at 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