There are a few great works, both in art and literature, which impress us not so much by their beauty as by their compelling power. No one can listen to the “Ring of the Nibelungs” without feeling the hand of a master in the creation of the harmonies it contains. No one can look on the figures painted by Michael Angelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel without a sense of awe in the presence of forms of such majesty and power. The nameless bronze by St. Gaudens, known as the Adams Monument, in the Rock Creek Cemetery at Washington will impose silence upon a chattering group of visitors the moment they enter the enclosure of evergreens that surrounds it. The rage of Othello and the horror of Macbeth make us shudder whether we will or no. Dante has the same commanding power over his readers.
Among the writers of fiction there is none who impress us in this way more profoundly than Tolstoi. His novels are often quite formless. There is no carefully developed plot, as with Scott or Wilkie Collins. The characters are by no means so strongly marked, they are neither so admirable nor so detestable as those ofDickens or of Victor Hugo. There is little humor in the narrative. The conversation is seldom brilliant, and is sometimes tedious. The style has no ornamentation, yet its very simplicity commands, and while we read we feel that we are in the hands of a master.
Probably no one since Shakespeare has had the power of penetrating the springs of human thought and action more accurately than Tolstoi. He startles us with revelations of traits in our own character which we have never realized, or instants in our own lives which we have never recalled before and which we recognize at once when we see them upon his pages, so that at every turn we exclaim, “How true that is! I have known that myself!” He is the greatest of all realists—not a mere photographer, for the photographer reproduces the insignificant and the unessential. Tolstoi gives us no long preliminary descriptions of persons or things, such as we find in Balzac or Walter Scott, but the really suggestive fact or trait appears at the right moment and gives a vividness and reality to the picture which no detailed account could ever convey.
A mother is teaching her son. “The boy was reading aloud, but at the same time twisting and trying to pull from his vest a button that was hanging loose. His mother had many times reproved him, but the plump little hand kept returning to the button. At last she had to take the button off and put it in her pocket. ‘Keep your handsstill, Grisha,’ said she, and again took up the bedquilt on which she had long been at work and which always came handy at trying moments. She worked nervously, jerking her fingers and counting the stitches.”
In another place a father is instructing his child. “The lesson consisted of a recitation of several verses of the Gospel and the review of the first part of the Old Testament. The lesson went fairly well, but suddenly the boy was struck by the appearance of his father’s forehead, which made almost a right angle near the temples, and he gave the end of the verses entirely wrong. The father concluded he did not understand what he was reciting and was vexed.”
The leader in a ball room pays a compliment to his partner. “‘It is restful to dance with you,’ said he, as he fell into the slow measures of the waltz. ‘Charming! Such lightness! such precision!’ This is what he said to almost all his dancing acquaintances.”
These slight touches give a better idea of what takes place than many words. The descriptions, as we have observed, are few and brief, but how graphic are they in their simple statements!
The visit of Levin, the country proprietor, to his stable to see a cow which has just calved is thus narrated. “Crossing the courtyard, where the snow was heaped under the lilac bushes, he stepped up to the stable. As he opened the door, which creaked on its frosty hinges, he was met by the warm, penetrating breath from the stalls, and the cattle, astonished at the unwontedlight of the lantern, turned around from their beds of fresh straw. The shiny black and white face of his Holland cow gleamed in the obscurity. Berkut, the bull, with a ring in his nose, tried to get to his feet but changed his mind and only snorted when they approached his stanchion. The beautiful Pava, huge as a hippopotamus, was lying near her calf, snuffing at it and protecting it with her back as with a rampart from those who would come too close.
“Levin entered the stall, examined Pava, and lifted the calf, spotted with red and white, on its long, awkward legs. Pava bellowed with anxiety, but was reassured when the calf was restored to her and began to lick it with her rough tongue. The calf hid its nose under its mother’s side and frisked its tail.”
No one has ever described the coming of Spring more vividly yet more simply than Tolstoi. “It snowed on Easter Sunday. Then suddenly on the following day a south wind blew up, the clouds drifted over, and for three days and three nights a warm and heavy rain fell ceaselessly. On Thursday the wind went down, and then over the earth was spread a thick gray mist, as if to conceal the mysteries that were accomplishing in nature: the ice in every direction was melting and disappearing; the rivers overflowed their banks; the brooks came tumbling down with foamy, muddy waters. Towards evening the Red hill began to show through the fog, the clouds drifted away like white sheep, and Spring in reality was there in allher brilliancy. Next morning a bright sun melted away the thin scales of ice which still remained, and the warm atmosphere grew moist with the vapors rising from the earth. The dry grass immediately took a greenish tint, and the young blades began to peep from the sod like millions of tiny needles. The buds on the birch trees, the gooseberry bushes, and the snow-ball trees swelled with sap, and around their branches swarms of honey bees buzzed in the sun. Invisible larks sent forth their songs of joy to see the prairies free from snow. The lapwings seemed to mourn their marshes, submerged by the stormy waters. The wild swans and geese flew high in the air, with their calls of spring. The cows, with rough hair and places worn bare by the stanchions, lowed as they left their stalls. Around the heavy, flossy sheep gambolled awkwardly the young lambs. Children ran barefoot over wet paths, where their footprints were left like fossils. The peasant women gossiped gaily around the edge of the pond where they were bleaching their linen. From all sides resounded the axes of the peasants, repairing their plows and their wagons. Spring had really come.”
The shattering of an ideal by a single word of disparagement is thus shown when a young girl hears from her father that the pious Madame Stahl, whom she had idolized, kept her bed because one leg was shorter than the other and she did not wish it noticed. “Her ideal of holiness, as seen in Madame Stahl, which she had for awhole month carried in her soul, had irrevocably disappeared, as a face seen in a garment thrown down by chance disappears when one really sees how the garment is lying. She retained only the image of a lame woman who stayed in bed to conceal her deformity, and who tormented poor Varenka because her plaid was not arranged to suit her, and it became impossible for her imagination to bring back to her the remembrance of the former Madame Stahl.”
How could domestic discomfort be better pictured than when a mother, with her six children, arrives at her country home and undergoes the following tribulations:
“The roof was leaking, the water dripped in the corridor and the nursery, and the little beds had to be brought down into the parlor. It was impossible to find a cook. Among the nine cows in the barn, according to the dairy-woman’s report, some were going to calve and the rest were either too young or too old, and consequently they could not have butter, or even milk for the children. Not an egg was to be had; it was impossible to find a hen. They had for roasting or broiling one tough old purple rooster. No women were to be found to do the washing; all were at work in the fields. They could not drive because one of the horses was balky and would not be harnessed. They had to give up bathing because the bank of the river had been trodden into a quagmire by the cattle, and, moreover, it was too conspicuous.... Walking near thehouse was not pleasant because the tumble-down fences let the cattle into the garden and there was in the herd a terrible bull that bellowed and was reported to be ugly. In the house there was not a clothes-press. The closet doors either would not shut or flew open when any one passed. In the kitchen there were no pots or kettles; in the laundry there were no tubs, nor even any scrubbing-boards for the girls.”
Nowhere, perhaps, in all literature, is a hunting expedition so graphically described as in the account of the party that set forth from Levin’s. The feelings of the hunters and of the dogs themselves are given with quiet but convincing realism.
It may be doubted whether some of Tolstoi’s shorter works are not more artistic productions than either of his two long novels. To take the single instance of a rather commonplace official who falls ill and dies and to make out of it the terrible tragedy of “Ivan Ilytch” requires, perhaps, even higher powers than to give such variegated pictures of life as appear in “War and Peace” or in “Anna Karenina.” Yet the latter novel, being many-sided and comprehensive, is perhaps his most representative, as it is certainly his best known work, and it must justly be ranked as among the very foremost of the masterpieces of fiction.
The book opens with an account of the confusion in the house of the Oblonskys when the easy-going and good-tempered Prince Stepan is detected by his wife Dolly in an intrigue with theFrench governess, and whose “stupid smile” when confronted with the letter that betrays him, “causes the whole trouble.” The Prince can not really repent and persuade himself that he loves his wife, whose charms have faded; he regrets only that he had not hid the thing more adroitly, and his sister Anna is called from Petersburg to Moscow to secure a reconciliation. Although he was entirely wrong, almost every one in the house was on his side, except his little girl, who knew only that there was trouble and that her mother was unhappy and who blushed for her father when he asked her so lightly after her mother’s welfare, until he too blushed when he perceived it. About the same time Levin, the country proprietor, also comes to Moscow to woo Kitty, the younger sister of the unfortunate wife. He had fallen in love successively with each of the daughters of the house, but his affection was now centered on the youngest, whom he deemed a creature so accomplished that he scarcely dared aspire to her hand. They had been old friends for many years, but Kitty had then another admirer, one Vronsky, a brilliant young officer, to whom at the moment her preference was given and Levin’s blunt offer was rejected. But Vronsky, who had gone to the railway station to meet his mother (whom he did not love and to whom for that very reason he was all the more conventionally considerate) found her in company with Anna Karenina, who had come to Moscowto compose Dolly’s troubles with her husband. Anna is the beautiful and accomplished wife of Karenin, an estimable but matter-of-fact Russian official, greatly her senior in age, who was making for himself an enviable career in the public service. At the station and afterwards at a ball Anna meets the young officer, and the two instantly fall in love with each other with a passion so deep and lasting that it can not afterwards be extinguished. This passion is at first, however, expressed only by inferences. Thus, an accident occurs at the station; a train-hand is crushed, and a pitiful scene described when the widow perceives his dead body; Vronsky leaves two hundred roubles for her relief, an act which Anna sees and feels that it “concerns herself too closely.” Anna composes successfully the domestic trouble between Prince Stepan and his wife, and here, too, the complete reconciliation appears in the chiding and ironical banter renewed between the pair rather than from any express acknowledgment.
But Anna, who has thus healed the wound in her brother’s household, has torn open one far more fatal in her own. Vronsky, who has neglected Kitty for the brilliant creature in whom his whole soul is now absorbed, meets Anna again at the station as she leaves. “I came simply for this, to be where you are,” he said. “I could not do otherwise.” Her eyes belied the remonstrance that she forced to her lips, and when she returned to Petersburg, where her husband was waiting for her, her first thought as she gazed onhis really distinguished face was, “Good Lord! Why are his ears so long?” When Vronsky afterwards meets her at a drawing-room in that city and she has forbidden him to speak of love, she feels that by the very use of the word “forbidden” she has recognized a certain jurisdiction over him which has encouraged him to speak.
Her husband, who had noticed that others were observing thetête-à-têtebetween his wife and the handsome officer, resolved to admonish her. “‘Anna, I must put you on your guard.’
“‘On my guard? Why?’ She looked at him so gayly, so innocently, that for any one who did not know her as her husband did the tone of her voice would have sounded perfectly natural, but for him, who knew that he could not deviate from the least of his habits without her asking the reason, who knew that her first impulse was always to tell him of her pleasures and her sorrows, the fact that Anna took special pains not to observe his agitation, or even to speak, was very significant to him. He felt by the very tone that she assumed that she had said openly and without dissimulation, ‘Well, thus it must be, and from henceforth.’ He felt like a man who should come home and find his house barricaded against him....
“‘Your rather too lively conversation this evening with Count Vronsky attracted attention.’ As he spoke he looked at Anna’s laughing eyes, for him so impenetrable, and saw with a feeling of terror all the idleness and uselessness of his words....He trembled; again he twisted his fingers till the knuckles cracked.
“‘I beg of you, keep your hands still; I detest that,’ said she.
“‘Anna, is this you?’ he said, trying to control himself and stop the movement of his hands.”
When he declares that he loves her a frown passes over her face. The word irritates her.
“‘Love!’ she thought; ‘does he even know what it means!’ And when they retired she waited long without moving, expecting that he would speak to her, but he said nothing. Then the image of another filled her with emotion and with guilty joy. Suddenly she heard a slow and regular sound of snoring. ‘Too late! Too late!’ she thought, with a smile. She remained for a long time thus, motionless, with open eyes, the shining of which it seemed to her she herself could see. From this night a new life began for Karenin and his wife. There was no outward sign of it. Anna continued to go into society, and everywhere she met Vronsky. Karenin understood it, but was powerless to prevent it. Whenever he tried to bring about an explanation she met him with humorous surprise which was beyond his penetration.”
Another incident revealed to him still more clearly the terrible truth. A hurdle race at which Vronsky rode is described with a realism of which Tolstoi only is the master. Anna’s husband observes her while she watches the contest in whichher lover is involved. “Her face was pale and stern. Nothing existed for her beyond the one person whom she was watching. Her hands convulsively clutched her fan. She held her breath.... He did not wish to look at her, but his gaze was irresistibly drawn to her face, whereon he read only too plainly and with feelings of horror all that he had tried to ignore.” When others fell in the race he saw that those were not the ones on whom her gaze was riveted. “The more he studied her face the greater became his shame. Absorbed as she was in her interest in Vronsky’s course, Anna was conscious that her husband’s cold eyes were upon her, and she turned around toward him for an instant questioningly and with a slight frown. ‘Ah! I don’t care,’ she seemed to say as she turned her glass to the race. She did not look at him again. The race was disastrous. Out of the seventeen riders more than half were thrown, and at last Vronsky fell. The terror caused by this was so universal that Anna’s cry of horror caused no astonishment, but her face continued to show more lively symptoms of her anxiety. She lost her presence of mind; she tried to escape like a bird caught in a snare. Her husband hastened to her and offered her his arm.
“‘Come, if it is your wish to go,’ he said in French; but she did not heed him, and gazed at the place where Vronsky had fallen. Her husband offered his arm again, and she drew back with aversion.”
At last, however, she feels compelled to accompanyhim to the carriage, and on the way home he reproves her.
“‘You have behaved improperly, and I would ask you not to let this happen again.’
“She heard only half of his words; she felt overwhelmed with fear; and she thought only of Vronsky, and whether he was killed.... She looked at her husband with an ironical smile, and answered not a word, because she had not noticed what he said. At first he had spoken boldly; but as he saw clearly what he was speaking about, the terror which possessed her seized him. At first her smile led him into a strange mistake. ‘She is amused at my suspicions! She is going to tell me now that they are groundless; that this is absurd.’ Such an answer he longed to hear: he was so afraid that his suspicions would be confirmed, that he was ready to believe any thing she might say. But the expression of her gloomy and frightened face allowed no further chance of falsehood.
“‘Possibly I am mistaken,’ said he: ‘in that case, I beg you to forgive me.’
“‘No, you are not mistaken,’ she replied, with measured words, casting a look of despair on her husband’s icy face. ‘You are not mistaken: I hear you, but I am thinking only of him. I love him. I have been false to you. I cannot endure you, I fear you, I hate you! Do with me as you please!’ And, throwing herself into the bottom of the carriage, she covered her face with herhands, and burst into tears.”...
“No one except Karenin’s most intimate friends suspected that this apparently cold and rational man had one weakness absolutely contradictory to the general consistency of his character. He could not look on with indifference when a child or a woman was weeping. The sight of tears caused him to lose his self-control, and destroyed for him his reasoning faculties.
“Karenin in spite of his anger against his wife could not forget the feeling which her weeping caused, and in his effort to control himself his face assumed an appearance of deathlike rigidity. When he reached home he deliberated upon his course. He thought of a duel, but as he was a timid man, he discarded it. He knew that ‘his friends would never allow him to fight and permit the life of a government official so indispensable to Russia to be exposed to danger.’ The service of the state, always important, assumed unwonted magnitude. As to divorce, public scandal would cause him to fall in public opinion. Separation was equally impossible. His only course was to keep his wife under his protection, doing what he could to break off her illicit relationship with Vronsky and preserving in every way possible his ostensible relations with her. ‘Only by acting in this manner,’ he thought to himself, ‘did he conform with the laws of religion, refusing to send away his guilty wife and consecrating his powers to her regeneration.’ He had not thought of finding a foothold in religion until he had settled the matter upon other grounds, then thissanction gave him full comfort and satisfaction.”
But the illicit relations continued and the scandal grew, until at last divorce seemed to him the only remedy, and he began to make preparations for the suit, but from this project he was recalled by a telegram from his wife that she was dying and would die easier if she had his forgiveness. When he reached his home, the Swiss opened the door even before Karenin rang the bell; dressed in an old coat and slippers.
“‘How is thebaruina!’
“‘She is as comfortable as could be expected.’
“Karenin turned very pale; he realized how deeply he had hoped for her death.”...
“A uniform overcoat hung in the hall. Karenin noticed it, and asked,—
“‘Who is here?’
“‘The doctor, the nurse, and Count Vronsky.’
“Karenin went into the drawing-room. There was nobody there; but the sound of his steps brought the nurse, in a cap with lilac ribbons, out of theboudoir. She came to Karenin, and, taking him by the hand with the familiarity that the approach of death permits, led him into the sleeping-room.
“‘Thank the Lord that you have come! She talks of nothing but you; always of you,’ she said.
“‘Bring some ice quick!’ said the imperative voice of the doctor from the chamber.
“In theboudoir, sitting on a little low chair, Karenin saw Vronsky weeping, his face covered with his hands. He started at the sound of thedoctor’s voice, uncovered his face, and found himself in the presence of Karenin. The sight of him disturbed him so much that he sank down in his chair, as if he wanted to disappear out of sight; then, making a great effort, he rose, and said,—
“‘She is dying: the doctors say that there is no hope. I am in your power. Only allow me to remain here. I will conform to your wishes in every other respect. I’—
“When he saw Vronsky in tears, Karenin felt the involuntary tenderness that the sufferings of others always caused him: he turned away his head without replying, and went to the door.”
“Karenin’s wrinkled face expressed acute suffering: he wanted to speak, but his lower lip trembled so that he could not utter a word, and his emotion hardly allowed him to glance at his dying wife. He took her hand, and held it between his own. Every time that he turned his head towards her, he saw her eyes fixed on him with a sweetness and a humility that he had never seen there before.
“‘Wait! you do not know—Wait, wait!’ She stopped to collect her thoughts. ‘Yes,’ she began again, ‘yes, yes, yes, this is what I want to say. Do not be astonished. I am always the same, but there is another being within me, whom I fear: it is she who loved him,him, and hated you; and I could not forget what I had once been. Now I am myself, entirely, really myself, and not another. I am dying, I know that I am dying....One thing only is indispensable to me: forgive me, forgive me wholly! I am a sinner; but Serozha’s nurse told me that there was a holy martyr—what was her name?—who was worse than I. I will go to Rome: there is a desert there. I shall not trouble anybody there. I will only take Serozha and my little daughter. No, you cannot forgive me: I know very well that it is impossible. Go away, go away! you are too perfect!’
“She held him with one of her burning hands, and pushed him away with the other.
“Karenin’s emotion became so great that he could no longer control himself. He suddenly felt his emotions change to a moral reconciliation, which seemed like a new and unknown happiness. He had not believed that the Christian law, which he had taken for a guide in life, ordered him to forgive and love his enemies; and yet his soul was filled with love and forgiveness. Kneeling beside the bed, he laid his forehead on her arm, the fever of which burned through the sleeve, and sobbed like a child.”...
“Vronsky came to the side of the bed, and, when he saw Anna, he hid his face in his hands.
“‘Uncover your face, look at him, he is a saint,’ said she. ‘Uncover your face! look at him!’ she repeated in an irritated manner. ‘Karenin, uncover his face: I want to see him.’
“Karenin took Vronsky’s hands and uncovered his face, disfigured by suffering and humiliation.
“‘Give him your hand; forgive him.’
“Karenin held out his hand to him, without trying to keep back the tears.”...
“‘The happiness I feel at being able to forgive, clearly shows me my duty. I offer the other cheek to the smiter: I give my last cloak to him who has robbed me. I only ask one thing of God,—that he will not take away from me this joy of forgiving.’
“Tears filled his eyes. Vronsky was amazed at the calm, luminous face.
“‘These are my feelings. You may drag me in the dust, and make me the laughing-stock of creation; but I will not give up Anna for that, nor will I utter a word of reproach to you,’ continued Karenin. ‘My duty seems clear and plain to me: I must remain with her; I shall remain with her. If she wishes to see you, I shall inform you of it; but now I think it will be better for you to go away.’
“Karenin rose: sobs choked his voice. Vronsky rose too, and, standing with bowed head and humble attitude, looked up at Karenin, without a word to say. He was incapable of understanding Karenin’s feelings, but he felt that such magnanimity was above him, and irreconcilable with his conception of life.”
But Anna recovers, and her old guilty love for Vronsky returns. She flees with him to other countries in Europe, but the tumult in her soul will not subside and social ostracism confronts her everywhere. She returns with Vronsky and lives for a time on his estates in Russia, and there arebrief intervals of happiness. Dolly visits her and finds that “Anna was all aglow with that elusive beauty which comes to a woman through the assurance of love returned. Her smiles which, as it were, flew over her face, her brilliant eyes, her graceful and quick motions, her voice, her whole person, from the dimples of her cheeks and the curve of her lip, with its full, rich sounds, and even the quiet, friendly manner in which she replied to a visitor who asked permission to mount her horse, was instinct with a seductive charm. It seemed as if she herself knew it, and was pleased.”
But this is for a moment. In spite of her passion and the constant devotion of her lover quarrels continually arise, jealousies, the fear of abandonment, and at last the desire for revenge upon one who she unjustly imagines is false or indifferent. Her final resolution is suicide, “to make him repent.” She accomplishes her purpose at a railway station under the same conditions as those when she first met her lover.
“Suddenly she remembered the man who was run over on the day when she saw Vronsky for the first time, and she knew then what was in store for her. With light and swift steps she descended the stairway which led from the pump at the end of the platform down to the rails, and stood very near the train, which was slowly passing by. She looked under the cars, at the chains and the brake, and the high iron wheels, and she tried to estimate with her eye the distance between the fore andback wheels, and the moment when the middle would be in front of her.
“‘There,’ she said, looking at the shadow of the car thrown upon the black coal-dust which covered the sleepers, ‘there, in the center, he will be punished, and I shall be delivered from it all,—and from myself.’
“Her little red travelling-bag caused her to lose the moment when she could throw herself under the wheels of the first car: she could not detach it from her arm. She awaited the second. A feeling like that she had experienced once, just before taking a dive in the river, came over her, and she made the sign of the cross. This familiar gesture called back to her soul memories of youth and childhood. Life, with its elusive joys, glowed for an instant before her, but she did not take her eyes from the car; and when the middle, between the two wheels, appeared, she threw away her red bag, drawing her head between her shoulders, and, with outstretched hands, threw herself on her knees under the car. She had time to feel afraid. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ thought she, trying to draw back; but a great, inflexible mass struck her head, and threw her upon her back. ‘Lord, forgive me all!’ she murmured, feeling the struggle to be in vain.... And the candle by which she read, as in a book, the fulfilment of her life’s work, of its deceptions, its grief, and its torment, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness,then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.”
Side by side with this tragedy of unlawful passion, the scenes alternating every few chapters, is the development of the normal love of Levin for Kitty, in scenes which are believed to have been taken from the life of Tolstoi himself. Strange to say that, if this be so, the passages of his own experience are less impressive (if not less realistic) than his imaginative story of the guilty pair. There are long and inconsequent discussions of agrarian problems, and a revelation of Levin’s varying moods, which are, indeed, extremely true to life, but awaken less sympathy or interest than the drama between Anna and Vronsky. Levin proposes to Kitty again, rather awkwardly, one would say, with chalk initials written on a card table, the meaning of which she guesses and answers in kind, an answer which he readily devines. Before their marriage he makes to her a full written confession of all the shortcomings of his past life. She is not at all alarmed or startled at his declaration of religious unbelief, but certain passages revealing past immoralities impress her as “terrible.” He finds her in tears, and she reproaches him for showing it to her, yet grants him forgiveness. The wedding is graphically described, especially the incident which shows the bridegroom “ramping with despair like a wild beast in its cage” while the people were waiting in church, because he could not find his shirt. Then comes the honeymoon, in which he finds thatmarried life was utterly different from his dreams.
“His surprise was great to find this charming and poetic Kitty, thinking, planning, taking charge of the linen, the furniture, the mattresses, the table service, the kitchen. The decided way in which she refused to travel, so that they might come immediately to their country home, and her willingness to let it be known that she knew something about domestic economy, and could think of such things in spite of her love, had struck him even during their engagement. It vexed him then, and now he felt still more vexed to find that she cared for these wearisome minutiae and the material side of life. But he saw that it was unavoidable.”
Their early quarrels are delineated with convincing realism, and perhaps the strongest chapters in this part of the work are those in which he describes Kitty’s insistence on going with him to visit his profligate brother, Nikolai, who is dying with consumption and in great poverty, being tended only by a poor creature who had long lived with him as his wife. Levin at first refused to allow her to go, declaring it impossible.
“‘I tell you, if you go, I am going too. I shall certainly go with you,’ said she with angry determination. ‘I should like to know why it would be impossible. Why did you say that?’
“—‘Because God knows when or in what place I shall find him, or by what means I shall reach him. You would only hinder me,’ said he, doing his best to retain his self-control.
“‘Not at all, I don’t need anything. Where you can go, I can go, too, and’—
“‘Well! If it were only because of this woman, with whom you cannot come in contact.’—
“‘Why not? I know nothing about all that, and don’t want to know. I know that my husband’s brother is dying; that my husband is going to see him; and I am going too’—
“‘Kitty! don’t be angry! and remember that in such a serious time it is painful for me to have you add to my grief by showing your weakness,—the fear of being alone. If you are lonely, go to Moscow’—
“‘Youalwaysascribe to me that I have such miserable sentiments,’ she cried, choking with tears of vexation. ‘I am not so weak.... I know it is my duty to be with my husband when he is in sorrow, and you want to wound me on purpose. You don’t want to take me’—
“‘Ah! this is frightful! to be such a slave!’ cried Levin, rising from the table, no longer able to hide his anger.
“‘Why, then, did you get married? You might have been free. Why—if you repent already?’—and Kitty fled from the room.
“When he went to find her, she was sobbing.
“He began to speak, striving to find words, not to persuade her, but to calm her. She would not listen, and did not allow one of his arguments. He bent over her, took one of her recalcitrant hands, kissed it, kissed her hair, and then her hands again; but still she refused to speak. Butwhen, at length, he took her head between his two hands and called her, ‘Kitty,’ she softly wept, and the reconciliation was complete.”
He found his brother suffering, amid squalid and sordid surroundings. Levin was struck with the uncleanliness and disorder of the room, and the bad air and the sick man’s groans, and it seemed to him that there was no hope. It did not occur to him to investigate how his poor limbs were lying, under the coverlid, to try to comfort him materially, and if he could not improve his condition, at least to make the best of a bad situation. The mere thought of these details made a cold chill run down his back; and the sick man, feeling instinctively that his brother was powerless to help him, was irritated. So Levin kept leaving the room under various pretexts, and coming back again,—unhappy to be with his brother, still more unhappy to be away from him, and unable to stay alone by himself.
“Kitty saw these things under a very different light: as soon as she came near the dying man, she was filled with pity for him, and instead of feeling fear or repulsion, her womanly heart moved her to seek every means of ameliorating his sad condition. Convinced that it was her duty to help him, she did not doubt the possibility of making him more comfortable, and she set herself to work without delay. The details which repelled her husband were the very ones which attracted her attention. She sent for a doctor, she went to the drug store; she set her maid and Marya Nikolayevnato sweeping, washing, and dusting, and she helped them herself. She had all needless articles carried away, and she had them replaced by things that were needed. Without minding those whom she met on the way, she came and went from her room to her brother-in-law’s, unpacking the articles that were necessary,—cloths, pillow-cases, towels, nightshirts....
“‘Go and get a little flask out of my bag, and bring it to me,’ she said to her husband. ‘In the meantime we will finish fixing him.’
“When Levin came back with the flask, the invalid was lying down in bed, and everything about him had assumed a different appearance. Instead of the stuffy air which they were breathing before, Kitty was perfuming the room with aromatic vinegar from an atomizer. The dust was all gone; a carpet was spread under the bed; on a little table were arranged the medicine vials, acarafe, the necessary linen, and Kitty’s English embroidery. On another table, near the bed, stood a candle, his medicine, and powders. The sick man, bathed, with smoothly brushed hair, lying between clean sheets, and propped up by several pillows, was dressed in a clean nightshirt, the white collar of which came around his extraordinarily long, thin neck. A new expression of hope shone in his eyes as he looked at Kitty....
“‘He has hidden it from the wise, and revealed it unto children and fools,’ thought Levin as he was talking with his wife a little while later.”
The description of the sufferings and death ofNikolai are given with a fidelity to truth which must commend itself to all those who have witnessed the last days of agony in those who are near to them.
We are now led on to another scene of Tolstoi’s realism, the birth of his first child, and here, too, every detail—the cheerfulness of the young wife amid her suffering, the terror, anxiety, and utter uselessness of the husband upon this critical occasion—were never set forth with greater power. Tolstoi writes very freely upon subjects in regard to which we English-speaking people deal with restraint and much false modesty, so that his plain-speaking is quite startling to us as we read.
In the later pages of the book are described the conversion of Levin (probably Tolstoi himself) to that religious faith which became the controlling force of his life. Evidently he had not advanced very far when the book closed, for this religious regeneration did not materially change his nature for the better nor make him so happy as he hoped, and he thus concludes: “I shall probably continue to be vexed with Ivan the coachman, and get into useless discussions, and express my thoughts blunderingly. I shall always be blaming my wife for what annoys me, and repenting at once. I shall always feel a certain barrier between the sanctuary of my inmost soul, and the souls of others, even my wife’s. I shall continue to pray without being able to explain to myself why, but my inward life has conquered its liberty. It willbe no longer at the mercy of circumstances; and my whole life, every moment of my life, will be, not meaningless as before, but full of deep meaning, which I shall have power to impress on every action.”
In “Anna Karenina” the contrast is very strong between the two pairs, Anna and Vronsky on the one hand, and Levin and Kitty on the other, between the course of illicit and of lawful love. Yet one can not lay down the book without feeling that the concluding chapters have fallen off a little in power from those that had preceded them. But despite its prolixity and thus weakening at its close Anna Karenina is entitled to a place beside the very best that human genius has accomplished in the literature of fiction.