In _The Kreutzer Sonata_ there is not even this "ray of light." It is a ferocious piece of work; Tolstoy lashes out at society like a wounded beast avenging itself for what it has suffered. We must not forget that the story is the confession of a human brute, who has taken life, and who is poisoned by the virus of jealousy. Tolstoy hides himself behind his leading character. We certainly find his own ideas, though heightened in tone, in these furious invectives against hypocrisy in general; the hypocrisy of the education of women, of love, of marriage--marriage, that "domestic prostitution"; the hypocrisy of the world, of science, of physicians--those "sowers of crime." But the hero of the book impels the writer into an extraordinary brutality of expression, a violent rush of carnal images--all the excesses of a luxurious body--and, by reaction into all the fury of asceticism, the fear and hatred of the passions; maledictions hurled in the face of life by a monk of the Middle Ages, consumed with sensuality. Having written the book Tolstoy himself was alarmed: "I never foresaw at all," he said in the _Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata_,"[16] that in writing this book a rigorous logic would bring me where I have arrived. My own conclusions terrified me at first, and I was tempted to reject them; but it was impossible for me to refuse to hear the voice of my reason and my conscience." He found himself repeating, in calmer tones, the savage outcry of the murderer Posdnicheff against love and marriage. "He who regards woman--above all his wife--with sensuality, already commits adultery with her." "When the passions have disappeared, then humanity will no longer have a reason for being; it will have executed the Law; the union of mankind will be accomplished." He will prove, on the authority of the Gospel according to Matthew, that "the Christian ideal is not marriage; that Christian marriage cannot exist; that marriage, from the Christian point of view, is an element not of progress but of downfall; that love, with all that precedes and follows it, is an obstacle to the true human ideal."[17] But he had never formulated these ideas clearly, even to himself, until they fell from the lips of Posdnicheff. As often happens with great creative artists, the work carried the writer with it; the artist outstripped the thinker; a process by which art lost nothing. In the power of its effects, in passionate concentration, in the brutal vividness of its impressions, and in fullness and maturity of form, nothing Tolstoy has written equals the _Kreutzer Sonata_.