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.
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