en fireworks and the sign-writing of the Aztecs. Voguee declared
that Tolstoy had, like an intrepid explorer, leaped into an abysm of
philosophical contradictions. Even the moderate French critic Faguet
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 assassinated 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 worshippers, 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,