s it passed. I have
been treating it as life; and that is all very well, and is the right
manner as far as it goes, but my treatment of life is capricious and
eclectic, and this life, this story of Anna, has suffered accordingly.
I have taken much out of it and carried away many recollections; I
have omitted to think of it as matter to be wrought into a single
form. What wonder if I search my mind in vain, a little later, for the
book that Tolstoy wrote?

But how is one to construct a novel out of the impressions that
Tolstoy pours forth from his prodigious hands? This is a kind of
"creative reading" (the phrase is Emerson's) which comes instinctively
to few of us. We know how to imagine a landscape or a conversation
when he describes it, but to gather up all these sights and sounds
into a compact fabric, round which the mind can wander freely, as
freely as it strays and contemplates and loses its way, perhaps, in
Tolstoy's wonderful world--this is a task which does not achieve
itself without design and deliberation on the part of the reader. It
is an effort, first of all, to keep the world of Anna (I cling to this
illustration) at a distance; and yet it must be kept at a distance if
it is to be impressed with the form of art; no artist (and the skilful
reader is an artist) can afford to be swayed and beset by his
material, he must stand above it. And then it is a further effort,
prolonged, needing practice and knowledge, to recreate the novel in
its right form, the best form that the material, selected and disposed
by the author, is capable of accepting.

The reader of a novel--by which I mean the critical reader--is himself
a novelist; he is the maker of a book which may or may not please his
taste when it is finished, but of a book for which he must take his
own share of the responsibility. The author does his part, but he
cannot transfer his book like a bubble into the brain of the critic;
he cannot make sure that the critic will possess his work. The reader
must therefore become, for his part, a novelist, never permitting
himself to suppose that the creation of the book is solely the affair
of the author. The difference between them is immense, of course, and
so much so that a critic is always inclined to extend and intensify
it. The opposition that he conceives between the creative and the
critical task is a very real one; but in modestly belittling his own
side of the business he is apt to forget an essential p