can get at the manner of most writers, and tell what it is, but I should be baffled to tell what Tolstoy’s manner is; perhaps he has no manner.  This appears to me true of his novels, which, with their vast variety of character and incident, are alike in their single endeavor to get the persons living before you, both in their action and in the peculiarly dramatic interpretation of their emotion and cogitation.  There are plenty of novelists to tell you that their characters felt and thought so and so, but you have to take it on trust; Tolstoy alone makes you know how and why it was so with them and not otherwise.  If there is anything in him which can be copied or burlesqued it is this ability of his to show men inwardly as well as outwardly; it is the only trait of his which I can put my hand on.

After ‘The Cossacks’ I read ‘Anna Karenina’ with a deepening sense of the author’s unrivalled greatness.  I thought that I saw through his eyes a human affair of that most sorrowful sort as it must appear to the Infinite Compassion; the book is a sort of revelation of human nature in circumstances that have been so perpetually lied about that we have almost lost the faculty of perceiving the truth concerning an illicit love.  When you have once read ‘Anna Karenina’ you know how fatally miserable and essentially unhappy such a love must be.  But the character of Karenin himself is quite as important as the intrigue of Anna and Vronsky.  It is wonderful how such a man, cold, Philistine and even mean in certain ways, towers into a sublimity unknown (to me, at least), in fiction when he forgives, and yet knows that he cannot forgive with dignity.  There is something crucial, and something triumphant, not beyond the power, but hitherto beyond the imagination of men in this effect, which is not solicited, not forced, not in the least romantic, but comes naturally, almost inevitably, from the make of man.

The vast prospects, the far-reaching perspectives of ‘War and Peace’ made it as great a surprise for me in the historical novel as ‘Anna Karenina’ had been in the study of contemporary life; and its people and interests did not seem more remote, since they are of a civilization always as strange and of a humanity always as known.

I read some shorter stories of Tolstoy’s before I came to this greatest work of his:  I read ‘Scenes of the Siege of Sebastopol,’ which is so much of the same quality as ‘War and Peace;’ and I read ‘Policoushka’ and most of his short stories with a sense of my unity with their people such as I had never felt with the people of other fiction.