Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/20

 14 stage. Well (though as I listened to it I felt the pity and fear to be almost insupportable) I left the theatre with a feeling of exultation, as I have left a concert room after hearing a piece of noble and tragic music. How out of such human discords such a divine harmony can be woven I do not know—that is the secret of Tolstoy's genius, as it is the secret of the musician's. Here, achieved in terms of naked horror, I found some of the things that Maeterlinck has aimed at and never quite rendered through an atmosphere and through forms of vague beauty. And I found also another kind of achievement, by the side of which Ibsen's cunning adjustments of reality seemed either trivial or unreal. Here, for once, human life is islanded on the stage, a pin-point of light in an immense darkness; and the sense of that surrounding darkness is conveyed to us as in no other play that I have ever seen, by an awful sincerity and by an unparalleled simplicity. Whether Tolstoy has learnt by instinct some stage-craft which playwrights have been toiling after in vain, or by what conscious and deliberate art he has supplemented instinct, I do not know. But out of horror and humour, out of the dregs of human life and out of mere faith in those dregs, somehow, as a man of genius does once in an age, Tolstoy has in this play made for us the