"A smartish, brisk conductor, whistling, before the train came to a full stop jumped off; and following him began to descend one by one the impatient passengers,--an officer of the guard with military bearing and frigid gaze, a smiling, lively small tradesman with a bag in his hand, and a peasant with a sack over his shoulder." 19. And from the same union of the mighty preacher with the mighty artist springs the second great characteristic of Tolstoy's art, that which in contrast to Turgenef's architectural manner I must call Tolstoy's panoramic manner. I have spoken in the last lecture of Turgenef as the great architect in the art of fiction. Tolstoy is the great panorama painter of fiction. Of architectural regularity there is little to be found in him, but not because he lacks the line sense of proportion of Turgenef, and the sense of beauty of form, but because his art is of a nature in which regularity of progress and rigid outline of form are not required. 20. Tolstoy's masterpieces therefore are panoramas, and his art instinctively seeks that material which easiest lends itself to such purpose. Hence his "Cossaks," hence his "Scenes before Sebastopol," hence his "Nekhludof." But a panorama needs no plot. Hence his "Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth" contains not even a trace of a plot. It is merely a series of pictures, each indeed in itself a thing of unspeakable beauty, but all grouped in such a manner as to give collectively a panorama of the entire growth of a human soul from the moment it ceases to be animal until it becomes man. In a panorama it matters little where each particular group is placed; just as in Kaulbach's "Era of the Reformation" it matters little whether the figure of Luther is on the left or on the right. "War and Peace" is thus like the Battle of Gettysburg, a vast panorama, and "Anna Karenina" is a vast panorama; the one is a panorama of the political life of the State, the other is a panorama of the spiritual life of the individual. But a panorama requires not so much plots as groups; hence "War and Peace" is not one story, but three stories; and each is the story not of one person or of one pair, but of a group of persons, of a group of pairs. And the same necessity we see in "Anna Karenina;" here again Tolstoy's materials are not persons but groups. Viewed as a work of architecture, the book seems to lack form, the author seems to lack the sense of proportion; for the book could be easily split into two different novels,--the novel of Levin and Kitty on the one hand, and the novel of Vronsky and Anna on the other. As works of architecture, neither would suffer if severed from the other. But as a panorama of the unfolding of heaven in the soul of Levin, and of hell in the soul of Anna, the story of Kitty and Levin cannot be read apart from the story of Anna and Vronsky and still remain a unit, and still remain intelligible.