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Title: The two frontiers
A study in historical psychology
Author: John Gould Fletcher
Release date: May 17, 2026 [eBook #78697]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Coward-McCann, Inc, 1930
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78697
Credits: Sean (@parchmentglow)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TWO FRONTIERS ***
THE TWO
FRONTIERS
A STUDY IN HISTORICAL PSYCHOLOGY
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER
PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY
COWARD-McCANN, INC.
IN THE YEAR 1930
COPYRIGHT, 1930, BY
COWARD-McCANN, INC.
_Printed in the U.S.A._
_To_
ELIE FAURE
BOOK I
_Only strong personalities can endure history; the weak are crushed
beneath it._
NIETZSCHE.
Chapter I
The study of history, which in the nineteenth century became no
longer the province of a few specialists, but an almost universal
pursuit carried on in hundreds of schools, and seemingly essential
to the welfare of the State, is only of value if we are able to use
historical criteria, the values of the past, as a means not only
of judging but also of directing the latent powers of the present
and the future. In most cases, however, to-day, history is studied
merely for the purpose of recovering the past; and in order to bring
the past into relation with the present day, something more than the
pure historical sense is needed. For the process called history is
in reality irreversible; we cannot go back to any specific age in
the past and live in it even if we would, for the simple reason that
we are the past plus--or minus--something. The only conception of
human progress that is philosophically correct is not a conception of
objective external progress at all: actually it is probable that we
exercise no more control over nature--and this despite our machines and
labour-saving inventions--than our most remote and savage ancestors
exercised with their magical rituals to ensure a supply of game, or
the earth’s fertility. If we have progressed at all, it is solely in
subjective curiosity, range of knowledge, and interest in our own
destiny. Through progress in research, depth of speculation, we have
become something different from the peoples of the past. We have added
to their experience other experiences of our own. We now face larger,
more complex, and more world-embracing problems than any Greek of the
age of Pericles ever envisaged. We must think more,--though whether our
thinking will lead to such good results may well be doubted--than any
of our forefathers thought during the whole course of their lives.
The superficial study of history on the other hand leads merely to
the shallow modern view that history has already organised the world
and done our thinking for us. We may develop this view optimistically
or pessimistically, but the results are equally vicious. If we
take the point of view that history has made us the heirs of the
ages, and set us on the summit of human progress, we sink into a
Philistine acceptance of evils that will lead inevitably to disastrous
self-complacency and to such catastrophes as the recent European War.
It was in fact in Germany in the nineteenth century that this view of
history developed, under Fichte and Hegel, and against its optimism
Nietzsche wrote the best of his early essays. But one can find much
of this same Philistine complacency with what history has already
achieved, in such countries as America to-day, and it is partly with
the aim of destroying it, that I have embarked on this study. On the
other hand if we regard history more pessimistically as a series of
magnificent efforts which somehow came to nothing, we fall into no less
serious an error. The outcome of such a belief is to beg the entire
question of our present-day existence. We become nostalgically romantic
over some specific period in the past, say Ancient Greece or the
thirteenth century, and ascribe all our inability fully to recapture
the period in question to something which we call “modern capitalism,”
or the Renaissance, or democracy, or evangelical Christianity. In any
case we transfer our own responsibility for the present day to the
shoulders of some scapegoat--and thereby absolve ourselves. But no one
is really ever absolved from taking part in history. The process of
thinking of history in terms of the past alone, tends to an act of
wish-fulfilment; by it we merely make of history that which we have
already wished history to be.
In order to correct this error in perspective, we must cease to regard
history as a mere procession of events, and learn to look upon it from
the standpoint of art and religion; these being not only humanity’s
highest and noblest, but also humanity’s ultimate and most completely
absolute values. From this standpoint the record of history is anything
but a record of progress. Rather is it a series of fluctuations;
periods of depression and stagnation alternating with periods of great
hope and activity. That we have struck a period of stagnation to-day
seems only too probable; the last thirty years of the nineteenth, and
the first thirty years of the twentieth century have carried us far
towards thorough-going religious and artistic chaos. But we cannot
redeem that chaos by returning to an order and discipline of the mind
which fitted the more limited intellectual and spiritual interests of
yesterday, as so many of our academic critics would have us do. To
revive humanism or scholasticism is useful, and to be commended as a
valuable antidote to nineteenth century utilitarianism and naturalism;
but all the scholasticism and humanism in the world cannot bring back
the thirteenth century as it was, nor restore us to the fifteenth. We
have to pick our way through the twentieth century degeneration of
values and chaos with but this consideration to console us: that it
was precisely when the values of the ancient world, in Greece, Rome
and Judea, were at their most degraded and chaotic that Christianity
was born. Certainly we no longer look forward to a repetition of that
particular event; but the event towards which the world is at present
tending may be at least of equal significance to man as the dawn of
Christianity. Let us for the moment keep an open mind on the matter.
Meanwhile, what we have to do is to read history with a fresh
understanding of its symbolic import. To do this we need only
concentrate attention on the values above-mentioned; the values of art
and religion. We are best able in them to study the great cultures of
the world in their symbolic relation to each other. We see in them
how each culture has its own special symbol or set of symbols, that
differentiates it from the whole. This science of comparative and
symbolical history will inevitably lead us to the present day as the
natural terminus of our investigation. Our object in studying history
will become largely the task of sifting out the values of the past from
the rubbish with which the present day has overlaid them. We will see
that the past contains in essence the present, that the present merely
repeats or transforms the past, and that where it fails to do so, it
fails through a lack of understanding of permanent human values. By
studying the essence of the past, we do our utmost towards redeeming
the failures of the present, and directing the forces of the future.
We may even some day become masters of the future, if we set ourselves
resolutely to learn the fate of those forces that have been found
hostile, in past ages, to the movement of life.
2
About no word of the historian’s vocabulary has there been so much
argument and so little agreement as about the word “civilization.”
There are those who, with Spengler, would take it to denote the final
stage of every great culture; a stage of which the chief features are
overcrowding in great cosmopolitan cities, decline of agriculture,
predominance of finance, prevailing economic crises, and the rule
of dictatorships and mobs; a rapid decline of the fine-arts into
sterile repetition of worn-out patterns and formulas; religion as
a mere question of conventional state worship, not as a creative
popular force; an increasing search for banal pleasures and barren
distractions; a growing economic distress caused by pressure from
below. Others, even more radical than Spengler, would qualify
civilization as a disease, and postulate a return to savagery as its
only possible cure. But even savagery, as we know, is not without
formal culture; and civilization, if we are to use the word at all,
is a development of formal culture. Perhaps the best definition of
civilization is that of Gobineau; “a state of relative stability, in
which multitudes bind themselves to seek peacefully the satisfaction
of their needs, and refine their intelligence and their morals.”
The crucial point of this definition is to be found in the word
“stability.” This stability is achieved by the general adoption of one
system of religion, of one style of art and architecture, of one system
of rule. Its nature is expressed alike in great public monuments, in
details of domestic life, and in the preservation of written records
and calendar-measurements. It is above all, a _state_; fluctuating
according to economic conditions, invasions from without, expansions or
contractions of effort, fresh racial intermixtures. And as such, its
past manifestations display many of the leading characteristics of its
recent manifestations which appear in every newspaper to-day.
There is no doubt for example that ancient Babylonia and Egypt are,
in comparison with such culture as their neighbours possessed, to be
ranked as civilizations of a high order. Both achieved the state of
stability that Gobineau postulates. And this state had as a basis in
each case, a common geographical and racial element. Both were, above
all, river cultures lying in close proximity to great desert wastes.
Into the Nile valley, as into the flood region of the Euphrates and
the Tigris, came an alien migration of Semitic culture. This Semitic
element, strongly monotheistic in tendency, worked as an influence
towards the final fusion of the local and tribal cults of the
indigenous peoples into a common mythological and ethical structure
which persisted for many centuries. But in each case the result was
entirely different. In Ancient Egypt, the Semitic influence, which
was exerted in successive waves of invasion from a period perhaps
antedating history down to the Hyksos kings, found a very highly
mixed congeries of races: in part dolmen-building pacific Berbers,
in part lightly-skinned and more warlike Lybians, the whole more or
less overlaying totemistic negro tribal confederations. The result
was a civilization of monumental power and splendour, the remains of
which had to wait for the dawn of the nineteenth century before being
investigated, and whose renewed influence on the world at large now
stands at a maximum. The leading characteristics of this civilization
were, first, the universal belief in personal immortality, leading to
a special cult of the tomb; second, the combined cult of the sun-disk
and of vegetation, expressed in the two great official religions of
Amen-ra and Osiris; third, the division of the country into forty
districts or nomes, corresponding probably to ancient tribal divisions,
and the sway exerted over each of these divisions by some entirely
local god, usually of animal form, representing the vestigial cult
of some totemistic deity. The greatness of Egypt rested therefore on
the fusion of two religious ideas of a high order that sprung from
without; the cult of the suffering vegetation-god, with its belief in
immortality, Aryan in essence and mystical in expression, symbolised
in the trinity of Osiris, Isis and Horus; and the sun-cult, highly
rationalistic and warlike, Semitic in essence, symbolised in the disk
and boat of Amen-ra. Both of these rested upon, without disturbing, a
foundation of primitive African totemism.
The development of the Babylonian belief sprang from an entirely
different source. Here the Semitic invaders found an already rooted
population probably of Mongolian stock, highly cultivated, and the
comparison of the resultant Babylonian-Assyrian culture with the
Egyptian is the comparison of that which is primarily Asiatic with
that which is primarily European. There is a close parallel between
the Babylonian ziggurat with its receding terraces and the great
Asiatic terraced shrines, of which the Altar of Heaven in Pekin is the
latest example; there is even closer parallel between the belief in
elemental spirits, devas, and demons of the Babylonians and the same
thing in the Chinese, Thibetans, and Japanese. There the austere and
not specifically creative imagination of the Semite worked again as a
precipitant, fusing the original non-tribal, non-totemistic diversity
of cult into a pantheon of fixed superior powers. The oldest gods, Ea,
the fish-shaped god of the waters, Anu, the god of the sky, Enlil (Bel
of Nippur), god of the Earth, were left undisturbed; but their cult
became less important than that of the later group, each of whom became
associated with a planet. Sin, the moon-god, Shamash, the sun-god,
Marduk, the conquering war-god of Babylon itself, who became associated
with the planet Jupiter, Nebo, the god of divination, associated
with Mercury, and Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, associated with
the morning and evening star of Venus, were the chief divinities of
developed Babylonian-Assyrian worship. Each of these represents some
supernatural magical force of the heavens, rather than of the earth.
The Babylonian faith paid little attention to personal immortality,
much to obedience to law and custom. Its chief religious documents are
magic incantations, moral precepts, epic tales of the creation and
the destruction of the world. Shamanism, the cultivation of the magic
powers whereby the priesthood strove to become one with the unseen and
invisible world of spiritual influences, was universal in Babylon, and
practically unknown in Egypt, where its place was taken by totemism.
Thus one may say that the Babylonian faith was super-rational, the
Egyptian a sub-rational one.
These differences are no less climatic than racial. The plain of
Mesopotamia, backed by the barren and terrible desert ranges of Persia
and Armenia, lies at the mercy of the elements. Even the floods of the
Euphrates and Tigris, that bring down the disintegrated loess from
those mountains, and make thereby the rich soil of Mesopotamia, are
uncontrollable torrents, which successive races have vainly tried to
stem by constructing great irrigation and canal systems to obviate
disaster. The climate itself is one of sudden sharp changes: torrential
rains followed by intense heat, icy winds succeeding torrid blasts from
the Persian Gulf. Under such conditions, the type of worship developed
would be naturally that of the elements, regarded as superior powers:
the “host of heaven” of the ancient Chaldees whose imagination so
powerfully influenced the Old Testament. On the other hand, in Egypt
the climate is uniform, the only outward change being the three months
of flood followed by nine months of dry weather. Rain is practically
unknown, and the surrounding deserts are for the most part adequate
defence against invasion. The only danger is in reality internal;
the danger of physical slackness and enervation brought about by
interbreeding in a hot subtropical climate. The importation of fresh
blood from without thus becomes from time to time a necessity to the
Egyptian, as it is a danger of the first order to the Babylonian.
During the course of ancient history from the first dynasty to the
twenty-second, the Egyptians present the spectacle (except for the
period of Amenophis IV) of a political and religious uniformity; in
Babylonia the religious basis alone was uniform; politically the
country was subject to violent and disruptive changes.
3
To an intelligent European coming to maturity on the threshold of the
sixteenth century, the world must have seemed in a state of crisis
and unrest comparable only to that which it had already gone through
when the power of ancient Rome in the fifth century broke before the
combined assaults of the barbarians. We, looking back on that age from
the standpoint of our equally perplexing modern problems, regard that
time as the culmination of the Renaissance; but to those who lived
in it (if we except a few classical humanists and scholars) it must
have appeared as if the end of the world, expected for many centuries,
was at last at hand. The Middle Ages had passed away, with none of
their hopes realised, or aims achieved. Not only had Christianity
failed in wresting the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the infidel,
but the infidel himself, in the person of the Turk, had succeeded in
overthrowing the last shadowy power of the Eastern Roman Empire, had
made himself master of Constantinople, and was now threatening Europe.
The trade route with the East that had upheld the glory of Genoa and
Venice was cut off by Turkish galleys; the boundaries of Europe stopped
at the littoral of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. The old dream of
the Middle Ages, which Dante had been the last to express, of a unified
Holy Roman Empire, sanctified by the blessing of the Vicar of Christ,
to take the place of the warring nationalities which the ancient
Pagan Empire had left behind as wrecks in its wake, had now at last
completely disappeared. France had become a powerful nationality, so
powerful as to be able to invade Italy and dictate terms to the Church.
The German Empire, always at war with its great feudal electors, was
practically bankrupt. England, practical, hard-headed and inclined to
heresy, had but recently settled a long feud between the rival houses
of York and Lancaster, and was rapidly reviving in power under the sway
of the shrewd Tudors. The only power that was not either indifferent or
hostile to the claims of the mediæval faith was that of Spain, and that
lay behind the barrier of the Pyrenees, and was further isolated by
having to struggle with its own domestic Moorish problem.
Moreover, along with the dream of the Holy Roman Empire, the opposite
dream of making the Pope himself the universal ruler of Europe, had
utterly vanished. The ambitious nobles of Italy were engaged in buying
and selling the most exalted of all Christian offices, with the avowed
aim of making themselves masters over the peninsula. At the present
moment, the Borgia family, by means of wholesale bribery, violence, and
outrage had seized upon the sacred office. One unyielding Dominican,
Savonarola, had condemned them to the utmost from the very centre of
Florence, but he had been silenced. Everywhere the attitude of mind
that had been fundamental to the Middle Ages, that this world was but
an anteroom and preparation for something far more important, eternal
bliss or eternal damnation, was fading away. God had given the world to
men; it was for them to enjoy it.
Meantime, an enormous rift was about to appear on the face of European
Christianity itself. The whole structure of the Christian faith whose
foundations, soaked in the blood of martyrs, lay underneath the debris
of the Roman Empire itself, and whose mighty walls had been guided
upward by the great monastic effort of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh
centuries; this whole structure which had burst forth into springing
magnificence of vaults and pinnacles under the great popular Gothic
awakening of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, now
displayed a tiny rift at the summit. Within fifty years from the
coming of the sixteenth century, everything lay in ruin. In the north
the altars were stripped, the monasteries despoiled or destroyed, the
vernacular psalms and the Bible took the place of the liturgy. In the
south, the basilica of St. Peter, the most sacred shrine of mediæval
Christianity itself, fell, to be replaced by a pompous shrine dedicated
to the temporal splendour of that papacy that could no longer command
obedience over half of Europe. The sombre prophecies of the Apocalypse
seemed about to be fulfilled. The “abomination of desolation” stood in
the holy place; or rather, there was no more a holy place that was not
already become an abomination of desolation. Thanks to the invention
of printing, the wary ambition of pushful princes, and the steady
uprise of the merchant-classes to positions of rank and power, Mammon
was gaining more adherents every day in his long battle with God.
Savonarola had already called in question the authority of the Pope, an
example which innumerable Protestants were soon to follow.
Into this tortured, desperate, final scene of the mediæval world,
in which the power that had directed the Middle Ages, the power of
mystic, legendary Christianity was seeking fanatically for destruction
in the embrace of death, while a newer more terrible Mars and Venus
uprose from the past to dispute about the new-born Renaissance,
there suddenly came the rumour of two tiny and inconspicuous events
somewhere in the unknown territory that lay beyond the boundaries of
men’s maps and minds. Three ships guided by an obscure Genoese pilot
and a shrewd Spanish navigator, had gone out into the Atlantic to look
for an island called Antillia which was rumored to exist somewhere
westward of the Canaries; two of them had returned, having apparently
not discovered this island, but with the knowledge of having sailed
far beyond, stumbling apparently upon the further Indies, which no one
had seen or heard of since Marco Polo had been there far back in the
thirteenth century. And twenty years earlier, in 1472, an embassy from
Ivan III, the quasi-independent ruler of a territory called Muscovy
which lay somewhere beyond the forests and swamps of Poland, and about
which nobody knew anything except that it was presumably of the Greek
Orthodox faith, but had paid tribute to Tartar infidels for untold
centuries, suddenly turned up in Rome and demanded the hand of Zoë,
niece of the last Christian ruler of Constantinople, from the Pope,
who had taken her under his protection. At this time the council of
Florence was sitting, debating whether the Eastern and the Western
Churches could not be re-united in view of the fact that the Turk had
taken Constantinople and was threatening Europe itself. It was naïvely
supposed that to marry Zoë to this Eastern schismatic would further
this object. So Zoë was sent on her long journey to Moscow, with a
Latin prelate, Cardinal Antonio, for a guide, to discuss the question
of the re-union of the Churches. In the upshot, Zoë married Ivan,
but there was no re-union, and Cardinal Antonio returned to Italy in
discomfiture. From these two insignificant events--both, be it noted,
engineered and pushed forward by Italians--we chart the entire course
of what is known as modern world-history.
4
The difference between ancient, mediæval, and modern history is only
a difference of degree, not of kind. Human beings, and what is still
more, human experiences, have been essentially the same in all ages;
and it is not the least of our romantic errors of adolescence to
think of the Greeks or the Elizabethans as beings belonging to an
entirely different species from the men we every day see about us.
The differences between one type of man and another are everywhere
differences in spiritual perception; and this has been always a
question of a few exceptionally favoured individuals as against a
commonplace and indistinguishable mob. It must be admitted, however,
that Christianity did much to heighten the spiritual perception even
of the multitude; historically Christianity enlarged the bonds of
the spiritual by taking in more of the actual. Before Christianity,
the gods were terrible powers to be placated, and human life had no
relation to their life. The gift Christianity gave to the world was
a dim and vague, but vast, notion that the roots of the physical
and the spiritual lay closely together, insofar as God had already
become Man for man’s sake. This perception, that perfection lay in
and through Christ, culminated in the great spiritual climax of the
Christian drama, the thirteenth century. After that period there was
rapid and sure decline. There was not again to be the birth of another
saviour through a Virgin, nor did the figure that the cathedrals had
dimly foreseen as standing before their altars, the figure of the
king-bishop, tiaraed with the three crowns of earth, purgatory, and
heaven, and belted with the sword of justice, take shape in actual
flesh. Instead of the bells and incense that were to usher in the Holy
Grail procession, there arose the charnel-vault order of corruption,
and the clank of bones beneath the armour of the knight; instead of
the bridal song of the Lamb and the Church, Gothic arches resounded
with the mocking psalmody of the _Dies Irae_ and the Dance of Death.
Slowly but with irresistible power, men turned away from the Uprisen
Judge that they had fancied would again come to judge the World; and
in Italy, parent of civilizations, the Popes themselves began with the
aid of Mars and Venus to dream of refounding Rome. In the jewelled
crucifix that hung about the neck of Alexander VI was set an antique
cameo, representing a nude Venus. Thus the old gods returned, not to
be worshipped as material, but as spiritual powers. A few men here and
there babbled strange news of new-found Indies, and remote Muscovy.
These were perhaps the terrestrial paradise; the new heaven and earth
proclaimed by the Evangelist.
If we turn from the scene of the sixteenth century to the middle of
the eighteenth, we find that the entire structure of Christian Europe
is changed. The rift that was to shatter the whole work of the Middle
Ages has developed, leaving Europe half Catholic, half Protestant. In
each case, a full century of fanaticism has burned through, leaving
rationalistic aches, tolerant scepticisms, polite lip-service to
formula, or naked barbarism and desperation. The power of Ancient Rome
has not been reborn in the person of the Pope; he may be pontifex, but
not beyond the states of the Church itself. The true ruler of European
mankind is now a periwigged, middle-aged Pallas, who has set aside her
shield and helmet and is busy attempting chemical experiments, doing
the grand tour, building baroque churches, and writing fugues and
chamber-music. Meanwhile beyond the borders of Europe are barbarians
with other gods: to the East the incalculable force of great Muscovy,
sated with the blood of Sweden and Poland; to the West, the equally
incalculable wilderness of the American Continent swallowing up hosts
of migrating English, French and Spaniards. In them men will inevitably
find again the spiritual symbols transformed and enlarged, whose
ancient manifestations still sleep underground in the valley of the
Nile and the Tigris. In them will re-awaken to rule over the earth the
spiritual flame of Egypt and Assyria.
Thus at the outset of our enterprise, to attach to our side all those
who are willing to use their imaginations in the study of man, and to
frighten away those who have no imagination and no need to use it for
anything, we inevitably set a myth to take the place of human history.
And indeed, could we in any case do better? What are the Greeks to
us to-day but the myths of Prometheus, of the warfare between the
Olympians and the Titans, of the Argonauts, and the fatal struggle
around Troy? All the meaning of Hellas--perhaps the whole course of
Hellenic history--is contained in these stories. What are the Romans
but the story of the Sabine Women, of the geese of the Capitol, of the
death of Regulus, of Horatius at the bridge? What is India but the
great chaotic conflict between gods and men set out in the Ramayana?
History is not alone the parroting of meaningless dates and facts, a
mere branch of ethnology or economics, or the study of picturesque and
powerful personalities. When all these are assimilated and done with,
history emerges as a series of symbols each infused with profound
spiritual meaning. It is through myth alone that man finds guidance in
his weary march through the vale of despair and the heights of glory.
Some day someone will write the great myth of our modern world: the
story of man striving to tame the machine he has invented: some day
there may even be recorded the myth of the entire planet we inhabit.
Let it, like the myth we are about to spin, find rest at last in the
archives of some superhuman and undying memory.
Chapter II
The influence of geographical situation and of climate on human culture
is a subject so vast and profound that only the combined industry and
genius of a Humboldt or an Elie Reclus could possibly ever exhaust
it. And even a perception of the fact that man everywhere responds
to his environment, reflects his environment, adapts himself to and,
in the end, identifies himself completely with his environment, does
not account for all the profound racial differences between man and
man. Setting these differences apart, we may nevertheless say that all
human cultures derive from five recognizable types: river culture,
largely pacific and agricultural; desert culture, largely nomadic and
warlike; mountain culture, largely fluctuating between mysticism and
realism, alternately conservative and adventurous; tropical-swamp
culture, largely theocratic, conservative and defensive; and marine
culture, largely democratic, inventive and adaptable. The best example
of the first class is ancient China; of the second, the Persians or
the Arabs; of the third, the Greeks, Etruscans and early Romans; of
the fourth, the Hindus, Cambodians, Aztecs and Mayas; of the fifth the
Cretans, Phœnicians and English.
A glance at the map will show that the nature of the North American
continent, as of Russia, was such as to insure that any culture either
country achieved was destined to be largely of the river type. The
central portion of the United States is occupied by the immense river
system of the Mississippi and its tributaries. This system flows
through immense plains, and its lower reaches are consequently subject
to frequent and damaging floods, forming an immense delta of two
hundred and fifty miles of intensely fertile black soil. To eastward
the region of the Appalachians and of the Blue Ridge is heavily
forested and of much poorer soil, but beyond these again, in the
Atlantic seaboard, is a series of rivers, running generally southward
and eastward, with good harbours at their mouths, and generally highly
fertile in their lower reaches, though less subject to floods. The
interior of the country, it is true, was not settled until after the
winning of independence at the close of the eighteenth century; but
the whole political development of the Colonies was an advance towards
the type of government that was most suitable to the environment
later found and assimilated in the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and
Missouri regions: a preponderantly agricultural community, intensely
suspicious of outside interference, deeply rooted in family sentiment
and respect for the soil, narrowly conservative in outlook and largely
ruled by primitive moral precept. Westward of the Mississippi stretches
the open prairie region tending to break down this life into the more
undeveloped forms of pure nomadism.
The purest example of such a culture is, as has already been pointed
out, the civilization of China. If we examine the moral and religious
basis of ancient Chinese life, we find that everything is made to
centre about the perpetuation of family life, and the maintenance of
the fertility of the soil. All outward forms, from the ritual spring
ploughing that the Emperor himself performed annually at the Temple
of Agriculture in Pekin, to the precepts of Confucius, derive from
the one prevailing desire to ensure an unchanging round of harvests
with the least disturbance of outward conditions. Such a people
is not predominantly warlike, and is better for defence than for
conquest. They are better qualified to display the firm qualities,
great endurance, immense solidarity, and a uniformity of style, than
the feats of daring and mental adaptability displayed by mountain and
marine peoples. In contrast with desert or tropical-swamp peoples,
their mythology is undeveloped, their religious ardour halts at the
frontiers of an ethical positivism.
In contrast with the map of North America, the map of Russia shows
even more clearly the characteristics of a featureless forest, an
unmarked plain. Yet a glance at this map will show that here too,
the development of culture has depended on the existence of great
river systems. The Volga with its tributaries, the Oka, the Dnieper,
the Western Dvina all have their headwaters within a few miles of
each other, and all radiate from a common centre, where the black
soil belt of central Russia, intensely favourable to agriculture,
meets the forest belt of the north. The position of these rivers, and
the direction in which they flowed, fixed inevitably the centre of
the Ancient Russian commonwealth. The Volga and the Oka communicate
with the Caspian; the Dnieper and its eastward neighbour, the Don,
with the Black Sea; the Dvina, and its tributaries, the Lovat and
the Volckov, flow into the Baltic. In the early Middle Ages this
became naturally the great trade route between Persia and the Eastern
Roman Empire, and the Hansa settlements, as well as the Scandinavian
peoples. Its Scandinavian Viking origin is shown by the Varangian
establishment of Kiev as the capital, back in the ninth century, with
Novgorod and Smolensk as outlying centres; unfortunately the political
unity that the converted Viking invaders were able to impose upon
the timid, conservative, and heathen Slavonic masses, was dependent
upon their ability to wage incessant war upon swarms of barbarians
from farther east. From the Pechenegs in 862, down to the Polovtsy
in 1238, the ancient Russian culture lay at the mercy of perpetual
Tartar invasion from the desert plains of Central Asia: Kiev finally
fell in 1238, and the insignificant independent principality of Moscow
more northward only survived by its comparative difficulty of access
and by the payment of a great tribute to the Tartar Khans. The first
ruler of Muscovy who began to win out in the long struggle with the
Tartars, a struggle which left the Russian people profoundly modified
ethnologically in the direction of a Mongolian type, was precisely Ivan
III, whom we have already seen sending to Rome to obtain the hand of
the niece of the last Eastern Emperor; with his reign we begin Modern
Russia which profoundly differs from, though it is the resultant of
the physical and racial forces that shaped mediæval Russia. Here
too we have a settled agricultural people, clinging to great river
systems, apprehensive of foreign invasion, intensely conservative,
strongly patriarchal, and primitively religious. The chief difference
between these people and the first Anglo-Saxon settlers of America
was psychological. In the case of the American colonies, social
and political unity depended on each individual’s attitude to his
neighbour; in the case of Russia, threatened on all sides with
invasion, it depended on the purely military and arbitrary power
exercised by a personal sovereign, the prince of Moscow.
2
The English-speaking colonies of America are generally supposed to
have asserted their complete independence in 1776 and to have won it
in 1783, when the fact is that they were completely independent almost
from the beginning. In theory and in theory only, they were begun as
an extension of royal property to the new-found continent. The Tudor
sovereigns were as highly imbued with the idea of the divine right of
kings as any other European sovereign of the time; their ideas on this
subject were not different from the ideas of their enemy, Philip II
of Spain. It will be remembered that the Spanish had pushed forward
their conquests and settlements on the principle that the money raised
to undertake them should be provided by the adventurers themselves;
except in the case of Columbus, the crown itself was not financially
interested in the exploits of the conquistadores of Mexico or Peru. But
once the country was won, one-fifth of the revenue had to go to the
crown. The Tudor plan was not very different. King James merely granted
permission to explore and settle to the Virginia Company, which itself
raised the funds; how much of the profits of the enterprise would
return to him was left open. The profit was expected to accrue from the
discovery of gold mines, or the exploration of a new trade route to the
East Indies.
The experience of the Virginia Company is particularly interesting in
this connection. After five years of struggle and the expenditure of a
great deal of money, it was found that the country contained nothing
of value as regards mines, and could only be a source of revenue if
developed agriculturally. Thereupon in 1612, King James gave way and
permitted each settler henceforward to take out an assignment of land.
The result was that the Virginia Company henceforward would at last be
able to assimilate profits, not on the basis of prospective mineral
discovery, but on the basis of exchange of commodities between the
old world and the new. But in order to keep the colony prosperous, it
was necessary to put its government in the hands of those who best
understood and were able to cope with the novel conditions. Therefore
some measure of self-government was permitted. Apart from the royal
governor and six councillors appointed by the Company, a popular
assembly was called together composed of two representatives elected by
each town, hundred, or plantation. Laws passed by this assembly could
be vetoed in England; but such a veto on the part of the King would
lead to the passive but unalterable resistance which is well known to
all students of early agricultural communities. For a few years after
1612, King James did not dare to interfere, and the Virginia Company
prospered by raising tobacco. Then, thanks to the whispers of sedition
within the colony that were carried to his ears, as well as the
protests of the Spanish Ambassador, who became more and more annoyed
at the English establishing themselves in nominally Spanish territory,
James decided to interfere. In 1624 he dissolved the Virginia Company,
and the colony again became crown property. But he died the next year,
without interfering with the popular assembly, which continued under
his successor. Had this popular assembly not existed, Virginia would
have probably become de-populated. The same type of popular assembly
was formed by the other colonies, after the example of Virginia, and
the history of the thirteen colonies up to the time of the Revolution
is a story of the struggles between the colonists themselves and
their royal governors; a struggle which culminated only with complete
independence.
The American colonies were not able to live and grow at all without
this local self-government on the democratic model, to build roads, put
up meeting-houses, make schools, fight the Indians, and impose tariffs
and taxes on their own products. It will be remembered that in 1623,
just before attempting to crush the Virginia Company altogether, King
James had been persuaded, after a long struggle with popular opinion,
to grant a monopoly on all tobacco brought to England to the Virginia
settlers. This monopoly, long agitated for, and supported by the
whole force of the powerful popular faction in the Virginia Company
itself, which had already sunk some two hundred thousand pounds in the
development of the new country, led to extravagant hopes on the part
of the London merchants who had supported the Virginia enterprise from
the beginning, of obtaining a great return from their investment. The
corresponding downfall of the company, and the reassertion of royal
authority, worked as a rapid cause of disillusionment with the power of
the crown, and largely contributed to the popular revolution against
the Stuarts which broke out in 1640.
The New England colonies, even more than Virginia, began as settlements
which had obtained nothing but a tacit permission to leave the country
from the English crown. Massachusetts, the first of them, owed its
being to the activities of certain English separatists, who finding
no religious liberty in England itself, first went to Holland, and
after six years, finally decided to cross the ocean to a spot where
they would be entirely free from outside interference. To these
Plymouth settlers, there were added in 1630 a great body of Puritans
who nominally were members of the Church of England but in reality
in complete revolt against Archbishop Laud, whose avowed aim was the
destruction of the Low-Church party. The refusal of these numerically
preponderant settlers to admit anyone to citizenship except members of
their own particular communion led to the settlement, by the dissenting
elements, of Rhode Island, and to the establishment of Connecticut,
neither of which had any support from the English Crown and both of
which were rooted in popular government. Meantime between these and
the colonies of Virginia and Maryland (which again had been formed by
religious refugees on a basis of tolerance) to the south, stood New
Amsterdam, which the Dutch had organised on the old feudal system of
making each great landholder responsible for the life and death of
his tenants. The Dutch experiment was a painful failure and became
assimilated into the other English settlements after 1664.
Thus, the development of the American seaboard colonies under English
auspices led to the creation of a number of practically independent
republics, differing widely in their views as to the relation between
politics and religion, owning a nominal sovereignty to the English
Crown, but in reality highly suspicious and intolerant of outside
interference, determined to support themselves with as little help from
others as possible and altogether transforming themselves from being
mere frontier trading posts to self-supporting but rival commonwealths.
They were separated from each other by the fact that they had been
originally planted near the mouths of navigable bays and rivers: the
Chesapeake, the Delaware, the Hudson, the Charles. The intervening
territory was still the no-man’s land of the Indian. The fact that the
Indian had to be pushed off the land before it could be settled, and
the fact that the Indian always resisted, gave the American colonies
their only solidarity. This is shown by the New England Confederation
of 1643 which came into being as a result of the Pequot War, and
the general fear of a league of Indians to drive out the whites. It
comprised the settlements of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and
New Haven.
The conditions in the interior were such as to make it certain that
only the English idea of gradually pushing the Indians westward by
means of a fringe of settlements could in any way prevail. The
Spaniards in the south and southwest had deliberately come into the
country only in order to exploit it; their interest was solely in
finding El Dorado, and only a few devoted missionaries among them
took any interest in the conditions of the Indian tribes, or tried
to promote agricultural settlement. The fact that the Spanish cared
nothing for anything but ostentation and conquest gave a superficial
veneer of European civilization to their chief centres of settlement,
but left the wilderness practically untouched between them. In fact,
the Spanish attitude of complete exploitation helped in the long run
the Indian cause, because the Spanish conquerors did not scruple
to mingle their blood with that of the Indian captives with the
result that a mixed race soon uprose, largely Indian in outlook, and
ferociously independent, which was destined later to give endless
trouble to the Spaniards themselves as to the people of the United
States. And as the white race pushed westward, and the evidences
of mineral wealth increased, while the prospective returns from
agriculture correspondingly diminished, something of the Spanish
attitude was naturally assimilated by the Anglo-Saxon pioneer stock,
with the result that the Spanish philosophy of reckless daring and
lazy indifference became the basis of the cowboy and “bad man”
type of the far West. The French had scarcely done better; except
for a few settlements of fisherfolk in Canada, they had contented
themselves with building a chain of trading posts about the Great
Lakes and the chief tributaries of the Mississippi, and had become
a breed of trappers and fur-traders. They too had no race prejudice
against intermingling their blood with the Indians. Thus, the idea of
the English invaders to conquer by means of complete settlement and
assimilation of the land to the forms of English culture was inevitably
the only path by which the land could become permanently what is known
in America as “a white man’s country”; but even in their case, as it
happened, something of the Indian outlook and social system inevitably
entered and modified the English colonial forms of life. This was
due to religious as well as economic differences. The middle-class,
mercantile, dissenting fanaticism of New England instinctively despised
the planter aristocracy, strongly episcopalian and conservative, of
Virginia and the Carolinas; the planter aristocracy equally hated the
pioneer squatter type that developed in the valleys beyond the Blue
Ridge; and this division of sentiment between the various sections of
the community was destined to run like a discordant thread throughout
the warp and woof of all later American life. It corresponded
roughly to the long-standing tribal antagonisms of the dispossessed
Indian tribes. Nor was this all. The investigations of American
anthropologists have conclusively shown that the children of European
immigrants, born in America, tend to take Indian characteristics, a
taller stature and a more powerful physical development than their
parents. Most notably is this the case in the change of head form. The
Indian head with its high cheek-bones, heavy jaw, sloping forehead, and
great development of the back and base of the skull, recurs, according
to Professor Franz Boas, even in the children of immigrants who have
only lived for a few months in America. So great is the influence of
climate, and perhaps also of diet, upon the naturally conservative,
slow-changing Anglo-Saxon. Moreover in the settling of America, the
Celtic side of the English genius strongly manifested itself; and a
considerable portion of the population, in the Southern colonies at
least, were Celtic in type and in sympathy. The Germanic tradition of
the town-meeting and the local assembly was curiously crossed with the
Scots-Irish tradition of the family feud and the local uprising.
We have now to compare this growth of the American settlements with
the growth of the Egyptian social system, as set out in our first
chapter. In the loose confederation of the geographically separate
colonies, we have a parallel to the division of the Egyptian territory
into separate nomes, under the sway of different tribes. In the
rivalry between Upper and Lower Egypt, we have a rivalry akin to the
rivalry between the Northern and the Southern colonies. In the shrewd
practical pragmatic realism of the American frontiersmen, we have
something that recalls the lack of space-feeling, the pastoral and
agricultural conventions that inform Egyptian art. Even in the respect
that the American colonies were to show for the royal charter, the
legal document, the written word, we have much that recalls to mind
the superstitious respect with which all the Egyptians regarded their
hieroglyphic writing. Only a Pharaoh is needed to complete the picture,
but the American colonies could not produce a Pharaoh, nor a priestly
cult to support him; because instead of the single valley of the Nile,
they were pushing up twenty great rivers; instead of a single dominant
religion, they had a dozen different ones to choose from.
3
As we have already seen, Ivan III, who became the independent ruler
of Moscow in 1462, and in 1472 married Zoë (who later took the name
of Sophia), the niece of the last Christian ruler of Constantinople,
was the first sovereign of Russia whose power became so important as
to make some impression on the course of Western European History. He
was the first to take the title of Sovereign of All Russia, and Czar,
and his reign lasting down to 1505 is the record of his struggle to
make that title good. In order to do so, he first had to deal with
the Golden Horde of the heathen Tartars, encamped for three centuries
on the lower Volga; but this power, which had continually kept Russia
in subjection, was now breaking up of itself, thanks to internal
dissensions about succession with the Tartars of the Crimea. Ivan’s
chief enemies lay in fact to the westward, in the great military and
feudal powers of Poland and Lithuania.
These two powers had acted largely together ever since 1386. In each
case the country was ruled by an independent sovereign, supported by
great feudal nobles. These nobles, whether as bishops, barons whose
castles commanded the trade-routes, landowners commanding the loyalty
of hundreds of serfs, were one and all jealous of any independent
action on the part of the king. And inasmuch as the sovereign in each
country depended entirely on their support in the case of war, and
the Tartar menace no less affected the security of Lithuania and of
Poland than that of Russia, the stability of both countries depended
on the continued loyalty and bravery, and the lack of inner causes of
friction, among the gentry themselves. This gentry, the _szlachta_,
was world-famous for its pride and fighting spirit. During the
centuries that followed the downfall of the old principality of Kiev
in 1226, the Lithuanian knights, backed by Poland, had absorbed the
richest and most fertile portion of Russia, the plain of the Dnieper,
including Smolensk and Kiev itself. To the north lay two independent
mercantile commonwealths, important centres of trade between the Urals
to eastward, and the Hansa towns of the Baltic to westward: Novgorod
and Pskov. These were ruled by their own town councils of nobles, or
boyars; they were more disposed to be friendly to Poland or Lithuania
than to Moscow. Against them no less than these two usurping powers,
Ivan III and his successor Basil III who died in 1533, had to make
war, in order to recover that which he regarded as his lost patrimony:
Russia itself.
The process that these princes inaugurated was completed by the
accession to the throne of Ivan III’s grandson in 1533, the most
extraordinary and tragic of all Russian rulers, known to later history
as Ivan the Terrible. During his long reign of forty-nine years the
whole system of complete autocratic government, resting ultimately on
the will of the Czar alone, that ruled Russia outwardly and inwardly
down to the advent of the Bolsheviks to power in 1917, came into
existence. When he came to the throne, his predecessors had already won
back the Dnieper territory as far as Smolensk from Lithuania, but this
was not enough. If the principality of Moscow, which now stretched from
the Black Sea to the shores of the Gulf of Finland, and to the Urals,
was to develop into a power capable of imposing its will on Europe,
it must have access to the Baltic. The mineral wealth of the Urals,
the sturgeon from the lower Volga, the furs and hides of the forest
belt, were in as great demand now by Sweden and the Hansa Confederacy
as the ancient products of Constantinople and the Levant that had
penetrated through the same territory in the Middle Ages had been.
Unfortunately the outlet to the Baltic lay through Livonia which was
Polish territory; and Poland and the Hansa knights, their allies, were
not disposed to let the Moscow Czars have sole control over this trade
route. Under Ivan IV, the attention of Muscovy turned from Lithuania to
Poland, and later to Sweden, which held Esthonia, the other outlet to
the Baltic, and a struggle ensued which went on till 1582, ending in a
complete check to the ambitions of the Moscow rulers. The outlet to the
Baltic Sea and accordingly to a position where Russia could treat with
the powers of Europe, as an independent equal, was not to be granted
for a full century. Meantime, during this same reign, the Crimean
Tartars who had succeeded the Golden Horde, and who had been friendly
enough to support Ivan IV’s predecessor in his Lithuanian wars, became
again hostile and turned to close alliance with the dreaded Turks who
had effectively closed the Black Sea outlet. As late as 1574, Moscow
itself was raided and burned by a force of 120,000, who took away over
a hundred thousand captives. Although the Muscovy Czars now controlled
the whole resources of the country from the frontier of Siberia to the
Polish plain, they were powerless until by establishing sea-contact
with Europe, they could obtain in exchange for their fish, furs and
minerals, weapons, munitions, and an army on the European model to
combat their enemies to the south and east.
This necessity for finding an outlet to the sea controlled all
of Russia’s later historical policy, as the necessity of warding
off interference from overseas controlled the whole policy of the
dawning American colonies. The necessity in each case was dictated
by geographical situation, no less than by sociological conditions.
A glance at the map will show that Russia is, strictly speaking, a
country without a coastline, whose three outlets to the Ocean, through
the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the White Sea, lie always at the mercy
either of hostile powers or of the elements. On the other hand, America
lies completely open on the Atlantic seaboard. There is entry through
a score of open rivers and bays, and the ocean-path being the way by
which settlement was made and maintained, it is easy to see how much
the colonists (who were in continual conflict with the English crown
over their scarcely won and jealously guarded liberties) longed to be
able to close the way of access behind them; or only keep it open for
those who would agree with their semi-agricultural, semi-nomad spirit
of independence. But if we turn from this picture to the map of Russia,
it is equally easy to see how, if the whole power of Muscovy was not
to fall apart, and the country to revert to being in part a conquest
of hostile Poland, in part a mere nomad dependency of Tartary, it was
necessary to keep a sea-route open for the marketing of Muscovy’s
products, and also necessary to enlist all the European aid possible
in improving the general backwardness of the country. So as early as
1547 we find Ivan the Terrible sending the Saxon Schlitte as emissary
to Europe to obtain artisans and scholars; many of the churches of
Moscow itself were the work of Italian architects; and the history of
Ivan’s later negotiations with England for a commercial treaty (which
as he said “weighed heavier on him than tribute”) and even for a bride,
in the person of one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour, is well known.
In order to maintain an insecure position between the two dangers of
the Tartar Caspian and the Teutonic Baltic, the autocratic ruler of
Muscovy had to call in the aid of Western Europe--and with it, the
subversive radicalism that Western Europe was to later develop. In
order to maintain their own insecure position between the danger of an
Indian Confederation to westward, and the danger of Crown interference
from overseas, the independently spirited colonists had to sink their
own radical differences of outlook and religion and become artificially
centralised about the most powerful classes in the community which
were the merchants and landowners. Thus the two countries, so much
akin in climate and physical features, and even in the highly mixed
nomad population that inhabited them--not to mention the perhaps common
Mongolian parentage of the underlying Tartar and Indian--early took the
path of polar opposition in temperament. The one became more and more
autocratic and despotic as the other became more and more democratic
and egalitarian. In the one, the outlying districts were always
swayed by a centralised power; but as this power depended on military
conquest, loot and tribute for its maintenance, it was in continual
danger of collapse. In the other, the separate colonies formed a loose
confederation that would be likely to collapse of itself from without
if it could not find a centre.
Here in this opposition of social organisation we find what in
Russia chiefly recalls Ancient Babylonia. Older than Egypt--for
recent archæological researches into the Sumerian civilisation
have left no doubt on that point--Babylonia was at first ruled by
independent city-dynasties, as was Russia during the Varangian period.
It only achieved unity under the dominance of a single city, which
geographically stood at its centre, and whose local god-cult was made,
probably under military pressure, the official state religion. Here we
have a parallel to the position of Moscow and to the development of the
official Russian church under Ivan the Terrible. This unity could only
be maintained so long as the central sovereign was a man of powerful
and strong personality: a Hammurabi or a Sargon. This condition also
obtained in Russia, as anyone can see by consulting the next chapter
of this book. The only thing in short lacking to this parallel is that
Babylonia-Assyria achieved its own symbolic mythology, a symbolic
mythology of great importance to the development of the Hebrews, and
consequently of Christianity; while early Muscovy, and the later
Russian Empire, only borrowed the essential basis of theirs from the
already formulated system of Eastern Christianity. But this failure of
the central intelligence of the Slav to distinguish independently the
immediate needs of his own temporal destiny from the limitless drift of
eternity, is characteristic; its psychological implications run like a
red thread throughout the entire course of later Russian history.
Chapter III
The English-speaking American colonies developed in comparative peace
and tranquillity, except for Indian wars on the frontier, internal
religious quarrels, and difficulties with their own harvests down to
the close of the Puritan Revolution in England and the accession of
Charles II in 1660. During the whole reign of Charles I, and later
under Cromwell, the internal difficulties of the English State were so
great, that no further attempts were made to interfere with the gradual
growth of the colonies, or to check the spread of self-government.
During the same period, Russia passed through its first and most
terrible internal crisis; a crisis always to be known later as “the
time of troubles,” and which was destined to fix immutably the
political foundations of the country as an independent state.
The aim of Ivan the Terrible was, as we have seen, to throw off
the grip that Poland and Sweden held on the Baltic; and to destroy
the power of Lithuania, which still, in alliance with a band of
freebooters, the Zaporogian Cossacks, held fast to the outlets of the
Dnieper in the Black Sea. There was also danger from the Tartars of the
Crimea, which must be reckoned with. Russia was therefore committed
to war on three of four sides; only on the side of Siberia could
Moscow’s sway be carried peacefully beyond the Urals. Ivan, as we have
seen, was checked in his ambitions to free the shores of the Baltic,
though he won notable victories in the Crimea, opening up the Caspian,
and overrunning a great deal of Siberia. But his chief troubles were
internal, and sprang from the feudal organization which had hitherto
supported the Princes of Muscovy on their thrones.
The chief powers, next to the Czar himself, were the great landowning
nobles, the boyars. It was this class alone that could vote taxes,
support campaigns with their serfs, send their sons to take part in
the state service. It was this class that now began to behave as the
corresponding class had done centuries before them in Western Europe.
They more and more attempted to put a check upon the power that was
falling into Ivan’s hands. The Czar of Muscovy had, unfortunately, no
middle class or merchant class to fall back upon, and so was forced
either to trust the boyars or no one. The example of Poland was always
before Ivan’s eyes. That warlike and once powerful kingdom was
continually sinking into anarchy and impotence, thanks to the greed and
independence of its gentry. After every reign there had followed an
interregnum, and the kingship was so shorn of power that it practically
had none left except that of punishing criminals, and making war.
Several of Ivan’s leading nobles, suspicious of his growing autocracy,
were now tempted into leaning towards Poland; and many of the former
independent cities, notably Novgorod, were going in the same way. The
fruits of freedom were becoming tempting to the Russians now that they
had lost them. In this situation Ivan struck, and struck hard with such
effect that his reign was ever after remembered as a time of terror.
He established a secret police, chosen and paid by him personally, who
were sworn to support the Czar at the cost of their lives, and by this
means, systematically destroyed all the boyars who showed signs of
independence. Tortures, murders, spyings, assassinations were the order
of the day. Even the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, venerated in
Russia as no man, protested against the régime of terror that Ivan set
up, but paid for his protest with his life.
Unfortunately, Ivan’s system proved workable only so long as there
was a strong and ruthlessly determined man at the head of affairs to
control it. As he left no successor, the leading boyars at his death
decided to offer the control of affairs to one of their number, Boris
Godunov. Boris was undoubtedly as suspicious of their power as Ivan had
been, but utterly unable to do without it, and so the country rapidly
fell into a condition of internal revolt directed and engineered from
Poland. During the period of utter anarchy that followed, Poland
might have acquired complete control over Russian affairs, had it not
been for internal jealousies among the boyars themselves, and for the
attitude of the Orthodox Church, which obscurely sensed and supported
the popular demand for a Russian Czar, born in Russia. After Polish
forces had vainly besieged the Kremlin itself, after Swedish troops had
been called in to restore order, after the country had been overrun by
looting bands of Don Cossacks from one end to the other, in 1613 there
came at last peace. The boyars sank their differences sufficiently
to elect Michael Romanov to the throne, and the influence of Poland,
always hated and loathed by the Russians, came to an end.
During these years, and increasingly under the first years of the
new Romanov dynasty, the chief social phenomenon in Russia was the
growth of serfdom. Serfdom had always existed, undisturbed from the
Middle Ages, on the estates of the great landowners. These estates
were continually increasing, as Ivan himself followed the policy of
making enormous grants of crown land and peasants to the gentry he
favoured. But as the country expanded and pushed its way over the
Urals to Siberia, and into the Crimea to the Caspian, it became common
for serfs to seek relief from intolerable conditions and burdens by
escaping eastwards into freedom. This process became chronic throughout
“the time of troubles.” Instead of fighting for some of the numberless
pretenders of the time, or waiting to be ravaged by the Cossacks, the
serfs simply abandoned their estates and went off to the frontier.
Every Czar during “the time of troubles” attempted to deal with this
problem. Strong decrees forbade the transfer of serfs from any of the
estates of the Church, the Crown, or the Service gentry. Still stronger
decrees made flight a criminal offence to be punished by lashing and
branding; at first five years were given as a time-limit during which
runaways could be hunted out, then ten, finally in 1646 the time-limit
was abolished, and any fugitive became an outlaw. Meantime the practice
of selling peasants apart from the estate, simply went on despite the
law against it, and had finally to be legalised in 1675. The peasant
had no power of redress, being forbidden to bring any complaint against
his master except that of state treason; the master could beat him,
starve him, force him to work like a dog for the state taxes, which
were continually increasing, and he must still submit. The process was
not the same as slavery, but was clearly even more cruel in its effects
than slavery. A bad crop, an epidemic, or an outbreak of trouble
among the rebellious Cossacks of the Southeast frontier was enough to
literally ruin thousands of peasants. And since the peasant could not
fly without becoming an outlaw, the subsequent history of Russia down
to the nineteenth century is punctuated with constant and perpetual
serf rebellions and peasant risings.
The Russian government system of degrading its own independent
peasantry down to the level of chattel slaves, was closely paralleled
by the gradual growth of a dependent slave class within the nominally
free American colonies. Negro slaves were brought into the Virginia
Colony as early as 1619. Without their aid it is probable that the
great tobacco plantations could not have been run at a profit. But the
rapid extension of territory which tobacco-planting entailed led to
the first outbreak of revolutionary class war in America in 1676. The
occasion was an outbreak of trouble with the Indians on the northern
frontier, which by that time had reached the Potomac. A rising of the
Susquehannahs led to a demand on the part of the colonists for an armed
force to destroy the Indians. The Governor, Berkeley, refused and
proposed to build forts. But the colonists under Nathaniel Bacon simply
refused to obey; and this struggle soon became a conflict between the
old conservative and royalist landowning gentry and the newly arrived
poorer settlers of the frontier. It was quelled; but over-production
of tobacco in the years that followed led to much burning of tobacco,
and a gradual transformation of Virginia, the most English in spirit
of all the colonies, into a revolutionary democracy. In the Carolinas,
where rice and cotton became the chief crops, negro slavery flourished
better; and with the spread of American territory into the Mississippi
Valley, it became rooted as an institution, despite the fact that,
theoretically, it was in conflict with the spirit of the people.
The New England colonies on their part did not need any urging to
become thoroughly rebellious to England’s authority. Charles II on
his return to the throne in 1660 had already concluded to make them
more amenable to the common usages of England. These usages comprised
a respect for the established church, which had never been recognized
in Massachusetts, and toleration for the Quakers (whom Charles
personally favoured) who had been repeatedly fined, whipped, and made
to suffer banishment at the hands of the sectaries of Boston. In
1676 Charles’ agent, Randolph, recommended that the Massachusetts
charter be declared forfeit. This was done in 1684, and all the New
England charters followed suit. Charles died before he could show the
full scope of his intentions, but under James II, the whole of the
New England region, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine,
Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut fell under the sway of a
single governor, who was to rule without an assembly, with the aid
of a council. A meeting house in Boston was to be set apart for the
Church of England. The governor whom James appointed, Andros, met with
opposition from the outset. The people refused to pay the taxes which
their own old assemblies had voted, now that they were demanded by
Andros acting alone. Rebellion was rampant throughout New England and
in New York, where Andros governed through a deputy, Francis Nicholson.
The rebellion came to a head when in November 1688 the government of
James II fell in England itself, and was succeeded by that of William
of Orange, in which the Parliament and the Whig party of the middle
class finally triumphed over the old loyal aristocracy. From that time
on, the American colonies were resolutely bent on self-government, and
in New England and Virginia at least, on pushing back the Indians,
and gaining control of the interior, in which the French were now
hoping to build up a great overseas empire. Between them lay the
recently founded colony of Pennsylvania which alone, through the
Quakers, took up a pacific attitude towards England. Southwards there
was more loyalty in the newly-founded Carolinas; but there was also a
semi-feudal agrarian society that, sooner or later, would challenge the
North.
2
We have now come to the year 1688, which marks a turning point in
American Colonial History, with the advent of the Whig oligarchy
founded by the mercantile class, and supported by William III and
the new House of Orange. In the same year, or a little later, Peter
the Great who had been nominally ruler of Russia since 1682, finally
got the power in his hands, by crushing the Streltsy and exiling the
Regent. Henceforth the two countries were to run their course of
development side by side.
It may be that the kind of reader whose mind is absorbed in statistics,
will here object: “There is really no parallel between a few
insignificant English-speaking colonies, planted on the far side of the
Atlantic, and consisting in 1690 of only two hundred thousand souls,
with a frontier running only fifty miles away from the seaboard, and
the older, more populous, if largely unformed realm of Muscovy.” But
history teaches that the mere size of a country has nothing whatever
to do with its importance in the story of human development. If size
and power to wage war were the sole criterion of importance, the Roman
Empire might logically be considered as having given more to humanity
at large than the whole of Ancient Greece and Judea. We know that
this is not so. Ancient Greece and Judea were each in their way more
spiritually important than Rome for the original ideas that they gave
to the common stock; and already in America, as in Russia, an original
idea was at work, which was profoundly to influence Europe. It is as
creators of new values that these two countries should be studied and
understood by the historian; not as economic, geographic, and political
entities. If we consider them purely under the latter heading, they
have been of somewhat less importance to Europe and the world at large,
than the South American Republics.
The years that had passed in Russia since 1613, when the Romanov
line first came to power, up to Peter’s full accession in 1689, were
important chiefly as witnessing a fresh consolidation of power about
the representatives of this new dynasty. Poland, which had been the
chief enemy, pursued its path of disintegration into its component
atoms, under the feudal system still in vogue. It was nominally
ruled by an assembly of its gentry, which had the power of electing
the King. Unfortunately the decisions of this national assembly had
to be unanimous. In case the national assembly disagreed with any one
of the delegates from the innumerable local assemblies, the delegate
in question could interpose a free veto on any decision taken. The
minority had also the right of combining for the sake of resistance
against the majority, with the result that the whole country was
continually racked by threats of civil war. Poland in short had carried
the principle of feudal rights out to their logical end in a complete
states’ rights government. It was in the same unhappy position as the
American colonies themselves, in regard to its own central government,
but unlike the American colonies, it had no body of independent
merchants to fall back upon as a rallying point in its internal
struggle. It consisted of nothing but the great landed proprietors
who had become separate military establishments, intensely jealous of
each other, and the peasants, who were in a worse condition even than
the Russian peasants, inasmuch as their masters had full control of
their labour, could parade them for extra work, could force them to buy
their necessaries from them, refused their rights to make contracts,
fixed their wages, and had over them the absolute power of life and
death. All export trade was in the hands of the gentry and all rights
of sitting in the local and national assemblies. The only exceptions
were the despised Jews who had become the money-lending class, and were
equally hated of noblemen and peasants.
Against decaying Poland, Russia had step by step built up a great
empire. But the Empire was worthless to her, unless she could obtain
foreign tools and arms, trade and an outlet to the sea. Under the
Romanovs the first great efforts were made to acquire these essentials.
Arms were imported, first from Sweden, later from Germany. A whole
colony of Saxons, Dutchmen, and other foreign artisans were brought
to Moscow and established in the so-called German Suburb. In 1647 a
western system of drill was introduced and foreign instructors were
brought in to train Russian regiments. Articles of western luxury made
their appearance: clocks, velvets, stone houses to replace wooden
huts, schools, and theatres which gave plays in foreign languages. But
transport was still difficult, bad, and toilsome, much in the same
condition as it was and remained on the American continent up to the
advent of the Industrial Revolution in 1840. The only difference was
that the American colonies lay far apart, settled in river valleys
running down to the coast, and separated by great stretches of
uninhabited country, whereas in Russia, Moscow was still at the centre
of affairs. The result was that in America’s case, each colony lived
largely on its own specific products. Cotton and rice came from the
Carolinas, tobacco from Maryland and Virginia, iron from Pennsylvania
and New Jersey, furs from New York, fish and pine timber from New
England. Trade abroad was more important than trade at home. In Russia
the whole volume of trade--Siberian minerals and furs, Volga grain,
Baltic pine, Persian carpets,--rolled and ebbed through the single
heart of Moscow and its outlying city-states, bound together not by
roads but by rivers.
In neither country was there anything resembling a system of education,
or any independent development towards general culture. In this respect
indeed the American colonies for all their inferiority in numbers and
scale, were ahead of the Russians. The Old Church Slavonic, which was
for conversational or writing purposes totally dead, was still used for
all Church services. The ecclesiastics were almost the only learned
class, and the attempts of the Romanovs to reform the Church books
merely led to the violent schism of the “old believers” who came to
hold Peter himself as the Antichrist. The educated classes aimed to
speak German or French, and despised their own language. Schools there
were none, and most education was to be sought abroad. In the American
Colonies, on the other hand, the desire for native education manifested
itself early. Harvard College was incorporated as early as 1650; in
Virginia, William and Mary followed in 1693; Yale in 1701. True, this
education in the colonies had for the most part been inaugurated
for the sole purpose of training candidates for the ministry, and
had a strongly Puritan and theological tinge; but most Americans at
least acquired an ability to speak and write good English, and some
smattering of Latin.
Meantime, in both countries, the throes of establishment were safely
over, and the first great expansion of effort rapidly followed. The
expansion was an expansion of land surface and population in America;
the latter increasing from two hundred thousand in 1690 to one and a
half millions in 1760. In Russia it was an immense expansion of power,
reacting on everyone from the Czar to the humblest serf. Peter himself
was, after Ivan the Terrible, the first great military leader the
Russians discovered, and he made good at last the claim to the Baltic,
and therefore to the open sea, against the country that was now, under
the successors of Gustavus Adolphus, mistress of that ocean: Sweden.
Meantime, in America, the colonies were not allowed to settle back into
complete enjoyment of their local liberties, won and ratified by King
William’s Government. During the next sixty years (1690-1750) they were
to take part in no less than four wars, each waged against the power
that had succeeded in penetrating further than any other into the true
heart of the American continent: France.
From the time that Champlain in 1603 had come into the St. Lawrence
Valley and had established Quebec as a trading post controlling
the furs of this region, down to the settlement of the mouth of
the Mississippi in 1718, and the later establishment of St. Louis
and Natchez as trading posts controlling the traffic of the great
interior valley, the French had been by far the most active power in
the exploring of the interior of the American continent. In contrast
with the English who had clung conservatively to the seaboard, they
had boldly penetrated the very heart of the country; in contrast with
the Spanish who had cared for nothing but the evidences of mineral
wealth, and had ruthlessly warred upon and decimated the Indians, the
French had attempted to live on terms of friendship with the native
tribes, and had sought for the basis of their sway in the great wealth
of fish, furs, and game the country possessed. The St. Lawrence, the
Great Lakes, the Mississippi had each in turn felt the impress of the
French effort, and had there been any fever of colonization to back the
hardihood of the French explorers, traders, and Jesuit missionaries,
it is possible that to-day the French language, rather than the English
tongue, might be the common speech over most of the United States.
Unfortunately there was little disposition on the part of the French
people to migrate to the new world. A mere meagre handful, some three
thousand in all, including the fisheries of Nova Scotia, held the
whole of Canada in 1660; in 1750 about six thousand persons inhabited
the whole Louisiana territory. The French could not be induced to
come and settle in the newly discovered territory; their own local
instincts of traditional loyalty to their provinces, and their own
internal stability, which have made of France the most economically
self-contained country in Europe, forbade. But the mere existence
of French trading posts throughout the St. Lawrence and Great Lake
territory, the vague but shadowy grip that France had established upon
the whole hinterland of the American continent, frightened King William
and his ministers, and coincided with their determination to break
the contemporaneous claim of France to leadership in Europe itself.
There resulted the wars called King William’s War, 1690-1697, Queen
Anne’s War, 1701-1713, King George’s War, 1745-1748, and the great
French and Indian War which beginning in 1753 ended with the complete
annihilation of all of France’s dreams of foreign empire in the Treaty
of Paris of February 1763.
The outcome of all these struggles was to leave the English masters
of the American continent from the Gulf of Mexico to Labrador and
westward to the Mississippi, including in their domain the chain of
the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence basin. France retired from the
American continent, leaving Spain--who had vainly allied herself with
her in order to stop the English from invading Florida,--to keep a
shadowy tenure on the western bank of the Mississippi. During the last
phases of this conflict, the first great series of wars, except for
Indian campaigns, waged on the American continent, Pennsylvania which
had hitherto been pacific under the Quaker ascendancy, ranked itself
alongside of the other colonies in the effort to break the French grip
upon the headwaters of the Ohio. This was accomplished thanks largely
to the persistence of one man, Benjamin Franklin. Meantime, Virginia
had shown that in a young officer of militia, George Washington, it
possessed a notable Indian fighter. Each colony in turn had raised a
local militia to carry on the struggle to its triumphant success. Thus
England had at last, through the alliance with the newly-born kingdom
of Prussia, triumphed over France, destroyed her fleet, and succeeded
in shaking off her hold on India as well as America. But in order to do
this England had created something that was to be of the utmost danger
to her as time went on. She had created American solidarity. Exactly as
Peter the Great by his personal effort, created Russian solidarity.
3
The subsequent history of both countries moves along the lines we have
already been tracing. Peter the Great’s most important achievement was
not so much his successful wars against Sweden and Turkey, nor his
establishment, as “a window looking on Europe,” of a new capital on
the shores of the Baltic, but the creation of a new state-bureaucracy
to take the place of the dominance of the old nobility, a
state-bureaucracy bound by self-interest to support his system, and
which completed its task by assimilating the old Orthodox Russian
Church (which had hitherto been independent, under its own Patriarch)
into the state-machine, under the direct control of a Procurator of
the Holy Synod. By this act, Peter destroyed the last possibility of a
moral opposition to his rule, and fixed the system of autocracy beyond
possibility of change as the only political form possible to Russia,
subject solely to the chance that his successors might not possess
the same force of character that he had displayed. Peter, in short,
assimilated European statecraft, only to become more powerful than
Europe. Meanwhile the American colonies, separated completely from
each other by large tracts of waste country, and still more separated
by differences of soil, religion, and social organization, found a
rallying point in the feeling that the great western territory west of
the Appalachians was to be theirs, and were, at the same time, provided
by England with a force not only to conquer it but to assert their own
independence, in the shape of a local militia. This force removed the
last hope that England could hold the country by a display of military
power, inasmuch as in New England, where the administrative centre was
the township, the militia could be turned out at a moment’s notice.
Henceforth the South, whose administrative unit was the county, dropped
back in the race for the supreme headship of the American continent.
England, by creating a New England, had sown the seeds of her own
downfall.
During the years that followed, while the great Virginia planters were
living on enormous feudal estates, worked by small armies of slaves,
and disregarding or despising the fringe of poorer squatters and
settlers that to westward were already pushing across the Appalachians,
the New England merchants and backwoodsmen were engaged in a struggle
with England that went on for years before exploding in an outbreak
of open revolution. The first phase of the struggle was over the
Navigation Acts, whereby England after 1650 had striven to control
the growing trade with the Colonies. By the most severe of these Acts
nothing could be shipped in or out of the Colonies except by English or
Colonial vessels, and the Colonies themselves were forbidden to trade
with any other power except England. This prohibition did not affect
the Southern planter aristocracy, inasmuch as they had no manufactures,
and no shipping, and sent out their agricultural products mainly and
regularly in English vessels to England, obtaining therefrom, even
in Washington’s day, their clothes, tools, and equipment. But the
New England colonies, unagricultural and mercantile, opposed the
Navigation Acts, necessarily. They had already become shipbuilding
powers, and regularly exported enormous quantities of dried fish to
Spain, Portugal, the West Indies, obtaining in return quantities of
Spanish-grown cane sugar to be turned into New England rum, which again
was exchanged for slaves in Africa, tea in China, silks and spices
in the East. New England was growing into a competitive shipping and
mercantile power alongside of England, so the Navigation Acts were
continually being evaded in the Northern Colonies. The second phase
of colonial opposition arose over taxation, notably over the taxation
of tea which particularly affected the Northern Colonies. The story
of the Boston Tea Party is too well known for me to have to refer to
it. The last phase arose over the general bureaucratic meddling with
the affairs of the colonies, expressed in the Stamp Act. In all these
underground struggles, the New England Colonies took the lead, with
the Southerners a bad second, and it is from this date that we must
look to the New Englanders with their completely commercial morality,
their Yankee cunning, and their fanatic dissenting Puritanism, as most
expressive of the direction in which America was travelling.
Thus while the drift of American sentiment gradually coalesced
and hardened against England, more and more strayed from the
ordered control of the Virginia planter aristocracy to the radical
experimentalism of the New England merchant group, the drift of
Russian sentiment was hardening in favour of Peter’s foreign-modelled
civil service and military establishment. In both cases a radical
and arbitrary minority was beginning to control the sluggish and
conservative majority. Underground, in South Russia particularly,
smouldered the popular feeling against the innovations of Peter and
his successors. It could do nothing because it lacked the weapons
wherewith to fight. Peter had taken good care to keep the army loyal
to him. But during Peter’s reign it burst out in the revolt of the Old
Believers; and in Catherine the Great’s period, which covered the years
when the American Colonies made their successful stand against England,
it exploded on the south-east Volga frontier among the Cossacks, in the
open class-war rebellion of Pugachev. Both Russia and America came into
power by building up systems of government that rested upon a profound
inner dualism. The dualism in America came from a struggle between the
aristocratic, agrarian, and conservative South, and the democratic,
mercantile, and independently-minded North and East. In Russia it
sprang from the opposition between the brilliant and sceptical
state-machine, pursuing its warlike ambitions even further into Europe,
and the inert, superstitious mass of the peasantry, particularly of
the lower Volga region, which was groaning under the weight of taxes
necessary to keep the state-service going, and unable--thanks to
serfdom--to retaliate except by open rebellion.
We have already pointed out that there exists a parallel between
Egypt and Babylonia, in Russia and America. Here again that parallel
must be alluded to. As in Babylonia, the state-religion was at the
outset composed of a series of regional cults, only welded later by
military force into the universal worship of the central Babylonian
sun-and-war-god Marduk, so in Russia the force of dissenting regional
sentiment contended against the deliberate state-policy of making the
Czar central autocrat of all the Russias and sole head of the Church.
As in Egypt, the religious struggle was between the sun-god, Ra of the
North, whose symbol was a golden disk, and the vegetation-god, Osiris
of the South, whose symbol was the tree of life, so in America there
was always tension between the agricultural South and the industrial,
gold-worshipping North. Russia could only keep going so long as the
Czar was victorious; America could only keep going so long as the
two divergent sections of its people fused into one. Unless we keep
these differences in mind we cannot understand either country. And it
is only by meditating upon them that we can fully understand all the
world-transformations that were historically to come into being from
the creation of Russia and the United States.
The process that we have been following culminated in Catherine
the Great and in Washington. These two historical and contemporary
figures not only represent immense landmarks in human history, but are
symbolical for long into the future, up to the threshold even of our
own day, of the power that is Russia, and is America. In studying them
as completely representative of the inner development we have been
following, we become witnesses of a phenomenon not common to human
history; the rise of two cultures side by side. This had happened
before in antiquity in the parallel growth of the Babylonian-Assyrian
and the Egyptian civilisations, which were, like Russia and America in
later times, river countries, and which were divided by the land-bridge
of Palestine and the Arab peninsula from each other. The later powers,
Russia and America, faced each other across the whole world, and
where Russia depended upon Europe for intellectual leadership, arms
and appliances, America depended on Europe for physical support, and
eventually for political independence itself. Nowhere is this more
clear than in the period we have now to study; the period of Catherine
in Russia, of Washington in America. Where Catherine interested herself
at the outset of her reign in Voltaire and Rousseau, wrote plays
herself in the French vein, was a brilliant leader of theoretical
intellectualism, many-sided and fascinating at the outset, and ended
as an ageing tyrant; Washington, the typical American of his time, was
a plain, blunt, country squire, intensely practical, not particularly
brilliant, with but one idea in his mind, the free expansion of
the colonies westward, who, despite himself, was dragged into the
current of Rousseauism and Voltairism practised by such spirits as
Paine and Jefferson, and ended as a retired moderate and a private
citizen. No more startling divergence could be found between countries
so similar geographically and climatically. There is something even
more interesting, psychologically and symbolically, in the fact that
Catherine the Great was a woman who had begun as a needy adventuress
without a drop of Russian blood in her veins, while Washington was
a man who began as a wealthy landowner of the most conservative and
long-rooted Virginian aristocracy. In both cases, the situation
found the one figure that could control it. In order to conquer
Europe, Russia had to find someone relentlessly efficient, utterly
unsentimental, theoretically advanced, but so profoundly imbued with
the desire to increase personal prestige as to be unwilling to bate a
jot of power; this was Catherine. In order to prevent the separation
from Europe from becoming a mere revulsion to anarchic chaos, America
had to find someone broad-mindedly tolerant, aristocratically reserved,
practical in outlook, so steady of purpose as never to be swayed by any
personal misfortune. This was Washington. Catherine’s reign (1762-1796)
led to the final destruction of Poland, brilliant military victories
over Turkey, terrible peasant misery at home, and the establishment of
Russia as the greatest military power threatening the whole of Europe;
Washington’s period of ascendency as General and President (1776-1797)
led to complete independence from England, immense expansion westwards,
an ever-widening rift between the agricultural South and the commercial
North, and the final establishment of America as a power completely
isolated, and determined to seek no further “world-entanglements,” but
to create its own political destiny.
Chapter IV
Up to a short time before America was discovered, and Russia emerged
on the stage of the world’s affairs under Ivan the Great, Europe had
been a social, moral, and spiritual unity. This unity, despised and
blackened by the apostles of enlightenment in the eighteenth century,
under the title of “the feudal system,” had been developing from the
fourteenth century onwards in the wrong direction of nationalist
monarchy, instead of in the only right one of such a popularly
grounded, elective feudalism as we find foreshadowed in the writings
of Plato, More, or Campanella. At its highest and best, it had not
succeeded in preventing such purely political wars as the dynastic
struggle of the later Plantagenets with France, or the heroic struggle
of the Holy Roman Empire with the papacy, or the civil struggle between
the burghers of the free towns and the feudal overlords; but it must
also be remembered on the credit side of the balance, that it had also
promoted the largely idealistic effort of the Crusaders, the unified
social and moral enlightenment of monasticism, and had created as well
a great common language of art, rooted in popular symbolism, a common
faith unified in outward observance, and, in its great revival of
Latin, a common speech whereby scholars from all parts of Europe might
easily understand each other.
These are compensation enough, in such minds as realize their complete
lack of such rallying points to-day, for the failure of those days to
achieve telephones or modern sanitation. The same order of thought that
had re-established centres of culture and philosophy after the complete
breakdown of the old Roman order in the eighth century, continued its
effort almost unimpaired up to the close of the fifteenth. We still in
a measure to-day partake of as many of its fruits as the failure of
discipline, represented by the revival of nationalistic warring powers
in the fourteenth, the revival of new learning in the fifteenth, and
the Protestant and counter-Catholic reformations of the sixteenth,
have left to us. At its apex, in the thirteenth century, life from
the North Cape to Palestine, from Cornwall to the Carpathians, was
of one piece throughout. As the next world was divided into the
realms of heaven, purgatory, and hell, so this world was divided into
its appropriate realms: the king’s palace, the feudal castle, the
cathedral, the abbey, the market town, the guildhall, the peasant’s
hut. Over all lay the spiritual sway of a unified ecclesiastic order,
the solid power of Catholic Christianity. Towards the east lay the
less intelligent, less rationally disciplined, more thaumaturgic and
despotically absolute power of the Orthodox Greek faith, which had been
completely separated from the western faith since the ninth century,
and which revolved about the decaying court of Constantinople. With the
fall of that capital in 1456 and the consequent driving of a wedge by
the Turks into the heart of Christianity, the rift between the Eastern
and the Western churches had become chronic, and the Eastern Church
had grown more and more hidebound and static, remote from anything
resembling forward-looking Christianity. A little before this event,
there had come about--thanks to the failure of the Crusades and the
spirit of growing commercialism--the rise of a new burgher class and
their alliance with the purely political and dynastic ambitions of a
nationalist monarchy, which took place first in France, and later in
England.
It is worth noticing that both these countries lay on the western
borders of Europe. In Spain, too, a nationalist monarchy developed, but
it was dependent on the support of the old feudal nobility rather than
the bourgeoisie, had its own internal problems to settle in the fact
that part of the country lay in the hands of the Mohammedans, and did
not in any case exert much influence abroad earlier than the sixteenth
century. Italy, unable to find a single ruler, was rapidly sinking
into the gulf of anarchy through which the torrent of the Renaissance
made its way, to peter out on the shoals of academicism and realistic
sentimentality. But soon after 1492, the date of Columbus’ discovery
of the New World, the most startling sign that a new order had come
into being in the world was furnished by Germany. In 1517 in the very
heart of the Holy Roman Empire of legend and heroic achievement for the
Catholic faith, the Augustinian monk Luther posted his theses to the
church door at Wittenberg. This was three years before Cortez completed
his conquest of Mexico, or Magellan made the first circumnavigation of
the globe. The subsequent process known as the Reformation, whether in
its early Protestant or later Catholic manifestation, paid no heed to
the great spiritual unity of the past. It rested entirely on social
and economic factors. Consciously or not, it either supported or
failed to combat the nationalist morality to which religion was to be
subservient, of which morality we have reaped the latest fruits in the
outburst of unspiritually motivated hatred that accompanied the Great
War. Its chief result was the complete separation of Northern Teutonic
and Southern Mediterranean Christianity.
If we could construct a thought map as opposed to a nationalist map of
Europe about the year 1550, we would find that Europe was no longer
in any sense a unity. Europe then, as since, fell readily into two
halves. The dividing line was never totally clear, but the northern and
western part of Europe was predominantly Protestant, as the eastern
and southern remained predominantly Catholic. In the western half of
Europe, Spain was the strongest of Catholic outposts; but Spain had her
last triumph in 1570, the year of Lepanto, and eighteen years later
was to know her first heavy defeat in the destruction of the Armada.
In opposition to Catholicism were England, the Scandinavian countries,
a considerable portion of France, notably the south-western half, and
practically all of northern and western Germany. Southern Germany, like
Bavaria, remained Catholic, but Switzerland again became Protestant.
On the other hand, Italy, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, remained
Catholic to the core.
Thus it came about that America became open--especially after the
defeat of the Spanish Armada--to colonization from Western and
Protestant European countries, while Russia, despite Ivan the
Terrible’s attempt to find a _rapprochement_ with England, became
open to influence from Eastern Europe, which was predominantly feudal
and Catholic. The outcome was to make Russia more and more feudal
and autocratic, while America became more and more _bourgeois_ and
Protestant. After Peter the Great’s time, Russia presented to Europe
the image of an autocracy of a little more logical and thorough-going
stamp than the autocracy practised in France and Spain; after King
William’s War, America became a democracy a little more advanced and
complete than the type of successful commercial democracy governing
England.
Both countries, nevertheless, sought for a common ideal in the past.
Russia, as refounded by Ivan the Great, proclaimed its kinship with
Rome. It was the “third Rome,” the first being the Rome of Augustus,
the second the Rome of Byzantium. The mystic idea that the _pallium_
of world-empire had travelled from Rome to Constantinople and from
Constantinople, in the wake of Ivan the Great’s bride, the Empress
Sophia, to Moscow, where it was to be firmly established for ever,
ruled Russian State policy from 1490 up to the outbreak of the
Bolshevik revolution in 1917. It invested the Romanovs and their
successors, who were not even Russian in essence, with semi-divine
authority and mystery. It was perhaps the basis of such a startling
stroke of policy as Catherine the Great’s offering open asylum to the
Jesuits after their banishment from France and Spain. At the same
time, the thirteen American colonies, newly established, began playing
with the notion that they too were Rome--but Rome of the republic,
Rome of the Latian league. This idea was markedly materialistic and
rationalistic, as the Russian idea was markedly mystical and emotional.
It grew to enormous proportions after the Revolution, when the infant
Republic was shaken to its foundations by the revelations concerning
the Society of the Cincinnati. Thus over the background of Russia and
America, the patterns of different Romes grew and spread.
That background was nomadic, centrifugal, primitive in both cases.
In America it was a background of hunters and fishers, trappers,
traders, and roving Redskins. It was Franco-Spanish, Spanish-Indian.
The type of man that this background was producing--and continued to
produce after the first Anglo-Saxons crossed the Alleghany barrier--was
the self-assertive, independent, inventive, resourceful hunter and
fighter. The fact that the country was wilderness, largely forested,
with poor communications and few openings for trade, added to Spanish
adventurousness, Norman-French daring, and Anglo-Saxon fanaticism a
fresh tang. If people could not agree together under law on major
points of religion or minor points of social observance, all that was
necessary was to kill off or frighten away a few Indians with firearms
and to live isolated, far apart. In this respect the North American
family soon became a wandering tribe, liable to the most casual
accretions from without and to the most arbitrary splits and divisions
of sentiment, except in districts early settled, where the common bonds
of a unified stock and better communications served to hold the clan
together. In the middle and western colonies, the white colonist soon
took on, in his dealings with his neighbours, and in his disposition to
rove about, the colours of Indian life.
The Russian too had his background, but the background was Tartar. It
was a life either agricultural or nomadic, like the American life, but
that which made and kept the country productive was not the independent
desire to make fortunes and to seek new fields for themselves on the
part of an active population, but a profound acceptance of inner
necessity on the part of an inert one. The Tartar-Russian temperament
was inert, or stung to sudden action under the pressure of crisis,
while the American temperament was active, sinking to inertia only
under the stimulus of growing prosperity. What drove the Russians
to migrate was not the sense of a new horizon to be attained, or a
new horizon to be conquered, but the mere desire to escape from an
unchanging round, an inner need to stand aloof from the village and
its elders, the landowner’s mansion and its barns, the bloodthirsty
Cossack, or the life-sapping tax-gatherer. That was because from the
beginning the Russian family had not been a family in the American
sense, but a great collection of souls: feudal retainers, house and
farm serfs, and distant tributaries. In Russia, and more particularly
in the steppes of Southern and Eastern Russia, apart from the trading
centres of the North Russia forest belt, the peasant tended continually
to revert to the colours of pure Tartar and nomad life.
Thus we may safely say, without fear of contradiction, that the
European influence, transported to America, lost its ordered English
characteristics, and became something more akin to Spanish buccaneering
or the loose confederacy of Indian tribes; while the same influence,
exerted on Russia from her western borders, made that country a
Late-Latin imperium, greatly modified by the spirit of Tartar nomadry.
This remarkable transformation was due, after all sociological, racial,
religious factors have been weighed and dismissed, primarily to
climatic and geological factors. In neither Russia nor North America
is nature a friendly factor, nor is it possible there to look on man
as an “addition to nature” nor as the “measure of all things” in the
Greco-Latin sense. Both countries had climates of exceptional severity,
vast stretches of soil of inferior productiveness, a population thinly
scattered, and lacking, until the later growth of railways, in means
of communication. The most fertile agricultural region of America, the
Mississippi valley, lay far inland through enormous forests, at the
mercy of floods and malaria, as the most fertile region of Russia, the
Volga basin, lay on the remote Caspian frontier, at the mercy of steppe
winds, and consequent famine and typhus. Psychologically, the Russian
and the American reacted differently to this situation. In Russia, the
influx of Tartar blood resulted in making the majority of the race
fatalistic, sensual, lazy, with a tendency towards a curious mingling
of pantheism and sacramental Christianity. In America, the influx
of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism made the majority reckless, highstrung,
extremely active, with a tendency towards a mingling of outward
practical sense and inward moral fanaticism.
From the date when America and Russia appeared on the horizon, we can
trace the steady rise of European individualism. The revolutionary
impulse of Europe has always been an affair of outstanding
individuals, perhaps of small minorities: even the French Revolution
was ultimately accomplished by a few outstanding clever politicians,
centering on Paris. The revolutionary impulse, on the other hand, in
both America and in Russia, has been an affair of mass-movements.
Washington was intellectually merely the ordinary American landowner
of his time; Lenin the ordinary provincial noble. Such revolutionary
upheavals as Alexander Second’s freeing of the serfs, or America’s
Civil War, came about not through the agitation of any single body
of men, but by a combination of interests: economic and sentimental.
In Russia, it was necessary for the emancipation of the serfs to
take place, because the system of Nicholas I, which had relied on
foreign conquest to ensure the prosperity of the country, had broken
down; and the system of serfdom, which had really only flourished
in the black soil belt of South Russia, was, as Alexander II said,
“in danger of abolishing itself from below.” In America it became
increasingly necessary to limit the field of the slave-holding class
to the Lower Southern States, or the economic control of the financier
and trading class in the North would be threatened by the irruption
of slave-holders into the rich Western territory and the consequent
creation of an agrarian imperialism. None of the changes that took
place in American or Russian political life during the nineteenth
century were so arbitrary as the violent cross-currents that, during
the same time, affected Europe.
The advance of Russia and America throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries was not without its influence in Europe, or rather
on the type of European genius that Europe was to produce. The rise
of the Jesuit order within the Catholic church and the corresponding
and opposed rise of mystical non-conformist sects such as swarmed
in the latter eighteenth century,--for example, Wesleyanism and
Swedenborgianism--were its first symptoms in the religious field.
The corresponding decline in architecture into the extravagances of
later baroque, or the frigidities of academic classicism, or the false
romanticism of the Gothic revival, mark its influx in the field of
architecture. Such individual geniuses as Voltaire or Kant, Blake
or Beethoven, Carlyle or Nietzsche, Ibsen or Shaw, reveal the same
splitting up of Europe into efficiently Americanised revolutionary
and sceptically Catholicised reactionary as was going on elsewhere.
Henceforth Europe, or European life, was no longer a unity; and only
a unity can produce great social movements, such as had culminated in
previous centuries in a Dante, a Shakespeare, an Aquinas, a Bach, a
Cervantes, or a Racine. From the outset of the nineteenth century, the
individual in Europe became more important than his age. It was only
outside the frontiers of Europe, in Russia or in America, that the age
was to remain more important than the individual.
2
It was through the deliberately exercised will of a minority that
Russia and America became independent; and this minority consisted
in both cases of people who had been largely Europeanised. Left to
themselves, the Russians would have relapsed into nomad savagery;
their unity was imposed on them by a long list of ambitious princes,
from Ivan the Great down to Peter the Great, whose eyes were directed
continually towards Europe. Left to themselves, the true Americans--the
early Spanish, French, and English colonists--might have conceivably
remained as divided and sparsely scattered settlements surrounded by a
fringe of Indians and wilderness: their contact with the outer world
was kept up by a long list of Puritan divines and southern aristocrats
armed with muskets, law books, and Bibles, and busily transplanting
into the wilderness the fundamental contrast between European Whig
and Tory. Up to 1688, the date of the Whig revolution in England
and its reverberation in the Colonies in the shape of King William’s
War, the whole history of the American colonies was nothing but chaos
and anarchy. The successive squabbles with governors, the successive
acceptance and dismissal of royal proprietors, the successive guerilla
wars with the Indians, form a complex labyrinth of greed, intrigue and
baseness not easy to match anywhere. It was only through influence and
pressure from without, from England, that any civilisation kept itself
alive at all. Likewise in Russia, the small body of German, Dutch,
Italian artisans, architects, engineers, scholars, soldiers of fortune
and sycophants that filled the German suburb at Moscow from 1500 to
1688, transformed Russia under Peter the Great, and continued to do so
under Elizabeth and Catherine.
The ruling minority in America curried favour with one or the other of
the political parties that happened to be in the ascendant in England;
in Russia, as the peasant was illiterate, the minority had to curry
favour with the Czar himself. During the reigns of Peter, of Elizabeth,
and Catherine, Russian literature--that is to say, literature
written in the Russian language, as distinguished from Old Church
Slavonic--made its appearance. The most potent weapon of civilisation,
the written word, was snatched once and for all from the hands of the
Orthodox monks and Metropolitans, whose chronicles had been hitherto
the sole means of expression, and given to the secular powers, the
outstanding nobles, upon whose support the safety of Czardom really
rested. This literature, in both cases, was to take its intellectual
tone from Europe, its sentimental pretexts only were Russian or
American.
The influence of such Republican speculations as James Harrington’s
“Oceana” influenced the one, as the influence of the sentimental
naturalism of Diderot and the Encyclopædists influenced the other. At
about the same time, and under the same conditions, the power of the
Old New England theocracy, and of the Byzantine family-order began to
wane, and the control of expression of opinion began to pass to the
thriving but new commercial communities of St. Petersburg, New York,
Charleston and Odessa.
To both new countries Europe was like a great land-bridge, representing
an older, more powerful, more refined civilisation. The ideas that
prevailed in America or in Russia were not only derived from this
body of thought, but were applied to conditions that were totally
different. In the case of Russia, the central authority of the Czar,
the nobles and the bureaucracy, attempted to transform an inert mass of
semi-Oriental serfdom into something resembling a modern nationalistic
monarchy. In the case of America, the most prosperous classes, the
independent merchants and bankers, attempted to fuse an inchoate mass
of fanatics, planters and frontiersmen into a political unity which
was democratic and federal. The ideas upon which both worked came from
Europe; in the case of Russia the model sought after was the model of
the unified French monarchy, the Prussian State, the Austrian Empire.
In the case of America the model unconsciously followed was that of the
Greek city-states, or of the principalities of the Italian Renaissance.
Long ago, if we look far enough back in history, the empires of
Babylonia-Assyria and of Egypt had been states dependent on great river
systems for their unity. They had sprung up independently, while the
land-bridge that lay between them, Palestine and Moab, being highland
and desert, was not only at a lower stage of culture, but, under the
Amorites and Hittites, became a body of traders, borrowing from each
in turn, and profiting by their situation in the territory where lay
the chief caravan routes between the two great centres of Babylon and
Heliopolis, to develop finally an independent viewpoint and a composite
race-unity for itself under the Semites. With Russia and America, the
same process was reversed. Europe lay as a land-bridge between Russia
and America. But this land-bridge, as a unified civilisation, had
already passed its maximum, and was headed for decline. Now certain
elements of that civilisation were to pass beyond Europe’s frontiers
into two countries, hitherto undeveloped, which were founded upon
river-systems. In Russia these elements were such as could seek a
common centre about the Czardom of Muscovy. In America, these elements
were such as could build themselves into harmony with the commercial
classes of the Atlantic seaboard controlling the river-ways that led
into the interior.
3
The “third Rome” that Russia proclaimed herself to be, at the time
when the Muscovite Czars became predominant in its affairs, was
essentially the mystical, inner Rome of the Byzantine Cæsars. Deriving
its authority from seclusion, intrigue, separation between court and
people, it accepted none as leader save he who had passed over the
portal of the Cathedral of the Transfiguration and had received on his
forehead the holy chrism from the hands of the Orthodox Patriarch;
however much he may have despised that patriarch in his heart, as did
Peter and Catherine. But America founded a Rome of another sort, and
in this Rome, democratic and enterprising, none was to be accepted
as leader save he who had turned his back upon the ruling party in
England and maintained, in combined political and religious thinking,
his independence of the motherland. Thus the two wings of the embodied
Imperial idea persisted in separation beyond Europe’s frontiers; and
the age of their uprise was the age of the decline of the Imperial idea
in Europe. Both America and Russia came on the stage of the world’s
affairs at the time of the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire; both
rose to power during the period of intense nationalism that followed;
and both played important parts in the final overthrow of Napoleon, who
may be said to have attempted to restore an Empire by the power of his
sword alone, when as a social and spiritual ideal, it was already dead.
In order to understand the sort of Rome America founded, we must look
back to the legendary sources of England. The study of legendary
history is often more valuable to the sociological investigator
than the study of actual events. The latter merely tells us what a
people were able to accomplish under changes of weather and economic
prosperity, the pressure of external influence, the million and one
contributory causes which make up the life and state of well or
ill-being of the community from day to day. Legendary history, on the
other hand, reveals the goal steadily aimed at, the ideal to which all
aspired, the psychical centre about which all this activity revolves.
Thus we cannot understand the Greeks without a study of Achilles,
Odysseus, Theseus. The fatalistic bravery, the wily shiftiness, the
adventurous courage of a whole folk, are here summed up. Rama and
Krishna tell us more about India than the pages of Indian history,
which are, as a matter of fact, mostly blank; nor is America itself
comprehensible without reference to such quasi-legendary figures as
Parson Weems’ Puritanic fixation of Washington, Davy Crockett, Andrew
Jackson, or Daniel Boone. The legendary history of England is to be
found in the pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History; and as the story
told therein is essentially representative of what many English minds
of the twelfth century believed to have been the truth, desired to make
the truth, it is necessary to look into it.
According to this account, Britain was founded by a Trojan prince,
a grandson of Æneas himself, founder of Rome. That such a thing is
doubly impossible, we now know, and we are apt to laugh at Geoffrey for
putting it forward. Yet even this legend may contain some substratum of
truth. The Latian tribes, from which the Romans came, were undoubtedly
subject to much Phœnician influence, and there is reason to suspect
that the Western Britons, at least, were also subject to some early
Phœnician influence. The “Trojans,” whoever they were, may have been
a Phœnician people, or a legend retailed by the Phœnicians. At all
events, we need not laugh at Geoffrey for his feeble arch spanning
the abyss between little Britain and majestic Rome. The fact is, that
almost everybody in England, rich or poor, (except perhaps a few
clerics who are by nature adepts at concealing both the truth and
their doubts) believed in Geoffrey’s time, and for several hundred
years later, that the Britons were the descendants of the Trojans,
and that under Arthur, their greatest king, they had conquered thirty
other kingdoms, and had been on the point of conquering Rome itself
when Mordred, Arthur’s nephew, seized crown and queen. This belief was
so strong that Henry II, at the end of the twelfth century, was not
only induced to rebuild Glastonbury, but his abbot, Henry of Blois,
discreetly “found” the tomb of Arthur there, in order to put a stop
to persistent rumors concerning the king’s possible reappearance. And
the belief was renewed, when under the Tudors, a remote descendant
of ancient British kings mounted the throne of his ancestors, thus
fulfilling the prophecy of Merlin.
The belief that prevailed in England after the Norman Conquest and
throughout the Middle Ages--and this belief was all the more powerful
because it was popular, unformulated, unrecognised by the rationalism
of the ruling orders--was that England was once on the point of
conquering Rome, and that under the new monarchy it would reassume
its position as head of the world’s affairs. This faith came to its
flower under the Tudors. Under Henry VIII the conquest of Rome became
an accomplished fact. The poets, philosophers and divines of the time
hailed the advent of Elizabeth in terms that made of her the equal, if
not the superior, of any empress of antiquity. And it was precisely
at this time that the newly-discovered realm of Virginia was thrown
open; that Puritanic sectaries driven out of England by the machinery
of the State Church which Tudors and Stuarts had set in action,
Calvinistic upholders of that ascetic intolerance which the Catholics
later were themselves to imitate, Congregationalist rebels against
episcopal supervision, were to establish overseas a republican form
of England--a third Rome. This feeling that the mother country, in
alliance with Protestant and Colonial dissent, might become a primitive
Roman commonwealth in opposition to the monarchial ideas of Renaissance
Europe, prevailed throughout the great struggle of the Commons with
Charles I, and the subsequent Cromwellian dictatorship. It is not for
nothing that John Milton, before writing “Paradise Lost,” meditated
an epic on the old Arthurian story. The “Cromwellian” tone of the old
story lay closely akin to the rooted ambitions of his race.
In short where Russia, by a process of unconscious assimilation,
became the successor of Byzantium and thus a bulwark against Europe, a
mystically isolated bulwark, which only such unorthodox Czars as Peter,
Catherine, and Alexander II dared to ignore,--America rose to power
precisely by consciously reverting to the Rome of the tribunes and of
warring patricians and plebeians, a Rome that found its first test in
a conflict with another country that had already previously risen to
imperial power. England became America’s Carthage; Poland, Lithuania
and Sweden became for Imperial Russia the analogues of the Greek
city-states. From this fact, and from a host of subsidiary facts, arose
the typical introverted attitude of the Russian and its opposite in
the American. About the typical, one hundred per cent American one can
learn everything but his feelings. His thoughts, his opinions, are all
on the surface. America is to him the greatest of countries. American
prosperity is the world’s prosperity, American life is the ideal life,
America’s expansion is the expansion of the world’s democratic hope
into backward Europe and remote, superstitious Asia. Over this simple
creed a Whitman, a Jefferson and an Emerson can shake hands. About a
Russian you know only his feelings. His opinions he is able to change
with disconcerting completeness. A Tolstoy can change from the creed
of “getting the best out of life for oneself and family,” to a creed
of ascetic denial of all the world’s goods, with no loss of intensity;
a Dostoevsky can somehow reconcile the inner conflict between mystic
Slavophilism and underground rebellion against Christianity itself,
without ceasing to be Dostoevsky. Only a completely exiled American,
like Henry James, or one who hankers after exile, like Poe, Hawthorne,
or Melville, can fully exploit his feelings; only a completely exiled
Russian, like Herzen, or one who hankers after exile like Turgenev,
Tchekhov, or Pushkin himself, can maintain any constancy in opinion.
4
But this is not the place to discuss the mental attitudes implied in
being an American and a Russian. That will come out more fully as we
go on. For the moment we must revert to the course of our interrupted
historical analysis, which was abandoned at the moment that the
Americans, under Washington, made themselves the sole masters and
controllers of the wealth of an immense continent, left by England
in their hands; while at the same time the Russians under Catherine
became masters and controllers of the whole of Eastern Europe, and
issued their first threat to shake off the power of the Turks from
Constantinople. Each had accomplished this at the price of a daring
alliance. Catherine had allied herself with Prussia, which in the
preceding reign had been Russia’s most important enemy, in order to
destroy Poland utterly; America had allied herself with France, which
twenty years before had appeared as the colonists’ chief enemy, in
order to conquer England. But the elaborate game of eighteenth century
diplomacy that both had played, based as it was on balances of power,
secret treaties, dynastic successions, bribings and spyings, and a
cynical understanding of the foibles of human nature, was about to come
to an end. In 1789 the French Revolution broke out, and the cause of
eighteenth century monarchy collapsed in ruins. During the same year
the first congress of the United States assembled, under the present
American Constitution.
During the years that had elapsed since the British Government withdrew
from the colonies in 1783, America had hardened from a confederation of
semi-independent commonwealths rather on the Polish model, completely
lacking in internal unity, to a federal republic. This transformation
had come about thanks to three converging causes. In the first place,
England, despite the Revolution, still held a vague sway over the
interior, and though promising to abandon her outposts in the Great
Lake territory, refused to do so. This gave the colonists a reason
for continuing to cling together, inasmuch as all were now equally
interested in the hunger for land that possessed the settlers pushing
forward beyond the Appalachian region. In the second place, without
a central government, there was danger that the outlying settlements
might be tempted by bribes and intrigue to throw in their lot with
England again. Vermont actually attempted to do so; and in the new
regions of Kentucky and Tennessee intrigue was going on with the
Spaniards in occupation of Louisiana that boded equally ill. Moreover
there was the question of the Indian tribes to settle; and the Great
Lakes and Mississippi region not only provided the chief backbone of
the Indian resistance, but were open to foreign agents ready to arm the
Indians, against the Colonists. Lastly, the colonies had come out of
the Revolution crippled with debt, and with a worthless currency. It
was to the interest of the newly-born, independent banking community of
New York, headed by Alexander Hamilton, to fund this debt and replace
this currency with legal tender. Thanks to Hamilton and his associates,
the Federal Union rested from the start upon the conservative money
power. The outbreak of a local rebellion in Massachusetts, the
increasing trouble on the frontier, served but to centralise and focus
the aims of the Colonists upon Federalism, and hasten the adoption of a
constitution.
During the same time, the Russian autocracy under Catherine became more
and more a question of the personal whim of whatever sovereign happened
to be occupying the throne. Catherine had begun as theoretically
liberal, but she had inherited a system that put unlimited power into
her hands to play with, and the year before she came to the throne, the
gentry were finally liberated from all obligations of state service.
This left her free to carry on the machinery of government with the aid
of any subordinates that would do her bidding absolutely, undeterred
by patriotic, religious, or moral scruples. As Catherine was herself
entirely without such scruples, and ruled alone by her passion for
vanity and display, her favourites had the easy task of appealing to
her baser side. Conquest was what Catherine wanted; whether it was to
bedazzle Diderot and Voltaire, or to partition Poland, or to embark
on a campaign with Turkey, she could not resist the lure of posing as
the mistress of Europe. Frederick the Great, who from his desperate
position as the leader of a forlorn hope, gradually built up Prussia
into a power to be reckoned with, understood this perfectly, and was
not sparing of his flatteries, while at the same time he watched with
equal understanding the rise of the colonies, and wrote measured and
intelligent eulogies of their leader Washington. The difficulty with
Catherine’s system, was that it depended altogether on her iron will,
and she could do nothing to ensure the same determination to over-ride
opposition for her successors. In order to go on she had to overlook
the desperate peasant-rising created by Pugachev, to break with one
favourite after another, and to treat with contempt the terrible
outbreak of cholera that occurred in Moscow itself during her reign.
To both countries, the French Revolution came as a terrible shock.
To Catherine it became apparent that unless the sovereigns of Europe
acted in concert to save the French Monarchy, her own game was as good
as lost. But unfortunately, the European sovereigns were indisposed
to act together, and separately the Revolutionary armies easily beat
them. To Washington and the most intelligent Americans, it soon became
obvious that although America was in alliance with France, to maintain
that alliance under new conditions would only lead to fresh European
occupations of American soil, and to the condition that the colonists
had already faced in the last years of the Revolution, when only the
dwindling and ill-equipped Continental army stood between them and
submission. In the outcome both countries, despite their previous
embroilments in European politics, took a fresh step backward into
isolation. In America that isolation was conscious and proclaimed; in
Russia it was instinctive, subconscious, and uneasy. Its course in both
cases, was charted and developed by the subsequent career of Napoleon.
We cannot understand Napoleon’s character, nor the tragedy of his
career, unless we grasp the fact that he was born in an atmosphere
of local rebellion resembling exactly the rebellion of the American
colonies under Great Britain. But in Corsica, this sort of thing was
bound to fail, because the Corsicans did not have, like the American
colonists, the undeveloped wastes and the boundless resources of
a remote continent to fall back upon. Napoleon grew to manhood
understanding that destiny would not consent to be on the side
of European uprisings; and this understanding guided his mental
orientation, first towards the idealistic Jacobins, whose real aim was
a Constitutional and popular monarchy, then, when that hope failed,
towards a military dictatorship. And this military dictatorship took on
more and more the outer form of a Roman imperium divested of Byzantine
ceremonial, in his own eyes. By combining theoretic liberalism with
personal talent he thought he could revive ancient Cæsarism.
The true turning point in Napoleon’s career came when from his camp
at Boulogne, he turned East before learning of Trafalgar, and went
off to fight Austria and Prussia. The star he then followed led him
inevitably to the blazing streets of Moscow, and finally to utter
self-destruction, because every step that he took upon the eastward
path depended on his ability to create an atmosphere of overwhelming
military prestige, in order to overawe all the monarchs of Europe into
accepting him as their equal. In thus turning eastward, Napoleon had
to go against his own inmost conviction that he was born to save the
Revolution. Had he overcome England’s stubborn opposition to change
(and there were many people in England half-disposed to pray that he
might do so) there would have been nothing against his victorious
forward advance but the Atlantic and the new American States, which
were unknown quantities in opinion, but which were rapidly dividing
into two parties under Washington and Jefferson. But in order to do
this, Napoleon would have been obliged to depend on such maritime war
genius as his country could bring forth, and since he had no ability
or experience in naval war, this decided him. Napoleon must have known
that he was not invincible on land--no general ever is--and yet his
attempt to create a European empire depended on his being practically
invincible, as he well knew. Hence his alternations of desperate hope
and disillusionment, hence the tragic epic, logically insane, of his
career.
Whether Napoleon was right or wrong in the course he followed, his
idea was destined to dominate Europe throughout the nineteenth century
and to survive into the twentieth. With prophetic insight he charted
the later course Europe was to follow, and laid the foundations of
the personal Cæsarism of Mussolini and his followers, as well as
anticipating in his continental system of Confederations, the reverse
process that has led to the establishment of a League of Nations. But
with European nineteenth century history it is not the purpose of this
study to deal, nor even with the outward events of American and Russian
history, except insofar as each bears upon, reflects and alters the
course of the other. The history of Napoleon is, after all, neatly
parallelled by the history of those Israelite kings who, caught between
Egypt and the Assyrian empire, were forced to turn first against one
and then the other. Our concern here is rather with the two forces
beyond Europe’s frontier, now at work in Russia and in America; forces
that were increasingly to direct the destiny not of Europe alone, but
of the world.
BOOK II
_“There is an organic logic, an instinctive and dream-sure logic of
all existence, as opposed to the logic of the inorganic, the logic
of understanding and of things understood--a logic of direction as
opposed to a logic of extension.”_
OSWALD SPENGLER,
“Decline of the West.”
_“If the cause of the happiness of this country (America) was
examined into, it would be found to arise as much from the great
plenty of land in proportion to the inhabitants, as from the wisdom
of their political institutions.”_
ALBERT GALLATIN,
in the Congressional Debate
on The Land Bill of 1796.
_“Why is it that in Europe those who call themselves Democrats
always stand for the people, or at any rate always rely on the
people, while our democrat is often an aristocrat, nearly always
supports that which oppresses the power of the people, and ends by
becoming a despot?”_
FEODOR DOSTOEVSKY,
commenting on the Pushkin Address, 1881.
Chapter V
Every race and every nation that has ever existed has achieved its
destiny only by selecting out of the many paths open to it, one path
peculiar to itself and following that, acquiring thereby the singular
virtue that is a particularity of that way of life, and of none other.
The choice of such a path is never either a deliberate act of will on
the part of a few individuals or of the great majority. It is due to
the operation of climatic, social, and political factors influencing
the capacity and environment of the race itself so that before we can
say what any organised body of men can achieve, we have to take into
consideration the place where they settle, the sort of work they are
best fitted to perform, and the psychological possibilities inherent
in the race itself. Thus we can say of the ancient Greeks that their
special virtue was a new kind of intellectual agility, due to their
position in a rocky and infertile peninsula, as small farmers and
shipmen; while to the east and south lay older and more long-settled
states which did not share the peculiar strain of adventurous daring
and natural sentiment that the original Dorian settlers possessed. The
Romans on the other hand, thanks to their genius for collective action,
as well as the necessity that was imposed on them from the outset of
conquering and ruling from fortified central hill-towns a more fertile
valley-land divided between warring and highly-varied racial stocks,
acquired early the virtues of discipline, loyalty, and legalism. The
ancient Hebrews, on account of their position as nomads, no less than
the constant proximity of the desert, together with the ever-present
fear of external conquest, developed into a race of religious seers,
prophets, and hard bargainers with the surrounding peoples, who
displayed greater resources of material power, but less spiritual
resource than they. Thus they acquired the mingled virtues of patience
and far-seeing desire for justice, and tempered their will to the
absolute to a higher degree than either Greeks or Romans. This method
of seeing each people not as an abstraction, but a living force, taking
and giving colour to its environment, could be applied with equal force
to all modern nations.
Until we understand these psychological and ethical differences between
nations, and are able to follow them from the highest historical event
down to the daily life of the humblest individual, history is no more
than a mere recital of names and dates. Waterloo, Trafalgar, Bunker
Hill, Gettysburg, Tsushima and the Somme have no meaning unless we
understand that behind every man and gun engaged there move the forces
of unseen yet potent essences, swaying the result in their hands, now
in one way, now in another. Homer was essentially right, artistically
and philosophically, when he made his gods not only take an interest
in the fortunes of the Trojan War upon earth, but also ready to take
now one side, now the other, in that contest. It is of the nature of
humanity to hold fast to that good which it realises to be necessary,
in art as in life; and to seek to adjust both art and life to the
most obvious reaction to necessity of the single soul, or of the body
politic, under the underlying circumstances. Thus ethics and æsthetics
are, psychologically speaking, essentially one and the same, and
artistic or religious history is written fundamentally for a moral
purpose. Even a Gibbon, despite his scepticism, was unable to avoid the
moral implications of his theme in writing “The Decline and Fall.”
Our problem here is not to settle the sociological differences
prevailing among the nations of Europe, but rather to examine the
peculiar psychology which has throughout controlled the behaviour
of the two great frontier states that at the end of the eighteenth
century began to react upon Europe’s destiny, Russia and North
America. What we shall have to say about North America here applies
also in the same measure to South America, in its interaction upon the
Latin-Mediterranean world; but in this respect it was North America
that was the teacher, and the Declaration of Independence that the
thirteen English-speaking colonies, which later formed the United
States, signed in 1776, was followed and copied thereafter throughout
the whole extent of both American continents. Both Russia and America,
in its most extreme and characteristic national form of the United
States, have existed long enough and have maintained, if not their
complete independence, at least their aloofness long enough to have
acquired psychological characteristics and virtues entirely different
from anything that European nations can show us. But if we go to the
pages of European historians, or even to European novelists, poets,
and philosophers prepared to ask the question: “What is an American,
a Russian? In what way do they differ from anything European or from
each other?”, we by no means obtain a satisfactory answer. The only way
we can deal with such a problem is by a direct envisagement first, of
all of the countries of Europe itself, in so far as they have common
characteristics; and second, of the conditions under which Russia and
America came to be what they are.
Europe, psychologically speaking, is a great circle. The lower part
of this circle--and since the downfall of Pagan Rome, the less
creative, active and pioneering part--is coloured by the older
Latin-Mediterranean civilisation, which thanks to its conquest of
North Africa was able in antiquity to be the central force in European
progress, but which lost this actuality after the seventh century,
thanks to the uprise of Islam, and the renewed political power of the
Germanic race. During the Middle Ages, the actually dominant force
in Europe became the power of the northern half, and this Northern
half has been controlled by two forces:--the boundless practical
energy of the Teuton, the equally boundless intellectual curiosity
of the Celt. If we follow these forces around the circumference of
the circle which is Europe, through England, France, Spain, Italy,
Austria, Hungary, Poland, Scandinavia, Scotland and Ireland till
everywhere the boundaries merge with what is non-European,--be that
either Moor or Turk or Lapp or Finn or Firbolg or Basque--we see that
each European nation has grown up as a variation on the original
Celtic-Teutonic-Latin chord; and that each has precisely what the
other lacks, so that they complete each other. But this cannot be
said of the great congeries of peoples that inhabit the Russian plain
from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Here the original Slavonic--that
is to say largely Scandinavian and East-European element--became
overlaid with Tartar racial colour, to such an extent that only the
intellectual top stratum, not the sentimental race-basis underneath,
remained European. Nor can we define Northern America as fundamentally
European, either. Apart from the Spanish influence, which so completely
merged itself with the native Red Indian race and atmosphere as to
become inseparable from it, we find that in America everywhere the
original variations--such as French, Scottish, Scandinavian, English,
Irish,--have tended not to remain distinct but to mingle with each
other to such an extent that the result is a racial composite,
continually becoming more and more flexible, which is solely united
by common bonds of language and economic association, not of defined
racial instinct. The result is that only the diminishing appeal of old
sentimental association, not the fundamental present-day adjustment to
the situation, makes the American something akin to the European. In
order therefore to understand either America or Russia we have largely
to dismiss Europe as a culturally fixed entity from our minds, and
plunge into a wilderness of conflicting forces, guided only by the
sense of historical movement and by our knowledge of the course that
history has already taken, together with our instinct for soil and
scenery and climate. When we arrive at the goals we are seeking, we
will perhaps find that our most valuable tools will not after all be
the fine pencil of the artist, but the plough of the economist, the axe
of the social statistician.
2
The fundamental quality of the American took its origin at the outset
from an overwhelming passion for land. The innumerable shiploads of
people that have sped westward across the Atlantic from Columbus’ first
voyage, down to the latest ocean liner, have sought to find land, to
achieve land, to settle land, to overrun land, to subdue land. Even
the Indian tribes that inhabited that interior before the white man
came shared this feeling for land to a considerable extent. Most of
them were nomads, practising little agriculture, and incapable of any
lasting combination against the whites, because of their incurable
habit of appropriating the hunting grounds of their neighbours. The
most effective combinations, such as that of the Aztecs in Mexico or
the Iroquois in the northwest, were very active despotisms, continually
raiding the territory of weaker tribes and holding them to tribute.
The whites, on attaining America, as they penetrated the interior,
increasingly tended to drop their European powers of combination and to
take on the nomadism and the local jealousies of the savage. One sees
this in the eternal quarrels of the Spanish conquistadores over their
spoil, no less than in the struggles of the separate colonies that
preceded and continued throughout the Revolution, over the development
of the western territory. The Revolution itself was less a war to put
an end to British oppression than a successful attempt on the part
of the colonial landholding aristocracy to attain to an indefinite
expansion to the westward without British interference. It was directed
by Washington who was himself one of the largest landowners of the
period, and whose whole life was motivated by the passion for acquiring
new land, notably in the Ohio region. From the Revolution through the
Civil War and down to the fantastic scenes of the Florida land boom of
a few years ago, the passion for land has been the motive force--one
might almost say the virtue--of the great majority of Americans. For
land spells to them security, and security means wealth, and wealth
leads to power. The American race--if we can speak of such a thing--is
a race of land-seizers and land-exploiters. The sinister prominence of
the lawyer in American life, even on the frontier, from the beginning,
was due to the innumerable wrangles about land-grants and land-claims.
The entire subdual of the American continent by the whites, which took
barely fifty years to accomplish, was accompanied by such a waste of
the public domain as has been rarely paralleled in history. It is not
for nothing that America has been referred to over and over again in
the words of its orators and writers as “the land of promise,” “land of
the Pilgrim’s pride,” “land of the free and home of the brave,” “the
land of to-morrow.” One meets with something of the same sort for the
first time in the glowing accounts of Columbus and the earliest Spanish
explorers.
The sensation which inspired these accounts that in America one finds
a fabulous and unexplored region of wealth, can still be experienced
by almost anyone making a voyage westward across the Atlantic. Owing
to the fact that the prevailing winds are westerly and that the Gulf
Stream runs east, the journey to this day, even under modern steamer
conditions, is frequently more rough and productive of discomfort than
the passage from America to Europe. The westward coasts of Europe drop
abruptly to the sea in great cliffs; the craggy coast of Cornwall, the
sombre cliffs of Ireland, the great headlands of Portugal and Spain.
Beyond that, there is nothing but waves and wind--wind always opposing
further progress. And America does not make its presence known, until
just before one reaches it. Two days before New York one encounters the
Gulf Stream, that strange region of low-lying clouds, of heavy rain
squalls, of intensely dark blue seas lifting and falling under crowns
of heavy white foam. These seas are weedy, and the gulls become more
frequent here, so that the whole has an effect of being a No Man’s
Land of fantasy, a world before the creation gave bounds to chaos, a
region where nothing is living except the ship. Then one comes out of
the Gulf Stream into greyer, shoal water. All the rest of the way lies
through shoals--long stretches of the sea more often shrouded in fog
than shaken by storms, flat, unstirring, that invite one ever further
and further onward. Europe is cut off, once and for all. The land--the
unknown land--is taking possession of us. And the first thing one sees
of this strange unknown region beyond Europe is a long empty sandbank,
inviting one further still.
On the other hand, in travelling towards Russia, one has the impression
that the land itself, like the ocean on the trans-Atlantic voyage,
will never really come to an end. Long before one has finished rolling
over the monotonous Polish plain, Europe is left behind. The endless
distances, the sombre pine woods, the starveling villages, the scraggy
fields, simply succeed one the other. Before such a landscape one
has the fear of being cut off--of not being able ever to return to
habitable scenes. Napoleon must have faced such a feeling when he
hesitated on almost every stage of his journey to Moscow before going
on; and even when one has gone on and crossed the frontier, the plain
is still the same, the desolation and loneliness are only a little
more intense. There is no Russia, nothing but a frightful distance
of wilderness left behind which we must recross in order to find the
social compactness of Europe. One is sick of land, sick of these
endless horizons long before reaching Moscow, where at last one finds
Russia. And when one reaches Russia at last, the mysterious face of the
country is hidden behind the red walls of the Kremlin.
The passion for land then which made America what it is, is not the
same passion that has made Russia what it is. Before the monotony
of Russia the educated Russian shrugs his shoulders, the uneducated
peasant spits. There is nothing here of the enthusiasm with which each
American tells you excitedly that his is “God’s own country.” Nothing
at all. The Russian is far more likely to assure you that his is “a
dark people” living in “an unhappy country.” The passion that moves the
Russian is at bottom something equally simple, and explicable, as the
passion that moves the American. It has different psychological roots,
and a different manifestation in form. But it isolates itself just as
completely from Europe as the American identification of land and
prosperity.
The Russian craves for power. This is comprehensible when one
understands that Russia, with her enormous population, lay helpless and
powerless under the Tartar invasion from the twelfth century till the
sixteenth, when Ivan the Great and his successor, Ivan the Terrible,
took the first steps towards independence, and consolidation. And even
after that time, long after Russia had become a unified whole under
the sole sway of Moscow, there were very few with power sufficient to
keep this unity together. This is the true significance of the “time
of troubles” that followed Ivan the Terrible’s end. His remaining
legitimate son, a minor, was mentally incapable of rule; the choice of
the leading nobles, Boris Godunov, was strong and capable, but could
not prevail against the idea--rooted in the hearts of the people--that
the power of the Czar should descend in unbroken succession from one
anointed sovereign to the other. It was easy for a perfectly obscure
man to impersonate the legitimate heir (who was actually dead), obtain
Polish support, and finally by bargaining with the other nobles, who
were jealous of Boris, make himself Czar. The subsequent history of the
next twenty years reads like a nightmare. A succession of pretenders
to the throne uprose, in each case giving out that they were sons,
legitimate or illegitimate, of Ivan; and anarchy and disruption grew
so rapidly that in the end in Moscow itself the nobles took two sides,
now upholding one party, now the other. Only the intervention of the
Church itself--at that time and for long later revered by the peasant
and noble alike as being the one source of supernatural and united
power,--saved the country’s independence, and allowed the Romanov line
to ascend the throne. The same troubles broke out after Peter the
Great’s reign. Having put his only legitimate heir to death, Peter
announced that on each successive Czar after his time devolved the duty
of naming his own successor. But he himself died before he did so.
The result was a fresh series of impersonations, and more disorder,
which rose to a climax in Catherine’s reign, in the peasant rebellion
of Pugachev, a Cossack, who gave out that he was the legitimate Czar,
the husband murdered by Catherine’s orders, and moreover gave names of
well-known courtiers to his peasant officers.
Thus, for over two centuries and a half, from the time when Ivan the
Great assumed the title of Czar of all the Russias at Moscow, down
to the time of Peter the Great, the idea had grown and spread in the
Russian mind that security, order, life and happiness itself were
dependent on the maintenance of power. This power was spiritual in
its essence; power to command and to be able to enforce one’s command.
That explains why successive pretenders to the throne, after Peter
the Great’s time, were at pains to have their cause blessed by some
prominent prelate of the “Old Believers,” the anti-reform party which
Peter himself had driven from the official Church, and which still
persisted despite his edicts. It also explains why in every Russian
house, before the Revolution, there was always to be found a shelf
containing icons. It is not that the Russian is more superstitious
than other people. It is simply because the saints are above all
miracle-workers. They have, it is felt, supernatural powers. They and
they alone can protect the sacred centre of the hearth from external
disorder. After the Revolution, when the saints were shown to be
powerless, the icons were taken down, and portraits of Lenin took
their place. The Russian, whether peasant or noble, reactionary or
revolutionary, seeks above all to command respect--and only the man
with unlimited power can do this, in his eyes. The hero of Dostoevsky’s
“Memoirs from the Underground” is illuminating in this respect. He is
ready to reject the offer of any Utopia, unless he is given the liberty
of “putting out his tongue at it,” and prefers to live in a hencoop
instead. The American would make no such mistake. He would live loyally
in the Utopia or the hencoop provided he were given a million dollars
or its equivalent in steel-works, oil or water power leases.
It may perhaps be argued that the American of the present day has not
the same passion for land-exploitation that his forbears had, but is
apt, as in the above example, to lay stress on the importance of making
money, of doing “big business.” This, however, is due less to any
transformation of his original impulse than to the prevailing effect of
the industrial system. Stocks, bonds, and factories have simply become
substitutes for the broad acres of undeveloped fertility that his
forefathers knew. Despite them, few Americans continue to live in the
homes that their ancestors built. They are migrants, seeking something
else. What they seek is a place where they can really feel at home, and
this they cannot find without liberty and prosperity. Of that liberty
and prosperity an individual domain is the actual symbol. It is not for
nothing that so many wealthy Americans acquire old estates in Europe.
Here they can for the first time feel that they are part of a settled
land-tradition. They belong somewhere; they have a home, not simply
a piece of soil only differentiated from the surrounding prairie by
having a house on it. They are henceforth free to indulge their passion
for possession to the utmost.
Power, then, means land, wealth, possessions to the American: to the
Russian it means simply absolute and arbitrary freedom to do as he
pleases. That is the psychological attitude that rules over the average
man in both cases. The average American believes himself to be a
product of “God’s own country” and only seeks an opportunity to prove
it; the average Russian believes himself accursed by fate and thwarted
by life, but is determined to make others respect his arbitrary whim.
And the intellectuals only differ from the average by the degree to
which they pursue these aims. It is impossible to show fully how this
is so without anticipating matter that, properly speaking, belongs to
another section of this study. We may however take two important and
highly illuminating examples to illustrate our thesis.
3
Let us take the case of the completely uprooted Russian and the
completely uprooted American. In such a case, if the obsession of
the two minds were towards power and land as we have just stated, we
should normally expect this obsession to be even more evident than it
is in the case of the stay-at-homes. The nineteenth century provided
two notable examples of this type, in the cases of Turgenev and Henry
James. Here were two men of high intelligence and artistic capacity who
spent their lives out of their respective countries. Since they were
nearly contemporaries (though Turgenev was the elder) and moneyed men
to boot, they practically came under the influence of the same type and
period of European civilisation; and there is also a close kinship in
their art, Turgenev having spent his life in refining upon the lyrical
realism of Gogol, while Henry James spent his in refining upon the
psychological realism of Hawthorne. Yet if we examine their careers
there is nothing that presents a greater contrast.
The motive that guided Henry James was a search for a fatherland.
He sought deliberately to build himself into the scheme of social
relationships offered him by the country of his choice, which was
England. In order to satisfy this passion for possessing a country, he
set himself the task of assimilating the past of England, of which he
knew little, and forgetting the past of America, of which he knew much.
The result was that he fell into a cosmopolitanism which was neither
English nor American; which was intensely artificial since it was the
result not of the working of social, moral or religious factors, but
of an æsthetic parasitism. Since James was a highly conscientious
artist, he could not help making the most of this material, but its
indecisiveness, its detachment from the cruder but more essential
issues of life gradually sapped the source of the power with which he
presented it. Even the common kinship of language which had perhaps
chiefly appealed to him in taking up his residence in England, became
a treacherous double-edged weapon, to be handled gingerly, rather than
as an ally in this struggle. It has been said that Thomas Hardy once
remarked sardonically that Henry James when he wrote about Washington
Square wrote well, but that when he wrote about England, “did not
know the difference between a rectory and a parish.” James himself
probably felt this, and it explains his increasing apologeticalness,
his increasing love of qualification, which makes his later style so
much of a painful maze and puzzle. In the search for a country--a
country that could never be totally his and yet must be made his--he
sacrificed everything: vigour and directness, independence of judgment,
breadth of vision, even his own life. The desire to become part of
England became the ruling passion of Henry James’ life; it became so
engrossing as to wipe out of his mind all earthly love affairs, and to
assume the proportions of a grand passion, pursued with the ardor of a
specialist. He attained his end, but only to die.
Turgenev did not go in this direction; he renewed by visits his own
sense of the physical appearance, the psychological reality of Russia.
But he sought just as persistently for some power greater than Russia
to which he might give himself. Ardently believing in freedom, liberal
in mind and in politics, he spent most of his life in revolt against
the crudeness and crassness of the Russian world he had known; nor was
he able to accept at its face value what the European State was ready
to put into its place, as his pamphlet, “The Execution of Troppmann”
bears witness. The only power, it seemed to him, was in the detached
individual; and this drew the aristocratic landowner Turgenev towards
the nihilists and the anarchists. He was the first to draw the portrait
of a nihilist in his novel, “Fathers and Sons.” This conclusion too
with its unsentimental realism, shocked Turgenev’s own conscience; with
the result that he became the great portrayer of indecisive souls, of
“superfluous men,” of hesitating, Hamlet-like, impotent characters
to be found in the whole range of Russian literature. His complete
erotic enslavement to the singer, Pauline Viardot, only increased
this tendency. Here was a power that at least was greater than his.
In his old age, in the “Dream-Tales” and “Poems in Prose,” Turgenev
became a confirmed pessimist, feeling that all power lay totally beyond
man’s grasp, in the divine indifference of nature and fate. Shortly
after a final visit to Russia, during which he was applauded by the
cosmopolitan literary salons, with their sentimental liberalism, but
critically attacked by the most powerful Russian writers of his own
generation, Turgenev died.
There are other points of parallelism between these two remarkable
figures; such, for example, as the curious preference both displayed
for female characters. But enough has been said to show that the
power-land antithesis, which is here set down as the key to the
Russian and American character persists even in the most refined,
uprooted and highly subtle specimens of the race. If it persists in
these, what must its strength be in the most native and elemental
specimens? To find this question answered, the reader must turn to a
later section of this study, where the antithesis will be more fully
discussed in the works of Tolstoy and Whitman, Melville and Dostoevsky.
Meanwhile it is sufficient to note once again that this antithesis
is, in fact, a likeness. What the American and the Russian both seek
is essentially freedom to do what they like--the freedom of which the
American Jefferson wrote when he said the human being mostly wants to
be let alone. The Russian seeks this freedom by means of attempting
to despotically impose himself upon others; the American by means of
acquiring the wealth or the estate that will enable him to set himself
apart from his neighbours. The outer means only are different; the
tendencies in their inner nature are essentially the same, springing
as they do from an inner revolt against the modified “freedom in
restraint” discovered and practised in Europe.
4
Before quitting this side of our subject it may be worth while to
discuss one of the most notable examples of a revolter against this
European “freedom in restraint” which America has produced. I refer
not to Whitman, who indeed is an extreme though later and more logical
example, but to Emerson. For Emerson was the pioneer in the path that
Thoreau and Whitman later followed, and the more scholarly bent of his
mind, together with the philosophical tinge he was able to throw over
his doctrine, make of him a figure of supreme importance in American
literature. There is no parallel to Emerson in Russian literature, no
such single figure as he to paradoxically span the whole field of
thought and give tone and direction to all that followed. For as he was
on the one side pantheist mystic, upholding a contemplative ideal very
different from the feverish pioneer effort on every side about him,
so he was on the other side equally practical Yankee, foreshadowing
the “practical truth” of the Pragmatists, and preferring activity to
thought.
The basis of his doctrine might be described in these words from the
longer of his two essays on “Nature”: “Why should not we also enjoy
an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry
and philosophy out of insight, not of tradition, and a religion by
revelation to us?... The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and
flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us
demand our own works and laws and worship.”
It must be noted that these “works and laws and worship” were all to be
derived afresh from nature by the Americans who--by the simple accident
of transporting themselves into a new and undeveloped country--were
suddenly going to find them out for themselves, without external help
from the past. Emerson’s own attitude towards the past is highly
paradoxical. In one breath, he admits that the past contains much
that is of value: Plato, and Jesus and other “representative men.”
But in the next, he repudiates utterly the lesson of the past and
declares the measure of history to be the ordinary man. Why? Because
the Americans were individualist pioneers, and far from toning down
their individualism, Emerson would make it still more acute. His chief
ethical doctrine is self-reliance to the uttermost. And self-reliance
to him meant in reality reliance on nature and external brute fact, as
it must in every pioneer and rapidly-developing community. In other
words, Emerson’s theory logically meant that the backwoodsman was
equally if not more important to the scheme of things than the sage,
the poet, and the scholar. It is true that Emerson tried to save his
own position as one of the best read men in America, by positing in
everyone’s breast a vague, mystical, and rather woolly “oversoul,”
which at its appropriate time and place would bend down and whisper in
the vulgarest being’s ear how much akin he was to Socrates or Marcus
Aurelius. But this check on his favourite self-reliance is altogether
the weakest and least important part of Emerson’s teaching and for its
obscurantism deserves to be ranked along with the infantile mystery
mongering of American pseudo-oriental cults and secret societies.
In his soberer moments, Emerson did indeed realize that there were two
laws abroad in this world: the “law for man and the law for thing” and
that while the “law for thing” had much the best of it, in practical
affairs, it was destructive of human worth and dignity in the long
run. But unfortunately, he never decided in his own mind whether to
give his support to human dignity, or to the “law for thing” which was
having its own way in the America of which he wrote. So he salved his
conscience by supposing that nature would help his fellow-countrymen
to find their own laws. But so far as nature is concerned, man is
probably of less importance, certainly of far less permanence, than the
tree that stands in the midst of the field and sucks its life strength
directly from the bosom of the earth and the oceanic vastness of the
air. But man comes and cuts down the tree to build himself a cabin, and
when he has built it makes a law of a sort which nature never knew, to
the effect that no one who crosses its threshold shall ever come armed
to kill him, and that the woman who sleeps with him on its wolf-pelt
bed for one night shall remain to serve him and his needs both night
and day. That is the law for the man, and it goes on, whether the wind
that rocked the tree, lays flat the cabin, or the earth that suckled it
swallows it up. Yet Emerson fondly supposed that some wonderful new
law could be made by simply transporting man out of a peasant’s cottage
that had stood for centuries in Europe, and giving him a log hut in the
wilderness. He flattered the vanity of the Americans, by telling them
that their prosperous growth would not only develop the body but the
soul. It was a false theory, doing incalculable harm.
Emerson’s philosophy was entirely a philosophy for pioneers and with
the vanishing of the pioneer type its influence and the influence
of the vague mystical land-hunger of the frontier--that marvellous
realm where wonderful things were always to be done, but never
accomplished--began to diminish in American life. Yet with its
insistence on individual self-reliance and on possession, Emerson
struck the keynote of the American philosophy of to-day with its
“go-getter” shrewdness, its refrain of “getting as much as you can
and giving as little as you can,” its assumption of superiority based
on individual cunning, its vague and pernicious subsidiary hankering
for what is mysterious and occult and esoteric, whereby its crudeness
is leavened. All this America owes to one man, to Emerson, and it is
obvious that we must forgive this man the enormous damage he did by
recollecting continually, how just before his day, America had passed
through the most inchoate period of her national development, a period
of democratic chaos, out of which neither an intelligent institution
nor an organized political state could have evolved had it not been for
the conservative moneyed classes. Let us also remember that Emerson, in
his private capacity, loved chiefly to appear as a scholar, in order to
distinguish himself from the community; much as Tolstoy, in his desire
to set himself apart, loved to pose as a peasant and wear birch-bark
shoes.
Chapter VI
Nothing is more illuminating of the contrasted power-land psychology
prevailing in Russia and America than the attitude taken up by both
nations in regard to the difficult and insistent problem of the
Jews. Since the beginning of Christianity, the Jews have been both
powerless and landless; whether in their dispersal they have aimed
at reattaining power or at reattaining land is a question that at
first sight seems almost impossible to answer. A certain amount of
knowledge of Jewish social conditions is necessary before we can even
begin to find the reply. The great Dispersal, following upon the fall
of Jerusalem, led the rabbis who thereby became in fact as well as in
theory, the heads of the people, to concentrate the attention of their
fellow-religionists on one point; a thorough understanding and detailed
obedience to the Law. The compilation of the Talmud, that strange
heterogeneous commentary, was the immediate result. As regards the
possession of land, all hopes that the Jew might have in that respect
were relegated to the distant future, when the Holy Land, by some
miracle, would be restored to him. The teaching of the rabbis was,
that to maintain his status as a Jew, every member of the community
must, above all, observe the law in the minutest particulars; beyond
this, he could hold any political creed he liked. Jehovah would restore
Zion to him in due time without his making an effort to attain it.
The later development of Judaism has in the main followed out this
principle. Zionism as a political faith has never been highly popular
amongst better-class Jews, and may be said to appeal mostly to those
who are least patient of the moral and intellectual despotism forged
by the rabbi-class throughout the Middle Ages to maintain their order.
Zionism often goes hand in hand with dangerously unorthodox political
and religious theory. It appeals more to the Chassid mystic, than to
the orthodox rationalist. The Jews who survived the Dispersal and the
early persecutions of the Romans, tended continually to become more
and more members of large city populations, handcraftsmen, traders, or
bankers, on the eve of the Middle Ages. During that period, the process
of making the Jews a parasitic, financial class, was accelerated. The
one trade that the Middle Ages left to them was that of jeweller or
money-lender. Progressive persecution, the need to keep all wealth in
movable form, the eternal migration from one country to another, more
and more concentrated the mind of the race on movable capital as a
source of power. Except for a few Ghettos, contemptuously permitted,
the Jew had no land.
The history of the Jews in Russia properly begins with Catherine’s
partition of Poland and the consequent establishment of the Pale
of Settlement in 1791. From that time on it has been a tale of
uninterrupted oppression and persecution. This oppression and
persecution was carried to fantastic lengths not only by the Czars
themselves but still more by their subjects. Pogroms were openly
applied to the unfortunate Jews by successive governments under
Alexander III and Nicholas II. It is now generally admitted that
these attacks were carried out by the armed population, with the open
connivance and aid of police officers. The military authorities in many
cases unsuccessfully protested against the inflammatory pamphlets,
underground propaganda, and other methods employed by the police
and the Ministry of the Interior to bring these massacres about.
Pogroms were, therefore, though encouraged from above, unmistakably
mob-movements and as such, in the overcrowded Jewish Pale, highly
popular. They corresponded to something essential in the character
of the Russian people themselves--an intense hatred and suspicion of
the Jew, combined with a desire to seek a scapegoat for intolerable
conditions of taxation and oppression.[1]
This suspicion arose undoubtedly through fear of the power the Jewish
race might possess if allowed to live and flourish in impunity.
The talk of “ritual murder” which motivated many pogroms was but a
symptom of this underlying belief common to the illiterate Russian
masses that the Jew had some hypnotic magic ability that set him apart
from other men. The fact that the Jews were highly literate, that
they frequently adopted the profession of doctors, money-lenders, or
something analogous--requiring brain work--struck the Russian peasant
as peculiar. His favourite receptacle of mystic power was the orthodox
Church, and above the Church the Czar, whom the Church alone could
sanctify. The Jew rejected the Church; in consequence, the Czar had
confined him in the Pale, and by successive edicts, forbidden him even
to attend the universities and obtain an education. The reason must be
that the Jew had some power greater than the Czar, the church, and even
God. He must be in fact, an ally of Satan. The pogrom followed as a
matter of course, and the most intense nationalism became allied with
the most rabid anti-Semitism.
When the régime of the Czars collapsed in the Revolution of 1917,
and the Bolsheviks came into power, it was noted by many that among
these Bolsheviks were several that were Jews. That Lenin himself was
a Jew--adopted by a family of provincial nobles to take the place
of a son lost in infancy--became one of the legends soon spread by
enemies of the new régime. There was however no evidence of this, and
the Jewish members of the new political party into whose hands Russia
fell, were not less hostile to Judaism in the orthodox sense than to
any other religion. And this naturally so, for the rabbis had again and
again insisted that only God Himself had the power and the ability to
deliver His people, and restore their sway. The later development of
the Bolshevik revolution has shown once again that the Russian people
have an instinctive hostility to everything Jewish in tone. The Jewish
members of the Soviet Council have been progressively eliminated, or
passed over; so that in Russia to-day the influence of Jewish ideas
is less than it ever was. Even Marx, whose theories gave Lenin his
impetus, is considered to-day less important than Lenin; and there
is growing an increased cult for Darwin and Ford rather than Marx
within the bosom of the Bolshevik party. The Bolshevik movement has
been in its essence, the development of an heretical religious faith,
based on the creed of Western naturalism and utilitarianism of the
Darwin-Herbert Spencer type. As such it is equally hostile to orthodox
Christianity or to orthodox Judaism.
2
The attitude of the American colonies towards the Jewish emigrants who
came to them was the very reverse of this. From the first settlements
of Jews in Newport, Charleston, Savannah, New York, these exiles were
allowed to take positions of honor and affluence. There has never been
a Ghetto in American life, and the only Ghettos that exist have been
created fairly recently by housing conditions and by the overcrowding
of some of the great Eastern cities. The Jews were among the most
prominent supporters of the American Revolution itself; and there
is irony as well as illumination in the fact that the one man who
may be said with truth to have founded the Federal Union, Alexander
Hamilton, was possibly half a Jew.[2] The fact that America supplied
a land of promise to the Jew, from the days when Cromwell first tried
toleration down to the present, has been tacitly admitted by the
increasing tide of Jewish emigration that has gone on from 1660 down
to the present day. The one thing that has possibly restrained it has
been the fact that the Jews are no longer fitted for an agricultural
life, but are apt to become members of those large-town mobs which
Jefferson and the other founders of the Republic so profoundly hated,
and which now represent so large a proportion of American society. A
few attempts were made by the colonies at the beginning to keep the
franchise from the Jews; but apart from that fact, there has been no
organised opposition to Jewish influence on the part of any class of
the community down to the close of the Great War.
The result is that the Jews, indifferent to land, have concentrated
more and more on the element which the early American neglected: the
element of power. The uprise of the Jewish power in America took
place during the great change from agricultural to industrial life
that coincided with the Civil War and which developed into the famous
“gilded age” of the seventies. During that period the Jewish community
in the New World split into two classes. The upper class became those
who, through the power conferred on them by wealth, grew more and more
closely allied to the dominant financier class, and became thereby more
and more closely American, abandoning the two qualities that had made
them specifically Jewish: the intense particularism of their creed
which had made them consider themselves a race set apart by God, and
the not less intense determination to remain a separate nation though
exiled and scattered among other nations. The lower class, increasing
at a great rate after 1880, when Alexander III began his long reign
of oppression in Russia, brought with them to America nothing but an
ingrown determination to stay what they were: and it is only among them
that anywhere in America to-day one can find that “mystic quality” that
in the words of Waldo Frank, makes the Jew what he is, and which once
lost, destroys his Judaism.
The Reform Movement in Judaism, as a double attack on the intolerant
particularism of the Jewish faith as the one faith blessed by God,
and on the sentiment of Jewish nationalism alike, owes its success
entirely to the support given by American rabbis in 1885. The greater
part of the wealth of the American Jewish community has gone to the
support of Reform Judaism. That this form of the Jewish faith is merely
a transition stage, and unsatisfying after all to the human desire to
live within the ordered limits of an absolute faith, which the Jews
have felt perhaps more profoundly than any other people, is shown
by the drift of many intelligent and unworldly-minded adherents of
reformed Jews out of their faith into Christian Science, theosophy, or
any one of the dozens of fantastic cults that flourish in America. The
only thing that Reform Judaism has given the American Jew is a feeling
that his forefathers were on the wrong track, not that he is on the
right one. When his faith becomes merely a local peculiarity, to be
tolerated as any other local peculiarity is tolerated, and no longer
_the_ faith, sole, absolute, and eternal; when his citizenship becomes
not a question of kingship in Zion but of possessing a vote and paying
taxes to the latest corrupt political gang that happens to be governing
America, then the Jew is alike homeless and rudderless, an atom in the
modern chaos. He has no longer unified personality nor spiritual power
of any kind. He is only a cog in an immense machine that does not move
in any direction, but which simply goes around and around, grinding
human lives and hopes to dust in the process.
The paradox of American Judaism is that America, by liberating the
Jew, has completely destroyed him. The paradox of Russian Judaism is
that Russia by oppressing the Jew, has only intensified his original
character. Zionism appeals to the Russian Jew mainly, and it is largely
through the support of Russian Jewish colonisation that Zionism is now
being tried out in Palestine. The Russian Jew in poverty has kept his
legends, his folk poetry, his contact with a mystic patrimony given
him by Moses. Moreover, the Russian revolution, with its consequent
liberation of the Jew from the old constraint, has enriched Russian
literature with a new strain of Jewish genius, reflected alike in
such works as Ansky’s “Dybbuk” and Babel’s “Horse Army.” The American
Jew on the other hand, to the degree that he becomes more wealthy and
powerful, becomes less intellectual, and usually pretends to despise
his own people. One finds dozens of Americans who quite obviously are
racially of the Semitic type, and who socially and religiously are at
but one remove from the faith of the Ghetto, ready to assert their
anti-Semitism. And even among those who still retain some vestiges of
respect for the attitude of their forefathers, one finds an increasing
disposition to mingle in the ranks of Gentile society, and to handle
facetiously the topic of their own race and religion, as if it
represented only a passing craze of the remote past, which they have
fortunately outgrown. As regards imagination, they tend increasingly to
respect the shibboleths of American business life.
3
The attitude of the average American, the “one hundred per center”
of the middle west and the industrial east, who is and must remain
the backbone of America culturally and socially, towards the Jewish
phenomenon, has considerably varied during the most recent years. To
this average individual nothing has mattered since the Civil War, so
long as the country remained prosperous. So long as his land bore
“bumper crops,” capable of being sold at high prices, so long as the
“melting pot,” by laying the stress on the Jew’s adaptability, went on
functioning properly, and transforming mediæval mystics and fanatics
into modern business men, all was well; no thinking about the future
was necessary. It is natural to the American temperament--a “free
soil” temperament long before Lincoln’s day--having linked up land and
liberty as it has done, not to wish to worry about the future, not to
do any more thinking than is absolutely necessary. Thinking is indeed
dangerous. It may lead to a suspicion that the Revolution was a mistake
and that the Constitution was only a new form of tyranny. America’s
awakening in this respect to a whole world of intimate problems that
she must settle, came for the most part, only after President Wilson
told his people that they must enter the World War. And then America
suddenly realised that the Jews had a great deal of power as well as
a great deal of cleverness, and were likely to use both for ends that
were far from being “one hundred per cent” American.
The resultant wave of anti-Semitism that swept the United States
was something practically unique in American history. There had
been before outbreaks of anti-Jewish feeling, notably in some of
the Southern States, but nothing of this nationwide character. From
mob-outrages engineered by the revived Ku Klux Klan to the declaration
of lofty Harvard University that it proposed to limit the number of
Jewish students, the campaign of hatred swept the country for a few
months, and then dissolved in a gale of laughter. It represented
nothing fundamental to the American character and temperament. It
undoubtedly arose from a feeling of suspicion that the cunning Jew
might intellectually be opposed to the American Constitution, which
is considered as the sacrosanct basis of American faith, much as the
Egyptian “Book of the Dead” was considered the sacrosanct basis of
Egyptian faith. Moreover, the Jew might secretly be in sympathy with
some of the dangerous anarchistic or other radical doctrines that had
recently come into such prominence, thanks to America’s deep-rooted
and insuperable objection to the war. The coming and passing of this
momentary wave of anti-Semitic sentiment coincided curiously in date
and duration with the period during which Russia, having cast off her
old values and not yet settled in her new ones, elevated many Jews,
who happened to be members of the victorious Communist party, to power.
4
The case is quite different when we come to the Catholics. Successive
Russian sovereigns from Catherine the Great who offered asylum to the
expelled Jesuits, down to the present day have shown partiality to
the Catholic faith; and to this day the Bolsheviks, in their war on
religion, have left the Catholic church largely undisturbed, hoping
perhaps to gain recruits to atheism out of the conflict between the
rival sects of Catholic and Orthodox.[3] This toleration of Catholicism
was formerly partly due to the fact that in Poland and Livonia, the
Czar ruled over thousands of Catholics; partly to the law that forbade
anyone born in the Orthodox faith to become a convert, on penalty of
exile and loss of estate. But in America a passionately intolerant
anti-Catholic feeling has existed since, at least, the New England
Colonies opposed James II and his nominee, Andros, and has known
numerous revivals since the “Native American” movement began opposing
the extension of the franchise to the Irish immigrant back in the
thirties. Economically and socially it has persisted, and even spread
from New England to the south and west. This anti-Catholic feeling
provides the basic strength of the recent post-war revival of the Ku
Klux Klan. And during the period while this book was being written, its
strength was again successfully tested in an important presidential
contest.
The fundamental American feeling about Catholicism is that it
forms, politically an _imperium in imperio_; that by its insistence
on parochial schools, instead of the usual public schools, by its
establishment of convents, monasteries, church-owned foundations,
everywhere, it becomes an extra-political power, secret in its methods,
ready to invade the United States from within and seize the better
part of her domain. This belief (whether it has any foundation in fact
or not is not material to this inquiry) has been largely strengthened
by the extraordinary solidarity of the Catholic communities in the
industrial regions, composed as they are, mainly of toiling foreigners;
and by the redoubtable power of ecclesiasticisms further southward, in
Mexico. Whether this feeling about the Catholic church is destined to
disappear--now that Mexico has an anti-clerical government, and even
the Vatican itself has taken on a Republican tone--is, for the moment,
uncertain; but there is no possibility of writing an intelligent
history of America without reference to its existence. A profound
distrust of Catholicism as a secret body subversive of Americanism
has again and again shown itself to be a mainspring of American
middle-class action. It explains a very great deal that is highly
popular in America, from the flourishing condition of freemasonry and
other semi-secret societies, down to the zeal for closing the saloons,
which were favourite meeting places for that purely Irish and Catholic
creation, the ward politicians. Now and again, as in the “Native
American” movement above mentioned, the later “Know-Nothing” movement,
the cry “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” the revived Ku Klux Klan, the
opposition to Governor Smith, it shows itself openly in the field of
political life.
The complete reason for the toleration of Catholicism under Czar and
Bolshevik alike, in Russia, in the very heart of a community that
in numbers at least has been openly the chief rampart of Eastern
Orthodoxy for centuries, and for the mistrust of the same faith
shown in America, despite the fact that America can boast of a large
percentage of Catholics, can only be discovered by examining more
fully the underlying attitude of the Russian and the American to all
religion. It suffices to say here that, to the American, Republicanism,
that is to say the liberty gained by local prosperity and by complete
ownership of one’s own property, is more important than any other form
of religion; while under successive Russian governments, Autocracy,
rooted in communal feeling, and in unworldly faith, has since the time
of Peter the Great at least, directed religion towards the ends it
proposed for itself. It is the considered opinion of most intelligent
observers that the Bolshevik government, in this respect, has acted
precisely as the governments that preceded it. It has warped religion
to its own ends; or, rather, it has created an altogether new religion
out of a few phrases of Marx and the life and example of Lenin. It is a
mummified body--Lenin from his mausoleum in the Red Square--that rules
Russia to-day. After all, did he not wear a peasant’s cap, and did
he not order electric light to be extended to every village, besides
giving the common workman bread, peace, and liberty? The cult of Lenin
as a new saint, or rather as a new Messiah, has some curious sides.
But the most curious side of all is to note how little distinguishes
this figure from the celebrated figure of Christ wandering as “a serf
throughout the Russian land, blessing it,” that so much inspired the
early Slavophils. Meantime the Central Presidium of the Soviet--the
new Autocrats of Russia--having achieved this version of Orthodoxy,
uses its power to persecute successfully the followers of every former
religion.
Chapter VII
There is a certain obvious parallel between religion in North America
and religion in Russia, because both countries are, and have been, for
centuries, fundamentally Christian. Yet the dissimilarities on the face
of it, are so manifest that it might seem to a visitor from another
planet that the religious life of the two countries sprang from sources
as opposed as the religion, let us say, of Ancient Egypt and Ancient
Assyria. What American Christianity accepts, Russian Christianity
rejects, and vice versa.
In both lands, Christianity came from without, and was an entirely
foreign creed to the animism practised by the natives before its
advent. But where American Christianity emerged from what has been
called Protestantism, that is to say the right of the individual
to decide on questions of faith for himself, Russian religion came
from the Orthodoxy of the Byzantine church, with its submission of
the individual intelligence to a super-personal, wonder-working
power transmitted by consecration from patriarch to patriarch. The
differences in form and outward observance all spring from an inner
difference in psychological attitude. To the American, the soul of
the individual believer is alone important, and his salvation is the
one desirable aim; to the Russian the communion of believers is alone
important, and the individual soul only retains his hold on salvation
by virtue of his complete adherence and loyalty to it. Consequently
in America, religion exalts the moral standard of the individual good
life; in Russia it upholds the spiritual standard of the communal
believing life. The one exalts conduct, the other faith.
It has not escaped the notice of shrewd historians that the American
makes a constant attempt to prove that his great men were intensely
moral and respectable in character. Washington is exalted above
Jefferson on the basis of a few legends like that of the cherry tree
or the other story, not less unhistorical, to the effect that the
great Revolutionary leader prayed at Valley Forge. Paine, who by his
inspired polemic probably did more to precipitate the Revolution than
any other publicist of the time, is tacitly ignored as being “a dirty
little atheist.” Recently, attempts have been made to show that Lincoln
was exaltedly religious; attempts that rest on exceedingly flimsy
foundations. And if Woodrow Wilson maintains any favour in America, it
will be rather because of his unbending Presbyterianism than because
of his eminent ability as a statesman. It is because Roosevelt, his
great rival, upheld the motto of “Fear God and take your own part” and
led the life of the normal husband and father, that he is immensely
popular among millions of his fellow-countrymen to-day.
The Russians go to the exactly opposite extreme. Their heroes are
precisely those whose lives were heroic examples of disregard of moral
conduct. Ivan the Terrible, blood-soaked, sensual, and incapable of
achieving any faith beyond the basest superstition; Peter the Great,
mocking the church-ceremonies with drunken parody, making and unmaking
patriarchs, the accursed Antichrist of the Old Believers; Pugachev,
the outlaw who despoiled nobles and monasteries alike; Tolstoy, the
great heretic and excommunicate, such are the sort of men Russia
unconsciously honours. Against them the Church can put nothing in the
field but a handful of monks and thaumaturgists.
That morals can be separated from faith has been consistently denied
throughout the history of European Christianity, by some of the most
intelligent men that European Christianity has produced. Whether this
denial is valid or not, there can be no doubt that Nature in itself is
morally indifferent, just as it is æsthetically indifferent. One can,
unfortunately, believe in life without believing in any specific moral
code; and the result is that what we call Christianity has been divided
into warring sects, those that exalt the observance of the feasts and
sacraments prescribed by the Church above moral discipline, and those
that exalt the achievement of lofty moral character above all feasts
and ceremonies. The former in the main, is the way taken by Russia;
the latter the way taken by America. In Russia one asks first whether
so-and-so is a believer or an atheist; in America whether so-and-so is
or is not “a good man.”
2
Every religious system (not excluding polytheism) defines Godhead
now in terms of outward nature, now in terms of man’s own inner
comprehension of himself. Religion is the meeting-place of objective
fact and subjective psychology; it is therefore the most comprehensive
and at the same time the least definable of all human activities.
Until we understand this fact we are in the position of a great many
nineteenth century free-thinkers, who for the life of them could not
understand why people should want to make such a pother about religion
when they could build factories instead of cathedrals, and amass
worldly wealth instead of seeking for the kingdom of heaven. To such
people, religion in itself seemed too childish and unprogressive to
be considered important. As a matter of fact, it was precisely these
nineteenth century materialists and unbelievers who were childish in
their faith in human progress, as the Great War proved.
Religion, in its most complete sense, might almost be defined as the
“most complex and mature attitude it is possible to take towards
reality.” This attitude comes from a fusion of all our faculties:
animal as well as intellectual, moral as well as æsthetic, individual
as well as social; organised on the plane of the individual will. This
fusion combines the boundless and at bottom irrational faith in life
that must guide us if we are to live at all, with the limited and
rational faith in a common moral code of conduct. It is because of
this combination of opposites that religion exists in some measure,
even among the irreligious; while the most highly religious being only
achieves it imperfectly. It attempts to reconcile both the absolute and
the relative, the single individual’s relation to the infinite, with
man’s whole relation to society.
From such a standpoint, both Russia and America have been incompletely
religious. In the one case, religion has relied altogether on its
thaumaturgic power over nature. One gets an impression, from reading
much Russian history, that the whole people have spent most of their
lives for centuries in making pilgrimages, praying to icons, visiting
monasteries, crying “Christ is risen!” on each successive Easter Day,
despite the fact they were living all the time in inimitable dirt,
disorder, oppression, and misery. Russian literature, being, for the
most part, an intellectual revolt against the pre-intellectual instinct
that dictated these practices, and aiming also for the most part at a
source of power that is far beyond the grasp of religious semi-magic
ritual, has largely disregarded these plain obvious facts, but they
remain in history. When we read that in Catherine the Great’s day,
the Moscow mob raised riots because the government proposed to remove
from its place a celebrated wonder-working image of the Madonna,[4]
at the foot of which the people were dying of cholera in heaps; when
we read that, in the revolution of 1905, one of the heroes was Father
Gapon who led the starving and striking mob into the square before the
Winter Palace, and bade them kneel there, where they were promptly
shot down by the Czar’s troops (it later transpired that Father Gapon
was an _agent provocateur_ in government employment); when we read
of the enormous prestige of Rasputin, then we realise that to every
Russian religion is something vast, mysterious, miracle-working.
Only Dostoevsky has brought out this quality of the Russian mind; his
great work, “The Brothers Karamazov,” essentially defines the attitude
towards God of all its characters. And God is primarily to all, power,
a force divorced from good or bad alike, that which will give each of
these characters the desires of his own heart. Even old Karamazov,
monster of immorality that he is and incapable of any redeeming action,
in this sense worships God.
One is even more impressed at this emphasis on the magic power of
religion made by the Russian mind, when one realises that the Church
not only blessed the fields, agricultural implements and cattle
of the peasants in the past, but also, according to Tolstoy, the
government-owned vodka factories and the brothels. So strong was the
feeling that religion gave to its professors a power of superhuman
and super-moral healing and blessing, that a Rasputin could under the
cloak of religion, carry on his shameless erotic practices undisturbed.
The feeling that everything in religion was necessarily sacrosanct,
accounts also for the rise of the Old Believers, who could not accept
Peter the Great’s and the Patriarch Nikon’s reform of the spelling of
the Church books. The Church, even in its errors, was so much above the
world that the world must not interfere with it. The Word of the Church
was sacred, and must be held so at whatever cost to logic.
The typical Russian peasant would therefore have agreed with Blake that
“everything that lives is holy” without adding thereto the corollary
that the tradition of the Church was not a living thing, but was merely
a dead tradition stifling the free spirit of independent inquiry. And
even the thorough-going attack on religion and the Orthodox Church
engineered by the Bolsheviks, has partaken of the same fanatic faith in
the magic power of rites and phrases. The body of Lenin was substituted
for saints and icons; and faith in Marxian formulas took the place of
faith in Church ceremonies. We will not understand Bolshevism if we
continue to think it irreligious. In all essentials it is simply a new
religion--or if one prefers, a new heresy. It is rooted in the same
fanatic faith in magic practices that the Russian mind has everywhere
displayed, from the time that Ivan the Great spoke of the _pallium_ of
Rome being transferred to Moscow.
3
We are accustomed to think of America as primarily the land of
religious toleration; but we are apt to forget that this toleration was
only born after nearly a century of complete intolerance, in which
New England itself, then at the head of American colonial effort, took
the lead. The American historian, Brooks Adams, in his “Emancipation
of Massachusetts,” has given us a useful summary of this period,
dating from the foundation of the Massachusetts Colony down the eve
of the Revolution; and has shown us how the founders of New England,
Endicott, Winthrop, and the rest, aimed at a thorough-going theocracy
which would permit neither religious dissent nor liberty of conscience.
The tale of executions, whippings, imprisonments, outrages and threats
executed upon unfortunate Antinomians, Quakers, Episcopalians, and
other sects dissenting from the “established faith” of New England
Congregationalism makes painful reading.
As a matter of fact, American toleration rests and always has rested
on respect for established property rights. The Puritans who founded
New England had obtained a charter from the King enabling them to make
a settlement in Massachusetts territory. They constrained this to mean
that no other opposing Protestant sect would be allowed either to enter
or to preach in their territory; while the Catholics in Maryland,
the Episcopalians in Virginia behaved not very differently. Their
religion became to them the symbol of their possessions--possessions
that they guarded jealously not less against all Indian attempts to
recover them, but against Royal and Parliamentary interference alike.
The result was that it was only such sentimental deists as Jefferson,
or such sentimental Quakers as Franklin, who realised the necessity
for toleration. They were in a minority. To most Americans religious
toleration has been but a phrase for moral intolerance.
To this day in America, great educational foundations which enjoy
enormous endowments, prestige, and power, are outwardly identified
with certain religious sects. Nothing can be taught in them except
what these sects prescribe as “moral.” To the traveller in America,
interested in education, it is often puzzling to be told that such and
such a university has a chapel to which all students are compelled to
go, although they may subscribe to some totally different religious
creed. Thus Princeton is Presbyterian; Yale, Congregational; the
University of Chicago, Baptist; Vanderbilt and dozens of other southern
colleges, Methodist; and so on. The non-sectarian college or university
is the exception, rather than the rule. And that is because religion
and moral teaching go hand in hand.
The American, it must be understood, maintains the attitude of
complete inner spiritual liberty only at the price of outward moral
conformity. In this respect he stands at precisely the opposite
pole to the Russian, whose steady maintenance of inner spiritual
obedience is frequently belied by furious outward revolts in the
direction of complete moral license. Each has one half of a religion
and each neglects the fact that every lasting religious body is a
great compromise between the external and internal character of man,
representing alike an outward discipline and an inner assent. To the
American the assent is all that matters, not the discipline. Thus even
so respectable a member of the Catholic faith as Governor Alfred Smith
of New York could recently declare that he believed in the complete
separation of the Church and State, and assert that the Church had
no right to interfere with politics, without realising that in thus
upholding the private assent of the citizen above all religious
discipline, he completely destroyed the ancient Roman Catholic
opposition to right of private judgment and thereby fully justified the
long revolt of Protestantism.
In such a state as America presents to the world, religion becomes a
question not of “By what power is God going to save me?” but of “How
am I to behave, so as to do right?” This question lies at the root of
the American conscience. If England is, as Frenchmen have said, the
land of moral fog, America is the land of moral blindness. It has not
escaped foreign observers that America is ruled by sermons and by
preachers. Here, indeed, American literature has little to reveal to
us, as Russian literature has little to say about peasant superstitions
concerning icons and saints’ days.[5] But from Jonathan Edwards to
Channing, from Channing to Henry Ward Beecher, from Beecher down to the
recent Billy Sunday and Aimee McPherson, all America--vulgar as well
as intelligent--waits every Sunday morning on its favourite preacher
in order to obtain moral guidance for the ensuing week in its affairs.
The sermon is to the American what the sacrament and the benediction
is to the Russian--a special talisman, something enabling him to carry
on his life, get his business done, clear up his relations with women,
regulate his activity. Hence the enormous popularity in recent America
of sermons dealing with the conduct of one’s business. Hence the
upholding of Jesus and the Apostles as typical “go-getters” and even
efficiency experts; the culmination of which is in such a recent book
as “The Man Nobody Knows” where Christ becomes the prototype of the
typical American advertisement agent!
The typical American therefore conceives of everyone as being “free and
equal” in Jefferson’s phrase without adding thereto the corollary that
everyone should be free to behave as it pleases him. On the contrary,
the more you meddle with your neighbour’s conduct the better for both
him and you. The Americans tend more and more to substitute “uplift”
in the place of religion--and the hankerings of the mystically-minded
(mostly the least literate and least economically independent,
therefore the least powerful) among them, pass unheard. Most Americans
would readily subscribe to Mark Twain’s dictum that man is “worthless
unless he is regulated,” and far from agreeing with Matthew Arnold
that conduct is three-fourths of life, they would make conduct all of
it. The belief that has emerged out of such a creed, resolutely held,
may be briefly summarised as a faith that the increase of business,
higher wages, and more prosperity on the American model will definitely
save the world. This belief has already its apostles, chief of whom
is perhaps Henry Ford. It, like Bolshevism, is a heresy, which we
must nevertheless reckon with as America’s chief contribution to the
solution of the great religious problem which vexes the world. Instead
of demanding that the oppressed proletarians everywhere must unite
to conquer the world, it says simply, “Make your fortune quick. In
prosperity lies happiness.”
4
It is impossible to leave this subject of religion and of America’s
and Russia’s peculiar angle of approach to it, without some reference
to the reciprocal influence America and Russia have had on religion
as practised in Europe. For both countries obtained their religions
ultimately from this source, though in the one case it was Byzantine
Orthodoxy that was borrowed, while on the other, it was Puritanic
Northern Protestantism.
To the average American any European form of religion is not good
enough. He demands a standard of conduct that is morally speaking,
egalitarian. What shocks him in religion as practised in European
countries is its disregard of the standards of living that he is
accustomed to at home. The picturesque dirt and disorder of Italian
lazzaroni, Spanish beggars, the promiscuity of English slums, the
grossness of German or Dutch peasants--all this shocks him as a
manifestation of moral blindness. He would gladly see all these peoples
washed, sanitated, above all made literate: his own respect for “law
and order,” shown in the popularity of sermons, is proof of this.
The ideal of useful citizenship which he maintains as substitute for
the mystic experience of Godhead, or the no less mystic experience
of repentance and reconciliation, makes him intolerant of any creed
that refrains from interference with the individual. His insistence
upon moral conduct has made him frequently uncharitable to his own
neighbours--as anyone who has lived for long in an American small town
can testify. This uncharitableness he extends in even fuller measure
to the stranger within and without his gates. The hordes of European
immigrants that come into his own country, the hosts of unwashed and
unregenerate foreigners without are not respectable--they do not
regulate their lives by his standards. His solution of the problem
upholds a great hope, but it is a hope without charity.
The average Russian, on the other hand, looks on European religion as
deficient not in goodness, but in truth. Catholicism has merely become
a branch of state-service, and Protestantism is too deeply tainted
with moral hypocrisy. But what is important to the Russian to know is
this; whether it is true that by any sacrament, prayer, or magic ritual
men become united to God? Is it true that Christ really did rise from
the dead for all mankind and manifests himself to them? Then let us
make trial of that possibility. In the days before the downfall of the
Romanovs, thousands of Russian peasants annually made the pilgrimage to
Palestine, and thought themselves lucky if they died on the banks of
the Jordan, believing that by this magic act they would be immediately
transported to Paradise, whatever their previous sins. And the whole
basis of Dostoevsky’s teaching, and to a great extent that of Tchekhov
and Tolstoy, was that “everything must be forgiven.” The whole of
Russia demanded a miracle, and perhaps it was because the Bolsheviks
promised such a miracle, that Russia accepted the Bolsheviks. Above all
the miracle must come from without, and the Bolsheviks came from abroad
bringing with them a new gospel. That was enough to convince millions
who were utterly unprepared to accept the historic materialism, or the
opposition to religion that lay at the root of Bolshevik teaching.
The question the Russian continually asks--even the most open and
avowed atheist among them asks it--is, by what means can man obtain
the superhuman power to make himself akin to God? The Russian, in his
desire for power, is willing to disregard every standard of ordinary
moral conduct in order to become united to Godhead. The American, in
his insistence on the Mosaic code which is motivated almost altogether
by respect for property, is willing to take up the most intolerant
Puritanism, rather than suffer interference with his property. Unlike
the American creed of moral conformity to the community for the sake
of material gain, the Russian religion has infinite charity to the
sinner, despises the wealth of the world, and produces outlaws,
anarchists, schismatics continually. That is why to the Russian mind
of to-day, a few words of Karl Marx or of Darwin may become equally
important as a Gospel as anything in the Bible; it equally explains why
to the American mind of to-day, a Bruce Barton or a Billy Sunday are of
superior importance to Saint Augustine or the Apostles.
Chapter VIII
The difference in attitude which the Russians and the Americans have
displayed in regard to faith and moral conduct--a difference which
rests, as we have shown, on a power-property antithesis--corresponds
also to a not less illuminating difference in the field of intellectual
speculation, and the fine arts generally. Neither country, it may
be noted, took any part in the intellectual and social movement
that is known as the Renaissance. The average Russian of the ruling
landowning aristocracy, was violently thrown from the Middle Ages
into the state politics of post-Reformation Europe, thanks to Peter
the Great’s reforms. The average American of the ruling New England
mercantile caste began as post-Reformation Puritan of the English type,
and steadily moved away from his early European environment into a
primitive background of local politics that recalls the quarrels of the
early Greek city-states.
Intellectual contact with Europe was begun and kept up at two removes
in each case. In Russia as we shall see, European romanticism, in
its cult of the Gothic and feudal, was the most powerful influence
in precipitating a national literature; in America the same contact
was kept up through the influence of the English eighteenth century
moralists, such writers as Addison, Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, Pope,
finding abundant imitators and followers in the Colonies.
Before the problems of Europe, and indeed the problems of the world
generally, the Russian is likely to ask the question, “Why is this?”
while the American asks the question, “How did it come about?” It is
obvious that both questions are necessary, and both are justified
at their proper time and place. The normal, untaught human being,
before undertaking any action, customarily and humanly asks “Why?”
His interest is primarily in the value of an action as such, not in
the means whereby it is to be performed. Then when he has decided on
performing the action, he is able to ask “How?” and thereby acquire
the full technique necessary to accomplish it. But the untaught
Russian, by asking “Why?” after, as well as before, undertaking action,
simply fosters his own attitude of nihilism and inertia; and that
the Russian has literally to be driven into action by intolerable
circumstances, and then generally goes too far, is the chief lesson to
be derived from the perusal of Russian history. The American, on the
other hand, by asking simply “How?” without examining beforehand the
value of the act or its consequences, acquires a superior technical
and executive skill at the expense of his ability to sort out what is
worth undertaking from what is less worth undertaking. Neither regard
“Why?” and “How?” as somehow complementary; neither are capable of the
ordered development of investigation into causes combined with study of
technique that goes on in European cultured circles.
The question “Why?” as opposed to the question “How?” when applied to
life in the way that the Russians and the Americans apply them, leads,
it is obvious, to diametrically opposing results. The Russian in his
eagerness to find the underlying cause of every phenomenon, is apt to
act, if at all, for a bewildering multiplicity of reasons; ranging from
the desire to reform the world, or the desire to ensure his personal
salvation, down to the mere desire to create mischief or relieve
himself from boredom (like the heroes of Dostoevsky’s “Memories from
the Underground” and Sologub’s “Little Demon.”) The American, in his
hope to master the technique of every possible form of human activity,
is apt to apply his question, “How is this done?” to a bewildering
multiplicity of ends. So much is this the case, that nothing is
commoner in American life than to find men who drift from one
profession to another without mastering any. This is markedly the case
even in American literature: Emerson transferred his activities from
those of the pulpit to those of essay-writing; Mark Twain was pilot,
gold-prospector, and author; Hawthorne and Melville were custom-house
clerks, in their spare time, and so on--without any apparent loss of
individuality. The versatility of the American mind, and its ability to
turn from one thing to another, is perhaps its most outstanding quality.
This technical versatility not only explains America’s undoubted
primacy in the field of public works and of engineering, but it also
provides an explanation for the complete lack of moral sense now and
then shown by Americans; a lack which, on the face of it, strongly
contradicts the lip-service which America still largely pays to the
Mosaic and the Puritan code. Take for example, the notorious murder
which agitated the American press a few years ago, when two youths,
undoubtedly responsible for the murder of a friend, declared they had
done it as an experiment, in order to see how it felt to be a murderer!
These youths were only carrying to its logical extreme a tendency far
too common in American life as a whole. The leading impulse of the
American is to want to try something, to start something, to play at
being something. It is for this reason that so many Americans start
in life as desiring to be authors or artists, only to find the attempt
far beyond their capacity, and to realise later that they are better
equipped as business men. For technical capacity alone, divorced
from all preoccupation with ulterior aims, tends merely to exalt the
executive faculties above the creative; it helps to make the majority
of men into business men. The creative artist, equipped as he is with
the imagination that concerns itself primarily with elemental cause and
effect, learns his difficult technique by mastering the resources of
his given material. The business man denying as he does any underlying
purpose in himself or others except the purpose of making profits,
applies to the whole of human life the prevailing standard of an easy
and simple technique. And because this technique is simple and easily
acquired, it becomes increasingly popular, so that the development
of the arts and culture suffers from lack of those who will apply
themselves to them.
It is for this reason that American life appears so standardized to
foreign observers. This standardization is due to the fact that very
few Americans are concerned with the question of the thing to be
done, and most are concerned with the question of the technique of
doing; and the simplest and easiest technique to master in America is
that of making money. As regards the value of the money, once made,
Americans have no more conception of that than they have of the value
of most things. In their lavishness and prodigality, they deserve to
be called, for the most part, the spendthrift nation of the world. But
having mastered the technique that is appropriate to their position
as inhabitants of an economically prosperous country, they are as yet
unwilling to master the technique that would make them great in other
fields. And this concentration on the technique of money-making which
has led to so much of America’s standardization--and incidentally also
to so much of its recent crime and moral callousness--is powerfully
upheld by the present mechanical industrial epoch, with its decline
in handicrafts, and the opportunities it offers to any business man
to become the possessor, simply by buying a few specimens, of the
best that the art of the past has already produced. It is for this
reason that the average American tourist sees in Europe, not Europe’s
intensely persistent energy, nor the vitality of her ideas, nor the
continual conflict between tradition and innovation, but only her cash
value as a market for antiques.
2
The Russian attempt to find a single central idea to explain the
universe, leads naturally to the exaggerated respect in which the
Orthodox Church has been and is still largely held among a great many
Russians--a respect which it took a Tolstoy to question, and which far
surpasses the respect shown to the Roman Catholic Church even in the
most Catholic countries. For the Orthodox Church represented a central
idea, hallowed by tradition, and fortified by all the apparatus of
miracle-working superstition. Most of Russian literature has been,
however, the product of minds that are, consciously or unconsciously,
in revolt from the Orthodox idea, and determined to find a central idea
outside of it, in some reconciliation with European tradition, or in
some reversion to Asiatic atavism. In this respect it is perfectly just
to apply to the whole Russian intelligentsia class the epithet that
Dostoevsky applied to the Western wing of it, the epithet of “uprooted.”
This uprootedness, this inability to find a fixed centre, leads not
only to the fantastic nihilism of much Russian literature and thought,
but to its prevailing tone of tension and cruelty. It is a common
complaint among European readers that Russian literature is morbid and
gloomy. This complaint is, however, ill-founded. A reading of such
European pessimists as Lucretius, Leopardi, Schopenhauer, or Thomas
Hardy, reveals depths of accepted despair unknown to the Russian soul.
But Russian literature and thought is intensely direct and cruel, as
all great metaphysical dialectic is cruel. The monstrous pantheon of
Indian divinities and the pessimistic nihilism of the Upanishads is
something not foreign to the Russian, as it is foreign to the European
mind. Above all, Russian thought tends to display itself in startling
contrast; to paint in bright, glaring primary colors. Here we have
again an Oriental trait, and a strongly marked one. There are few
nuances in Russian literature, and the writers who showed themselves
masters of the nuance are, like Tchekhov and Turgenev, more highly
appreciated abroad than at home.
American literature and thought, on the other hand, being largely
concerned with technique, is apt to respond not to the idea, but
to the formula. The figure of Sam Slick, the Yankee clockmaker and
peddler, who certainly never thought for one moment whether clocks
were of much use to his customers, but who knew all about how they
were made, and could take them apart and put them together better
than anyone, inevitably recurs to the memory when we try to envisage
the typical American mind. How much of American political theory and
activity, North and South, how much of the truly American passion for
local laws, state and city ordinances, constitutional amendments,
legal innovations, has been due to this passion for meddling and
tinkering--to this intensive study of technique! And the same passion
reappears in the field of literature. In this respect the figure of Poe
is particularly noteworthy. We can scarcely classify Poe as one of the
greatest forces in American literature, because philosophically he had
nothing whatever to say that had not already been said before him by
the English romantics and the New England transcendentalists. But if we
regard him as a virtuoso pure and simple, a virtuoso of technique, he
immediately becomes perhaps the most important of all American authors.
Poe was so intensely concerned with technique and technique alone, that
he broke new literary ground in half-a-dozen different directions,
without saying anything essentially new. He developed the lyrical
refrain to a point unknown before his day. In “Ulalume” and “The Raven”
he practically invented symbolism. He transformed the experimentally
onomatopœic prose of De Quincey into the perfect prose poem. He
invented the detective story. In his “Voyage of Arthur Gordon Pym” and
other pseudo-scientific tales, he became the father of the scientific
phantasy later developed by H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and others. In
his “Eureka,” he even tried to reconcile scientific cosmogony and
myth-making--a daring attempt that had to wait till the post-Einstein
period before it found imitators. It was this despised American hack
whom most of the New England leaders of thought considered as a
charlatan, who became the technical teacher of the whole generation of
later symbolists and æsthetes in France and England; just as it was
the purely moral and non-technical influence of Tolstoy that helped to
produce much of the anti-æsthetic literature of the ‘social document’
type (Zola, Romain Rolland), later throughout Europe.
Poe was, however, not the only example of an American author concerned
with formulæ. The prevalence of manner over matter may be observed
in most American authors, and becomes overwhelmingly important when
we turn from the field of literature proper to the field of public
debate and political oratory. This field has been practically unknown
in Russia, thanks to the activities of the censorship, and the general
suppression of free speech, but such documents as have come down to
us, such as for example, Dostoevsky’s celebrated Pushkin speech, or
Lenin’s speeches, do not reveal any very great oratorical ability.
Compare them with the rolling periods of Webster or even with such
comparatively simple efforts as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and the
contrast is flagrant. The difference is that the Russian makes only a
single vast generalisation, that the Russian is omni-human in destiny
and is appointed by God to reconcile all the nations of the earth, and
attempts to illustrate it prosaically by carefully chosen selections
from Pushkin’s or Marx’s works.
But in the case of Webster, or of the Gettysburg Address, the whole
speech is more or less a tissue of highly poetical generalisations.
Specific argument there is little or none--the less the better. The
influence of such oratory in its substitution of the telling phrase,
the resounding but intellectually empty statement, upon social life in
America is much more vast than can ever be imagined by most Europeans,
and has been an almost unmixed evil. Its pernicious effects were again
seen in the recent tragedy of President Wilson when confronted with
the realities of the European situation, and the still more obvious,
but lesser known, tragedy of the whole public and private career of
the late William Jennings Bryan. This oratorical temperament which is
so common in America, attempts to heal profound and rooted differences
of race, religion, politics, society, by the application of a few
telling phrases, a handful of brilliant slogans. The few great public
speakers that Russia has produced, such as Lenin, have made no such
fatal mistake. Their efforts, however lacking in the wholly technical
qualities that sweep audiences off their feet, were masterpieces of
close realistic, _terre-à-terre_ argument.
3
America has already had three well-marked cultural and intellectual
periods, each followed by a corresponding decline. The first--if we
exclude, as we have a right to do, the stirrings of intellectual life
in the Mathers and other purely colonial figures--began about the
middle of the eighteenth century, culminated in the Revolution, and
produced its last figures in Irving and Cooper. It was predominantly
political and rationalistic. The second, beginning about 1840, the year
before the publication of Emerson’s first series of Essays, reached
its climax in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, and died
away in the seventies. It was romantic and sentimental. The third,
stirring the dry bones of respectability with the wind of a new realism
about 1890, is still continuing at the present day. In each case, the
movement towards culture was halted by an external war, and dissolved
later in a period of growing financial prosperity. The first period
came to a full close by 1830, though Irving and Cooper were to survive
it; the second stage was virtually at an end in 1875, when the growing
power of industrialism took the stage, challenging Emerson, Whitman
and Melville; the third epoch may have already reached its culmination
in the years following on the Great War. In each case, the successful
wars in which America engaged, the Revolution and the War of 1812, the
Mexican and Civil Wars, the Spanish War and the European War, diverted
energy from American culture, and transferred it to the commercial,
financial, and industrial field.
Like America, Russia has had three periods of culture. The first, under
the leadership of Pushkin and Gogol, began with the Napoleonic struggle
and ended about 1836--though Gogol himself was to survive it for a few
years. It was predominantly romantic and revolutionary. The second
began approximately with the Crimean War of 1854, culminated in the
liberation of the serfs in 1861 and went on through the seventies. Its
leaders were Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. It was predominantly
realistic and political. The third, beginning about 1890, has continued
down to the present day. It is almost entirely symbolical in feeling.
In each case, Russia’s foreign campaigns, whether successful or not,
seem to have shaken up her pervading inertia and spiritlessness. The
struggle with Napoleon gave rise to the brilliant generation of
Pushkin; the Crimean War inspired Dostoevsky and Tolstoy; the building
of the Transsiberian Railway and consequent Japanese-Russian War, may
be said to have created the school of the symbolists, which, as Prince
Mirsky has said, dominated the first decade of this century. By the
fluctuations of campaigns fought at a distance, as opposed to civil
wars, Russia has been bettered: America has been spoiled by them,
and has never stood so high in culture as she did during the brief
years of her own civil war. That is because war abroad enlarges man’s
horizon, war at home limits it. The Russian type, prisoner to its own
centrality, requires to escape continually from its petty and hampering
environment; the American type, boldly going forth from itself into
ever new regions, needs some force that will hold it at home and make
it create a local centre of indigenous culture.
One can trace the same characteristics in the strong centralisation of
Russian literary and spiritual culture, as opposed to its boundless
diffusion in America. In Russia, all intellectual movements have
gravitated from the beginning to Moscow and to Petrograd; in America,
Concord, Richmond, Charleston, San Francisco, Chicago, Nashville,
have all promoted new movements, each in a sense more important than
anything achieved by New York. New York has been only a market-place,
a place where literary people may come together and drift apart, a
temporary haven for those wearied of provinciality and wishing to
assert their cosmopolitanism. American culture, in order to be itself,
to find spiritual roots, has to flee from the mock cosmopolitan
Europeanism of its capitals and to become provincial, rooted in the
backwoods, solitary and remote, as were Thoreau and Hawthorne. Russian
culture, on the other hand, in order to be itself, has to tend towards
a definite centre. The European is freed from these distressing
choices; the division between city-dweller and country-dweller is for
him less sharp and severe. He is, if highly cultivated, a member of a
mystic body which ignores national boundaries and has, in the largest
sense, unity of purpose. He absorbs a certain quantity of American and
Russian culture, but only to produce, under normal circumstances, its
cleverly-compounded antidote.
From the centralised condition of Russian culture, and its opposite in
America, it follows that the cultivated Russian who lives abroad, tends
to become more democratic in his outlook, while the cultivated American
under similar circumstances, tends to become more aristocratic. A
centralised culture is impossible without an aristocracy to support
it. Unless the ranks of society are graded and defined from above, the
meanest workman can become, economically and socially, the equal, if
not the superior, of the finest scholar, the highest creative artist.
Such a condition is what America definitely aspires towards. The
condition which Russia tends to create is that no one, not the greatest
artist, nor the finest scholar, should ever consider himself the equal
of the mysterious ruler who, deriving his power from heaven alone, sits
apart in the Kremlin. In America, the will being free, the quality of
thought does not matter; in Russia, the will being subordinate, all
can aspire to be thinkers. When a Russian goes abroad, the resultant
liberation of his will enables it to act in harmony with his mind
for the first time, so that he becomes an advanced radical; when an
American takes up his residence in Europe, the freeing of his thought
that takes place limits for the first time his boundless will, so that
he usually becomes a traditional conservative.
But in thus entering upon and attempting to define the influence
America and Russia have had on the whole field of intellectual
and æsthetic effort we are at once challenged by more important
distinctions. American thought tends to the rounded and static, Russian
thought tends to lose itself in the eternal flow of harmony. Now if
we try to make a scheme of the arts according to those which are more
plastic and those which are more harmonic in their outlook on reality,
we will get a figure somewhat as follows:
Plasticity -------- Harmony
|
Ritual
(under which comes dancing)
Painting Drama
Sculpture Literature
Architecture Music
Unless we do construct such a scheme in our minds, we can have no clear
conception of what art is. For no other human concept has been so badly
handled and blunderingly misunderstood as has this concept of art; and
by none more than by the æstheticians. One is almost tempted to retort
to the followers of Croce, who declare that all art is a pure abstract
intuition of the artist, a reality apart from physical fact, that, on
the contrary, art as an abstract concept has no reality, and that there
is no such thing as art, there are only arts, each being a synthesis
of certain aspects of objective reality. Art synthesises reality, as
science analyses it; and the synthesis alters in outlook whether we see
it from the aspect of time (which in the arts is music and corresponds
to pure mathematics in the sciences) or from the aspect of space
(which in the arts is architecture and corresponds to physics in the
sciences). Which of the arts we take as more fundamental or important
than any other depends, after all, on the quality of our psychological
outlook, not on the degree of our æsthetic appreciation. There can be
no doubt that in an ordered state, the arts progress from the space
organisation of architecture to the time organisation of music; just as
in a disordered state, the fact that all the arts tend towards music is
taken by æsthetic theorists to mean that music is the greatest of all
arts.
It is interesting to attempt some application of this classification
to the phenomena we have been discussing, of Russia and America. In
these countries the art of ritual, which we have set at the summit of
our pyramid, inasmuch as it contains elements of all the other arts
and depends on them all for its own existence, stood at opposing poles
from the very outset. There can be no two types of religious service
more opposed in essence than the Orthodox Russian communion service
and the Congregational, Methodist or Baptist “Sunday meeting.” The one
culminates in the invisible priest’s taking of the sacrament behind the
closed and veiled iconostasis, while the congregation without humbly
wait on their knees; the other, culminating in sermon and offertory, is
an act taken part in by the whole congregation, to whose willingness
the minister is entirely subsidiary. How far these two types of ritual
have affected the arts of America and Russia is a question that only
future manuals of æsthetics can settle. For the need of the moment
is an æsthetic based on fruitful psychological principles, and not a
purely theoretic æsthetic such as Croce offers us. But for this we may
have to wait for another century.
Neither America nor Russia has been able to express to the full their
native genius; they could only have done so had the French Revolution
and Napoleonic wars been followed by a complete collapse of Europe. But
it is probable that the direction of the American genius lies towards
architecture, sculpture, and painting; the direction of the Russian
genius lies towards drama, literature and music. Thus does art attempt
to redress the balance which the social organisation overweights in the
opposing direction. For the American continually tends to disintegrate,
to be individualised, to evade the centre; while the Russian
continually tends to reintegrate, to become centralised and feel the
appeal of the universal. Art, seeking for a strongly-opposed principle
of spiritual unity in each case, in America finds a plastic motive in
organised space-architecture; in Russia it finds a dynamic motive in
the harmonic time-rhythm of folk-song. Anyone who has seen an American
skyscraper or who has heard a well-trained Russian choir sing, will
realise more fully than my words can tell him the implications of this
statement.
The most characteristic new American contribution to art is probably
the recessed skyscraper, of which an archetype was already produced
before the white man saw the American continent, by the Pueblo Indians.
The most characteristic new Russian contribution to art is probably
the ballet, a mingling of movement and song, of which the archetype
was to be found in the fairs and local feast days of old Russia. In
both countries the connection between the arts, and notably between
literature and painting, is closer than elsewhere. A Tolstoy could
justify the increasing ethical tone of his art by an appeal to the
practice of such painters as Jules Breton or Defregger; a Whistler
could defend the increasing æstheticism of his by a passionate appeal
to what is essentially literature and poetry. Neither country has
arrived at the extreme limit of sophisticated culture to be found in
Europe, with its chatter of vapid specialists.
4
When America and Russia started on their course as independent
entities--which process beginning about 1688, only reached its
consummation in a century--the style of architecture which prevailed
in both countries was remotely akin. The Russian style had previously
been the Byzantine as modified by Levantine and Swedish influences. The
American style, if we omit the Mayas, began as the colonial baroque,
as developed by the architects who followed Sir Christopher Wren.
Peter the Great, however, built his new capital in the baroque style,
the style of Versailles and The Hague, and his influence contributed
towards the relegation of Byzantine influence to the hinterland. It is
this link of Baroque architecture that bridges a great gap between the
mind of Russia and that of America.
Baroque architecture has been called by an English critic the
“architecture of Humanism.” It might equally be called the architecture
of absolutism. For its leading æsthetic aim, which was, in the words
of the same critic, to convey a sense of overflowing and exuberant
strength, might be used, and in fact was used by two widely different
political parties. It might convey a sense of overflowing and exuberant
strength on the part of an oligarchical but popular republic, as in
the case of the Salute at Venice; of a dramatic but popular creed, as
in the case of the Church of St. Peter’s; of a corrupt but prosperous
administration as in the case of the houses of the great Whigs who
ruled England. Or it might convey monastic seclusion, absolute
obedience, complete autocracy, as in the case of the Jesuit churches,
the Escorial Palace, or Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles.
The later classical revival under the Empire, too, was double-sided.
It might signify the sternness of unbending republicanism, or the
dictatorship of Cæsarism. It was the former aspect that appealed to
America; the classic there quickly overbore the baroque, and has
persisted down to this day. On the other hand, the craze for baroque
ornament and decoration persisted in Russia down to the time of the
Great War. The early stage sets for the Russian ballet, notably the
work of Benois and Bakst, are its last expression.
If we pass from architecture to painting, we get another set of
contrasts. The ideal of Russian painting up to the close of the
nineteenth century seems to have been the great historical panorama
(Repin, Vereshchagin). On the other hand, the ideal of American
painting has been since the days of Stuart, the portrait. Here we have
again the contrasted principles of anarchic autocracy and republican
individualisation that we find elsewhere. That neither Russian nor
American painting amounted to much proves nothing, nor can we gain a
point by saying that neither was highly aware of what was going on in
Europe. American painters proved themselves to be good characterisers,
but bad decorators; Russian artists had the will and desire to execute
great decoration, but character was beyond their grasp. Similarly
Russian sculpture tends to the eccentric, the unbalanced; American to
the static and commonplace.
The contrast is still more marked when we come to the art of
literature. Throughout Russian literature the noblest character is
frequently shown as doing the weakest and most ignoble things. American
fiction, on the other hand, tends to exalt the ignoble, to give the
most dignified actions to the character one would suppose least capable
of them. This will appear more fully in the later analysis.
In drama the taste of the American public has always been for
melodramatic situations and broad handling; in Russia for inconclusive
and complex situations and subtle handling. One need only compare the
spectacular heaviness of the later O’Neill plays with the extreme
subtlety of Tchekhov.
To conclude with the art of music, we may say that in America the
composer has tended to construct well, but to characterise poorly;
in Russia to construct badly but to characterise well. All these
differences in art-practice arise from the fact that in both countries
the system of society is greater than the will of any individual to
support it. But the system itself in Russia is autocratic, centralised,
bureaucratically ordered; therefore the individual who revolts from
it, revolts upon impulse. He is instinctively an anarchist; his protest
is of the heart, not the reason. The system in America is anarchic,
decentralised, dependent solely on individual enterprise; therefore
the individual who revolts, acts upon reflection, he is intellectually
and spiritually an aristocrat (even when he calls himself a radical),
his protest is one of reason and commonsense humanity. Thus we see
that art in both countries exists not as an expression of tradition,
but as a protest against a political and social tradition that is felt
in some way hostile to life. For this reason art in both countries is
in essence revolutionary; it does not aim at correcting and changing
tradition so much as destroying it.
BOOK III
_“Russia began by asking Europe for the finished products of
western civilisation, to meet the requirements of her state
service. It was not in this offhand way that Europe had been able
to produce these finished products, which had behind them a whole
background of civilisation. Gradually the Russian customer was
driven backwards to a fuller and closer appreciation of what he
really lacked. He began by asking for weapons and went on to ask
for military training. He began by asking for clocks or any other
fascinating machinery and went on to ask for technical service.
He began by asking for ready-made books on given subjects, and
went on to ask for education. He began by asking for knowledge and
inevitably, however slowly, he was compelled to recognise the need
for that training of character which can alone produce competent,
self-respecting and honest servants of the state. He began by
asking for the end and went on with infinite inner conflicts and
searchings of heart to ask for the beginnings.”_
PROFESSOR BERNARD PARES,
“A History of Russia.”
_“Our America to-day I consider in many respects as but indeed a
vast seething mass of materials, ample, better (also worse) than
previously known; eligible to be used to carry towards its crowning
stage and build for good, the great ideal nationality of the future
... no limit here to land, help, opportunities, mines, products,
demands, supplies, and with--I think--our political organization,
national, state, and municipal--permanently established as far
ahead as we can calculate, but so far no social, religious, or
æsthetic organizations consistent with our politics.”_
WALT WHITMAN,
Preface to 1872 Edition of “Leaves of Grass.”
Chapter IX
Apart from the influence of politics, the greatest spiritual influence
that Russia and America have had on the world for a century past
has been manifested through their respective literatures. It is to
this field that we must now turn, for the most striking series of
our parallels. This literature has been, in both cases, something so
entirely apart in its inner development from anything produced in
Europe before the end of the eighteenth century, that we cannot apply
to it the traditional standards of European criticism. Unlike what has
been the case in European literatures, the literary form itself has not
emerged from the sociological and moral factors generally prevailing at
the moment. Rather has it been used as a weapon of protest, as a means
for overcoming the stultification of the environment, in both America
and Russia. It has been essentially revolutionary, dictated by a small
protesting minority, rather than rooted in the traditional lore of the
soil.
At the close of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, the mind of
Europe became divided between the rival claims of absolutism and
of radicalism. A wave of romantic sentiment, of revolutionary storm
and stress, with its longing for a past that could no longer exist,
together with its intense democratic feeling for the forgotten folk
sources of art, swept over England and Germany, and began to appear
in France. It made impossible henceforward the frigid artificialities
of form displayed in the poetry of Pope and Johnson, the dramas of
Voltaire, the essays of Addison and Fontenelle, the epic of Klopstock.
And it was from this rising wave of Romantic sentiment that both
America and Russia started on their careers as independent producers
of literature. They have continued on their way as literary countries
thanks altogether to nineteenth-century romanticism. Without some
understanding of the struggle between romanticism and realism, their
literary history does not make sense, it has neither cohesion nor
development. It is true that both countries have produced devotees of
classical form, but for the most part in the shape of critics, not
creators. The underlying genius of both countries has been unable
to accept the European tradition, even when it was imitated; it has
forced itself into alien moulds only to burst them. One cannot deny for
example that Whitman’s poems are poems, nor that Dostoevsky’s novels
are novels. Only they correspond to nothing either in form or content
or mental attitude that was done before them as poems and novels.
The word itself, freed from considerations of economy, tradition,
and classical usage, makes here its own form; arbitrary, intensely
personal, always stumbling and shambling on the brink of incoherence.
It is therefore impossible to write a just and final literary history
of either country. In this field everyone is a partisan. According to
whether the critics’ prepossessions are for literature that reflects
that social struggle, or for finished beauty of form, or for profound
and tragic revelation of unsuspected depths of life; according to
whether the critic of Russian and American literature is primarily a
social reformer, an academic humanist, or an advanced radical theorist,
the judgment will fall. Kropotkin cannot endure the later Dostoevsky;
hundreds of American professors cannot endure Whitman. The utmost that
can be done is to let one literature illuminate the other, to show how
the same psychological factors produce often closely corresponding
results, to draw parallels between those portions of the literature
of both countries that have most closely affected Europe. So only
do we get any insight into the mysteries of the Slav and American
soul. Only in literature is so close an insight possible; in American
painting and architecture, and in Russian dance and music, we have
also national expressions, but limited, tentative, and owing to their
fundamental differences in formal approach (the static and plastic as
against the auditory and agitated) very difficult of comparison. It is
possible in some respects to bring the products of the written word in
each European country together; we can for example set up a comparison
between the drama of Lope de Vega and Calderon, the drama of Corneille
and Racine, the drama of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. But it would be
far more difficult if we tried to compare sculpture and painting as
practised in the three countries mentioned over that period. So in the
case of Russia and America, we must concentrate on the written word as
being the most accessible and comprehensible means of comparison.
We may admit at the outset that to most observers modern Russian
literature is far richer in individual talent, and in works of high
ability, than American literature has hitherto been. This is due to the
working of three very important factors. In the first place, Russia
from the outset had a racial, soil-rooted language of its own and was
not forced to transform traditional English modes of expression to fit
an altered environment, or to teach an immigrant population. In the
second, the fact that political discussion of every sort was forbidden
in Russia during most of the period under review, while America has
lived in a perpetual atmosphere of constant political agitation,
made many more choose the profession of authorship in Russia, while
in America it tended to make many who might have been writers, into
politicians, orators, publicists. In the third place, before beginning
to create a modern literature on her own account, Russia had already
a rich folklore and legendary history of the past to draw upon. In
the case of the Americans, the folklore and traditions of the early
Indians, even of the French and the Spanish settlers, were in a sense
so foreign to the dominant English-speaking psychology, that they could
not be used, except as exotic colour. The result was that to this
day the American writer, with all the ability in the world, has less
material to his hands. Homer could not have been Homer had he come to
Greece from, let us say, Egypt, without understanding or appreciation
of the past. The American writer is more frequently found in that
predicament than the Russian. He has neither a tradition of folklore to
fall back upon for the past, nor essentially an individual experience,
out of which to build up his present day. Only too frequently in
America a usable past (to borrow the phrase of a well-known American
critic) and a meaningful present fail to coincide to produce the
literary masterpiece.
Yet a parallel between both countries is not only necessary, but
psychologically illuminating. This parallel will follow the lines of
the historical parallel, already tentatively traced for the outward
events, in the first book of this study. Here too we will see two
forces starting from opposite poles approaching a coincidence only
to diverge and to again approach coincidence. Here too we watch the
interplay of the same underlying climatic and soil factors on extremely
mixed races that start life under widely different political and social
constants. What is more, this parallel supplements and completes the
other. It enables us to disentangle the essentially Slavic element from
the essentially American element of the two cultures. It may even show
how these two forces operating freely in the world for a century and a
half, like the opposing poles of an electric battery, may ultimately be
reconciled, if not in the field of the practical, at least in the field
of the ideal; how they not only closely correspond to each other, but
ultimately become one.
2
The first stirrings of independent American literature (as distinct
from Colonial literature, or Red Indian traditions) appear most
clearly in the writings of Benjamin Franklin. The first stirrings
of Russian literature as distinct from a few court writers such as
Derzhavin in the Catherine period, to whom might be added Catherine
herself (although she wrote in French), and the remnants of old
Slavonic traditions, appear in the writings of Krylov. What strikes us
instantly about these two writers--the penniless American journalist
who steadily climbed the ladder of success until he reached the top,
and the son of the poor army officer who likewise spent a lifetime
in journalism to emerge at last as a sort of social lion--is the
curious impression of shrewd, canny and independent worldly wisdom
that emerges from the pages of both. Neither is a literary hero, nor
an independent creator, nor a prophet. Both have a utilitarian side,
a leaning to moral teaching, closely allied to a great deal of homely
common sense. It is true that Franklin spent much of his energies in
political agitation and in scientific research, which detracts from
his magnitude as an author. But as has already been pointed out, the
same field was not open to the Russian, with the result that his satire
is both sharper and tenser. Yet Franklin’s “Autobiography” is a fable
of the industrious apprentice making his way through the ranks of
Colonial society, as Krylov’s so-called fables are real pictures of
the artificial and vain social order (shaken by the French Revolution)
in which Krylov, the idle and pleasure-loving, found himself. Both
contain elements of poetry, but these elements are of small importance
as compared to the prose content. And both were, precisely because they
limited their aims to what was immediately possible, rather than to
what was the ideal statement, immensely popular.
From such small beginnings American and Russian literature emerged on
the world’s stage with Alexander Pushkin and Washington Irving. It may
seem to the casual and purely objective observer that no parallel is
at all possible between these two men. Irving was simply an agreeable
minor writer, with a prose style of considerable urbanity and charm,
who happened for a time to be ranked above his merits abroad as at
home, and who now is conveniently forgotten; whereas Pushkin was above
all a great and original poet. Yet this verdict which might be passed
by nine out of ten European literary critics is, quite possibly, a
false one. Of the two writers it is Irving who is the most original, as
he had none of the stock of folklore or of ancient tradition to go on;
all that had been swept away from under his feet by the Revolution, and
had to be discovered or invented afresh. He was in the position of an
artist who has to paint a new picture on a blank canvas without either
brushes or colors. On the other hand, Pushkin could simply use the old
material that lay to his hand, and his task was merely to interfuse it
with a new revolutionary spirit. If we can think of Irving as detached
from European literature as Pushkin was; if we can remember that living
on the Hudson, he was as socially remote from the world of Addison and
Goldsmith, whom he admired, as Pushkin in the Caucasus was remote from
Byron and Sterne whom he worshipped, we can reach a juster estimate of
the achievement of both men.
There is a feeling of nostalgia for the past that, particularly in
autumn, assails one in such a new country as America with even greater
force than anywhere in Europe. To the European, especially to the
dweller in a cosmopolitan city, the relics of the Middle Ages, the
richness of the Renaissance, the courtliness of the eighteenth century
are, after all, dead and vanished remnants of a force that has long
since flowed into other channels. But to the American who has never
known them, these things appear under their most Utopian aspect, as
examples of a life full of leisure, where work was despised, people
were free, natural and gracious, and harmony with inner and outer
nature was achieved. The American is afflicted therefore with an
incredible nostalgia for the past, the European past, but the country
he sees about him offers no past at all but that of the wilderness,
of the pioneer and the Indian. He therefore aims, according as he
is sensitive to beauty, or fundamentally in discord with his own
surroundings, either to transfer the riches of Europe bodily to his
shores and to strive to live in the midst of them; or to revert to pure
and simple savagery. The first path was that trodden by Irving; the
second was that chosen by Cooper.
The quality that made Irving a classic author during his lifetime and
that kept him so, arose from his overwhelming grace of expression.
Around the poor and threadbare material of folklore at his disposal he
threw the beauty of an incomparable style, a manner of telling that
makes of him still the most readable of American authors. “Rip Van
Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “The History of New York” are
all minor incidents of life, enlarged and expanded to their utmost
limit, avoiding the tensity of great tragedy, but crammed with the
humor of a disillusioned romanticism. They are not, like the works of
their contemporary Scott, direct assimilations and fresh re-creations
of the material of the past. Irving stands aloof from his own fantasy,
and warns us that this is how life may have been once lived, but
that after all life cannot go on in this way. Thus an undercurrent
of melancholy is unavoidable to the careful reader of these stories.
When Irving’s heart is more closely engaged, as in his fantasies of
the Alhambra, he becomes at once even more supreme as an artist, but
less human in range. He seems to be thinking always that all this
enchantment is purely imaginary, and that his people are not real
men and women. His Alhambra is not so much a castle in Spain, as a
castle in the air. Later Irving tried to remedy this defect by writing
objective history, and busied himself with the life of Columbus, of
Washington, of Astor. But even here he was dogged by the curious
unreality that is the fate of the romantic who cannot find romance in
the world that is about him, or in his own immediate race-memories.
His Columbus is a mediæval stained-glass saint. His Washington is a
classical plaster-cast. Only his Astor has any reality. Thus Irving’s
later works are inferior to his earlier. He was not equipped to draw
men of action but only such dreamers as Rip Van Winkle and Wouter van
Twiller. And an underlying mistrust of women--explainable by the fact
that Irving was a bachelor with several unsuccessful love-affairs to
account for--emerges equally from these classically built pages.
The problem that Pushkin set himself to solve was, in all essentials,
similar to the problem that bothered Irving. Only in Pushkin’s case
there was no lack of material for his talent--rather the reverse,
which explains why, in his short and disordered life, he was able
to turn out so much that is memorable. Pushkin’s question was how to
put this material into classic form, how to make it appear light,
graceful, easy and charming. That he solved this question, and wrote
works of great exhilaration and formal perfection in his youth, in a
language which was before his day barely more than a barbaric dialect,
is the considered verdict of everyone who knows Russian. But this
achievement did not satisfy Pushkin. He did not believe in the world
that he himself had created, and an endless succession of folk-heroes,
of Russians and Ludmillas, could not satisfy him for long. His private
attitude was atheistic and what is more anarchistic, as is indicated by
the obscene Gabriliad and many another youthful poem. As he grew older
he tried more and more to find a world in which to believe, with the
result that this scion of the nobility took to posing as a peasant,
and cultivated an air of heroic misanthropy, derived from Byron. The
two forces flowed together in “Eugene Onegin,” which is the one work
of Pushkin that has united all his qualities. Here under the mantle
of Byronism which he had wrapped round himself, and which essentially
belied his own care-free temper, we get a world which is real but
detestable, and in which the bitterness stands close to the surface.
Yet this world, from which neither Pushkin nor any other later Russian
has found escape, was in a sense forced on him by outer circumstances,
particularly by the great early emotional crisis of his life, which
came from his secret sympathy with the Decembrist uprising in 1825
(when he was twenty-six) which he later had to disavow in order to
escape Siberia. This crisis was fatal to Pushkin’s harmony, in the same
way as Irving’s early emotional crisis, his engagement broken by death,
was fatal to Irving. The remainder of his work is a prolonged emotional
dissatisfaction, much on the lines of Irving’s half-humorous stories.
Pushkin became a realist despite himself, as Irving a romanticist
despite himself. Each is therefore a classic in the Russian or American
sense, but not in the European.
3
With James Fenimore Cooper we approach a very different problem. This
honest, stern and embittered man, at war with society and himself,
whose best writing was done at the latest period of his development,
is perhaps to-day the least known and least appreciated of American
writers. This is due to the fact that about much of his work he
deliberately threw the false glamour of an idyllic romanticism. Hating
the frontier as he did, hating equally the time-serving and vulgar
democracy of his own period, he sympathised at heart with nothing
but the already remote past of the Indian scout (of whom he has left
us an immortal portrait in Leatherstocking) and fundamentally the
Indian himself. An aristocrat to the bone, he threw himself repeatedly
back upon the eighteenth century. In his love of what was already a
remote and murky past, he recalls the Russian historian Karamzin, who
similarly after an early period of political polemic, went back to the
past and strove to glorify it. And the result was much the same in both
cases. Karamzin’s Russian history is, in the opinion of most critics
of standing, not really a history at all, but a marvellous portrait
gallery of living men and women held together by a flowing stream of
narrative tending to idealise and prettify the details of the picture
he was presenting. Cooper’s romances are similarly not romances at all,
but wonderful pictures of bygone events, storms at sea, revolutionary
battles, adventures in the wilderness, similarly vitiated by a tendency
to write idyllically about the past. And as Cooper influenced Melville
and hundreds of other American writers of adventure tales, so Karamzin
influenced Gogol and Dostoevsky. Cooper was indeed more important as an
influence than as an actual creator. Where he was great was in Uncas
and Chingachgook and Leatherstocking; his noble and persistent belief
in character saved him from incredible sentimentality of incident and
a viciously mannered style. The untold glory of the already vanishing
heroic age of American life when men took their lives in their hands
and lived alone with the wilderness, fired Cooper. He was scarcely
adequate to the tragic implications of his own theme.
Here we reach a point that is important for us to understand if we are
to grasp the real nature of the underlying contrast between American
and Russian culture, and the common causes of their failure. Under the
system of levelling democracy such as America adopted and practised,
men could not combine together to wrest a meaning and significance
from frontier conditions except by making sacrifice of some part of
their own personality. The complete personality, therefore, as such,
stood outside the bounds of American organised society, and became
inarticulate, unformed, illiterate, and to all intents and purposes,
a pariah and an outlaw. A Daniel Boone, a Leatherstocking, or in a
later age, a Kit Carson, or a Huckleberry Finn, are the authentic
“originals” of the American landscape. In their presence everything
else becomes feebly Colonial; an imitation of remote European manners
and traditions. Only in the South, where some elements of settled
aristocracy had rooted themselves, could culture and personality
exist side by side in the same individual, and this culture took
social and political, rather than literary forms. The North and the
ever-widening frontier of the West were incapable of producing a
single personality of the intellectual range and poised character
of Jefferson. At the other end of the scale, under the increasing
centralisation and autocracy of the Muscovite Czars, no one could have
independent personality except the Czar himself and a few important
nobles of his entourage. The system of abolishing local independence
worked, as a leveller of the mass, with equal efficiency as the system
of mob-democracy. Only a few of the older Slavonic and Baltic nobility
resisted, and it was within their ranks that literature was cultivated,
as it was within the ranks of the better-bred families of America that
the first attempts at an indigenous culture took place.
4
In both Russia and America, therefore, the rage for imitation of
European ways of life and thought early became of equal importance with
the suppressed desire to shape life according to local conditions. This
fact explains the popularity of such figures, for instance, as Bryant
and Zhukovsky. Bryant simply transported bodily the nature feeling of
Wordsworth to the American scene, as Zhukovsky tried to interfuse the
idyllic sentiment of Parny and Chenier into his aboriginal background.
Both spent a large part of their lives as translators; a task far
easier to the Russian than to the American, as the Russian could not
fail to enrich his material (chosen frequently from third-rate European
sources) by contact with far deeper and more lasting earthborn springs
of inspiration, whereas the American impoverished his by a scrupulous
and Puritanic zeal for correctitude. Both translated Homer, but while
Zhukovsky’s translation became and remained a Russian classic, Bryant’s
translation is a monument of Puritanic austerity and plainness and is
likely to abandon the mind of the cultivated English-speaking reader
in favour of the surging violence of Chapman, the artifice of Pope, or
the rich and tender idyllism of Butcher and Lang. But for all that,
Bryant’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” are Greece as seen through American
eyes, and their homespun dignity are more valuable, because more
native, to the American critic than any European version. The impulse
both Bryant and Zhukovsky gave to translations has persisted throughout
the whole range of Russian and American literature; it is symptomatic
of the fact that culture in both countries is not a natural growth,
but something that has to be propped up and supported by continual
reference to what goes on without, in lands where authors are born to
more settled traditions.
Chapter X
There comes a moment in the history of every people when, by some
almost imperceptible inner growth of cultural self-consciousness, a
great, new, and original art is born among them. This moment coincides
with the first slackening of the impulse that has made the particular
people whose history we are surveying, free and victorious in their
long struggle for unity and liberty. The period that follows in every
case depends upon an emergence from early political upheaval and chaos,
and in its frankness and joyousness, resembles the coming of spring. A
slackening of unified political effort takes place, and a corresponding
increase of individual talent in other fields. Italy reached this
moment with her pictorial arts and literature early in the fourteenth
century; France under Ronsard and the Pleaid; England under the Tudors.
In Russia and America the old cultural background, such as it was,
blocked the path of a new birth down to the period at which we have now
arrived in the course of our study. Russia’s Renaissance and America’s
Renaissance coincided; both began about 1830. The first great figures
that these two Renaissances produced in the field of literature were
Gogol and Hawthorne.
Let us look for one moment at the social conditions under which these
two men came to maturity. In Russia the whole period is covered by the
reign of Nicholas I. Alexander I, who had succeeded in 1794 and whose
reign had led to a complete triumph over Napoleon after Moscow, died
in 1825. His reign had strengthened the hold of the autocracy upon the
great mass of the population, and had enormously increased as well
the prestige of Russia in Europe, but had successively alienated the
more enlightened nobility, who were all for the contemporary remedy
of Western liberalism--a constitution. His death was the signal for
the abortive uprising of the Decembrists, who were one and all nobles
and could command little support in the army. The aim of Nicholas
was to preserve everything exactly as it had been left by Alexander.
Personally friendly as he was to liberal thought at the beginning,
patron of both Pushkin and Gogol, possessed of great native courage
and invincible determination, the movement of events in Europe from
1830 to 1848 forced him little by little into the camp of the extreme
reactionaries, and the close of his reign found even the Slavophils in
opposition to the Czar. By his personal interference in the affairs of
Poland and Turkey he drew down upon him the enmity of Austria, England,
and France, at that time the three greatest European powers. In regard
to literature and the spread of ideas, his reign was marked by a
steady growth in the power of the censorship, tending to abolish every
manifestation of original thought.
All during this time, the pressure of Russia on its westward frontier,
the frontier of Europe, was enormous, as during the same period
America exerted immense pressure on its own westward frontier--the
frontier that led through the Spanish colonial possessions, to the
Pacific. The increase in repressive autocracy in Russia, under
Nicholas I, was counterbalanced in America by a great increase in
expansive democracy. The period opens with the disappearance of the
last of the old Federalist “dynasty” among the Presidents, which had
ruled (with the slight interregnum of Jefferson’s presidency) from
Washington’s presidency down to 1829. At that date John Quincy Adams
went out of office. He was succeeded by Andrew Jackson who was not
only a democrat, but a backwoodsman, a Southerner, and an apostle of
the common people. The only opposition Jackson need fear was from the
aristocratic and older South, in the person of John C. Calhoun, and to
a slight extent from the Northern Whigs. The latter party were soon
conciliated, and for the rest of that period under review, down to the
Civil War, we have a series of presidents whose democracy, slightly
tainted with Whiggism, leads to a remarkable series of compromises
between the agricultural and slave-holding South and the industrial
and trading North, and the ever-expanding Western territory which in
theory (but not in fact) lay equally open for both sections--Northern
and Southern--to settle upon and inhabit. What makes this period
remarkable in American history is first, the constant succession of
characterless and feebly respectable presidents--Van Buren, Fillmore,
Pierce, Buchanan--so characterless and feeble that a single Calhoun who
spent his lifetime in opposition to the whole system resembles a giant
by comparison; second, the increasing pressure on the southwest, on
Mexico, which resembles Nicholas First’s increasing pressure on Turkey;
and third, the growth of literature in the midst of a system which was
politically corrupt and persisted wholly on the principle of “to the
victors belong the spoils,” yet did such lip-service to respectability
that Hawthorne himself dared scarcely mention directly the word
“adultery” in his masterpiece. We would do well to recall the Russian
censorship in this connection, as also the fact that under Nicholas I,
government bribery and corruption (as revealed by the Crimean War)
reached a level only paralleled later under Nicholas II.
Under such conditions, the genius of Gogol and Hawthorne came to
flower. So close were they, not only in the themes upon which they
worked, but in their personal psychology, their inmost successes and
failures, that it matters little which we take first. But inasmuch as
to the English-speaking Occidental, the Russian’s art illuminates by
contrast that of the American’s, whereas the reverse is less likely to
be true, we will take first the career and activity of the unhappy man
who more than any other, made Russian literature what it specifically
is.
2
Nikolay Vasilievich Gogol was born on March 19, 1809, in a market town
of Sorochintsky in the province of Poltava. He came from a family of
Ukrainian Cossack gentry. The district in which he had been born he
himself immortalized in his story of “Taras Bulba.” It was the district
beginning about two hundred miles south of Moscow, embracing Kiev and
the dangerous shallows and rapids that encumber the course of the
lower Dnieper, which was the important “river road” leading to what
throughout the Middle Ages was Russia’s main sea frontier: the frontier
of the Black Sea. In the words of an able American commentator on
Russian affairs this district, known as the Ukraine, was “the Border
Marches. Naturally it has varied, in different epochs, just as our
western frontier (pretty nearly its exact equivalent) varied at
different periods throughout the history of the United States, and was
pushed further and further from the eastern centre of civilisation. In
the case of Russia, Moscow represented that centre.”[6]
In this district, then, Gogol was born. His people were the Ukrainian
Cossacks. This word meant to the Russian mind not an independent
race, but an independent class: the freebooter, the military nomad
of the boundless plain, the man whose home was the saddle, and whose
roof was in the sky, the exact counterpart of the Western American
“bad man.” But unlike the “bad man” of the West, these Cossacks had
been deliberately sent to populate the Ukraine by the policy of the
government. In the reign of Ivan the Terrible, it became necessary to
have a military force on this southwest frontier, in order to hold back
the Crimean Tartars, who were continually threatening Moscow through
advance from the Kherson peninsula. Czar Ivan thereupon collected
all the young men of adventurous disposition and warlike tendencies
that could be found for this purpose. Most of them were, in fact,
criminals--a body of men, warring alike upon Pole and Turk, who lived
in semi-monastic state in a movable capital on the banks of the
Dnieper, and who had become so great a menace to the Czar himself that
after Pugachev’s rebellion in the reign of Catherine the Great, they
were suppressed. It was from this group Gogol sprang.
He was, in fact, the last flower of the old Cossack independence of
spirit. After a sensitive, sickly, and morbid boyhood, he drifted to
St. Petersburg at the age of twenty, equipped with nothing but a bad
idyllic poem and a boundless ambition and vanity. Here he was taken up
by literary society and his first book of Ukrainian tales, “Evenings
on a Farm near Dikanka,” made such a sensation that he rapidly became
a social lion. He produced more tales and attempted to become a
teacher of history with small success. But he became increasingly the
idol of the more idealistic Russian intellectuals whose spiritual
home was Moscow, and whose aims were Slavophilism. Towards this group
he gravitated increasingly. His comedy, “The Government Inspector,”
was an immediate and unqualified success of mingled admiration and
disparagement, and he was now able to go abroad, choosing Rome as a
place of residence. From there, he came back to Russia, with the first
part of his masterpiece “Dead Souls” (published 1842). But life abroad
and still more the homage paid to him, had convinced him that he must
have some greater mission than merely to be a writer. He must become
a prophet, and regenerate Russia spiritually. His first attempt in
this direction took the form of the religious prose polemic, “Select
Passages from a Correspondence with Friends.” In this book, he throws
overboard the St. Petersburg Liberals and the Moscow Slavophils alike,
and reveals himself shamelessly as a preacher of nothing but dumb
obedience to the Czar, ready to transform his mission of regeneration
into the rôle of an upholder of complete reaction in religious and
political matters. Only an intense egotist could have written such
a book, with its attacks on all who had helped him in the past, and
henceforth Gogol had no friends. He could not find peace either
within or without Russia, and pilgrimages to the Holy Land, restless
self-abnegations, tormented repentances, were alike in vain. In 1852,
he died having by his own act destroyed the greater portion of the
manuscript of the second part of his “Dead Souls.”
The inner history of Gogol is that of a man who seeks freedom
everywhere but can find it nowhere in the self-satisfied, petty
bourgeois civilization of his epoch, with its scum of semi-concealed
political corruption floating on the top of artificial manners, its
apeing of foreign fashion, its sentimentality and sordidness. All this
comes out very strongly in the novel which is Gogol’s unquestioned
masterpiece, his “Dead Souls.” The hero of this book, Chichikov,
is a sort of picture of Gogol himself, in his aimlessness, his
self-satisfied inferiority, his timidity with women. He has conceived
a brilliant plan, of obtaining an heiress in marriage by representing
himself as a large landowner with a great number of serfs. To carry
this plan into effect, he buys up from the landowners of a certain
district, the serfs that have recently died or run away, and whose
names, not having been struck off the census rolls, still leave
their owners liable to payment of poll tax for them. Equipped with
this list of “dead souls” he intends to pose as a wealthy man, but
his scheme fails through his own impudence. Gogol certainly meant to
make Chichikov attractive, and even to show his “regeneration” in
the second part, which was never finished; but Chichikov remains at
best a mean-spirited busybody, at worst a base adventurer with an
undeveloped moral sense. What the book is chiefly remarkable for is
its extraordinary portrait gallery of characters each set in their
appropriate surroundings of Russian landscape. As Chichikov drives
hither and thither on his enterprise of cheating, we are treated to
a panorama of Russian landscape and of Russian life, and each is as
dreary as the other. This novel has been compared to “Pickwick Papers,”
but the laughter of “Dead Souls” is bitter and harsh and menacing. One
cannot avoid a feeling as one reads on and on that the dead peasants
whom Chichikov absorbs were at least once men, fully alive, unspoilt
and integral (however degraded their conditions of existence); but
that the living landowners who possess them--with the exception of
the half-crazy old maid Korobotchka who gives the plot away, and the
embittered miser Plyuskin,--are neither wholly alive nor honest. They
are walking ghosts, horrible simulacra; rotting away within, the
degenerate self-satisfied scions of all manner of public and private
corruption.
“Dead Souls” remains valuable therefore chiefly as satire--a bitter
satire by a “soul” itself in peril of death; one who had come to
central Russia from the freer, wilder atmosphere of the frontier,
and who had there earnestly sought for truth and beauty only to find
stifling mediocrity, hypocrisy, and corruption. From this strain
of satire, Gogol himself vainly sought escape; escape into the
wild heroism of the old Cossack life vividly described in “Taras
Bulba,” escape into peasant folklore, escape into morbid religious
introspection. Gogol is usually credited with being the first
thorough-going Russian realist, but in fact realism was to him always
the enemy. On its face appeared the grin of the evil one, or the smirk
of the hypocrite. Only once is Gogol the objective realist in his play
the “Government Inspector.” Here he merely set down the facts, and gave
his skill in dialogue a free run. The result was equal to the most
bitter and cruel of all his satires; all the bitterer because here
there is no fantasy to fly to, no charm of sentiment to colour it. For
the whole of his life, Gogol struggled like a man in a net. He must
speak the truth, but the truth only hurt him. He must create beauty. He
had the courage to call “Dead Souls” a poem, and his whole career was
like a boldly planned and beautifully conceived raid of a daring chief
into the heart of a hostile country. But when he had arrived at the
summit of his career, beauty still mocked him from far away. Gogol left
Russian literature neither romantic nor realistic; he mingled humor
with bitter earnest, and magnificence with sordidness. In the end he
could not write any more. The warring forces within his soul tore him
to pieces.
3
The career of Hawthorne, if we set aside slight differences in early
environment and upbringing, was startlingly parallel. In his inner
life, Hawthorne was the exact counterpart to Gogol. He was born in
1804 of what might be called America’s radical aristocracy, the long
line of Puritan legalists, divines, and shipmasters that had been the
bulwark of the attacks against England’s unifying and centralizing
tendencies, from 1629 to the Revolution. An ancestor had taken part in
the hanging of witches and whipping of Quakers; just as an ancestor
of Gogol probably took part in the scenes of raid and rapine that are
so vividly told in “Taras Bulba.” A delicate childhood, a melancholy,
secretive and hypochondriac disposition, a precocious desire to
write, complete the picture. But unlike Gogol, Hawthorne did not have
to travel from his home to attain fame as a writer. He was born and
already established at the centre where all movement of ideas took
place: within sight of Boston. In his day, the force that had made the
Revolution a success, and had given New England the intellectual and
moral primacy of the New World, was already weakening. Further and
further off the frontier was moving, across the Mississippi. As each
new barrier interposed by nature was passed, the power of New England
waned. Already its trade and shipping were passing into the hands of
New York. Its population, moving out to the richer agricultural lands
of the Middle West, were maintaining all the faults of the Puritan
system, the greed, avarice, stiffness, and ugliness, without the
redeeming Puritan mental discipline. Hawthorne was therefore almost
the last flower of idealistic New England; the last flower of the old
stock that was to produce the first fine fruit of American literature.
And like Gogol, Hawthorne was primarily a humorist; but whereas Gogol’s
humour is lit up by savage hatred (which blazes to a great flame in
“Dead Souls,” despite Gogol), Hawthorne’s humor is made poignant by
the nostalgic hopelessness of regret. Behind Gogol’s mask is a sneer;
behind Hawthorne’s face one sees the terrible infinite vanity of all
earthly things.
It is instructive in this respect, to compare Hawthorne’s finest novel,
“The House of Seven Gables,” with Gogol’s masterpiece, “Dead Souls.”
Where Gogol adopts a setting that seems to take in its sweep the
whole of the Russian landscape, Hawthorne confines his action to the
precincts of a single house. Yet in this small compass of space, with
the use of barely more than half-a-dozen characters, he conveys the
sense of a past stretching back to infinity; a past so remote, awful
and unchangeable that the present day of his novel is but a feeble
echo of its long-appointed doom. Over this thought of the past, as an
event that cannot be recalled or redeemed, Hawthorne returns again and
again, as Gogol returns again and again to his motive that the souls
of his characters are really dead and can only be brought to life in
the future. The ruin of a people is here summed up in the downfall of
a single family within the four walls of a house, as in Gogol the same
ruin pursues Chichikov everywhere. Both novels are novels about what
are literally “dead souls”--Hepzibah and Clifford and old Uncle Venner
and the daguerreotypist Holgrave are as impotent to break the doom that
weighs upon them as any of Gogol’s landowners. But the doom here is
concentrated on a single point, whereas in Gogol it is widespread and
diffused.
In his admirable study of Hawthorne, Henry James suggests that the
“House of the Seven Gables” is more like a prelude or unfinished
sketch for a novel than a complete story. We know that Gogol was
unable to finish his novel, though he schemed that Chichikov should be
regenerated. Hawthorne did finish his, but the last chapters are an
anticlimax after what is the real end; the death of Judge Pyncheon, and
the flight of Hepzibah and Clifford. The real end is the railway: “At
one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the next a village
had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it had vanished ...
the spires of meetinghouses seemed set adrift from their foundations;
the broad-based hills glided away.” This flight into the external
world away from the accursed house which held them, is a liberation;
it is a removal without an aim, a complete escape from “what we call
real estate--the solid ground to build a house on--which is the broad
foundation on which nearly all of the guilt of the world rests.” This,
and not the weak anticlimax by which the story actually ends, is the
real conclusion, so far as there can be any conclusion, in Hawthorne’s
mind. To get away from property--to get away from land, to own
nothing--that is Hawthorne’s solution, his magic charm for breaking the
spell of the past.
In Gogol’s novel, the same flight motive, which Hawthorne introduces
with skilful effect as a liberation from the House of Seven Gables,
rotting into ruin, is introduced and maintained throughout the story.
Chichikov moves hither and thither, forever aimless, forever wandering,
seeking to obtain something lasting; a mythical estate, imaginary
domain lures him on. He cannot be regenerated until he settles down and
heroically transcends his sordid past. Hawthorne’s characters cannot be
regenerated until they fly away from the past and become nonentities.
4
Here we see in its purest form the workings of that power-land
antithesis that we have already described as lying at the root of
the contrasted Russian and American psychology. The land on which
Hawthorne’s own characters pursue their existence warps their
characters; the power that the Russian helplessly desires to achieve,
warps the minds not only of Chichikov, but of all the other landowners
about him. Hawthorne himself could no more escape his heritage than
Gogol. He attempted to escape, in brilliant excursions into folklore,
such as “The Scarlet Letter,” in faintly objective comedy such as
“The Blithedale Romance,” finally even in life abroad. But in the end
he too had to confess himself beaten. The life of which he was so
fine a recorder became more and more a regretful memory of tradition;
and meantime the flood of democracy surged irresistibly past him to
other aims. Hawthorne could only be outwardly, but not inwardly, a
democrat. His political support of Franklin Pierce, and consequent
upholding of the rights granted to the Southern States at the time of
the making of the Constitution--including the right to hold slaves, and
to extend their territory--made him anathema to his own neighbours,
the abolitionists, to whom the Mexican War had become a shameful
memory, and who were about to give their support to the mad fanatic,
John Brown. Hawthorne went abroad after this, where he remained, very
indecisive in his attitude and writings till the eve of the Civil
War. That event disillusioned him completely. He declared publicly
that he considered that John Brown had been justly hanged; and that
the American’s allegiance, in the nature of things, was always to
one’s own native state, rather than to the country as a whole. These
remarks, duly deprecated by the editor of the paper in which they
appeared, only served to show that Hawthorne was now as much of a
disillusioned aristocrat as Gogol had been before him. He died, in
a fit of black melancholia, after making several abortive attempts
at writing a romance which would deal with the subject of a supposed
elixir of life,--attempts which came to nothing. Like Gogol, he was
one who had sought for happiness within his own country, and later
without, and had found it nowhere; but could not abandon the idea that
somewhere there existed a magic talisman that would set things right
and make life worth living. Because of the bitter fanaticism of this
hope--a hope which Europe from time to time also entertains but always
abandons--Gogol and Hawthorne were the first supremely great figures in
their national literatures.
Chapter XI
In the preceding chapter it was necessary, in speaking of Gogol, to
make some passing reference to Moscow Slavophilism. It was also hardly
possible to speak of Hawthorne without some reference to New England
Transcendentalism. These two great currents of thought, though they did
not of themselves produce the talent that was attracted to them, were
of such importance in the history of Russian and American culture that
it is impossible to write a summary of either without some reference to
them. It is the more necessary to do so, since these two forces both
took their rise from popular mysticism.
Mysticism is a constant factor in the development of any nation. Only
in most European countries, especially in Latin and Catholic countries,
the aim of the spiritual rulers has been to keep mysticism in check, to
give it practical and constructive aims. This has been only possible
insofar as the Christian Church has itself assumed the discipline
and ordered ranks of the Roman army. The breakdown of discipline
before the Reformation led not, as Catholic historians would have
us believe, to any orgy of license, but to an unchecked explosion of
popular mysticism. This mysticism did not differ in kind, but only
in degree, from the famous mysticism of the Middle Ages. It was less
architectural, less social in essence; it depended more and more on an
individual and personal approach to God, on what the Catholic critic
would call “private judgment.” This “private judgment” was not long in
invading the Catholic Church itself. Compare for example St. Augustine
with Saint Theresa. The former is just as mystical at bottom as the
latter; but he constructs his “City of God” objectively, as a refuge
for all men. In Saint Theresa, on the other hand, all depends upon
personal approach, everything is transformed into a subjective relation
between the soul itself and its Maker, and all this has no end, no
beginning; it is an ecstasy equally out of time and place. Small wonder
that the theologians of Saint Theresa’s day thought her doctrine
suspect, if not highly heretical.
Transcendentalism is simply a carrying to its logical end of this
doctrine of personal and popular mysticism. In New England, for a
century and a half before the Revolution, a battle had been waged for
the rights of the individual conscience, which had successively been
held to be superior to the organised church, to the combined church and
state, and ultimately to the law itself. To the Transcendentalists
there remained no longer any barrier between man and God; and Emerson’s
doctrine of self-reliance as well as his notion of the oversoul,
practically said “Let us be God.” It is well known how the Emersonian
oversoul led directly to the superman of Nietzsche; the only difficulty
that the Transcendentalists had in making themselves into supermen was
a lack of training. It was suddenly discovered, by whom it does not
matter, that the Hindoo ascetics possessed such training. The only sure
method therefore of transforming New England yokels and small-town
tradesmen into thorough-going “oversouls” was to become as Hindoo as
possible. Everyone went about reciting the Bhagavad-Gita; and Emerson
was able to refer in his Journal to the New England summer as being a
“Hindoo day.”
It escaped the attention of the Transcendentalists that the Hindoo
ascetics whom they strove to imitate had not at all proclaimed the
liberty of conscience and the complete right of self-reliance which the
Americans asserted. The Hindoo ascetic accepts the idol of the meanest
of his compatriots, as authentically representing a god. This the
Transcendentalists were not prepared to do. They were individualists,
yet so democratic in theory as to suppose that merely by saying to
quite ordinary people, “Here is Emerson; go and make yourself more
like him,” the ordinary people would all be magically transformed
into New England Brahmins. Unfortunately human nature is not like
that--as Thoreau, at once the shrewdest and most sincere of the
Transcendentalists, admitted.
Transcendentalism was therefore a brilliant pose, and its leaders soon
showed its lack of root in reality by upholding the fanatic minority
of the abolitionists, as well as by defending the conduct of such born
outlaws and desperadoes as John Brown. The same remark may be largely
applied to Slavophilism. This movement began as an aristocratic,
idealistic, sentimental movement on the part of the more intelligent
Moscow nobility to preserve authentic Russian culture against the
onslaughts of western European materialism. It therefore had distinct
leanings towards the Orthodox Church, and the maintenance of the Czar’s
power. Unfortunately, the Orthodox Church had become, since Peter
the Great, merely another branch of the State bureaucracy, under the
control of a Procurator of the Holy Synod, from whom the Patriarch took
orders; and the Czar himself had no idea of improving the system, or
of helping Russian culture, but only of maintaining his power intact.
The Slavophil movement therefore tended to play into the hands of the
reactionaries, and its belief in “Holy Russia” was as much a pose
as the belief of the Transcendentalists in Brahmin New England. It
nevertheless produced interesting minor figures, notably Aksakov, who
presents a curious parallel to Thoreau, which we here lack space to
discuss.
These two movements, both mystical in essence, both quasi-oriental
in approach--for Slavophilism derives something from Buddhism, as
Transcendentalism owes much to Hinduism--produced between them the four
greatest geniuses that Russia and America have given to the world.
These four geniuses bridged in their life and work the great crises of
the sixties; the crisis marked by the Civil War between the States in
America, in Russia by the liberation of the serfs, and the tragic reign
of Alexander II. The value of these four great men, and still more
their failure, give us more than a merely political and social picture
of their respective epochs, a true insight into the measure of the
problems that Russia and America were given to contend with. We will
take the two men who made the more objective approach to these problems
first: Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoy.
It is utterly impossible to treat Tolstoy and Whitman apart for the
purposes of this study. Both were so completely and aboriginally a part
of their country in outlook that neither resembles anything whatsoever
European. Tolstoy’s natural view of European art and culture was
that everything in it was artificial, morbid, false, and above all,
sexually provocative--and Whitman persisted throughout his lifetime in
the error that European art simply glorified the airs and trappings
of outworn feudalism. Both turned away from an elaborate and complex
culture to the simplest native elements they could find; in Whitman
the dock-labourers, stage-drivers, longshoremen, and common workmen,
and in Tolstoy the shrewd and simple Kutuzov, the Cossack bandit, the
peasant saint. Apart from the fact that Whitman wrote in a rhythmical
poetry that was to be like no other poetry ever conceived, having
nothing of the stock poetical touches, the heightened style of the
old masterpieces, alternating from a direct realism to a vague and
incoherent mysticism, while Tolstoy wrote in a prose that at its best
is unparalleled for direct powers of keen observation, and at its worst
is dry and tedious like a Government report--apart from this fact,
Whitman and Tolstoy present precisely the same problem to the critical
intelligence. Both were divinely gifted amateurs, natures of immense
animal vitality and range of experience, imbued with a perpetual
itch for self-expression; pioneers and path-breakers of an art that
was to be at once popular and folk-art, and yet was to disdain all
the background of mythological fantasy on which folk-art ultimately
rests, and remain cold, clear, and rational. They combined together in
two unique and practically interchangeable individualities the most
elemental and earthern mysticism of the unspoilt, savage, and the
completely practical aim of the modern scientific philanthropist.
There are, it is true, certain minor and slight differences between
them. Neither, despite their intense nationalism, was racially
completely assimilated to the country in which he lived and worked.
Tolstoy’s ancestry goes back to a Baltic, possibly East Prussian
strain; Whitman, as is well known, had Dutch blood in his veins. This
slight foreign element perhaps explains the self-centred aloofness
of either from the main intellectual current of their times. The
idealistic Orthodoxy of the Slavophil movement made no appeal to
Tolstoy; and Whitman, after a period in which he came under the direct
influence of Emerson, threw overboard Transcendentalism, with its
insistence on scholarship and intellectual culture. One may say also
that Whitman’s best work was all done before his breakdown in 1872, was
in fact done by the time of the close of the Civil War in 1865, while
Tolstoy’s best work was all done after that date down to his death.
This was to a certain extent due to the fact that Whitman was by nine
years the elder, but also due to the working of social and personal
factors that it will be part of our task to examine. Apart from this,
and apart from some minor differences such as the fact that Whitman’s
was fundamentally a feminine nature, glorifying sex theoretically as a
biological function, but in practice apt to dwell almost to the point
of mawkish morbidity on the magnetic charm of athletic masculinity,
while Tolstoy was so profoundly masculine as to despise women utterly
and yet to be always swayed by their sexual attractiveness--apart from
this purely personal divergence, the two forces in their literary
resultant, are interchangeable. Each represents an unalterable granitic
insensitive residue of final perception, at war with all outside
influences, rejecting every European refinement, and struggling to
spread itself over the world. These two, Tolstoy and Whitman, stand
alone in the history of their country’s thought as neither barbarians
nor decadents, but something far more elemental. They were essentially
backwoodsmen.
Both had what is only common to the backwoodsman and the savage:
absolutely Adamic vision. If we can suppose a stage in human
consciousness when man is not subjective, does not project his longings
into the past or the future, is not concerned with what follows upon
death or what is the purpose of life, lets reason follow upon impulse
without any ulterior speculation as to whether reason is adequate
to explain, or impulse adequate to guide his effort--if we can
suppose such a stage, then Tolstoy and Whitman both stood in it from
the beginning. Whitman has marvellously described this stage in his
poem “There Was a Child Went Forth,” and Tolstoy in a passage of his
autobiography, and to this stage they both returned again and again.
Both stood on the same level of undifferentiated animal consciousness.
The intellectual development of both was fragmentary, the spiritual
evolution always at the mercy of some catastrophic “conversion.” What
Tolstoy describes himself as being at twenty he remained at fifty,
and the Whitman of the earliest “Leaves of Grass” is the same Whitman
that wrote “Specimen Days” twenty years later. To live in this fashion
is extremely difficult under modern civilised conditions, and Tolstoy
might have easily passed through a physical breakdown similar to that
which cut short Whitman’s career, had he not married an able and
efficient woman, and been the inheritor of a large estate. For the
Adamic vision, as I have described it, neither looks at things with the
practical materialistic vision of most modern men, nor at them with
the idealistic vision of the minority. It sees at once both sides, and
neither. To it a tree is not only a symbol of grateful shade, greenness
and eternal retreat from men, but also so much mere wood to be cut
down and burnt, and ultimately only a tree. The civilised man sees now
one side, now the other; the primitive man, the true Adamite sees both.
It would be very easy to show how passage after passage in Tolstoy’s
work corresponds with other passages in Whitman’s work in this
quality of Adamic vision. One need only contrast the horse race in
“Anna Karenina,” the battle-fields or the burning of Moscow in “War
and Peace,” or that marvellous scene (also in “Anna Karenina”) where
the peasants mow the grass, and the proprietor of the fields takes
part in their labour, with many a passage out of Whitman--the superb
description of late afternoon in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the
passage beginning “I am the mashed fireman with breast-bone broken” in
“Song of Myself,” the completely captured sense of flight in “To the
Man-of-War-Bird,” the amazing rhythm and pulse of the sea-shore in “Out
of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and many another poem. These two men
were so completely innocent and indifferent as regards intellectual
aspirations and metaphysical struggles that when confronted with
nature in its grandest and simplest aspects (which too is innocent and
indifferent) they at once felt at home, and gave us not “nature seen
through a temperament,” so much as nature itself.
It is important also in this connection to note that both possessed a
supreme power of painting war. Whitman doubtless inherited a dislike
of war from his Quaker ancestry, and Tolstoy certainly opposed
war theoretically as being contrary to his favourite doctrine of
non-resistance. Yet it was precisely these two non-resisters who
gave us the most supreme war documents that we possess. The battle
scenes in “War and Peace” are unmatched in all literature except by
Whitman’s own “Drum-Taps.” Nor is there anything strange in this. To
the non-resistant, the man whose soul has learned a wise passivity,
the upholder of “vegetable life,” such as Whitman and Tolstoy were,
war is simply the spectacle of nature seen at its highest moment:
casually beautiful, unconsciously cruel, monotonous, arbitrary,
heedless of both good and evil. It is the logician, the metaphysician,
who escapes from this viewpoint and regards war as purposive action,
or as purposeless savagery. Neither Whitman nor Tolstoy were able to
take this attitude. To both war remained a Dionysiac orgy of nature, in
which they were able to merge their own passivity, and neither had the
slightest notion of the aims for which the side to which they happened
not to be attached was fighting for. Whitman supposed that the North
in the Civil War was fighting nothing but the “southern slave power,”
forgetting that the ranks of the South were filled not by mercenaries
(which every slave-power supports) but by free mountaineers in
butternut homespun, who had never owned a slave in their lives, were
utterly undisciplined in their ideas of freedom, and loved the cause
of local independence more than their lives; while the northern armies
increasingly became full of conscripted German and Irish immigrants
without the remotest attachment to their adopted country. And Tolstoy
equally marred the whole plan of his “War and Peace” with a portrait of
Napoleon that is nothing but spiteful and partisan caricature--he makes
Napoleon little short of idiotic, forgetting utterly that the Napoleon
who crossed the Russian frontier was a Napoleon who had acquired the
fatal habit of hesitation--extremely common in Russia--and that the
army he led had equally acquired the habit of indiscipline--another
Russian trait.
2
But this is not the place for a complete estimate of these two great
men. Otherwise, we would be obliged to take into account the fact
that Tolstoy began as a psychological analyst, and progressed through
ever broader objectivity to his final transformation into a moral
feuilletonist, while Whitman exactly reversed the process. Our object
here is a more difficult one; to examine the type of mind likely to
be produced by such frontier civilisations as America and Russia, and
thereby to estimate their influence on other minds. The problem is
psychological and social, rather than cultural and literary. Therefore
we must pass on from the great achievements of these two men to the
narrower and more purely personal foundations of æsthetic theory on
which those achievements rested.
The aim of the Transcendentalists was to transform native New England
independence of character into something culturally significant by
interfusing it with pantheistic mysticism derived alike from Hindu
and American Indian sources. The aim of the Slavophils was to exalt
the primitive folk culture and institutions of the Russian peasant by
similarly emphasising its mystic and Orthodox Christian side. The one
rested on the zemstvo of the Russian village; the other on the New
England town meeting. Each was in fact nothing more than a theory based
upon the assumption that the Russian, or American, was as such superior
to the European.
To this theory Whitman and Tolstoy responded by making a practical
experiment. What they said in effect was this:--“You say the ordinary
bark-shoed peasant, the ordinary New England backwoodsman, is capable
of finer shades of feeling than any that Europe can show. Very well
then. We will be respectively in our lives a backwoodsman and a
peasant, and thereby transform ourselves into the greatest artists of
our country.”
Viewed from this standpoint Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas” and his
Preface to the first edition of “Leaves of Grass” are the most
important of his writings, as Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” and his later
polemics are the most important of his. Both artists started from
themselves, and tried to deduce a general law from a particular
instance. Whitman’s proposition (to take that first) was, if we
disengage it from the vague phraseology in which he chose to wrap it,
as follows:--
“America differs from anything either European or Asiatic in the fact
that it is politically entirely a democracy. Yet this democracy will
never come to anything unless it produces forms of art, literature,
religion to correspond to its native institutions. These forms of art
can only grow on this soil, in their appropriate atmosphere, and to
make them grow I will produce poems such as I think any democratic
person can truly read and enjoy. These works or works akin in spirit to
them must become, in the future, the perfect canons of form.”
To this specious plea American democracy responded by twice prosecuting
Whitman’s work for alleged indecency; by almost literally starving
him to death--if he had not been maintained by special European
financial support after his breakdown in 1872, this starvation might
have been an accomplished fact--and by neglecting him in his life and
afterwards. It is true that Whitman took compensation in his last years
by surrounding himself with a small group of adulators who went to the
extent of comparing him to Buddha and Christ. But his own work and his
life suffered. If he had not mistakenly thought his own message (with
all its blunders) more important than any life he might live, he might
perhaps have married Mrs. Gilchrist or another, and have recovered
strength enough to give us a second masterpiece, equal to “Leaves of
Grass.” His achievement, with its very human traits, has suffered
woefully from being concealed in the clouds of incense cast to heaven
by a tiny minority of Whitman-idolaters. As a matter of fact, not one
in ten thousand or a hundred thousand Americans is ever able to get
anything out of his poetry, or to realise that his theory is anything
but an utter confusion of art and morals. Whitman has had no successor
in his own country, and the chief influence of his work has been abroad.
Tolstoy’s problem was very similar. He, too, as a combination of
mystic and rationalist, set himself the task of practically realising
the programme of Slavophilism; but the path he had to pursue to this
end was in itself very different from that which the Slavophils
followed. He had first of all to forget the fact that he was born a
landowner, with all the caste prejudices and conservative impulses of
the agricultural nobility; and he had to become as nearly as possible,
inwardly and outwardly a peasant. It took Tolstoy a long time, and in
the end left him with a much clearer, albeit a more radical message,
than Whitman. This message he sets out in his famous “What is Art?”
The basis of Tolstoy’s æsthetics is contained in the following
sentences:--“Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man
consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others
feelings that he has lived through, and that others are infected by
these feelings and also experience them.” And further “Art is not, as
the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of
beauty or of God; it is not, as the æsthetic physiologists say, a game
in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the
expression of man’s emotion by external signs, it is not the production
of pleasing objects, and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a
means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings
and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of
individuals and of humanity.”
It is worth noting, in regard to the first part of this definition,
that apparently an art which has ceased to infect humanity with its
feelings, has ceased to become art in Tolstoy’s eyes. Let us take for
example the well-known example of Cretan art. Undoubtedly, this was
art, and infected people with its feelings at one time. The Cretan
civilisation however perished, and remained unknown till the late
nineteenth century. During all this time, the Cretans according to
Tolstoy’s definition, were not artists since their art infected no
one with its feelings. Suddenly, after Sir Arthur Evans’ discoveries
the Cretans became artists again. In other words, Tolstoy takes the
capacity of art to influence others for good or ill, for art itself.
Precisely the same mistake was made by Whitman. He too supposed that
poetry, simply because it was poetry, would have the capacity to
breed a “huskier race of orators and bards,” would unite America in
“the manly love of comrades,” would even be eugenic in its effect of
producing the ideally perfect type of woman. The error in both cases is
rather like that of a man who has mistaken the programme of a concert
for the effect of the music upon him.
But there is still a more serious error behind Tolstoy’s doctrine.
He declares, in revolt against the “art for art’s sake” doctrine
fashionable in his time, that “art is a means for union among men,
joining them together in the same feelings.” He might have reflected
that the only art that had historically done so was, like the
cathedral-art of the Middle Ages, rooted entirely in a religious
doctrine accepted by all ranks of society, and it was this religious
and moral doctrine, and not the quality of the work itself, that made
it “a means for union among men.” But Tolstoy in his rationalistic
fervour, had already rejected the mystical solution of the Orthodox
faith, and unlike Whitman, did not hope to replace the older attitude
towards religion with any new outlook. Consequently he argued that
art which did not teach human unity and brotherhood was not art at
all, and devoted himself to demolishing Shakespeare and Wagner, the
nineteenth century Frenchmen, and ultimately his own best work. He
tried to transform art into a moral tract for peasant consumption; and
supposed that unless he became a peasant himself, he could not any
longer be an artist. The error was enormous. It is not by wearing bast
shoes and plowing one’s own fields that one acquires the range of power
and feeling necessary to create an epic like “War and Peace” or the
“Iliad.” To behave as Tolstoy did, is simply to mistake the outward
means of life for its end in inner spirituality. A Saint Francis, a
Lao-Tze, could cast away the whole apparatus of luxury and vanity and
remain great artists, because the feeling of such men remained on the
same plane of transcendental human understanding as that of Beethoven
or of Shakespeare. But Tolstoy did not ultimately understand or share
anyone’s feelings but his own, and he made war incessantly upon his own
nature. Therefore he drew upon himself Dostoevsky’s profound criticism
that he was like “an animal who runs in a certain direction till he has
to turn his head, and cannot do so without turning his entire body,
and running in the opposite direction.” And the profound criticism of
Whitman is to be found in the writings of a Southerner, Lanier, who
remarked that just because the Mississippi River or Niagara Falls were
great, Whitman thought he could become equally great by writing about
them.
3
Whitman and Tolstoy both failed in their aims, but Whitman’s enforced
admission of failure wrung from him in the end an attitude that is more
attractive, humanly speaking, than Tolstoy’s final inhuman rejection
of all human contact. It was fortunate, however, that both died before
they saw the inevitable end to which their theories led. Whitman’s
glorification of the average American, instead of the rare exception,
developed a race of human beings of which Mr. Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt”
is the type; the completely self-satisfied, idea-hating, greedy
and noisily vulgar herd-man of the Middle West, without æsthetic
imagination or spiritual depth of any kind. Tolstoy’s ideal of a
peasant aristocracy no less in the end developed the “kulak,” becoming
familiar to us since the Bolshevist accession to power:--the peasant
who having made his bargain with the community, becomes so inert and
rooted in his power that he will not even grow a grain of corn more
than is necessary to feed himself, nor acquire the education that is
offered him beyond the extent that his own interests dictate. The two
types closely resemble each other and we may have more to say about
them. For the present it is enough to observe that Tolstoy and Whitman
sacrificed their lives and strength and talents (which were not small
ones) towards the establishment of states of society and of human
types that, if either were alive to-day, they would be the first to
reject. The reason why this result came about was due, however, not to
some personal fault of their own, but to mistaken premises on the part
of great masses of their own countrymen. The Transcendentalists had
exalted self-reliance, which in the end comes down to a bare personal
preference by which the Philistine is the equal of the artist and
above all social discipline. Whitman simply led this hypothesis to its
natural conclusion. The Slavophils had mistaken the rooted inertia and
conservatism of the peasant for a superior spiritual faith; Tolstoy
showed that this faith could not subsist on the same terms as the faith
that had produced the masterpieces of higher culture. Each made what
was essentially the same mistake. Both overlooked the fact that we
cannot make man better, or nobler, or happier in the last resort--we
cannot lift life above the level on which it stands--merely by
multiplying the common denominator of the needs and desires of humanity.
Chapter XII
The Civil War in America and Alexander Second’s freeing of the serfs
in Russia, which took place at the same time, were very different
in their effect upon the two countries. The Civil War, as the most
intelligent of the Transcendentalists, Thoreau and Hawthorne, foresaw,
was not likely to turn out into a victory of New England mysticism
over Southern rationalism and materialism. The desperate gallantry and
lost-cause chivalry with which the South flung itself into the struggle
and maintained it for the first two years, soon disabused everyone
but the politicians. The real balance of power lay with the northern
industrialists, busily making munitions and army equipment, and with
the population of the yet unformed border communities of Illinois,
Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas. After 1862 the victory, if victory was to
be won, would fall with its spoils, not to the abolitionists (the
most honest of whom, William Lloyd Garrison, was in favor of letting
the South go) nor to the small group of learned and cultivated New
Englanders, but to the steel magnates of Pennsylvania, the squatter
immigrants of the prairie, rapidly building Chicago, their true
capital, where the name of Emerson was unknown. The Civil War was the
first heavy defeat for American culture, and it is doubtful if America
has ever completely recovered from it. Coming as it did, before either
the North or the South had reached their fullest mental development,
and while the West was still mentally and physically undeveloped, it
only transferred power to the frontier and provided another episode in
the progressive decentralisation and deculturisation of America.
Far otherwise was it at the other end of the scale. Alexander’s action
in liberating the serfs, and his own liberal tendencies, sent a wave of
hope over everyone in Russia, and not least over the Slavophils. Their
programme was about to be accomplished. The next twenty years following
1860 is the richest and most remarkable period in Russian literature
until we reach the period that beginning about 1900, covers the present
day. During this time not only Tolstoy did his best work, which we have
already dealt with, but these years also covered the entire mature
achievement of another great Russian, who in his absolute uniqueness as
a spiritual force, surpasses even Tolstoy: Feodor Dostoevsky. One of
the few figures that we can remotely set beside him (and that we can do
so even remotely is a fact in itself of some significance) is that of
his American contemporary Herman Melville.
There can be little basis for comparison between the outward careers
of the son of the poor Russian doctor (with Volhynian, perhaps remote
Polish blood in his veins) who came to St. Petersburg at the age of
twenty-two to make a literary sensation with his first story, and who,
three years later, having taken part in meetings of a group of young
Socialists of markedly westernizing tendencies, was sent off to penal
servitude in Siberia, where he remained for ten years; and the life
of the scion of two of the proudest and most aristocratic of American
colonial families, who became stricken with poverty at twelve, ran away
to sea, tried school-teaching for three years, shipped aboard a whaler
at twenty-two, returned at twenty-four, married, poured out literary
work for about ten years, and relapsed again into the silence of
complete oblivion for over twenty years. When one adds the detail that
Dostoevsky’s period of imprisonment and exile in Siberia very nearly
corresponds to Melville’s sole period of creative work (1849-1859 in
Dostoevsky’s case, and 1847-1856 in Melville’s) one realises that
neither time nor space can be used as a basis of comparison. The
true comparison lies inward: in the unique spiritual torment, the
unsatisfied thirst for perfection that made Dostoevsky and Melville
what they were.
In the history of every great nation there comes a time when the need
of men to find what may be called the Golden Age becomes acute. This
search for the ideal, as it influences literature, is often attacked
by modern literary critics under the name of Romanticism. Nevertheless
nineteenth century Romanticism has very little in common with this
particular striving, which probably affected the Greeks just when they
touched high-water mark in the fifth century, certainly was present
with the Romans from Virgil onwards, and woke again with the first
stirrings of the Italian Renaissance. It seems as if man cannot create
his highest flights of beauty and imagination without the longing for
some marvellous Utopia to be finally achieved to lure him on. In the
case of the English race, the prospect and aspiration towards this
Golden Age in dream and in reality spanned the age of the Tudors, and
Shakespeare speaks its last farewell in “The Tempest’s” air-borne
music. To the Americans and the Russians the hope of a new birth,
arising from the ashes of the past, had existed as we have seen, from
the beginning; but their literature had been born prematurely old and
disillusioned in regard to what was the faith, not of the cultured few,
but the majority. Hawthorne had turned away from the life of his epoch
to brood on the shapes evoked for him by ancestral memories. Gogol had,
after a brief attempt to show the heroic past in its tragic splendor,
turned aside to acridly and bitterly satirize the present. But the
forces of Transcendentalism and Slavophilism had shown that however
evil the present might be, life and literary work would be impossible
in Russia and America, without hope and trust in the future. This
hope Tolstoy and Whitman tried to turn into hard, rational, everyday
reality. Melville and Dostoevsky on the other hand were not concerned
with what was practical reality--their aspirations were too great for
that--but with the vaster if more indefinite world of human hearts and
souls. They sought to go beyond the gospel of Transcendentalism and
Slavophilism into a search for the ultimate perfection of the human
type.
2
Feodor Michaelovitch Dostoevsky was born on October 30, 1821, at
Moscow. His father was an army doctor, who combined in his life the
vices of alcoholism and of avarice. The family was well-to-do, and
possessed estates in the country, together with a certain number of
serfs, but the elder Dostoevsky (who had many of the characteristics
of old Karamazov) not only denied his family support, but behaved in
such an insupportable manner towards his own peasants, that while on
a visit to one of his estates, he was smothered by the serfs with the
cushions of his own carriage. This tragic event haunted Dostoevsky
through all his later life. About the mother (who appears to have been
an ineffectual, harmless personage) we know little. Young Dostoevsky
was sent with his brother to St. Petersburg at twenty-one, to join
the Government Corps of Engineers, but soon abandoned this to take up
writing. Already he was afflicted with a mild form of epilepsy, which
was aggravated by his disorderly and riotous mode of existence. His
first novel, “Poor Folk,” created a mild sensation; the “literature
of pity,” the sentimental novel of the Dickens type was in the air,
and Dostoevsky’s work was of the sort to please the public taste. He
became acquainted with Belinsky and Nekrassov, the leading critic and
poet of the time, and was hailed as the true heir of Gogol’s tradition.
He soon became familiar with the advanced literary circles, which
were extremely radical in politics, and this led to his downfall. He
joined the political group of one Petrachevsky where the questions of
constitutional government on the English model, abolition of serfdom,
and freedom of the press were ardently debated. The whole group was
arrested, and after having the death-sentence passed on them, were
led into the prison yard to be executed, when a messenger came forward
announcing that this sentence had been commuted to imprisonment and
exile in Siberia. There Dostoevsky remained for ten years, till 1859.
It was not until after his return to Russia, and after his marriage
which took place in Siberia had proved a total failure, and after a
violent and lacerating love affair with a demoniacal and coldly proud
woman, that Dostoevsky found himself as a writer. The book in which
he found himself, though it has not the fame of the greater novels,
is in reality the key to his life and thought. It is called “Memories
from the Underground,” and was written in 1862. It was followed by
“Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “The Gambler,” “The Possessed” (to
give it its English title; the Russian title is, properly speaking,
“Devils”), and “The Brothers Karamazov.” During these later years,
Dostoevsky’s life was not less harrowing than during the earlier. His
second marriage, with a young unspoilt girl who was devoted to him,
gave him some happiness, but his later years were harassed by constant
money troubles, and from 1867 to 1874 he had to live abroad, as a
penniless bankrupt. This state of affairs was further aggravated by a
mania for gambling which possessed him, and by his epileptic seizures,
now grown acute. His complete break with the Western liberals of
his youth, and his whole-hearted adoption of a mysticism resting on
Orthodoxy, alienated his early friends; and the Slavophils with whose
doctrines he now sympathised were repelled by his rudeness of manner,
his contempt for good society, and a sort of masked anarchism that
they perceived in him. Nevertheless, his “Brothers Karamazov,” which
appeared in the year before his death, made Dostoevsky popular, and his
Pushkin address, delivered a few months before the end, was a sort of
apotheosis. He died suddenly, as the result of an aggravated quarrel
with some relatives over money affairs, early in 1881.
Dostoevsky’s thought may be thus summarized: The human soul was to
him of incommunicable, unique value. And not only the human soul of
the higher ranks of society, but that of the lower, the “injured and
oppressed,” those who had been warped and embittered by the world and
by man. Dostoevsky knew well that he was such a warped individual, and
that nothing could heal him except some miracle of divine and earthly
harmony. This miracle could only be brought about by the production of
some superior human type, who would at once be “master of the world,”
a superman and yet one who sympathised and understood the lowest and
most degraded of men. But the trouble was that such types, the Father
Zossimas, the Alyosha Karamazovs, the Prince Myshkins, stood aloof from
the world and innocent of its temptations, they were ineffectual pure
fools, and in the world’s eyes, “Idiots.” On the other hand the world,
and Russia in particular (in whose destiny Dostoevsky forced himself
to believe with the anguished fervor of one who had been made to
suffer by it, and yet who had no other country) was likely to progress
in the exactly opposite direction and to produce the anti-Christian
“superman,” the serene monster, cold-bloodedly dabbling in ultimate
iniquity. Dostoevsky’s major work is a vast descent into the abyss
of human perversion, at the bottom of which stood hell, like a “cold
bathhouse filled with spiders.” If Tolstoy was as Adam before the fall,
Dostoevsky was Adam after.
Herman Melville, on the other hand, was born in the inner circle of
America’s colonial aristocracy. His father, a descendant of English
landowners and Revolutionary patriots, travelled abroad as a young man,
was highly cultivated for his time, but allowed the family fortune
to slip through his fingers. He died when Melville was only twelve
years old, leaving his family bankrupt. His mother, a cold, proud, and
essentially selfish descendant of the most notable of the colonial
Dutch settlers who had rallied to Washington’s side, did nothing
to mitigate the poverty of her family, and at the age of seventeen,
Melville shipped before the mast as a common seaman on a voyage to
Liverpool. This voyage, later described in “Redburn,” seems to have
opened Melville’s eyes to the cruelty and injustice of the world. He
returned after a painful experience as a penniless waif in England, to
America, and tried school teaching for a number of years. Meanwhile
he was writing, desultorily and badly. In 1840, when twenty-one years
of age, he again, in a fit of desperation, went to sea, this time on
a whale ship bound to the South Seas. How he deserted his ship at the
Marquesas, lived for a time with cannibals, returned to Tahiti, saw the
inside of a jail, and finally became a common seaman aboard an American
man-of-war which brought him back to his native country, is all fully
told in his first two books “Typee,” “Omoo,” and their later successor
“White Jacket.” The return to America in 1846 enabled Melville to
devote himself to literature, and his first book “Typee,” recounting
his adventures in the Marquesas, made a sensation in England and
America, being a “success of scandal” in the latter country on account
of certain passages not complimentary to the missionaries in the South
Seas. After writing its successor, “Omoo,” Melville married. The
marriage, with a woman of wealth and position, brought only further
disillusionment, as it is apparent that Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of
the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, had neither imagination nor tact
to sympathise with her husband’s work nor his sensitive temperament.
A family of children soon engrossed her, and Melville was forced to
struggle on alone in the effort to support not only his wife, but his
mother (who despised him heartily) and his wife’s sister as well. There
followed in rapid succession, “Mardi” (1848), “Redburn” (1848) and
“White Jacket” (1849) written to support his waning fortunes. In 1849,
he went to England, which had begun to take very favourable notice of
his work, and he might have become there a minor literary lion, but
family concerns, and perhaps also his own aloof independence of spirit,
soon recalled him. The first fruits of his return were “Moby Dick” and
“Pierre,” the two masterpieces of the mature Melville. A disastrous
fire at his publishers which destroyed the plates of his works, the
hostility of the reviewers to “Pierre,” Hawthorne’s defection from
friendship, the increasing lack of understanding of his own family, and
ill-health, all conspired to embitter him. After one or two further
attempts, and a second trip abroad on which he wrote the poem “Clarel,”
which could not even find a publisher, Melville retired from the field.
His last years were spent as collector of the customs of the port of
New York, where he died in 1891. His death passed absolutely unnoticed,
and it is only in the last decade that he has begun to emerge into the
fame that life denied him.
Melville’s work began as a continuation of the adventure story as
practised by Cooper. “Typee” and “Omoo” are largely what they purport
to be; a sublimation of actual experience of a white man amongst
strange countries and savage peoples with a considerable dash of
idyllic and exotic colouring. But Melville’s attitude towards the
savages of the South Seas (to which he came, be it noted, after the
disillusionment and shattering of early romantic hopes recounted in
“Redburn”) was very different from the skilled idealisation of the
remote practised by Cooper. He was the first man to ask himself and
others the question, “If this savage life is so much more rational and
sensible than Christianity, why pretend to be Christian?”--a question
to which to this day there has remained no answer. Thus he early became
profoundly suspicious of the virtues of his own countrymen, while at
the same time (like Dostoevsky) he knew himself innately bound to his
own country by unbreakable ties. He thus affirms the sole achievement
that Christianity really has to its credit, the conquest of the world
by democracy, while at the same time his eyes are open to all the
evil done daily in the world in the name of democracy. This profound
division of self, this inner warping grew up early in him, and the
struggle was but intensified by his boyish adoration of his selfish,
purse-proud, and beautiful mother, which turned to disgust after his
father’s death. Thus he interjected into the sea-story elements which
had nothing whatever to do with realistic experience; elements derived
from his profound knowledge of the ways of humanity, intensified by
his own loneliness and aloofness from mankind. Very early he seems
to have traversed the waste of German metaphysics, and to have
become a transcendentalist, if not before Emerson, at least coeval
with Hawthorne. Each of the major novels, “Redburn,” “White Jacket,”
“Moby Dick,” “Mardi,” is less the description of an actual voyage
than a terrible allegoric record of spiritual defeat and despair.
Even “Redburn,” the one most based perhaps on actual experience, is
haunted by the figure of Jackson, a vision of pure unadulterated evil;
and the two last are desperate flights of imagination away from the
world. In all his best work, except “Pierre,” Melville makes us walk
a ship’s deck, which should be the breeding ground of the most mystic
whole-hearted democracy on earth, and in every line and passage he
shows us how this fair scene, seen from within man’s soul, is only hell.
3
It is customary among literary critics to devote attention to
Melville’s remarkable style, and to stress the point that Dostoevsky’s
major novels are nothing but glorified detective stories. It is true
that Melville possessed a style that in its measured eloquence was the
equal and sometimes the superior of his models, De Quincey and Sir
Thomas Browne, and that--at its best--makes the style of Hawthorne
shrivel into insignificance. It is true also that all of Dostoevsky’s
great works centre about a commonplace murder, and that he uses the
most elementary devices of suspense and horror to heighten our interest
about this murder. But the significant thing is that neither Melville’s
long purple passages, surcharged with descriptive power, by which he
makes you see every detail of his scenes in an unearthly light, nor
Dostoevsky’s interminable hysteric conversations, in which each of
his characters tries in turn to lay bare the inmost criminal secret
of his or her soul, are anything more than skilful devices to set out
the heart of the subject, which is in both cases the complete, candid,
and terribly disillusioned revelation of the workings of the naked and
helplessly-entangled human soul. Both carried pure character-creation
to a point beyond that which any other writer has attempted, except
perhaps Shakespeare in “Hamlet”; and both, like Shakespeare in
“Hamlet,” were obsessed by their characters, and obsessed above all by
the “mystery of iniquity,” the infinite perversion and moral deformity
of humankind.
It is possible to show how this is so only by a direct comparison of
the masterpiece of both men. “The Brothers Karamazov” is outwardly, at
least, the story of the murder of a wealthy landowner by his sons. But
a moment’s examination of the character of old Karamazov, the landowner
in question, will convince us that no such man as old Karamazov could
possibly exist in actual flesh. He transcends all human limitations.
He is not only a coarse wine-bibber, and an avaricious miser with his
money, like Dostoevsky’s own father, but an unbridled sensualist, a
cynic, a sentimentalist, and a buffoon--none of which Dostoevsky’s
father ever was. He is, in short, an encyclopædia of all Russian vices,
is in fact, a symbol of that Old Russia which Dostoevsky saw had to
be put to death. And as such, he triumphs in life and death over his
sons. The oldest, Ivan, who is also the noblest, sees his faith in
God and man destroyed by the monstrous conduct of his father, and
goes insane; the second, Dmitri, follows a crooked path of sensuality
and sentimentality, but is redeemed by some traits of generosity for
which he has to suffer; the youngest of all, Alyosha, fancies that he
has gained redemption and become “a new man” by entering a monastery,
but in the end has to admit that he too is in essence “Karamazov.”
The actual murder is consummated by Smerdyakov, the unacknowledged
offspring of Karamazov himself and a gutter-drab; he hangs himself, and
Dmitri has to suffer the penalty. The end of the book leaves Dostoevsky
questioning alike human and divine justice; there is no solution,
except perhaps in suffering, and the shout of “Hurrah for Karamazov!”
with which the story closes, may conceal an even deadlier irony.
Melville’s “Moby Dick” is very different as regards setting, but its
import is even more clear. Here we have what purports to be the story
of a whaling-cruise. But in fact the story from beginning to end is
pure allegory, thinly disguised with masses of irrelevant detail about
whales and whaling. Moby Dick, the White Whale, whose killing is the
special aim of the ship’s cruise, is nothing but a symbol: a symbol of
the unearthly, unconquerable, superhuman--and after all is said and
done, strangely beautiful--power of evil. He exists in every sea of the
world, but it is precisely in the “Pacific,” in the heart of a noonday
calm, that he is found. He has been sighted before, but never without
disaster; has been hunted by others, but has always escaped. Captain
Ahab, master of the ship that is now seeking him, has been disabled by
him, in a previous encounter, having lost one leg. This Captain Ahab is
Melville’s symbol of the human will in its highest and most courageous
aspect; the human will that, not having been able to conquer evil by
fair means, in direct battle, now strives to do so by unhallowed ones.
By a stroke of superb genius, Melville makes him master even of the
souls of simple savages; his three chief harpooners are respectively a
South Sea Islander, a Negro, and an American Indian. His control over
his three mates, all of whom represent some shade of manly courage, is
also practically absolute. Moby Dick is duly hunted, and destroys the
ship and Ahab alike in a scene whose magnificence of prose and mounting
terror alike have no parallel in anything written by man. The only
person who has foreseen the inevitable tragedy is an idiot boy, to whom
no one pays attention; the only one who survives it is the outcast,
Ishmael, who tells the story.
Here, too, the parallel with Shakespeare is inevitable. As Dostoevsky
recalls “Hamlet,” and in part “Othello,” so Melville recalls the
Shakespeare of “Macbeth” and “King Lear.” If we can suppose a Lear
endowed with superhuman force, who instead of wandering out upon
the heath and raving, feeds his insanity with the steady thought of
revenge, and at last sets out, backed by others, to accomplish it,
we get in this Lear a complete picture of Ahab. He is undaunted, so
long as his ship lasts, ready to match weapons with God Himself. Only
when his ship goes down before the battering onrush of the superhuman
power behind Moby Dick does Ahab momentarily give way; and then but to
recover and hurl another unavailing harpoon at his antagonist. Ship
and captain alike go down in the struggle, and the last thing seen is
a topmast pennon floating above the waters, with a sky-hawk entangled
in its folds: “And so the bird of heaven with his whole captive form
enfolded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship which, like
Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of
heaven along with her, and helmeted herself in it.” “Then all collapsed
and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand
years ago.” To the problem of evil Melville has no more an answer,
then, than Dostoevsky. He can but suggest that if evil conquers, it
is so much the worse for God who lets evil conquer; a solution to
which Dostoevsky might have answered in the words of Kirillov in
“The Possessed,” that God in that case was dead, and man must become
God. That Melville adds his favourite tag “all is vanity,” to this
conclusion would seem to Dostoevsky an impertinence. “We have to live
nevertheless,” he might have retorted; a fact poor Melville often
neglected to take into account.
Before Melville arrived at this conclusion, that the world was more
evil than good, he too had striven to portray the ideal human type of
his dreams. Jack Chase in “White Jacket” (who is significantly made an
Englishman) is the apotheosis of Melville’s type; the bluff, hearty,
pleasant Anglo-Saxon blend of Pagan and Puritan. Perhaps it was his own
wavering between England and America (where the bluff, hearty, pleasant
type is but too frequently in practice a hypocrite and a bully to boot)
that made Melville select for his life’s loyalty, this sort of being,
and not continue his search into the deeper waters of the human soul;
certainly it was his own reticent prudery in sexual matters--a prudery
not shared by the great Russian with whom his name is here linked--that
made him hesitate before what must have been the final statement of his
problem. What that statement might have been, “Pierre” exists to show;
Melville in the end meant to portray evil as seductive but ruinous, and
good as purely negative and helpless. The public would have none of
this, and Melville decided to keep silent about the dangerous secret
of his own philosophy. That he did not continue to write was America’s
second great disaster in the field of culture; following on the Civil
War, it was a double fatality scarcely paralleled elsewhere, and
certainly not in Russia. But in his transformation of the realistic
adventure story into the “allegory of Good and Evil” Melville perhaps
pointed the way to American authors as yet unborn.
Chapter XIII
The last chapter of our study of the two literatures--Russian and
American--has, in its study of four great figures, brought the story
to a climax. Nothing is more characteristic of the mental history of
the two countries than the way in which under Whitman and Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky and Melville, the whole problem of democracy in relation to
art, and the whole problem of human aspiration in its strife with evil,
was examined and investigated. But the generation that followed was not
able to profit by their example. The great climax was succeeded by an
anti-climax; and Russian literature, no less than American literature,
after the seventies, assumes the picture of a sterile and uncultivated
plain.
This state of affairs was due to the operation of social and economic
causes. The great reforms adopted in Russia by Alexander II to
signalise his advent to the throne were halted; first, by an attempt
at assassination made in 1866; second, by the sort of advance _en
masse_ which always takes place in Russian history after a period of
increasing internal peace and prosperity. The surplus population of
released serfs and discontented landowners now swarmed east across the
Urals and opened up the whole of the fertile lands of Siberia to the
borders of Mongolia. This expansion was followed by the usual reaction
in the shape of a war with Russia’s old enemy Turkey (1877); a war
in which Russia gained nothing, and which disillusioned everybody,
including even the Slavophils.
The course of events in America was not essentially different. The
close of the Civil War marked an enormous expansion of the American
territory westward, and the whole region, from the foothills of the
Rockies to the Sierras and beyond to the Pacific became inhabited. The
first transcontinental railway was built in the shape of the Missouri
Pacific; and the period of the seventies was a period of furious
speculation, of fierce political tension, of steady industrial growth
and agricultural expansion. In this “Gilded Age” of America’s new-won
prosperity, the question of a native culture and of the fine arts were
largely lost sight of. The only part of the country that resisted the
general drive towards increasing economic and industrial development
was the South, and that lay fettered and bound by the Reconstruction
Acts, and was unable to do anything for itself until after 1876--the
date of the Tilden-Hayes election.
The prevailing characteristic of this period is the increasing
influence of Europe upon the two countries. Alexander Second’s action
in liberating the serfs had thrown the gates open to all the ideas of
European liberalism. The opening up of the western plains and the vast
region between the Rockies and the Pacific with its wealth in minerals,
as well as its cattle-raising possibilities, opened the gates no less
to the countless hosts of European settlers. The Irish had already been
coming since the terrible famine years of 1845-7, and the Germans too
had come over ever since the forties. By the outbreak of the Civil War
the original native-born population had begun to be outnumbered by the
hosts of immigrants that passed steadily through the Narrows. After
1870, with the Prussian monarchy in complete control over Germany, the
House of Savoy in control of Italy, and England less disposed than
ever to give the Irish Home Rule, the swarms of immigrants increased,
fed by thousands whose ancestors had fought and died in the cause of
Republicanism in some part or the other of Europe, and by millions who
were attracted across the Atlantic simply by the steamer-agent’s tales
of Western prosperity. The Italians, notably, soon became as prominent
as the Irish and the Germans; and to all these races were added
Scandinavians, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Poles from the eastern
frontiers of Europe, and Jews from every part of the world. The three
states of the remote northwest, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho increased
their population from 282,000 in 1880 to 763,000 in 1890 and to two
millions in 1910; while California which contained only five hundred
thousand people when the first transcontinental railway was finished
in 1869, added more than half the same number to its inhabitants in
the next decade. In twenty years after 1870, the population of Kansas,
Nebraska, and the Dakotas was increased sixfold. The city of Chicago
which had only 350 population in 1833, by 1840 contained over four
thousand, and in 1870 had swollen to the enormous figure of three
hundred thousand! Thus while Russia added to its power by spreading
a homogeneous population over immense tracts of unsettled country
eastward, America obtained a firm grip on its own domain by importing
heterogeneous populations into the vast tract of unsettled country
westward.[7]
It is impossible, therefore, in the thirty years that followed 1865,
to construct anything resembling a cultural history of either Russia
or America. At least, literature will not serve so completely as an
index to the flow of ideas that took place in this period. The Russian
genius during this period manifested itself best in music; this was
the period of Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin. In
America the genius of the race took up architecture, and it was the
Golden Age of Richard Morris Hunt, of Richardson, Root, McKim, Louis
Sullivan, and of the craftsmen like La Farge and St. Gaudens who worked
with them. In each case, it was a period of eclecticism. In Russia
the German-Italian form of symphony and opera was borrowed, and was
filled with a content that was essentially rooted in folk-emotion; in
America the style of the Beaux-Arts or of Ancient Rome or the Early
Middle Ages was equally borrowed, to be infused with native-born force
and energy. The most original--because the least foreign--elements
in this development had the most difficult task to survive. They had
to learn how to speak their message of purely native inspiration in
a language that, through derivation from European tradition, was
completely alien to them. One might draw a not uninstructive parallel
between Mussorgsky, the most Russian of Russian composers, and the
gifted but unfortunate Louis Sullivan. Each had much to say to their
generation that no one would accept. But this is not the place for such
a comparison, inasmuch as we have from the outset decided to confine
our critical investigation to the limits of a single art, that of
literature.
2
American literature during the period of the seventies and eighties
was entirely dominated by the figure of Samuel Langhorne Clemens,
known to innumerable admirers as “Mark Twain.” At first sight, his
work is on so much a lower level than that of Hawthorne, Henry James
or Whitman as to be unworthy of consideration in the opinion of the
few culture-saturated critics who mostly arrange and settle the merit
of authors. And it is worth noticing that Clemens carried out his work
without any particular encouragement from such intellectual critics.
Their encouragement only came to him at the close of his life, when he
was already writing sentimental and feebly grotesque satires on life
in general, and vainly setting up as a philosopher with his assault
on Christian Science, and the desolatingly mechanistic view of life
set out in “What is Man?” The fact is, that for the latter part of his
life, Mark Twain, profiting by an immense popularity, wrote nothing but
superior journalism or feeble echoes of his own inimitable early self.
That early self left an immortal residue in only three volumes--“Tom
Sawyer,” “Huckleberry Finn,” and the first twenty chapters of “Life
on the Mississippi.” If we add to this the figure of Colonel Mulberry
Sellers in the book appropriately called “The Gilded Age,” and a few
chapters of “Roughing It,” we obtain all of Mark Twain that posterity
will presumably read and cherish.
Mark Twain is the perfect type of the backwoodsman in letters. His
early training as a newspaper man gave him sufficient command over
the written word to express himself clearly, and an early roving
life, with its picturesque experience, did the rest. In so far as he
had any philosophy of life at all, it was a doctrine to the effect
that the uncultivated and native present day is worth all the feudal
past, and that homely shrewdness and simplicity is better than
spiritual and intellectual mastery. This doctrine has its affinities
to the glorification of the “average man” preached by Whitman, and
in the later Mark Twain one finds as it were, Whitman simplified and
caricatured:--the Yankee is superior to King Arthur, democracy is
superior to aristocracy, machinery is more than great painting and
music, woman is inevitably a superior _genus_ to man. But no one reads
Mark Twain for his philosophy nowadays, though thousands have read him
for his unsurpassed pictures of frontier types, for his description
of an America that has vanished before the advance of the modern
mechanical civilisation which it brought in its train. The finest
of his works, “Huckleberry Finn,” and “Life on the Mississippi,”
are immense picaresque epics of irresponsible adventure. To find
anything resembling them one has to go back to Europe of the sixteenth
century. They represent a stage of history Europe had long outgrown;
a youth-time in a world which was innocent alike of culture and of
morality. Mark Twain himself said of his finest book that it had
no moral, and that “they who find a plot in it, shall be shot.” In
“Huckleberry Finn” there is no plot but only happenings: a mad, gay,
and cruel _reductio ad absurdum_ of life itself, as lived under
frontier conditions, with the incurable nostalgia for romantic and
picturesque escapades (witness Jim’s release from the lock-up, or the
episode of the false Dauphin and the Duke) leading the story on.
The proper parallel here is with Nicholas Leskov (or Lyeskov). This
author, practically unknown out of Russia, owed his popularity among
the uncultivated public to the astounding freshness of his rendering
of remote Russian life--the life of priests in tiny villages, of
fishermen and hunters, of tramps and vagabonds. It is only of recent
years that foreign critics have observed that in reading Lyeskov, we
are reading the most Russian of authors. Dostoevsky’s Russia is a
distorted picture, tinged with his own spiritual struggle; Tolstoy’s
is a great epic warped by his own perverse intellect; but Lyeskov is
observer pure and simple. He too, like Clemens, had to suffer from an
early period in which his work was utterly despised by the literary
intelligentsia--who were more highly polished and socialistic, in
a materialistic sense, in their work. He also had a late period in
which he comes nearer and nearer to the sentimental side of Tolstoy,
as Clemens had a period in which he apes Whitman. But the essential
Lyeskov is the unsurpassed portrayer of the Russian frontier, and of
its cruel, care-free, and purposeless life. His masterpiece, “The
Enchanted Wanderer,” recently translated into English, is even in
its translation a work of immense sane humanity and humour. Like
“Huckleberry Finn,” it is a picaresque novel, and like that book it has
neither plot nor moral. It is folk-tale pure and simple, stripped of
all accretions of superstition, symbolism, and magic, and with nothing
but the rounded note of a persistent religious nostalgia (akin to Tom
Sawyer’s nostalgic longings for romance and adventure) to give it
coherence.
It would be a mistake however to suppose that either Lyeskov or Mark
Twain were anything more than exceptions in the course of their
respective literatures during this period. The whole epoch from 1870
down to the end of the century is marked by a progressive drifting
apart of the two countries which had so nearly coincided in spirit
in Whitman and Tolstoy, Melville and Dostoevsky. This drifting apart
was marked by an increasing outward standardisation of effort. It
was during this period that the standardised Russian revolutionary,
mouthing all the catchwords of advanced European materialism, began
to appear, to be matched by his contemporary, the standardised
American business man. Each class consumed the sort of literature
that was suited to its palate. In Russia there flourished the peasant
novel of highly socialistic tendencies, the works of Gleb Uspensky,
Pissemsky, Korolenko, and the bitterer and more intellectually upright
Saltykov-Schedrin. In America the type of fiction most in demand dealt
mainly with cultivated, well-to-do people, was generally optimistic in
outlook, but was no less surely an article prepared to satisfy popular
demand. Its best output was in the tales of Howells, Cable, Thomas
Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, Mrs. Wharton. The honest peasant of the
one matches pretty completely the upright capitalist (usually the last
scion of an old southern or New England family) of the other. But the
line of advance, which was to produce the most revolutionary fruit in
the nineties, lay through the short story.
3
The short story as practised in the Occident throughout the nineteenth
century, is in fact a typically oversophisticated and decadent
art-form. To the mind of the highly cultured but impotently sensitive
reader it presents not the great curve of emotion that the finest
poetry offers, not the “allegory addressed to the intellectual
imagination” of great prose, not even the panoramic viewpoint of outer
action or of spiritual abysses that the novel reveals, but a cool
complete piece of minor architecture, a fragment of life, a detached
statement that has neither past nor future implied in it. The short
stories of the East are largely different. They are popular epics, and
different also in their moral earnestness and immense range in short
compass are the short stories of Balzac, Flaubert, Hawthorne. The
technically perfect modern short story has no moral earnestness, no
message, it merely is an incident revealed so completely as to leave no
loophole for the imagination. It is objective reporting, informed by
a mood; and no one carried the art of short story writing further in
these respects than the American Stephen Crane and the Russian Anton
Tchekhov.
The comparison between the methods of Crane and Tchekhov has been made
before, but it is one that will bear reiteration. It extends even to
personal and social characteristics. Both were descendants of old petty
bourgeois families, long settled on the soil. Both graduated through
journalism into their art. Tchekhov began by writing quite commonplace
and feeble comic stories, and Crane wasted a great deal of his time on
hackwork. Both were irregular workers, and were men of feeble health.
Indeed the only difference is that Tchekhov, thanks to his life as a
country physician, matured later and gained a greater final mastery
over his material than Crane.
The aim of both was an entirely impersonal and objective presentation
of life. This has been called realism, but in both Crane’s and
Tchekhov’s case, it came nearer impressionism than realism. Each
was at the mercy of a single mood which is reiterated in their
stories _ad nauseam_. In Tchekhov’s case the mood is deliberately
low-toned, sombre, and neutral--a mood of resignation, of quiescence,
of Buddhistic absorption into Nirvana. In Crane’s case the mood is
one of racketing excitement, fierce and brutal display of energy.
On these two moods each exhausted the resources of their art: Crane
his color vowels, and sudden startling comparisons; Tchekhov his
monotonous deliberately prosaic effect. But in each case, the mood
flows out of an attitude towards life that is the same. To both the
world, and particularly nature, is deliberately hostile, alien to the
human spirit. Before this tragic fact, Tchekhov counselled acceptance,
endurance; Crane on the other hand advocated a furious display of
heroic energy. Thus Crane is most completely the artist when his
frequently violent satiric intention is laid aside, and he can play the
part of the poet of action, as in the superb “Red Badge of Courage,”
which first won him fame, and which is free from his stoical fatalism.
Tchekhov is, on the other hand, at his best in his plays, notably “The
Cherry Orchard,” where he loses sight of his own sentimentalism, and
works with at least some underlying satiric intent. Neither, however,
ever wrote a complete masterpiece, nor were they capable of doing so.
Despite the activities of the Tchekhov cult we must insist that the
American at his best frequently appears the finer artist, as in this
story already mentioned, or in “The Open Boat.” He at least had a
supreme power of visualising a scene, and a trick of individualising
his characters by one outstanding trait or peculiarity which the
Russian lacked, though this is perhaps counterbalanced by Tchekhov’s
more complete mastery over architectural form.
Both were minor writers, because they were fatalists. To the great
writer life is a fatality, frequently a tragedy, but not a tragedy
preordained. But this sense of being doomed by external fatality, by
the insignificant fact, is the very basis of Tchekhov’s work--and
the same sense haunted Crane in his brief, agitated life. They were
both, it is possible, depressed beyond the normal in their personal
temperaments. But still more certainly, the period in which they lived
was one in which major art was not possible. In America the plutocrats
of the Gilded Age were going down in a blaze of glory. Outrageous and
shameless coarseness and corruption was mingled with hypocritic parade
of lip-service to genteel virtue; European snobbery walked arm in arm
with a pretence of democratic simplicity. In Russia, the dreary record
of reaction under Alexander III was trailing to its unhonoured grave in
the sink of official corruption under Nicholas. Both Crane and Tchekhov
were victims of their times, and both held the art for art’s sake
theory far more sincerely probably than their European contemporaries.
Both with supreme skill showed that even when held sincerely, it but
resulted in the best cases, in something philosophically incomplete; at
the worst, in a personal tic, a mannerism.
4
The high technical level to which Crane and Tchekhov had brought their
art, combined with their avoidance of philosophic content, were both
symptoms of the gulf down which the American and the Russian spirit
had descended since the high-water mark in the sixties. Multitudes
of men now knew that something was wrong; but few could suggest a
remedy. Two men, however, by their personal effort, attempted at least
to stay or fix the retrograde movement of the spirit by attempting
the _Weltanschauung_ of a formal philosophy. These men were Vladimir
Soloviev and William James.
Before their coming, neither country had known anything resembling
a formal philosophy. Emerson, it is true, had raised himself to the
dignity of being ranked as one; but Emerson was in truth at bottom
partly a mystic poet, partly a shrewd detached commentator on events.
His best work bears as little relation to philosophy definitely so
called, as the more pessimistically colored--but not less philosophical
in content--poetry of Tyutchev bears to the German transcendentalism
of his time. In any case, James did not derive his philosophy from
Emerson, but from an attitude much more matter-of-fact. He obtained it
from the New England practical spirit, the “desire to get on in life,”
the everyday common sense that was, when he wrote, proving so morally
inadequate to deal with the ever-increasing problems of capitalism and
industrialism. In his insistence on practicality, on the “truth that
works,” on “the cash-value of thought,” William James was nearer to the
needs and demands of the average man as posited by Whitman; and much
of his democratic outlook, his homely honesty of phrase was in fact due
to Whitman. Similarly Soloviev drew his own preoccupation with moral
problems, not from any preceding thinker, but direct from the piercing
analysis of Dostoevsky.
Both James and Soloviev were educated and spent much of their lives
abroad. The substance of their thought was derived in part from
European, in part from American sources. The aim in each case was
to reconcile two divergent streams of thought, to bring them into
harmony. James after an early career in which he had tried to be an
artist, engineer and physician in turn, turned to psychology. But
his real interest lay outside the bounds of psychology--at that time
dominated by the methods of the purely psycho-physical school. His
early upbringing as a Swedenborgian, as well as a highly sensitive
temperament, drew him to the investigation of religious phenomena, and
all his life he strove to reconcile the higher ranges of mysticism,
ecstasy, union with God, heroic self-sacrifice, with the plain
common-sense of the average American type. Thus he was led to attempt
to find a common ground between “radical empiricism”--the search for
the usable truth, the trial-and-error, rule-of-thumb, method of the
pragmatist--and the utterly unpractical absolute standpoint of the
visionary. In order to do so, he had to attack the point of view of
the earlier idealists of the Kant and Hegel type, men who had inherited
something of the old methods of scholasticism. He had to treat human
life and aspiration not as an end, but an instrument; and to regard the
universe not as a finished article, but as a pluralistic chaos. That he
still strove to redeem that chaos consequently became merely a personal
gesture, and not at all a question of final significance. In this, too,
he resembles his spiritual progenitor, Walt Whitman.
Vladimir Soloviev was trained as a historian. He absorbed the
historical sense from his father who had written a history of Russia,
and his early work was devoted to Church History. In examining the
history of Christianity he was struck by the fact that the Eastern and
Western Churches had separated, and that neither was in agreement with
Protestantism. This schism seemed to him to show that Christianity had
somehow failed to fulfil the aim of its Founder, and he set himself
the task of preaching the necessity of an undivided Church. This was
the substance of his book “Russia and the Universal Church” which with
its definitely Romanising tone was forbidden by the Russian censorship
and had to appear first in a French translation. But even the Roman
Church could not hold him for long. Christianity itself was worthless
as a revelation of God’s purpose to man, except where based on a
universal moral law, the “natural religion” of the eighteenth-century
deists. To find this moral law seemed to him the aim of science; to
invest it with all the grandeur of a revelation from on high was the
purpose of religion. Thus Soloviev was led to try and reconcile the
evolutionary theory of the West with the Eastern Orthodox tradition. In
so doing he was forced to oppose the theories of the Schopenhauer and
Tolstoy school which would strip religion of all its magic and mystic
significance, and reduce life to passive non-resistance; a tendency
which as he pointed out, was Buddhist, not Christian.
Moreover there remained for Soloviev the outstanding question which
was, “If there is a universal moral law and if the Church itself can
teach that law better than the Tolstoyan rationalist, why is there so
much evil in the world, and what is the way to get rid of this evil?”
The answer was that the evil was permitted by God, and that the only
way to get rid of it was through ascetism, mortification of the flesh.
There can be no doubt that Soloviev through the adoption of ascetic
practices, deliberately shortened his own life. He was led therefore
more and more to a position in which the whole history of the world
appears as simply a gigantic conflict between Good and Evil. This
position is not Christian; it is in reality, Manichean. There is not
one God, but two; God and Satan divide mankind between themselves,
until the end of the world. Thus Soloviev ultimately found his problem
unsolvable, and lapsed into a pluralism more logical and definite, and
far more honest and despairing than the optimistic pluralism of James.
It seems a great tragedy that the American in the end gave his
adherence to the philosophy of Bergson, with its aimless yielding to
the endless flux, and its refusal of all stability to the intellect;
while the Russian in his turn, preoccupied with the problem of evil,
saw in the end Tolstoy as a precursor of Antichrist and wrote the
half-insane rhapsody of the end of history which fills the last
pages of his “Three Conversations.” But in reality this tragedy was
inevitable in both cases. The endless flux of Bergsonism bolstered
James in the last of his illusions, the illusion that all good
Americans are born and die with, the illusion that in the race of
modern progress, America is ahead of the world and the world will be
saved through her; while Soloviev’s ultimate denial of moral progress,
apart from the established Orthodox faith, saved the last of his
illusions, the typically Russian illusion that Russia by remaining
backward and resisting the West, will yet save the world. Each of
these men is a standing proof that outside the frontiers of Europe,
impersonal thought, thought that is detached from daily circumstances
is utterly impossible. Each is a vivid, embittered, and intensely
honest and typical commentary on the hollowness and pretentiousness of
European philosophy, when applied to conditions of life that remain
outside the orbit of purely European interests.
5
With the onset of the twentieth century, we witness America and
Russia taking up the same weapons in their rearguard battle with
cosmopolitanism and Europeanism. The weapon in each case is that of
realism. Thus in each country a school of writers sprung up to whom
literature was largely a protest against unequal social conditions,
injustices in the body politic, the yawning cleft between the rich
and the poor, and the moral decay consequent upon the general
nineteenth-century “_laissez-faire_” attitude. It is profitable to
compare the school which is represented by Gorky, Kuprin, Bunin, in
Russia with the group whose leading members in America were Edith
Wharton, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Robert Herrick. But we cannot
really distinguish these writers on the basis of literary merit. They
gave us naturalistic documents rather than artistic interpretations.
Their work was interesting as protest mainly: the _Weltanschauung_
of these writers, if they possessed one, was pure naturalism, and as
naturalists pure and simple they produced documents but not art. Some
exception might be made for Gorky and Mrs. Wharton’s “Ethan Frome,” but
except for the fact that the Americans chose their favourite heroes
from business men enmeshed in their own toils, and the Russians from
tramps and outlaws, there is but little otherwise to choose between
them.
It is more instructive to note the damage which the theories of this
group did to highly talented individual artists, like Leonid Andreiev
and Jack London. Both might, under happier auspices, have been poets
and it is worth noting that whenever either dealt with the material
most known to them, the life of little insignificant out-of-the-way
villages in the case of Andreiev (“The Governor,” or “In the Fog”) or
the life of the untamed frontier in the case of London (“The Call of
the Wild,” “Burning Daylight”), each wrote something that might be
called a minor classic. But Andreiev’s pretentious and melodramatic
insistence on the “madness and horror,” the void of life, together
with his heavy sentimentalism (derived from doses of Schopenhauer and
Tolstoy) is as meaningless to us as was London’s confused minglings
of Nietzschean master-morality with crude Socialistic strivings.
London’s “Sea Wolf” is, as a character, as much a bit of pasteboard
as Andreiev’s “Lazarus.” Both London and his Russian contemporary,
were supremely honest men, who rejected with contempt the hypocritical
lip-service to theory paid by the social reformers of their days; both
preferred to be immoralists rather than sentimentalists, and it is for
this that we must respect them, rather than for any good work. For it
is obvious that both had their heads turned by early successes, and
were victims of their own love of melodramatic excess. That two such
men should have lacked moral stability sufficient to keep them from
drinking themselves to death, shows how far the social order in America
and Russia of their time was on the way to the abyss.
After their day the drive to naturalism continued, but on a lower
level, having largely thrown overboard the general flavour of moral
teaching that still persisted in the work of the earlier naturalists.
The figure of the “business superman” appeared in America as the
figure of the “sexual superman” appeared in Russia. Theodore Dreiser
became responsible for the one, and Mikhail Artzybashev for the
other. Whether there is really very much to choose between them as
art-products is a question that time must settle. It is more important
to note that this phase did not in any case last long. Between the
year 1900 and the outbreak of the great war there rose up in both
countries a revolt against the “social document,” and the naturalistic
attitude towards life. This revolt took the form mainly of a more
symbolical treatment of facts, and it expressed itself not in prose
but in poetry. Thus Robinson, Frost, Lindsay, Sandburg, Miss Lowell,
Conrad Aiken and Robinson Jeffers had their counterparts in time and
aim in Balmont, Bryusov, Blok, Bely, Viacheslav Ivanov and Pasternak.
The value of their work becomes more doubtful, as the younger, more
savagely objective, post-war generation takes the field to-day. What
is important to observe is that while cosmopolitan Naturalism held
the field in 1900, by 1915 the situation was reversed and a new and
more native symbolism, combined with a groping mysticism, derived from
very primitive sources, and strongly dashed with sexual imagery, took
its place. This even affected the prose writers such as Sologub and
Sherwood Anderson.
This extraordinary reversal of literary taste, which took place in the
limits of one half a generation, is a tragic indication of the fact
that the mentality of Russia and America had already grown unstable.
Instead of the long quarrel between upholders of mystic orthodoxy and
advanced materialists, between Slavophils and Westernizers, literary
conservators and outlaws, being settled, it had grown more acute until
the whole structure of society was rent by it from top to bottom. In
the early twentieth century both Russia and America had to choose to
break again with their past, to become something essentially different,
as they had chosen in 1688, between 1773 and 1790, and in 1860. To show
what the break was, and its results, it is necessary to turn back to
the course of our interrupted historical survey.
BOOK IV
_“The union of Russian revolutionary inspiration with the American
practical spirit; this is the essence of practical Leninism.”_
JOSEPH STALIN.
_“Machinery, the modern Messiah.”_
HENRY FORD.
Chapter XIV
The history of the nineteenth century is the history of the decline and
fall of Europe. The logical madness of Napoleon’s attempt to transform
by the power of the sword and the brilliance of his individual genius,
a group of mutually jealous and innately suspicious nationalities,
differing in language, religion and local tradition, into a single
unified power, failed as soon as Napoleon became old enough to lose
grip on his peculiar gifts. In this defeat both America and Russia,
as we have seen, had their share. Russia exhausted Napoleon’s armies,
as England--the true parent of America, and of America’s achieved
Teutonic-Celtic compromise between apparent political liberty and
actual spiritual conformity--exhausted his ideas. During this very
period England and America drew together again, and again came into
closest spiritual contact, despite the prolonged agonies of the
Revolution, the memory of which smouldered less in the hearts of its
leaders, such as Washington and Jefferson, than in the depths of the
raw new settlements on the Indian frontier. Indeed, had it not been
for another characteristic piece of blundering diplomacy on the part of
England, enshrined in what is known as Jay’s Treaty, the two countries
which had opposed each other so long and desperately, might have
come into firm alliance. The prevailing sentiment in England, after
all her wars, successful and unsuccessful, has usually been to shake
hands with her late foe; but this refusal on the part of the people
to bear a grudge is not always shared by the brilliant diplomats and
the aristocratically educated politicians of that paradoxical island.
What is won by the simple courage of her yeomen, England throws away by
the clever stupidity and superiority of her politicians, who are for
the most part far too cynically sophisticated to place any reliance on
human nature. This was again the case after the Napoleonic struggle:
America and England had to remain politically isolated--though in
fact, all their interests were shared in common--for the simple reason
that the Englishman could only envisage empire in terms of trading
posts separated by oceans, while the American saw his empire as new
settlements spreading ever westward across unpopulated land-wastes.
On the other and eastern frontier of Europe, where the steppes of the
Ukraine unchangeably roll up to the gates of Moscow, the armies of
Napoleon had but recently passed, strewing with the evidences of the
most disastrous defeat in history the snow-covered plains. The outcome
of Napoleon’s titanic failure was soon to be apparent here not less
in the spiritual than in the military sphere. Russia moved again, and
still more sharply, away from Europe, as America had but recently and
once again moved away from England. Czar Alexander I, who might now
pride himself on the fact that his climate, if not his armies, had
defeated Napoleon, was not in the least disposed to undervalue the
historical importance of the appearance of that personage. To England,
whether the England was that of the yokel or the poet, of Hodge or
of Byron and Shelley, Napoleon was merely a temporary and absurd
tyrant--a Corsican ogre feasting on the sufferings of slaves groaning
beneath his whip-lash; one who had betrayed the spirit of liberty for
a personal whim. To Alexander I and the whole Russian people, Napoleon
was the French Revolution itself, _in propria persona_, the Promethean
fire-bringer of liberty, the logical incarnation of a spirit opposed
to historical continuity. The fact that he wore a military uniform
and called himself Emperor, as did the Czar, did not matter. What
mattered was that one of common birth, owning no power of descent
save that conferred on him by his own ability, the representative
of the dispossessed, the opponent of religion, and the overthrower
everywhere of monarchy, should dare to measure swords with the
consecrated Czar himself, whose will was sacred. This was sufficient
to identify Napoleon as Antichrist in the eyes of Alexander and his
meanest subjects alike. And the subsequent history shows that the Czar
was prepared, by all the traditions of his breed and office, to act
upon this hint up to the limit. In order to maintain his power intact,
he had to see to it that Europe begot no more Napoleons. His one idea
for the regeneration of the world was the establishment of a Holy
Alliance, of absolute monarchs with the aim of upholding everywhere
the sacrosanct traditions of religion and monarchy, and everywhere
keeping down the incoherent but vital drive to liberty that Napoleon
had striven to transform into a weapon of self-aggrandisement. Great
was Alexander’s disillusionment when he discovered the chief opponent
to this project was to be England itself, which had but recently fought
Napoleon to the death; still greater was his despair when he learned
through the formation of the Decembrist conspiracy, that his own
intelligentsia would not follow him. With dramatic suddenness the vain,
obstinate, fickle and shiftily brilliant creature who had saved Europe
from republicanism, died; or, according to Russian legend, did not die,
but walked out upon the road as a pilgrim under an assumed name, in
expiation of the crime of parricide by which he had come to the throne.
In any case, he left Russia to a more ruthless successor, determined
alike to uphold his personal prestige and totally undisposed to play
with the dangerously liberal notions of Europe.
Here we must again remind the reader that it is not the primary purpose
of this study to provide a detailed and objective history of either
Europe, America, or Russia as they manifested themselves throughout
the nineteenth century. Rather our aim is to pierce everywhere through
this tangled surface of objective facts to the more permanent realm of
subjective results. The story of the nineteenth century in Europe is,
as far as the European peoples are concerned, the story of the final
emergence of an intense and peculiarly aggravated form of bourgeois
nationalism. The French Revolution, Napoleon, and the industrial
revolution, as political factors, alike conspired to intensify and make
acute this mob-drift; romanticism and realism alike, in the field of
the arts, fanned its fires. The nineteenth century proved that Europe
no longer existed as a great political and spiritual possibility.
In its place were only a group of mutually jealous and competitive
units, whose local quarrels, to be healed only by exhaustion, would
recur again and again. In compensation, the nineteenth century, if
it could not produce a rebirth of Mediæval Europe, gave us for the
first time since the Middle Ages, Europeans. Through Goethe and
Heine, Stendhal and Flaubert, Ibsen and Nietzsche, Havelock Ellis and
Verhaeren, Unamuno and Ferrero the line of the great Europeans has
gone on, embracing all the European nations in the persons of certain
representatives, in a mingled blend of love of country combined with
love of mankind, cultivation of local traditions fused with total
abhorrence of war. Perhaps the noblest task that America and Russia
have accomplished in the world, has been that they have sometimes,
albeit unconsciously, aided and abetted in the production of true
Europeans. For without such, Europe at the present day would be what
she has been for a century past, a desert.
2
The significance of the nineteenth century to America is that it
precipitated and made acute the struggle between the commercial and
industrial North, the agrarian and conservative South, and the vast
mass of raw pioneers who, in the Middle West, actually held the balance
of power. The North, in the outcome easily won, less on account of its
numbers, and certainly not because of any intellectual brilliance, but
because of the plain fact that the South and the Middle West could
not even agree among themselves as regards essentials. The New England
minority, men like the Transcendentalists, Fourierites, Abolitionists,
regarded the perfect form of civilisation as a collection of industrial
bourgeois city-states, strongly practical in aim, egalitarian in
essence, dependent on absolute liberty of the citizen. To achieve this
aim it was necessary for them to agitate for the abolition of negro
slavery, which had existed in the South since the Colonial Period.
The Southern minority, on the other hand, envisaged the perfect state
as a collection of loosely-combined agrarian communities, maintained
precisely by the development of slavery as an institution, and governed
by an élite of aristocrats, whose activities, released from manual
toil, could flow into intellectual channels. The balance of power
between these two tendencies, which were incompatible from the outset,
lay in the hands of the frontier squatter class of the Middle West and
Far West. Their only concern was, which side could provide them most
quickly with manufactured articles in return for their raw products.
Garrison meant as little, spiritually, to them as Calhoun. America was
their oyster, and all they cared for was the eating; in other words,
they measured everything precisely by its value in dollars and cents to
themselves. Since they were mostly poor men, dependent on their labor,
and not economically tied to any particular section of the country
(the whole history of the American frontier is a history of continual
migration) they looked askance at slavery, which was decidedly the
sort of game only a settled, rich man could play. Since New England
idealism meant rather devotion to culture than to goods and chattels,
they were equally indifferent to the most radical ideas of the New
England reformers. They preferred to steer a middle course, and neither
to accept slavery nor transcendentalism, realising that they had a
continent to develop and their fortunes to make, and that the balance
of power lay in their hands. From their emergence on the American stage
in the person of President Andrew Jackson in 1829, we may date the
typical shibboleths of “union” being held more precious than liberty,
the constitution as impervious to logic, cheap money and big business
as more important factors in life than either leisure or high thinking.
The situation in Russia differed in form, and in form only. In
essentials it was precisely the same. Once again we have a majority
of unintelligent peasants, a tiny minority of intelligent radicals,
and between them the theoretically unlimited power of the Czar. The
difficulty with the radicals was that they could not even agree among
themselves. Some were absorbed by the materialistic socialism of the
West, which was to be elevated to the rank of a dogma by the work of
Karl Marx in this very epoch; still others were non-resistant idealists
and anarchists; still a third group were mystic reactionaries,
strongly tinged with the Oriental communism that lies at the heart
of Christianity viewed in its most primitive aspect. The Czar was
quite frequently ready to listen to them; in fact, the sole redeeming
traits in the character of Nicholas I, who was Alexander’s successor,
were his befriending of radical Russian authors (including Pushkin
and Griboedev), his personal courage, and his determination to make
decisions for himself. But the balance of the Czar’s power lay with
the immense mass of uneducated, coarse and dirty peasantry; so long
as their superstitions were not meddled with, so long as Russia could
wage successful wars abroad, thus keeping up the price of foodstuffs,
so long as the authority of the landowners and the burden of taxes lay
not too heavy on their shoulders, all would be well. Nicholas’ system
of maintaining, as far as possible, the internal _status quo_ while
outwardly posing as the champion of Christianity and the upholder of
the oppressed Slav race (which at this time was striving to get free
from the yoke of Turkey) broke down badly in the ill-success of the
Crimean War. The system of maintaining power by pressing upon Europe,
and doing nothing within, could not go on. Czardom itself could
not survive, so long as serfdom persisted as an institution. Under
Nicholas’ successor, Alexander II, serfdom was abolished by a stroke
of the pen, and thenceforward all Russians were theoretically free. To
reach the same result, at the same moment, America had to go through
the agony of four years’ civil war.
The outcome of this momentous decision was the same in both cases.
In America, the Southern aristocracy was swept away, but with it
went the last remnant of New England idealism. The “go-getter” type
of American definitely appeared, and has dominated the scene ever
since, despite every effort to uproot him. The seventies became for
America the dawn of the “gilded age”; an orgy of land speculation, of
feverish devil-may-care industrialism, of stock exchange gambling and
political corruption swept the country. The South could not protest,
being enslaved by the corrupt reconstruction government; the protest
of the surviving New England idealists went unheeded. Culture was only
important in so far as it represented an acquisitive value and the aim
of all Americans became to acquire the essential wealth that could
enable them to purchase culture, and so show themselves superior to
their neighbours.
Meantime the country was filling up with impoverished but ambitious
European immigrants, from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, the
Balkans, who were ready to barter their share in European traditions
for a hand in the melting-pot, which was to transform them all from
disillusioned idealists into one hundred per cent wage-slaves. The
nineteenth century in America thus proved a tragic triumph of the
“divine average” which Whitman had so mistakenly hymned. It left
America at the close of the nineties industrial in essence, ruthlessly
efficient, contemptuous of Europe, and essentially vulgar. Out of the
strivings of Virginia aristocrats and New England radicals had emerged
a land of bumptious barbarians. The last heirs of the old intellectual
tradition, men like Henry James, Whistler, Stephen Crane, even Mark
Twain, began coming to Europe and staying there, in voluntary exile.
The outcome in Russia was equally disastrous to the spiritual health
of the nation at large. The result of the alliance between Czar and
mujik was but to strengthen the hostility to all ideas, especially
to European ideas, and to drive the minority of the intelligentsia
still further along the path that led to desperate nihilism. After a
brief interlude of liberalism under Alexander II, Russia again took
the path of repression, and the reign of his successors, Alexander III
and Nicholas II, are noteworthy only for the complete suppression
of all thought, the relentless persecution of every form of protest
against the established trinity of orthodoxy, autocracy and Don Cossack
brutality. Even Dostoevsky, who regarded himself as the special
prophet of the old dispensation, was obliged in his famous Pushkin
address, delivered at the close of his life, to utter a protest against
the prevailing dirt, corruption, inefficiency and criminality, and
to uphold the work of the revolutionaries, by speaking of Russia’s
“pan-human mission,” and the ideals of the “Russian wanderer.” For the
rest, persecuted, outlawed, butchered and oppressed, Russian thought
scarcely dared lift up its head. Nicholas II succeeded, and nothing was
changed. The end of the century found Russia sinking into a quagmire
of corruption; and literature, which had maintained its protest since
Pushkin, began to give up the struggle by taking on the colours of
a defeated pessimism--the sensational pessimism of Andreiev, the
neutral pessimism of Tchekhov, the immoralist Nietzschean pessimism
of Artzybashev. The one outlet left to the Russian spirit was an
illimitable despair.
The nineteenth century in America concluded with a great economic
crisis followed by a foreign war, the first war in which America had
been engaged since the Civil War had closed thirty years before. The
nineteenth century in Russia closed also, a few years later, with a
foreign war in the Far East, which coincided with an economic and
political crisis at home. These two events were the logical outcome
of the previous development we have already traced, and which had
apparently fully settled the _status quo_ in both countries, without
really settling anything. In both countries the unsolved questions
of the relation between industrialism and agrarianism, monopoly
and free ownership, foreign expansion and home reform, came almost
simultaneously to a head. In 1898, following on the panic and great
strike of 1893-4, America went to war with Spain; in 1904 the Russian
government, which had steadily pursued, since the Crimean War, an
ambitious advance through Siberia and Manchuria to the point where it
was prepared, through possession of the spearhead of Port Arthur, to
challenge Europe’s growing interest in China and Korea, found itself
surprisingly halted by the outbreak of a struggle with Japan.
3
It is necessary here to go back a little, and to ask the question
why these two movements which ushered in the twentieth century, did
not coincide in date in both countries, inasmuch as they derived
ultimately from the same tragic division of opinion between rulers and
ruled, intelligentsia and peasants, though the intelligentsia in the
one case were a handful of thinking radicals striving to break down the
strangle-hold of the big business bosses and protectionist monopolies,
and in the other an even more desperate handful of writers and
publicists vainly protesting against the unholy alliance of Czardom,
corrupt civil service, and secret police.
The answer to this question is to be found in the unequal incidence of
the industrial era in point of time upon both countries. America had
become industrial, except for the South, as early as 1840. After 1865
industrialism was everywhere paramount, and its sway was undisputed.
But in Russia industrialism did not really begin until after 1892, when
Sergius Witte became Minister of Finance and of Communications. As a
direct result, the Transsiberian railway was built, thus giving Russia
at last full opportunity for expansion in the only direction in which
expansion was left open to her, namely, the Far East. Russia thereby
followed the path of full industrialism, a path which had been open
to the United States ever since the first transcontinental railway,
the Union Pacific, had been opened in 1877. It is interesting to note
that, once again, what was in the latter case the result of the steady
influence of millions of new settlers upon a Federal government
impotent to direct or interfere (for the Union Pacific was begun during
the upheaval of the Civil War) became in the latter, the action of only
one man, backed by the authority of the Czar.
In this delay of about a generation may be found the reason why Russia
postponed the internal crisis that in her case, as in America’s, was
to mark the slow transition from spiritual adolescence to dangerous
maturity. Industrialism, in both cases, provided the lever that set
in motion, once for all, the vast and ponderous machine that had been
created. In the one case, it solidified, in the other it disrupted;
and we need not invoke either Slav stupidity or Yankee smartness to
explain the psychological causes of the crisis of 1904-5 or that of
1893-1898. In essence the two movements were similar, it was only
in their results--as is practically always the case in American and
Russian social life--that they could be thought of apart. In America
the régime of free competition in industry supported by protective
tariffs, and outward lip service to the Federal constitution as the
sole God-given means of developing and fulfilling the destinies of
the United States, had steadily built up the cities at the expense of
the agrarian interest, until a succession of bad crops unconsciously
restored the balance. The result was, first, trade depression; then
reduction of wages; then a great strike at Chicago, which had, as
the second American city, only just finished flamboyantly hailing the
fourth centenary of Columbus’ discovery by means of a World’s Fair;
lastly, blundering interference by the Federal Government which helped
nobody and a smouldering agitation, freshly dividing the country into
sections, arousing the discontented farmers for cheap money, and the
discontented industrialists for an overseas empire, to absorb their
surplus products. The result was that the inevitable demand for
expansion of America beyond the ocean borders found its first moral
pretext in the insurrection of 1895 in Cuba.
Turn from this to the situation in Russia, where to balance the
American trinity of industrialist, agrarian and sentimental radical,
we have the three already familiar elements of Czar, mujik, and
intelligentsia nobility. Since 1861 the mujik had been nominally
free, and their village zemstvos, or local assemblies, were growing
inevitably in power and influence. The Czar owed the continuance of
his power entirely to the support of this peasant class. But because
of their continued increase in numbers, it was impossible to keep them
contented without finding for them continually new lands whereon to
settle; and such lands could only be opened in Siberia, Manchuria,
Turkestan, the Far East. By building the Siberian railway and by
concentrating on industrial development, Witte simply speeded up the
outcome of this logical process. Thereby he split up the radical
intelligentsia into three groups; those who, working through the
zemstvos and the landed classes, were demanding free speech and a
parliament; those who, working through the industrialists, were all for
a physical force revolution and Marxian socialism to follow; and those
who, working through the newly created and prospering middle classes,
were all for protecting their rights by a conservative parliament on
the English model. By deliberately driving Russia to take the path of
industrialism and eastward expansion, in order to maintain the alliance
between Czar and peasant, Witte proved himself not the least important
servant of the Crown; but his service led directly to two results. It
created an urban proletariat, of the utmost future danger as a hotbed
of political radicalism, and inevitably forced on the Japanese-Russian
War.
In either case, the policy followed was an attempt to resolve by
an arbitrary act certain difficulties that could only be attacked
from within. The average Middle-Western farmer took no interest in
an economic protectorate over the Caribbean; the average Russian
provincial noble had no quarrel with Japan. In the one case, it was
only through the support of the great Eastern industrialists that the
Union could be preserved in permanent form; in the other the central
government was obliged to absorb a certain proportion of surplus
peasant population, every year, either by creating an industrial class,
or by promoting emigration to Siberia, in order to avoid civil war.
The result of the movement of 1893-1898 was to make the industrial
capitalist class the dictators of American policy, domestic and
foreign; that of the parallel movement of 1893-1904 was to create a new
industrial class, only awaiting a leader and an opportunity to take
over the reins of government from the weak-kneed Czar and his advisers.
That the one movement accomplished its ends largely by peaceable
economic penetration, and that the other movement grew on account of
its arbitrary and violent character matters little. Each violently
wrenched a whole country out of its national orbit of development, and
set it upon a path that inevitably brought it into conflict with other
countries. In America’s case the conflict was to be with Europe, in
Russia’s with Japan.
Thus both countries, for the space of about thirty years, had
simultaneously explored the path of pacific expansion, and in both
cases that means failed. That is the lesson we must keep in mind as
once more we find America and Russia confronting each other across
the space of Europe at the close of the nineteenth century. Since 1865
America’s entire policy had been maintenance of freedom of contract,
protection of home markets, industrial expansion. The policy fell of
its own weight because a glut of manufactured articles and the growing
inability of the farmers to wring heavier crops from the soil, created
a financial crisis of the type that recurs throughout American history.
Since the disastrous Crimean War, and still more since the Treaty of
Berlin in 1878 had robbed Russia of the fruits of her last victory over
the Turks, the policy of the Czar and his advisers had been avoidance
of all foreign ideas and radical notions combined with expansion of
foreign markets and improvement of domestic communications in order to
link up the most outlying parts of the Empire. This policy, too, fell
of its own weight and came to nothing because in its zeal to foster
commerce and industry it created an industrial urban class determined
to take no orders even from the Czar, and because in its hurried race
eastward, it finally dashed the trace-pole of the Russian troika
against the immovable foundation stones of the Great Wall of China.
Chapter XV
At the close of the nineteenth century, the American people were
opportunistic, optimistic, and prosperous; the Russian people were
gradually sinking back from the status of a warlike, daring and
adventurous nation into a state of sluggishly Oriental passivity
and fatalism. In the one case, the power and resources of the West,
exploited by the great Eastern financiers, had overwhelmed the last
remnants of dying New England idealism, and had dragged the South,
incapable of resistance, after it. In the other, the arbitrary will
of the central government, backed by an army of corrupt bureaucrats,
and by another army of illiterate peasants wearing the Czar’s uniform,
had slowly radiated from Moscow through the veins of an immense
country until it reached the far distant Pacific at Vladivostok and
Port Arthur. Had Washington or Catherine the Great been permitted to
revisit the scene of their labours again at the close of the century,
they might well have been amazed at the work of their descendants.
Both would have been astounded at the immense expansion of what had
been originally a very simple idea. Washington in particular would
have been hard put to discover his small, and almost poverty-stricken
country, almost all English-speaking, with its scant three millions
of inhabitants, and frontiers scarcely one hundred miles removed from
the seaboard, in the vast congeries of races, ninety millions strong,
industrialised up to the hilt and flaunting their wealth, that swarmed
over America. But Catherine, too, though she would still have found
herself at home among the superstitious mujiks, would have missed
the intellectual brilliance of her court and have thought the state
bureaucracy overcrowded. Though she might have admired Witte and his
special creation of the Transsiberian railway, she would have shrunk
back in horror from Tolstoy as from a monstrosity. And what Catherine
would have thought of the special qualities of will and character
manifested by her descendant, Nicholas II, had best perhaps be left to
the imagination. In short, though nothing apparently had been changed,
everything in reality was different. America was waxing, and Russia was
waning rapidly, like two moons revolving in opposite directions.
The same phenomenon, with the same result, had happened long ago in
the ancient world. We have referred before to Egypt and Babylonia as
providing an instructive parallel to the two cases of America and
Russia. It is necessary now again to recall them to memory, and to
note that the period of Egypt’s greatest economic supremacy coincided
precisely with the period of the supine Kassite rulers of Babylonia.
That the Kassites were foreigners, is a fact perfectly well known,
but it is also fair to point out that the Czar was in a very special
sense a foreigner in his own realm. Catherine herself was purely
East German; and the habit of marrying petty German princesses had
persisted so long in the Romanov house that Nicholas II was himself
the grandson of a princess of Hesse-Darmstadt and the husband of
another. As in Babylonia, Russia was being bled white to support the
supremacy of a foreign class. Meantime, America, holding for the most
part to the dominant Republican party dynasty which had settled itself
into power on the heels of the Civil War, had swept into its system
of standardised ethics, mass-patriotism and business psychology, race
after race from the old world. The situation was becoming not very
different, after all, from that which confronted the Ancient World
when Amenophis IV, later known as Akhnaton, mounted the throne of
the Pharaohs. And the part that the Hittites had played in the drama
of 1500 B.C. was to be played by Prussia; for this is the period of
Prussia’s ultimate greatness on the world’s stage.
The drama began in America with the outbreak of the Spanish-American
War. The farmers of the South and West were already in revolt against
the increasing cost of living which high protective tariffs had brought
in their train. They were preparing to sweep the entire country under
the leadership of Bryan. The industrial workers of the East had already
threatened to follow them, in the great strike of 1893. If they had
done so, the country would have split up in three sections, even less
geographically definable than the boundaries of the North and South
had proven at the time of the Civil War. The great industrialists of
the East, and the millionaires of Wall Street with their hands on
the pulse of the country, took fright. The election of 1896 proved
the turning point. The nominee of the industrialist republicans
was William McKinley, an affable, ingratiating, hard-working, but
essentially spineless Ohioan; but the real power, the power of the
campaign funds, lay in Wall Street, which lavishly poured out its
treasure to aid the Republican Party to victory. The result was
that the less-organised forces of Bryan failed; and McKinley became
President. But the industrial outlook was none too rosy. In order to
prevent a glut of manufactured products, and the repetition of such
a crisis of unemployment as had already taken place in 1893-6, it
was necessary not only to maintain domestic protection, but to find
foreign markets. And foreign markets in America’s case meant inevitably
foreign war. The pretext came when the battleship _Maine_ blew up in
Havana harbour. At the price of a war with Spain, a war almost lost
through America’s incapacity for military leadership, yet bound to be a
victory in the end because of her opponent’s even greater helplessness,
America acquired an overseas dominion in the Philippines, and practical
certainty of headship in the Caribbean in the not remote future.
The results were momentous, socially and psychologically. America had
proven once and for all that she could defeat a European power in the
field. That the power chosen for this experiment was Spain, which
was antiquated in equipment, weak in leadership, and inefficient in
diplomacy, mattered not a jot. The fact that various European countries
had half-heartedly shown the Spanish some sympathy was enough to set
fire to the powder-magazine of American jingoism. A vast subterranean
echo of England’s old Armada victory shook the Anglo-Saxon foundations
of the country, trailed through the yellow press, and infected every
woman and every schoolboy. This was truly the legendary age of
American history, and its chosen hero became Theodore Roosevelt, the
millionaire turned cowboy, the “trust-buster” with the big stick
who defied equally Wall Street and the trade unions, who was ready
apparently to ride and tame together the two wild horses of industry
and agriculture, and to implant in every American breast the triumph
of the average man. Under his leadership America jumped overnight in
the eyes of the world from the status of a gawky, awkward, shambling
frontiersman of the Lincoln type, to that of a big overgrown schoolboy
with a book in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, equally ready
to lecture and to bully the world. One need only be respectful to
the “basis of prosperity” on which all American institutions rested
at home, and ready to pounce upon any European nation that dared to
interfere abroad, in order to be great.
2
Turn now from this picture to that of Russia during the close of the
twentieth century. The construction of the Transsiberian railway,
and the consequent industrial régime that Witte had fostered, led to
a momentary return of prosperity. His creation of a gold standard
backed by a gold reserve, together with the state monopoly that at
this time was imposed on the manufacture and sale of vodka, happily
combined with Alexander Third’s open policy of neutrality in Europe
and of rapid penetration to the Far East. The outcome was a hectic
period of urban development and factory construction. Meanwhile, the
peasantry, especially in the overcrowded region of the Lower Volga, had
to continue to suffer, despite their emancipation. Their zemstvos, or
local councils, were given no power of legislation; and they were still
paying in taxes for the costs of their own liberation back in 1861, and
were to continue to pay up to 1910. A succession of bad crops on the
Lower Volga in 1891 and 1893 did the rest, and famine drove them into
the factories of the large towns, where they rapidly became transformed
from illiterate and untrained agriculturalists, with all the earth-born
superstitions of their class, to active revolters and plotters against
Church and State, greedily swallowing Marx as their new gospel.
In the midst of this situation Alexander III died, to be succeeded
by the helplessly fatalistic and spineless Nicholas II. He soon fell
under the spell of the young wife who had been brought from Germany
for him by his father, and who had first appeared before the Russian
people in Alexander’s own funeral procession. This new accession,
in 1894, simply meant that Alexander’s policy would continue to be
followed blindly, but without the determination and efficiency that
the Czar had shown in pursuing it. More and more the peasants were to
be encouraged to emigrate; Siberia soon filled up with a new class of
desperate adventurers, and those who did not take this path crowded
into the factories of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where they were
rapidly converted by the steady preaching of the fanatics of Marxism.
Their motto was “Wait until the hour is ready when we may strike, and
then throw down your tools.” Meanwhile the government proved blind
to this new development, and contented itself with further driving
the intelligentsia underground or into exile, and making half-hearted
attempts to limit the hours of work, and the age at which the people
were to be employed in the new factories.
The clash came finally in 1904. In that year, Japan, taking fright
at the steady penetration of Russian influence and trade through
Manchuria to Korea, China, and the Pacific, suddenly moved her armies,
without the formality of a declaration of war, against Port Arthur.
The result was to find Russia utterly unprepared. East of Lake Baikal,
where the Transsiberian railway had a gap of one hundred miles which
could be traversed in summer by steamers, but in winter had to be
crossed on sledges, Russia had only eighty thousand field troops, with
twenty-three thousand garrison, and thirty thousand railway frontier
guards. Japan, on the other hand, could throw in one hundred and fifty
thousand line troops at once, and held all the advantages of lines of
communication. Russia was doomed to defeat from the outset; and this
defeat, for the first time in her history, came not from the invading
forces of Europe, but from her own invasion of Asia, which had been
followed up to the point where she came into conflict with the one
Asiatic nation which had westernised itself, and which was determined,
thanks to its own population and trade problem, to keep a firm hold
on the Pacific coast lands. But what made this defeat inevitable was
the lack of enthusiasm that the Russian people themselves displayed
towards the war. Since Nicholas, on his accession, had dismissed the
appeal of the zemstvos for a parliamentary constitution as “senseless
dreams,” the landowners themselves had become hostile; and the new
urban proletariat was indifferent to the demands of any class but its
own, and waiting for its opportunity.
The outcome was to prove to anyone but the vacillating and incapable
Czar, whose head had been completely turned by the large doses of
flattery administered to him by Emperor Wilhelm II (who for his part
secretly cherished ambitions towards Europe similar to Russia’s Asiatic
dreams) that the continuance of power in the hands of the Romanovs,
which had been the sole means of holding the Russian Empire together
since the days of Peter the Great, would cease, if once deprived of
the support of the united Russian people. Despite the blessings of
the Orthodox Church on the new crusade against the Japanese, despite
desperate attempts to whip up patriotic sentiment, Russia was defeated
not only in Manchuria, but on the home front. The Japanese War
concluded not only with military defeat, but with a firm promise on the
part of the Czar to open a Duma. This was wrung from him by the great
strike of 1905, which paralysed the entire country, and by the passive
but effectual resistance of the agrarian class themselves. The war with
Japan was rapidly wound up by the intervention of Witte, who made the
best bargain he could under the circumstances, in August, 1905; and the
attention of the Russian government henceforward was directed towards
dealing with the desperate situation at home.
Nicholas might in this crisis have abdicated and passed on the
succession of the throne to someone equipped with more will-power and
sense of the situation than himself, but for the fact that the Czarina
had at last, on the outbreak of the war, presented him with a son. His
one object henceforward was to transmit the patrimony of the Russian
Empire as intact as possible to his heir; and in this aim his wife
completely seconded him. The drift of his policy was to summon the
Duma, make only such concessions as could be wrung from him, and if
the situation proved too dangerous, to reassert his autocracy. It was
a policy of desperation, which needed such a supreme Machiavellian as
Catherine the Great to carry out successfully; and the conditions--not
to speak of the ability involved--under which it was now undertaken
were entirely different. In order to keep an eye on the insistent
smouldering rebellion of the new factory class, Nicholas’ Government
had adopted the policy of setting secret revolutionary agitators to
work in industrial districts, in order that the expected uprising
when it came might be known beforehand. The result had only been to
completely paralyse the country in the strikes of 1905; and once the
safety-valve of the Duma was constructed, it was not likely, despite
the Czar’s secret hopes, to merely blow off in talk.
There followed ten years of fantastic nightmare for Russia. While in
America, the country grew more and more consolidated in its power and
prosperity, more and more ready for the date when it might emerge into
the leadership of the world, under the successful compromise between
“big business” and free competition discovered by Roosevelt; in Russia
an outworn and scandalously patched together system tended more and
more to break down under its own weight, as Napoleon long ago had
accurately foreseen and predicted. The first Duma was suppressed, only
to give way to one more radical. The elections were then purged so as
to insure a conservative majority, but still the drift to revolution
could only be temporarily stayed. What made matters still worse and
finally transformed the most conservative landowning class into open
opponents of the autocracy, were the scandals concerning the Czar’s
own court and heir. The wretched child for whom Nicholas had staked
everything, proved a congenital invalid, with no hope for cure from
legitimate doctoring. In this resort, the thoughts of the monarch and
of his consort turned to the apparatus of miracle which, they fondly
believed, lay somewhere in the country itself. The result is well
known to the world at large. From the day when the animally cunning
and unholy Rasputin first left the trail of his dirty boots across the
Czar’s carpet, Nicholas himself was doomed.
The watchword of the twentieth century for America was “uplift”; a
determination to exploit the resources of the country up to the limit,
and to preserve the Puritan outlook on life that had led to such
important results, although the Puritan strain itself was steadily
declining in numbers and ability. Abroad, America was determined to
make her influence felt as at home; and the shadow of the dollar began
to extend itself not only over the American continent, but in the
remote regions of Europe and the Far East. The watchword for Russia
during the same period was suppression of everything that stood in the
way of the continuance of the Romanov dynasty, and suppression of the
underground struggle for power by all other sections. The combined
forces of Church and State would struggle on for a time longer, though
deprived of every vestige of intelligent support. There was nothing to
do but to wait on fate. When Crown and Church fell, they would fall
together. Abroad, Russia had little influence; all she asked for from
her new ally France was not a hand in policy, but capital to enable
her to meet the expenses of the immense military establishment she was
compelled to keep up in order to avert an explosion at home. Though
facing the East, she was drawn into the orbit of European nationalist
diplomacy by her economic needs. In America, on the other hand, no one
need ask Europe for financial aid. But there had to be an increasing
economic penetration of Europe to counterbalance industrial tension at
home.
3
Meantime, while these tremendous events were preparing, the nations
of the European continent pursued the path that had been left open to
them by Napoleon’s collapse, the path of a final intensification of
separate effort, backed by the combined forces of industrialism and
parliamentarism. It is possible that never to the average individual
had European life appeared on the surface so promising, so rich in
its complexity, as during the first decade of the twentieth century.
Despite the upheavals of 1848, despite the recrudescence of war that
had broken out in the years 1866-1870, the continent that was the
home of man’s ripest and maturest forms of civilisation had made
an astonishing recovery. The old and the new had been skilfully
combined. Except in France, the trappings of royalty persisted side by
side with keen-witted Parliaments, whose members, inflamed by fiery
patriotism and the carefully fostered sense of nationality, vied with
each other in demanding more and more factories and better armaments.
Thanks to the triumphs of science, the ever new discoveries that had
been made in the realm of invention, the spread of electric light,
telephones, railways, sanitation, medical skill, literacy, with the
rapidly approaching advent of the motor car and the aeroplane in
the offing--thanks to all these things, and the possession of the
franchise, the future was held to be a rosy one. England in particular
fêted the culmination of the Victorian age, and her last triumph over
the Boers. France threw wide the doors of a great exhibition in Paris
to celebrate a century of progress. Italy had reawakened as by magic
from her decay, and was becoming a modern nation, without losing her
ancient picturesqueness. In Austria, despite internal difficulties, the
veteran Franz Joseph still firmly held together the various parts of
his ramshackle Empire. Even backward Spain, newly defeated by America,
might aspire to a new Empire in Morocco. As for the Far East, that too
was giving way before the dominating force of the white man; in the
Philippines, where America was proving herself the heir to England’s
colonial ability; in China, where the Boxer rising had been quelled;
in India, which England held firmly; and on the continent of Africa,
parcelled out into colonies, and ruled by a dozen different nations.
Yes, the future was full of hope, a great hope for the white man.
Such was the picture that Europe presented to the superficial observer
at the close of the century. But underneath, things were very, very
different, as a few lonely Europeans--men like Ibsen and Nietzsche--had
learned to their cost. The aggressive nationalism that had gone on
unchecked throughout the nineteenth century had proven the real enemy
of progress. Every European nation had its own army, its own fleet;
and these immense military establishments were not only expensive,
but dangerous. Peace was outwardly maintained by means of a complex
web of diplomacy and treaties. The Triple Alliance balanced the
Triple Entente; but day by day this web became stretched to finer
tension, nearer to the breaking point. What was still worse was that
a generation of unchecked industrial competition, taking as its tacit
watchword its own interpretation of Darwin’s law of “the struggle
for life and the survival of the fittest,” had created immense city
slums, huge industrial areas of unrelieved hideousness, festering
plague-spots where drink, crime, misery, disease--varied only by
strikes and discontent--stalked open and unabashed. The protests of a
few idealists, a few æstheticians, such as Ruskin and William Morris,
had passed unheeded. Religion itself could do nothing to mend matters,
inasmuch as it was mostly State-religion, paying lip-service to the
established powers. When it condemned, it did so mostly for wrong
reasons, as in the case of Zola, whose only too honest and accurate
social novels proved meat far too strong for ecclesiastical stomachs.
To the radical minority of impartial and intelligent observers,
whether these called themselves socialists, anarchists, communists,
or simply honest men, something in the cardboard edifice of European
nationalistic prosperity was certain to give way; whether it was
the perpetual military establishments, or the intensive industrial
competition, or the futile and stupid madness of “patriotic”
Parliaments, or the mob-spirit already manifesting itself as latent
in democracy. But though the radicals saw the abyss yawning beneath
their feet, they could not arrest the earth-tremor that was shortly
to precipitate them and their respective nations into it. The régime
of mechanical competition and of intensified nationalist effort had
taken too firm a hold ever to be checked by words, however eloquent
and far-seeing. As many intelligent men realised this fact, a sort
of _fin de siècle_ weariness sprang up through the nineties, spread
itself throughout Europe, and after taking the various forms of
decadentism, symbolism, exoticism, finally immobilised itself in the
cynical lightness of an Anatole France. Meanwhile, the web of diplomacy
was re-spun, re-stretched, half ruptured at a touch and again tied
together. Every year brought new threats of war, balanced by new
projects of peace, until most people dreamed that war might never
come. The sound of a revolver-shot in the sleepy town of Serajevo at
last proved sufficient to shatter the fabric of a century of European
diplomacy. A sort of convulsion passed over the face of the world, and
the next moment, the nations that had maintained the fiction of armed
peace ever since 1870 suddenly found themselves involved in the vast
cataclysm of another European war.
Chapter XVI
Fifteen years since the outbreak, and eleven years since the cessation
of European hostilities have passed away; but the question is not yet
fully settled of responsibility for the war. Fortunately the question
need not here be asked; for it would lead us too far into the maze of
treaties and of safeguarding diplomacy by which the European nations
strove to make innocuous that national sentiment they themselves had so
outwardly fostered. Our concern here is not with moral responsibility,
but with tendency and result. The tendency in Europe, for a century of
European history, had been to prepare for war and to strive to maintain
outwardly the peace by diplomacy. There came a time when the machine
of war, carefully prepared and oiled, went forward simply of itself.
The brakes of diplomacy refused to work any longer. That moment came in
August, 1914.
The ultimate decision for war no doubt came from the fact that Russia,
having mobilised her armies, in response to Austria’s insulting
ultimatum to Serbia, refused to withdraw the mobilisation order and to
allow Kaiser Wilhelm to make his eleventh-hour appearance in the rôle
of peacemaker. But to say that thereby Russia was solely responsible
for the war, is to utter the most pernicious nonsense. One might as
well say that America--who began and furthered the negotiations in the
person of President Wilson--was solely responsible for the peace, as
embodied in the Treaty of Versailles. From the moment when the Czar
and his advisers decided not to tolerate any further Austro-German
interference with the Slav nationalities of the Balkans--interference
which had already completely alienated Bulgaria and had transformed
Rumania from a friendly people to a sullenly hostile one--from that
moment the issue was already as good as settled. The Russian people
awoke as by magic from the stupor of their long nightmare, and walked
forth in the sunlight of a clear racial policy. Henceforward there
were to be no more mad attempts to penetrate into distant Asia, while
ignoring the plaint of the neighbour lying wounded at their own doors.
The dream of uniting the oppressed western Slavs of Europe into one
great free confederation under the headship of orthodox Moscow--a dream
which had been Russia’s up to Peter the Great’s day, and which had
revived under Nicholas I and Alexander II--needed but the touch of the
Russian ultimatum to Austria to start afresh from the soil. The “third
Rome” was to be no more a lost ideal but an accomplished fact. In the
fervour of a mystical re-conversion to an ideal which had somehow been
lost sight of, all party differences, all scars and injuries were
forgotten, and immense throngs again kneeled before the Czar. Only
the tram operatives of St. Petersburg and Moscow, indifferent to any
feeling but that of class, persisted for a time in a crippling strike,
at the same time the ultimatum went forward to Austria and her ally,
Germany. A small defection, but one pregnant with ominous possibilities
for the future.
Having mobilised his forces on the frontier, ready to move forward
in case Austria persisted in enforcing the terms of her outrageous
military and political demands upon helpless Serbia, the Czar refused
to countermand the order, despite Kaiser Wilhelm’s belated and hysteric
attempts to extricate himself from a position in which he had already
placed himself. Had Russia done so, what would have been the result?
The infuriated armies of Russia, withdrawn from the frontier, and
doubly tricked by their rulers, from accomplishment of an aim that
seemed to them perfectly just, might have perhaps marched upon Moscow
and deposed the Romanovs. No doubt this consideration was also present
in the minds of the Czar and of his chief advisers. It was necessary
at least to make an armed demonstration of goodwill to the Slav peoples
in general, in order to save their faces. Moreover, there was France
to be considered; France, which had solely stood by Russia during the
dark years since 1905, and which was burning with the hope of revenge
on Germany. So the time-limit of midnight August 1st expired, and the
world blundered into war.
The fact that Russia, despite her immense awakening of enthusiasm
for the cause of her fellow-Slavs, and despite her determination to
fight on to the bitter end--a determination which she proved over and
over again--was, after all, badly led and shamefully equipped, was no
handicap at the outset. Had the East Prussian campaign which was halted
at Tannenberg, not been fought, the allies could not have stood firm,
and stemmed the German onset at the Marne. This campaign, in the end
disastrous to the Russians, was nevertheless of equal moral effect on
the ultimate result as was America’s intervention three years later. In
the one case as in the other, it was not skill, but the mere weight of
numbers that finally decided the issue. The French troops, badly beaten
in their first attempt to seize upon Alsace-Lorraine, and supported
only by a meagre skeleton force of British, fell back steadily upon
Paris, until suddenly the pressure upon their crumbling front relaxed
and the desperate stand upon the Marne was transformed into an advance
to the Aisne. And this policy had been dictated to the German general
staff by the trail of smoking farmsteads and ravaged towns that the
Russians were making in the Hohenzollern province of East Prussia. The
well-directed thrust of the German armies to get between the desperate
French troops and Paris itself, and to cut off one from the other,
failed because two army corps had to be detached to aid Hindenburg to
trap the advancing Russians at Tannenberg. Thus the true agent of the
so-called “miracle of the Marne” was neither France nor England, but
Russia--that Russia whom her allies abandoned and repudiated three
years later in the time of her bitterest humiliation.
Despite the appalling loss of eighty thousand effectives at Tannenberg,
the great masses of the Russian people undoubtedly felt that they
could go on waging war indefinitely. Austria on the Carpathian-Polish
frontier proved as easy for them to invade as East Prussia was
impossible. All that they needed to accomplish the ultimate result was
a steady supply of munitions and supplies from the better-equipped
allies. But this feeling was not shared by the more intelligent heads
of affairs in the allied countries. One of the most far-seeing, the
English war secretary, Kitchener, had spoken of three years as being
the probable duration of the contest. It would take that time, he
thought, to stem the German advance through Belgium into France and
to train and equip armies sufficiently strong to coöperate with the
Russians elsewhere, and thus to force Germany to abandon the struggle.
By a miracle which was even greater in its total effect, though less
popularly acclaimed, than the “miracle of the Marne,” England barely
managed to save the Channel Ports through her stand at Ypres, and thus
effectively blockaded Germany--though this miracle was accomplished at
the price of all her fighting effectives. The war became, after the
first winter, a war of attrition with only one outstanding question:
how long would it take the Allies, backed as they were by the immense
wave of enthusiasm that was sweeping England and her colonies, to raise
the enormous forces required to throw back Germany in the West, and to
bring relief in the East to Russia, who was now equally blockaded--her
only effective port being Archangel. For by this time Germany had
persuaded Turkey to enter the war on her side.
The question was not long in being answered. In the spring of 1915
England committed herself to an attack upon the Gallipoli peninsula.
Had that attack been pressed home, and Constantinople fallen, the war
would certainly have ended then and there. For Germany could not then
have halted the immense supply of munitions and equipment that England,
confident of her financial resources and Still mistress of the seas,
was now cleverly procuring for herself and her allies through the
factories of outwardly neutral America. But as regards Russia, Germany
was already doing her work pretty thoroughly. Though the supplies were
pouring into Archangel, they were for the most part never allowed
to leave the wharves, or mysteriously disappeared _en route_ to the
Russian armies. For by now a small group of sycophantic courtiers and
corrupt administrators of the Czar’s own inner circle, taking their
tone from Berlin, and possibly also from the imperious and self-willed
Czarina, were asking themselves the question, “What should happen, if,
after all, we won? Would we not have put into the hands of the people
the very weapon whereby to destroy our power?”
Thus through outward delay and inner treachery, the Allies themselves
threw away their chief opportunity of forcing a decision upon Germany.
The Gallipoli advance, thanks to divided counsels in England and in
France, was never pressed home in time. The Russian armies, which
despite their terrible shortage in munitions, had fought their way
into Galicia in the spring of 1915 and delivered their last effective
threat to Vienna, crumbled away helplessly before the new policy
Germany had conceived of standing like a wall in the West, and sweeping
down all opposition in the East. From the foothills of the Carpathians
and the Hungarian plains to the Pripet marshes that lay two hundred
miles behind Warsaw, the Russian armies retreated, fighting with sticks
instead of rifles, and having back of them not sufficient reserves of
ammunition even to feed their batteries for a day. The outcome was that
the Grand Duke Nicholas, an able hard-bitten soldier, was deposed from
command of the Russian armies, and the Czar, now more than ever swayed
by the evil influences of his consort and Rasputin, took command.
Russia’s doom was sealed.
At the same time, England, misled by the French into thinking that the
German effectives were wasting away more rapidly than those of the
Allies in the West, withdrew from Gallipoli and launched a disastrous
attack at Loos, which was completely abortive, and served only to sweep
away a great portion of the new armies which Kitchener had summoned
into being. Henceforward, stalemate was practically certain, and by
this stalemate Germany in the end stood ready to profit. For she could
now move towards the East whenever and wherever she pleased. Bulgaria
was brought into the war on Germany’s side to counterbalance Italy’s
defection to the cause of the Allies, in 1915; and from Antwerp to the
Persian Gulf, Kaiser Wilhelm now ruled supreme. Russia had utterly
collapsed in the East, and the iron wall of troops still stood firmly
planted on French soil. That was the prospect that uplifted all German
hearts to face, in 1916, another year of war.
2
So the first act of the great drama ended with Germany everywhere
triumphant in the East and the Allies unable to force a decision
anywhere on their own chosen ground of the West. But this result had
only hardened the Western allies to persist. Their very lives were now
at stake, and they still held the German lines immobilised, and the
German coasts in the grip of the blockade. Economically, Germany could
persist no more than Napoleon had persisted, in bearing the strain. She
still had two military weapons whereby she might be able to bring her
last two opponents, France and England, to the ground. These were her
own power of making munitions, a power which had been tested and proven
successful in pulverising the Russians in the spring of 1915; and in
addition, the submarine which might eventually starve out England.
Both weapons were launched on the world in full strength in 1916.
The million of shells which the German armies showered on Verdun
in the first twelve hours’ bombardment of that fortress, and the
million tons of shipping which England began losing every month,
proved, however, equally ineffective to bring the war to its close.
The first led directly to open discontent behind the lines in Germany
itself; the latter led indirectly to America’s entry into the war. For
despite the wave of horror that had swept over her at the loss of the
_Lusitania_, America now learned with amazement that the Germans had
no intention whatever of abandoning the submarine, with its constant
threat to neutral traffic. The outcome was to bring America into the
struggle as a fresh factor of incalculable strength against an already
disillusioned Germany.
Yet this decision was not taken immediately. Apart from two strongly
vocal minorities, one of which insistently upheld the cause of the
Allies, while the other just as clearly pointed out the tremendous
triumphs of the German military machine, the great bulk of the American
people were still indifferent. They had, and they desired, no quarrel
with the people of Germany. On this basis, the sentimental basis of
“having kept America out of the war,” President Wilson was re-elected
in November 1916. He knew, and had given indications that he knew,
that the business of American neutrality was played out. But this
knowledge was not shared by the great majority of his people, who
fondly hoped to continue to profit at the expense of both sides in the
struggle, by maintaining a prosperous neutrality.
With incredible folly, the military leaders of Germany, blind to the
harvest of suffering they were creating in the homes and hearts of
their own people, played completely into the American President’s
hands. They issued a proclamation pointing out the devastation that
the German arms had already caused (a devastation real enough when
we consider that a million Russians had been slaughtered, another
million were prisoners in German hands, and that great tracts of land
had been left desert in Northern France, Poland, and the Balkans) and
demanding that this destruction should now cease. Let the Allies come
to the council table, and they would learn Germany’s demands. In the
swollen phrases of this threatening note, the American President found
his opportunity. He issued an appeal to the Allies to state their war
aims. The reply was unexpectedly moderate, but official Germany gave no
indication that she would accept it. Instead, while Wilson spoke openly
of a peace without victory, based on the cessation of interference
by one nation in another’s affairs, government by the consent of the
governed, freedom of the seas, and limitation of armaments, Germany
unsheathed her last weapon. On January 31st, 1917, she proclaimed a
blockade of England, France, and Italy, closed the ports of Europe
to neutral shipping, and declared that her submarines would sink
henceforward all ships that endeavoured to trade with the belligerents
at war with Germany. The answer was prompt and immediate. The American
government severed diplomatic relations with Germany.
Thus America came into the war in defence of the same principle of
freedom of the seas about which she had once before fought England in
1812. The leaders of Germany, had they possessed any intimate knowledge
of American history, or the American character, might have foreseen
this result. For the American nation as a whole lives and flourishes
by, and wages its greatest struggles over, the application of certain
very simple shibboleths and slogans. It was so in 1776, in 1812, in
1861, and it was again to prove so in 1917. Unlike the Russians, who
can always change their outward principles completely, without losing
any of their inner characteristics, the Americans have no special inner
characteristics (as they have no aristocracy) but make up for this lack
by their whole-hearted obedience to certain primary ideas and taboos
which are to them sacred. The threat which Germany delivered to the
cherished right of America to trade freely with all the nations of the
earth, and thereby to end the whole edifice of American prosperity,
proved sufficient to unite all sections of the American people; and
never did President Wilson speak more surely on behalf of the entire
nation than when, paraphrasing Luther, he declared that America “could
do no other” than fight.
Thus it happened that America, immense in untouched power and resource,
united to defeat Germany at the same moment when Russia, bleeding and
defeated, with an internal revolution on her hands, reeled out of the
struggle. For the first time--if we except the opening up of Japan in
which each had taken previously a hand--the two nations whose effort
was to dominate the future, met on a common ground. Like an electric
flash, or the torches that the Greek runners had carried in their
races long gone by, an impulse flashed from one to the other. That
impulse may have differed in origin, but not in aim. What Russia by her
concentration of power into a vacillating but central ruling class,
could not do, America, by her diffusion of power into a self-reliant
bourgeoisie, accomplished. Russia had crippled the European nationalist
military machine; America overwhelmed the economic. And not only the
liberated Slavs of Eastern Europe, but also the Mediterranean powers,
owe their existence to-day to the action of two nations, neither of
which stood to profit thereby: America and Russia.
3
The impulse that had pushed the two great frontier nations forward
to their momentary encounter on the blood-soaked and devastated soil
of Europe, was unquestionably the same in essence, though differing
profoundly in origin and in ultimate result. In the case of Russia, the
unconscious weight of public opinion, holding steadily to its ancient
dream of a great Pan-Slav Empire, had literally pushed from behind
the vacillating and enfeebled Czar. In the case of America, an aloof,
cautious, and essentially undemocratic President had found at last a
democratic formula to which popular opinion, holding firm to its old
dream of liberty for all peoples, could respond. The situation of 1688,
of 1776-89, of 1860-65 was thus repeated, on a larger scale, and with
the world itself for background; and the repercussion of both events in
their respective countries led to the same profound and far-reaching
changes.
In America, the principles which President Wilson had enunciated in
his celebrated Fourteen Points--principles which the Allies promptly
accepted as a basis for negotiation with a Germany, now ready to
acknowledge its defeat, and which they conveniently forgot immediately
afterwards--came into open and direct conflict with the outstanding
notion which had guided America in its foreign relations since the days
of Washington; that there was to be above all, aloofness from Europe,
no entanglement in European affairs. The result was that the American
President, who had been unquestionably empowered by his people to wage
war, found himself unable to make peace. The moment he stepped upon
European soil, President Wilson ceased to represent the American people
and became only representative of himself. Thus the declaration of
the Armistice led not to peace and sheathing of the sword, but to the
last act of the world struggle, an act in which America was obliged to
play the part of striving to rehabilitate Europe economically, while
standing aloof politically.
At the other end of the scale, it is necessary to note that since the
spring of 1917, Russia had been in revolution, a revolution which took
an extreme form in the Bolshevik seizure of power in November of that
year. Lacking a Czar, abandoned by its Allies, utterly disillusioned
about the war, leaderless, and incapable of continuing the struggle,
the country now presented an opportunity to any clever opportunist who
could, under the guise of promising to the peasants bread, peace and
land, effectively usurp the central power of the Czar. Lenin alone
saw this opportunity and was ready to seize it and bend it to its
purposes. A new alliance equally deadly to avowed Czarists and liberal
intellectuals was forged between factory-worker and mujik; and from the
achievement of this alliance we date present-day Russia. The situation
had found the sole man, ruthless, undemocratic, efficient, who could
guide it. In America, Wilson had skilfully manœuvred his people into
a position where further retreat into neutrality was, as he thought,
impossible. He had created his own opportunity, instead of waiting
for it to come to him; and having created it, he immediately supposed
that he could personally master it, and that it would follow him
blindly. He did not count on the revulsion of horror that would follow
upon America’s awakening to the fact that the country was enmeshed
in European diplomacy, the determination on the part of his people
to remain an independent frontier. Thus the American and the Russian
crises followed very different courses.
There is much in the career of Woodrow Wilson that recalls the tragic
life-story of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Amenophis IV, known to later
ages as Akhnaton. Like the Egyptian king who strove to transform
the religion of his people from a tribal polytheism into a pure and
universal form of monotheism, Wilson strove to formulate finally the
American creed as it affected the world. But the American creed is too
loosely held, too vague a sentiment, to be formulated. A Californian,
though he may belong to the same racial stock, cannot have the same
outlook as a New Englander; a New Orleans Creole cannot share the
attitude to life of a Scandinavian settler in Northern Michigan.
America owes its continuance solely to the fact that all these diverse
racial and geographical stocks assume that their pooled effort will
make America sufficient to itself, and that “government of the people
by the people for the people” will still persist in bestowing the
fruits of middle-class prosperity. But it is obvious that this simple
creed--or superstition--cannot be maintained if once any attempt is
made to apply it to the more complex European situation. Once America
backs any side in the European struggle, then that side has to become
outwardly, if not inwardly, American; that is to say, it has to abandon
all the traditional differences that distinguish it from its European
neighbours. Wilson strove to reconcile the psychology of America with
the remoter psychology of Europe, in the same way as Amenophis strove
to identify all forms of Egyptian worship with his own personal and
individual creed. In striving thus to simplify the situation, he merely
complicated it. And the result was, as in the case of the Egyptian
Pharaoh whom he resembled, a personal tragedy of immense magnitude,
which left the American President an outlaw and heretic in his own
country, and pursued him to his death with rancour and misunderstanding.
Russia in repudiating the war and the Romanovs had to repudiate
Europe, and this despite the Bolsheviks themselves, whose dream was
probably a Marxian version of Peter the Great’s Empire. It became
again a peasant country facing the East. America, by its repudiation
of Wilson, was driven also to repudiate Europe, and this despite the
most intelligent classes of Americans who were aware that the one hope
of the maintenance of European peace lay in the establishment of an
European concert of nations. America became again a land of opportunist
industrialism, facing westward. Thus the two nations, having like two
planets revolved in opposing orbits up to the moment these orbits
coincided, resumed again their former course, but not without the hope
of some further encounter in the future. The optimistic idealism of
President Wilson, ready to accept the most outrageous provisions of
the Versailles Treaty for the sake of preserving his conception of
a League of Nations bound to respect the fundamental principles of
democracy, was finally rejected not by Europe, but by America. The
fatalistic materialism of Lenin, ready to swallow complete defeat at
Brest-Litovsk for the sake of creating a proletarian world-empire,
broke equally before the lack of European support and the obstinacy
of the Russian peasantry. With Wilson’s final retirement and Lenin’s
new economic policy the issue of the great drama was largely settled
as regards the two chief protagonists of Russia and America. But the
third, Europe, caught in the cleft of the dilemma, unable to decide
for either democratic capitalism or demagogic dictatorship, has as yet
found no clear issue out of the impasse.
This position, which is the world position of to-day, was enforced on
Europe by the successive abandonment of the European situation on the
part of both Russia and America. In the case of Russia, the abandonment
was perhaps more absolute, because it was more deeply psychological.
The Russian asked Europe for a new fetich, a new sacred talisman, to
replace the old fetich of the Orthodox Czar which was utterly worn out,
and impotent to protect him longer against misfortune. Such a belief
in the power of a fetich, a cult-object, is Oriental, and indeed the
Russian is fundamentally Oriental. The fetich of success had been
imported formerly from abroad, by Peter the Great, by Catherine, by
Alexander II, by Witte. Now it was no longer forthcoming. Even the guns
and the gold that the Allies had promised and provided, were turning
against the Russians themselves. A new talisman would have to be found
within. Lenin was the sole man who could provide it. A workman’s cap,
a few words from Marx, education and electric light for all, would be
sufficient. Russia could scramble out of her impasse, secure in the
conviction that she henceforth could control her destiny alone, while
undermining the nations of Europe with their own revolutionary ethic.
But America, too, abandoned Europe for causes that, however economic
they may appear on the surface, have a firmly-grounded psychological
foundation. Unlike Russia, all the talismans, wealth, power,
prosperity, were in her hands. But she was uneasy because she could
not discover a verbal formula that would cover equally her own
political union and the diversity of disunited European nations. This
belief in a formula--which expresses itself in Egyptian hieroglyph,
in Aristotelian syllogism, in algebraic equation--is Occidental, and
America is fundamentally Occidental. Even the arguments of the most
enlightened European statesmen, prepared to back up President Wilson
in his demand for a League of Nations, turned against America itself. A
League of Nations--what did that mean but a confederation of sovereign
and independent states such as had threatened to disrupt the economic
alliance between North and Middle West during the fateful years of
1854-65? What else did it mean, but that the Americans themselves, in
so far as they were still sentimentally attached to Europe, could still
feel themselves to be Europeans? The whole process of “Americanization”
was threatened by such a programme. Common standards of Puritan
conduct, of business dealing, of economic prosperity were threatened by
such a step. Wilson’s words, however close they seemed to Lincoln’s,
would effectively destroy all that the armies invoked by Lincoln had
fought for. They would destroy Americanism, and make Europeans equal
in every respect, to Americans. Let them be anathema! America hastened
to scramble out of her impasse, fearful that the European nations were
plotting against her, and determined henceforth to undermine them by
means of the “peaceful penetration” of mass-production.
Nations have their phobias and complexes no less than individuals. In
the case of America and Russia, a complex and a phobia were to take the
place of the natural growth of tradition, and to strive to overcome the
world.
Chapter XVII
For the past ten years the situation of Europe has been both grotesque
and tragic. Had she made her exit from the stage of world-politics with
the gesture of tragic dignity that marked the downfall of the ancient
Roman Empire, had she been overwhelmed by a new wave of barbarians,
the historian of to-day might have a more pleasant and profitable task
to fulfill. But unfortunately nothing of this came to pass, nor did
Europe really recover from the death-blow of the war. Since 1921, when
the French armies marched into the Ruhr, she has become like a patient
suffering from shell-shock who acts irresponsibly and has no coherent
purpose in life. Apart from the tenuous hope of a League of Nations
which has not been able to prevent fresh combinations of power, such
as have been clearly revealed by the various naval pacts, nor fresh
outbursts of rabid nationalism, such as France, Italy and various
Balkan nationalities have displayed, Europe has done little, either
morally or politically. Of the two new world-philosophies offered her,
she has chosen neither.
The American world-philosophy, in the ultimate form that it has taken
since the close of the war, is a rough-and-ready simplification of
the far more complex but equally individualistic social philosophy
of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. It exalts the physical liberty
of the individual at the expense of his general social and moral
responsibility. Immediately after the close of war, the labour
situation in America became again acute. The great industrial trade
unions, realising the immense part they had played in carrying the
Allied effort to a successful conclusion, had long begun to agitate
for an overthrow of the existing form of government and for such a
seizure of power as had been effected in Russia. The American system
of democratic capitalism, reverting into the hands of the great
industrialists and their allies and servants, set itself to the
task of destroying this opposition. Its two outstanding means were
mass-production and coöperative capitalism. It set itself to the task
of manufacturing more quickly and of giving the worker a share in
the product. Thereby it created a new prosperity and a standardised
happiness. Any protest became in the eyes of its leaders a crime
against true Americanism. To enforce this unalterable Americanism upon
the immense masses of citizens of foreign descent, it was necessary to
stop the flow of immigration; and this was promptly done. To prevent
the country lapsing into a state of sheer moral anarchy, such as was
foreshadowed by the post-war revivals of the Ku Klux Klan, the fierce
recrudescence of race-hatreds cutting athwart all sections of American
life, it was necessary to concentrate solely on a more intensive
development of that industrial prosperity that had characterised the
war years. The South was industrially invaded as well as the North,
the East and the West became more firmly linked together by the
great money and manufacturing interests. Finally, to ensure that the
reëstablishment of the country was to be permanent, on the old basis of
complete aloofness from both European radicalism and European idealism,
it was necessary to stifle or suppress freedom of spirit, freedom of
thought, freedom of public utterance, and to concentrate altogether
on the immense material achievements that America had already
accomplished--the improvement in living conditions, the provisions of
schools, hospitals, roads, and scientific inventions for all sections
of the population. Accordingly, the study of American patriotic views
became an important part of school curriculums. Anyone who thought
otherwise than these views taught, must either hold his peace or accept
exile and poverty. During the years that immediately succeeded the war,
a new body of American intellectuals again took the road to Europe,
not to mention those who were forcibly cast out upon Soviet Russia.
The Russian world-philosophy, as formulated by the leaders of the new
Bolshevik régime, was also a comprehensive simplification of what was
formerly a much more complex social position. It skilfully provided
an outlet for public enterprise, while maintaining the power in the
hands of a specially chosen and selected class. Unquestioningly the
Bolsheviks accepted the postulate, which America had been foremost in
proclaiming, that all power derives ultimately from the lowest ranks of
the people, from the peasants and factory workers. This happened also
to be the postulate of Karl Marx, and accordingly Marxism became a new
State religion to take the place of the old, which had delegated this
power of the people themselves into the hands of the Czar and of the
Orthodox Church. But in its application to the situation created by
the Russian débâcle, this dogma proved to be just as much of a check
upon free activity as had all the old restrictions of the Czar. It
exalted the moral and social responsibility of the individual at the
expense of his physical liberty. Everyone, whether Communist or not,
must henceforth behave in the way laid out for him by the heads of the
Communist party, who though representing an even smaller proportion
of the entire people than the American Wall Street magnates,
nevertheless had now all the power in their hands. The masses would be
fed, housed, educated, on condition only that they did not undertake
counter-revolutionary propaganda, and the Communist Secret Service
was there to enforce this law, on penalty of death or imprisonment,
against all who attempted to modify the existing political system. A
new revolutionary army, recruited among the peasants, and backed by
firm discipline, arose to take the place of the old; but the field
of its activity was to be limited to helping the foreign proletariat
to overthrow their own capitalist Imperialist governments, and to
maintaining Lenin’s system intact at home. All foreign influences,
whether in the shape of very limited concessions to foreign capital,
or works of art with a definitely anti-communist tendency, were to
be severely supervised and ruthlessly suppressed. Thus freedom of
activity outside the bounds of the Communist dogma became as impossible
in Russia during the years after the war, as freedom of thought
outside the bounds of the Capitalist assumption became in America.
The underlying aim of the Russians became to create an army of young
Lenins; that of the Americans to achieve a million Henry Fords.[8]
It is quite obvious that none of the European nations could
whole-heartedly accept either the American or the Russian solution.
To follow the Russian idea out in all its logical implications meant
the suppression of the Parliamentary régime to which Europe had been
accustomed, and the transformation of all the European countries from
constitutional monarchies to proletarian dictatorships, in which
the will of a single man, or a small committee of men reinforced
and balanced through the establishment of local advisory councils
controlled all industrial production. To carry out in detail the
American idea, it was necessary for Europe to abolish all gradations
of rank and responsibility, such as a constitutional monarchy implies,
and to concentrate entirely on demagogic parliamentarism, backed and
controlled by the industrial interests which have everything to gain
from an increase of individual production and prosperity. To follow
out this ideal proved quite as impossible for Europe as to Russianise
their existing populations. The traditional conservatism which dreads a
complete break with the past, the already established forms of social,
moral, and religious usage, and the lingering remnants of nationalist
pride and sentiment, stood everywhere in the way. Only in one country,
Italy, was the combination effected of proletarian demagogy and
autocratic dictatorship. Thanks to a chapter of accidents, Mussolini
and his henchmen took over the rule of that country from the hands
of the conservative Catholics and the anti-clerical Liberals alike.
For the rest, the European countries tended to fall into the same
alignment that had been theirs upon the first appearance of America
and Russia upon the stage of the world. Western Europe, led by England
and reconstructed Germany, tended to become more and more American and
parliamentary; Eastern Europe, under the leadership of Italy, Hungary,
Poland, tended to become more and more arbitrary and swayed by the
dictates of revolutionary militarism.
2
The modern world, which we are examining from the perilously close
range of participators in, rather than spectators of its effort, is
essentially the fruit of two streams of influence, emanating from
beyond the European frontier, and expressing themselves logically
in the solutions of the social problem which America and Russia
have found. These two streams of influence have been at work upon
Europe, and in a different way upon the Far East, for at least two
centuries past. At the present moment they are rapidly approaching
their culmination. In order to understand this culmination it is
necessary to turn aside from the field of outward political action and
to state, as far as such things can be finally stated, the fundamental
psychological characteristics that go to the making up of what may be
called the typical Russian and the typical American.
The Americans, taken as a class apart from Europeans or Asiatics,
tend to have no interest whatever in thought for its own sake. Their
special delight is not in thought, but in purely physical activity.
This refusal to think maturely, to speculate even remotely about the
ultimate problems of the world and of humanity, has frequently led
European observers to characterise the American people as a young
nation, a nation not grown up. But it was possibly quite as evident
in the days of Washington as it is now; the only difference being
that it has by now grown a dominating characteristic of all parts
of the country, whereas in the early stages it was confined mostly
to the frontier, and obscured from view by the influence of the
better-educated colonial seaboard settlements, still under the spell
of European ways of thinking. The whole course of American history may
be summed up as the history of the spread of the pioneer and of his
type of mind into every department of human effort. The pioneer type
is always a man too busy with cutting away virgin forests, building
roads, cultivating land, opening mines and factories, inventing
machines, making automobiles, gambling with stocks, devoting himself
to social “service,” to stop and ponder upon the æsthetic values of
art and religion, or the metaphysical problems of human destiny.
Such questions cannot enter into his pragmatic scheme of material
effort directed towards immediate ends. For him the sheer delight of
making suffices, not the value of the thing made. So habitual, so
universal has this cult of activity for its own sake grown to the
Americans, that it is constantly employed by all ranks of the people
as a substitute for thought. The American uses leisure itself, not as
a valuable opportunity for self-examination, but only as a stimulus
to some new kind of activity. Sports and games, travel, book- and
picture-collecting, education itself, become for him simply fresh
pretexts for employing some more of his surplus energy, for taking
part in some new form of mental distraction. For example, the European
lecturers who annually go to America in such great numbers may be under
the illusion that they are somehow guiding or directing the American
mind into more fruitful channels; their American audiences are under
no such illusion. Their aim is at the best merely to rapidly get
firsthand information about some new fact that puzzles them; at the
worst, to momentarily accept the lecturer’s own views as a substitute
for creative and independent thinking of their own, whereby they share
the illusion that they are actually participating in some form of human
thought-process.
Even when the American is in repose, he must somehow feel that his
body, if not his mind, is exerting itself. The fundamental symbol of
American life is not, as many observers have held, the skyscraper,
with its busy activity, nor the athletic field with its gladiatorial
baseball and football games, nor even that puritanic symbol of the
pitcher of melting ice-water which makes its inevitable appearance
equally upon the tables of the humblest lunch counters and the desks
of bank presidents and statesmen. The true, the classic American
symbol is the rocking-chair. It symbolises alike domestic comfort, and
nomadic restlessness. In the rocking-chair one need not speak and yet
one must continue to move to and fro. In the rocking-chair activity
becomes a soothing narcotic, and absence of mental purpose a stimulus
to further effort. The rocking-chair removes all the necessity for
the contemplation of the great cosmos of justice and injustice, truth
and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, to plant man firmly in the lesser
cosmos of his personal individuality, his simple animal “reaction” to
practical truth. In the rocking-chair one can “loaf and invite one’s
soul” for an endless journey. The goal does not matter. This is true
on every weekday, and on Sunday the activities of the rocking-chair
are supplemented by the Sunday newspaper supplement, providing another
substitute for thought.
On the other hand, the Russians, as opposed to the Americans, tend to
have very little interest in physical activity. A fund of Mongolian
inertia, concealed at the roots of the Russian character, probably
accounts for this; but it is impossible to understand the tragic
disorder of many Russian lives,[9] as well as the strange crisis of
feverish and misdirected fury that traverse Russian history, unless we
admit at the outset that the Russian is in some way prejudiced against
activity for its own sake. If he undertakes activity at all, it must
be for some object that lies beyond activity. Thus we find the Russian
peasant becoming a tramp in order to “save his soul”; the Russian
intellectual indulging in all forms of drunken debauchery in order to
acquire the “experience that is necessary to an artist”; the Russian
Czar making war on Oriental or European nations in order to prove that
he is “by the Grace of God, leader of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.”
Nor has the Russian Revolution brought about any change in this state
of affairs. Lenin himself, although he displayed while in power a
quite remarkably un-Russian ability to make rapid decisions, owed
his advent to power largely to his ability to hold his ground without
altering his position. His own pedantic and doctrinaire Marxism shows,
no less than his stoic fatalism, the fact that mere obstinate adherence
to a theory was to him more important than practice, for many years
before the moment that he suddenly found Russia at his feet. And Lenin
owed, though perhaps he himself would never have admitted it, a great
deal to the fiery Jew, Trotsky, who was profoundly un-Russian, indeed
American, in temperament. The Revolution owed its success entirely to
a few clean-cut practical actions thrown athwart a raging torrent of
unpractical ideas and theories; Lenin and Trotsky rather saved Russia
from herself, than created a new Russia. And since the Revolution the
stream of endless discussion of theoretical ideas, has merely flowed
on, like water under a bridge, leaving the structure of the state
intact. A wise and witty French observer, Luc Durtain, who has seen
Russia since the Revolution, has remarked that the Russian conversation
is, in times of food shortage, in itself equal to meat and drink.
What, then, is the specific symbol of Russian life? It is not the
immobile gleam of the ikon in the corner of the house, nor the
strangely drifting, tentative and slow-gathering mass-demonstrations
of the people, nor the oddly mechanical governmentally-ordered
demonstrations, nor the curiously vivid splashes of gay and exotic
colour that contrast with the sombreness of the landscape. The specific
symbol of Russia is probably the samovar. Ready at all times of the day
and night to provide hot water, it stimulates but does not nourish,
like the endless Russian conversations. It is the essential element
of every Russian social gathering, and yet at the same time is only a
pretext for meeting and wasting one’s energy in talk: as much a pretext
as Moscow, Russia itself, life, or the Universe in Russian eyes. It
does not provide tea in itself. For that a teapot is still necessary.
It only provides the hot water that may be used or not to produce tea,
as you will. In short, it is as perfect a symbol of inactive power as
anyone is ever likely to find. And, like Russia herself, it has fire
in its belly: fire hidden away from too prying eyes, under an outward
shell of servility and conformity.
3
The conflict that is being fought out to-day between America and
Russia is a psychological one. It is a subjective conflict between two
opposed conceptions of the destiny of mankind, rather than an objective
conflict between armies and directly political aims. And the two
fields of its activity are the European and the Asiatic world.
Both Russia and America have achieved within their borders what to them
is the perfect mode of existence. They have arrived at the Utopian
state of complete optimism and confidence for the future. Despite the
activities of one set of European prophets, the Soviet system has not
broken down. It is more secure, after ten years, than the system of
Czardom that it replaced. Despite the activities of another set of
prophets, American democratic capitalism has not broken down either. It
apparently possesses inexhaustible reserves of prosperity and energy.
But Europe, scarcely recovered from the horrors of its own internecine
struggle, cannot follow the course of either country. Europe is like
the ancient Hebrew monarchy divided between the imperialist tolerance
of the kings of Israel and the narrow particularism of the kings of
Judah. To the working classes the Russian solution, in its trenchant
logic, immediately appeals; but this drives the capitalist classes only
further towards embracing the ideas of America. To the intellectuals,
the American solution is a monstrous vulgarisation; but this only means
that they must either become reactionary, or accept the revolutionary
message of Russia. Europe, caught between the intellectual and
moral millstones of two great powers which were originally of its
own creation, but which have gone their own ways without accepting
the nineteenth century compromises, is awaiting a new political
Messiah with a clear message; hence the popularity of such a figure
as Mussolini. But whether Europe, in its decadent cosmopolitanism,
will ever achieve anything resembling the unity of which its poets
only dreamed, is doubtful. It is far more likely to pass, by gradual
infiltration of influence and direction, completely under the sway of
the United States.
But it is not only in Europe that the world-struggle is being waged.
The balance of power, ultimately, lies in the Far East, and its
enormous reserves of natural resources and of population. And during
the past ten years the Far East has shown clearly the direction it
proposes to follow. It is ready to accept the material achievements of
the West, without in the slightest degree altering its own racial and
social traditions. Thus it is ready to turn the weapons of the West
against the West itself, while remaining at heart far more akin to the
spirit of non-individualistic fatalism which has successfully guided
Russia. The most outstanding example of this recent development in the
East is Japan, which in the words of a modern Russian writer, “wishes
to take her machinery from America, her spiritual culture from Russia.”
China and India are likely sooner or later to take the same path,
thanks to the awakening of Asiatic racial pride, actively fomented
by Europe’s glaring administrative blunders and internal political
divisions.
4
The parallel lines that we have drawn between the two great frontier
nations are now complete, and the whole world finds itself in the
dilemma of having to make either a choice or a compromise between the
ideals of America and of Russia. At the present moment, the tendency is
probably towards a compromise of some sort, the war years and post-war
years having too profoundly shaken mankind. But this tendency is only
temporary, and is due to the slow disappearance of the generation that
lived through the crisis of the war, a generation that emerged from the
conflict profoundly sceptical of itself and of others, and incapable of
the supreme unreason of an absolute creed.
If Russia succeeds in consolidating its moral gains in the Far East,
while America no less succeeds in its clever policy of economic
penetration into Europe--a policy to which European newspapers,
theatres, hotels, shops and social usages are gradually but
unmistakably responding--if these two achievements come about, another
world-conflict is almost certain to take place before the close of
the twentieth century. For between an industrialised and proletarian
East and an industrialised and plutocratic West, the population
problem will rapidly become as acute as it already is in Japan. Nor
will the sporadic and necessarily individualistic propaganda of birth
control mend matters here. Under the present conditions controlling
this propaganda, the better, finer and more harmonious sections
of the population simply tend to die out, while the lower, baser,
and least intelligent, go on increasing--thus destroying the aim
of eugenics and inverting the true course of human evolution. This
inversion of evolution is now powerfully aided by the mushroom-like
growth of industrial capitalism, ready to exploit the lower levels for
its own purposes, and also by all so-called “religious” propaganda,
which has unfortunately always an equally “practical” end in view,
whether directed by the ideals of Communist Bolshevism, Catholic
Ecclesiasticism, or American Rotarianism. Thus the only hope for
avoidance of a conflict between the two forces loosed on the world
by Russia and America, becomes some shadowy proposal for complete
disarmament, or the limitation of competitive industrialism and the
breeding of a new aristocratic élite to control the economic and social
life of the various nations. Such a proposal lies apparently outside
the sphere of “practical” politics, and only the idealist philosopher
Plato has dealt fully with its implications.
The fact that most intelligent Europeans have come to despair of the
prospect, and have practically abandoned any further attempt to control
the two opposing forces let loose upon the world, is shown by the
extraordinary revival, within recent years, of intellectual interest
in the eighteenth century. Such people realise that the nineteenth
century, with its compromise between materialism and idealism, failed
to liberate humanity, so they yearn to go back to a happier, more
harmonious time, before instinct and reason conflicted, when neither
Russia nor America interfered with the course of human existence. This
movement towards the eighteenth century is however merely a final
gesture of world-weary romanticism, impotent to create any new values
for humanity. It cannot postpone by a single day the conflict that is
increasingly approaching between the unloosed forces of America and
Russia.
The only factors that may prevent that conflict from taking on an acute
phase in the not distant future, exist not in hyper-intellectual and
creatively sterile Europe, but in Russia and in America themselves.
Russia’s attempt to get the East completely on her side by stirring
up the Asiatics against the Caucasians may perhaps prove abortive,
for the reason that the heads of the Communist party take at the
same time no pains to conceal their immense contempt for all forms
of transcendent and organised religion save their own. This side of
Bolshevik propaganda may possibly fail to appeal very strongly to the
other-worldly millions of the Orient. At the same time, America’s
effort to control Europe through intensive financial and economic
penetration may possibly fail because of the inferior intellectual
character of the envoys she sends to Europe, or because Europe may
still place a higher value on leisure, culture, and beauty, than upon
any of the energy-wasting devices America has to offer her. But apart
from this, there seems very little doubt that America and Russia are
destined to bulk more and more largely in the world’s affairs, until
the inevitable clash between them takes place. Europe has no longer the
economic force nor the creative will to resist America. Asia has no
longer the spiritual fervour nor the unified faith to hold back Russia.
If such a conflict as we have envisaged should take place, what would
be the result? The crisis of the European war would simply be repeated
on a larger scale. Russia, together with her Eastern allies, would
possess incalculable reserves of man-power; and the fact that the
Soviet Republic has shown a determination to maintain in existence a
highly-efficient and disciplined army of considerable numbers, would
give her an initial advantage, in case the first attack in the opening
stages of the contest came from her side. But America and her European
allies would undoubtedly possess a preponderance of machinery, greater
financial resources, and a far superior naval and aerial force. After
the first year of battle, their effort would only increase, while
Russia’s effort would almost necessarily diminish. Russia’s only hope
would be in a short rather than in a long war.
On the other hand, even should the Western Allies hold the coasts
of Russia, together with the Far East, in a complete blockade, a
Russo-Mongolian combination could continue the struggle almost
indefinitely. The immense reserves of food, land, and man-power at the
disposal of the Soviet war lords would insure this. Russia cannot be
completely beaten by a blockade (even when that is aided by internal
famine) as the Allies found out in 1919. Nor can she be beaten by
land-invasion, as Napoleon found out in 1812. The only hope for the
West of obtaining a decision in their favour would be to invade and
terrorise Russia through the air. Such a campaign, if the West had
sufficient preponderance in the air to carry it to a successful
conclusion, might eventually lead to an admission of physical defeat
on Russia’s part. But hers would nevertheless remain a moral victory of
enormous importance to the future of the human race.
The dangers of a war of this nature, especially if the forces engaged
are anywhere near equal, can scarcely be overstated. The recent
European war gave those who took part in it a faint foretaste of them.
There would be continuous bombing of enemy capitals, communications,
granaries, food and munition depots. Armies would operate at enormous
distances from their base of supplies, with resultant tension and
spirit of mutiny ready to flame up every moment. Ocean-going submarines
would defy the blockade, and spread death and destruction on the high
seas. Governments might have to meet and be conducted from secret
places underground in order to escape destruction from poison-gas and
other lethal weapons. Spying and counter-spying would be universal.
Such a state of affairs might well lead the world rapidly back to a
state of sheer anarchy, and undo in a few years the finest effort of
five thousand years of civilisation. The break-up of the Roman Empire,
or the recent chaos in China, offers but a feeble picture of what such
a world would be like. The end of such a conflict might well be such a
state of famine, disorder and exhaustion as to leave no hope to mankind
for the future.
Under these circumstances, the duty of every intelligent Russian and
every intelligent American of to-day becomes clear. Since salvation is
not to be looked for either from the old civilisations of the East nor
from the more recent European civilisations; since both are now rapidly
and inevitably in decay after their last great creative period (which
was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than the eighteenth
or nineteenth); since, above all, no revival of unified religious faith
is to be looked for either among the Western Christian sects, or the
great Oriental religions, we must either find some hope of salvation
in ourselves, or admit our defeat, and with it the ultimate defeat
of mankind. Step by step, inch by inch, we must oppose the tides of
Bolshevism and of Americanism that are now sweeping over the world. We
must save America and Russia from themselves. That is our mission and
our purpose. But how can we fulfil this mission that our time--perhaps
the most tragic time in all human history--imposes upon us? We can
not fulfil it separately, for that is a task beyond the powers of any
single man, or body of men. We must strive to inform both America and
Russia with a purpose alien to their whole historical development.
Against these two attempts to impose on mankind a purely mechanical and
material conformity, we must uphold, perhaps for the last time, the
values of an ideal and supra-physical unity of spirit, not of function,
of a humanism that is at once scientific and æsthetic, and of a world
outlook that reconciles both man’s desire to achieve “the good life”
for himself on this planet, and his overwhelming sense of awe and
wonder at the superhuman processes of the universe. Perhaps this task
is altogether beyond our feeble and intermittent powers. Yet it is the
one remaining task left to humanity to accomplish in our age. And after
all, it is a problem that only education can solve, and we must leave
it to the teachers to accomplish. It is Russia, not America, that needs
an Emerson to lead it towards individual self-reliance. It is America,
not Russia that needs a Dostoevsky to show it the value of common
submission to the mysterious powers that govern the development of all
spirituality.
_April 1927-August 1929._
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The list that follows is not intended to be exhaustive. To cite, for
example, all the literary works of the authors discussed in Book III
would be a wearisome and a fruitless task. The list here given will be
found valuable to the student who seeks to expand his mental horizon by
reading further on the topics discussed in these pages.
_GENERAL WORKS_
A History of Russia, by Sir Bernard Pares. 1927.
The Oxford History of the United States, by S. E. Morison. 2 vols. 1927.
Main Currents in American Thought, by Vernon Louis Parrington. 1927.
Vol. I. The Colonial Mind (1620-1800).
Vol. II. The Romantic Revolution (1800-1860).
A History of Russian Literature to 1881, by Prince D. S. Mirsky. 1927.
Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881-1925, by Prince D. S. Mirsky.
1926.
(These two books contain valuable bibliographies of works
translated into English.)
Panorama de la Littérature Russe Contemporaire, by Vladimir Pozner.
Paris. 1929.
The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler. 2 vols. 1926-9.
Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humains, by Count Arthur Gobineau. 2
vols. Paris. 1884.
The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, by Henry Adams. 1919.
The Law of Civilization and Decay, by Brooks Adams. 1921.
The Revolutions of Civilization, by Flinders Petrie.
History of Religions, by G. F. Moore. Vol. I (Egypt, Babylonia,
Assyria, etc.). International Theological Library, 1914.
The Amarna Age. A Study of the Crisis of the Ancient World, by Rev.
James Baikie. 1926.
The Emancipation of Massachusetts, by Brooks Adams. Revised and
enlarged edition with new Preface. 1919.
Middletown, by Robert S. and Helen Merrill Lynd. 1929.
The Golden Day, by Lewis Mumford. 1926.
_WORKS ON SPECIAL TOPICS_
George Washington, the Image and the Man, by W. E. Woodward. 1928.
Catherine the Great, by Katherine Anthony. 1925.
Hawthorne, by Henry James. (English Men of Letters Series) 1879.
Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, by Raymond M. Weaver. 1921.
Whitman, An Interpretation in Narrative, by Emory Holloway. 1926.
Walt Whitman, by Basil de Sélincourt. London. 1914.
Dostoevsky, by André Gide. Paris. 1923.
Tolstoy as Man and Artist, by Dmitri Merejkowski. 1902.
The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks. 1922.
Stephen Crane, by Thomas Beer (with a preface by Joseph Conrad). 1923.
Anton Chekhov, by Leon Shestov, 1916.
Woodrow Wilson, by William Allen White. 1926.
Woodrow Wilson: A Character Study, by R. E. Annin. 1924.
Lenin, by Valeriu Marcu. 1928.
Geist und Geschichte der Bolschewismus, by Réne Fülop-Miller. 1927.
L’Autre Europe. Moscou et Sa Foi, by Luc Durtain. 1928.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The threat of pogroms has by no means disappeared under the
Bolsheviks. See Luc Durtain’s “L’Autre Europe” for details.
[2] His mother’s name was Rachel Levine. His father is unknown. Mrs.
Levine might have been a Christian married in a Jewish family but the
name of Rachel is not common among Christians.
[3] This statement may perhaps be questioned by some Catholics.
Apparently, Catholics are not allowed to undertake missionary activity
in Russia. But the church cult has not been suppressed.
[4] This same image was recently removed by the Bolsheviks, apparently
without any opposition whatever. Such are the paradoxes of Russian
history.
[5] A notable exception is the sermon in Melville’s “Moby Dick.”
[6] Isabel F. Hapgood. Introduction to “Taras Bulba.” New York, 1915.
[7] It has been estimated that during the fifty years between 1870
and 1910, America added to her previous population of forty million,
twenty-five million foreign settlers.
[8] See on this point, “The Diary of a Communist Schoolboy,” by S.
Ignatyev. Also “American Prosperity” by Paul M. Mazur.
[9] For example, the life of Pushkin or of Dostoevsky.
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