Can we feel that Tolstoy has so represented the image of time, the
part that time plays in his book? The problem was twofold; there was
first of all the steady progression, the accumulation of the years,
to be portrayed, and then the rise and fall of their curve. It is the
double effect of time--its uninterrupted lapse, and the cycle of which
the chosen stretch is a segment. I cannot think there is much doubt
about the answer to my question. Tolstoy has achieved one aspect of
his handful of years with rare and exquisite art, he has troubled
himself very little about the other. Time that evenly and silently
slips away, while the men and women talk and act and forget it--time
that is read in their faces, in their gestures, in the changing
texture of their thought, while they only themselves awake to the
discovery that it is passing when the best of it has gone--time in
this aspect is present in War and Peace more manifestly, perhaps, than
in any other novel that could be named, unless it were another novel
of Tolstoy's. In so far as it is a matter of the _length_ of his
fifteen years, they are there in the story with their whole effect.

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 t