The Forged Coupon | Page 8

the expressive Slav
vernacular, and of his magical art of infusing his pictures of Russian
scenery not merely with beauty, but with spiritual significance. I can
think of no prose writer, unless it be Thoreau, so wholly under the spell
of Nature as Tolstoy; and while Thoreau was preoccupied with the
normal phenomena of plant and animal life, Tolstoy, coming near to
Pantheism, found responses to his moods in trees, and gained spiritual
expansion from the illimitable skies and plains. He frequently brings
his heroes into touch with Nature, and endows them with all the innate
mysticism of his own temperament, for to him Nature was "a guide to
God." So in the two-fold incident of Prince Andre and the oak tree
("War and Peace") the Prince, though a man of action rather than of
sentiment and habitually cynical, is ready to find in the aged oak by the
roadside, in early spring, an animate embodiment of his own
despondency.
"'Springtime, love, happiness?--are you still cherishing those deceptive
illusions?' the old oak seemed to say. 'Isn't it the same fiction ever?
There is neither spring, nor love, nor happiness! Look at those poor
weather-beaten firs, always the same . . . look at the knotty arms
issuing from all up my poor mutilated trunk-- here I am, such as they
have made me, and I do not believe either in your hopes or in your
illusions.'"
And after thus exercising his imagination, Prince Andre still casts
backward glances as he passes by,
"but the oak maintained its obstinate and sullen immovability in the
midst of the flowers and grass growing at its feet. 'Yes, that oak is right,
right a thousand times over. One must leave illusions to youth. But the
rest of us know what life is worth; it has nothing left to offer us.'"

Six weeks later he returns homeward the same way, roused from his
melancholy torpor by his recent meeting with Natasha.
"The day was hot, there was storm in the air; a slight shower watered
the dust on the road and the grass in the ditch; the left side of the wood
remained in the shade; the right side, lightly stirred by the wind,
glittered all wet in the sun; everything was in flower, and from near and
far the nightingales poured forth their song. 'I fancy there was an oak
here that understood me,' said Prince Andre to himself, looking to the
left and attracted unawares by the beauty of the very tree he sought.
The transformed old oak spread out in a dome of deep, luxuriant,
blooming verdure, which swayed in a light breeze in the rays of the
setting sun. There were no longer cloven branches nor rents to be seen;
its former aspect of bitter defiance and sullen grief had disappeared;
there were only the young leaves, full of sap that had pierced through
the centenarian bark, making the beholder question with surprise if this
patriarch had really given birth to them. 'Yes, it is he, indeed!' cried
Prince Andre, and he felt his heart suffused by the intense joy which
the springtime and this new life gave him . . . 'No, my life cannot end at
thirty-one! . . . It is not enough myself to feel what is within me, others
must know it too! Pierre and that "slip" of a girl, who would have fled
into cloudland, must learn to know me! My life must colour theirs, and
their lives must mingle with mine!'"
In letters to his wife, to intimate friends, and in his diary, Tolstoy's love
of Nature is often-times expressed. The hair shirt of the ascetic and the
prophet's mantle fall from his shoulders, and all the poet in him wakes
when, "with a feeling akin to ecstasy," he looks up from his
smooth-running sledge at "the enchanting, starry winter sky overhead,"
or in early spring feels on a ramble "intoxicated by the beauty of the
morning," while he notes that the buds are swelling on the lilacs, and
"the birds no longer sing at random," but have begun to converse.
But though such allusions abound in his diary and private
correspondence, we must turn to "The Cossacks," and "Conjugal
Happiness" for the exquisitely elaborated rural studies, which give
those early romances their fresh idyllic charm.

What is interesting to note is that this artistic freshness and joy in
Nature coexisted with acute intermittent attacks of spiritual lassitude. In
"The Cossacks," the doubts, the mental gropings of Olenine-- whose
personality but thinly veils that of Tolstoy--haunt him betimes even
among the delights of the Caucasian woodland; Serge, the fatalistic
hero of "Conjugal Happiness," calmly acquiesces in the inevitableness
of "love's sad satiety" amid the scent of roses and the songs of
nightingales.
Doubt and despondency, increased