It is Anna Karenina; and I turn to it now, not for its beauty and
harmony, not because it is one of the most exquisitely toned, shaded,
gradated pieces of portraiture in fiction, but because it happens to
show very clearly how an effect may be lost for want of timely
precaution. Tolstoy undoubtedly damaged a magnificent book by his
refusal to linger over any kind of pictorial introduction. There is
none in this story, the reader will remember. The whole of the book,
very nearly, is scenic, from the opening page to the last; it is a
chain of particular occasions, acted out, talked out, by the crowd of
people concerned. Each of these scenes is outspread before the
spectator, who watches the characters and listens to their dialogue;
there is next to no generalization of the story at any point. On every
page, I think, certainly on all but a very few of the many hundred
pages, the hour and the place are exactly defined. Something is
happening there, or something is being discussed; at any rate it is an
episode singled out for direct vision.
The plan of the book, in fact, is strictly dramatic; it allows no such
freedom as Balzac uses, freedom of exposition and retrospect. Tolstoy
never draws back from the immediate scene, to picture the manner of
life that his people led or to give a foreshortened impression of
their history. He unrolls it all as it occurs, illustrating everything
in action. It is an extraordinary feat, considering the amount of
experience he undertakes to display, with an interweaving of so many
lives and fortunes. And it is still more extraordinary, considering
the nature of the story, which is not really dramatic at all, but a
pictorial contrast, Anna and her affair on one side of it, Levin and
his on the other. The contrast is gradually extended and deepened
through the book; but it leads to no clash between the two, no
opposition, no drama. It is an effect of slow and inevitable change,
drawn out in minute detail through two lives, with all the others that
cluster round each--exactly the kind of matter that nobody but
Tolstoy, with his huge hand, would think of trying to treat
scenically. Tolstoy so treats it, however, and apparently never feels
any desire to break away from the march of his episodes or to fuse his
swarming detail into a general view. It means that he must write a
very long book, with scores and scores of scenes, but he has no
objection to that.
It is only in its plan, of course, that Anna Karenina is strictly
dramatic; its method of execution is much looser, and there indeed
Tolstoy allows himself as much freedom as he pleases. In the novel of
pure drama the point of view is that of the reader alone, as we saw;
there is no "going behind" the characters, no direct revelation of
their thought. Such consistency is out of the question, however, even
for Tolstoy, on the great scale of his book; and he never hesitates to
lay bare the mind of any of his people, at any moment, if it seems to
help the force or the lucidity of the scene. And so we speedily grow
familiar with the consciousness of many of them, for Tolstoy's hand is
always as light and quick as it is broad. He catches the passing
thought that is in a man's mind as he speaks; and though it may be no
more than a vague doubt or an idle fancy, it is somehow a note of the
man himself, a sign of his being, an echo of his inner tone. From Anna
and the other 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 _donnée_, 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 great genius are enlightening; here, in Anna Karenina, is one
that calls attention to Tolstoy's characteristic fashion of telling a
story, and declares its remarkable qualities.
The story of Anna, I suggested, is not essentially dramatic. Like the
story of Emma Bovary or of Eugénie Grandet, it is a picture outspread,
an impression of life, rather than an action. Anna at first has a life
that rests on many supports, with her husband and her child and her
social possessions; it is broadly based and its stability is assured,
if she chooses to rely on it. But her husband is a dull and pedantic
soul, and before long she chooses to exchange her assured life for
another that rests on one support only, a romantic passion. Her life
with Vronsky has no other security, and in process of time it fails.
Its gradual failure is her story--the losing battle of a woman who has
thrown away more resources than she could afford. But the point and
reason of the book is not in the dramatic question--what will happen,
will Anna lose or win? It is in the picture of her gathering and
deepening difficulties, difficulties that arise out of her position
and her mood, difficulties of which the only solution is at last her
death. And this story, with the contrasted picture of Levin's
domesticity that completes it, is laid out exactly as Balzac did _not_
lay out his story of Eugénie; it is all presented as action, because
Tolstoy's eye was infallibly drawn, whenever he wrote, to the instant
aspect of his matter, the play itself. He could not generalize it, and
on the whole there was no need for him to do so; for there was
nothing, not the least stir of motive or character, that could not be
expressed in the movement of the play as he handled it. Scene is laid
to scene, therefore, as many as he requires; he had no thought of
stinting himself in that respect. And within the limit of the scene he
was always ready to vary his method, to enter the consciousness of any
or all the characters at will, without troubling himself about the
possible confusion of effect which this might entail. He could afford
the liberty, because the main lines of his structure were so simple
and clear; the inconsistencies of his method are dominated by the
broad scenic regularity of his plan.
Balzac had not the master-hand of Tolstoy in the management of a
dramatic scene, an episode. When it comes to rendering a piece of
action Balzac's art is not particularly felicitous, and if we only
became acquainted with his people while they are talking and acting, I
think they might often seem rather heavy and wooden, harsh of speech
and gesture. Balzac's _general_ knowledge of them, and his power of
offering an impression of what he knows--these are so great that his
people are alive before they begin to act, alive with an energy that
is all-sufficient. Tolstoy's grasp of a human being's whole existence,
of everything that goes to make it, is not as capacious as Balzac's;
but on the other hand he can create a living scene, exquisitely and
easily expressive, out of anything whatever, the lightest trifle of an
incident. If he describes how a child lingered at the foot of the
stairs, teasing an old servant, or how a peasant-woman stood in a
doorway, laughing and calling to the men at work in the farmyard, the
thing becomes a poetic event; in half a page he makes an unforgettable
scene. It suddenly glows and flushes, and its effect in the story is
profound. A passing glimpse of this kind is caught, say, by Anna in
her hungry desperation, by Levin as he wanders and speculates; and
immediately their experience is the fuller by an eloquent memory. The
vividness of the small scene becomes a part of them, for us who read;
it is something added to our impression of their reality. And so the
half-page is not a diversion or an interlude; it speeds the story by
augmenting the tone and the value of the lives that we are watching.
It happens again and again; that is Tolstoy's way of creating a life,
of raising it to its full power by a gradual process of enrichment,
till Anna or Levin is at length a complete being, intimately
understood, ready for the climax of the tale.
But of course it takes time, and it chanced that this deliberation
made a special difficulty in the case of Anna's story. As for Levin,
it was easy to give him ample play; he could be left to emerge and to
assume his place in the book by leisurely degrees, for it is not until
much has passed that his full power is needed. Meanwhile he is a
figure in the crowd, a shy and disappointed suitor, unobtrusively
sympathetic, and there are long opportunities of seeing more of him in
his country solitude. Later on, when his fortunes come to the front
with his marriage, he has shown what he is; he steps fully fashioned
into the drama. With Anna it is very different; her story allows no
such pause, for a growing knowledge of the manner of woman she may be.
She is at once to the front of the book; the situation out of which
the whole novel develops is made by a particular crisis in her life.
She meets and falls in love with Vronsky--that is the crisis from
which the rest of her story proceeds; it is the beginning of the
action, the subject of the earliest chapters. And the difficulty lies
in this, that she must be represented upon such a critical height of
emotion before there is time, by Tolstoy's method, to create the right
effect for her and to make her impulse really intelligible. For the
reader it is all too abrupt, the step by which she abandons her past
and flings herself upon her tragic adventure. It is impossible to
measure her passion and her resolution, because she herself is still
incompletely rendered. She has appeared in a few charming scenes, a
finished and graceful figure, but that is not enough. If she is so
soon to be seen at this pitch of exaltation, it is essential that her
life should be fully shared by the onlooker; but as Tolstoy has told
the story, Anna is in the midst of her crisis and has passed it
before it is possible to know her life clearly from within. Alive and
beautiful she is from the very first moment of her appearance;
Tolstoy's art is much too sure to miss the right effect, so far as it
goes. And if her story were such that it involved her in no great
adventure at the start--if she could pass from scene to scene, like
Levin, quietly revealing herself--Tolstoy's method would be perfect.
But as it is, there is no adequate preparation; Anna is made to act as
a deeply stirred and agitated woman before she has the _value_ for
such emotions. She has not yet become a presence familiar enough, and
there is no means of gauging the force of the storm that is seen to
shake her.
It is a flaw in the book which has often been noticed, and it is a
flaw which Tolstoy could hardly have avoided, if he was determined to
hold to his scenic plan. Given his reluctance to leave the actually
present occasion, from the first page onwards, from the moment Anna's
erring brother wakes to his own domestic troubles at the opening of
the book, there is not room for the due creation of Anna's life. Her
turning-point must be reached without delay, it cannot be deferred,
for it is there that the development of the book begins. All that
precedes her union with Vronsky is nothing but the opening stage, the
matter that must be displayed before the story can begin to expand.
The story, as we have seen, is in the picture of Anna's life _after_
her critical choice, so that the first part of the book, the account
of the given situation, cannot extend its limits. If, therefore, the
situation is to be really made and constituted, the space it may cover
must be tightly packed; the method should be that which most condenses
and concentrates the representation. A great deal is to be expressed
at once, all Anna's past and present, the kind of experience that has
made her and that has brought her to the point she now touches.
Without this her action is arbitrary and meaningless; it is vain to
say that she acted thus and thus unless we perfectly understand what
she was, what she had, what was around her, in the face of her
predicament. Obviously there is no space to lose; and it is enough to
look at Tolstoy's use of it, and then to see how Balzac makes the
situation that _he_ requires--the contrast shows exactly where
Tolstoy's method could not help him. His refusal to shape his story,
or any considerable part of it, as a pictorial impression, his desire
to keep it all in immediate action, prevents him from making the most
of the space at his command; the situation is bound to suffer in
consequence.
For suppose that Balzac had had to deal with the life of Anna. He
would certainly have been in no hurry to plunge into the action, he
would have felt that there was much to treat before the scene was
ready to open. All the initial episodes of Tolstoy's book, from Anna's
first appearance until she drops into Vronsky's arms, Balzac might
well have ignored entirely. He would have been too busy with his
prodigious summary of the history and household of the Karenins to
permit himself a glance in the direction of any particular moment,
until the story could unfold from a situation thoroughly prepared. If
Tolstoy had followed this course we should have lost some enchanting
glimpses, but Balzac would have left not a shadow of uncertainty in
the matter of Anna's disastrous passion. He would have shown precisely
how she was placed in the conditions of her past, how she was exposed
to this new incursion from without, and how it broke up a life which
had satisfied her till then. He would have started his action in due
time with his whole preliminary effect completely rendered; there
would be no more question of it, no possibility that it would prove
inadequate for the sequel. And all this he would have managed, no
doubt, in fewer pages than Tolstoy needs for the beautiful scenes of
his earlier chapters, scenes which make a perfect impression of Anna
and her circle as an onlooker might happen to see them, but which fail
to give the onlooker the kind of intimacy that is needed. Later on,
indeed, her life is penetrated to the depths; but then it is too late
to save the effect of the beginning. To the very end Anna is a
wonderful woman whose early history has never been fully explained.
The facts are clear, of course, and there is nothing impossible about
them; but her passion for this man, the grand event of her life, has
to be assumed on the word of the author. All that he really showed,
to start with, was a slight, swift love-story, which might have ended
as easily as it began.
The method of the book, in short, does not arise out of the subject;
in treating it Tolstoy simply used the method that was congenial to
him, without regarding the story that he had to tell. He began it as
though Anna's break with her past was the climax to which the story
was to mount, whereas it is really the point from which the story sets
out for its true climax in her final catastrophe. And so the first
part of the book is neither one thing nor the other; it is not an
independent drama, for it cannot reach its height through all the
necessary sweep of development; and on the other hand it is not a
sufficient preparation for the great picture of inevitable disaster
which is to follow. Tolstoy doubtless counted on his power--and not
without reason, for it is amazing--to call people into life by means
of a few luminous episodes; he knew he could make a living creature of
Anna by bringing her into view in half a dozen scenes. She descends,
accordingly, upon her brother's agitated household like a beneficent
angel, she shines resplendent at some social function, she meets
Vronsky, she talks to her husband; and Tolstoy is right, she becomes a
real and exquisite being forthwith. But he did not see how much more
was needed than a simple personal impression of her, in view of all
that is to come. Not she only, but her world, the world as she sees
it, her past as it affects her--this too is demanded, and for this he
makes no provision. It is never really shown how she was placed in her
life, and what it meant to her; and her flare of passion has
consequently no importance, no fateful bigness. There is not enough of
her, as yet, for such a crisis.
It is not because Vronsky seems an inadequate object of her passion;
though it is true that with the figure of Vronsky Tolstoy was
curiously unsuccessful. Vronsky was his one failure--there is surely
no other in all his gallery to match it. The spoilt child of the
world, but a friendly soul, and a romantic and a patient lover--and a
type fashioned by conditions that Tolstoy, of course, knew by
heart--why should Tolstoy manage to make so little of him? It is
unfortunate, for when Anna is stirred by the sight of him and his
all-conquering speciosity, any reader is sure to protest. Tolstoy
should have created Vronsky with a more certain touch before he
allowed him to cause such a disturbance. But this is a minor matter,
and it would count for little if the figure of Anna were all it should
be. Vronsky's importance in the story is his importance to Anna, and
her view of him is a part of _her_; and he might be left lightly
treated on his own account, the author might be content to indicate
him rather summarily, so long as Anna had full attention. It returns
upon that again; if Anna's own life were really fashioned, Vronsky's
effect would be _there_, and the independent effect he happens to
make, or to fail to make, on the reader would be an irrelevant affair.
Tolstoy's vital failure is not with him, but with her, in the prelude
of his book.
It may be that there is something of the same kind to be seen in
another of his novels, in Resurrection, though Resurrection is more
like a fragment of an epic than a novel. It cannot be said that in
that tremendous book Tolstoy pictured the rending of a man's soul by
sudden enlightenment, striking in upon him unexpectedly, against his
will, and destroying his established life--and that is apparently the
subject in the author's mind. It is the woman, the accidental woman
through whom the stroke is delivered, who is actually in the middle of
the book; it is _her_ epic much rather than the man's, and Tolstoy did
not succeed in placing him where he clearly meant him to be. The man's
conversion from the selfishness of his commonplace prosperity is not
much more than a fact assumed at the beginning of the story. It
happens, Tolstoy says it happens, and the man's life is changed; and
thereafter the sombre epic proceeds. But the unrolling of the story
has no bearing upon the revolution wrought in the man; that is
complete, as soon as he flings over his past and follows the convoy of
prisoners into Siberia, and the succession of strange scenes has
nothing more to accomplish in him. The man is the mirror of the
scenes, his own drama is finished. And if Tolstoy intended to write
the drama of a soul, all this presentation of the deadly journey into
exile, given with the full force of his genius, is superfluous; his
subject lay further back. But Resurrection, no doubt, _is_ a fragment,
a wonderful shifting of scenes that never reached a conclusion; and it
is not to be criticized as a book in which Tolstoy tried and failed to
carry out his purpose. I only mention it because it seems to
illustrate, like Anna Karenina, his instinctive evasion of the matter
that could not be thrown into straightforward scenic form, the form in
which his imagination was evidently happiest. His great example,
therefore, is complementary to that of Balzac, whose genius looked in
the other direction, who was always drawn to the general picture
rather than to the particular scene. And with these two illustrious
names I reach the end of the argument I have tried to follow from book
to book, and it is time to gather up the threads.