s he knows better than
to tell it himself. He approaches it through the mind of an onlooker,
Napoleon or Kutusov or the little girl by the stove in the corner,
borrowing the value of indirectness, the increased effect of a story
that is seen as it is mirrored in the mind of another. But he chooses
his onlooker at random and follows no consistent method. The
predominant point of view is simply his own, that of the independent
story-teller; so that the general effect of these pictures is made on
a totally different principle from that which governs the story of the
young people. In that story--though there, too, Tolstoy's method is
far from being consistent--the effect is _mainly_ based on our free
sharing in the hopes and fears and meditations of the chosen few. In
the one case Tolstoy is immediately beside us, narrating; in the other
it is Peter and Andrew, Nicholas and Natasha, who are with us and
about us, and Tolstoy is effaced.

Here, then, is the reason, or at any rate one of the reasons, why the
general shape of War and Peace fails to satisfy the eye--as I suppose
it admittedly to fail. It is a confusion of two designs, a confusion
more or less masked by Tolstoy's imperturbable ease of manner, but
revealed by the look of his novel when it is seen as a whole. It has
no centre, and Tolstoy is so clearly unconcerned by the lack that one
must conclude he never perceived it. If he had he would surely have
betrayed that he had; he would have been found, at some point or
other, trying to gather his two stories into one, devising a scheme
that would include them both, establishing a centre somewhere. But no,
he strides through his book without any such misgiving, and really it
is his assurance that gives it such an air of lucidity. He would only
have flawed its surface by attempting to force the material on his
hands into some sort of unity; its incongruity is fundamental. And
when we add, as we must, that War and Peace, with all this, is one of
the great novels of the world, a picture of life that has never been
surpassed for its grandeur and its beauty, there is a moment when all
our criticism perhaps seems trifling. What does it matter? The
business of the novelist is to create life, and here is life created
indeed; the satisfaction of a clean, coherent form is wanting, and it
would be well to have it, but that is all. We have a magnificent novel
without it.

So we have, but we might have had a more magnificent still