s 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; ther