He is the master of the changes of age in a human being. Under his
hand young men and women grow older, cease to be young, grow old, with
the noiseless regularity of life; their mutability never hides their
sameness, their consistency shows and endures through their
disintegration. They grow as we all do, they change in the only
possible direction, that which results from the clash between
themselves and their conditions. If I looked for the most beautiful
illustration in all fiction of a woman at the mercy of time, exposed
to the action of the years, now facing it with what she is, presently
betraying and recording it with what she becomes, I should surely find
it in the story of Anna Karenina. Various and exquisite as she is, her
whole nature is sensitive to the imprint of time, and the way in which
time invades her, steals throughout her, finally lays her low, Tolstoy
tracks and renders from end to end. And in War and Peace his hand is
not less delicate and firm. The progress of time is never broken;
inexorably it does what it must, carrying an enthusiastic young
student forward into a slatternly philosopher of middle life, linking
an over-blown matron with the memory of a girl dancing into a crowded
room. The years move on and on, there is no missing the sense of their
flow.
But the meaning, the import, what I should like to call the moral of
it all--what of that? Tolstoy has shown us a certain length of time's
journey, but to what end has he shown it? The question has to be
answered, and it is not answered, it is only postponed, if we say that
the picture itself is all the moral, all the meaning that we are
entitled to ask for.
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