the book does not account for it; the effect I speak of spreads far
beyond them. It is not that he has imagined so large an army of
characters, it is that he manages to give them such freedom, such an
obvious latitude of movement in the open world. Description has
nothing to do with it; there is very little description in War and
Peace, save in the battle-scenes that I am not now considering. And it
is not enough to say that if Tolstoy's people have evident lives of
their own, beyond the limits of the book, it is because he understands
and knows them so well, because they are so "real" to him, because
they and all their circumstances are so sharply present to his
imagination. Who has ever known so much about his own creations as
Balzac?--and who has ever felt that Balzac's people had the freedom of
a bigger world than that very solid and definite habitation he made
for them? There must be another explanation, and I think one may
discern where it lies, though it would take me too far to follow it.

It lies perhaps in the fact that with Tolstoy's high poetic genius
there went a singularly normal and everyday gift of experience. Genius
of his sort generally means, I dare say, that the possessor of it is
struck by special and wonderful aspects of the world; his vision falls
on it from a peculiar angle, cutting into unsuspected sides of common
facts--as a painter sees a quality in a face that other people never
saw. So it is with Balzac, and so it is, in their different ways, with
such writers as Stendhal and Maupassant, or again as Dickens and
Meredith; they all create a "world of their own." Tolstoy seems to
look squarely at the same world as other people, and only to make so
much more of it than other people by the direct force of his genius,
not because he holds a different position in regard to it. His
experience comes from the same quarter as ours; it is because he
absorbs so much more of it, and because it all passes into his great
plastic imagination, that it seems so new. His people, therefore, are
essentially familiar and intelligible; we easily extend their lives
in any direction, instead of finding ourselves checked by the
difficulty of knowing more about them than the author tells us in so
many words. Of this kind of genius I take Tolstoy to be the supreme
instance among novelists; Fielding and Scott and Thackeray are of the
family. But I do not linger over a matter that for my narrow argument
is a side-issue.