A TOLSTOY MEDALLION
THE COVER OF THE TRACT “WHERE LOVE IS, THERE GOD IS ALSO”
scathing attack upon militarism in general and the Franco-Russian Alliance in particular—“The Christian Teaching” (1898), and “The Slavery of our Times” (1900). Various letters on the successive famines and on the religious persecutions in Russia deserve separate mention; they remind us that since the failure of the revolutionary movement miscalled “Nihilism,” Tolstoy has gradually risen to the position of the one man who can continue with impunity a public crusade, in the foreign and the clandestine presses at least, against all Imperial authority and social maladjustments. Mr. Tchertkoff, Mr. Aylmer Maude, the “Brotherhood Publishing Co.,” and the “Free Age Press” deserve praise for their efforts to popularise these and other works of the Count in thoroughly good translations. In “What is Art?” (1898), not content with the bare utilitarian argument that it is merely a means of social union, he launched a jehad against all modern ideas of Art which rely upon a conception of beauty and all ideas of beauty into which pleasure enters as a leading constituent. A short but luminous essay on “Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction” is a more satisfactory contribution to the subject.
ONE OF THE POSTCARDS ISSUED IN MOSCOW IN 1898 TO COMMEMORATE TOLSTOY’S LITERARY JUBILEE
It is more to our purpose to note that in this volcanic and fecund if fundamentally simple personality the artist has dogged the steps of the evangelist to the last. “Master and Man” (1895) is one of the most exquisite short stories ever written. “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch” (1884) and “Resurrection” (1899) are in some ways the most powerful of all his works. The much-condemned “Dominion of Darkness” (1886) and “Kreutzer Sonata” (1889) will be more fairly judged when the average Englishman has learned the supreme merit of that uncompromising truthfulness which gives nobility to every line the grand Russian ever wrote. To submit a work like “Resurrection” to the summary treatment which the ordinary novel receives and merits is absurd. It is a large picture of the fall and rise of man done by the swift and restless hand of a master who stands in a category apart, with an eye that sees externals and essentials with like accuracy and rapidity. Because the dramatic quality of these living pictures lies, not in their organisation into a conventionally limited plot, but first in the challenging idea upon which they are founded, then the inexorable development of individual characters, and ever and anon in the grip of particular episodes, the little critics scoff. The idea, the characters, the episodes are all too real and vital for their precious British self-complacency. The grandmotherly Athenæum