Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/323

Rh on the husband's cloak?" he replied, "No; it is better to have the wife's."

And in very fact this touch is extraordinary. At first you do not see why it should be the woman's cloak, but at the same time you feel that it is admirable—that it could not be otherwise.

Every artistic phrase, whether it belongs to a Goethe or a Fedka, is distinguished from one which is not artistic by the simple fact that it calls up an innumerable throng of thoughts, representations, and illustrations.

The neighbor, in the woman's cloak, irresistibly suggests the picture of a feeble, narrow-chested peasant, just as in all probability he was. The woman's cloak, thrown down on the bench, and therefore coming first to hand, brings up before you a perfect picture of a peasant's establishment on a winter's evening. At the mere mention of the cloak there arise involuntarily before your eyes the late hour, at the time when the peasant, undressed for the night, is sitting before his splinter, and the women, coming and going in their housework,—getting water and feeding the cattle,—and all that external disorder in the peasant's mode of life, where not a single person has a garment that is particularly his, and not a single thing has its proper place.

This one expression, "He put on the woman's cloak" defines the whole character of the environment in which the action passes, and this phrase was not discovered accidentally, but chosen deliberately.

I still remember vividly how his imagination conjured up the words spoken by the peasant when he found the paper and could not read it:—

"If my Serozha here knew how to read, he would jump up, tear the paper out of my hands, read it all through, and tell me who this old man is."

In this way we can see the relation between the laboring man and the book which he holds in his sunburned hands; this worthy man, with his patriarchal, pious inclinations, seems to stand before you. You feel that the author has a deep love for him, and has therefore completely understood him, so as to suggest to him