There is little material for the stage in the novels of Tolstoi. Those novels are full, it is true, of drama; but they cannot be condensed into dramas. The method of Tolstoi is slow, deliberate, significantly unemphatic; he works by adding detail to detail, as a certain kind of painter adds touch to touch. The result is, in a sense, monotonous, and it is meant to be monotonous. 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 Camélias,' 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. He has seen something, for the first time, in what he now feels to be its true light, and he sees it "as clearly as he saw the palace, the sentinels, the fortress, the river, the boats and the Stock Exchange. And just as on this northern summer night there was no restful darkness on the earth, but only a dismal, dull light coming from an invisible source, so in Nekhludoff's soul there was no longer the restful darkness, ignorance." The chapter is profoundly impressive; it is one of those chapters which no one but Tolstoi has ever written. Imagine it transposed to the stage, if that were possible, and the inevitable disappearance of everything that gives it meaning!