The Craft of Fiction | Page 9

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 by the big
prodigality of Tolstoy's invention. If a novel could really be as large as
life, Tolstoy could easily fill it; his great masterful reach never seems
near its limit; he is always ready to annex another and yet another tract
of life, he is only restrained by the mere necessity of bringing a novel
somewhere to an end. And then, too, this mighty command of spaces
and masses is only half his power. He spreads further than any one else,
but he also touches the detail of the scene, the single episode, the fine
shade of character, with exquisite lightness and precision. Nobody
surpasses, in some ways nobody approaches, the easy authority with
which he handles the matter immediately before him at the moment, a
roomful of people, the brilliance of youth, spring sunshine in a forest, a
boy on a horse; whatever his shifting panorama brings into view, he
makes of it an image of beauty and truth that is final, complete,
unqualified. Before the profusion of War and Peace the question of its
general form is scarcely raised. It is enough that such a world should
have been pictured; it is idle to look for proportion and design in a book
that contains a world.
But for this very reason, that there is so much in the book to distract
attention from its form, it is particularly interesting to ask how it is
made. The doubt, the obvious perplexity, is a challenge to the exploring
eye. It may well be that effective composition on such a scale is
impossible, but it is not so easy to say exactly where Tolstoy fails. If
the total effect of his book is inconclusive, it is all lucidity and
shapeliness in its parts. There is no faltering in his hold upon character;
he never loses his way among the scores of men and women in the
book; and in all the endless series of scenes and events there is not one
which betrays a hesitating intention. The story rolls on and on, and it is
long before the reader can begin to question its direction. Tolstoy seems
to know precisely where he is going, and why; there is nothing at any
moment to suggest that he is not in perfect and serene control of his

idea. Only at last, perhaps, we turn back and wonder what it was. What
is the subject of War and Peace, what is the novel about? There is no
very ready