But the reader at last takes an easy way with these maddening
interruptions; wherever "the historians" are mentioned he knows that
several pages can be turned at once; Tolstoy may be left to belabour
the conventional theories of the Napoleonic legend, and rejoined later
on, when it has occurred to him once more that he is writing a novel.
When he is not pamphleteering Tolstoy's treatment of the second story,
the national saga, is masterly at every point. If we could forget the
original promise of the book as lightly as its author does, nothing
could be more impressive than his pictures of the two hugely-blundering
masses, Europe and Russia, ponderously colliding at the apparent
dictation of a few limited brains--so few, so limited, that the irony of
their claim to be the directors of fate is written over all the scene.
Napoleon at the crossing of the Niemen, Napoleon before Moscow, the
Russian council of war after Borodino (gravely watched by the small
child Malasha, overlooked in her corner), Kutusov, wherever he
appears--all these are impressions belonging wholly to the same cycle;
they have no effect in relation to the story of Peter and Nicholas, they
do not extend or advance it, but on their own account they are supreme.
There are not enough of them, and they are not properly grouped and
composed, to _complete_ the second book that has forced its way into the
first; the cycle of the war and the peace, as distinguished from the
cycle of youth and age, is broken and fragmentary.
Pages:
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47