But to this point, at least in relation to one of the two, I shall return directly. Tolstoy's novel is wasteful of its subject; that is the whole objection to its loose, unstructural form. Criticism bases its conclusion upon nothing whatever but the injury done to the story, the loss of its full potential value. Is there so much that is good in War and Peace that its inadequate grasp of a great theme is easily forgotten? It is not only easily forgotten, it is scarcely noticed--on a first reading of the book; I speak at least for one reader. But with every return to it the book that _might_ have been is more insistent; it obtrudes more plainly, each time, interfering with the book that is. Each time, in fact, it becomes harder to make a book of it at all; instead of holding together more firmly, with every successive reconstruction, its prodigious members seem always more disparate and disorganized; they will not coalesce. A subject, one and whole and irreducible--a novel cannot begin to take shape till it has this for its support. It seems obvious; yet there is nothing more familiar to a novel-reader of to-day than the difficulty of discovering what the novel in his hand is about. What was the novelist's intention, in a phrase? If it cannot be put into a phrase it is no subject for a novel; and the size or the complexity of a subject is in no way limited by that assertion. It may be the simplest anecdote or the most elaborate concatenation of events, it may be a solitary figure or the widest network of relationships; it is anyhow expressible in ten words that reveal its unity. The form of the book depends on it, and until it is known there is nothing to be said of the form. IV But now suppose that Tolstoy had not been drawn aside from his first story in the midst of it, suppose he had left the epic of his country and "the historians" to be dealt with in another book, suppose that the interpolated scenes of War and Peace, as we possess it, were to disappear and to leave the subject entirely to the young heroes and heroines--what shall we find to be the form of the book which is thus disencumbered? I would try to think away from the novel all that is not owned and dominated by these three brilliant households, Besukhov, Bolkonsky, Rostov; there remains a long succession of scenes, in a single and straightforward train of action. It is still a novel of ample size; it spreads from the moment when Peter, amiably uncouth, first appears in a drawing-room of the social world, to the evening, fifteen years later, when he is watched with speechless veneration by the small boy Nicolenka, herald of the future. The climax of his life, the climax of half a dozen lives, is surmounted between these two points, and now their story stands by itself. It gains, I could feel, by this process of liberation, summary as it is.