Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/506

482 and peace of this lovable family, and, especially, ruins the life of the heroine.

And this is why all the events and actors in this tale are so lifelike and memorable. The weak, good-natured, debilitated mother; the upright, weak, attractive father; the still more attractive daughter in her simplicity, naturalness, and sympathy with all that is good; their mutual relations, their first journey, their servants and neighbors; the sly, coarsely sensual, avaricious, fastidious, insolent suitor, who, as usual, deceives the innocent girl by the customary sham idealization of the coarsest instinct; the marriage, Corsica, the beautiful descriptions of nature; the husband's coarse falseness, his seizure of power over the property, his quarrel with his father-in-law, the yielding of the good people, and the victory to insolence; the relations with the neighbors—all this is life itself in all its complexity and diversity. But not only is all this vividly and finely described; every part is, moreover, penetrated by a kind, pathetic tone which involuntarily infects the reader. One feels that the author loves this woman, loves her, not for her external form, but for her soul, for that which is good in her, that he commiserates with her, suffers with her; all of which is involuntarily transmitted to the reader. And the questions, "Why, for what end, is this fine being ruined?" "Ought it indeed to be so?" arise of themselves in the soul of the reader and compel him to examine into the meaning of human life.

Notwithstanding the false notes which here and there appear in the novel, such as, for example, the minute description of the young girl's skin, or the impossible and unnecessary details as to how, through the abbot's advice, the forsaken wife again becomes a mother (details which destroy all the charm of the heroine's purity), or the melodramatic and unnatural account of the injured husband's vengeance; notwithstanding these blemishes, not only did the novel appear to me to be excellent, but I saw behind it, no longer a talented chatterer and joker, not knowing and not wishing to know right from wrong (such as Maupassant had appeared to