And Tolstoy, with the help
of some secret of his own, which is his genius, does not hesitate for
an instant. His hand is plunged into the scene, he lifts out of it
great fragments, right and left, ragged masses of life torn from their
setting; he selects. And upon these trophies he sets to work with the
full force of his imagination; he detects their significance, he
disengages and throws aside whatever is accidental and meaningless; he
re-makes them in conditions that are never known in life, conditions
in which a thing is free to grow according to its own law, expressing
itself unhindered; he liberates and completes. And then, upon all this
new life--so like the old and yet so different, _more_ like the old,
as one may say, than the old ever had the chance of being--upon all
this life that is now so much more intensely living than before,
Tolstoy directs the skill of his art; he distributes it in a single,
embracing design; he orders and disposes. And thus the critic receives
his guidance, and _his_ work begins.
No selection, no arrangement is required of him; the new world that is
laid before him is the world of art, life liberated from the tangle of
cross-purposes, saved from arbitrary distortion. Instead of a
continuous, endless scene, in which the eye is caught in a thousand
directions at once, with nothing to hold it to a fixed centre, the
landscape that opens before the critic is whole and single; it has
passed through an imagination, it has shed its irrelevancy and is
compact with its own meaning.
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