story is brought to a full close in an episode which gathers up all
the threads and winds them together. The youths and maidens are now
the parents of another riotous brood. Not one of them has ended where
he or she expected to end, but their lives have taken a certain shape,
and it is unmistakable that this shape is final. Nothing more will
happen to them which an onlooker cannot easily foretell. They have
settled down upon their lines, and very comfortable and very estimable
lines on the whole, and there may be many years of prosperity before
them; but they no longer possess the future that was sparkling with
possibility a few years ago. Peter is as full of schemes as ever, but
who now supposes that he will _do_ anything? Natasha is absorbed in
her children like a motherly hen; Nicholas, the young cavalier, is a
country gentleman; they are all what they were bound to be, though
nobody foresaw it. But shyly lurking in a corner, late in the evening,
with eyes fixed upon the elders of the party who are talking and
arguing--here once more is that same uncertain, romantic, incalculable
future; the last word is with the new generation, the budding morrow,
old enough now to be musing and speculating over its own visions.
"Yes, I will do such things--!" says Nicolenka; and that is the
natural end of the story.

But meanwhile the story has rambled and wandered uncontrolled--or
controlled only by Tolstoy's perfect consistency in the treatment of his
characters. They, as I have said, are never less than absolutely true to
themselves; wherever we meet them, in peace or war, they are always the
people we know, the same as ever, and yet changing and changing (like
all the people we know) under the touch of time. It is not they, it is
their story that falters. The climax, I suppose, must be taken to fall
in the great scenes of the burning of Moscow, with which all their lives
are so closely knit. Peter involves himself in a tangle of misfortunes
(as he would, of course) by his slipshod enthusiasm; Natasha's courage
and good sense are surprisingly aroused--one had hardly seen that she
possessed such qualities, but Tolstoy is right; and presently it is
Andrew, the one clear-headed and far-sighted member of the circle, who
is lost to it in the upheaval, wounded and brought home to die. 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