never flag. He lays bare each throb of her tortured heart. He is the Parrhasius of novelists.
Mr. Howells says: "The warmth and light of Tolstoï's good heart and right mind are seen in 'Anna Karenina,' that saddest story of guilty love in which nothing can save the sinful woman from herself,—not her husband's forgiveness, her friend's compassion, her lover's constancy, or the long intervals of quiet in which she seems safe and happy in her sin. It is she who destroys herself persistently, step by step, in spite of all help and forbearance; and yet we are never allowed to forget how good and generous she was when we first met her; how good and generous she is fitfully, and more and more rarely to the end. Her lover works out a sort of redemption through his patience and devotion; he grows gentler, wiser, worthier through it; but even his good destroys her."
Mr. Howells also comments on the extraordinary vitality of the work.
"A multitude of figures pass before us," he says, "recognizably real, never caricatured nor grotesqued, nor in any way unduly accented, but simple and actual in their evil or their good. There is lovely family life, the tenderness of father and daughter, the rapture of young wife and husband, the innocence of girlhood, the beauty of fidelity; there is the unrest and folly of fashion, the misery of wealth, and the wretchedness of wasted and mistaken life, the hollowness of ambition, the cheerful emptiness of some hearts, the dull emptiness of others. It is a world, and you live in it while you read and long afterward, but at no step have you been betrayed, not because your guide has warned or exalted you, but because he has been true, and has shown you all things as they are."
It is hardly worth while to particularize the immortal scenes with which the panoramic canvas is crowded, though the Vicomte de Vogüé characterizes the deathbed scene of Nikolaï Levin as "one of the most finished masterpieces of which literature has reason to be proud," and the description of the races at Tsarskoye-Selo, apart
