" Tolstoy seems to
look squarely at the same world as other people, and only to make so
much more of it than other people by the direct force of his genius,
not because he holds a different position in regard to it. His
experience comes from the same quarter as ours; it is because he
absorbs so much more of it, and because it all passes into his great
plastic imagination, that it seems so new. His people, therefore, are
essentially familiar and intelligible; we easily extend their lives
in any direction, instead of finding ourselves checked by the
difficulty of knowing more about them than the author tells us in so
many words. Of this kind of genius I take Tolstoy to be the supreme
instance among novelists; Fielding and Scott and Thackeray are of the
family. But I do not linger over a matter that for my narrow argument
is a side-issue.
The continuity of space and of daylight, then, so necessary to the
motive of the book, is rendered in War and Peace with absolute
mastery. There is more, or there is not so much, to be said of the way
in which the long flight of time through the expanse of the book is
imagined and pictured. The passage of time, the effect of time,
belongs to the heart of the subject; if we could think of War and
Peace as a book still to be written, this, no doubt, would seem to be
the greatest of its demands. The subject is not given at all unless
the movement of the wheel of time is made perceptible.
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