some corresponding or consequent action which takes place visibly before us.  You will find, throughout Tolstoi’s work, many striking single scenes, but never, I think, a scene which can bear detachment from that network of detail which has led up to it and which is to come out of it.  Often the scene which most profoundly impresses one is a scene trifling in itself, and owing its impressiveness partly to that very quality.  Take, for instance, in “Resurrection,” Book II., chapter xxviiii., the scene in the theatre “during the second act of the eternal ‘Dame aux Camelias,’ in which a foreign actress once again, and in a novel manner, showed how women died of consumption.”  The General’s wife, Mariette, smiles at Nekhludoff in the box, and, outside, in the street, another woman, the other “half-world,” smiles at him, just in the same way.  That is all, but to Nekhludoff it is one of the great crises of his life.  He has seen something, for the first time, in what he now feels to be its true light, and he sees it “as clearly as he saw the palace, the sentinels, the fortress, the river, the boats and the Stock Exchange.  And just as on this northern summer night there was no restful darkness on the earth, but only a dismal, dull light coming from an invisible source, so in Nekhludoff’s soul there was no longer the restful darkness, ignorance.”  The chapter is profoundly impressive; it is one of those chapters which no one but Tolstoi has ever written.  Imagine it transposed to the stage, if that were possible, and the inevitable disappearance of everything that gives it meaning!

In Tolstoi the story never exists for its own sake, but for the sake of a very definite moral idea.  Even in his later novels Tolstoi is not a preacher; he gives us an interpretation of life, not a theorising about life.  But, to him, the moral idea is almost everything, and (what is of more consequence) it gives a great part of its value to his “realism” of prisons and brothels and police courts.  In all forms of art, the point of view is of more importance than the subject-matter.  It is as essential for the novelist to get the right focus as it is for the painter.  In a page of Zola and in a page of Tolstoi you might find the same gutter described with the same minuteness; and yet in reading the one you might see only the filth, while in reading the other you might feel only some fine human impulse.  Tolstoi “sees life steadily” because he sees it under a divine light; he has a saintly patience with evil, and so becomes a casuist through sympathy, a psychologist out of that pity which is understanding.  And then, it is as a direct consequence of this point of view, in the mere process of unravelling things, that his greatest skill is shown as a novelist.  He does not exactly write well; he is satisfied if his words express their meaning, and no more; his words have neither beauty nor subtlety in themselves.  But, if you will only give him time, for he needs time, he will creep closer and closer up to some doubtful and remote truth, not knowing itself for what it is:  he will reveal the soul to itself, like “God’s spy.”