The man is the mirror of the
scenes, his own drama is finished. And if Tolstoy intended to write
the drama of a soul, all this presentation of the deadly journey into
exile, given with the full force of his genius, is superfluous; his
subject lay further back. But Resurrection, no doubt, _is_ a fragment,
a wonderful shifting of scenes that never reached a conclusion; and it
is not to be criticized as a book in which Tolstoy tried and failed to
carry out his purpose. I only mention it because it seems to
illustrate, like Anna Karenina, his instinctive evasion of the matter
that could not be thrown into straightforward scenic form, the form in
which his imagination was evidently happiest. His great example,
therefore, is complementary to that of Balzac, whose genius looked in
the other direction, who was always drawn to the general picture
rather than to the particular scene. And with these two illustrious
names I reach the end of the argument I have tried to follow from book
to book, and it is time to gather up the threads.
XVII
The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I
take to be governed by the question of the point of view--the question
of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story. He tells it
as _he_ sees it, in the first place; the reader faces the story-teller
and listens, and the story may be told so vivaciously that the
presence of the minstrel is forgotten, and the scene becomes visible,
peopled with the characters of the tale.
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