Page:Rolland Life of Tolstoy.djvu/98

94 with the moonlight, dreams and speaks wildly, above the window of the listening Andrei… the emotions of the first ball, the expectation of love, the burgeoning of riotous dreams and desires, the sleigh-ride, the night in the snow-bound forest, full of fantastic lights; Nature, and the embrace of her vague tenderness: the evening at the Opera, the unfamiliar world of art, in which reason grows confused; the folly of the heart, and the folly of the body yearning for love; the misery that floods the soul; the divine pity which watches over the dying lover… One cannot evoke these pitiful memories without emotion; such emotion as one would feel in speaking of a dear and beloved woman. How such a creation shows the weakness of the female types in almost the whole of contemporary drama and fiction! Life itself has been captured; life so fluid, so supple, that we seem to see it throbbing and changing from one line to another.

Princess Marie, the ugly woman, whose goodness makes her beautiful, is no less perfect a portrait; but how the timid, awkward girl would have blushed, how those who resemble her must blush, at finding unveiled all the secrets of a heart which hides itself so fearfully from every glance!

In general the portraits of women are, as I have said, very much finer than the male characters; in especial than those of the two heroes to whom Tolstoy has given his own ideas: the weak, pliable nature of Pierre Besoukhov, and the hard, eager nature of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. These are characters which lack a centre of gravity; they