her figures of the forefront, down to the least of the
population of the background, I could almost say to the wonderful
little red baby that in one of the last chapters is disclosed to Levin
by the triumphant nurse--each of them is a centre of vision, each of
them looks out on a world that is not like the world of the rest, and
we know it. Without any elaborate research Tolstoy expresses the
nature of all their experience; he reveals the dull weight of it in
one man's life or its vibrating interest in another's; he shows how
for one it stirs and opens, with troubling enlargement, how for
another it remains blank and inert. He does so unconsciously, it might
seem, not seeking to construct the world as it appears to Anna or her
husband or her lover, but simply glancing now and then into their mood
of the moment, and indicating what he happens to find there. Yet it
is enough, and each of them is soon a human being whose privacy we
share. They are actors moving upon a visible scene, watched from the
reader's point of view; but they are also sentient lives, understood
from within.

Here, then, is a mixed method which enables Tolstoy to deal with his
immense subject on the lines of drama. He can follow its chronology
step by step, at an even pace throughout, without ever interrupting
the rhythm for that shift of the point of view--away from the
immediate scene to a more commanding height--which another writer
would certainly have found to be necessary sooner or later. He can
create a character in so few words--he can make the manner of a man's
or a woman's thought so quickly intelligible--that even though his
story is crowded and over-crowded with people he can render them all,
so to speak, by the way, give them all their due without any study of
them outside the passing episode. So he can, at least, in general; for
in Anna Karenina, as I said, his method seems to break down very
conspicuously at a certain juncture. But before I come to that, I
would dwell further upon this peculiar skill of Tolstoy's, this
facility which explains, I think, the curious flaw in his beautiful
novel. He would appear to have trusted his method too far, trusted it
not only to carry him through the development and the climax of his
story, but also to constitute his _donnee_, his prime situation in the
beginning. This was to throw too much upon it, and it is critically
of high interest to see where it failed, and why. The miscalculations
of a grea