poleon, if their drama were fully treated, leaving no room for
another. But, mutilated as it is, each of the fragments is broadly
handled, highly finished, and perfectly adjusted to a point of view that
is not the point of view for the rest of the book.

And it is to be remarked that the lines of cleavage--which, as I
suggested, can be traced with precision--by no means invariably divide
the peaceful scenes of romance from the battles and intrigues of the
historic struggle, leaving these on one side, those on the other.
Sometimes the great public events are used as the earlier theme
demands that they should be used--as the material in which the story
of youth is embodied. Consider, for instance, one of the earlier
battle-pieces in the book, where Nicholas, very youthful indeed, is
for the first time under fire; he comes and goes bewildered, laments
like a lost child, is inspired with heroism and flees like a hare for
his life. As Tolstoy presents it, this battle, or a large part of it,
is the affair of Nicholas; it belongs to him, it is a piece of
experience that enters his life and enriches our sense of it. Many of
the wonderful chapters, again, which deal with the abandonment and the
conflagration of Moscow, are seen through the lives of the
irrepressible Rostov household, or of Peter in his squalid
imprisonment; the scene is framed in their consciousness. Prince
Andrew, too--nobody can forget how much of the battle in which he is
mortally wounded is transformed into an emotion of _his_; those pages
are filched from Tolstoy's theory of the war and given to his fiction.
In all these episodes, and in others of the same kind, the history of
the time is in the background; in front of it, closely watched for
their own sake, are the lives which that history so deeply affects.

But in the other series of pictures of the campaign, mingled with
these, it is different. They are admirable, but they screen the
thought of the particular lives in which the wider interest of the
book (as I take it to be) is firmly lodged. From a huge emotion that
reaches us through the youth exposed to it, the war is changed into an
emotion of our own. It is rendered by the story-teller, on the whole,
as a scene directly faced by himself, instead of being reflected in
the experience of the rising generation. It is true that Tolstoy's
good instinct guides him ever and again away from the mere telling of
the story on his own authority; at high moment