, and a
novel that would not be _this_ novel merely, this War and Peace, with
the addition of another excellence, a comeliness of form. We might
have had a novel that would be a finer, truer, more vivid and more
forcible picture of life. The best form is that which makes the most
of its subject--there is no other definition of the meaning of form in
fiction. The well-made book is the book in which the subject and the
form coincide and are indistinguishable--the book in which the matter
is all used up in the form, in which the form expresses all the
matter. Where there is disagreement and conflict between the two,
there is stuff that is superfluous or there is stuff that is wanting;
the form of the book, as it stands before us, has failed to do justice
to the idea. In War and Peace, as it seems to me, the story suffers
twice over for the imperfection of the form. It is damaged, in the
first place, by the importation of another and an irrelevant
story--damaged because it so loses the sharp and clear relief that it
would have if it stood alone. Whether the story was to be the drama of
youth and age, or the drama of war and peace, in either case it would
have been incomparably more impressive if _all_ the great wealth of
the material had been used for its purpose, all brought into one
design. And furthermore, in either case again, the story is
incomplete; neither of them is finished, neither of them is given its
full development, for all the size of the book. But to this point, at
least in relation to one of the two, I shall return directly.

Tolstoy's novel is wasteful of its subject; that is the whole
objection to its loose, unstructural form. Criticism bases its
conclusion upon nothing whatever but the injury done to the story, the
loss of its full potential value. Is there so much that is good in War
and Peace that its inadequate grasp of a great theme is easily
forgotten? It is not only easily forgotten, it is scarcely noticed--on
a first reading of the book; I speak at least for one reader. But with
every return to it the book that _might_ have been is more insistent;
it obtrudes more plainly, each time, interfering with the book that
is. Each time, in fact, it becomes harder to make a book of it at all;
instead of holding together more firmly, with every successive
reconstruction, its prodigious members seem always more disparate and
disorganized; they will not coalesce. A subject, one and whole and
irreducible--a n