your own life; you are not sure she
does not belong to the borderland of your own past in which dreams and
reality are mingled. _War and Peace_ eclipses all other historical
novels; it has all Stendhal's reality, and all Zola's power of dealing
with crowds and masses. Take, for instance, a masterpiece such as
Flaubert's _Salammbo_; it may and very likely does take away your
breath by the splendour of its language, its colour, and its art, but
you never feel that, even in a dream, you had taken part in the life
which is painted there. The only bit of unreality in _War and Peace_
is the figure of Napoleon, to whom Tolstoy was deliberately unfair.
Another impression which Tolstoy gives us in _War and Peace_ is that
man is in reality always the same, and that changes of manners are not
more important than changes in fashions of clothes. That is why it is
not extravagant to mention _Salammbo_ in this connection. One feels
that, if Tolstoy had written a novel about ancient Rome, we should
have known a score of patricians, senators, scribblers, clients,
parasites, matrons, courtesans, better even than we know Cicero from
his letters; we should not only feel that we _know_ Cicero, but that
we had actually known him. This very task--namely, that of
reconstituting a page out of Pagan history--was later to be attempted
by Merezhkovsky; but brilliant as his work is, he only at times and by
flashes attains to Tolstoy's power of convincing.

_Anna Karenina_ appeared in 1875-76. And here Tolstoy, with the touch
of a Velasquez and upon a huge canvas, paints the contemporary life of
the upper classes in St. Petersburg and in the country. Levin, the
hero, is himself. Here, again, the truth to nature and the reality is
so intense and vivid that a reader unacquainted with Russia will in
reading the book probably not think of Russia at all, but will imagine
the story has taken place in his own country, whatever that may be. He
shows you everything from the inside, as well as from the outside. You
feel, in the picture of the races, what Anna is feeling in looking on,
and what Vronsky is feeling in riding. And with what reality, what
incomparable skill the gradual dawn of Anna's love for Vronsky is
described; how painfully real is her pompous and excellent husband;
and how every incident in her love affair, her visit to her child, her
appearance at the opera, when, after having left her husband, she
defies the world, her gradual growing irrit