"
continued
Anna, without seeing her
husband.
husband.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v25 - Tas to Tur
He has truly endeavored to cast his lot with the
lowliest, and he has counted it all joy so far as he has succeeded.
His scruple against constraining the will of others suffers their will
to make his self-sacrifice finally histrionic; but this seems to me not
the least part of his self-sacrifice, which it gives a supreme touch of
pathos. It is something that in fiction he alone could have imagined,
and is akin to the experience of his own Karénin, who in a crucial
moment forgives when he perceives that he cannot forgive without
being ridiculous. Tolstoy, in allowing his family to keep his wealth,
for fear of compelling them to the righteousness which they do not
choose, becomes absurd in his inalienable safety and superiority; but
we cannot say that he ought not to suffer this indignity. There is
perhaps a lesson in his fate which we ought not to refuse, if we can
learn from it that in our time men are bound together so indissolu-
bly that every advance must include the whole of society, and that
even self-renunciation must not accomplish itself at the cost of others'
free choice.
It is usual to speak of the ethical and the æsthetical principles as
if they were something separable; but they are hardly even diver-
gent in any artist, and in Tolstoy they have converged from the first.
He began to write at a time when realistic fiction was so thoroughly
established in Russia that there was no question there of any other.
Gogol had found the way out of the mists of romanticism into the
## p. 14989 (#573) ##########################################
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open day, and Turguénief had so perfected the realistic methods that
the subtlest analysis of character had become the essence of drama.
Then Tolstoy arrived, and it was no longer a question of methods.
In Turguénief, when the effect sought and produced is most eth-
ical, the process is so splendidly æsthetical that the sense of its per-
fection is uppermost. In Tolstoy the meaning of the thing is so
supreme that the delight imparted by the truth is qualified by no
consciousness of the art. Up to his time fiction had been part of the
pride of life, and had been governed by the criterions of the world
which it amused. But he replaced the artistic conscience by the
human conscience. Great as my wonder was at the truth in Tol-
stoy's work, my wonder at the love in it was greater yet. Here
for the first time, I found the most faithful pictures of life set in the
light of that human conscience which I had falsely taught myself
was to be ignored in questions of art, as something inadequate and
inappropriate. In the august presence of the masterpieces, I had
been afraid and ashamed of the highest instincts of my nature as
something philistine and provincial. But here I stood in the presence
of a master, who told me not to be afraid or ashamed of them, but
to judge his work by them, since he had himself wrought in honor
of them. I found the tests of conduct which I had used in secret
with myself, applied as the rules of universal justice, condemning
and acquitting in motive and action, and admitting none of those
lawyers' pleas which baffle our own consciousness of right and
wrong. Often in Tolstoy's ethics I feel a hardness, almost an arro-
gance (the word says too much); but in his æsthetics I have never
felt this. He has transmuted the atmosphere of a realm hitherto
supposed unmoral into the very air of heaven. I found nowhere in
his work those base and cruel lies which cheat us into the belief
that wrong may sometimes be right through passion, or genius, or
heroism. There was everywhere the grave noble face of the truth
that had looked me in the eyes all my life, and that I knew I must
confront when I came to die. But there was something more than
this,-infinitely more. There was that love which is before even the
truth, without which there is no truth, and which, if there is any last
day, must appear the Divine justice.
It is Tolstoy's humanity which is the grace beyond the reach of
art in his imaginative work. It does not reach merely the poor and
the suffering: it extends to the prosperous and the proud, and does
not deny itself to the guilty. There had been many stories of adul-
tery before 'Anna Karénina,' nearly all the great novels outside
of English are framed upon that argument, but in 'Anna Karén-
ina' for the first time the whole truth was told about it. Tolstoy
has said of the fiction of Maupassant that the truth can never be
## p. 14990 (#574) ##########################################
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immoral; and in his own work I have felt that it could never be
anything but moral. In the 'Kreuzer Sonata,' which gave a bad
conscience to Christendom, there was not a moment of indecency or
horror that was not purifying and wholesome. It was not the logic
of that tremendous drama that marriage was wrong,- though Tolstoy
himself pushed on to some such conclusion,- but only that lustful
marriage, provoked through appetite and fostered in idleness and
luxury, was wrong. We may not have had the last word from him
concerning the matter: he may yet see marriage, as he has seen
immortality, to be the inevitable deduction from the human postu-
late. But whatever his mind about it may finally be, his comment on
that novel seems to me his one great mistake, and a discord in the
harmony of his philosophy.
It jars the more because what you feel most in Tolstoy is this
harmony, this sense of unity. He cannot admit in his arraignment
of civilization the plea of a divided responsibility: he will not suffer
the prince, or the judge, or the soldier, personally to shirk the con-
sequences of what he officially does; and he refuses to allow in him-
self the division of the artist from the man. As I have already more
than once said, his ethics and æsthetics are inseparably at one; and
this is what gives a vital warmth to all his art. It is never that
heartless skill which exists for its own sake, and is content to dazzle
with the brilliancy of its triumphs. It seeks always the truth in the
love to which alone the truth unveils itself. If Tolstoy is the great-
est imaginative writer who ever lived, it is because, beyond all others,
he has written in the spirit of kindness, and not denied his own per-
sonal complicity with his art.
As for the scope of his work, it would not be easy to measure
it; for it seems to include all motives and actions, in good and bad,
in high and low, and not to leave life untouched at any point as it
shows itself in his vast Russian world. Its chief themes are the old
themes of art always,-they are love, passion, death; but they are
treated with such a sincerity, such a simplicity, that they seem
almost new to art, and as effectively his as if they had not been
touched before.
Until we read The Cossacks,' and witness the impulses of kind-
ness in Olenin, we do not realize how much love has been despised
by fiction, and neglected for passion. It is with a sort of fear and
trembling that we find ourselves in the presence of this wish to do
good to others, as if it might be some sort of mawkish sentimentality.
But it appears again and again in the cycle of Tolstoy's work: in the
vague aspirations recorded in 'Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth'; in
the abnegation and shame of the husband in 'Anna Karénina,' when
he wishes to forgive his wife's paramour; in the goodness of the
## p. 14991 (#575) ##########################################
LYOF TOLSTOY
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muzhik to the loathsome sick man in 'The Death of Ivan Ilyitch'; in
the pitying patience of Prince Andreí Bolkonsky with Anatol Kura-
gin in 'War and Peace,' where amidst his own anguish he realizes
that the man next him under the surgeon's knife is the wretch who
robbed him of the innocent love of his betrothed; in the devotion of
the master, even to the mergence of conscious identity, to the servant
in 'Master and Man';- and at no time does it justify our first skep-
tical shrinking. It is as far as possible from the dramatic tours de
force in Hugoesque fiction; it is not a conclusion that is urged or an
effect that is solicited: it is the motive to which all beauty of action
refers itself; it is human nature,- and it is as frankly treated as if
there could be no question of it.
This love-the wish to do good and to be good, which is at the
bottom of all our hearts, however we try to exclude it or deny it—is
always contrasting itself in Tolstoy's work with passion, and proving
the latter mortal and temporal in itself, and enduring only in its union
with love. In most other novelists, passion is treated as if it were
something important in itself,- as if its intensity were a merit and
its abandon were a virtue,-its fruition Paradise, its defeat perdition.
But in Tolstoy, almost for the first time, we are shown that passion
is merely a condition; and that it has almost nothing to do with
happiness. Other novelists represent lovers as forced by their pas-
sion to an ecstasy of selfish joy, or an ecstasy of selfish misery; but
he shows us that they are only the more bound by it to the rest of
the world. It is in fact, so far as it eventuates in marriage, the
beginning of subjection to humanity, and nothing in it concerns the
lovers alone.
It is not the less but the more mystical for this; and Tolstoy
does full justice to all its mystical beauty, its mystical power. Its
power upon Natacha,- that pure, good, wise girl,-whom it suddenly
blinds and bewilders till she must be saved from ruin in spite of her-
self, and almost by violence; and upon Anna Karénina,—that loving
mother, true friend, and obedient wife, are illustrated with a vivid-
ness which I know not where to match. Dolly's wretchedness with
her faithless husband, Kitty's happiness in the constancy of Levine,
are neither unalloyed; and in all the instances and examples of pas-
sion, we are aware of the author's sense of its merely provisional
character. This appears perhaps most impressively in the scenes of
Prince Andrei Bolkonsky's long dying, where Natacha, when restored
and forgiven for her aberration, becomes as little to him at last
as if she had succeeded in giving herself to Anatol Kuragin. The
theory of such matters is, that the passion which unites them in life
must bring them closer still in death; but we are shown that it is
not so.
—
## p. 14992 (#576) ##########################################
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Passion, we have to learn from the great master, who here as
everywhere humbles himself to the truth, has in it life and death;
but of itself it is something only as a condition precedent to these:
without it neither can be; but it is lost in their importance, and is
strictly subordinate to their laws. It has never been more charm-
ingly and reverently studied in its beautiful and noble phases than it
is in Tolstoy's fiction; though he has always dealt with it so sincerely,
so seriously. As to its obscure and ugly and selfish phases, he is so
far above all others who have written of it, that he alone seems
truly to have divined it, or portrayed it as experience knows it. He
never tries to lift it out of nature in either case, but leaves it more
visibly and palpably a part of the lowest as well as the highest
humanity.
He is apt to study both aspects of it in relation to death; so apt
that I had almost said he is fond of doing it. He often does this in
'War and Peace'; and in 'Anna Karénina' the unity of passion and
death might be said to be the principle and argument of the story.
In The Death of Ivan Ilyitch' the unworthy passion of the mar-
riage is a part of the spiritual squalor in which the wretched world-
ling goes down to his grave. In the 'Kreuzer Sonata' it is the
very essence of the murder; and in the Powers of Darkness' it is
the spring of the blackest evil. I suppose that one thing which has
made Tolstoy most distasteful to man-made society is, that in all
sins from passion he holds men chiefly accountable. It is their lux-
ury which is so much to blame for the perversion. I can recall, at
the moment, only one woman- the Princess Helena - in whom he
censures the same evils; and even in her he lets you feel that her
evil is almost passive, and such as man-made society chiefly forced
upon her. Tolstoy has always done justice to women's nature; he
has nowhere mocked or satirized them without some touch of pity
or extenuation: and he brings Anna Karénina through her passion
to her death, with that tender lenity for her sex which recognizes
womanhood as indestructibly pure and good.
He comes nearer unriddling life for us than any other writer. He
persuades us that it cannot possibly give us any personal happiness;
that there is no room for the selfish joy of any one except as it dis-
places the joy of some other, but that for unselfish joy there is infi-
nite place and occasion. With the same key he unlocks the mystery
of death; and he imagines so strenuously that death is neither more
nor less than a transport of self-surrender, that he convinces the
reason where there can be no proof. The reader will not have for-
gotten how in those last moments of earth which he has depicted, it
is this utter giving up which is made to appear the first moment of
heaven. Nothing in his mastery is so wonderful as his power upon
## p. 14993 (#577) ##########################################
LYOF TOLSTOY
14993
us in the scenes of the borderland where his vision seems to pierce
the confines of another world. He comes again and again to it, as
if this exercise of his seership had for him the same fascination that
we feel in it: the closing hours of Prince Andreí, the last sorrowful
instants of Anna Karénina, the triumphal abnegation of the philis-
tine Ivan Ilyitch, the illusions and disillusions of the dying soldier
in 'Scenes of the Siege of Sebastopol,' the transport of the sordid
merchant giving his life for his servant's in 'Master and Man,'—all
these, with perhaps others that fail to occur to me, are qualified by
the same conviction, imparting itself so strongly that it is like a
proven fact.
Of a man who can be so great in the treatment of great things,
we can ask ourselves only after a certain reflection whether he is as
great as some lesser men in some lesser things; and I have a certain
diffidence in inquiring whether Tolstoy is a humorist. But I incline
to think that he is, though the humor of his facts seeks him rather
than he it. One who feels life so keenly cannot help feeling its gro-
tesqueness through its perversions, or help smiling at it, with whatever
pang in his heart. I should say that his books rather abounded in
characters helplessly comic. Oblensky in 'Anna Karénina,' the futile
and amiably unworthy husband of Dolly, is delicious; and in 'War
and Peace,' old Count Rostof, perpetually insolvent, is pathetically
ridiculous,- as Levine in the first novel often is, and Pierre Bezukhof
often is in the second. His irony, without harshness or unkindness,
often pursues human nature in its vain twistings and turnings, with
effects equally fresh and true; 'as where Nikolai Rostof, flying before
the French, whom he had just been trying his worst to kill, finds it
incredible that they should be seeking to harm one whom he knew
to be so kind and good as himself. In Polikoushka, where the two
muzhiks watching by the peasant's dead body try to shrink into
themselves when some polite people come in, and to make them-
selves small because they are aware of smelling of the barn-yard,
there is the play of such humor as we find only now and then in
the supreme humorists. As for pathos, the supposed corollary of
humor, I felt that I had scarcely known what it might be till I read
Tolstoy. In literature, so far as I know it, there is nothing to match
with the passage describing Anna Karénina's stolen visit to her little
son after she has deserted her husband.
――――――――――――
I touch this instance and that, in illustration of one thing and
another: but I feel after all as if I had touched almost nothing in
Tolstoy, so much remains untouched; though I am aware that I
should have some such feeling if I multiplied the instances indefi-
nitely. Much is said of the love of nature in writers, who are sup-
posed to love it as they catalogue or celebrate its facts; but in
XXV-938
## p. 14994 (#578) ##########################################
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Tolstoy's work the nature is there just as the human nature is: sim-
ple, naked, unconscious. There is the sky that is really over our
heads; there is the green earth, the open air; the seasons come and
go: it is all actual, palpable,—and the joy of it as uncontrived appar-
ently as the story which it environs, and which gives no more the
sense of invention than the history of some veritable passage of
human events. In 'War and Peace' the fortunes of the fictitious
personages are treated in precisely the same spirit, and in the same
manner, as the fortunes of the real personages: Bezukhof and Napo-
leon are alike real.
He
out of the ver-
what it
Of methods in Tolstoy, then, there can scarcely be any talk.
has apparently no method: he has no purpose but to get what he
thinks, simply and clearly before us. Of style there seems as little
to say; though here, since I know him only in translation, I cannot
speak confidently. He may have a very marked style in Russian;
but if this was so, I do not see how it could be kept
sions. In any case, it is only when you come to ask ya
is, that you realize its absence. His books are full of
conviction, his experience, - and yet he does not impart his
quality to the diction as other masters do. It would indeed
hard to imitate the literature as the life of Tolstoy, which will
ably find only a millennial succession.
stoy, his
P
W. P. Scrolls.
ANNA'S ILLNESS
personal
be as
From Anna Karénina': translated by Nathan Haskell Dole. Copyright 1886,
by T. Y. Crowell & Co.
WHE
HEN he returned to his lonely room, Alekséi Aleksandrovitch
involuntarily recalled, little by little, the conversations
that had taken place at the dinner and in the evening.
Dolly's words had only succeeded in arousing his vexation. His
situation was too difficult to allow him to apply the precepts
of the New Testament; besides, he had already considered this
question, and decided it in the negative. Of all that had been
said that day, the remark of that honest fool Turovtsuin had
made the liveliest impression on his mind:-
-
"He did bravely; for he challenged his rival and killed him. ”
Evidently this conduct was approved by all; and if they had
not said so openly, it was out of pure politeness.
## p. 14995 (#579) ##########################################
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WA
RE
**
*
W
*
1L
"But what good would it do to think about it? Had he
not resolved what to do? " And Alekséi Aleksandrovitch gave
no more thought to anything except the preparations for his
departure, and his tour of inspection.
He took a cup of tea, opened a railway guide, and looked for
the departure of trains-to arrange for his journey.
At this moment the servant brought him two dispatches.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch opened them. The first announced the
nomination of Stremof to the place for which he had been am-
bitious.
Karénin threw down the telegram, and began to walk up and
down the room. "Quos vult perdere Jupiter dementat," said
he, applying quos to all those who had taken part in this nomina-
tion. He was less disturbed by the fact that he himself had not
been nominated, than to see Stremof-that babbler, that speechi-
fier—filling the place. Couldn't they understand that they were
ruining themselves, that they were destroying their prestige, by
such a choice?
"Some more news of the same sort," he thought with bitter-
ness as he opened the second telegram. It was from his wife:
her name, “Anna," in blue pencil, stood out before his eyes.
"I am dying. I beg you to come: I shall die easier if I have
your forgiveness. "
He read these words with scorn, and threw the paper on the
floor. "Some new scheme," was his first thought. "There is no
deceitfulness of which she is not capable. She must be on the
eve of her confinement, and there is something amiss. But what
can be her object? To compromise me? to prevent the divorce?
The dispatch says, 'I am dying. "" He re-read the telegram,
and suddenly realized its full meaning. "If it were true,- if
the suffering, the approach of death, had caused her to repent
sincerely, and if I should call this pretense, and refuse to go to
her, that would not only be cruel, but foolish; and all would blame
me. »
"Piotr, order a carriage: I am going to Petersburg! " he cried
to the servant.
Karénin decided to go to his wife, and be ready to return
at once if her illness was a pretense: on the other hand, if she
were really repentant, and wanted to see him before she died,
*«Whom Jupiter wishes to destroy he makes mad. »
## p. 14996 (#580) ##########################################
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LYOF TOLSTOY
he would forgive her; and if he reached her too late, he could at
least pay his last respects to her.
Having made up his mind to do this, he gave it no more
thought during the journey. Alekséi Aleksandrovitch, tired and
dusty with his night of traveling, reached Petersburg in the
early morning. He crossed the still deserted Nevsky Perspective,
looking straight before him through the morning mist, without
wishing to think of what was awaiting him at home. He did
not wish to think about it, because he couldn't help feeling that
his wife's death would put a speedy end to all the difficulties
of his situation. The bakers, the night izvoshchiks, the dvorniks
sweeping the sidewalks, the closed shops,-all passed like a
flash before his eyes; he noticed everything, and tried to stifle
the hope that he reproached himself for entertaining. When he
reached his house he saw an izvoshchik, and a carriage with a
coachman asleep, standing before the door. On the steps Alekséi
Aleksandrovitch made another effort to come to a decision,—
wrested, it seemed to him, from the most hidden recess of his
brain, and which was something like this: "If she has deceived
me, I will be calm, and go away again; but if she has told the
truth, I will do what is proper. "
The Swiss opened the door even before Karénin rang the
bell; the Swiss presented a strange appearance, without any neck-
tie, dressed in an old coat and slippers.
"How is the baruina? »
"She is as comfortable as could be expected. "
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch turned very pale: he realized how
deeply he had hoped for her death.
Kornéi, the servant in morning-dress, came quickly down the
stairs.
"Madame is very low," he said. "There was a consultation
yesterday, and the doctor is here now. "
"Take my things," said Alekséi Aleksandrovitch, a little com-
forted to learn that all hope of death was not lost; and he went
into the reception-room.
A uniform overcoat hung in the hall. Alekséi Aleksandrovitch
noticed it, and asked:-
"Who is here? "
"The doctor, the nurse, and Count Vronsky. "
Karénin went into the drawing-room. There was nobody
there; but the sound of his steps brought the nurse, in a cap
## p. 14997 (#581) ##########################################
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14997
with lilac ribbons, out of the boudoir. She came to Aleksei
Aleksandrovitch, and taking him by the hand with the familiarity
that the approach of death permits, led him into the sleeping-
room.
"Thank the Lord that you have come! She talks of nothing
but you; always of you," she said.
"Bring some ice quick! " said the imperative voice of the
doctor from the chamber.
In the boudoir, sitting on a little low chair, Alekséi Aleksan-
drovitch saw Vronsky weeping, his face covered with his hands.
He started at the sound of the doctor's voice, uncovered his face,
and found himself in the presence of Karénin. The sight of him
disturbed him so much that he sank down in his chair, as if he
wanted to disappear out of sight; then making a great effort, he
rose, and said:
I am
"She is dying: the doctors say that there is no hope.
in your power. Only allow me to remain here. I will conform
to your wishes in every other respect. I”-
When he saw Vronsky in tears, Alekséi Aleksandrovitch felt
the involuntary tenderness that the sufferings of others always
caused him: he turned away his head without replying, and went
to the door.
Anna's voice could be heard from the sleeping-room,-lively,
gay, and articulating clearly. Aleksei Aleksandrovitch went in,
and approached her bed.
Her face was turned towards him. Her cheeks were bright,
her eyes brilliant: her little white hands, coming out of the
sleeves of her night-dress, were playing with the corner of the
coverlet. Not only did she seem fresh and well, but in the hap-
piest frame of mind; she talked fast and loud, accenting her
words with precision and nicety.
"For Alekséi. I am speaking of Alekséi Aleksandrovitch
strange, isn't it, and cruel, that both should be named Alekséi?
Aleksei would not have refused me: I should have forgotten. He
would have forgiven- Da! why does he not come? He is good;
he himself does not know how good he is. Ach! Bozhe moï!
what agony! Give me some water quick! Ach! but that is not
good for her,my little daughter. Nu! then very well; give her
to the nurse. I am willing; that will be even better. Nu! when
he comes, she will be hateful in his sight; take her away. "
"Anna Arkadyevna, he has come; here he is," said the nurse,
trying to draw her attention to Alekséi Aleksandrovitch.
## p. 14998 (#582) ##########################################
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LYOF TOLSTOY
"Ach! what nonsense!
" continued Anna, without seeing her
husband. "Da! give the little one to me, give her to me!
He hasn't come yet. You pretend that he will not forgive me,
because you do not know him. Nobody knows him. I alone-
His eyes, one must know them. Serozha's are very like them;
that is why I can no longer look at them. Has Serozha had his
dinner? I know he will be forgotten. Oh, do not forget him!
Let Serozha be brought into the corner chamber, and let Mariette
sleep near him. ”
Suddenly she was silent; she looked frightened, and raised her
arms above her head as if to ward off a blow.
She had recog-
nized her husband.
"No, no," she said quickly, "I am not afraid of him; I am
afraid of dying. Alekséi, come here. I am in a hurry, because
there is no time to be lost. I have only a few minutes to live;
the fever will be upon me again, and I shall know nothing more.
Now I am conscious: I understand everything and I see every-
thing. "
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch's wrinkled face expressed acute suf-
fering: he wanted to speak, but his lower lip trembled so that
he could not utter a word, and his emotion hardly allowed him
to glance at the dying woman. He took her hand and held it
between his own. Every time that he turned his head towards
her, he saw her eyes fixed on him with a sweetness and a humil-
ity that he had never seen there before.
"Wait! you do not know-wait, wait! " She stopped to col-
lect her thoughts. "Yes," she began again, "yes, yes, yes; this
is what I want to say. Do not be astonished. I am always the
same; but there is another being within me whom I fear: it is
she who loved him, him, and hated you; and I could not forget
what I had once been. Now I am myself,-entirely, really my-
self, and not another. I am dying, I know that I am dying; ask
him if I am not. I feel it now; there are those terrible weights
on my hand and my feet and on my fingers. My fingers! they
are enormous; but all that will soon be over. One thing only
is indispensable to me: forgive me, forgive me wholly! I am a
sinner; but Serozha's nurse told me that there was a holy mar-
tyr-what was her name? - who was worse than I. I will go
to Rome; there is a desert there. I shall not trouble anybody
there. I will only take Serozha and my little daughter. No, you
cannot forgive me; I know very well that it is impossible. Go
away, go away! you are too perfect! "
## p. 14999 (#583) ##########################################
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She held him with one of her burning hands, and pushed him
away with the other.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch's emotion became so great that he
could no longer control himself. He suddenly felt his emotions
change to a moral reconciliation, which seemed like a new and.
unknown happiness. He had not believed that the Christian
law, which he had taken for a guide in life, ordered him to for-
give and love his enemies; and yet his soul was filled with love
and forgiveness. Kneeling beside the bed, he laid his forehead
on her arm,—the fever of which burned through the sleeve,-
and sobbed like a child. She bent towards him, placed her arm
around her husband's bald head, and raised her eyes defiantly.
"There, I knew that it would be so. Now farewell, farewell
to all! They are coming back again. Why don't they go away?
Da! take off all these furs from me! "
The doctor laid her back gently on her pillows, and drew the
covering over her arms. Anna made no resistance, looking all
the while straight before her with shining eyes.
"Remember that I have only asked your pardon: I ask
nothing more. Why doesn't he come? " she said, suddenly look-
ing towards the door, towards Vronsky. "Come! come here, and
give him your hand. "
Vronsky came to the side of the bed, and when he saw Anna
he hid his face in his hands.
"Uncover your face: look at him,- he is a saint," said she.
"Uncover your face! look at him! " she repeated in an irritated
manner. "Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, uncover his face: I want to
see him. "
Alekséi Aleksandrovitch took Vronsky's hands and uncovered
his face, disfigured by suffering and humiliation.
"Give him your hand; forgive him. "
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch held out his hand to him, without try-
ing to keep back the tears.
"Thank the Lord! thank the Lord! " said she; "now every-
thing is right. I will stretch out my feet a little, like that; that
is better. How ugly those flowers are! they do not look like
violets," she said, pointing to the hangings in her room. "Bozhe
moi! Bozhe moi! when will this be over? Give me some mor-
phine, doctor; some morphine. Bozhe moi! Bozhe moï! » And
she tossed about on the bed.
## p. 15000 (#584) ##########################################
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The doctors said that in this fever there was not one chance
in a hundred of her living. She passed the day delirious and
unconscious. Towards midnight her pulse became very low: the
end was expected every moment.
Vronsky went home, but he came back the next morning to
learn how she was. Alekséi Aleksandrovitch came to meet him
in the reception-room, and said to him, "Stay here: perhaps she
will ask for you. " Then he took him to his wife's boudoir him-
self. In the morning the restlessness, the rapidity of thought
and speech, returned; but soon unconsciousness intervened again.
The third day was much the same, and the doctors began to
hope. On this day Alekséi Aleksandrovitch went into the bou-
doir where Vronsky was, closed the door, and sat down in front
of him.
"Aleksei Aleksandrovitch," said Vronsky, feeling that an
explanation was to be made, "I cannot speak,-I cannot think.
Have pity on me! Whatever may be your suffering, believe that
mine is still more terrible. "
He was going to rise; but Alekséi Aleksandrovitch prevented
him, and said, "Pray listen to me: it is unavoidable. I am forced
to explain to you the feelings that guide me, that you may avoid
making any mistake in regard to me. You know that I had
decided on a divorce, and that I had taken the preliminary steps
to obtain one? I will not deny that at first I was undecided;
I was in torment. I confess that I wanted to avenge myself.
When I received the telegram, and came home, I felt the same
desire. I will say more: I hoped that she would die. But"-
he was silent for a moment, considering whether he would.
wholly reveal his thoughts" but I have seen her: I have
forgiven her absolutely. The happiness I feel at being able to
forgive, clearly shows me my duty. I offer the other cheek
to the smiter: I give my last cloak to him who has robbed me.
I only ask one thing of God,-that he
me this joy of forgiving. "
will not take away from
Tears filled his eyes. Vronsky was amazed at the calm, lumi-
nous face.
"These are my feelings. You may drag me in the dust, and
make me the laughing-stock of creation; but I will not give up
Anna for that, nor will I utter a word of reproach to you,” con-
tinued Aleksei Aleksandrovitch. "My duty seems clear and
B
## p. 15001 (#585) ##########################################
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plain to me: I must remain with her; I shall remain with her.
If she wishes to see you, I shall inform you of it; but now I
think it will be better for you to go away. "
Karénin rose: sobs choked his voice. Vronsky rose too, and
standing with bowed head and humble attitude, looked up at
Karénin, without a word to say. He was incapable of under-
standing Alekséi Aleksandrovitch's feelings; but he felt that such
magnanimity was above him, and irreconcilable with his con-
ception of life.
ANNA AND HER SON
From 'Anna Karénina: translated by Nathan Haskell Dole. Copyright 1886,
by T. Y. Crowell & Co.
ANNA'S
NNA'S chief desire on her return to Russia was to see her
son. From the day that she left Italy she was filled with
this idea; and her joy increased in proportion as she drew
near Petersburg. She did not trouble herself with the question
how she should manage this meeting, which seemed to her of
such importance. It was a simple and natural thing, she thought,
to see her child once more, now that she was in the same town
with him; but since her arrival she suddenly realized her pres-
ent relation towards society, and found that the interview was not
easy to obtain.
She had been two days now in Petersburg, and never for an
instant had she forgotten her son; but she had not seen him.
To go straight to her husband's house, and risk coming face
to face with her husband, seemed to her impossible. They might
even refuse to admit her. To write to Alekséi Aleksandrovitch
and ask permission of him, seemed to her painful even to think
of. She could be calm only when she did not think of her hus-
band; and yet she could not feel contented to see her son at a
distance. She had too many kisses, too many caresses, to give
him.
1
Serozha's old nurse might have been an assistance to her,
but she no longer lived with Alekséi Aleksandrovitch.
On the third day, having learned of Alekséi Aleksandrovitch's
relations with the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Anna decided to
write her a letter composed with the greatest care, in which she
## p. 15002 (#586) ##########################################
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would tell her frankly that the permission to see her son de-
pended on her. She knew that if her husband found it out, he,
in his part of magnanimous man, would not refuse her.
answer.
It was a cruel blow to have her messenger return without an
She had never felt so wounded, so humiliated; and yet
she had to acknowledge that the countess was right.
Her grief
was all the keener because she had to bear it alone. She could
not and did not wish to confide it to Vronsky. She knew that
though he was the chief cause of her unhappiness, he would look
upon her meeting with her son as of little account; and the mere
thought of the unsympathetic tone in which he would speak of
it made him seem odious to her. And the fear that she might
come to hate him was the worst of all. Therefore she made up
her mind to hide from him her action in regard to the child.
She stayed at home all day long, and racked her brain to
think of other ways of meeting her son; and finally she decided
upon the most painful of all,-to write directly to her husband.
Just as she was beginning her letter, Lidia Ivanovna's reply was
brought. She accepted it with silent resignation; but the un-
friendliness, the sarcasm, that she read between the lines, pierced
deep into her soul.
"What cruelty! What hypocrisy! " she said to herself. "They
want to insult me and torment the child. I will not let them do
She is worse than I am: at least I do not lie. "
So.
She immediately decided to go on the morrow, which was
Serozha's birthday, directly to her husband's house to see the
child, no matter what it cost in fees to the servants; and to put
an end to the ugly network of lies with which they were sur-
rounding the innocent child.
She went to a neighboring shop and purchased some toys;
and thus she formed her plan of action: She would start early in
the morning, before Alekséi Aleksandrovitch was up; she would
have the money in her hand all ready to bribe the Swiss and
the other servants to let her go up-stairs without raising her veil,
under the pretext of laying on Serozha's bed some presents sent
by his godfather. As to what she should say to her son, she
could not form the least idea; she could not make any prepara-
tion for that.
The next morning, at eight o'clock, Anna got out of her hired
carriage and rang the door-bell of her former home.
## p. 15003 (#587) ##########################################
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"Go and see what is wanted. It's some baruina," said Kapi
tonuitch, in overcoat and galoshes, as he looked out of the win-
dow and saw a lady closely veiled standing on the porch. The
Swiss's assistant, a young man whom Anna did not know, had
scarcely opened the door before Anna thrust a three-ruble note
into his hand.
"Serozha-Sergéi Alekseievitch," she stammered; then she
went one or two steps down the hall.
The Swiss's assistant examined the note, and stopped the vis-
itor at the inner glass door.
"Whom do you wish to see? " he asked.
She did not hear his words, and made no reply.
Kapitonuitch, noticing the stranger's confusion, came out from
his office and asked her what she wanted.
"I come from Prince Skorodumof to see Sergéi Alekseie-
vitch. "
"He is not up yet," replied the Swiss, looking sharply at the
veiled lady.
Anna had never dreamed that she should be so troubled by
the sight of this house, where she had lived nine years. One
after another, sweet and cruel memories arose in her mind, and
for a moment she forgot why she was there.
"Will you wait? " asked the Swiss, helping her to take off her
shubka. When he saw her face, he recognized her, and bowed
profoundly. "Will your Ladyship be pleased to enter? " he said
to her.
She tried to speak; but her voice failed her, and with an en-
treating look at the old servant she rapidly flew up the stairs.
Kapitonuitch tried to overtake her, and followed after her, catch-
ing his galoshes at every step.
"Perhaps his tutor is not dressed yet: I will speak to him. "
Anna kept on up the stairs which she knew so well; but she
did not hear what the old man said.
"This way.
Excuse it if all is in disorder. He sleeps in
the front room now," said the Swiss, out of breath. "Will your
Ladyship be good enough to wait a moment? I will go and see. "
And opening the high door he disappeared.
Anna stopped and waited.
"He has just waked up," said the Swiss, coming back through
the same door.
## p. 15004 (#588) ##########################################
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LYOF TOLSTOY
And as he spoke, Anna heard the sound of a child yawning;
and merely by the sound of the yawn she recognized her son,
and seemed to see him alive before her.
"Let me go in-let me! " she stammered, and hurriedly
pushed through the door.
At the right of the door was a bed, and on the bed a child
was sitting up in his little open nightgown; his little body was
leaning forward, and he was just finishing a yawn and stretching
himself. His lips were just closing into a sleepy smile, and he
fell back upon his pillow still smiling.
"Serozha! " she murmured, as she went towards him.
Every time since their separation that she had felt an access
of love for the absent son, Anna looked upon him as still a child
of four, the age when he had been most charming. Now he no
longer bore any resemblance to him whom she had left; he had
grown tall and thin. How long his face seemed! How short his
hair!
lowliest, and he has counted it all joy so far as he has succeeded.
His scruple against constraining the will of others suffers their will
to make his self-sacrifice finally histrionic; but this seems to me not
the least part of his self-sacrifice, which it gives a supreme touch of
pathos. It is something that in fiction he alone could have imagined,
and is akin to the experience of his own Karénin, who in a crucial
moment forgives when he perceives that he cannot forgive without
being ridiculous. Tolstoy, in allowing his family to keep his wealth,
for fear of compelling them to the righteousness which they do not
choose, becomes absurd in his inalienable safety and superiority; but
we cannot say that he ought not to suffer this indignity. There is
perhaps a lesson in his fate which we ought not to refuse, if we can
learn from it that in our time men are bound together so indissolu-
bly that every advance must include the whole of society, and that
even self-renunciation must not accomplish itself at the cost of others'
free choice.
It is usual to speak of the ethical and the æsthetical principles as
if they were something separable; but they are hardly even diver-
gent in any artist, and in Tolstoy they have converged from the first.
He began to write at a time when realistic fiction was so thoroughly
established in Russia that there was no question there of any other.
Gogol had found the way out of the mists of romanticism into the
## p. 14989 (#573) ##########################################
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open day, and Turguénief had so perfected the realistic methods that
the subtlest analysis of character had become the essence of drama.
Then Tolstoy arrived, and it was no longer a question of methods.
In Turguénief, when the effect sought and produced is most eth-
ical, the process is so splendidly æsthetical that the sense of its per-
fection is uppermost. In Tolstoy the meaning of the thing is so
supreme that the delight imparted by the truth is qualified by no
consciousness of the art. Up to his time fiction had been part of the
pride of life, and had been governed by the criterions of the world
which it amused. But he replaced the artistic conscience by the
human conscience. Great as my wonder was at the truth in Tol-
stoy's work, my wonder at the love in it was greater yet. Here
for the first time, I found the most faithful pictures of life set in the
light of that human conscience which I had falsely taught myself
was to be ignored in questions of art, as something inadequate and
inappropriate. In the august presence of the masterpieces, I had
been afraid and ashamed of the highest instincts of my nature as
something philistine and provincial. But here I stood in the presence
of a master, who told me not to be afraid or ashamed of them, but
to judge his work by them, since he had himself wrought in honor
of them. I found the tests of conduct which I had used in secret
with myself, applied as the rules of universal justice, condemning
and acquitting in motive and action, and admitting none of those
lawyers' pleas which baffle our own consciousness of right and
wrong. Often in Tolstoy's ethics I feel a hardness, almost an arro-
gance (the word says too much); but in his æsthetics I have never
felt this. He has transmuted the atmosphere of a realm hitherto
supposed unmoral into the very air of heaven. I found nowhere in
his work those base and cruel lies which cheat us into the belief
that wrong may sometimes be right through passion, or genius, or
heroism. There was everywhere the grave noble face of the truth
that had looked me in the eyes all my life, and that I knew I must
confront when I came to die. But there was something more than
this,-infinitely more. There was that love which is before even the
truth, without which there is no truth, and which, if there is any last
day, must appear the Divine justice.
It is Tolstoy's humanity which is the grace beyond the reach of
art in his imaginative work. It does not reach merely the poor and
the suffering: it extends to the prosperous and the proud, and does
not deny itself to the guilty. There had been many stories of adul-
tery before 'Anna Karénina,' nearly all the great novels outside
of English are framed upon that argument, but in 'Anna Karén-
ina' for the first time the whole truth was told about it. Tolstoy
has said of the fiction of Maupassant that the truth can never be
## p. 14990 (#574) ##########################################
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immoral; and in his own work I have felt that it could never be
anything but moral. In the 'Kreuzer Sonata,' which gave a bad
conscience to Christendom, there was not a moment of indecency or
horror that was not purifying and wholesome. It was not the logic
of that tremendous drama that marriage was wrong,- though Tolstoy
himself pushed on to some such conclusion,- but only that lustful
marriage, provoked through appetite and fostered in idleness and
luxury, was wrong. We may not have had the last word from him
concerning the matter: he may yet see marriage, as he has seen
immortality, to be the inevitable deduction from the human postu-
late. But whatever his mind about it may finally be, his comment on
that novel seems to me his one great mistake, and a discord in the
harmony of his philosophy.
It jars the more because what you feel most in Tolstoy is this
harmony, this sense of unity. He cannot admit in his arraignment
of civilization the plea of a divided responsibility: he will not suffer
the prince, or the judge, or the soldier, personally to shirk the con-
sequences of what he officially does; and he refuses to allow in him-
self the division of the artist from the man. As I have already more
than once said, his ethics and æsthetics are inseparably at one; and
this is what gives a vital warmth to all his art. It is never that
heartless skill which exists for its own sake, and is content to dazzle
with the brilliancy of its triumphs. It seeks always the truth in the
love to which alone the truth unveils itself. If Tolstoy is the great-
est imaginative writer who ever lived, it is because, beyond all others,
he has written in the spirit of kindness, and not denied his own per-
sonal complicity with his art.
As for the scope of his work, it would not be easy to measure
it; for it seems to include all motives and actions, in good and bad,
in high and low, and not to leave life untouched at any point as it
shows itself in his vast Russian world. Its chief themes are the old
themes of art always,-they are love, passion, death; but they are
treated with such a sincerity, such a simplicity, that they seem
almost new to art, and as effectively his as if they had not been
touched before.
Until we read The Cossacks,' and witness the impulses of kind-
ness in Olenin, we do not realize how much love has been despised
by fiction, and neglected for passion. It is with a sort of fear and
trembling that we find ourselves in the presence of this wish to do
good to others, as if it might be some sort of mawkish sentimentality.
But it appears again and again in the cycle of Tolstoy's work: in the
vague aspirations recorded in 'Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth'; in
the abnegation and shame of the husband in 'Anna Karénina,' when
he wishes to forgive his wife's paramour; in the goodness of the
## p. 14991 (#575) ##########################################
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muzhik to the loathsome sick man in 'The Death of Ivan Ilyitch'; in
the pitying patience of Prince Andreí Bolkonsky with Anatol Kura-
gin in 'War and Peace,' where amidst his own anguish he realizes
that the man next him under the surgeon's knife is the wretch who
robbed him of the innocent love of his betrothed; in the devotion of
the master, even to the mergence of conscious identity, to the servant
in 'Master and Man';- and at no time does it justify our first skep-
tical shrinking. It is as far as possible from the dramatic tours de
force in Hugoesque fiction; it is not a conclusion that is urged or an
effect that is solicited: it is the motive to which all beauty of action
refers itself; it is human nature,- and it is as frankly treated as if
there could be no question of it.
This love-the wish to do good and to be good, which is at the
bottom of all our hearts, however we try to exclude it or deny it—is
always contrasting itself in Tolstoy's work with passion, and proving
the latter mortal and temporal in itself, and enduring only in its union
with love. In most other novelists, passion is treated as if it were
something important in itself,- as if its intensity were a merit and
its abandon were a virtue,-its fruition Paradise, its defeat perdition.
But in Tolstoy, almost for the first time, we are shown that passion
is merely a condition; and that it has almost nothing to do with
happiness. Other novelists represent lovers as forced by their pas-
sion to an ecstasy of selfish joy, or an ecstasy of selfish misery; but
he shows us that they are only the more bound by it to the rest of
the world. It is in fact, so far as it eventuates in marriage, the
beginning of subjection to humanity, and nothing in it concerns the
lovers alone.
It is not the less but the more mystical for this; and Tolstoy
does full justice to all its mystical beauty, its mystical power. Its
power upon Natacha,- that pure, good, wise girl,-whom it suddenly
blinds and bewilders till she must be saved from ruin in spite of her-
self, and almost by violence; and upon Anna Karénina,—that loving
mother, true friend, and obedient wife, are illustrated with a vivid-
ness which I know not where to match. Dolly's wretchedness with
her faithless husband, Kitty's happiness in the constancy of Levine,
are neither unalloyed; and in all the instances and examples of pas-
sion, we are aware of the author's sense of its merely provisional
character. This appears perhaps most impressively in the scenes of
Prince Andrei Bolkonsky's long dying, where Natacha, when restored
and forgiven for her aberration, becomes as little to him at last
as if she had succeeded in giving herself to Anatol Kuragin. The
theory of such matters is, that the passion which unites them in life
must bring them closer still in death; but we are shown that it is
not so.
—
## p. 14992 (#576) ##########################################
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Passion, we have to learn from the great master, who here as
everywhere humbles himself to the truth, has in it life and death;
but of itself it is something only as a condition precedent to these:
without it neither can be; but it is lost in their importance, and is
strictly subordinate to their laws. It has never been more charm-
ingly and reverently studied in its beautiful and noble phases than it
is in Tolstoy's fiction; though he has always dealt with it so sincerely,
so seriously. As to its obscure and ugly and selfish phases, he is so
far above all others who have written of it, that he alone seems
truly to have divined it, or portrayed it as experience knows it. He
never tries to lift it out of nature in either case, but leaves it more
visibly and palpably a part of the lowest as well as the highest
humanity.
He is apt to study both aspects of it in relation to death; so apt
that I had almost said he is fond of doing it. He often does this in
'War and Peace'; and in 'Anna Karénina' the unity of passion and
death might be said to be the principle and argument of the story.
In The Death of Ivan Ilyitch' the unworthy passion of the mar-
riage is a part of the spiritual squalor in which the wretched world-
ling goes down to his grave. In the 'Kreuzer Sonata' it is the
very essence of the murder; and in the Powers of Darkness' it is
the spring of the blackest evil. I suppose that one thing which has
made Tolstoy most distasteful to man-made society is, that in all
sins from passion he holds men chiefly accountable. It is their lux-
ury which is so much to blame for the perversion. I can recall, at
the moment, only one woman- the Princess Helena - in whom he
censures the same evils; and even in her he lets you feel that her
evil is almost passive, and such as man-made society chiefly forced
upon her. Tolstoy has always done justice to women's nature; he
has nowhere mocked or satirized them without some touch of pity
or extenuation: and he brings Anna Karénina through her passion
to her death, with that tender lenity for her sex which recognizes
womanhood as indestructibly pure and good.
He comes nearer unriddling life for us than any other writer. He
persuades us that it cannot possibly give us any personal happiness;
that there is no room for the selfish joy of any one except as it dis-
places the joy of some other, but that for unselfish joy there is infi-
nite place and occasion. With the same key he unlocks the mystery
of death; and he imagines so strenuously that death is neither more
nor less than a transport of self-surrender, that he convinces the
reason where there can be no proof. The reader will not have for-
gotten how in those last moments of earth which he has depicted, it
is this utter giving up which is made to appear the first moment of
heaven. Nothing in his mastery is so wonderful as his power upon
## p. 14993 (#577) ##########################################
LYOF TOLSTOY
14993
us in the scenes of the borderland where his vision seems to pierce
the confines of another world. He comes again and again to it, as
if this exercise of his seership had for him the same fascination that
we feel in it: the closing hours of Prince Andreí, the last sorrowful
instants of Anna Karénina, the triumphal abnegation of the philis-
tine Ivan Ilyitch, the illusions and disillusions of the dying soldier
in 'Scenes of the Siege of Sebastopol,' the transport of the sordid
merchant giving his life for his servant's in 'Master and Man,'—all
these, with perhaps others that fail to occur to me, are qualified by
the same conviction, imparting itself so strongly that it is like a
proven fact.
Of a man who can be so great in the treatment of great things,
we can ask ourselves only after a certain reflection whether he is as
great as some lesser men in some lesser things; and I have a certain
diffidence in inquiring whether Tolstoy is a humorist. But I incline
to think that he is, though the humor of his facts seeks him rather
than he it. One who feels life so keenly cannot help feeling its gro-
tesqueness through its perversions, or help smiling at it, with whatever
pang in his heart. I should say that his books rather abounded in
characters helplessly comic. Oblensky in 'Anna Karénina,' the futile
and amiably unworthy husband of Dolly, is delicious; and in 'War
and Peace,' old Count Rostof, perpetually insolvent, is pathetically
ridiculous,- as Levine in the first novel often is, and Pierre Bezukhof
often is in the second. His irony, without harshness or unkindness,
often pursues human nature in its vain twistings and turnings, with
effects equally fresh and true; 'as where Nikolai Rostof, flying before
the French, whom he had just been trying his worst to kill, finds it
incredible that they should be seeking to harm one whom he knew
to be so kind and good as himself. In Polikoushka, where the two
muzhiks watching by the peasant's dead body try to shrink into
themselves when some polite people come in, and to make them-
selves small because they are aware of smelling of the barn-yard,
there is the play of such humor as we find only now and then in
the supreme humorists. As for pathos, the supposed corollary of
humor, I felt that I had scarcely known what it might be till I read
Tolstoy. In literature, so far as I know it, there is nothing to match
with the passage describing Anna Karénina's stolen visit to her little
son after she has deserted her husband.
――――――――――――
I touch this instance and that, in illustration of one thing and
another: but I feel after all as if I had touched almost nothing in
Tolstoy, so much remains untouched; though I am aware that I
should have some such feeling if I multiplied the instances indefi-
nitely. Much is said of the love of nature in writers, who are sup-
posed to love it as they catalogue or celebrate its facts; but in
XXV-938
## p. 14994 (#578) ##########################################
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Tolstoy's work the nature is there just as the human nature is: sim-
ple, naked, unconscious. There is the sky that is really over our
heads; there is the green earth, the open air; the seasons come and
go: it is all actual, palpable,—and the joy of it as uncontrived appar-
ently as the story which it environs, and which gives no more the
sense of invention than the history of some veritable passage of
human events. In 'War and Peace' the fortunes of the fictitious
personages are treated in precisely the same spirit, and in the same
manner, as the fortunes of the real personages: Bezukhof and Napo-
leon are alike real.
He
out of the ver-
what it
Of methods in Tolstoy, then, there can scarcely be any talk.
has apparently no method: he has no purpose but to get what he
thinks, simply and clearly before us. Of style there seems as little
to say; though here, since I know him only in translation, I cannot
speak confidently. He may have a very marked style in Russian;
but if this was so, I do not see how it could be kept
sions. In any case, it is only when you come to ask ya
is, that you realize its absence. His books are full of
conviction, his experience, - and yet he does not impart his
quality to the diction as other masters do. It would indeed
hard to imitate the literature as the life of Tolstoy, which will
ably find only a millennial succession.
stoy, his
P
W. P. Scrolls.
ANNA'S ILLNESS
personal
be as
From Anna Karénina': translated by Nathan Haskell Dole. Copyright 1886,
by T. Y. Crowell & Co.
WHE
HEN he returned to his lonely room, Alekséi Aleksandrovitch
involuntarily recalled, little by little, the conversations
that had taken place at the dinner and in the evening.
Dolly's words had only succeeded in arousing his vexation. His
situation was too difficult to allow him to apply the precepts
of the New Testament; besides, he had already considered this
question, and decided it in the negative. Of all that had been
said that day, the remark of that honest fool Turovtsuin had
made the liveliest impression on his mind:-
-
"He did bravely; for he challenged his rival and killed him. ”
Evidently this conduct was approved by all; and if they had
not said so openly, it was out of pure politeness.
## p. 14995 (#579) ##########################################
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WA
RE
**
*
W
*
1L
"But what good would it do to think about it? Had he
not resolved what to do? " And Alekséi Aleksandrovitch gave
no more thought to anything except the preparations for his
departure, and his tour of inspection.
He took a cup of tea, opened a railway guide, and looked for
the departure of trains-to arrange for his journey.
At this moment the servant brought him two dispatches.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch opened them. The first announced the
nomination of Stremof to the place for which he had been am-
bitious.
Karénin threw down the telegram, and began to walk up and
down the room. "Quos vult perdere Jupiter dementat," said
he, applying quos to all those who had taken part in this nomina-
tion. He was less disturbed by the fact that he himself had not
been nominated, than to see Stremof-that babbler, that speechi-
fier—filling the place. Couldn't they understand that they were
ruining themselves, that they were destroying their prestige, by
such a choice?
"Some more news of the same sort," he thought with bitter-
ness as he opened the second telegram. It was from his wife:
her name, “Anna," in blue pencil, stood out before his eyes.
"I am dying. I beg you to come: I shall die easier if I have
your forgiveness. "
He read these words with scorn, and threw the paper on the
floor. "Some new scheme," was his first thought. "There is no
deceitfulness of which she is not capable. She must be on the
eve of her confinement, and there is something amiss. But what
can be her object? To compromise me? to prevent the divorce?
The dispatch says, 'I am dying. "" He re-read the telegram,
and suddenly realized its full meaning. "If it were true,- if
the suffering, the approach of death, had caused her to repent
sincerely, and if I should call this pretense, and refuse to go to
her, that would not only be cruel, but foolish; and all would blame
me. »
"Piotr, order a carriage: I am going to Petersburg! " he cried
to the servant.
Karénin decided to go to his wife, and be ready to return
at once if her illness was a pretense: on the other hand, if she
were really repentant, and wanted to see him before she died,
*«Whom Jupiter wishes to destroy he makes mad. »
## p. 14996 (#580) ##########################################
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he would forgive her; and if he reached her too late, he could at
least pay his last respects to her.
Having made up his mind to do this, he gave it no more
thought during the journey. Alekséi Aleksandrovitch, tired and
dusty with his night of traveling, reached Petersburg in the
early morning. He crossed the still deserted Nevsky Perspective,
looking straight before him through the morning mist, without
wishing to think of what was awaiting him at home. He did
not wish to think about it, because he couldn't help feeling that
his wife's death would put a speedy end to all the difficulties
of his situation. The bakers, the night izvoshchiks, the dvorniks
sweeping the sidewalks, the closed shops,-all passed like a
flash before his eyes; he noticed everything, and tried to stifle
the hope that he reproached himself for entertaining. When he
reached his house he saw an izvoshchik, and a carriage with a
coachman asleep, standing before the door. On the steps Alekséi
Aleksandrovitch made another effort to come to a decision,—
wrested, it seemed to him, from the most hidden recess of his
brain, and which was something like this: "If she has deceived
me, I will be calm, and go away again; but if she has told the
truth, I will do what is proper. "
The Swiss opened the door even before Karénin rang the
bell; the Swiss presented a strange appearance, without any neck-
tie, dressed in an old coat and slippers.
"How is the baruina? »
"She is as comfortable as could be expected. "
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch turned very pale: he realized how
deeply he had hoped for her death.
Kornéi, the servant in morning-dress, came quickly down the
stairs.
"Madame is very low," he said. "There was a consultation
yesterday, and the doctor is here now. "
"Take my things," said Alekséi Aleksandrovitch, a little com-
forted to learn that all hope of death was not lost; and he went
into the reception-room.
A uniform overcoat hung in the hall. Alekséi Aleksandrovitch
noticed it, and asked:-
"Who is here? "
"The doctor, the nurse, and Count Vronsky. "
Karénin went into the drawing-room. There was nobody
there; but the sound of his steps brought the nurse, in a cap
## p. 14997 (#581) ##########################################
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with lilac ribbons, out of the boudoir. She came to Aleksei
Aleksandrovitch, and taking him by the hand with the familiarity
that the approach of death permits, led him into the sleeping-
room.
"Thank the Lord that you have come! She talks of nothing
but you; always of you," she said.
"Bring some ice quick! " said the imperative voice of the
doctor from the chamber.
In the boudoir, sitting on a little low chair, Alekséi Aleksan-
drovitch saw Vronsky weeping, his face covered with his hands.
He started at the sound of the doctor's voice, uncovered his face,
and found himself in the presence of Karénin. The sight of him
disturbed him so much that he sank down in his chair, as if he
wanted to disappear out of sight; then making a great effort, he
rose, and said:
I am
"She is dying: the doctors say that there is no hope.
in your power. Only allow me to remain here. I will conform
to your wishes in every other respect. I”-
When he saw Vronsky in tears, Alekséi Aleksandrovitch felt
the involuntary tenderness that the sufferings of others always
caused him: he turned away his head without replying, and went
to the door.
Anna's voice could be heard from the sleeping-room,-lively,
gay, and articulating clearly. Aleksei Aleksandrovitch went in,
and approached her bed.
Her face was turned towards him. Her cheeks were bright,
her eyes brilliant: her little white hands, coming out of the
sleeves of her night-dress, were playing with the corner of the
coverlet. Not only did she seem fresh and well, but in the hap-
piest frame of mind; she talked fast and loud, accenting her
words with precision and nicety.
"For Alekséi. I am speaking of Alekséi Aleksandrovitch
strange, isn't it, and cruel, that both should be named Alekséi?
Aleksei would not have refused me: I should have forgotten. He
would have forgiven- Da! why does he not come? He is good;
he himself does not know how good he is. Ach! Bozhe moï!
what agony! Give me some water quick! Ach! but that is not
good for her,my little daughter. Nu! then very well; give her
to the nurse. I am willing; that will be even better. Nu! when
he comes, she will be hateful in his sight; take her away. "
"Anna Arkadyevna, he has come; here he is," said the nurse,
trying to draw her attention to Alekséi Aleksandrovitch.
## p. 14998 (#582) ##########################################
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LYOF TOLSTOY
"Ach! what nonsense!
" continued Anna, without seeing her
husband. "Da! give the little one to me, give her to me!
He hasn't come yet. You pretend that he will not forgive me,
because you do not know him. Nobody knows him. I alone-
His eyes, one must know them. Serozha's are very like them;
that is why I can no longer look at them. Has Serozha had his
dinner? I know he will be forgotten. Oh, do not forget him!
Let Serozha be brought into the corner chamber, and let Mariette
sleep near him. ”
Suddenly she was silent; she looked frightened, and raised her
arms above her head as if to ward off a blow.
She had recog-
nized her husband.
"No, no," she said quickly, "I am not afraid of him; I am
afraid of dying. Alekséi, come here. I am in a hurry, because
there is no time to be lost. I have only a few minutes to live;
the fever will be upon me again, and I shall know nothing more.
Now I am conscious: I understand everything and I see every-
thing. "
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch's wrinkled face expressed acute suf-
fering: he wanted to speak, but his lower lip trembled so that
he could not utter a word, and his emotion hardly allowed him
to glance at the dying woman. He took her hand and held it
between his own. Every time that he turned his head towards
her, he saw her eyes fixed on him with a sweetness and a humil-
ity that he had never seen there before.
"Wait! you do not know-wait, wait! " She stopped to col-
lect her thoughts. "Yes," she began again, "yes, yes, yes; this
is what I want to say. Do not be astonished. I am always the
same; but there is another being within me whom I fear: it is
she who loved him, him, and hated you; and I could not forget
what I had once been. Now I am myself,-entirely, really my-
self, and not another. I am dying, I know that I am dying; ask
him if I am not. I feel it now; there are those terrible weights
on my hand and my feet and on my fingers. My fingers! they
are enormous; but all that will soon be over. One thing only
is indispensable to me: forgive me, forgive me wholly! I am a
sinner; but Serozha's nurse told me that there was a holy mar-
tyr-what was her name? - who was worse than I. I will go
to Rome; there is a desert there. I shall not trouble anybody
there. I will only take Serozha and my little daughter. No, you
cannot forgive me; I know very well that it is impossible. Go
away, go away! you are too perfect! "
## p. 14999 (#583) ##########################################
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She held him with one of her burning hands, and pushed him
away with the other.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch's emotion became so great that he
could no longer control himself. He suddenly felt his emotions
change to a moral reconciliation, which seemed like a new and.
unknown happiness. He had not believed that the Christian
law, which he had taken for a guide in life, ordered him to for-
give and love his enemies; and yet his soul was filled with love
and forgiveness. Kneeling beside the bed, he laid his forehead
on her arm,—the fever of which burned through the sleeve,-
and sobbed like a child. She bent towards him, placed her arm
around her husband's bald head, and raised her eyes defiantly.
"There, I knew that it would be so. Now farewell, farewell
to all! They are coming back again. Why don't they go away?
Da! take off all these furs from me! "
The doctor laid her back gently on her pillows, and drew the
covering over her arms. Anna made no resistance, looking all
the while straight before her with shining eyes.
"Remember that I have only asked your pardon: I ask
nothing more. Why doesn't he come? " she said, suddenly look-
ing towards the door, towards Vronsky. "Come! come here, and
give him your hand. "
Vronsky came to the side of the bed, and when he saw Anna
he hid his face in his hands.
"Uncover your face: look at him,- he is a saint," said she.
"Uncover your face! look at him! " she repeated in an irritated
manner. "Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, uncover his face: I want to
see him. "
Alekséi Aleksandrovitch took Vronsky's hands and uncovered
his face, disfigured by suffering and humiliation.
"Give him your hand; forgive him. "
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch held out his hand to him, without try-
ing to keep back the tears.
"Thank the Lord! thank the Lord! " said she; "now every-
thing is right. I will stretch out my feet a little, like that; that
is better. How ugly those flowers are! they do not look like
violets," she said, pointing to the hangings in her room. "Bozhe
moi! Bozhe moi! when will this be over? Give me some mor-
phine, doctor; some morphine. Bozhe moi! Bozhe moï! » And
she tossed about on the bed.
## p. 15000 (#584) ##########################################
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The doctors said that in this fever there was not one chance
in a hundred of her living. She passed the day delirious and
unconscious. Towards midnight her pulse became very low: the
end was expected every moment.
Vronsky went home, but he came back the next morning to
learn how she was. Alekséi Aleksandrovitch came to meet him
in the reception-room, and said to him, "Stay here: perhaps she
will ask for you. " Then he took him to his wife's boudoir him-
self. In the morning the restlessness, the rapidity of thought
and speech, returned; but soon unconsciousness intervened again.
The third day was much the same, and the doctors began to
hope. On this day Alekséi Aleksandrovitch went into the bou-
doir where Vronsky was, closed the door, and sat down in front
of him.
"Aleksei Aleksandrovitch," said Vronsky, feeling that an
explanation was to be made, "I cannot speak,-I cannot think.
Have pity on me! Whatever may be your suffering, believe that
mine is still more terrible. "
He was going to rise; but Alekséi Aleksandrovitch prevented
him, and said, "Pray listen to me: it is unavoidable. I am forced
to explain to you the feelings that guide me, that you may avoid
making any mistake in regard to me. You know that I had
decided on a divorce, and that I had taken the preliminary steps
to obtain one? I will not deny that at first I was undecided;
I was in torment. I confess that I wanted to avenge myself.
When I received the telegram, and came home, I felt the same
desire. I will say more: I hoped that she would die. But"-
he was silent for a moment, considering whether he would.
wholly reveal his thoughts" but I have seen her: I have
forgiven her absolutely. The happiness I feel at being able to
forgive, clearly shows me my duty. I offer the other cheek
to the smiter: I give my last cloak to him who has robbed me.
I only ask one thing of God,-that he
me this joy of forgiving. "
will not take away from
Tears filled his eyes. Vronsky was amazed at the calm, lumi-
nous face.
"These are my feelings. You may drag me in the dust, and
make me the laughing-stock of creation; but I will not give up
Anna for that, nor will I utter a word of reproach to you,” con-
tinued Aleksei Aleksandrovitch. "My duty seems clear and
B
## p. 15001 (#585) ##########################################
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15001
plain to me: I must remain with her; I shall remain with her.
If she wishes to see you, I shall inform you of it; but now I
think it will be better for you to go away. "
Karénin rose: sobs choked his voice. Vronsky rose too, and
standing with bowed head and humble attitude, looked up at
Karénin, without a word to say. He was incapable of under-
standing Alekséi Aleksandrovitch's feelings; but he felt that such
magnanimity was above him, and irreconcilable with his con-
ception of life.
ANNA AND HER SON
From 'Anna Karénina: translated by Nathan Haskell Dole. Copyright 1886,
by T. Y. Crowell & Co.
ANNA'S
NNA'S chief desire on her return to Russia was to see her
son. From the day that she left Italy she was filled with
this idea; and her joy increased in proportion as she drew
near Petersburg. She did not trouble herself with the question
how she should manage this meeting, which seemed to her of
such importance. It was a simple and natural thing, she thought,
to see her child once more, now that she was in the same town
with him; but since her arrival she suddenly realized her pres-
ent relation towards society, and found that the interview was not
easy to obtain.
She had been two days now in Petersburg, and never for an
instant had she forgotten her son; but she had not seen him.
To go straight to her husband's house, and risk coming face
to face with her husband, seemed to her impossible. They might
even refuse to admit her. To write to Alekséi Aleksandrovitch
and ask permission of him, seemed to her painful even to think
of. She could be calm only when she did not think of her hus-
band; and yet she could not feel contented to see her son at a
distance. She had too many kisses, too many caresses, to give
him.
1
Serozha's old nurse might have been an assistance to her,
but she no longer lived with Alekséi Aleksandrovitch.
On the third day, having learned of Alekséi Aleksandrovitch's
relations with the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Anna decided to
write her a letter composed with the greatest care, in which she
## p. 15002 (#586) ##########################################
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15002
would tell her frankly that the permission to see her son de-
pended on her. She knew that if her husband found it out, he,
in his part of magnanimous man, would not refuse her.
answer.
It was a cruel blow to have her messenger return without an
She had never felt so wounded, so humiliated; and yet
she had to acknowledge that the countess was right.
Her grief
was all the keener because she had to bear it alone. She could
not and did not wish to confide it to Vronsky. She knew that
though he was the chief cause of her unhappiness, he would look
upon her meeting with her son as of little account; and the mere
thought of the unsympathetic tone in which he would speak of
it made him seem odious to her. And the fear that she might
come to hate him was the worst of all. Therefore she made up
her mind to hide from him her action in regard to the child.
She stayed at home all day long, and racked her brain to
think of other ways of meeting her son; and finally she decided
upon the most painful of all,-to write directly to her husband.
Just as she was beginning her letter, Lidia Ivanovna's reply was
brought. She accepted it with silent resignation; but the un-
friendliness, the sarcasm, that she read between the lines, pierced
deep into her soul.
"What cruelty! What hypocrisy! " she said to herself. "They
want to insult me and torment the child. I will not let them do
She is worse than I am: at least I do not lie. "
So.
She immediately decided to go on the morrow, which was
Serozha's birthday, directly to her husband's house to see the
child, no matter what it cost in fees to the servants; and to put
an end to the ugly network of lies with which they were sur-
rounding the innocent child.
She went to a neighboring shop and purchased some toys;
and thus she formed her plan of action: She would start early in
the morning, before Alekséi Aleksandrovitch was up; she would
have the money in her hand all ready to bribe the Swiss and
the other servants to let her go up-stairs without raising her veil,
under the pretext of laying on Serozha's bed some presents sent
by his godfather. As to what she should say to her son, she
could not form the least idea; she could not make any prepara-
tion for that.
The next morning, at eight o'clock, Anna got out of her hired
carriage and rang the door-bell of her former home.
## p. 15003 (#587) ##########################################
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15003
"Go and see what is wanted. It's some baruina," said Kapi
tonuitch, in overcoat and galoshes, as he looked out of the win-
dow and saw a lady closely veiled standing on the porch. The
Swiss's assistant, a young man whom Anna did not know, had
scarcely opened the door before Anna thrust a three-ruble note
into his hand.
"Serozha-Sergéi Alekseievitch," she stammered; then she
went one or two steps down the hall.
The Swiss's assistant examined the note, and stopped the vis-
itor at the inner glass door.
"Whom do you wish to see? " he asked.
She did not hear his words, and made no reply.
Kapitonuitch, noticing the stranger's confusion, came out from
his office and asked her what she wanted.
"I come from Prince Skorodumof to see Sergéi Alekseie-
vitch. "
"He is not up yet," replied the Swiss, looking sharply at the
veiled lady.
Anna had never dreamed that she should be so troubled by
the sight of this house, where she had lived nine years. One
after another, sweet and cruel memories arose in her mind, and
for a moment she forgot why she was there.
"Will you wait? " asked the Swiss, helping her to take off her
shubka. When he saw her face, he recognized her, and bowed
profoundly. "Will your Ladyship be pleased to enter? " he said
to her.
She tried to speak; but her voice failed her, and with an en-
treating look at the old servant she rapidly flew up the stairs.
Kapitonuitch tried to overtake her, and followed after her, catch-
ing his galoshes at every step.
"Perhaps his tutor is not dressed yet: I will speak to him. "
Anna kept on up the stairs which she knew so well; but she
did not hear what the old man said.
"This way.
Excuse it if all is in disorder. He sleeps in
the front room now," said the Swiss, out of breath. "Will your
Ladyship be good enough to wait a moment? I will go and see. "
And opening the high door he disappeared.
Anna stopped and waited.
"He has just waked up," said the Swiss, coming back through
the same door.
## p. 15004 (#588) ##########################################
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And as he spoke, Anna heard the sound of a child yawning;
and merely by the sound of the yawn she recognized her son,
and seemed to see him alive before her.
"Let me go in-let me! " she stammered, and hurriedly
pushed through the door.
At the right of the door was a bed, and on the bed a child
was sitting up in his little open nightgown; his little body was
leaning forward, and he was just finishing a yawn and stretching
himself. His lips were just closing into a sleepy smile, and he
fell back upon his pillow still smiling.
"Serozha! " she murmured, as she went towards him.
Every time since their separation that she had felt an access
of love for the absent son, Anna looked upon him as still a child
of four, the age when he had been most charming. Now he no
longer bore any resemblance to him whom she had left; he had
grown tall and thin. How long his face seemed! How short his
hair!
