The Forged Coupon | Page 6

women, revealing in his unguarded
confidences fine shades of his many-sided nature, and throwing light
on the impression he made both on his intimates and on those to whom
he was only known as a writer, while his moral philosophy was yet in
embryo. They are now about to appear in book form under the auspices
of M. Stakhovich, to whose kindness in giving me free access to the
originals I am indebted for the extracts which follow. From one of the
countess's first letters we learn that the feelings of affection, hope, and
happiness which possessed Tolstoy in Switzerland irresistibly
communicated themselves to those about him.
"You are good in a very uncommon way," she writes, "and that is why
it is difficult to feel unhappy in your company. I have never seen you
without wishing to be a better creature. Your presence is a consoling
idea. . . . know all the elements in you that revive one's heart, possibly
without your being even aware of it."
A few years later she gives him an amusing account of the impression
his writings had already made on an eminent statesman.
"I owe you a small episode. Not long ago, when lunching with the
Emperor, I sat next our little Bismarck, and in a spirit of mischief I
began sounding him about you. But I had hardly uttered your name
when he went off at a gallop with the greatest enthusiasm, firing off the
list of your perfections left and right, and so long as he declaimed your
praises with gesticulations, cut and thrust, powder and shot, it was all
very well and quite in character; but seeing that I listened with interest
and attention my man took the bit in his teeth, and flung himself into a
psychic apotheosis. On reaching full pitch he began to get muddled,
and floundered so helplessly in his own phrases! all the while chewing
an excellent cutlet to the bone, that at last I realised nothing but the tips
of his ears--those two great ears of his. What a pity I can't repeat it
verbatim! but how? There was nothing left but a jumble of confused
sounds and broken words."

Tolstoy on his side is equally expansive, and in the early stages of the
correspondence falls occasionally into the vein of self-analysis which in
later days became habitual.
"As a child I believed with passion and without any thought. Then at
the age of fourteen I began to think about life and preoccupied myself
with religion, but it did not adjust itself to my theories and so I broke
with it. Without it I was able to live quite contentedly for ten years . . .
everything in my life was evenly distributed, and there was no room for
religion. Then came a time when everything grew intelligible; there
were no more secrets in life, but life itself had lost its significance."
He goes on to tell of the two years that he spent in the Caucasus before
the Crimean War, when his mind, jaded by youthful excesses,
gradually regained its freshness, and he awoke to a sense of
communion with Nature which he retained to his life's end.
"I have my notes of that time, and now reading them over I am not able
to understand how a man could attain to the state of mental exaltation
which I arrived at. It was a torturing but a happy time."
Further on he writes,--"In those two years of intellectual work, I
discovered a truth which is ancient and simple, but which yet I know
better than others do. I found out that immortal life is a reality, that love
is a reality, and that one must live for others if one would be
unceasingly happy."
At this point one realises the gulf which divides the Slavonic from the
English temperament. No average Englishman of seven-and-twenty (as
Tolstoy was then) would pursue reflections of this kind, or if he did, he
would in all probability keep them sedulously to himself.
To Tolstoy and his aunt, on the contrary, it seemed the most natural
thing in the world to indulge in egoistic abstractions and to expatiate on
them; for a Russian feels none of the Anglo-Saxon's mauvaise honte in
describing his spiritual condition, and is no more daunted by
metaphysics than the latter is by arguments on politics and sport.

To attune the Anglo-Saxon reader's mind to sympathy with a mentality
so alien to his own, requires that Tolstoy's environment should be
described more fully than most of his biographers have cared to do.
This prefatory note aims, therefore, at being less strictly biographical
than illustrative of the contributory elements and circumstances which
sub-consciously influenced Tolstoy's spiritual evolution, since it is
apparent that in order to judge