WALKS AND TALKS WITH TOLSTOI -MARCH, 1894 81 



conference with his son Alexis, in reply to my remark 

 upon the marvel that a prince of such genius as Peter 

 should have appeared at Moscow in the seventeenth cen 

 tury, he said that he did not admire Peter, that he was 

 too cruel, administering torture and death at times with 

 his own hands. 



We next halted before a picture representing the horri 

 ble execution of the Strelitzes. I said that * such pictures 

 prove that the world does, after all, progress slowly, in 

 spite of what pessimists say, and that in order to refute 

 pessimists one has only to refer to the improvements in 

 criminal law.&quot; To this he agreed cordially, and de 

 clared the abolition of torture in procedure and penalty to 

 be one great gain, at any rate. 



We spoke of the present condition of things in Europe, 

 and I told him that at St. Petersburg the opinion very 

 general among the more thoughtful members of the diplo 

 matic corps was that war was not imminent; that the 

 Czar, having himself seen the cruelties of war during the 

 late struggle in the Balkans, had acquired an invincible 

 repugnance to it. He acquiesced in this, but said that it 

 seemed monstrous to him that the peace of the empire 

 and of Europe should depend upon so slender a thread as 

 the will of any one man. 



Our next walk was taken across the river Moskwa, on 

 the ice, to and through the Kremlin, and as we walked the 

 conversation fell upon literature. As to French litera 

 ture, he thought Maupassant the man of greatest talent, 

 by far, in recent days, but that he was depraved and 

 centered all his fiction in women. For Balzac, Tolstoi evi 

 dently preserved admiration, but he cared little, appa 

 rently, for Daudet, Zola, and their compeers. 



As to American literature, he said that TourguenefT had 

 once told him that there was nothing in it worth reading ; 

 nothing new or original; that it was simply a copy of 

 English literature. To this I replied that such criticism 

 seemed to me very shallow ; that American literature was, 

 of course, largely a growth out of the parent stock of Eng- 



II. 6 



