooth, they are for the most part boiling over with the joy of life--but he meant the feminism of so much of our novel writing put forth by men.

The censor in Russia by his very stringency caused a great fictional literature to blossom, despite his forbidding blue pencil. In America the sentiment of the etiolated, the brainless, the prudish, the hypocrite is the censor. (Though something might be said now about the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction.) Not that Mr.

Howells is strait-laced, prudish, narrow in his views--but he puts his foot down on the expression of the tragic, the unusual, the emotional.

With him, charming artist, it is a matter of temperament. He admires with a lat.i.tude quite foreign to English-speaking critics such diverse genius as Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Galdos, Jane Austen, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Mathilde Serao--greater than any modern woman writer of fiction--Henry James, and George Moore. But he admires each on his or her native heath. That their particular methods might be given universal application he does not admit. And when he wrote the above about Dostoevsky New York was not so full of Russians and Poles and people from southeastern Europe as it is now. Dostoevsky, if he were alive, would find plenty of material, tragedy and comedy alike, on our East Side.

The new translation of Dostoevsky in English by Constance Garnett is significant. A few years ago Crime and Punishment was the only one of his works well known. The Possessed, that extraordinary study of souls obsessed by madness and crime, The Brothers Karamazov, The House of the Dead, and The Idiot are to-day in the hands of American readers who indorse what Nietzsche said of the Russian master: "This profound man ... has perceived that Siberian convicts, with whom he lived for a long time (capital criminals for whom there was no return to society), were persons carved out of the best, the hardest and the most valuable material to be found in the Russian dominions.... Dostoevsky, the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn." George Moore once had dubbed the novelist, "Gaboriau with psychological sauce."

Since then, Mr. Moore has contributed a charming introduction to Poor Folk, yet there is no denying the force and wit of his hasty epigram.

Dostoevsky is often melodramatic and violent; his "psychology" vague and tortuous.

And in the letters exchanged between Nietzsche and Georg Brandes, the latter writes of Dostoevsky after his visit to Russia: "He is a great poet but a detestable fellow, altogether Christian in his emotions, and quite _sadique_ at the same time. All his morality is what you have christened 'Slave's' morality.... Look at Dostoevsky's face: half the face of a Russian peasant, half the physiognomy of a criminal, flat nose, little penetrating eyes, under lids trembling with nervousness, the forehead large and well-shaped, the expressive mouth telling of tortures without count, of unfathomable melancholy, of morbid desires, endless compa.s.sion, pa.s.sionate envy. An epileptic genius whose very exterior speaks of the stream of mildness that fills his heart, of the wave of almost insane perspicuity that gets into his head, finally the ambition, the greatness of endeavour, and the envy that small-mindedness begets.... His heroes are not only poor and crave sympathy, but are half imbeciles, sensitive creatures, n.o.ble drabs, often victims of hallucinations, talented epileptics, enthusiastic seekers after martyrdom, the very types that we are compelled to suppose probable among the apostles and disciples of the early Christian era. Certainly no mind stands further removed from the Renaissance."

Of all Dostoevsky's portraits after Sonia, the saintly prost.i.tute, that of Nastasia Philipovna in The Idiot is the most lifelike and astounding. The career of this half-mad girl is sinister and tragic; she is half-sister in her temperamental traits to Paulina in the same master's admirable story The Gambler. Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov is another woman of the demoniac type to which Nastasia belongs. Then there are high-spirited, hysterical girls such as Katarina in Karamazov, Aglaia Epanchin in The Idiot, or Liza in The Possessed (Besi). The border-land of p.u.b.erty is a favourite theme with the Russian writer. And consider the splendidly fierce old women, mothers, aunts, grandmothers (Granny in The Gambler is a full-length portrait worthy of Hogarth) and befuddled old men--retired from service in state and army; Dostoevsky is a masterly painter of drunkards, drabs, and neuropaths. Prince Mushkin (or Myshkin) the semi-idiot in The Idiot is depicted with surpa.s.sing charm. He is half cracked and an epileptic, but is one of the most lovable young men in fiction. Thinking of him, you recall what Nietzsche wrote of Christ: "One regrets that a Dostoevsky did not live in the neighbourhood of this most interesting decadent, I mean some one who knew just how to perceive the thrilling charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childish." Here is a "moral landscape of the dark Russian soul," and an exemplification in the Prince Myshkin of The Idiot, who is evidently an attempt to portray a latter-day Christ.

Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, like Rogozhin in The Idiot, Stavrogin in The Possessed were supermen before Nietzsche, but all half mad. A famous alienist has declared that three-fourths of Dostoevsky's characters are quite mad. This is an exaggeration, though there are many about whom the aura of madness and melancholy hovers. Dostoevsky himself was epileptic; poverty and epilepsy were his companions through a life crowded with unhappiness. (Born 1822, died 1881.) He was four years in Siberia, condemned though innocent as a member of the Petrachevsky group. He tells us that the experience calmed his nerves. His recollections of his Dead House are harrowing, and make the literature of prison life, whether written by Hugo, Zola, Tolstoy, or others, like the literary exercise of an amateur. It is this sense of reality, of life growing like gra.s.s over one's head, that renders the novels of Dostoevsky "human doc.u.ments." Calling himself a "proletarian of letters" this tender-hearted man denied being a psychologist--which pre-eminently he was: "They call me a psychologist; it is not true. I am only a realist in the highest sense of the word, _i. e._, I depict all the soul's depths."

If he has shown us the soul of the madman, drunkard, libertine, the street-walker, he has also exposed the psychology of the gambler.

He knew. He was a desperate gambler and in Baden actually starved in company with his devoted wife. These experiences may be found depicted in The Gambler.

He has been called the "Bossuet of the detraques," but I prefer that other and more appropriate t.i.tle, the Dante of the North. His novels are infernos. How well Nietzsche studied him; they were fellow spirits in suffering. All Dostoevsky is in his phrase: "There are no ugly women"--put in the mouth of the senile, debauched Karamazov, a companion portrait to Balzac's Baron Hulot. His love for women has a pathological cast. His young girls discuss unpleasant matters. Even Frank Wedekind is antic.i.p.ated in his Spring's Awakening by the Russian in The Brothers Karamazov: "How can Katarina have a baby if she isn't married?" cries one of the youngsters, a question which is the very nub of the Wedekind play. "Two parallel lines may meet in eternity,"

which sounds like Ibsen's query: "Two and two may make five on the planet Jupiter." He was deeply pious, nevertheless a questioner. His books are full of theological wranglings. Consider the "prose-poem" of the Grand Inquisitor and the second coming of Christ. Or such an idea as the "craving for community of wors.h.i.+p is the chief misery of man, of all humanity from the beginning of time." We recognise Nietzsche in Dostoevsky's "the old morality of the old slave man," and a genuine poet in "the secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the stars." His nave conception of eternity as "a chamber something like a bathhouse, long neglected, and with spider's webs in its corners"

reminds us of Nietzsche when he describes his doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence. The Russian has told us in memorable phrases of the blinding, intense happiness, a cerebral spasm, which lasts the fraction of a second at the beginning of an epileptic attack. For it he declares, for that brief moment during which paradise is disclosed, he would sacrifice a lifetime. Little wonder in the interim of a cold, grey, miserable existence he suffered from what he calls "mystic fear," the fear of fear, such as Maeterlinck shows us in The Intruder.

As for the socialists he says their motto is: "Don't dare to believe in G.o.d, don't dare to have property, fraternity or death, two millions of heads!"

The foundational theme of his work is an overwhelming love for mankind, a plea for solidarity which too often degenerates into sickly sentimentalism. He imitated d.i.c.kens, George Sand, and Victor Hugo--the Hugo of Les Miserables. He hated Turgenieff and caricatured him in The Possessed. It is true that in dialogue he has had few superiors; his men and women talk as they would talk in life and only in special instances are mouthpieces for the author's ideas--in this quite different from so many of Tolstoy's characters. Merejkowski has said without fear of contradiction that Dostoevsky is like the great dramatists of antiquity in his "art of gradual tension, acc.u.mulation, increase, and alarming concentration of dramatic action." His books are veritably tragic. In Russian music alone may be found a parallel to his poignant pathos and gloomy imaginings and shuddering climaxes.

What is more wonderful than Chapter I of The Idiot with its adumbration of the entire plot and characterisation of the book, or Chapter XV and its dramatic surprises.

His cardinal doctrine of non-resistance is ill.u.s.trated in the following anecdote. One evening while walking in St. Petersburg, evidently in meditation a beggar asked for alms. Dostoevsky did not answer. Enraged by his apparent indifference, the man gave him such a violent blow that he was knocked off his legs. On arising he picked up his hat, dusted his clothes, and walked away; but a policeman who saw the attack came running toward the beggar and took him to the lock-up.

Despite his protest Dostoevsky accompanied them. He refused to make a charge, for he argued that he was not sure the prisoner was the culpable one; it was dark and he had not seen his face. Besides, he might have been sick in his mind; only a sick person would attack in such a manner. Sick, cried the examining magistrate, that drunken good-for-nothing sick! A little rest in jail would do him good. You are wrong, contradicted the accused, I am not drunk but hungry. When a man has eaten, he doesn't believe that another is starving. True, answered Dostoevsky, this poor chap was crazy with hunger. I shan't make a complaint. Nevertheless the ruffian was sentenced to a month's imprisonment. Dostoevsky gave him three roubles before he left. Now this kind man was, strange as it may seem, an anti-Semite. His diary revealed the fact after his death. In life he kept this prejudice to himself. I always think of Dostoevsky as a man in shabby clothes mounting at twilight an obscure staircase in some St. Petersburg hovel, the moon s.h.i.+ning dimly through the dirty window-panes, and cobwebs and gloom abounding. "I love to hear singing to a street organ; I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings, when all the pa.s.sers-by have pale, green, sickly faces, or when wet snow is falling straight down; the night is windless ... and the street lamps s.h.i.+ne through it," said Raskolnikov. Here is the essential Dostoevsky.

And his tenacious love of life is exemplified in Raskolnikov's musing: "Where is it I've read that some one condemned to death says or thinks an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he would only have room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of s.p.a.ce all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live than to die at once." We feel the repercussion of his anguish when death was imminent for alleged partic.i.p.ation in a nihilistic conspiracy. Or, again, that horrid picture of a "boxed eternity": "We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little room, like a bath-house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it is that." The grotesque and the sinister often nudge elbows in these morbid, monstrous pages.

His belief in the unchanging nature of mankind is pure fatalism.

"Afterwards I understand ... that men won't change and that n.o.body can alter it and that it's not worth wasting efforts over it.... Whoever is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them. He who despises most things will be a lawgiver among them, and he who dares most of all will be most in right. Any one who is greatly daring is right in their eyes. So it has been till now, and so it always will be." Thus Rodion, the student to the devoted Sonia. It sounds like Nietzsche avant la lettre. Or the cynicism of: "Every one thinks of himself, and he lives most gaily who knows best how to deceive himself." He speaks of his impending exile to Siberia: "But I wonder shall I in those fifteen or twenty years grow so meek that I shall humble myself before people and whimper at every word that I am a criminal. Yes, that's it, that's it, that's what they are sending me there for, that's what they want. Look at them running to and fro about the streets, every one of them a scoundrel and a criminal at heart, and worse still, an idiot. But try to get me off and they'd be wild with righteous indignation. Oh, how I hate them all!" (The above excerpts are from the admirable translation by Constance Garnett.)

As for his own mental condition, Dostoevsky gives us a picture of it in Injury and Insult: "As soon as it grew dusk I gradually fell into that state of mind which so often overmasters me at night since I've been ill, and which I shall call mystic fear. It is a crus.h.i.+ng anxiety about something which I can neither define nor even conceive, which does not actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realised, at this very moment, to appear and rise up before me like an inexorable, horrible misshapen fact." This "frenzied anguish" is a familiar stigma of epilepsy. Its presence denotes the approach of an attack.

But the "sacred malady" had, in the case of Dostoevsky, its compensations. Through this fissure in the walls of his neurotic soul he peered and saw its strange perturbations, divined their origins in the very roots of his being, and recorded--as did Poe, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche--the fluctuations of his sick will. With this Russian, his Hamlet-like introspection becomes vertigo, and life itself fades into a dream compounded of febrile melancholy or blood l.u.s.t. It was not without warrant that he allows Rogoszin, in The Idiot, to murder Nastasia Philipovna, because of her physical charms. The aura of the man foredoomed to morbid crime is unmistakable.

The letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky came as a revelation to his admirers. We think of him as overflowing with sentiment for his fellow man, a socialist, one who "went to the people" long before Tolstoy dreamed of the adventure, a man four years in prison in Siberia, and six more in that bleak country under official inspection; truly, a martyr to his country, an epileptic and a genius. You may be disappointed to learn from these telltale doc.u.ments--translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne--that the Russian writer while in exile avoided his fellow convicts, was very unpopular with them, and that throughout his correspondence there are numerous contemptuous references to socialism and "going to the people." He preferred solitude, he a.s.serts more than once, to the company of common folk or mediocre persons. He gives Tolstoy at his true rating, but is cruel to Turgenieff--who never wished him harm. The Dostoevsky caricature portrait of Turgenieff--infinitely the superior artist of the two--in The Possessed is absurd. Turgenieff forgave, but Dostoevsky never forgave Turgenieff for this forgiveness. Another merit of these letters is the light they shed on the true character of Tolstoy, who is shown in his proper environment, neither a prophet nor a heaven-storming reformer.

Dostoevsky invented the phrase: "land-proprietor literature," to describe the fiction of both Tolstoy and Turgenieff. He was abjectly poor, gambled when he got the chance (which was seldom), hated Western Europe, France and Germany in particular, but admired the novels of George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Charles d.i.c.kens. He tells us much of his painful methods of writing ("what do I want with fame when I'm writing for daily bread?" he bitterly asks his brother), and the overshadowing necessity that compelled him to turn in "copy" when he lacked food, fire, friends. No wonder this private correspondence shows us anything but a lover of mankind, no matter how suffused in humanitarianism are his books, with their drabs, tramps, criminals, and drunkards. Turgenieff divined in him s.a.d.i.s.tic predispositions; he was certainly a morbid man; while Tolstoy wrote of him: "It never entered my head to compare myself with him.... I am weeping now over the news of his death ... and I never saw the man." Dostoevsky was a profound influence on the art and life of Tolstoy.

It may interest musical persons to learn that it was through the efforts of Adolphe Henselt, piano virtuoso and composer, that Dostoevsky was finally allowed to leave Siberia and publish his writings. Henselt, who was at the time court pianist and teacher of the Czarina, appealed to her, and thus the ball was set rolling that ended in the clemency of the Czar. To Henselt, then, Russian literature is indebted for the "greater Dostoevsky." Why he was ever sent to Siberia is still a mystery. He had avowed his disbelief in the teachings of the Petrachevsky group, and only frequented their meetings because "advanced" European literature was read aloud.

Dostoevsky was never a nihilist, and in his open letter to some St.

Petersburg students he gives them sound advice as to the results of revolution. Poor man! He knew from harsh experience.

II

Thanks to the Count Melchoir de Vogue, who introduced Tolstoy to the French in Le Roman Russe (containing studies of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenieff, Dostoevsky) literary Paris was for a time saturated in Russian mysticism, and what the clear-headed Alphonse Daudet called "Russian pity." It was Count de Vogue, member of the Academy and Neo-Catholic (as the group headed by Ernest Lavisse elected to style itself), who compressed all Tolstoy in an epigram as having ("the mind of an English chemist in the soul of a Hindoo Buddhist") On dirait l'esprit d'un chimiste anglais dans l'ame d'un buddhiste hindou.

The modulation of a soul, at first stagnant, then plunged into the gulf of hopelessness, and at last catching a glimpse of light, is most clearly expressed by Leo Nikolaievitch in his Resurrection. That by throwing yourself again into the mire you may atone for early transgressions--the muddy sins of your youth--is one of those deadly ideas born in the crazed brain of an East Indian jungle-haunting fanatic. It possibly grew out of the barbarous custom of blood sacrifices. Waiving the tales told of his insincerity by Frau Anna Seuron, we know that Tolstoy wrestled with the five thousand devils of doubt and despair, and found light, his light, in a most peculiar fas.h.i.+on. But he is often the victim of his own illusions. That, Vogue, a great admirer, pointed out some years ago. Turgenieff understood Tolstoy; so did Dostoevsky, and so does latterly the novelist Dmitri Merejkowski.

Turgenieff's appeal to Tolstoy is become historic, and all the more pathetic because written on the eve of his death.

Dear and beloved Leo Nikolaievitch: I have not written to you for a long time, for I lie on my deathbed. I cannot get well; that is not to be thought of. But I write in order to tell you how glad I am to have been your contemporary, and to make my last earnest request. My friend, return to literary work.

This talent of yours has come from where all else comes. Oh, how happy I should be could I believe that my entreaty would prevail with you. My friend, our great national writer, grant my request.

This may be found, if we remember aright, in the Halperine-Kaminsky memoir.

Turgenieff, who was the greater artist of the pair, knew that Tolstoy was on the wrong path with his crack-brained religious and social notions; knew that in his becoming the writer of illogical tracts and pamphlets, Russia was losing a great artist. What would he have said if he had lived to read the sad recantation and artistic suicide of Tolstoy: "I consign my own artistic productions to the category of bad art, except the story, G.o.d Sees the Truth, which seeks a place in the first cla.s.s, and The Prisoner of the Caucasus, which belongs to the second." Also sprach Tolstoy in that madman's book called What is Art?

a work wherein he tried to outvie Nordau's abuse of beautiful art.

The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, Hamlet, Macbeth, Dante, and Goethe, are all consigned to the limbo of bad art; bad because not "understanded of the people." The peasant, the moujik, is to be the criterion of art, an art which, in that case, ought to be a cross between fireworks and the sign-writing of the Aztecs. Vogue declared that Tolstoy had, like an intrepid explorer, leaped into an abysm of philosophical contradictions. Even the moderate French critic f.a.guet becomes enraged at the puerilities of the Russian. He wrote: "Tolstoy, comme createur, comme romancier, comme poete epique, pour mieux dire, est un des quatre ou cinq plus grands genies de notre siecle. Comme penseur, il est un des plus faibles esprits de l'Europe."

Not all that, replies Remy de Gourmont; Tolstoy may be wildly mistaken, but he is never weak-minded. We think it is his strength, his intensity that sends him caracoling on a dozen different roads in search of salvation.

How a man lacking the critical faculty may be misled is to be seen in What is Art? To master his subject the deluded novelist read all the essays, disquisitions, and works he could find on the theme of aesthetics. This as a preparation for clear thinking. It reminds one of that comical artist Pellerin, in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale, who devoured all the aesthetic treatises, ancient and modern, in search of a true theory of the beautiful before he painted a picture; and he had so thoroughly absorbed the methods of various painters that he could not sit down at his easel in the presence of his model without asking himself: Shall I "do" her a la Gainsborough, or, better still, in the romantic and mysterious manner of M. Delacroix, with fierce sunsets, melting moons, guitars, bloodshed, balconies, and the cries of them that are a.s.sa.s.sinated for the love of love?

Tolstoy reaches, after many hundred pages of his essay, the astoundingly original theory that art "is to establish brotherly union among men," which was better said by Aristotle, and probably first heard by him as a Socratic pearl of wisdom. It remained for Merejkowski to set right the Western world in its estimate of Tolstoy as man and artist. In his frank study, the facts in the case are laid bare by a skilled, impartial hand. What he writes is well known among Russians; it may shock English-speaking wors.h.i.+ppers, who do not accept Tolstoy as a great artist, but as the prophet of a new dispensation--and it may be said, without beating about the bush, he rather liked the niche in which he was placed by these uncritical zealots.

The fate of the engineer hoist by his own petard is Tolstoy's. The peasants of his country understand him as little as they understand Beethoven, that Beethoven he so bitterly, so unjustly a.s.sailed in The Kreutzer Sonata. (Poor Beethoven. Why did not Tolstoy select Tristan and Isolde if he wished some fleshly music, some sensualistic caterwauling, as Huxley phrased it? But a melodious violin and piano sonata!) Tolstoy may go barefoot, dig for potatoes, wear his blouse hanging outside, but the peasantry will never accept him as one of their own. He has written volumes about "going to the people," and the people do not want him, do not comprehend him. And that is Tolstoy's tragedy, as it was the tragedy of Walt Whitman.

Curious students can find all they wish of Tolstoy's psychology in Merejkowski's book. One thing we cannot forbear dwelling upon--Dostoevsky's significance in any discussion of Tolstoy.

Dostoevsky was a profounder nature, greater than Tolstoy, though he was not the finished literary artist. All that Tolstoy tried to be, Dostoevsky was. He did not "go to the people" (that pose of dilettantish anarchy)--he was born of them; he did not write about Siberian prisons from hearsay, he lived in them; he did not attempt to dive into the deep, social waters of the "submerged tenth," because he himself seldom emerged to the surface. In a word, Dostoevsky is a profounder psychologist than Tolstoy; his faith was firmer; his attacks of epilepsy gave him glimpses of the underworld of the soul, terrifying visions of his subconscious self, of his subliminal personality. And he had the courage of his chimera.

Tolstoy feared art as being too artificial, and, as Merejkowski shows: "From the dread mask of Caliban peeps out the familiar and by no means awe-inspiring physiognomy of the obstinate Russian democrat squire, the gentleman Positivist of the sixties." He never took writing as seriously as Dostoevsky; in Tolstoy there is a strong leaven of the aristocrat, the man who rather despises a mere pen worker. Contrast Dostoevsky's att.i.tude before his work, recall the painful parturition of books, his sweating, remorseful days and nights when he could not produce. And now Tolstoy tells us that Uncle Tom's Cabin is greater than Shakespeare. Is it any wonder Turgenieff remonstrated with him?

Is it any wonder if, after reading one of his latter-day tracts, we are reminded of The Washerwoman of Finchley Common, that cla.s.sic in the polemics of sniffling piety? The truth is that Tolstoy, a wonderful artist in plastic portraiture, consciously or unconsciously fas.h.i.+oned the Tolstoy legend, as did Richard Wagner the Wagner legend, Victor Hugo the Hugo legend. Men of genius and imagination are nearly all play-actors in matters autobiographical.

It is to Dostoevsky, once the despised outcast, that we must go for the human doc.u.ments of misery, the naked soul, the heart of man buffeted by fate. If you think Resurrection strong, then read Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead. If Anna Karenina has wooed you--as it must--take up The Idiot; and if you are impressed by the epical magnitude of War and Peace, study that other epic of souls, The Brothers Karamazov, which illuminates, as if with ghastly flashes of lightning, the stormy hearts of mankind. Tolstoy wrote of life; Dostoevsky lived it, drank its sour dregs--for he was a man accursed by luck and, like the apocalyptic dreamer of Patmos, a seer of visions denied to the robust, ever fleshly Tolstoy. His influence on Tolstoy was more than Stendhal's--Stendhal whom Tolstoy called his master.

Tolstoy denies life, even hates it after having enjoyed it to the full. His religion in the last a.n.a.lysis is nihilism, and if carried to its logical conclusion would turn the civilised world into a desert.

Our great man, after his family was in bed, sometimes ate forbidden slices of beef, and he had been seen enjoying a sly cigarette, all of which should endear him to us, for it proves his unquenchable humanity. Yet that roast-beef sandwich shook the faith of thousands.

No--it will not do to take Tolstoy seriously in his attempts at evolving a parody of early Christianity. He is doubtlessly sincere, but sincerity is often the cloak for a mult.i.tude of errors.

His Katusha--Maslova, as she is more familiarly known in Resurrection--is a far less appealing figure than the street-walker Sonia in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The latter lives, while poor Maslova, a crude silhouette in comparison, as soon as she begins the march to Siberia is transformed into a clothes-horse upon which Tolstoy drapes his moral plat.i.tudes. She is at first much more vital than her betrayer, who is an unreal bundle of theories; but in company with the rest of the characters she soon goes up in metaphysical smoke. Walizewski a.s.serts that all Tolstoy's later life was a regrettable pose. "But this is the usual price of every kind of human greatness, and in the case of this very great man, it is an atavistic feature of the national ... education, which in his case was originally of the most hasty and superficial description."

In As the Hague Ordains, the anonymous author attacks "our great reformer and humbug," Count Leo Tolstoy. She claims that there was hardly a village in China so abounding in filth and ignorance as the Tula village of Yasnaya Polyana, beside Tolstoy's country home.

"I wonder," she writes, "why the procession of foreign visitors who go to Yasnaya Polyana, who lavish adulation and hysterical praises upon that cra.s.s socialist and mischief-maker of his day, never think to look around them and use their reasoning powers. Would it not be the logical thing for Yasnaya Polyana to be the model village of Russia?

Something cleaner than Edam or Marken? A little of his magnificent humanitarianism and benevolence poured upon that unsanitary village on his own estate would be more practical, it seems to me, than the thin treacle of it spread over the whole universe. Talk is cheap in Yasnaya Polyana, and the Grand Poseur plays his part magnificently. Every visitor goes away completely hypnotised, especially the Americans, with their frothing about equality and the universal brotherhood of man. Universal grandmother! All men are just as equal as all noses or all mouths are equal. The world gets older, but learns nothing, and it cherishes delusions, and the same ones, just as it did in the time of the Greek philosophers. Leo Tolstoy might well have lived in a tub or carried a lantern by day, like the most sensational and theatrical of the ancients. He is only a past master of reclame, of the art of advertising. The Moujik blouse and those delightful tableaux of a real n.o.bleman shoemaking and haymaking make his books sell. That is all.

And, under the unsuspecting blouse of the humanitarian is the fine and perfumed linen of the dandy. Leo Tolstoy, the Beau Brummel of his corps in my father's day--the dandy in domino to-day."