Meanwhile he is a
figure in the crowd, a shy and disappointed suitor, unobtrusively
sympathetic, and there are long opportunities of seeing more of him in
his country solitude. Later on, when his fortunes come to the front
with his marriage, he has shown what he is; he steps fully fashioned
into the drama. With Anna it is very different; her story allows no
such pause, for a growing knowledge of the manner of woman she may be.
She is at once to the front of the book; the situation out of which
the whole novel develops is made by a particular crisis in her life.
She meets and falls in love with Vronsky--that is the crisis from
which the rest of her story proceeds; it is the beginning of the
action, the subject of the earliest chapters. And the difficulty lies
in this, that she must be represented upon such a critical height of
emotion before there is time, by Tolstoy's method, to create the right
effect for her and to make her impulse really intelligible. For the
reader it is all too abrupt, the step by which she abandons her past
and flings herself upon her tragic adventure. It is impossible to
measure her passion and her resolution, because she herself is still
incompletely rendered. She has appeared in a few charming scenes, a
finished and graceful figure, but that is not enough. If she is so
soon to be seen at this pitch of exaltation, it is essential that her
life should be fully shared by the onlooker; but as Tolstoy has told
the story, Anna is in the midst of her crisis and has passed it
before it is possible to know her life clearly from within.
Pages:
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250