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 middle of
drawing-rooms and of prison cells, talking nonsense with a convincing
disbelief, was in any sense a mouthpiece for Tolstoi's poor simple
little gospel.
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