But two such novels as these, two
such immemorial epics, caught up together and written out in a couple
of thousand pages, inadvertently mixed and entangled, and all with an
air of composure never ruffled or embarrassed, in a style of luminous
simplicity--it was a feat that demanded, that betokened, the genius of
Tolstoy. War and Peace is like an Iliad, the story of certain men, and
an Aeneid, the story of a nation, compressed into one book by a man
who never so much as noticed that he was Homer and Virgil by turns.
Or can it perhaps be argued that he was aware of the task he set
himself, and that he intentionally coupled his two themes? He
proposed, let us say, to set the unchanging story of life against the
momentary tumult, which makes such a stir in the history-books, but
which passes, leaving the other story still unrolling for ever.
Perhaps he did; but I am looking only at his book, and I can see no
hint of it in the length and breadth of the novel as it stands; I can
discover no angle at which the two stories will appear to unite and
merge in a single impression. Neither is subordinate to the other, and
there is nothing above them (what more _could_ there be?) to which
they are both related. Nor are they placed together to illustrate a
contrast; nothing _results_ from their juxtaposition. Only from time
to time, upon no apparent principle and without a word of warning, one
of them is dropped and the other resumed.
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