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Tolstoy's work the nature is there just as the human nature is: simple, naked, unconscious. There is the sky that is really over our heads; there is the green earth, the open air; the seasons come and go: it is all actual, palpable,—and the joy of it as uncontrived apparently as the story which it environs, and which gives no more the sense of invention than the history of some veritable passage of human events. In War and Peace' the fortunes of the fictitious personages are treated in precisely the same spirit, and in the same manner, as the fortunes of the real personages: Bezukhof and Napoleon are alike real.

Of methods in Tolstoy, then, there can scarcely be any talk. He has apparently no method: he has no purpose but to get what he thinks, simply and clearly before us. Of style there seems as little to say; though here, since I know him only in translation. I cannot speak confidently. He may have a very marked style in Russian; but if this was so, I do not see how it could be kept out of the versions. In any case, it is only when you come to ask yourself what it is, that you realize its absence. His books are full of Tolstoy,- his conviction, his experience, and yet he does not impart his personal quality to the diction as other masters do. It would indeed be as hard to imitate the literature as the life of Tolstoy, which will probabiy find only a millennial succession.

In the time between the second and third of his great fictions Tolstoy wrote several minor books which I would not have my reader think less than very great. The penetrating conscience so active in (My Confession,) (My Religion, (Life) and the like is powerfully present in the (Kreutzer Sonata) and in (What is Art?> These polemics are as masterly in their sort as the earlier expressions of the author's beliefs and feelings and they are not ethically or æsthetically different, After he came to himself in his principles he did not change in his conclusions, but at times he deepened or broadened the base of them so as to let the meaning of them be more clearly felt. His recognition of Maupassant's excellent art came strangely from such a moralist as himself, whose abhorrence Maupassant's material must often have been. But Tolstoy has the large inconsistency which seems at times infirm judgment; with the perfect fealty to character which his own fiction always showed, he could be so tolerant of caricature that he accounted Dickens the greatest master of English fiction In this he might have been swayed by his sense of the humanit His own moral temperament was of the vastness of there was due allowance for all weather; sometimes th very bad, as when he declared Hosea Ballou the fir authors, but this may have been through the defect o It may have been a touch of the cutting humor which

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he thought himself dealing with some humorless inquirer. Or, he may He may have been really no great critic of literature, while he was so pre-eminently a critic of life, and above all others a censor of the soul. appear an inadequate observer of his own methods to the reader of the Chartreuse de Parme) when he says he has derived them from the method of Stendhal; but there can be no question of his self-criticism when he deals with his conscience and the source of hope which he tells us he found only in the words and acts of Christ, whom above He brings the whole of human conduct all others he tried to follow. in himself and in his neighbor to this test; it is the criterion of his art as it is of his life, and without the test of this he does not value art. This was the cause of his turning upon his fiction at a certain time and accusing it of inadequacy to the need of the spirit amidst the highest things it could give, and recognizing that no one was a better man for the best things that any man had done in art, though he might be exempt from the self-contempt of artificiality and immorality.

sex.

It is not clear to me whether in coming back to fiction from the polemics of his middle years he returns to one of his three greatest novels by the way of one which is less rather in size than in scope, but' whether (Resurrection) was planned after (The Kreutzer Sonata> or not, I think I may justly imagine that he could not satisfy himself without offering a supreme testimony to the truth as he saw it and felt it in the mystery of the sex sacrificed in love to the lust of the other He is the austerest, the severest censor of the folly and vanity of women, but he is first of those who recognize the essential innocence of the women whom men make their prey. At a certain moment he sees no hope for redemption from this secular iniquity but in celibacy, and he suffered this to become the accepted moral of The Kreutzer Sonata); but celibacy is not the moral of Resurrection, as it was not the moral of the peril and the rescue of Natacha in War and Peace. > In his final great fiction he explores the tragedy of the wronged woman through all its gruesome and horrifying details, past all possibility of reparation from the man who wronged her, when she can love and marry only a man who has had no part in her wrong or in any moment of the social squalor following from it.

Without having recurred to the book, I am half-minded to declare <Resurrection) the greatest of Tolstoy's fictions. I came to it after the first fervor of my devotion for him had spent itself, but the surprise of it restored me to my earlier feeling; and now I am not sure but that when the account is finally made up, it will not be decided that (Resurrection) is a truer representation of life and a more perfect work of In form it is art than either War and Peace) or (Anna Karénina.) certainly more compact, and in spirit it is not less loyal to truth. It is, of course, an awful tragedy, but it is the «noble terror» of tragedy which it strikes into the reader. It makes him partner in its events;

he is «the doubter and the doubt» in all the dark course of the cruel betrayal and the atrocious sacrifice of womanhood that follows through the ways that the sin and the sinner keep. The wrong cannot be atoned for by any act of penitence or reparation; yet the victim is not destroyed. This is what Tolstoy shows with his sublime constancy to the truth which he cannot help finding the truth. The event could not be otherwise than it falls out, in his vision; with what is left of her in her ruin the victim must rebuild her life not on the remorse of the man who has wronged her, but upon the love of some other man who has nothing to do with her wrong, and simply offers her his love. 'moralist who was not a great artist could not have divined this.

ence.

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I suppose many will think the last end of Tolstoy, and the conditions tending to it, as tragical as anything he has written. Esthetically it seems to me more tragical, and it seems to me so because it is more inevitable, more strictly in accord with the law of human experiThe old appear to me nearly always run to earth, hunted down by a fate whose prey, though not whose sport, they are. To save his soul alive Tolstoy had done what he could to renounce himself. He had abjured all that he could of the pride of life, and forbidden himself to hope for any joy of life except through daily toil for daily bread. This alone could bring him release from sorrow and remorse for sin; only this could restore the meaning of existence and take away the terror of death and justify the hope of immortality. But Tolstoy could not earn his daily bread as the poor earned theirs; his was the hard doom of inalienable affluence which he could not divert from those whose due it was in law, and in his helpless love for them he entered upon a hollow mockery of daily toil for daily bread; he sat at the table of the countess, his wife, and ate the coarse food of the peasant. He made shoes which he did not sell for his living, but probably gave away. The world came to look on at the drama, the Inhuman Comedy which did not cease to make its protagonist pitiable. We do not know just how far he was able to bear it or at what moment it became intolerable, or how. We know that it did become intolerable and that at last he fled from it and died apart from his family a sick old man, broken by fate and yielding to despair. He sought to lead the life which he believed that Christ meant us all to live, but he died baffled and defeated. Yet he may after all have had his triumph, or he still may have it; the death on Calvary in the hour of it was not the victory which Christianity has ever since been painting it; and the apparently futile endeavor of Tolstoy may yet have due meaning from the Life which he strove to make his own.

ANNA'S ILLNESS

From (Anna Karénina): translated by Nathan Haswell Dole. Copyright 1886, by T. Y. Crowell & Co.

K

ARÉNIN was sitting in his lonely room when a servant brought him two dispatches. Aleksei Aleksandrovitch opened them. The first announced the nomination of Stremof to the place for which he had been ambitious.

Karénin threw down the telegram, and began to walk up and down the room.. "Quos vult perdere Jupiter dementat," said he, applying quos to all those who had taken part in this nomination. He was less disturbed by the fact that he himself had not been nominated, than to see Stremof-that babbler, that speechifier-filling the place. Couldn't they understand that they were ruining themselves, that they were destroying their prestige, by such a choice?

"Some more news of the same sort," he thought with bitterness as he opened the second telegram. It was from his wife: her name, “Anna,” in blue pencil, stood out before his eyes.

"I am dying. I beg you to come: I shall die easier if I have your forgiveness."

He read these words with scorn, and threw the paper on the floor. "Some new scheme," was his first thought. "There is no deceitfulness of which she is not capable. She must be on the eve of her confinement, and there is something amiss. But what can be her object? To compromise me? to prevent the divorce? The dispatch says, 'I am dying.'" He re-read the telegram, and suddenly realized its full meaning. "If it were true,- if the suffering, the approach of death, had caused her to repent sincerely, and if I should call this pretense, and refuse to go to her, that would not only be cruel, but foolish; and all would blame me."

"Piotr, order a carriage: I am going to Petersburg!" he cried he servant.

Karénin decided to go to his wife, and be ready to return once if her illness was a pretense: on the other hand, if she e really repentant, and wanted to see him before she died,

"Whom Jupiter wishes to destroy he makes mad.»

he would forgive her; and if he reached her too late, he could at least pay his last respects to her.

Having made up his mind to do this, he gave it no more thought during the journey. Alekséi Aleksandrovitch, tired and dusty with his night of traveling, reached Petersburg in the early morning. He crossed the still deserted Nevsky Perspective, looking straight before him through the morning mist, without wishing to think of what was awaiting him at home. He did not wish to think about it, because he couldn't help feeling that his wife's death would put a speedy end to all the difficulties of his situation. The bakers, the night izvoshchiks, the dvorniks sweeping the sidewalks, the closed shops, -all passed like a flash before his eyes; he noticed everything, and tried to stifle the hope that he reproached himself for entertaining. When he reached his house he saw an izvoshchik, and a carriage with a coachman asleep, standing before the door. On the steps Alekséi Aleksandrovitch made another effort to come to a decision,wrested, it seemed to him, from the most hidden recess of his brain, and which was something like this: "If she has deceived me, I will be calm, and go away again; but if she has told the truth, I will do what is proper."

The Swiss opened the door even before Karénin rang the bell; the Swiss presented a strange appearance, without any necktie, dressed in an old coat and slippers.

"How is the baruina?»

"She is as comfortable as could be expected."

Alekséi Aleksandrovitch turned very pale: he realized how deeply he had hoped for her death.

Kornéi, the servant in morning-dress, came quickly down the

stairs.

"Madame is very low," he said. "There was a consultation yesterday, and the doctor is here now."

"Take my things," said Alekséi Aleksandrovitch, a little com forted to learn that all hope of death was not lost; and he went into the reception-room.

A uniform overcoat hung in the hall. Alekséi Aleksandr noticed it, and asked:

"Who is here?"

"The doctor, the nurse, and Count Vronsky."

Karénin went into the drawing-room. There was n there; but the sound of his steps brought the nurse, inɔ