he subject
is somehow and somewhere imperfectly expressed, it means that the
story has suffered. Where then, and how? Is it because the treatment
has not started from the heart of the subject, or has diverged from
the line of its true development--or is it that the subject itself was
poor and unfruitful? The question ramifies quickly. But anyhow here is
the book, or something that we need not hesitate to regard as the
book, recreated according to the best of the reader's ability. Indeed
he knows well that it will melt away in time; nothing can altogether
save it; only it will last for longer than it would have lasted if it
had been read uncritically, if it had not been deliberately recreated.
In that case it would have fallen to pieces at once, Anna and
Clarissa would have stepped out of the work of art in which their
authors had so laboriously enshrined them, the book would have
perished. It is now a single form, and let us judge the effect of it
while we may. At best we shall have no more time than we certainly
require.

III

A great and brilliant novel, a well-known novel, and at the same time
a large and crowded and unmanageable novel--such will be the book to
consider first. It must be one that is universally admitted to be a
work of genius, signal and conspicuous; I wish to examine its form, I
do not wish to argue its merit; it must be a book which it is
superfluous to praise, but which it will never seem too late to praise
again. It must also be well known, and this narrows the category; the
novel of whose surpassing value every one is convinced may easily fall
outside it; our novel must be one that is not only commended, but
habitually read. And since we are concerned with the difficulty of
controlling the form of a novel, let it be an evident case of the
difficulty, an extreme case on a large scale, where the question
cannot be disguised--a novel of ample scope, covering wide spaces and
many years, long and populous and eventful. The category is reduced
indeed; perhaps it contains one novel only, War and Peace.

Of War and Peace it has never been suggested, I suppose, that Tolstoy
here produced a model of perfect form. It is a panoramic vision of
people and places, a huge expanse in which armies are marshalled; can
one expect of such a book that it should be neatly composed? It is
crowded with life, at whatever point we face it; intensely vivid,
inexhaustibly stirring, the broad impression is made b