open day, and Turguénief had so perfected the realistic methods that the subtlest analysis of character had become the essence of drama. Then Tolstoy arrived, and it was no longer a question of methods. In Turguénief, when the effect sought and produced is most ethical, the process is so splendidly æsthetical that the sense of its perfection is uppermost. In Tolstoy the meaning of the thing is so supreme that the delight imparted by the truth is qualified by no consciousness of the art. Up to his time fiction had been part of the pride of life, and had been governed by the criterions of the world which it amused. But he replaced the artistic conscience by the human conscience.) Great as my wonder was at the truth in Tolstoy's work, my wonder at the love in it was greater yet. Here for the first time, I found the most faithful pictures of life set in the light of that human conscience which I had falsely taught myself was to be ignored in questions of art, as something inadequate and inappropriate. In the august presence of the masterpieces, I had been afraid and ashamed of the highest instincts of my nature.as something philistine and provincial. But here I stood in the presence of a master, who told me not to be afraid or ashamed of them, but to judge his work by them, since he had himself wrought in honor of them. I found the tests of conduct which I had used in secret with myself, applied as the rules of universal justice, condemning and acquitting in motive and action, and admitting none of those lawyers' pleas which baffle our own consciousness of right and wrong. Often in Tolstoy's ethics I feel a hardness, almost an arrogance (the word says too much); but in his æsthetics I have never felt this. He has transmuted the atmosphere of a realm hitherto supposed unmoral into the very air of heaven. I found nowhere in his work those base and cruel lies which cheat us into the belief that wrong may sometimes be right through passion, or genius, or heroism. There was everywhere the grave noble face of the truth that had looked me in the eyes all my life, and that I knew I must confront when I came to die. But there was something more than this,-infinitely more. There was that love which is before even the truth, without which there is no truth, and which, if there is any last day, must appear the Divine justice.

It is Tolstoy's humanity which is the grace beyond the reach of art in his imaginative work. It does not reach merely the poor and the suffering: it extends to the prosperous and the proud, and does not deny itself to the guilty. There had been many stories of adultery before 'Anna Karénina,'-nearly all the great novels outside of English are framed upon that argument,- but in 'Anna Karénina' for the first time the whole truth was told about it. Tolstoy has said of the fiction of Maupassant that the truth can never be

immoral; and in his own work I have felt that it could never be anything but moral. In the 'Kreuzer Sonata,' which gave a bad conscience to Christendom, there was not a moment of indecency or horror that was not purifying and wholesome. It was not the logic of that tremendous drama that marriage was wrong,- though Tolstoy himself pushed on to some such conclusion,- but only that lustful marriage, provoked through appetite and fostered in idleness and luxury, was wrong. It will no doubt seem strange to many of us that he did not see marriage, as he had seen immortality, to be the inevitable deduction from the human postulate. But whatever the process of his reasoning may have been his comment on that novel seems to me his one great mistake, and a discord in the harmony of his philosophy.

It jars the more because what you feel most in Tolstoy is this harmony, this sense of unity. He cannot admit in his arraignment of civilization the plea of a divided responsibility: he will not suffer the prince, or the judge, or the soldier, personally to shirk the consequences of what he officially does; and he refuses to allow in himself the division of the artist from the man. As I have already more than once said, his ethics and æsthetics are inseparably at one; and this is what gives a vital warmth to all his art. It is never that heartless skill which exists for its own sake, and is content to dazzle with the brilliancy of its triumphs. It seeks always the truth in the love to which alone the truth. unveils itself. If Tolstoy is the greatest imaginative writer who ever lived, it is because, beyond all others, he has written in the spirit of kindness, and not denied his own personal complicity with his art.

As for the scope of his work, it would not be easy to measure it; for it seems to include all motives and actions, in good and bad, in high and low, and not to leave life untouched at any point as it shows itself in his vast Russian world. Its chief themes are the old themes of art always, they are love, passion, death; but they are treated with such a sincerity, such a simplicity, that they seem almost new to art, and as effectively his as if they had not been touched before.

Until we read The Cossacks,' and witness the impulses of kindness in Olenin, we do not realize how much love has been despised by fiction, and neglected for passion. It is with a sort of fear and trembling that we find ourselves in the presence of this wish to do good to others; as if it might be some sort of mawkish sentimentality. But it appears again and again in the cycle of Tolstoy's work in the vague aspirations recorded in 'Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth'; in the abnegation and shame of the husband in ‘Anna Karénina,' when he wishes to forgive his wife's paramour; in the goodness of the

上 muznik to the loathsome sick man in 'The Death of Ivan Ilyitch'; in the pitying patience of Prince Andreí Bolkonsky with Anatol Kuragin in War and Peace,' where amidst his own anguish he realizes T that the man next him under the surgeon's knife is the wretch who robbed him of the innocent love of his betrothed; in the devotion of the master, even to the mergence of conscious identity, to the servant in 'Master and Man';-and at no time does it justify our first skeptical shrinking. It is as far as possible from the dramatic tours de force in Hugoesque fiction; it is not a conclusion that is urged or an effect that is solicited: it is the motive to which all beauty of action refers itself; it is human nature, and it is as frankly treated as if ⚫ there could be no question of it.

This love-the wish to do good and to be good, which is at the bottom of all our hearts, however we try to exclude it or deny it is always contrasting itself in Tolstoy's work with passion, and proving the latter mortal and temporal in itself, and enduring only in its union with love. In most other novelists, passion is treated as if it were something important in itself,- as if its intensity were a merit and its abandon were a virtue,—its fruition Paradise, its defeat perdition. But in Tolstoy, almost for the first time, we are shown that passion is merely a condition; and that it has almost nothing to do with happiness. Other novelists represent lovers as forced by their passion to an ecstasy of selfin joy, or an ecstasy of selfish misery; but he shows us that they are only the more bound by it to the rest of the world. is in fact, so far as it eventuates in marriage, the subjection to humanity, and nothing in it concerns the

beginning lovers one.

It is not the less but the more mystical for this; and Tolstoy oes full justice to all its mystical beauty, its mystical power. Its power upon Natacha,- that pure, good, wise girl,-whom it suddenly blinds and bewilders till she must be saved from ruin in spite of herself, and almost by violence; and upon Anna Karénina,—that loving mother, true friend, and obedient wife,-are illustrated with a vividness which I know not where to match. Dolly's wretchedness with her faithless husband, Kity's happiness in the constancy of Levine, are neither unalloyed; and in all the instances and examples of passion, we are aware of th author's sense of its merely provisional character. This appears perhaps most impressively in the scenes of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky's long dying, where Natacha, when restored and forgiven for her abrration, becomes as little to him at last as if she had succeeded in giving herself to Anatol Kuragin. The theory of such matters is that the passion which unites them in life must bring them closer till in death; but we are shown that it is

not so.

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Passion, we have to learn from the great master, who here as everywhere humbles himself to the truth, has in it life and death; but of itself it is something only as a condition precedent to these: without it neither can be; but it is lost in their importance, and is strictly subordinate to their laws. It has never been more charmingly and reverently studied in its beautiful and noble phases than it is in Tolstoy's fiction; though he has always dealt with it so sincerely, so seriously. As to its obscure and ugly and selfish phases, he is so far above all others who have written of it, that he alone seems truly to have divined it, or portrayed it as experience knows it. He never tries to lift it out of nature in either case, but leaves it more visibly and palpably a part of the lowest as well as the highest humanity.

He is apt to study both aspects of it in relation to death; so apt that I had almost said he, is fond of doing it. He often does this in 'War and Peace'; and in Anna Karenina' the unity of passion and death might be said to be the principle and argument of the story. In The Death of Ivan Ilyitch' the unworthy passion of the marriage is a part of the spiritual squalor in which the wretched worldling goes down to his grave. In the Kreuzer Sonata' it is the very essence of the murder; and in the Powers of Darkness' it is the spring of the blackest evil. I suppose that one thing which has made Tolstoy most distasteful to man-made society is, that in all sins from passion he holds men chiefly accountable. It is their luxury which is so much to blame for the perversion. the moment, only one woman - the Princess Helena censures the same evils; and even in her he lets you feel that her evil is almost passive, and such as mar-made society chiefly force 1 upon her. Tolstoy has always done justice to women's nature; has nowhere mocked or satirized them without some touch of f or extenuation: and he brings Anna Kirénina through her pas to her death, with that tender lenity for her sex which recog womanhood as indestructibly pure and good.

can recall, at whom he

He comes nearer unriddling life for us than any other writer." persuades us that it cannot possibly give us any personal happin that there is no room for the selfish joy f any one except as it places the joy of some other, but that fo unselfish joy there is nite place and occasion. With the same ey he unlocks the mys of death; and he imagines so strenuously that death is neither 1, nor less than a transport of self-surrener, that he convinces reason where there can be no proof. Th reader will not have gotten how in those last moments of eartl which he has depict is this utter giving up which is made to pear the first mome heaven. Nothing in his mastery is erful as his power

14993 us in the scenes of the borderland where his vision seems to pierce the confines of another world. He comes again and again to it, as if this exercise of his seership had for him the same fascination that we feel in it: the closing hours of Prince Andreí, the last sorrowful instants of Anna Karénina, the triumphal abnegation of the philistine Ivan Ilyitch, the illusions and disillusions of the dying soldier in 'Scenes of the Siege of Sebastopol,' the transport of the sordid merchant giving his life for his servant's in 'Master and Man,'-all these, with perhaps others that fail to occur to me, are qualified by the same conviction, imparting itself so strongly that it is like a proven fact.

Of a man who can be so great in the treatment of great things, we can ask ourselves only after a certain reflection whether he is as great as some lesser men in some lesser things; and I have a certain diffidence in inquiring whether Tolstoy is a humorist. But I incline to think that he is, though the humor of his facts seeks him rather than he it. One who feels life so keenly cannot help feeling its grotesqueness through its perversions, or help smiling at it, with whatever pang in his heart. I should say that his books rather abounded in characters helplessly comic. Oblensky in 'Anna Karénina,' the futile and amiably unworthy husband of Dolly, is delicious; and in 'War and Peace,' old Count Rostof, perpetually insolvent, is pathetically. ridiculous, as Levine in the first novel often is, and Pierre Bezukhof often is in the second. His irony, without harshness or unkindness, often pursues human nature in its vain twistings and turnings, with effects equally fresh and true; as where Nikolai Rostof, flying before the French, whom he had just been trying his worst to kill, finds it incredible that they should be seeking to harm one whom he knew to be so kind and good as himself. In Polikoushka, where the two muzhiks watching by the peasant's dead body try to shrink into themselves when some polite people come in, and to make themselves small because they are aware of smelling of the barn-yard, there is the play of such humor as we find only now and then in the supreme humorists. As for pathos, the supposed corollary of humor, I felt that I had scarcely known what it might be till I read Tolstoy. In literature, so far as I know it, there is nothing to match with the passage describing Anna Karénina's stolen visit to her little son after she has deserted her husband.

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touch this instance and that, in illustration of one thing and her: but I feel after all as if I had touched almost nothing in artfoy, so much remains untouched; though I am aware that I certd have some such feeling if I multiplied the instances indefiis, Much is said of the love of nature in writers, who are supwhi to love it as they catalogue or celebrate its facts; but in