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 whi