which is intended to group together facts and to draw from them conclusions, is replaced by a philosophical contemplation of events, devises nothing and undertakes nothing; but he listens to and remembers everything; he knows how to profit by it at the right moment; he will hinder nothing that is of use, he will permit nothing harmful. He sees on the faces of his troops that inexpressible force which is known as the will to conquer; it is latent victory. He admits something more powerful than his own will: the inevitable march of the facts which pass before his eyes; he sees them, he follows them, and he is able mentally to stand aloof.”
In short, he has the heart of a Russian. This fatalism of the Russian people, calmly heroic, is personified also in the poor moujik, Platon Karatayev, simple, pious, and resigned, with his kindly patient smile in suffering and in death. Through suffering and experience, above the ruins of their country, after the horrors of its agony, Pierre and Andrei, the two heroes of the book, attain, through love and faith, to the moral deliverance and the mystic joy by which they behold God living.
Tolstoy does not stop here. The epilogue, of which the action passes in 1820, deals with the transition from one age to another: from one Napoleonic era to the era of the Decembrists. It produces an impression of continuity, and of the resumption of life. Instead of commencing and ending in the midst of a crisis, Tolstoy finishes, as he began, at the moment when a great wave has
