He would only
have flawed its surface by attempting to force the material on his
hands into some sort of unity; its incongruity is fundamental. And
when we add, as we must, that War and Peace, with all this, is one of
the great novels of the world, a picture of life that has never been
surpassed for its grandeur and its beauty, there is a moment when all
our criticism perhaps seems trifling. What does it matter? The
business of the novelist is to create life, and here is life created
indeed; the satisfaction of a clean, coherent form is wanting, and it
would be well to have it, but that is all. We have a magnificent novel
without it.
So we have, but we might have had a more magnificent still, and a
novel that would not be _this_ novel merely, this War and Peace, with
the addition of another excellence, a comeliness of form. We might
have had a novel that would be a finer, truer, more vivid and more
forcible picture of life. The best form is that which makes the most
of its subject--there is no other definition of the meaning of form in
fiction. The well-made book is the book in which the subject and the
form coincide and are indistinguishable--the book in which the matter
is all used up in the form, in which the form expresses all the
matter. Where there is disagreement and conflict between the two,
there is stuff that is superfluous or there is stuff that is wanting;
the form of the book, as it stands before us, has failed to do justice
to the idea.
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