are the constant horrible and tragic features of Andreyev's art.

In his stories dealing with biblical characters, Judas Iscariot and Lazarus, we have horror and dreams again. Judas Iscariot and the Saviour are pictured as twins nailed to the same cross and wearing the same crown of thorns. The traitor in Andreyev's story loves Jesus the Man. There is a dread secret in the terrible eyes of Judas, as there is a wondrous secret in the beautiful eyes of Jesus. This horrible proximity of divine beauty and of monstrous hideousness presents a problem which the artist tries to solve. He makes of Judas a fanatical revolutionist, the slave of an idea who has resolved to materialize "horror and dreams" and to bring about the truth. There is in Judas that same duality which characterizes so many of Andreyev's heroes. He has two faces. He lies and dissembles. Throughout the whole story the dual personality of the Traitor is brought out with wonderful skill. In "Judas Iscariot" Andreyev contrasts Judas with Jesus. In "Lazarus" he contrasts the morose Jew, whom Jesus brought back from death into life after three days and three nights in the darkness of the tomb, with the life-loving Augustus. If in "Judas Iscariot" Judas, wise, cunning and evil, overcomes Jesus, naive, meek and trustful, in "Lazarus" it is the Roman Emperor who causes the eyes of the Jew to be pierced, but is in the end overcome himself.

"Anathema"—a play of Andreyev which in grandeur of conception equals Goethe's Faust, has for its humble hero, David Leiser, trustful, stupid, guileless, ever obedient to his heart, who reaches immortality and lives the life of immortality and light. His enemy, Anathema, who follows the cold dictates of reason, is foiled.

From Andreyev's pen we have a series of dramatic pictures, "Black Masks," "King Hunger," "Savva," "To the Stars," and others, and a number of stories, some of them in places streaked with a realism that is almost too revolting for the Anglo-Saxon ideas of propriety. Thus in "My Memoirs," he tells of an insane doctor of mathematics, who confined for life in a prison for a horrible crime sets down his experiences in a series of hypocritical diary notes, and who expatiates upon the beauties of nameless vice. In "The Darkness," the bomb throwing idealist, who hiding from the police on the eve of his deed, enters a house of ill-fame and becomes so abashed at the sight of the life of an inmate that he exclaims "It is a disgrace to be good," and kisses her hand, only to have his face slapped because the fallen woman resents his parading of goodness at her expense.

Andreyev, because of the cumulative portrayals of the weird and the horrible, has been called the Russian Edgar Allan Poe. But between Poe and Andreyev there lies a century of time and a world of space.

Poe's hero, in "The Fall of the House of Usher," is the last remnant of a feudal epoch dying in a crumbling castle, every stone of which speaks of a series of generations and of external and internal dissolution. The heroes of Andreyev are solitary men, hiding in their professorial studies, in the basements of tenement houses, in the caves of Judea. Death with Poe is mysteriously beautiful, with Andreyev it is a blighting, baneful curse. The solitude of Poe's heroes is the tragic solitude of a superman on a lonely height, the solitude of Andreyev's heroes is the solitude of little men, worn out with the futile vicissitudes of life. But the horror of life and of death makes these two great artists kin. Of the Russian authors Dostoyevsky is nearest to Andreyev. The solitude of the curse-stricken man, of the man on the brink of ruin, the morbid acuteness of his perceptions, the dominion of intellect over life, the eternal longing to overstep the boundary, the endless striving with God, the city with its garrets and basements—these are the favorite themes both of Dostoyevsky and of Andreyev.

As to style, Leonid Andreyev is a wonderful word painter, but his brush knows only somber colors. The basic background of his stories and of his dramas is a dark-grey, sometimes streaked with fiery-red. His pessimism leads him to look upon the world through dark spectacles. Duke Lorenzo is held captive by "Black Masks." He sails in a ship with "black sails." At the prow of the vessel is a "young woman in black."

The stories included in this first volume of Andreyev's works in the "Russian Authors' Library" series are: "When the King Loses his Head," "Judas Iscariot," "Lazarus," "Life of Father Vassili," "Ben-Tobith" and "Dies Irae."

ARCHIBALD J. WOLFE.

CONTENTS.

WHEN THE KING LOSES HIS HEAD
JUDAS ISCARIOT
LAZARUS
LIFE OF FATHER VASSILY
BEN-TOBITH
THE MARSEILLAISE
DIES IRAE

WHEN THE KING LOSES HIS HEAD.

PART I.

There stood once in a public place a black tower with massive fortress-like walls and a few grim bastioned windows. It had been built by robber barons, but time swept them into the beyond, and the tower became partly a prison for dangerous criminals and grave offenders, and partly a residence. In the course of centuries new structures were added to it, and were buttressed against the massive walls of the tower and against one another; little by little it assumed the dimensions of a fair sized town set on a rock, with a broken skyline of chimneys, turrets and pointed roofs. When the sky gleamed green in the west there appeared, here and there, lights in the various parts of the tower. The gloomy pile assumed quaint and fanciful contours, and it somehow seemed that at its foot there stretched not an ordinary pavement, but the waves of the sea, the salty and shoreless ocean. And the picture brought to one's mind the shapes of the past, long since dead and forgotten.

An immense ancient clock, which could be seen from afar, was set in the tower. Its complicated mechanism occupied an entire story of the structure, and it was under the care of a one-eyed man who could use a magnifying glass with expert skill. This was the reason why he had become a clockmaker and had tinkered for years with small timepieces before he was given charge of the large clock. Here he felt at home and happy. Often, at odd hours, without apparent need he would enter the room where the wheels, the gears and the levers moved deliberately, and where the immense pendulum cleft the air with wide and even sweep. Having reached the limit of its travel the pendulum said:

"'Twas ever thus."

Then it sank and rose again to a new elevation and added:

"'Twill ever be, 'twas ever thus, 'twill ever be, 'twas ever thus, 'twill ever be."

These were the words with which the one-eyed clockmaker was wont to interpret the monotonous and mysterious language of the pendulum: the close contact with the large clock had made him a philosopher, as they used to say in