ovel cannot begin to take shape till it has this for
its support. It seems obvious; yet there is nothing more familiar to a
novel-reader of to-day than the difficulty of discovering what the
novel in his hand is about. What was the novelist's intention, in a
phrase? If it cannot be put into a phrase it is no subject for a
novel; and the size or the complexity of a subject is in no way
limited by that assertion. It may be the simplest anecdote or the most
elaborate concatenation of events, it may be a solitary figure or the
widest network of relationships; it is anyhow expressible in ten words
that reveal its unity. The form of the book depends on it, and until
it is known there is nothing to be said of the form.

IV

But now suppose that Tolstoy had not been drawn aside from his first
story in the midst of it, suppose he had left the epic of his country
and "the historians" to be dealt with in another book, suppose that
the interpolated scenes of War and Peace, as we possess it, were to
disappear and to leave the subject entirely to the young heroes and
heroines--what shall we find to be the form of the book which is thus
disencumbered? I would try to think away from the novel all that is
not owned and dominated by these three brilliant households, Besukhov,
Bolkonsky, Rostov; there remains a long succession of scenes, in a
single and straightforward train of action. It is still a novel of
ample size; it spreads from the moment when Peter, amiably uncouth,
first appears in a drawing-room of the social world, to the evening,
fifteen years later, when he is watched with speechless veneration by
the small boy Nicolenka, herald of the future. The climax of his life,
the climax of half a dozen lives, is surmounted between these two
points, and now their story stands by itself. It gains, I could feel,
by this process of liberation, summary as it is.

At any rate, it is one theme and one book, and the question of its
form may be further pressed. The essential notion out of which this
book sprang, I suggested, was that of the march of life, the shift of
the generations in their order--a portentous subject to master, but
Tolstoy's hand is broad and he is not afraid of great spaces. Such a
subject could not be treated at all without a generous amount of room
for its needs. It requires, to begin with, a big and various
population; a few selected figures may hold the main thread of the
story and represent its course, but