tside, 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."

If you want to know how, daily life goes on among people who know as
little