inally 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 crass 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
nobleman 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."

III

Tolstoy the artist! When his vagaries are forgotten, when all his
books are rags, when his very name shall be a vague memory, there will
live the portrait of Anna Karenina. How dwarfed are his other
achievements compared with the creation of this woman, and to create a
living character is to be as the gods. Tolstoy has painted one of the
three women in the fiction of the nineteenth century. If the roll-call
of the century is ever sounded, these three women shall have endured
"the drums and tramplings" of many conquests,