I suppose there
is nothing that is more difficult to ensure in a novel. Merely to
lengthen the series of stages and developments in the action will not
ensure it; there is no help in the simple ranging of fact beside fact,
to suggest the lapse of a certain stretch of time; a novelist might as
well fall back on the row of stars and the unsupported announcement
that "years have fled." It is a matter of the build of the whole book.
The form of time is to be represented, and that is something more than
to represent its contents in their order. If time is of the essence
of the book, the lines and masses of the book must show it.
Time is all-important in War and Peace, but that does not necessarily
mean that it will cover a great many years; they are in fact no more
than the years between youth and middle age. But though the wheel may
not travel very far in the action as we see it, there must be no doubt
of the great size of the wheel; it must seem to turn in a large
circumference, though only a part of its journey is to be watched. The
revolution of life, marked by the rising and sinking of a certain
generation--such is the story; and the years that Tolstoy treats,
fifteen or so, may be quite enough to show the sweep of the curve. At
five-and-twenty a man is still beginning; at forty--I do not say that
at forty he is already ending, though Tolstoy in his ruthless way is
prepared to suggest it; but by that time there are clear and
intelligent eyes, like the boy Nicolenka's, fixed enquiringly upon a
man--the eyes of the new-comers, who are suddenly everywhere and all
about him, making ready to begin in their turn.
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