For Tolstoy's wretched and morbid hero, roused to insight by his own cruel deed, can place the blame where it rightfully belongs; he can see that the real fault does not lie in woman as woman, but in woman as man has corrupted her. With an incisive truth that Strindberg cannot rival he gets to the very root of the mischief and reveals it in man's own sensuality. He makes a serious and passionate plea for purity in men; he speaks with horror of the doctors who encourage vice and of the pseudo-science which declares it necessary. The moral corruption which ensues does not begin and end, as people falsely think, with women of loose life; on the contrary, it pervades the whole of society. The man who has "fallen" takes a wrong attitude towards all women; he regards them, even the pure and innocent, as being created for his physical pleasure. Tolstoy, like Meredith, finds in the demand for "innocence" and "bloom" mainly the desire of the voluptuary to whet his own jaded appetite. The result is the degradation of women; they are all, even to most innocent young girls, turned into sexual lures, made to expose their arms and bosoms in immodest ways, and to provoke the appetites of men. The hero goes on to analyse the miseries of his unhappy marriage; here again they are traced to the root-cause--the excessive sensuality of the husband, who degrades his wife and destroys her health and her nerves, thus exciting in her incessant irritability, which, in its turn, exasperates and annoys him. The only remedy, Tolstoy insists, is to treat woman as a human being, to give her full human rights, and not consider her simply as a possession. At present woman is treated as an object of pleasure, and becomes a degraded and demoralised serf. In her turn she enslaves man by demanding endless luxuries which his labour must produce. Once the exposition is complete the story advances {82} with Tolstoy's usual masterly skill. The psychology of hate has never been drawn with a more fearful accuracy. To the end the hero is self-rigorous; he acknowledges that he killed his wife, not because she violated his love (he had none), but simply because he regarded her as a property in which he had an inalienable right. He feels, and makes us feel, that this is the most horrible feature in the whole repulsive tale.