greatly wounded by this desertion. I saw him when he was dying in Paris, and it seemed as if all the tides of life and passion had swirled through his grand head, with its dishevelled white hairs and its proud movements, suggesting the wounded lion. By the irony of Fate he was at this moment completing his last work under the title Désespoir. In this book he said his last word about the Russian character, which he had studied so thoroughly for forty years.

The eclipse of which I have spoken will not prove to be a permanent one. In Russia as in the West he will again be placed in the first rank by the verdict of posterity, and remembered as the teller of tales who knew so surely the path to our hearts, the consummate artist who satisfies the intelligence by the Attic eurythmy of his masterpieces and who enchants Russian ears by the music of his prose.

We find nothing of this in Dostoïevsky. His is not an acquired art; it is the result of a tempestuous nature, a morbid intensity of thought which overwhelms the reader. In 1848, when he was only twenty years of age, he was implicated in the Pétrachevsky plot, and was exiled to Siberia, where he spent four years among the convicts. When the amnesty freed him from his chains he brought back to the world that harrowing description, La Maison des Morts, rendered all the more tragic by the tone of resignation and of sweetness which pervades this extraordinary memoir. The novels which followed-Humiliés et Offensés, Crime et Châtiment, and L'Idiot-are the chapters of a mystic and fraternal gospel, in which the sympathetic observer seems to glorify every aspect of life of the unhappy, even their vices and the disorders of their minds. And this, not from the point of view of the Romantic School, for the sake of the pictorial value of vice and misery, but because the "religion of human suffering is indulgent to everything that is unlovely.”

He, too, made a study of Nihilism, when he wrote Les Possédés and Les Frères Karamazoff; he lived the Nihilist's life in a nightmare evoked by the epileptic disorder of his imagination. He took possession of his readers' souls by his hallucinations, filled

with terror and with pity, yet always framed in the most precise realism. His power depends upon a most singular anomaly—a flood of compassion proceeding from the most pitiless of all writers. I call him cruel, because such of his books as Crime et Chatiment inflict upon the readers a torture comparable to the procedure of the medieval inquisitor who kissed his patient while he applied the red-hot irons to his flesh.

Cats cats with souls full of virtue and philosophy, souls imprisoned by a magician in the nerves of these extraordinary creatures; no other simile so well indicates the characters which Dostoïevsky formed in his own image. In order to understand them, in order to represent to oneself their conversation, their attitudes, their glances, their furies, and their loves, one must watch the electrified roof-life of the feline race-the shadowy movements, the sly approaches, the groundless alarms, the tentative caresses, the disquieting reveries, the threatening laziness of an animal always crouched in readiness to spring. It is in this fashion that the conspirators and the lost women behaved, to whom the novelist introduces us in students' garrets, these demoniacs assembled in mutual love and mutual hate, the two passions so confused that one can never tell which tortures their souls, and that both seem always present. Turn at hazard to a page of Krotkaia, Les Possédés, Les Frères Karamazoff, and you find that the hero of the episode is lost in tenderness and pity for his fellow creatures, possessed by an instinctive need to make them bleed and suffer for their own good. In the books of this Russian writer, there is a greater flow of virtue and of sensibility than in all the romances of the eighteenth century, there are more crimes and worse crimes than in the whole repertory of tragedy, but while in the drama the good people and the bad people are ranged in opposing ranks, here one finds crime and virtue side by side in the same hearts. It is another sort of exaggeration, and perhaps nearer to the truth than the exaggeration of the classic writers.

With a few exceptions, the tales of Dostoïevsky are not fantastic, for the madman is not fantastic in the true sense of the word; he is tragic and realistic, and most of his characters would,

in the Occident, be considered mad, and even in Russia, are on the road to madness. No one is so logical as a madman; one sees that in the reasoned speeches of Dostoïevsky's madmen, in their adherence to a fixed idea; but the madman is logical in one direction only, and goes to the end of that one road.

Need I add that there is at least one epileptic in each of his novels, and that the author prefers to select that one for his hero? Dostoïevsky was subject to the terrible malady, owing it, no doubt, to the terrors of his younger days, to the torments he suffered during his exile in Siberia. This hypothesis explains his work and his life. I have never known any one more acutely nervous than this little man with the shining eyes, I have never seen a sadder face than his, always contracted or distorted by alarming spasms. When he was animated by anger, in connection with one of his ideas, one could have sworn that one had seen his face before, in the dock of a criminal court, or among the vagabonds who beg at the gates of a Russian prison. At other moments, his face had the gentleness of the old saints one sees depicted in the Slavonic images. All his characteristics were of the people; his inexpressible mixture of grossness, refinement, and sweetness is often seen in Russian peasants. It was for this reason that the masses adopted him for their own, loved him to the verge of frenzy. I do not mean the masses of the peasantry, who, in Russia, do not read at all, or at any rate read nothing save almanacks and religious books: but the new class who are beginning to use their minds-the needy clerks, writers, officials, teachers, male and female students. On the 10th of February 1881, I saw these impassioned adherents of the writer crowd into the room where he had just died, I saw them almost stifled in the effort to approach his coffin, seizing as relics the funeral flowers which other admirers had heaped upon his bier. Two days later, I saw this same throng massed, in great sad waves, behind the hearse of the writer to whom they rendered funeral honours worthy of a conqueror. They recognised the image of their own lives in that troubled heart, in that clouded brain which had endowed with superabundant life the types so common in Russia, so rare elsewhere;

they were grateful to him because he had formulated, upon so many pages, the unwholesome asceticism and the touching sense of brotherhood which lie at the root of their natures; and for the last time the Russian populace knelt with the writer before the 'immensity of human suffering."

'

I have reserved for the final words of this study Count Leo Tolstoi, because he is younger, by several years, than the rest of the great writers of whom he alone survives, and also because the signal and well-deserved success of his works has constituted him the universal representative of Russian thought-more, even-the literary Napoleon whose sovereignty is recognised to-day in both hemispheres. It is now just twenty years since I offered my first article on Guerre et Paix to the editor of a great French review: "We will print this to please you," he said, "but who will ever take the trouble to read this Russian's rubbish?" Save for a few friends of Tourguéneff, who were influenced by his enthusiastic admiration of his compatriot, there were not at that time twenty persons in all Paris who knew Tolstoi's name—a name which since then has made its way around the whole planet.

Nearly half a century ago the Russian public learned to esteem him. The young artillery officer, a furious gambler, had lost at play a large sum which he was unable to pay. In order to find the money needed to meet this debt of honour, he offered to the editor of a Moscow periodical the novel which he had written in the Caucasus, during his spare hours while on duty in the Terek pass. This novel was Les Cosaques, that masterpiece of poetry and of melancholy philosophy in which Eastern scenery and the Eastern temperament-painted in brilliant hues by the Romantic School of writers-now appeared in their true colours for the first time. Born in 1828, Leo Nikolaievitch, Count Tolstoi, is now (1899) seventy-one years of age. He has not lived merely to write, nor has he written in order to live. As he observed the world, and studied into his own nature, too, bold pictures of all that he saw projected themselves upon the paper; he wrote as a surgeon makes anatomical drawings, not for the sake of the drawings themselves, but in order the better to understand man and his

maladies. Each time Tolstoi took up his pen, he tried to answer the same question, “Why am I not happy? Why are other men no happier? By what means can they be made happier?"

As a young man he had seen military action in the Caucasus and in the Crimea. He had brought back from his campaign Les Cosaques and the marvellous Tableaux du Siège de Sébastopol, reports as exact as those of a sapper endowed with genius, and possessed by a logical aversion to the sad and noble calling which he follows. Still a youth, this observer studied his own life by the light of his own sense of right, beginning already to analyse his inner nature. From this first study of himself sprang that pitiless treatise of auto-psychology, Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse. Resigning his commission at an early age, the ex-officer took his place in the elegant society of St. Petersburg. He saw the life of the Court and of society, he experienced all the passions in which Russians of his position expended the ardours of their national character, at a time when there was no other outlet for their energies. One may tell the whole truth about a man who has made his own confession so openly, who has manifested so bitter a desire to reveal his real nature. Wine, women and cards-he exhausted all the intoxications, and this at a period when excesses were frenzied at a period and in a country where a few thousand of the privileged class owned thousands of serfs, when pleasureseekers drove horses to death in order to feel the madness of a swift night drive over the snow, as they went to where the gipsies were ready to shout their hoarse songs of passion, returning later to seek for still stronger emotions, staking a fortune on a card, and, later still, drowning in wine the intolerable voice of reason: "the jade reason," as Tolstoi still said, when his gray hairs covered an apostolic head; reason which is an enemy and a torture to the unconquered hearts which she pretends to curb.

This wild pleasure-seeker remained, nevertheless, a cold and keen observer. Reconcile these contradictions, if you can-and you will have explained the genius of Tolstoi, the genius of the race of which he is the type. The critics waste their learning, perhaps because learning has nothing to do with the soul of the