The Forged Coupon and Other Stories

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THE FORGED COUPON

And Other Stories

By Leo Tolstoy




CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
THE FORGED COUPON
AFTER THE DANCE
ALYOSHA THE POT
MY DREAM
THERE ARE NO GUILTY PEOPLE
THE YOUNG TSAR




INTRODUCTION

IN an age of materialism like our own the phenomenon of spiritual power
is as significant and inspiring as it is rare. No longer associated with
the "divine right" of kings, it has survived the downfall of feudal and
theocratic systems as a mystic personal emanation in place of a coercive
weapon of statecraft.

Freed from its ancient shackles of dogma and despotism it eludes
analysis. We know not how to gauge its effect on others, nor even upon
ourselves. Like the wind, it permeates the atmosphere we breathe, and
baffles while it stimulates the mind with its intangible but compelling
force.

This psychic power, which the dead weight of materialism is impotent
to suppress, is revealed in the lives and writings of men of the most
diverse creeds and nationalities. Apart from those who, like Buddha
and Mahomet, have been raised to the height of demi-gods by worshipping
millions, there are names which leap inevitably to the mind--such names
as Savonarola, Luther, Calvin, Rousseau--which stand for types and
exemplars of spiritual aspiration. To this high priesthood of the quick
among the dead, who can doubt that time will admit Leo Tolstoy--a genius
whose greatness has been obscured from us rather than enhanced by his
duality; a realist who strove to demolish the mysticism of Christianity,
and became himself a mystic in the contemplation of Nature; a man of
ardent temperament and robust physique, keenly susceptible to human
passions and desires, who battled with himself from early manhood until
the spirit, gathering strength with years, inexorably subdued the flesh.

Tolstoy the realist steps without cavil into the front rank of modern
writers; Tolstoy the idealist has been constantly derided and scorned by
men of like birth and education with himself--his altruism denounced as
impracticable, his preaching compared with his mode of life to prove
him inconsistent, if not insincere. This is the prevailing attitude of
politicians and literary men.

Must one conclude that the mass of mankind has lost touch with idealism?
On the contrary, in spite of modern materialism, or even because of it,
many leaders of spiritual thought have arisen in our times, and have won
the ear of vast audiences. Their message is a call to a simpler life, to
a recognition of the responsibilities of wealth, to the avoidance of war
by arbitration, and sinking of class hatred in a deep sense of universal
brotherhood.

Unhappily, when an idealistic creed is formulated in precise and
dogmatic language, it invariably loses something of its pristine beauty
in the process of transmutation. Hence the Positivist philosophy
of Comte, though embodying noble aspirations, has had but a limited
influence. Again, the poetry of Robert Browning, though less frankly
altruistic than that of Cowper or Wordsworth, is inherently ethical, and
reveals strong sympathy with sinning and suffering humanity, but it is
masked by a manner that is sometimes uncouth and frequently obscure.
Owing to these, and other instances, idealism suggests to the world
at large a vague sentimentality peculiar to the poets, a bloodless
abstraction toyed with by philosophers, which must remain a closed book
to struggling humanity.

Yet Tolstoy found true idealism in the toiling peasant who believed in
God, rather than in his intellectual superior who believed in himself
in the first place, and gave a conventional assent to the existence of a
deity in the second. For the peasant was still religious at heart with
a naive unquestioning faith--more characteristic of the fourteenth or
fifteenth century than of to-day--and still fervently aspired to God
although sunk in superstition and held down by the despotism of the
Greek Church. It was the cumbrous ritual and dogma of the orthodox state
religion which roused Tolstoy to impassioned protests, and led him step
by step to separate the core of Christianity from its sacerdotal shell,
thus bringing upon himself the ban of excommunication.

The signal mark of the reprobation of "Holy Synod" was slow in
coming--it did not, in fact, become absolute until a couple of years
after the publication of "Resurrection," in 1901, in spite of the
attitude of fierce hostility to Church and State which Tolstoy had
maintained for so long. This hostility, of which the seeds were
primarily sown by the closing of his school and inquisition of his
private papers in the summer of 1862, soon grew to proportions
far greater than those arising from a personal wrong. The dumb and
submissive moujik found in Tolstoy a living voice to express his
sufferings.

Tolstoy was well fitted by nature and circumstances to be the peasant's
spokesman. He had been brought into intimate contact with him in the
varying conditions of peace and war, and he knew him at his worst and
best. The old home of the family, Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy, his
brothers and sister, spent their early years in charge of two guardian
aunts, was not only a halting-place for pilgrims journeying to and from
the great monastic shrines, but gave shelter to a number of persons of
enfeebled minds belonging to the peasant class, with whom the devout and
kindly Aunt Alexandra spent many hours daily in religious conversation
and prayer.

In "Childhood" Tolstoy apostrophises with feeling one of those
"innocents," a man named Grisha, "whose faith was so strong that you
felt the nearness of God, your love so ardent that the words flowed from
your lips uncontrolled by your reason. And how did you celebrate his
Majesty when, words failing you, you prostrated yourself on the ground,
bathed in tears" This picture of humble religious faith was amongst
Tolstoy's earliest memories, and it returned to comfort him and uplift
his soul when it was tossed and engulfed by seas of doubt. But the
affection he felt in boyhood towards the moujiks became tinged with
contempt when his attempts to improve their condition--some of which are
described in "Anna Karenina" and in the "Landlord's Morning"--ended in
failure, owing to the ignorance and obstinacy of the people. It was not
till he passed through the ordeal of war in Turkey and the Crimea
that he discovered in the common soldier who fought by his side an
unconscious heroism, an unquestioning faith in God, a kindliness and
simplicity of heart rarely possessed by his commanding officer.

The impressions made upon Tolstoy during this period of active service
gave vivid reality to the battle-scenes in "War and Peace," and are
traceable in the reflections and conversation of the two heroes, Prince
Andre and Pierre Besukhov. On the eve of the battle of Borodino,
Prince Andre, talking with Pierre in the presence of his devoted
soldier-servant Timokhine, says,--"'Success cannot possibly be, nor has
it ever been, the result of strategy or fire-arms or numbers.'

"'Then what does it result from?' said Pierre.

"'From the feeling that is in me, that is in him'--pointing to
Timokhine--'and that is in each individual soldier.'"

He then contrasts the different spirit animating the officers and the
men.

"'The former,' he says, 'have nothing in view but their personal
interests. The critical moment for them is the moment at which they are
able to supplant a rival, to win a cross or a new order. I see only one
thing. To-morrow one hundred thousand Russians and one hundred thousand
Frenchmen will meet to fight; they who fight the hardest and spare
themselves the least will win the day.'

"'There's the truth, your Excellency, the real truth,' murmurs
Timokhine; 'it is not a time to spare oneself. Would you believe it, the
men of my battalion have not tasted brandy? "It's not a day for that,"
they said.'"

During the momentous battle which followed, Pierre was struck by the
steadfastness under fire which has always distinguished the Russian
soldier.

"The fall of each man acted as an increasing stimulus. The faces of the
soldiers brightened more and more, as if challenging the storm let loose
on them."

In contrast with this picture of fine "morale" is that of the young
white-faced officer, looking nervously about him as he walks backwards
with lowered sword.

In other places Tolstoy does full justice to the courage and patriotism
of all grades in the Russian army, but it is constantly evident that
his sympathies are most heartily with the rank and file. What genuine
feeling and affection rings in this sketch of Plato, a common soldier,
in "War and Peace!"

"Plato Karataev was about fifty, judging by the number of campaigns in
which he had served; he could not have told his exact age himself, and
when he laughed, as he often did, he showed two rows of strong, white
teeth. There was not a grey hair on his head or in his beard, and his
bearing wore the stamp of activity, resolution, and above all, stoicism.
His face, though much lined, had a touching expression of simplicity,
youth, and innocence. When he spoke, in his soft sing-song voice, his
speech flowed as from a well-spring. He never thought about what he
had said or was going to say next, and the vivacity and the rhythmical
inflections of his voice gave it a penetrating persuasiveness. Night and
morning, when going to rest or getting up, he said, 'O God, let me
sleep like a stone and rise up like a loaf.' And, sure enough, he had no
sooner lain down than he slept like a lump of lead, and in the morning
on waking he was bright and lively, and ready for any work. He could
do anything, just not very well nor very ill; he cooked, sewed, planed
wood, cobbled his boots, and was always occupied with some job or other,
only allowing himself to chat and sing at night. He sang, not like a
singer who knows he has listeners, but as the birds sing to God, the
Father of all, feeling it as necessary as walking or stretching himself.
His singing was tender, sweet, plaintive, almost feminine, in keeping
with his serious countenance. When, after some weeks of captivity his
beard had grown again, he seemed to have got rid of all that was not his
true self, the borrowed face which his soldiering life had given him,
and to have become, as before, a peasant and a man of the people. In the
eyes of the other prisoners Plato was just a common soldier, whom they
chaffed at times and sent on all manner of errands; but to Pierre he
remained ever after the personification of simplicity and truth, such as
he had divined him to be since the first night spent by his side."

This clearly is a study from life, a leaf from Tolstoy's "Crimean
Journal." It harmonises with the point of view revealed in the "Letters
from Sebastopol" (especially in the second and third series), and shows,
like them, the change effected by the realities of war in the intolerant
young aristocrat, who previously excluded all but the comme-il-faut from
his consideration. With widened outlook and new ideals he returned to
St. Petersburg at the close of the Crimean campaign, to be welcomed by
the elite of letters and courted by society. A few years before he would
have been delighted with such a reception. Now it jarred on his awakened
sense of the tragedy of existence. He found himself entirely out of
sympathy with the group of literary men who gathered round him, with
Turgenev at their head. In Tolstoy's eyes they were false, paltry, and
immoral, and he was at no pains to disguise his opinions. Dissension,
leading to violent scenes, soon broke out between Turgenev and Tolstoy;
and the latter, completely disillusioned both in regard to his great
contemporary and to the literary world of St. Petersburg, shook off the
dust of the capital, and, after resigning his commission in the army,
went abroad on a tour through Germany, Switzerland, and France.

In France his growing aversion from capital punishment became
intensified by his witnessing a public execution, and the painful
thoughts aroused by the scene of the guillotine haunted his sensitive
spirit for long. He left France for Switzerland, and there, among
beautiful natural surroundings, and in the society of friends, he
enjoyed a respite from mental strain.

"A fresh, sweet-scented flower seemed to have blossomed in my spirit; to
the weariness and indifference to all things which before possessed
me had succeeded, without apparent transition, a thirst for love, a
confident hope, an inexplicable joy to feel myself alive."

Those halcyon days ushered in the dawn of an intimate friendship between
himself and a lady who in the correspondence which ensued usually
styled herself his aunt, but was in fact a second cousin. This lady, the
Countess Alexandra A. Tolstoy, a Maid of Honour of the Bedchamber, moved
exclusively in Court circles. She was intelligent and sympathetic, but
strictly orthodox and mondaine, so that, while Tolstoy's view of
life gradually shifted from that of an aristocrat to that of a social
reformer, her own remained unaltered; with the result that at the end
of some forty years of frank and affectionate interchange of ideas,
they awoke to the painful consciousness that the last link of mutual
understanding had snapped and that their friendship was at an end.

But the letters remain as a valuable and interesting record of one
of Tolstoy's rare friendships with 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 a man's actions justly one must be able
to appreciate the motives from which they spring; those motives in turn
requiring the key which lies in his temperament, his associations, his
nationality. Such a key is peculiarly necessary to English or American
students of Tolstoy, because of the marked contrast existing between the
Russian and the Englishman or American in these respects, a contrast
by which Tolstoy himself was forcibly struck during the visit to
Switzerland, of which mention has been already made. It is difficult
to restrain a smile at the poignant mental discomfort endured by
the sensitive Slav in the company of the frigid and silent English
frequenters of the Schweitzerhof ("Journal of Prince D. Nekhludov,"
Lucerne, 1857), whose reserve, he realised, was "not based on pride,
but on the absence of any desire to draw nearer to each other"; while he
looked back regretfully to the pension in Paris where the table d' hote
was a scene of spontaneous gaiety. The problem of British taciturnity
passed his comprehension; but for us the enigma of Tolstoy's temperament
is half solved if we see him not harshly silhouetted against a
blank wall, but suffused with his native atmosphere, amid his native
surroundings. Not till we understand the main outlines of the Russian
temperament can we realise the individuality of Tolstoy himself: the
personality that made him lovable, the universality that made him great.

So vast an agglomeration of races as that which constitutes the Russian
empire cannot obviously be represented by a single type, but it will
suffice for our purposes to note the characteristics of the inhabitants
of Great Russia among whom Tolstoy spent the greater part of his
lifetime and to whom he belonged by birth and natural affinities.

It may be said of the average Russian that in exchange for a precocious
childhood he retains much of a child's lightness of heart throughout
his later years, alternating with attacks of morbid despondency. He
is usually very susceptible to feminine charm, an ardent but unstable
lover, whose passions are apt to be as shortlived as they are violent.
Story-telling and long-winded discussions give him keen enjoyment,
for he is garrulous, metaphysical, and argumentative. In money
matters careless and extravagant, dilatory and venal in affairs; fond,
especially in the peasant class, of singing, dancing, and carousing; but
his irresponsible gaiety and heedlessness of consequences balanced by
a fatalistic courage and endurance in the face of suffering and danger.
Capable, besides, of high flights of idealism, which result in epics,
but rarely in actions, owing to the Slavonic inaptitude for sustained
and organised effort. The Englishman by contrast appears cold and
calculating, incapable of rising above questions of practical utility;
neither interested in other men's antecedents and experiences nor
willing to retail his own. The catechism which Plato puts Pierre
through on their first encounter ("War and Peace") as to his family,
possessions, and what not, are precisely similar to those to which
I have been subjected over and over again by chance acquaintances in
country-houses or by fellow travellers on journeys by boat or train. The
naivete and kindliness of the questioner makes it impossible to resent,
though one may feebly try to parry his probing. On the other hand he
offers you free access to the inmost recesses of his own soul, and
stupefies you with the candour of his revelations. This, of course,
relates more to the landed and professional classes than to the peasant,
who is slower to express himself, and combines in a curious way a firm
belief in the omnipotence and wisdom of his social superiors with a
rooted distrust of their intentions regarding himself. He is like a
beast of burden who flinches from every approach, expecting always a
kick or a blow. On the other hand, his affection for the animals
who share his daily work is one of the most attractive points
in his character, and one which Tolstoy never wearied of
emphasising--describing, with the simple pathos of which he was master,
the moujik inured to his own privations but pitiful to his horse,
shielding him from the storm with his own coat, or saving him from
starvation with his own meagre ration; and mindful of him even in his
prayers, invoking, like Plato, the blessings of Florus and Laura, patron
saints of horses, because "one mustn't forget the animals."

The characteristics of a people so embedded in the soil bear a closer
relation to their native landscape than our own migratory populations,
and patriotism with them has a deep and vital meaning, which is
expressed unconsciously in their lives.

This spirit of patriotism which Tolstoy repudiated is none the less
the animating power of the noble epic, "War and Peace," and of his
peasant-tales, of his rare gift of reproducing 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!'"