Tolstoi as Man and Artist. By Dmitri Merejkowski. (A. Constable
and Co. Os. net.)—It is not easy to say what M. Merejkowski really thinks of Tolstoi as an artist. His view of him as a man is less obscure. Put in a few words, it is that Tolstoi is profoundly egotistic, while he thinks himself, and indeed means to be, profoundly altruistic. We have no call, possibly our author has no call, to pass judgment on this side of Tolstoi's personality„ except, indeed, that the " man" has been put very much into evidence. All Europe has been invited, so to speak, to see him "at home," to note what he eats and drinks, to hear what are his conceptions of duty, and to observe how far he lives up to them. But as an artist, what does M. Merejkowski think of him He is not perfect ; he is not representatively Russian. The ideal Russian is to come hereafter, and to be a compound of Tolstoi and Dostolevski, a definition which is less enlightening than we could wish.. "In this Russian," goes on our author, " shall the Man-God be manifested to the Western world," a sentence which seems to us absurd or worse. When we come to particulars, there is much acute criticism in the appreciation of Tolstoi as an artist. His tricks of style, his incessant repetition of some physical detail in his characters—a point of curious resemblance to Charles Dickens—and the cruelty, one might say the brutality, of his realism are insisted upon. Al! this is gone into at much length, and almost, we must own, to weariness. We are disposed to ask now and then, Is the subject quite adequate ? M. Merejkowski has also written, we are told, " a study of the Religion of Tolstoi and Dostolevaki," but it is not yet determined whether this shall be given to the English and American public.
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