One cannot but feel some terror in cutting the pages of a new translation of Tolstoy. The cheering hope of a fresh and closer impression of this great messenger of the Infinite is clouded by recollections of underpaid English and strange, enthusiast barbarisms of vocabulary through which, many years ago, we gnawed to our first acquaintance with Russian writers. Yet perhaps Tolstoy suffered less than some others. The form and print of Messrs. Dent's edition promise agreeably and should satisfy for the present the demand for a complete popular text. Professor Leo Wiener, of Harvard, is responsible for the translation, and, though we shall still desire to possess Tolstoy in our own Cisatlantic vernacular (Mrs. Garnett and Mr. Aylmer Maude in their several editions have broken the back of the work), we may warmly congratulate the editor on his rendering, which reads easily and is, for the most part, convincing, though it beats us at times by a purely indigenous expression. "I flunked" is even more esoteric. It must, I think, be "fair" Harvard.

Here, then, is Tolstoy's work in its order of date-eight volumes, from the small-beer chronicle of Childhood to the great ocean-currents of War and Peace. Returning to these beginnings-delighting myself again with The Cossacks after so many years-my own newest impression holds an element of surprise that Tolstoy should have been able so far to persuade himself and us that the prophet of our day is really a different man from the novelist-soldiersquire of fifty years ago. He had to find himself, doubtless. The finding appeared to him as the change he then

"Tolstoy:" Complete works. London: Dent and Co. 3s. 6d. per volume.

recorded in his Confession; but the Tolstoy that he discovered is discernibly here from the outset, and in his inmost soul is the secret of the power of all this work.

I think I delight especially in The Cossacks (1852) because it was my own introduction to Tolstoy, and thus the vivid succulence, as of spring herbs, of this offthrow of his twenty-fourth year has a double freshness for me. What a document! Not a second-hand syllable in it. All seen and felt and alive, and made intimately personal to the reader, with a magic of little scenes that cling in him as beheld and experienced. Olenin, the civilized subaltern, sceptic and sentimentalist, finds reality and the secret of wholesome life with the full-blooded old hunter Eroshka, the swaggering Cossack frontiersman and his sweetheart. Then comes, under the disdainful witchery of this clean, strong, wayward creature, the inevitable discovery of the Bothie of Tober na Vuolich, and the world is again transmuted for him. Life is here! he cries; not in the cities. And it is so, but the life is not for him. Thus early his kingdom, plainly, is not of this world. Maryanka's love, had he won it, the return to Nature, had he attempted it, the animal life at its finest were as external for him as the life of the world he had fled from. Experience has but carried deeper the riddle that he brought with him. The vividness of The Cossacks illuminates for us the psychical matrix of the sentimental journals of the civilized man. Childhood, Boyhood, Youth are quasi-"Confessions"; the memoirs of Nekhludoff continue these pictures. Α certain flatness and sameness oppresses us in most Russian stories of well-to-do (or shabby-genteel) people.

All families are of one social type-the self-owning, landed class, living emptily and frivolously at Petersburg or Moscow, or rusticating tediously in vast country mansions amid a primitive household and slovenly, distrustful peasants. The contrasts and interplay of social and professional variety are absent. All the more do the subtleties and vagaries of the individual personality arrest Tolstoy; the more are we made partakers in that profound and ever-vigilant sensibility upon which all spiritual and formal idiosyncrasies imprint themselves with such stinging precision. It is in this capacity for perception that the vastness of Tolstoy lays hold on us; and back of it (as our translator would say) is that great seeing spirit that is the Tolstoy of later days. But this is a spiritual seer: the artist is a seer still clothed in flesh and nerves and reacting creatively to feeling. When Tolstoy the artist passed from the drabness and parasitism of genteel Russian circles to the dazzling virgin majesty of the Caucasus rampart, the crisp aromatic naturalism of the Cossack village, his art reacted instantly to the stimulus of naked reality. The later written parts of the sentimental autobiography seem a relapse into flatness. But definiteness of feeling and positive upspringing of conviction aggressive against the artificial society quickly as sert themselves. Lucerne (1857) is as trenchant and dumbfoundering a sermon in the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth as anything that Tolstoy has ever written. Linen-Measurer-the story of a broken-down horse-is full of the modern Tolstoy. The kindly disillusioning exercise of Domestic Happiness holds implicit the merciless Kreutzer Sonata. And constantly in the shorter stories and essays that spirit flashes through that was finally to take form as the man we now know.

That could not, however, be until his

genius had gathered indignation and power and mastery. In War and Peace the mastery is declared. The delicate impressionability is no longer the cause of the writing; it is an instrument to the will of the writer, the servant of the spiritual sight. In this enormous book, with poignant beauty everywhere discerned "under the measureless grossness and the slag," two men in especial embody themselves, unprecise in outline, massive, dominating, symbolic, unexhausted as Rodin's sculpture-Kutusof, the Russian of a century since at war; Pierre Bezuhof, the cultured Russian of peace. Kutusof, whom I had supposed obsolete, has a pale but recognizable avatar in Kuropatkin's strategy in Manchuria: that general's telegram explaining why he was driven from Mukden is pure Kutusof. The other figure, Pierre, is a piece of work not paralleled, within my reading, in literature. The book had to be so vast to give depth for him. It would not have been possible to convince of him by making him, in a slighter setting conspicuous. His sig

nificance is worked down to from the surface of the action of the tale. He moves, a lymphatic mooncalf, a rich man's bastard, unpolished, adrift on turgid humanitarian impulses, reciting Republican formulas, picked up, undigested, in Paris, incapable of self-control, debauched, an easy prey to the matchmaker, to the swindling stewards of his properties, a figure at first rather less sympathetic than even the average in that tiresome social class of which I have spoken, with nothing but love affairs and luxury to employ them. (In peace that is. In war they show different. In the small simplified world of a regiment in the field it is possible for the most futile of social failures to be a "perfect man.") Then, suddenly, we begin to guess what Tolstoy is doing with us. There are glints under the surface as of a

terized Bolkonski family-more even than the exquisite Natasha, once Andrey Bolkonski's betrothed and later Pierre's own wife.

To Andrey Tolstoy reveals his secret of Death-and no death scene more true or more wonderfully balanced has been written than the chapter of his dying experience:

He evidently apprehended matters of life with difficulty. . not because he was deprived of the power of understanding, but because he understood something different, something the living did not and could not understand, and which absorbed all his attention. . . . They cannot understand that all the feelings which they value so much -all, all our thoughts which seem so important to us--are not necessary. . . . That threatening, eternal, unknown, and remote something, the presence of which he had always felt, was now near to him, and, because of that strange ease of existence which he experienced was almost comprehensible and palpable to him.

...

No array of words can say how much he is at peace about death. But to Pierre, made receptive by the illumination of his sudden love for Natasha, in the moment of her shame and abasement at her betrayal of Andrey, beguiled by his friend, Tolstoy reveals his secret of life and power, and in doing so seems to challenge us-"If ye believe not me, believe the works; out of this I have written this book"and the challenge is unanswerable. In the school of his arrest in the sack of Moscow, while helping a child and a woman; in his purely accidental escape from court-martial justice, mechanically slaughtering haphazard sus

pects; in the hideous automatisms that function at the tap of a drum; in his barefoot pilgrimage as a prisoner with the French, his comradeship with the eternally lovable Russian soldierpeasant ("He had learnt that God was greater, more infinite, and more incomprehensible in Karataev than in what the Freemasons had called The Architect of the Universe"); in his return to find himself richer with a third of his fortune than he had ever been before.

Formerly he had seemed to be a good but unhappy man, and so people instinctively kept away from him. Now a smile of the joy of life constantly played about his lips and in his eyes beamed sympathy, and people felt at their ease in his presence.

He had discovered

The possibility for each one to think, feel, and look at things in his own way, and the impossibility of dissuading a man with words.

("I and mine do not convince by arguments, metaphors, tropes: I and mine convince by ourselves," as Whitman puts it.)

Thus losing he finds himself. There is nothing arresting, nothing brilliant in Pierre. He is engendered nebulously in the depths of the book, diffused but massive, compact, in his essence, of the softest and most pervasive thing in the world, responsive human kindness and brotherliness; the treasure that the Russian and perhaps the Negro race seem to hold more than others in trust for a wiser humanity, reminding us of the entrancing baby softness we knew in Sergius Stepniak, strongest and kindest of men.

I notice that whilst throughout these earlier writings I constantly am aware of the contemporary Tolstoy in passages where he is writing simply as artist, embodying in imagined form the

promptings of his intimate sensibility, this identity is less clear in his argued passages, such as the essay on the philosophy of history and the theory of war, in War and Peace. The comparatively unconvincing impression which these dissertations leave seems to me significant. Tolsoy as theorist really had not then come clearly to apprehend what it was he was meaning as artist. That inner kingdom that he finally preaches that Olenin divined in the Caucasus-to this belongs his spirit from the first. Extraordinary artist as he was, he was never other than moralist; his spirit, clad in sense, breaks ground with disquieted apprehension. The shrouded genius does not at first set itself up in criticism; it records, suffering a little in all its excitement of vision. Getting assurance, growing to conscious will, it protests: seeks to mend the forms of the world through action, the thoughts of The Speaker.

the world through Art. Reaching mastery, in War and Peace and Anna Karenina, it passes from protest against the actual to assertion of the spiritual laws of life, and finally that which was, in its exquisite fineness, most sensitive and retiring in the young artist takes its place in the preacher as the strongest and most dominant guide of doctrine. The receptive, impressionable, passive, almost negative spirit, withdrawing its own personality and preconceptions, recording impacts without reasoned selection, this is characteristic of Russia in letters. In Tolstoy, now that the rugged passional force of the man has come to subject itself wholly to the spiritual inspiration, it forces the civilized world to give ear to his outpourings as prophet as masterfully as it forced his earlier audience to acclaim him as

Artist.

Sydney Olivier.

"The Lord's Prayer in Five Hundred Languages," lately published by Messrs. Gilbert and Rivington, does not, at the first glance, promise much to the casual reader. But the man who dips into it is doomed. Its fascinations are such that it cannot be laid down. The languages that one cannot "make head or tail of" at first, are hardly less interesting on investigation than those which one easily puzzles out; and hardly a page is without some entrancing discovery, redolent of lost history, leaping, illuminative, out of the dark backward and abysm of time. A wordfor-word rendering of the Chinese dialect airily described as "Easy Wenli" (the character is ideographic Chinese) gives some idea of the tasks which missionaries have to grapple with. "Our Father in Heaven he, wish Thy name

perfectly holy: They dominion rulecome-to, Thy will received-done in earth as in heaven truly. Grant us to-day the day what use food: forgive our sindebts, as we forgive sin-debts against us those so. Not lead us enter seducing temptation, but save us out of evilwickedness. For kingdom the, power the, glory the all belong to Thee, in age-age indeed. Heart wishes exactly so." Hardly less interesting are the barbarous dialects called Dutch- and Mauritius-Creole. The latter, a sort of pigeon-French, something like the horrible petit nègre of Cochin China, begins thus: "Nou Papa, Ki dan le ciel, fair Ki vou nom li sanctifié. Ki vou réïn vini. Fair ça Ki vou vlê, laho la ter, comman dan lé ciel."

Perhaps the most curious facts which one alights upon are those connected

with the kinship of languages, where the same word occurs in a number of different versions. The familiar “báp” (father) of Hindustani turns up in all sorts of forms and in unexpected places, as "bap" in the Romansch of the Engadine, "bab" in Grisons, "papa" in the Caroline Islands, "babbu" in Corsican and several dialects of Sardinia, "bapa" in Malay, "babath" in Kabyle, "papah” in a language of West Africa, "baba" in Matabele and in two or three languages of Eastern Equatorial Africa! The repeated appearance of a double labial in the word for "Father" (which in some African languages is actually "mama") suggests the idea that infantile speech has fixed the name independently in many languages which, so far as we know, could not possibly have borrowed from one another. A certain added tenderness is thus given to the sublime opening Invocation. In Guiana the translator seems to have shirked a difficulty: the opening word is "Jehovah," which, whatever it may or may not mean, certainly is not a translation of "Our Father." Elsewhere it seems likely that the unedifying associations of the Muhammadan heaven have been purposely evaded, for Urdu (Muhammadan Hindustani) the word is rendered "ásmán." Now "ásmán" means simply "sky": the word for heaven is "bihisht," which is actually employed in the Baluchi rendering. In Hindi, the word used is (correctly) "svarg." In all these "name" is rendered (with different accents, all importing a long vowel) "nam." How far afield we have to travel for the origin of "nomen" therefore! But even more remarkable are the Welsh "sancteiddier" and Magyar "szenteltessek" for "hallowed."

The Academy

Welsh is certainly older than the Roman occupation of Britain: yet "sancteiddier"-the only comprehensible word in the specimen of that difficult tongue-is clearly the Latin "sanctus." But what is the relation between "sanctus" and the Magyar word? Is either derived from other, or is the likeness mere accident? It would be remarkable if there were no accidental resemblances. In Awari, a language of the Caucasus, the word seems to be "hallal"; but Professor Skeat does not carry "hallow" and "holy" farther back than Goth. "heilag." A still more mysterious coincidence is the Gitano (Spanish Gipsy) "bastardo" for "evil" Lexicographers, following Webster, derive "bastard" from O.F. "bast" (packsaddle). Is the Gipsy word a mere reflex, or have we here a discovery? The accepted derivation, bast fils-debast, may have literary support, which of course would settle the matter: but it is not on the face of it convincing.

The Lord's Prayer has almost from time immemorial been employed, in glottological collections, as the specimen passage. In a learned preface to Messrs. Gilbert and Rivington's volume, Dr. Reinhold Rost mentions Conrad Gessner (1555), Chamberlayne (1715), Adelung ("Mithridates," Berlin, 1808-17), and A. Auer (“Sprachenhalle," Vienna, 1844-47) as having thus employed the greatest of all prayers. The last-named work contained 200 versions. But nothing to approach the present collection, either in copiousness or interest, has ever been published; and so far from being a mere technical handbook for experts it is, as above indicated, a most fascinating work for any reader.