s over, is that left by the hearing
of noble and tragic music. How, out of such human discords, such a
divine harmony can be woven I do not know; that is the secret of
Tolstoi's genius, as it is the secret of the musician's. Here, achieved
in terms of naked horror, we find some of the things which Maeterlinck
has aimed at and never quite rendered through an atmosphere and through
forms of vague beauty. And we find also another kind of achievement, by
the side of which Ibsen's cunning adjustments of reality seem a little
trivial or a little unreal. Here, for once, human life is islanded on
the stage, a pin-point of light in an immense darkness; and the sense of
that surrounding darkness is conveyed to us, as in no other modern play,
by an awful sincerity and an unparalleled simplicity. Whether Tolstoi
has learned by instinct some stagecraft which playwrights have been
toiling after in vain, or by what conscious and deliberate art he has
supplemented instinct, I do not know. But, out of horror and humour, out
of some creative abundance which has taken the dregs of human life up
into itself and transfigured them by that pity which is understanding,
by that faith which is creation, Tolstoi has in this play done what
Ibsen has never done--given us an interpretation of life which owes
nothing to science, nothing to the prose conception of life, but which,
in spite of its form, is essential poetry.

Ibsen's concern is with character; and no playwright has created a more
probable gallery of characters with whom we can become so easily and so
completely familiar. They live before us, and with apparently so
unconscious a self-revelation that we speculate about them as we would
about real people, and sometimes take sides with them against their
creator. Nora would, would not, have left her children! We know all
their tricks of mind, their little differences from other people, their
habits, the things that a novelist spends so much of his time in
bringing laboriously before us. Ibsen, in a single stage direction,
gives you more than you would find in a chapter of a novel. His
characters, when they are most themselves, are modern, of the day or
moment; they are average, and represent nothing which we have not met
with, nothing which astonishes us because it is of a nobility, a
heroism, a wildness beyond our acquaintance. It is for this that he has
been most praised; and there is something marvellous in the precision of
his measureme