h a shape is ascribable, good or bad. I have spoken of the
difficulty that prevents us from ever seeing or describing the shape
with perfect certainty; but evidently we are convinced that it is
there, clothing the book.

Not as a single form, however, but as a moving stream of impressions,
paid out of the volume in a slender thread as we turn the pages--that
is how the book reaches us; or in another image it is a procession
that passes before us as we sit to watch. It is hard to think of this
lapse and flow, this sequence of figures and scenes, which must be
taken in a settled order, one after another, as existing in the
condition of an immobile form, like a pile of sculpture. Though we
readily talk of the book as a material work of art, our words seem to
be crossed by a sense that it is rather a process, a passage of
experience, than a thing of size and shape. I find this contradiction
dividing all my thought about books; they are objects, yes, completed
and detached, but I recall them also as tracts of time, during which
Clarissa and Anna moved and lived and endured in my view. Criticism is
hampered by the ambiguity; the two books, the two aspects of the same
book, blur each other; a critic seems to shift from this one to that,
from the thing carved in the stuff of thought to the passing movement
of life. And on the whole it is the latter aspect of the two which
asserts itself; the first, the novel with its formal outline, appears
for a moment, and then the life contained in it breaks out and
obscures it.

But the procession which passes across our line of sight in the
reading must be marshalled and concentrated somewhere; we receive the
story of Anna bit by bit, all the numerous fragments that together
make Tolstoy's book; and finally the tale is complete, and the book
stands before us, or should stand, as a welded mass. We have been
given the material, and the book should now be there. Our treacherous
memory will have failed to preserve it all, but that disability we
have admitted and discounted; at any rate an imposing object ought to
remain, Tolstoy's great imaginative sculpture, sufficiently
representing his intention. And again and again, at this point, I make
the same discovery; I have been watching the story, that is to say,
forgetful of the fact that there was more for me to do than to watch
receptively and passively, forgetful of the novel that I should have
been fashioning out of the march of experience a