e are wide tracts in which they do not appear at all.
Again and again Tolstoy forgets them entirely; he has discovered a
fresh idea for the unification of this second book, a theory drummed
into the reader with merciless iteration, desolating many a weary
page. The meaning of the book--and it is extraordinary how Tolstoy's
artistic sense deserts him in expounding it--lies in the relation
between the man of destiny and the forces that he dreams he is
directing; it is a high theme, but Tolstoy cannot leave it to make its
own effect. He, whose power of making a story _tell itself_ is
unsurpassed, is capable of thrusting into his book interminable
chapters of comment and explanation, chapters in the manner of a
controversial pamphlet, lest the argument of his drama should be
missed. But the reader at last takes an easy way with these maddening
interruptions; wherever "the historians" are mentioned he knows that
several pages can be turned at once; Tolstoy may be left to belabour
the conventional theories of the Napoleonic legend, and rejoined later
on, when it has occurred to him once more that he is writing a novel.

When he is not pamphleteering Tolstoy's treatment of the second story,
the national saga, is masterly at every point. If we could forget the
original promise of the book as lightly as its author does, nothing
could be more impressive than his pictures of the two hugely-blundering
masses, Europe and Russia, ponderously colliding at the apparent
dictation of a few limited brains--so few, so limited, that the irony of
their claim to be the directors of fate is written over all the scene.
Napoleon at the crossing of the Niemen, Napoleon before Moscow, the
Russian council of war after Borodino (gravely watched by the small
child Malasha, overlooked in her corner), Kutusov, wherever he
appears--all these are impressions belonging wholly to the same cycle;
they have no effect in relation to the story of Peter and Nicholas, they
do not extend or advance it, but on their own account they are supreme.
There are not enough of them, and they are not properly grouped and
composed, to _complete_ the second book that has forced its way into the
first; the cycle of the war and the peace, as distinguished from the
cycle of youth and age, is broken and fragmentary. The size of the
theme, and the scale upon which these scenes are drawn, imply a novel as
long as our existing War and Peace; it would all be filled by Kutusov
and Na