le 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.

That prison scene is, on the whole, well done, and the first part of it,
when the women shout and drink and quarrel, is acted with a satisfying
sense of vulgarity which contrasts singularly with what is meant to be
a suggestion of the manners of society in St. Petersburg in the scene
preceding. Perhaps the most lamentable thing in the play is the first
act. This act takes the place of those astounding chapters in the novel
in which the seduction of Katusha is described with a truth, tact,
frankness, and subtlety unparalleled in any novel I have ever read. 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 o