Nearly every critic, at least nearly every English critic,[8] in dealing with _Anna Karenina_, has found fault with the author for the character of Vronsky. Anna Karenina, they say, could never have fallen in love with such an ordinary commonplace man. Vronsky, one critic has said (in a brilliant article), is only a glorified “Steerforth.” The answer to this is that if you go to St. Petersburg or to London, or to any other town you like to mention, you will find that the men with whom the Anna Kareninas of this world fall in love are precisely the Vronskys, and no one else, for the simple reason that Vronsky is a man. He is not a hero, and he is not a villain; he is not what people call “interesting,” but a man, as masculine as Anna is feminine, with many good qualities and many limitations, but above all things alive. Nearly every novelist, with the exception of Fielding, ends, in spite of himself, by placing his hero either above or beneath the standard of real life. There are many Vronskys to-day in St. Petersburg, and for the matter of that, _mutatis mutandis_, in London. But no novelist except Tolstoy has ever had the power to put this simple thing, an ordinary man, into a book. Put one of Meredith’s heroes next to Vronsky, and Meredith’s hero will appear like a figure dressed up for a fancy-dress ball. Put one of Bourget’s heroes next to him, with all his psychological documents attached to him, and, in spite of all the analysis in the world, side by side with Tolstoy’s human being he will seem but a plaster-cast. Yet, all the time, in _Anna Karenina_ we feel, as in _War and Peace_, that the author is still unsatisfied and hungry, searching for something he has not yet found; and once again, this time in still sharper outline and more living colours, he paints an ideal of simplicity which is taking us towards Ivan Durak in the character of Levin. Into this character, too, we feel that Tolstoy has put a great deal of himself; and that Levin, if he is not Tolstoy himself, is what Tolstoy would like to be. But the loneliness and the void that are round Tolstoy’s mind are not yet filled; and in that loneliness and in that void we are sharply conscious of the brooding presence of despair, and the power of darkness.