Prince
Andrew, too--nobody can forget how much of the battle in which he is
mortally wounded is transformed into an emotion of _his_; those pages
are filched from Tolstoy's theory of the war and given to his fiction.
In all these episodes, and in others of the same kind, the history of
the time is in the background; in front of it, closely watched for
their own sake, are the lives which that history so deeply affects.
But in the other series of pictures of the campaign, mingled with
these, it is different. They are admirable, but they screen the
thought of the particular lives in which the wider interest of the
book (as I take it to be) is firmly lodged. From a huge emotion that
reaches us through the youth exposed to it, the war is changed into an
emotion of our own. It is rendered by the story-teller, on the whole,
as a scene directly faced by himself, instead of being reflected in
the experience of the rising generation. It is true that Tolstoy's
good instinct guides him ever and again away from the mere telling of
the story on his own authority; at high moments he knows better than
to tell it himself. He approaches it through the mind of an onlooker,
Napoleon or Kutusov or the little girl by the stove in the corner,
borrowing the value of indirectness, the increased effect of a story
that is seen as it is mirrored in the mind of another.
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