INTRODUCTION After making a production of Redemption, the chief feeling of the producer is one of deep regret that Tolstoi did not make more use of the theatre as a medium. His was the rare gift of vitalization: the ability to breathe life into word-people which survives in them so long as there is any one left to turn up the pages they have made their abode. In the world of writing, many terms that should be illuminative have become meaningless. So often has the barren been called "pregnant," the chill of death "the breath of life," the atrophied "pulsating," that when we really come upon a...

Extract: CHAPTER I. All the efforts of several hundred thousand people, crowded in a small space, to disfigure the land on which they lived; all the stone they covered it with to keep it barren; how so diligently every sprouting blade of grass was removed; all the smoke of coal and naphtha; all the cutting down of trees and driving off of cattle could not shut out the spring, even from the city. The sun was shedding its light; the grass, revivified, was blooming forth, where it was left uncut, not only on the greenswards of the boulevard, but between the flag-stones, and the birches, poplars...

Ann Veronica describes the rebellion of Ann Veronica Stanley, "a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty," 1] against her middle-class father's stern patriarchal rule. The novel dramatizes the contemporary problem of the New Woman. It is set in Victorian era London and environs, except for an Alpine excursion. Ann Veronica offers vignettes of the Women's suffrage movement in Great Britain and features a chapter inspired by the 1908 attempt of suffragettes to storm Parliament. Plot Mr. Stanley forbids his adult daughter, a biology student at Tredgold Women's College and the youngest of his five...

Extract: CHAPTER I. . . . 169] The justification of all persons who have freed themselves from toil is now founded on experimental, positive science. The scientific theory is as follows: - "For the study of the laws of life of human societies, there exists but one indubitable method, -the positive, experimental, critical method "Only sociology, founded on biology, founded on all the positive sciences, can give us the laws of humanity. Humanity, or human communities, are the organisms already prepared, or still in process of formation, and which are subservient to all the laws of the...

Extract: THE POWER OF DARKNESS ACT I The Act takes place in autumn in a large village. The Scene represents Peter's roomy hut. Peter is sitting on a wooden bench, mending a horse-collar. Anisya and Akoulina are spinning, and singing a part-song. PETER looking out of the window] The horses have got loose again. If we don't look out they'll be killing the colt. Nikita Hey, Nikita Is the fellow deaf? Listens. To the women] Shut up, one can't hear anything. NIKITA from outside] What? PETER. Drive the horses in. NIKITA. We'll drive 'em in. All in good time. PETER shaking his head] Ah, these...

Extract: Scene 1 A dirty room in a low-class restaurant. A table, at which people sit drinking tea and vodka. In the foreground a small table, at which sits Fedya, tattered, and much come down in the world. With him is Petushkov, a gentle, mild man with long hair, of clerical appearance. Both are slightly drunk. PETUSHKOV. I understand, I understand. That is true love Yes? Go on. FEDYA. Well, you know, if a woman of our class showed such feeling and sacrificed everything for the man she loved.... But she was a gipsy, brought up to money-hunting, and yet she had this self-sacrificing love ...

Extract: ACT I Scene 1 The scene represents the verandah of a fine country-house, in front of which a croquet-lawn and tennis-court are shown, also a flower-bed. The children are playing croquet with their governess. Mary Ivanovna Saryntsova, a handsome elegant woman of forty; her sister, Alexandra Ivanovna Kohovtseva, a stupid, determined woman of forty-five; and her husband, Peter Semyonovich Kohovtsef, a fat flabby man, dressed in a summer suit, with a pince-nez, are sitting on the verandah at a table with a samovar and coffee-pot. Mary Ivanovna Saryntsova, Alexandra Ivanovna Kohovtseva,...

Extract: THE DOOR IN THE WALL I One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story. He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him...

Argument Wells describes his aim as to state "as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious belief of the writer." He distinguishes his religious beliefs from Christianity, and warns readers that he is "particularly uncompromising" on the doctrine of the Trinity, which he blames on "the violent ultimate crystallization of Nicaea." He pleads for a "modern religion" or "renascent religion" that has "no revelation and no founder." Wells rejects any belief related to God as Nature or the Creator, confining himself to the "finite" God "of the human heart." He devotes a chapter to...

Mr. Polly sat on a stile and cursed. He cursed the world, his wife, and himself, for Mr. Polly was thirty-five years old and buried alive. He hated his slovenly wife, his fellow shopkeepers, and every other person in the world. He felt that his life had been nothing but one frustration after another, from babyhood into his middle thirties. Mr. Polly had been the usual adored baby, kissed and petted by his parents. His mother had died when he was seven years old. After the routine sketchy schooling of his class, he was apprenticed by his father to the owner of a draper's shop. Although Mr....