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
fashion. But he is often the victim of his own illusions. That, Voguee,
a great admirer, pointed out some years ago. Turgenieff understood
Tolstoy; so did Dostoievsky, 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, God Sees the Truth, which seeks a place in the
first class, 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
betwe