ch 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 i