III

A great and brilliant novel, a well-known novel, and at the same time

a large and crowded and unmanageable novel--such will be the book to

consider first. It must be one that is universally admitted to be a

work of genius, signal and conspicuous; I wish to examine its form, I

do not wish to argue its merit; it must be a book which it is

superfluous to praise, but which it will never seem too late to praise

again. It must also be well known, and this narrows the category; the

novel of whose surpassing value every one is convinced may easily fall

outside it; our novel must be one that is not only commended, but

habitually read. And since we are concerned with the difficulty of

controlling the form of a novel, let it be an evident case of the

difficulty, an extreme case on a large scale, where the question

cannot be disguised--a novel of ample scope, covering wide spaces and

many years, long and populous and eventful. The category is reduced

indeed; perhaps it contains one novel only, War and Peace.

Of War and Peace it has never been suggested, I suppose, that Tolstoy

here produced a model of perfect form. It is a panoramic vision of

people and places, a huge expanse in which armies are marshalled; can

one expect of such a book that it should be neatly composed? It is

crowded with life, at whatever point we face it; intensely vivid,

inexhaustibly stirring, the broad impression is made by the big

prodigality of Tolstoy's invention. If a novel could really be as

large as life, Tolstoy could easily fill it; his great masterful reach

never seems near its limit; he is always ready to annex another and

yet another tract of life, he is only restrained by the mere necessity

of bringing a novel somewhere to an end. And then, too, this mighty

command of spaces and masses is only half his power. He spreads

further than any one else, but he also touches the detail of the

scene, the single episode, the fine shade of character, with exquisite

lightness and precision. Nobody surpasses, in some ways nobody

approaches, the easy authority with which he handles the matter

immediately before him at the moment, a roomful of people, the

brilliance of youth, spring sunshine in a forest, a boy on a horse;

whatever his shifting panorama brings into view, he makes of it an

image of beauty and truth that is final, complete, unqualified. Before

the profusion of War and Peace the question of its general form is

scarcely raised. It is enough that such a world should have been

pictured; it is idle to look for proportion and design in a book that

contains a world.

But for this very reason, that there is so much in the book to

distract attention from its form, it is particularly interesting to

ask how it is made. The doubt, the obvious perplexity, is a challenge

to the exploring eye. It may well be that effective composition on

such a scale is impossible, but it is not so easy to say exactly where

Tolstoy fails. If the total effect of his book is inconclusive, it is

all lucidity and shapeliness in its parts. There is no faltering in

his hold upon character; he never loses his way among the scores of

men and women in the book; and in all the endless series of scenes and

events there is not one which betrays a hesitating intention. The

story rolls on and on, and it is long before the reader can begin to

question its direction. Tolstoy _seems_ to know precisely where he is

going, and why; there is nothing at any moment to suggest that he is

not in perfect and serene control of his idea. Only at last, perhaps,

we turn back and wonder what it was. What is the subject of War and

Peace, what is the novel _about_? There is no very ready answer; but

if we are to discover what is wrong with the form, this is the

question to press.

What is the story? There is first of all a succession of phases in the

lives of certain generations; youth that passes out into maturity,

fortunes that meet and clash and re-form, hopes that flourish and wane

and reappear in other lives, age that sinks and hands on the torch to

youth again--such is the substance of the drama. The book, I take it,

begins to grow out of the thought of the processional march of the

generations, always changing, always renewed; its figures are sought

and chosen for the clarity with which the drama is embodied in them.

Young people of different looks and talents, moods and tempers, but

young with the youth of all times and places--the story is alive with

them at once. The Rostov household resounds with them--the Rostovs are

of the easy, light-spirited, quick-tongued sort. Then there is the

dreary old Bolkonsky mansion, with Andrew, generous and sceptical, and

with poor plain Marya, ardent and repressed. And for quite another

kind of youth, there is Peter Besukhov, master of millions, fat and

good-natured and indolent, his brain a fever of faiths and aspirations

which not he, but Andrew, so much more sparing in high hopes, has the

tenacity to follow. These are in the foreground, and between and

behind them are more and more, young men and women at every turn,

crowding forward to take their places as the new generation.

It does not matter, it does not affect the drama, that they are men

and women of a certain race and century, soldiers, politicians,

princes, Russians in an age of crisis; such they are, with all the

circumstances of their time and place about them, but such they are in

secondary fashion, it is what they happen to be. Essentially they are

not princes, not Russians, but figures in the great procession; they

are here in the book because they are young, not because they are the

rising hope of Russia in the years of Austerlitz and Borodino. It is

laid upon them primarily to enact the cycle of birth and growth,

death and birth again. They illustrate the story that is the same

always and everywhere, and the tumult of the dawning century to which

they are born is an accident. Peter and Andrew and Natasha and the

rest of them are the children of yesterday and to-day and to-morrow;

there is nothing in any of them that is not of all time. Tolstoy has

no thought of showing them as the children of their particular

conditions, as the generation that was formed by a certain historic

struggle; he sees them simply as the embodiment of youth. To an

English reader of to-day it is curious--and more, it is strangely

moving--to note how faithfully the creations of Tolstoy, the

nineteenth-century Russian, copy the young people of the twentieth

century and of England; it is all one, life in Moscow then, life in

London now, provided only that it is young enough. Old age is rather

more ephemeral; its period is written on it (not very deeply, after

all), and here and there it "dates." Nicholas and Natasha are always

of the newest modernity.

Such is the master-motive that at first sight appears to underlie the

book, in spite of its name; such is the most evident aspect of the

story, as our thought brushes freely and rapidly around it. In this

drama the war and the peace are episodic, not of the centre; the

historic scene is used as a foil and a background. It appears from

time to time, for the sake of its value in throwing the nearer

movement of life into strong relief; it very powerfully and

strikingly shows what the young people _are_. The drama of the rise of

a generation is nowhere more sharply visible and appreciable than it

is in such a time of convulsion. Tolstoy's moment is well chosen; his

story has a setting that is fiercely effective, the kind of setting

which in our Europe this story has indeed found very regularly,

century by century. But it is not by the war, from this point of view,

that the multifarious scenes are linked together; it is by another

idea, a more general, as we may still dare to hope, than the idea of

war. Youth and age, the flow and the ebb of the recurrent tide--this

is the theme of Tolstoy's book.

So it seems for a while. But Tolstoy called his novel War and Peace,

and presently there arises a doubt; did he believe himself to be

writing _that_ story, and not the story of Youth and Age? I have been

supposing that he named his book carelessly (he would not be alone

among great novelists for that), and thereby emphasized the wrong side

of his intention; but there are things in the drama which suggest that

his title really represented the book he projected. Cutting across the

big human motive I have indicated, there falls a second line of

thought, and sometimes it is this, most clearly, that the author is

following. Not the cycle of life everlasting, in which the rage of

nations is an incident, a noise and an incursion from without--but the

strife itself, the irrelevant uproar, becomes the motive of the fable.

War and Peace, the drama of that ancient alternation, is now the

subject out of which the form of the book is to grow. Not seldom, and

more frequently as the book advances, the story takes this new and

contradictory alignment. The centre shifts from the general play of

life, neither national nor historic, and plants itself in the field of

racial conflict, typified by that "sheep-worry of Europe" which

followed the French Revolution. The young people immediately change

their meaning. They are no longer there for their own sake, guardians

of the torch for their hour. They are re-disposed, partially and

fitfully, in another relation; they are made to figure as creatures of

the Russian scene, at the impact of East and West in the Napoleonic

clash.

It is a mighty antinomy indeed, on a scale adapted to Tolstoy's giant

imagination. With one hand he takes up the largest subject in the

world, the story to which all other human stories are subordinate; and

not content with this, in the other hand he produces the drama of a

great historic collision, for which a scene is set with no less

prodigious a gesture. And there is not a sign in the book to show that

he knew what he was doing; apparently he was quite unconscious that he

was writing two novels at once. Such an oversight is not peculiar to

men of genius, I dare say; the least of us is capable of the feat,

many of us are seen to practise it. But two such novels as these, two

such immemorial epics, caught up together and written out in a couple

of thousand pages, inadvertently mixed and entangled, and all with an

air of composure never ruffled or embarrassed, in a style of luminous

simplicity--it was a feat that demanded, that betokened, the genius of

Tolstoy. War and Peace is like an Iliad, the story of certain men, and

an Aeneid, the story of a nation, compressed into one book by a man

who never so much as noticed that he was Homer and Virgil by turns.

Or can it perhaps be argued that he was aware of the task he set

himself, and that he intentionally coupled his two themes? He

proposed, let us say, to set the unchanging story of life against the

momentary tumult, which makes such a stir in the history-books, but

which passes, leaving the other story still unrolling for ever.

Perhaps he did; but I am looking only at his book, and I can see no

hint of it in the length and breadth of the novel as it stands; I can

discover no angle at which the two stories will appear to unite and

merge in a single impression. Neither is subordinate to the other, and

there is nothing above them (what more _could_ there be?) to which

they are both related. Nor are they placed together to illustrate a

contrast; nothing _results_ from their juxtaposition. Only from time

to time, upon no apparent principle and without a word of warning, one

of them is dropped and the other resumed. It would be possible, I

think, to mark the exact places--not always even at the end of a

chapter, but casually, in the middle of a page--where the change

occurs. The reader begins to look out for them; in the second half of

the novel they are liberally sprinkled.

The long, slow, steady sweep of the story--the _first_ story, as I

call it--setting through the personal lives of a few young people,

bringing them together, separating them, dimming their freshness,

carrying them away from hopeful adventure to their appointed

condition, where their part is only to transmit the gift of youth to

others and to drop back while the adventure is repeated--this motive,

in which the book opens and closes and to which it constantly returns,

is broken into by the famous scenes of battle (by some of them, to be

accurate, not by all), with the reverberation of imperial destinies,

out of which Tolstoy makes a saga of his country's tempestuous past.

It is magnificent, this latter, but it has no bearing on the other,

the universal story of no time or country, the legend of every age,

which is told of Nicholas and Natasha, but which might have been told

as well of the sons and daughters of the king of Troy. To Nicholas,

the youth of all time, the strife of Emperor and Czar is the occasion,

it may very well be, of the climax of his adventure; but it is no more

than the occasion, not essential to it, since by some means or other

he would have touched his climax in any age. War and peace are likely

enough to shape his life for him, whether he belongs to ancient Troy

or to modern Europe; but if it is _his_ story, his and that of his

companions, why do we see them suddenly swept into the background,

among the figures that populate the story of a particular and

memorable war? For that is what happens.

It is now the war, with the generals and the potentates in the

forefront, that is the matter of the story. Alexander and Kutusov,

Napoleon and Murat, become the chief actors, and between them the play

is acted out. In this story the loves and ambitions of the young

generation, which have hitherto been central, are relegated to the

fringe; there are wide tracts in which they do not appear at all.

Again and again Tolstoy forgets them entirely; he has discovered a

fresh idea for the unification of this second book, a theory drummed

into the reader with merciless iteration, desolating many a weary

page. The meaning of the book--and it is extraordinary how Tolstoy's

artistic sense deserts him in expounding it--lies in the relation

between the man of destiny and the forces that he dreams he is

directing; it is a high theme, but Tolstoy cannot leave it to make its

own effect. He, whose power of making a story _tell itself_ is

unsurpassed, is capable of thrusting into his book interminable

chapters of comment and explanation, chapters in the manner of a

controversial pamphlet, lest the argument of his drama should be

missed. But the reader at last takes an easy way with these maddening

interruptions; wherever "the historians" are mentioned he knows that

several pages can be turned at once; Tolstoy may be left to belabour

the conventional theories of the Napoleonic legend, and rejoined later

on, when it has occurred to him once more that he is writing a novel.

When he is not pamphleteering Tolstoy's treatment of the second story,

the national saga, is masterly at every point. If we could forget the

original promise of the book as lightly as its author does, nothing

could be more impressive than his pictures of the two hugely-blundering

masses, Europe and Russia, ponderously colliding at the apparent

dictation of a few limited brains--so few, so limited, that the irony of

their claim to be the directors of fate is written over all the scene.

Napoleon at the crossing of the Niemen, Napoleon before Moscow, the

Russian council of war after Borodino (gravely watched by the small

child Malasha, overlooked in her corner), Kutusov, wherever he

appears--all these are impressions belonging wholly to the same cycle;

they have no effect in relation to the story of Peter and Nicholas, they

do not extend or advance it, but on their own account they are supreme.

There are not enough of them, and they are not properly grouped and

composed, to _complete_ the second book that has forced its way into the

first; the cycle of the war and the peace, as distinguished from the

cycle of youth and age, is broken and fragmentary. The size of the

theme, and the scale upon which these scenes are drawn, imply a novel as

long as our existing War and Peace; it would all be filled by Kutusov

and Napoleon, if their drama were fully treated, leaving no room for

another. But, mutilated as it is, each of the fragments is broadly

handled, highly finished, and perfectly adjusted to a point of view that

is not the point of view for the rest of the book.

And it is to be remarked that the lines of cleavage--which, as I

suggested, can be traced with precision--by no means invariably divide

the peaceful scenes of romance from the battles and intrigues of the

historic struggle, leaving these on one side, those on the other.

Sometimes the great public events are used as the earlier theme

demands that they should be used--as the material in which the story

of youth is embodied. Consider, for instance, one of the earlier

battle-pieces in the book, where Nicholas, very youthful indeed, is

for the first time under fire; he comes and goes bewildered, laments

like a lost child, is inspired with heroism and flees like a hare for

his life. As Tolstoy presents it, this battle, or a large part of it,

is the affair of Nicholas; it belongs to him, it is a piece of

experience that enters his life and enriches our sense of it. Many of

the wonderful chapters, again, which deal with the abandonment and the

conflagration of Moscow, are seen through the lives of the

irrepressible Rostov household, or of Peter in his squalid

imprisonment; the scene is framed in their consciousness. Prince

Andrew, too--nobody can forget how much of the battle in which he is

mortally wounded is transformed into an emotion of _his_; those pages

are filched from Tolstoy's theory of the war and given to his fiction.

In all these episodes, and in others of the same kind, the history of

the time is in the background; in front of it, closely watched for

their own sake, are the lives which that history so deeply affects.

But in the other series of pictures of the campaign, mingled with

these, it is different. They are admirable, but they screen the

thought of the particular lives in which the wider interest of the

book (as I take it to be) is firmly lodged. From a huge emotion that

reaches us through the youth exposed to it, the war is changed into an

emotion of our own. It is rendered by the story-teller, on the whole,

as a scene directly faced by himself, instead of being reflected in

the experience of the rising generation. It is true that Tolstoy's

good instinct guides him ever and again away from the mere telling of

the story on his own authority; at high moments he knows better than

to tell it himself. He approaches it through the mind of an onlooker,

Napoleon or Kutusov or the little girl by the stove in the corner,

borrowing the value of indirectness, the increased effect of a story

that is seen as it is mirrored in the mind of another. But he chooses

his onlooker at random and follows no consistent method. The

predominant point of view is simply his own, that of the independent

story-teller; so that the general effect of these pictures is made on

a totally different principle from that which governs the story of the

young people. In that story--though there, too, Tolstoy's method is

far from being consistent--the effect is _mainly_ based on our free

sharing in the hopes and fears and meditations of the chosen few. In

the one case Tolstoy is immediately beside us, narrating; in the other

it is Peter and Andrew, Nicholas and Natasha, who are with us and

about us, and Tolstoy is effaced.

Here, then, is the reason, or at any rate one of the reasons, why the

general shape of War and Peace fails to satisfy the eye--as I suppose

it admittedly to fail. It is a confusion of two designs, a confusion

more or less masked by Tolstoy's imperturbable ease of manner, but

revealed by the look of his novel when it is seen as a whole. It has

no centre, and Tolstoy is so clearly unconcerned by the lack that one

must conclude he never perceived it. If he had he would surely have

betrayed that he had; he would have been found, at some point or

other, trying to gather his two stories into one, devising a scheme

that would include them both, establishing a centre somewhere. But no,

he strides through his book without any such misgiving, and really it

is his assurance that gives it such an air of lucidity. He would only

have flawed its surface by attempting to force the material on his

hands into some sort of unity; its incongruity is fundamental. And

when we add, as we must, that War and Peace, with all this, is one of

the great novels of the world, a picture of life that has never been

surpassed for its grandeur and its beauty, there is a moment when all

our criticism perhaps seems trifling. What does it matter? The

business of the novelist is to create life, and here is life created

indeed; the satisfaction of a clean, coherent form is wanting, and it

would be well to have it, but that is all. We have a magnificent novel

without it.

So we have, but we might have had a more magnificent still, and a

novel that would not be _this_ novel merely, this War and Peace, with

the addition of another excellence, a comeliness of form. We might

have had a novel that would be a finer, truer, more vivid and more

forcible picture of life. The best form is that which makes the most

of its subject--there is no other definition of the meaning of form in

fiction. The well-made book is the book in which the subject and the

form coincide and are indistinguishable--the book in which the matter

is all used up in the form, in which the form expresses all the

matter. Where there is disagreement and conflict between the two,

there is stuff that is superfluous or there is stuff that is wanting;

the form of the book, as it stands before us, has failed to do justice

to the idea. In War and Peace, as it seems to me, the story suffers

twice over for the imperfection of the form. It is damaged, in the

first place, by the importation of another and an irrelevant

story--damaged because it so loses the sharp and clear relief that it

would have if it stood alone. Whether the story was to be the drama of

youth and age, or the drama of war and peace, in either case it would

have been incomparably more impressive if _all_ the great wealth of

the material had been used for its purpose, all brought into one

design. And furthermore, in either case again, the story is

incomplete; neither of them is finished, neither of them is given its

full development, for all the size of the book. But to this point, at

least in relation to one of the two, I shall return directly.

Tolstoy's novel is wasteful of its subject; that is the whole

objection to its loose, unstructural form. Criticism bases its

conclusion upon nothing whatever but the injury done to the story, the

loss of its full potential value. Is there so much that is good in War

and Peace that its inadequate grasp of a great theme is easily

forgotten? It is not only easily forgotten, it is scarcely noticed--on

a first reading of the book; I speak at least for one reader. But with

every return to it the book that _might_ have been is more insistent;

it obtrudes more plainly, each time, interfering with the book that

is. Each time, in fact, it becomes harder to make a book of it at all;

instead of holding together more firmly, with every successive

reconstruction, its prodigious members seem always more disparate and

disorganized; they will not coalesce. A subject, one and whole and

irreducible--a novel cannot begin to take shape till it has this for

its support. It seems obvious; yet there is nothing more familiar to a

novel-reader of to-day than the difficulty of discovering what the

novel in his hand is about. What was the novelist's intention, in a

phrase? If it cannot be put into a phrase it is no subject for a

novel; and the size or the complexity of a subject is in no way

limited by that assertion. It may be the simplest anecdote or the most

elaborate concatenation of events, it may be a solitary figure or the

widest network of relationships; it is anyhow expressible in ten words

that reveal its unity. The form of the book depends on it, and until

it is known there is nothing to be said of the form.