uty and energy of the
imagination articulate. It is not any more than is construction the
essence of the greatest art: it is, however, a prerequisite of the
greatest art. Even those writers whom we regard as the least decorative
labour and sorrow after it no less than the aesthetes. We who do not know
Russian do not usually think of Tolstoy as a stylist, but he took far more
trouble with his writing than did Oscar Wilde (whose chief fault is,
indeed, that in spite of his theories his style is not laboured and
artistic but inspirational and indolent). Count Ilya Tolstoy, the son of
the novelist, published a volume of reminiscences of his father last year,
in which he gave some interesting particulars of his father's energetic
struggle for perfection in writing:

When _Anna Karenina_ began to come out in the _Russki Vyestnik_ [he
wrote], long galley-proofs were posted to my father, and he looked
them through and corrected them. At first, the margins would be
marked with the ordinary typographical signs, letters omitted,
marks of punctuation, and so on; then individual words would be
changed, and then whole sentences; erasures and additions would
begin, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass
of patches, quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to
send it back as it stood because no one but my mother could make
head or tail of the tangle of conventional signs, transpositions,
and erasures.

My mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out
afresh.

In the morning there lay the pages on her table, neatly piled
together, covered all over with her fine, clear handwriting, and
everything ready, so that when "Lyovotchka" came down he could send
the proof-sheets out by post.

My father would carry them off to his study to have "just one last
look," and by the evening it was worse than before; the whole thing
had been rewritten and messed up once more.

"Sonya, my dear, I am very sorry, but I've spoilt all your work
again; I promise I won't do it any more," he would say, showing her
the passages with a guilty air. "We'll send them off to-morrow
without fail." But his to-morrow was put off day by day for weeks
or months together.

"There's just one bit I want to look through again," my father
would say; but he would get carried away and rewrite the whole
thing afresh. There