I
read them over before I went to the theatre, and when I got to the
theatre I found a scene before me which was not Tolstoi's scene, a
foolish, sentimental conversation in which I recognised hardly more than
a sentence of Tolstoi (and this brought in in the wrong place), and, in
short, the old make-believe of all the hack-writers for the stage,
dished up again, and put before us, with a simplicity of audacity at
which one can only marvel ("a thing imagination boggles at"), as an
"adaptation" from Tolstoi. Tolstoi has been hardly treated by some
translators and by many critics; in his own country, if you mention his
name, you are as likely as not to be met by a shrug and an "Ah,
monsieur, il divague un peu!" In his own country he has the censor
always against him; some of his books he has never been able to print in
full in Russian. But in the new play at His Majesty's Theatre we have,
in what is boldly called Tolstoi's "Resurrection," something which is
not Tolstoi at all. There is M. Bataille, who is a poet of nature and a
dramatist who has created a new form of drama: let him be exonerated.
Mr. Morton and Mr. Tree between them may have been the spoilers of M.
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