It is a
beautiful and human story of its kind; but note that it has entirely
dropped the representative character which it wore at the beginning and
is to pick up again at the end. Tolstoy has forgotten about this; partly
he has been too much engrossed in his historical picture, and partly he
has fallen into a new manner of handling the loves and fortunes of his
young people. It is now a tale of a group of men and women, with their
cross-play of affinities, a tale of which the centre of interest lies in
the way in which their mutual relations will work out. It is the kind
of story we expect to find in any novel, a drama of young
affections--extraordinarily true and poetic, as Tolstoy traces it, but a
limited affair compared with the theme of his first chapters.
Of that theme there is no continuous development. The details of the
charming career of Natasha, for example, have no bearing on it at all.
Natasha is the delightful girl of her time and of all time, as
Nicholas is the delightful boy, and she runs through the sequence of
moods and love-affairs that she properly should; she is one whose
fancy is quick and who easily follows it. But in the large drama of
which she is a part it is not the actual course of her love-affairs
that has any importance, it is the fact that she has them, that she is
what she is, that every one loves her and that she is ready to love
nearly every one.
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