The whole point of the action is in
its representative character, its universality; this it must plainly
wear.
It begins to do so at once, from the very first. With less hesitation,
apparently, than another man might feel in setting the scene of a
street or parish, Tolstoy proceeds to make his world. Daylight seems
to well out of his page and to surround his characters as fast as he
sketches them; the darkness lifts from their lives, their conditions,
their outlying affairs, and leaves them under an open sky. In the
whole of fiction no scene is so continually washed by the common air,
free to us all, as the scene of Tolstoy. His people move in an
atmosphere that knows no limit; beyond the few that are to the fore
there stretches a receding crowd, with many faces in full light, and
many more that are scarcely discerned as faces, but that swell the
impression of swarming life. There is no perceptible horizon, no hard
line between the life in the book and the life beyond it. The
communication between the men and women of the story and the rest of
the world is unchecked. It is impossible to say of Peter and Andrew
and Nicholas that they inhabit a "world of their own," as the people
in a story-book so often appear to do; they inhabit _our_ world, like
anybody else. I do not mean, of course, that a marked horizon, drawn
round the action of a book and excluding everything that does not
belong to it, is not perfectly appropriate, often enough; their own
world may be all that the people need, may be the world that best
reveals what they are to be and to do; it all depends on the nature of
the fable.
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