Reviews of Books plished the duty which history marked out for her to perform. By means of the Rus sian Alliance, she has broken out of the circle of solitude in which Bismarck confined her. By means of her understandings with Great Britain, Italy and Spain, she has restored the balance of power which the German hegemony had destroyed in 1871. By means of the Russo-Japanese, Franco-Japanese, and AngloRussian rapprochements she has secured complementary guarantees to her reconquered liberty."
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undeserving of capital punishment. But in Russia progressive men are prone to regard reform less hopefully than revolution, con trary to the spirit of other nations of stronger legal traditions, and positive morality must be admitted to be undergoing such singular vicissitudes and committing such strange vagaries there at the present day, that it is really hard to determine who are the defend ers of the true social order, those who repre sent the state or those who would undermine its very foundations. Andreyev declares in his preface that his THE SOUL OF THE CRIMINAL READ task "was to point out the horror and iniquity of capital punishment under any circum AND INTERPRETED stances." His view is that it is not only The Seven Who were Hanged. By Leonid Andreyev. Translated by Herman Bernstein. wrong in the case of the righteous and inno cent, whether they be ignorant and timid, or J. S. Ogilvie Pub. Co., N. Y. ($1.) IN a recent book dealing with "Criminal enlightened and determined, but that it "is Types in Shakspere" (published by still more horrible when it forms the noose Methuen, London) Dr. August Goll, a Danish around the necks of weak and ignorant peo magistrate, discussing Brutus, Macbeth, and ple." Consequently the pitiable Esthonian other interesting figures, observes that the peasant who in cold, dense brutality mur criminal is far more interesting than the crime, dered his master stands out from his pages that he must have his own point of view and with haunting, symbolical vividness. The way of thinking, and that the criminologists tragedy of Werner, an educated man of iron must study him individually rather than as will, is terrible, but the awe of it all comes from his thrilling vision of the significance the element of a mass. This is the method applied by the Russian of his own life hidden obscure in the abyss author, one of the most remarkable and of time rather than from the hideousness of unique men in the world of contemporary his fate. To quote one of many striking passages:— letters, Leonid Andreyev, in his graphic por The fatigue that had tormented Werner trayal of the effects produced by a sentence of death upon seven of his compatriots. His during the last two years had disappeared; the dead, cold, heavy serpent with its closed object in writing was to tear aside the veil eyes and mouth clinched in death had fallen which obscures a general understanding of away from his breast. Before the face of human beings snared in the toils of capital death, beautiful Youth came back to him punishment. It is an eloquent and beautiful physically. Indeed, it was more than beau tiful Youth. With that wonderful clarity of reading of the human soul, written by one the spirit which in rare moments comes over whose striking imaginative gifts, wondrous man and lifts him to the loftiest peaks of literary charm, and simple and passionate meditation, Werner suddenly perceived both life and death, and he was awed by the splen reserve, because of his whole-hearted sym of the unprecedented spectacle. It pathy with the suffering and oppressed, dor seemed to him that he was walking along the stamp him as one of the world's greatest living highest mountain-ridge, which was narrow like the blade of a knife, and on one side he authors. The only fault that could easily be found saw Life, on the other side—Death,—like two sparkling, deep, beautiful seas, blending in with this story by Andreyev lies in the possible one boundless, broad surface at the horizon. fact that his exquisite sympathy with the "What is this? What a divine spectacle!" miserable beings of whom he gives us so he said slowly, rising involuntarily and truthful a picture, his almost feminine tender straightening himself, as if in the presence of supreme being. And destroying the walls, ness, may at times carry him too far in the aspace and time with the impetuosity of his direction of blurring, after the feminine fash all-penetrating look, he cast a wide glance ion, the ethical values upon which society somewhere into the depth of the life he was to forsake. relies for its stability. He cannot help pro life appeared to him in a new light. ducing the impression which he himself ex HeAnd did not strive, as before, to clothe in periences, that those of whom he writes are words that which he had seen; nor were there
