Page:Rolland Life of Tolstoy.djvu/108

104 proud woman. All that is best in her, her sincere, courageous mind, crumbles and falls; she has no longer the strength to sacrifice her worldly vanity; her life has no other object than to please her lover; she refuses, with shame and terror, to bear children; jealousy tortures her; the sensual passion which enslaves her obliges her to lie with her gestures, her voice, her eyes; she falls to the level of those women who no longer seek anything but the power of making every man turn to look after them; she uses morphia to dull her sufferings, until the intolerable torments which consume her overcome her with the bitter sense of her moral downfall, and cast her beneath the wheels of the railway-carriage. “And the little moujik with the untidy beard”—the sinister vision which has haunted her dreams and Vronsky’s—“leaned over the track from the platform of the carriage”; and, as the prophetic dream foretold, “he was bent double over a sack, in which he was hiding the remains of something which had known life, with its torments, its betrayals, and its sorrow.”

Around this tragedy of a soul consumed by love and crushed by the law of God—a painting in a single shade, and of terrible gloom—Tolstoy has woven, as in War and Peace, the romances of other lives. Unfortunately these parallel stories alternate in a somewhat stiff and artificial manner, without achieving the organic unity of the symphony of