As soon as he had finished with his youth, he turned to the life of a grown-up man in _The Morning of a Landowner_, and told how he tried to live a landowner's life, and how nothing but dissatisfaction came of it. He escapes to the Caucasus, and seeks regeneration, and the result of the search here is a masterpiece, _The Cossacks_. He goes back to the world, and takes part in the Crimean war; he describes what he saw in a battery; his eagle eye lays bare the _splendeurs et misères_ of war more truthfully perhaps than a writer on war has ever done, but less sympathetically than Alfred de Vigny--the difference being that Alfred de Vigny is innately modest, and that Tolstoy, as he wrote himself, at the beginning of the war, "had no modesty."
After the Crimean war, he plunges again into the world and travels abroad; and on his return to Russia, he settles down at Yasnaya Polyana and marries. The hero of his novel _Domestic Happiness_ appears to have found his heart's desire in marriage and country life. It was then that he wrote _War and Peace_, which he began to publish in 1865. He always had the idea of writing a story on the Decembrist movement, and _War and Peace_ was perhaps the preface to that unwritten work, for it ends when that movement was beginning. In _War and Peace_, he gave the world a modern prose epic, which did not suffer from the drawback that spoils most historical novels, namely, that of being obviously false, because it was founded on his own recollection of his parents' memories. He gives us what we feel to be the very truth; for the first time in an historical novel, instead of saying "this is very likely true," or "what a wonderful work of artistic reconstruction," we feel that we were ourselves there; that we knew those people; that they are a part of our very own past. He paints a whole generation of people; and in Pierre Bezukhov, the new landmarks of his own search are described. Among many other episodes, there is nowhere in literature such a true and charming picture of family life as that of the Rostovs, and nowhere a more vital and charming personality than Natasha; a creation as living as Pushkin's Tatiana, and alive with a reality even more convincing than Turgenev's pictures of women, since she is alive with a different kind of life; the difference being that while you have read in Turgenev's books about noble and exquisite women, you are not sure whether you have not known Natasha yourself and in your own life; you are not sure she does not belong to the borderland of your own past in which dreams and reality are mingled. _War and Peace_ eclipses all other historical novels; it has all Stendhal's reality, and all Zola's power of dealing with crowds and masses. Take, for instance, a masterpiece such as Flaubert's _Salammbô_; it may and very likely does take away your breath by the splendour of its language, its colour, and its art, but you never feel that, even in a dream, you had taken part in the life which is painted there. The only bit of unreality in _War and Peace_ is the figure of Napoleon, to whom Tolstoy was deliberately unfair. Another impression which Tolstoy gives us in _War and Peace_ is that man is in reality always the same, and that changes of manners are not more important than changes in fashions of clothes. That is why it is not extravagant to mention _Salammbô_ in this connection. One feels that, if Tolstoy had written a novel about ancient Rome, we should have known a score of patricians, senators, scribblers, clients, parasites, matrons, courtesans, better even than we know Cicero from his letters; we should not only feel that we _know_ Cicero, but that we had actually known him. This very task--namely, that of reconstituting a page out of Pagan history--was later to be attempted by Merezhkovsky; but brilliant as his work is, he only at times and by flashes attains to Tolstoy's power of convincing.