about themselves as you know about your neighbours in a street or
drawing-room, read Jane Austen, and, on that level, you will be
perfectly satisfied. But if you want to know why these people are happy
or unhappy, why the thing which they do deliberately is not the thing
which they either want or ought to do, read Tolstoi; and I can hardly
add that you will be satisfied. I never read Tolstoi without a certain
suspense, sometimes a certain terror. An accusing spirit seems to peer
between every line; I can never tell what new disease of the soul those
pitying and unswerving eyes may not have discovered.

Such, then, is a novel of Tolstoi; such, more than almost any of his
novels, is "Resurrection," the masterpiece of his old age, into which he
has put an art but little less consummate than that of "Anna Karenina,"
together with the finer spirit of his later gospel. Out of this novel a
play in French was put together by M. Henry Bataille and produced at the
Odeon. Now M. Bataille is one of the most powerful and original
dramatists of our time. A play in English, said to be by MM. Henry
Bataille and Michael Morton, has been produced by Mr. Tree at His
Majesty's Theatre; and the play is called, as the French play was
called, Tolstoi's "Resurrection." What Mr. Morton has done with M.
Bataille I cannot say. I have read in a capable French paper that "l'on
est heureux d'avoir pu applaudir une oeuvre vraiment noble, vraiment
pure," in the play of M. Bataille; and I believe it. Are those quite the
words one would use about the play in English?

They are not quite the words I would use about the play in English. It
is a melodrama with one good scene, the scene in the prison; and this is
good only to a certain point. There is another scene which is amusing,
the scene of the jury, but the humour is little more than clowning, and
the tragic note, which should strike through it, is only there in a
parody of itself. Indeed the word parody is the only word which can be
used about the greater part of the play, and it seems to me a pity that
the name of Tolstoi should be brought into such dangerous companionship
with the vulgarities and sentimentalities of the London stage. I heard
people around me confessing that they had not read the book. How
terrible must have been the disillusion of those people, if they had
ever expected anything of Tolstoi, and if they really believed that
this demagogue Prince, who stands in nice poses in the midd