Tolstoy, who wished to found an art for all men, achieved universality at the first stroke. Throughout the world his work has met with a success which can never fail, for it is purged of all the perishable elements of art, and nothing is left but the eternal. _The Power of Darkness_ does not rise to this august simplicity of heart: it does not pretend to do so. It is the reverse side of the picture. On the one hand is the dream of divine love; on the other, the ghastly reality. We may judge, in reading this play, whether Tolstoy's faith and his love of the people ever caused him to idealise the people or betray the truth. Tolstoy, so awkward in most of his dramatic essays,[13] has here attained to mastery. The characters and the action, are handled with ease; the coxcomb Nikita, the sensual, headstrong passion of Anissia, the cynical good-humour of the old woman, Matrena, who gloats maternally over the adultery of her son, and the sanctity of the old stammering Hakim--God inhabiting a ridiculous body. Then comes the fall of Nikita, weak and without real evil, but fettered by his sin; falling to the depths of crime in spite of his efforts to check himself on the dreadful declivity; but his mother and his wife drag him downward.... "The peasants aren't worth much.... But the _babas!_ The women! They are wild animals ... they are afraid of nothing! ... Sisters, there are millions of you, all Russians, and you are all as blind as moles. You know nothing, you know nothing!... The moujik at least may manage to learn something--in the drink-shop, or who knows where?--in prison, or in the barracks; but the _baba_--what can she know? She has seen nothing, heard nothing. As she has grown up, so she will die.... They are like little blind puppies who go running here and there and ramming their heads against all sorts of filth.... They only know their silly songs: 'Ho--o--o! Ho--o--o!' What does it mean? Ho--o--o? They don't know!"[14] Then comes the terrible scene of the murder of the new-born child. Nikita does not want to kill it. Anissia, who has murdered her husband for him, and whose nerves have ever since been tortured by her crime, becomes ferocious, maddened, and threatens to give him up. She cries: "At least I shan't be alone any longer! He'll be a murderer too 1 Let him know what it's like!" Nikita crushes the child between two boards. In the midst of his crime he flies, terrified; he threatens to kill Anissia and his mother; he sobs, he prays:-- "Little mother, I can't go on!" He thinks he hears the mangled baby crying. "Where shall I go to be safe?" It is Shakespearean. Less violent, but still more poignant, is the dialogue of the little girl and the old servant-woman, who, alone in the house, at night, hear and guess at the crime which is being enacted off the stage.