If you want to know how, daily life goes on among people who know as little about themselves as you know about your neighbours in a street or drawing-room, read Jane Austen, and, on that level, you will be perfectly satisfied.  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. 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.  Tolstoi according to Captain Marshall, I should be inclined to define him; but I must give Mr. Tree his full credit in the matter.  When he crucifies himself, so to speak, symbolically, across the door of the jury-room, remarking in his slowest manner:  “The bird flutters no longer; I must atone, I must atone!” one is, in every sense, alone with the actor.  Mr. Tree has many arts, but he has not the art of sincerity.  His conception of acting is, literally, to act, on every occasion.  Even in the prison scene, in which Miss Ashwell is so good, until she begins to shout and he to rant, “and then the care is over,” Mr. Tree cannot be his part without acting it.