Paint queer visions of the world, and all the wonders of D.T.

They must be seen to be enjoyed. But they too will "have their day"they'll "have their day and cease to be," and the lively old painters, and tired young ones, may "go in" for it, but they do so at their peril. But, knowing the pain and danger, too, of painting Nature with truth-"Nature" in the sense in which we have been speaking-we hesitate to recommend it. It is too drastic, and would doubtless kill a lot of fine fellows, and be too great a drain on the funds of the Artists' Benevolent Society. So, after this long round, we are forced into the position of asking once more, "Is Art a failure?"

Is Art a failure? The question is preposterous, of course; and yet that is virtually what the Post-Futurists and other men of modern movements are thrusting upon us, in the hope, doubtless, that they may be taken seriously. We have seen their efforts referred to as "modern aspirations," and as a "shaking of the dry bones." In old-fashioned, early Edwardian days, days before the virus cinema had got into our blood, we had a mild form of entertainment called the negro minstrels. The wild man who did most of the clowning also went in for violent shaking of dry bones; but he was often amusing, and was sometimes even wise, in his own way. The analogy therefore is not quite complete -but there it is. Art may be a failure

as far as giving an accurate representation of Life and Nature goes; that is, as phenomenon pure and simple (and we have surely proved and insisted on this with a spiteful sort of relish sufficient to satisfy the most exacting iconoclast); but Art can suggest and hint at Nature in a very satisfying way, and thus give us the greatest and most refined of pleasures. In the past she has been one long and triumphant success. Nation upon nation has arisen and grown great, then vanished like a wreath of smoke and left nothing behind but the remnants of their Art. From the Art of these nations, in one form or another, we have been able to gauge the degree and quality of their culture and civilization. We have no other means of judging it, in fact. Doubtless it will be the same with ourselves in turn, and other races of mankind-widely different from ourselves, perhaps will weigh and sum us up in the self-same way. Were we to cast the mind's eye over the wide range calmly, and without too much bias against ourselves, we would have no reason to fear the verdict. In their own relations, and in their own English way, we have as great a race of artists as the world has ever seen. We may not have dived very deeply into the "science of appearances," but all the same we have now living amongst us a goodly number of artists that would do credit to any age whatever. Nor are they all outside the Academy, as some disappointed ones are apt to say. It may be a difficult thing for some safety-loving worshipper of old masters to believe, but many old masters of the future are quietly working beside us, and what we think, what we feel, and what we are, will be passed on by them to other ages and other races of men, as surely as the coming of to-morrow's dawn. We have carefully considered the case of the Post-Futurists, and have, moreover, propounded a prob

lem for them-and any others whom it may concern, which we heartily recommend. If they desire anything difficult, anything quite awfully original, and yet on sound and permanent lines, let them try it. We wish them all success.

In the meantime we will not give up Art for Post-Futurism, but will stick to her through thick and thin. So hie we to the National Gallery to stand before Rembrandt and his fellow-aristocrats of Art and banish all the present-day chatter in absorbing admiration. But there is a baneful note attending these great works now, which is far from artistic, but is not to be ignored. One cannot help wondering, as one stands before them, what pranks some mighty lord might not be tempted to play with them if he had the chance. Also what unimaginable price some American will actually pay for them when our country has "gone to the dogs." (For it is going to the dogs for certain, and shortly too. We had it from a good authority-a politician in a big way, and one who is in a position to know.) Unfortunately, this class of picture has become the most effective wealth-advertising medium in the world. However, the pictures are all The Nineteenth Century and After.

right, and Post-Futurism would be a sorry substitute for them, we should think. Nor shall we glory in artistic snobbery and prate only to the old masters, but will see great Art even in the newest painted. We will wend our way to the Academy in the good old way-even try to "spot" the picture of the year- and admire anew the wonderful outdoor studies of Sargent. (How we miss his portraits!) The noble landscape of Arnesby Brown; the style and old-English grace of Shannon's portraits; the cool, limpid, and exquisite color of Clausen's larger picture; the graceful fantasia of Charles Sims (a difficult art to make convincing, and requiring many gifts). Also the extraordinary and powerful picture by Mr. Strang, the commonplace lifted into the region of great Art! These, and many more we will enjoy, without distraction at the thought that these fine artists are still here, and are not yet the sport of dealers, lords, and millionaires. That the pictures are newly painted will not affect our estimate or our pleasure.

There is no old,
There is no new,

There only is the good and true,
And the best is all around.

Robert Fowler.

There are few people to whom English readers have better cause to be grateful than Mrs. Garnett for her long line of translations from the Russian. We owe it mainly, indeed, we owe it almost entirely, to her that Russian novels may now be read in sound and native English. The number of people

*The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Constance Garnett. (Heinemann. 3s. 6d. net.) A Great Russian Realist. By J. A. T. Lloyd. (Stanley Paul. 10s. 6d. net)

Dostoievski. From the Russian of Merejkowski. By G. A Mounsey. (The De la More Press. 1s. 6d. net.)

in this country who are interested in such things and who can read them in the original is negligible, and until lately there did not even in French exist a complete and literary translation of Tolstoi, there still does not of Dostoevsky. Mrs. Garnett has given us Tolstoi and Turgenev, and she now, with "The Brothers Karamazov," sets out (we trust) on what will in some ways be a still more welcome and important benefaction. In the thirty years which have elapsed since Dos

toevsky's death, with all the obstacles there have been to keep us at a distance from his work, we have at least learned enough to know how greatly a full English version of it is to be desired.

We hear of his huge popular

ity in Russia, and how, not only by his readers in their thousands, but by the critics themselves, he is put at the head of Russian novelists. We are told that through him alone can we hope to understand the Russian soul, divined and interpreted in his novels as nowhere else. And if there were nothing else to rouse curiosity, it would be enough to know that there met in him two such violently opposed suffrages, generally speaking, as those of Nietzsche, who found Dostoevsky the only psychologist who could teach him anything, and Tolstoi, who, though he knew him only through his books, wrote of him as "the nearest and dearest and most necessary of men to me." Yet of this man, both by habit of mind and by literary method far more remote from Western ways than either of the two great novelists with whom it seems inevitable to compare him, we have had to form what impression we could by means of versions either avowedly incomplete and "adapted," or at best without native and idiomatic grace. One or two of his books have, indeed, fared better than the rest, and by one of them, "Crime and Punishment," he has been almost solely known. The rest have been little read, except here and there by an enthusiast, and it cannot be wondered at. English readers, embarking on the huge tract of Dostoevsky's fiction, need all the help they can get in the way of clarity and comfort. His word is not one with which in any case it is easy to get on terms, and his prolixity, his endless digressions, his wild composition, may readily baffle us long before we have done so. Even M. de Vogüé in the chapter, penetrating as far as it

goes, devoted to Dostoevsky in his study of the Russian novel, ends by denying him the name of genius and leaves us with the impression that we need not go further than "Crime and Punishment" after all; and Merejkovsky, in the essay translated by Mr. Mounsey, goes no further himself. These difficulties and discouragements we may hope are now over. Nothing in the world can make Dostoevsky a writer to be taken up lightly in a vacant hour; the mere sight of the eight hundred densely-packed pages of "The Brothers Karamazov" disposes of any such idea. But abridgment is not simplification, it is confusion; and in Mrs. Garnett's capable and straightforward prose there are no puzzling gaps (as there have been in both the French and American versions) and no disturbing exoticisms of style. We could wish, indeed, that the book might have been allowed a rather more attractive paper and print, and possibly bound in two volumes; as it is, the page has a most unsympathetic baldness, contrasting to its great disadvantage with the same publisher's and translator's edition of Turgenev.

The gulf which separates "The Brothers Karamazov" from both "War and Peace" and "Virgin Soil" is so obvious that when critic after critic draws his inevitable distinctions between the three authors we are tempted to feel that the mere fact of their being all Russian is not enough for comparison. It is easy to distinguish between a crowded street, an illimitable plain, and a shaven lawn of grass; we never thought of confusing them, and the differentiation is otiose. Mr. Lloyd, in his book named above, gives too much space to his variations on this simple theme. His characterizations are often useful and acute; but they are too diffuse, too full of repetitions, and he might well have saved room for more about Dostoevsky him

self, fuller biographical detail, and more extracts from his very interesting letters. Here and elsewhere it would be a relief if we could be less certain, whenever Dostoevsky is mentioned, that Tolstoi and Turgenev are punctually at hand. Yet it is true that in one aspect their collocation has more to tell us than that they all three wrote in Russian. Mr. Lloyd says, quite justly, of Dostoevsky, that he "combined, as perhaps no other writer in the world, sympathy with every phase of physical and mental suffering, and a watchful inquisitiveness in regard to the patholology of the human soul"; but he does not add that, by slightly varying the phrase, we arrive at a profound distinction between the realism of Russian fiction, as exemplified by either of our three authors, and that of Western Europe. It is a distinction which unites Dostoevsky's grim and ominous street-scenery, Tolstoi's lucid horizons and huge sky-spaces, Turgenev's ordered and civilized designs. They all three possess the gift of a realism on one side freely sympathetic, carelessly personal, openly interested, and on the other detached and reserved, vigilant and impartial. Tolstoi, for example, even after he had simplified his scheme of values to such a point that it could only be satisfied by the moral and artistic innocence of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," could never himself write a page of fiction in which the old sane, keen-eyed realist was really trampled underfoot as he professed to be. Even in “Resurrection" the uncritical moral purpose, with the best will in the world, never gets the better of the invincible instinct of the born artist to allow nothing to interfere with his loyalty to his subject. To represent loyally, to keep the whole of the matter in hand in its due proportion, and at the same time to be profoundly implicated in it, to be incapable of a purely external curiosity in regard to its developments-if we

look for an index to Russian nineteenth-century fiction we may find it in some such combination, hardly known in France or England.

No

Dostoevsky, torn with savage indignation, seems ready to hurl himself on his characters in pain and fury, and tear them limb from limb; they exasperate him, he hates them, he can hardly believe people can be so monstrous; his words pour forth, as he tells us about them, in a torrent so irresistible that he seems to have forgotten his listeners, forgotten his book, forgotten everything but the violent effect it has made upon him to have seen and known these miserable creatures. aloofness here, one would say; he is much too angrily interested to stand above them; he is their victim, passionately protesting and accusing. So it seems at first; his voice is insistent, he holds us with his glittering eye, and it is difficult to attend to his voluble tale. And yet, before long, we too have forgotten the story-teller. Out of his violence and vehemence there presently emerges a picture from which there is no escape; a strange dark scene, an ominous background, unremarked in detail and yet known and definite, like the background of a dream, and in front a crowd of wild unaccountable figures, endlessly talking, endlessly explaining themselves, whom we never perhaps quite understand-at least we never know what they will do next, we are prepared for anything-but whose life and movement are absolutely their own, whose action we may find inexplicable, but never arbitrary or artificial. We have forgotten the storyteller, and that because he has, after all, kept himself far more disengaged from his story than we had thought. He has been watching his characters, bringing them out, testing them, as carefully as though he had never had any but a collector's interest in them. Even where his resentment seemed to

be bitterest, we discover that he has been patiently extricating a perplexed, bewildered soul from shell within shell of hypocrisy and meanness, where the avenging angel he appeared to be might have been content to condemn offhand.

This double gift of indignation and justice is well brought out by Mr. Lloyd, though here again a little more compression would have been well. Dostoevsky's life, like his books, was lacerated with innumerable woes of body and spirit. Epilepsy, the perpetual want of money, the necessity of working against time, with no opportunity of producing his best, such is the constant refrain of his letters. Until, in his last years of fame, he reached comparative freedom from anxiety, there is only one period of his life in which the cry of irritation and despair is not continual. That period was his imprisonment in Siberia, the most sensational tragedy of his life, that one, no doubt, which left the deepest mark, but which he surmounted and mastered and always afterwards declared himself grateful for. It was characteristic of the way in which misfortunes were heaped upon him that his arrest and condemnation were due to a total misunderstanding of his political opinions, which from the beginning were positively against revolution. For an indiscretion he spent four years in prison and four more in exile, yet it is precisely in writing of those years that his tone is calm and quiet. M. de Vogüé insists on Dostoevsky's sense of "la bonté de la souffrance en elle-même, surtout de la souffrance subie en commun, sa vertu unique pour résoudre toutes les difficultés," and his years in Siberia seem indeed to have had this virtue. Suffering was to Dostoevsky the one unifying force in a world where success and happiness are disruptive and individualizing. If suffering resolves all difficulties, it does so

by substituting in man the idea of brotherhood for the idea of antagonism. The extraordinary power of resignation and endurance in the Russian mind is thus no mere moral inertia, no "slavemorality," no shirking of responsibility, but a direct impulse towards unity and harmony, towards the only quarter in which human effort can come to fruition. The beauty of pain is a phrase which has sickly associations for us because it suggests a morbid perversity. To Dostoevsky it is a sane and simple expression of that which makes for human health and life; and when Raskolnikov kisses Sonia's feet, when the old monk prostrates himself before Dmitri Karamazov, they are saluting the embodiment of this all-pervading force.

a

Raskolnikov, the student-murderer of "Crime and Punishment," reaches this recognition through the failure of his attempt to stand alone and shake his fist at the world; it is a profoundly artistic design that makes the very deed by which he was to prove his Napoleonic independence-murdering helpless old woman-the instrument of his final enlightenment. It is perhaps Dostoevsky's best finished work, but it is too much of a tour de force to show the full sweep of his genius. For that reason it was a good choice to open the new edition with "The Brothers Karamazov." It is true that it was Dostoevsky's last novel, that it is only a fragment (though complete in itself) of a huge design which he did not live to carry out, and that its overpowering volubility makes it a difficult one on which to begin acquaintance with the author. Indeed M. de Vogüé, writing a few years after Dostoevsky's death, could dismiss it in six lines on the ground that even in Russia it was considered impossible to read. Whether or no it has yet been read in Russia, there is now no reason why it should not be read in England, and it gives by