he had finished with his youth, he turned to the life of a
grown-up man in _The Morning of a Landowner_, and told how he tried to
live a landowner's life, and how nothing but dissatisfaction came of
it. He escapes to the Caucasus, and seeks regeneration, and the result
of the search here is a masterpiece, _The Cossacks_. He goes back to
the world, and takes part in the Crimean war; he describes what he saw
in a battery; his eagle eye lays bare the _splendeurs et miseres_ of
war more truthfully perhaps than a writer on war has ever done, but
less sympathetically than Alfred de Vigny--the difference being that
Alfred de Vigny is innately modest, and that Tolstoy, as he wrote
himself, at the beginning of the war, "had no modesty."

After the Crimean war, he plunges again into the world and travels
abroad; and on his return to Russia, he settles down at Yasnaya
Polyana and marries. The hero of his novel _Domestic Happiness_
appears to have found his heart's desire in marriage and country life.
It was then that he wrote _War and Peace_, which he began to publish
in 1865. He always had the idea of writing a story on the Decembrist
movement, and _War and Peace_ was perhaps the preface to that
unwritten work, for it ends when that movement was beginning. In _War
and Peace_, he gave the world a modern prose epic, which did not
suffer from the drawback that spoils most historical novels, namely,
that of being obviously false, because it was founded on his own
recollection of his parents' memories. He gives us what we feel to be
the very truth; for the first time in an historical novel, instead of
saying "this is very likely true," or "what a wonderful work of
artistic reconstruction," we feel that we were ourselves there; that
we knew those people; that they are a part of our very own past. He
paints a whole generation of people; and in Pierre Bezukhov, the new
landmarks of his own search are described. Among many other episodes,
there is nowhere in literature such a true and charming picture of
family life as that of the Rostovs, and nowhere a more vital and
charming personality than Natasha; a creation as living as Pushkin's
Tatiana, and alive with a reality even more convincing than Turgenev's
pictures of women, since she is alive with a different kind of life;
the difference being that while you have read in Turgenev's books
about noble and exquisite women, you are not sure whether you have
not known Natasha yourself and in