Tolstoi endeavours to give us something
more nearly resembling daily life than any one has yet given us; and in
daily life the moment of spiritual crisis is rarely the moment in which
external action takes part. In the drama we can only properly realise
the soul's action through some corresponding or consequent action which
takes place visibly before us. You will find, throughout Tolstoi's work,
many striking single scenes, but never, I think, a scene which can bear
detachment from that network of detail which has led up to it and which
is to come out of it. Often the scene which most profoundly impresses
one is a scene trifling in itself, and owing its impressiveness partly
to that very quality. Take, for instance, in "Resurrection," Book II.,
chapter xxviiii., the scene in the theatre "during the second act of the
eternal 'Dame aux Camelias,' in which a foreign actress once again, and
in a novel manner, showed how women died of consumption." The General's
wife, Mariette, smiles at Nekhludoff in the box, and, outside, in the
street, another woman, the other "half-world," smiles at him, just in
the same way. That is all, but to Nekhludoff it is one of the great
crises of his life.
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