The continuity of space and of daylight, then, so necessary to the
motive of the book, is rendered in War and Peace with absolute
mastery. There is more, or there is not so much, to be said of the way
in which the long flight of time through the expanse of the book is
imagined and pictured. The passage of time, the effect of time,
belongs to the heart of the subject; if we could think of War and
Peace as a book still to be written, this, no doubt, would seem to be
the greatest of its demands. The subject is not given at all unless
the movement of the wheel of time is made perceptible. I suppose there
is nothing that is more difficult to ensure in a novel. Merely to
lengthen the series of stages and developments in the action will not
ensure it; there is no help in the simple ranging of fact beside fact,
to suggest the lapse of a certain stretch of time; a novelist might as
well fall back on the row of stars and the unsupported announcement
that "years have fled." It is a matter of the build of the whole book.
The form of time is to be represented, and that is something more than
to represent its contents in their order. If time is of the essence
of the book, the lines and masses of the book must show it.

Time is all-important in War and Peace, but that does not necessarily
mean that it will cover a great many years; they are in fact no more
than the years between youth and middle age. But though the wheel may
not travel very far in the action as we see it, there must be no doubt
of the great size of the wheel; it must seem to turn in a large
circumference, though only a part of its journey is to be watched. The
revolution of life, marked by the rising and sinking of a certain
generation--such is the story; and the years that Tolstoy treats,
fifteen or so, may be quite enough to show the sweep of the curve. At
five-and-twenty a man is still beginning; at forty--I do not say that
at forty he is already ending, though Tolstoy in his ruthless way is
prepared to suggest it; but by that time there are clear and
intelligent eyes, like the boy Nicolenka's, fixed enquiringly upon a
man--the eyes of the new-comers, who are suddenly everywhere and all
about him, making ready to begin in their turn. As soon as that
happens the curve of time is apparent, the story is told. But it must
be _made_ apparent in the book; the shape of the story must give the
reason for telling it, the purpose of the author in chronicling his
facts.