Education might do somewhat to control the personal habits for which
ungenerous observant men are inclined to dislike one another. It has
done little. As to literature, this has had the most curiously diverse
influence upon the human sensitiveness to habit. Tolstoi's perception of
habits is keener than a child's, and he takes them uneasily, as a child
does not. He holds them to be the occasion, if not the cause, of hatred.
Anna Karenina, as she drank her coffee, knew that her sometime lover was
dreading to hear her swallow it, and was hating the crooking of her
little finger as she held her cup. It is impossible to live in a world
of habits with such an apprehension of habits as this.
It is no wonder that Tolstoi denies to other men unconsciousness, and
even preoccupation. With him perception never lapses, and he will not
describe a murderer as rapt away by passion from the details of the room
and the observation of himself; nor will he represent a theologian as
failing--even while he thinks out and decides the question of his
faith--to note the things that arrest his present and unclouded eyes. No
habits would dare to live under those glances. They must die of dismay.
Tolstoi sees everything that is within sight. That he sees this
multitude of things with invincible simplicity is what proves him an
artist; nevertheless, for such perception as his there is no peace. For
when it is not the trivialities of other men's habits but the actualities
of his own mind that he follows without rest, for him there is no
possible peace but sleep. To him, more than to all others, it has been
said, "Watch!" There is no relapse, there is no respite but sleep or
death.
To such a mind every night must come with an overwhelming change, a
release too great for gratitude. What a falling to sleep! What a
manumission, what an absolution! Consciousness and conscience set free
from the exacted instant replies of the unrelapsing day. And at the
awakening all is ready yet once more, and apprehension begins again: a
perpetual presence of mind.
Dr. Johnson was "absent." No man of "absent" mind is without some hourly
deliverance. It is on the present mind that presses the burden of the
present world.