CURRENT IDEAS IN ST. PETERSBURG
ST. PETERSBURG, _January 27th_.
People are now saying that the revolutionary movement in Russia has
suffered a complete defeat. I do not share this point of view; my reason
is not based upon prophetic discernment into the future, but on what has
happened in the past.
If we are in the presence of a stream and note the beginnings of its
turbulent course, and then observe that it has met with the obstacle of
a dam and burst through that obstacle, and that this occurrence has been
repeated six times, with the result that every time the dam has been
burst the stream has gathered in strength, when this dam is made a
seventh time we are justified in concluding that as the dam is the same
in kind as it was before, and the stream also, the stream will break
through it a seventh time, although every time the dam was made the
onlookers made the observation that the progress of the stream was
definitively impeded. Now this is precisely what has happened with
regard to the Russian revolutionary movement up to the present time. And
we are now witnessing an act of a drama which began in 1895.
The course of events was like this: When the Emperor Nicholas II. came
to the Throne a deputation of the Zemstva were told that their moderate
demands for the beginning of reform were senseless dreams. Upon these
words the first dam was built, and it took the form of universal
repression.
In December, 1904, the ukase, embodying the nullified projects of Prince
Mirsky, was immediately followed by a threatening Manifesto, and a
second dam was made. This dam, however, was ineffectual, and it was
followed by the rising of the workmen of the 9th of January, and when
this meeting was dispersed by the troops, and a third dam constructed,
people said—and among them people who lived here and ought to have known
better—that the Russian revolution was over. February 18th saw the
publication of the two contradictory Manifestoes and the Boulygin
project, and during this time the dam took the shape of the Trepoff
dictatorship, which, as General Trepoff is a competent man, proved to be
for the time being more effectual than the obstacles which had hitherto
been employed.
However, in spite of this there came the incidents of the mutiny on
board the _Kniaz Potemkin_ and at Kronstadt and Libau. This was followed
by the concession of the law giving the Duma on August 6th, which was
accompanied by a law forbidding public meetings. A fourth dam had been
made. But the current only increased in strength. The Agrarian movement
began. The Labour movement increased. Meetings took place everywhere
till the dam burst, owing to the fact that the whole of Russia went on
strike in October, 1905.
Then the Manifesto of the 17th of October was given—a Manifesto granting
freedom of meeting and of speech, but no laws. It was followed by the
declaration of martial law in Poland. This measure was in its turn
succeeded by the St. Petersburg strike, the Sevastopol mutiny, and a
violent agrarian agitation in the province of Saratov, which spread all
over the “black soil” country in Russia. Repressive measures followed.
The Zemstvo leaders then addressed themselves to Count Witte, and asked
for a cessation of repressive measures, the control of irresponsible
bureaucrats in the provinces, and the right of universal suffrage. This
was refused. The postal officials, who had formed a union, were
arrested; there ensued postal strikes in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Thereupon a law was promulgated—this was the fifth dam—by which each
provincial governor could declare his government to be outside the law.
This was followed by the armed rising in Moscow, and after this a sixth
dam was made by the adoption of repressive measures of arrest all over
Russia.
Now, such questions as whether the revolutionary party was right or
wrong; whether they were too much in a hurry, and too impulsive and
violent in their methods; whether postal officials and Government
servants are justified in striking, &c., are altogether beside the mark.
The fact is that they have six times been successful in bursting the
barrier which has been placed to oppose them. And now once again people
are saying that because the movement has been temporarily
checked—because a dam has been made—the movement is over; that the
stream will not be able to continue its course. This is where I take
leave to differ from those who have from the first predicted the
ultimate collapse of the revolutionary movement. I differed then—in
January, 1905—and I continue to differ now. I am aware that I am laying
myself open to the charge of prophesying. “When you keep a diary,” said
a shrewd observer of a past generation, “don’t write down public events
which you can find in any record, but put down what you think will
happen, and then you will be astonished to see how wrong you have been.”
ST. PETERSBURG, _February 1st_.
I have been amusing myself by putting down some current ideas—those of
some people I have met here and some of my own, in the form of a
dialogue. The people represented are not real people. They are scarcely
even types, but mere mouthpieces of current ideas. I have not tried to
describe a conversation such as one now hears in Russia, but I have
attempted to put in the form of dialogue certain ideas I have heard
expressed by my friends and certain opinions which have occurred to
myself during such intercourse.
“There are three parties I could belong to,” said the small landlord;
“the alliance of October 17th, the alliance of Right and Order, and the
Constitutional Democratic Party. I would be willing to support any one
of these three, in the hope that they would lead directly or indirectly
to the disappearance of the present dynasty and to the establishment of
a real autocracy.”
The student laughed. “The Constitutional Democrats will not lead you to
an autocracy of any kind,” he said.
“I am not so sure,” said the landlord. “Napoleon was the child of the
Revolution, and so was Cromwell. I support the Radicals in the same way
in which I would have supported the Puritans to get rid of Charles I.,
and make way for Cromwell.”
“And Charles II.?” asked the professor, who had just returned from a
prolonged stay in England.
“Precisely, and Charles II.,” said the landlord. “The Charles the Firsts
of history are invincibly ignorant, whereas the Charles the Seconds have
learned the lesson and make ideal monarchs. One cannot always be
governed by men of genius, and in the intervening period, when the
genius is absent, I prefer to be governed by a man of the world, such as
Charles II. or Louis XVIII., rather than by demagogues and idealists.”
“It is better to be governed by honest demagogues and idealists than by
dishonest Bureaucrats,” said the student. “The Bureaucrats made the
war.”
“When the war was declared you students marched cheering into the
streets, and I myself happening to be in uniform that day—I am in the
Reserve—was carried in reluctant triumph on the shoulders of an
enthusiastic crowd. The war can be blamed, not because it was immoral,
for it was not more immoral than any other war, but because it was made
too late, and because it was unsuccessful.”
“The war,” said the professor, “was a war made by irresponsible
capitalists, in the same way as the South African War was the work of a
gang of financiers, and had a true Englishman of genius, such as
Gladstone or Bright, been alive, the war would not have been possible.”
“Yes,” said the student, “the feeling here was never so great against
England during this war as during the war in South Africa.”
“The English,” answered the landlord, “made the same mistake as we did;
they knew nothing about South Africa, and made the war later than they
should have done; had they waited longer the Afrikander element would
have probably turned them out of South Africa altogether, and they would
have lost their prestige and their Colonies. Bismarck foresaw this, and
hoped that it might happen.”
“The English have gained nothing by having betrayed their ancient
tradition, and sacrificed to false gods,” said the professor, “but now
they are returning to the true path, and it is to Liberal England that
we must look for example and support.”
“You mean,” said the landlord, “that one set of men, including some
bright intellects and a number of average, that is to say, mediocre men,
have been replaced by another set of men containing exactly the same
proportion of capacity, mediocrity, and incompetence. By what miracle
are they to govern the country better or worse than their opponents?
Have they shown that they could do so in the past? And I would apply
this argument to the situation here. Do you imagine that a Ministry
composed of intellectuals would be radically different from a Ministry
composed of Bureaucrats? The intellectuals will be merely Bureaucrats
who have not learnt their business, and when they have learnt their
business they will be Bureaucrats; that is, perhaps, why the Zemstvo
leaders were reluctant to enter the Cabinet.”
“The Zemstvo leaders were reluctant to join Count Witte because they
disapproved of his programme,” said the student, “and, whether they
become Bureaucrats or no, they will be under the control of society.”
“The Bureaucrats are blamed for lawlessness,” said the landlord, “but
the revolutionaries seem to me so entirely incapable of controlling
themselves that they do not lead one to believe in their capacity for
controlling other people. The fact is that we Russians are all a mixture
of lawlessness and apathy. We are blamed for our apathy, for our want of
co-operation, but I thank Heaven for it, for did it not exist, the
lawlessness would lead to excesses of a dangerous character; as it is,
there is no country where an individual can enjoy such a degree of
personal freedom as in Russia. Russia is the only country where the
words liberty, fraternity, and equality have any reality. These things
are facts in Russia. But they are not facts in England. First, as
regards liberty. There is no liberty either of thought or _mœurs_ in
England. Liberty of thought flourishes under an autocracy; in the reign
of Nero, Renan tells us, ‘la liberté de penser ne fit que gagner. Cette
liberté-là se trouve toujours mieux d’avoir affaire à un roi ou à un
prince qu’à des bourgeois jaloux et bornés.’ I do not consider my
liberty of thought to be violated if I can only read an eclipsed version
of the leading articles of the English and French halfpenny Press; but I
do consider it violated if I am forbidden to witness a masterpiece full
of thought and moral import, such as Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ or a beautiful
play like Mæterlinck’s ‘Monna Vanna.’ This is the case in England. The
English fetter themselves with convention, and ostracise those who
revolt against the convention. You cannot smoke in a railway refreshment
room in England. You must dress for dinner. You cannot have supper after
12.30 a.m. at a restaurant. You cannot go to a theatre on Sunday. You
cannot admire anything unless it is the fashion, and once it is the
fashion you must admire it. As to equality, the whole of English life is
a struggle to belong to the layer of society immediately above your own,
and not to be suspected of belonging to that immediately beneath your
own. Hence England is the paradise of snobbery, social and intellectual.
There is a mad race to be ‘in the swim’ socially and ‘in the know’
intellectually, and to read the right books and admire the right
pictures. As to equality I will give you a concrete instance. Let two
men get drunk in London, one a rich man and the other a poor man. If
they make a disturbance and get taken up, the rich man, by taking a
little trouble, will get the matter hushed up. The poor man will not get
off. You will say that there is one law for the rich and one for the
poor in every country. But I say that here in Russia nobody cares if you
go drunk in the street, and that, whether you are rich or poor, if you
do so the same thing will happen to you; you will be taken to the
_uchastok_ and kept there till you get sober. Whereas in England they
care very much; you have to appear before a magistrate—but the rich man
will get out of this. As to fraternity, the English hedge themselves
round with every kind of social prejudice and barrier they can devise.
Their clubs are like their prisons, places where it is forbidden to
speak to your neighbour, except under special circumstances, and where
you have to wear a special costume. A Russian convict enjoys a greater
freedom of social intercourse than an English shopman. I judge from
their books. Read ‘Kipps,’ by H. G. Wells. It is a record of leaden
social tyranny.”
“What you call convention,” said the professor, “is merely the
maintenance of order. It may be exaggerated, but an exaggeration in this
sense is preferable to one in the other. You can sup here at a
restaurant all night, but a man may shoot you for not being brisk enough
in your manifestation of loyalty.”
“Many Englishmen would gladly shoot Mr. Bernard Shaw for the same
offence,” said the landlord, “but they have not the courage of their
convictions.”
“What you call freedom,” said the professor, “is precisely the opposite
of freedom. It is lawlessness. Your neighbour can kill you with
impunity. Where does your freedom come in the matter? What freedom is
there in not being allowed to read a foreign newspaper unless it is
expurgated, or in being sent to Siberia for disapproving of the methods
of Government officials?”
“The people who were sent to Siberia,” said the landlord, “were those
who wished to overturn the existing form of government, under which the
ordinary individual enjoyed peculiar liberty. And even here how mildly
the Government acted! Really remarkable agitators like Tolstoi were left
alone. The English acted more drastically, and hounded Byron and Shelley
from the country. But when it is a question of expressing their
convictions they would never throw a bomb; they cannot go further than
throwing a herring at Mr. Balfour. The fact is that the English are a
nation of shopkeepers, and they have the shopkeeper’s aversion from a
mess in the shop.”
“If that means having shopmen,” said the professor, “such as Chatham,
Fox, Burke, Gladstone, Bright, and Morley, I wish we were also a nation
of shopkeepers. If a nation’s destinies are controlled by men like
Alexeiev and Bezobrassov it does not seem to me to make it less like a
shop, only the shop is managed on dishonest principles.”
“The greatest of all English thinkers,” answered the landlord, “was a
dishonest official, Lord Bacon; her greatest soldier a general who
peculated, the Duke of Marlborough. The man who made England’s prestige
dwindle to its lowest depth was Gladstone.”
“We cannot reach a lower depth than that to which the Bureaucracy has
brought us,” said the student.
“As a remedy you want liberal demagogues,” said the landlord. “What we
want is not a change of kind, but of quality; not a Liberal Cabinet and
a Liberal autocrat, but a capable Cabinet and a capable autocrat; and,
therefore, I support the revolutionaries, in the hope that out of the
ruins and ashes of what they will destroy the phœnix may arise.”
“And we,” said the student, “can do without phœnixes, which we regard as
a doubtful blessing; on the other hand, what we want, and what we are
determined to get, are laws, not manifestoes—laws guaranteeing the
elementary rights of liberty and equality; and these we are determined
to attain, even at the sacrifice of the peculiar liberty, equality, and
fraternity which you say we enjoy; even if the ultimate result be that
the Emperor ceases to call us _Bratzi_ (little brothers) and the
theatres are closed on Sunday.”
ST. PETERSBURG, _February 4th_.
To-day I had a long conversation with X, one of the most enlightened
Liberals in the service of the Russian Government. He said that the
action of the Government in proclaiming the Manifesto of October 17th
could only be compared to the Declaration of the Rights of Man by the
French Revolution before any constitution was defined. The Manifesto had
proclaimed in Russia principles unknown in that country, and the fact
remained, although it was sometimes overlooked, that it was the
Government and not a National Assembly which had taken the momentous
step. Whatever circumstances may have provoked this step, it is none the
less true that Count Witte by taking it retained the control over the
general situation, and still retains it in spite of all appearances to
the contrary. This was a merit not recognised by his detractors, who are
now universal. Then he went on to say that the source of the trouble and
confusion now was that the Manifesto formed the programme and the basis
of a Constitution; it was not a Constitution in itself (since it had
been conferred by an Autocrat and could be taken back again); this fact
had been slow in dawning on the people, unused to abstract political
discussion, and most people, probably the majority, considered the
Manifesto to be equivalent to an established Constitution. The trouble
is, he added, that some of the most intelligent of the moderate Liberals
of the upper classes do not know what a Constitution is. If the
Manifesto had been immediately followed by a Constitution, the questions
which at the present time were giving rise to heated debate would never
have been raised. They would have been settled before they were
discussed by the public. As it was the Manifesto contained a collection
of principles which all parties sought to interpret and to exploit to
their own advantage. The reactionary party sees in the preservation of
the word “Autocrat” the key of the situation. He added that though his
party was not large, and had lost a great deal of its influence, none
the less it possessed a deep root in the Conservative element in Russia.
Count Witte, he said, is supposed, and rightly, to interpret the word
“Autocrat” historically, and to substitute for the word “Limited” that
of “Independent” (International). He then spoke of the Octobrists, the
party of the 17th of October. He said that they showed conciliatory
tendencies, which although obviously well meaning in times of
Revolution, made for weakness. They avoid the question of title and that
of the oath of the sovereign, and declare themselves satisfied with the
clear and precise act guaranteeing the oath on the part of the successor
to the throne; and they remain content with the Manifesto as far as the
actual sovereign is concerned. The Radical parties take no interest in
this question, the Social Democrats take even less, since they look to
Revolution and to Revolution only for the ultimate decision of the
destiny of their country. There are two other questions, he continued,
which up to the present have been scarcely mentioned, nor is there much
hope that the Government will have the courage to face them unaided. One
is that of the relations among the different nations of which the
Russian Empire is composed, the other is the Agrarian question. This
last question is not a constitutional or a legislative question. The
power of the autocrat, while it existed, could alone have solved it. The
autocratic power exists no longer now in fact, although its place has
not yet been taken by a definite new _régime_. He said that among the
mass of conflicting conjectures and rumours with regard to the future,
two important things were clear: (1) that the Government was determined
to retain in its hands the power to give a Constitution; (2) that it was
determined to grant a Constitution and to proceed to the elections. He
said it was impossible to say more at the present; everything depended
on the nature of the future Assembly, and whether it would be possible
for the Moderate elements to exercise any preponderating influence. Up
to now they had been widely divergent and discordant among themselves.
If their efforts to gain a solid majority were successful, the greatest
danger would be over; if not, the Revolution was in its infancy, for if
the Moderates were to fail, the two extreme parties would be left face
to face, as different from one another as possible, yet both at one for
different reasons in their uncompromising opposition to all temperate
and constitutional reform. He said he made no allusion to the various
risings and repressions, because these events exercised, in reality,
only an indirect influence on the progress of the ideas he had
mentioned, sometimes by facilitating their spread, and sometimes by
impeding it. It had neither produced nor stopped them. There were two
parallel and different currents of events now in progress in Russia. One
forced itself on the attention, the other was exceedingly difficult to
trace. For that reason it was futile to discuss exclusively the progress
of revolutionary feeling and the ultimate success of repressive
measures.
It is interesting to look back on this conversation now in December,
1906, since it shows the illusions which Russian Liberals cherished a
year ago.
ST. PETERSBURG, _February 11th_.
I have put into the form of a dialogue some of the many conflicting
views I have lately heard expressed with regard to Count Witte.
“We have no right,” said the Moderate Liberal, “to doubt the good faith
of the Government at the present moment as regards the promise of the
Constitution and the elections for the Duma. Until the Government proves
to us that it does not intend to keep its word we are bound to believe
it.”
“It has never kept its word in the past,” said the student, “and
everything which it is doing at present tends to show that it has no
intention of doing so now.”
“Count Witte knows what he is doing,” said the man of business. “When
our grandchildren read of this in books they will wonder why we were so
blind and so obstinate, just as we now wonder at the blindness which
prevailed when the opposition to Bismarck was absolutely universal.”
“I share the scepticism of our young friend,” said the Zemstvo
representative, “but for different reasons. I do not share your
confidence in Count Witte. The basis of that confidence is in your case
the fact that Count Witte is a man of business. I maintain that a man of
business can only exert a real and lasting influence in the affairs of a
nation in times of revolution, convulsion, and evolution, or what you
please to call it, on one condition, namely, that of recognising and
taking into account the force of ideas and of moral laws. You smile, and
say that this is nonsense. But I say this, not because I am an idealist,
for I am not one, but because I have got an open mind, which seeks the
causes of certain phenomena and finds them in the existence of certain
facts. One of these facts is this: that you cannot set at naught certain
moral laws; you cannot trample on certain ideas without their rebounding
on to you with invincible force. You men of business deny the existence
of these moral laws, and scoff at the force of ideas; but it is on
practice and facts that I base my argument, and not on theory. That is
why men like Cromwell succeed, and why men like Metternich fail.”
“And Napoleon?” asked the man of business.
“Napoleon slighted one of these laws by invading Spain, and this was the
cause of his overthrow, although Napoleon was a soldier, which is an
incalculable advantage.”
“And Bismarck?” asked the man of business.
“Bismarck,” said the Zemstvo representative, “is a case in point. He
followed and used ideas. He worked for the great national ideal, the
ideal of united Germany. He incarnated the national idea. What is Count
Witte’s ideal? A national loan or the expansion of the Russo-Chinese
Bank? It is not enough to say that the revolution is merely the work of
enemies financed by foreigners, and then _Schwamm darüber_, as the
Germans say. Whoever supports it, it is there; and if it were merely an
artificial forced product, surely you, as a man of business, must admit
that it would have died a natural death by this time. You say that the
people can only be actuated by their own interests. I say that the
people are often actuated by something which has nothing to do with
their interests. History affords me countless examples which prove I am
right. When people have been killed, tortured, and burnt for an idea, it
is absurd to say they were interested. Interested in what? In the
possible rewards of a future life? But people have been tortured and
burnt not only for their faith but for their opinions: Giordano Bruno,
De Witt, and many others. There are some, too, whose outward enthusiasm
has been lined with scepticism, and who have died for a cause in which
they did not even believe. And when a person now throws a bomb at a
governor it may explain the fact to say he is mad, but it does not
explain the fact to say that he is bought, because he knows quite well
he is going to certain death. To deny this is a sign, in my opinion, of
a limited intelligence. ‘Il n’a pas l’intelligence assez large,’ a
French writer once said, ‘pour concevoir que l’intérêt n’est pas seul à
mener le monde, qu’il se mêle souvent et qu’il cède parfois à des
passions plus fortes, voire à des passions nobles.’ This is why I
disbelieve in Count Witte. I believe he suffers from this limitation,
the limitation from which Bismarck did not suffer. In times of peace it
would not signify; in times such as these it makes all the difference.
Have you read a book by H. G. Wells called the ‘Food of the Gods’? I do
not know what the English think of Wells; but we, some of us at least,
and the French, take him seriously as a thinker. Well, in this book
there is an argument between a Prime Minister and the representative of
the giant race. All the Prime Minister’s arguments are excellent, but
they are fundamentally wrong, because his action is morally wrong. This
story applies to the situation here. A race of giants has grown up.
Count Witte, with conviction and eloquence, repeats again and again that
their action is impossible, that he must be helped, that the existence
of mankind is at stake. But all the time he is denying to this race the
right of existence. And they know they have the right to live. He is
denying the moral law and saying that his opponents are only hirelings,
or madmen. His arguments are specious, but the giants are there, and
they will not listen; he sends troops and police against them; they
answer by bombarding the country with their giant food, which causes
gigantic growth to spring up wherever it falls. In our case this food
takes the shape of ideas and the rights of man.”
“Yes, but since he has promised a Constitution,” said the Moderate
Liberal, “you cannot prove that he does not mean to keep his promise.”
“I feel certain he will give some kind of a Constitution,” answered the
Zemstvo representative. “I feel equally certain that it will mean
nothing at all. I am not convinced for a moment that he believes in
Constitutional Government for Russia. And if he disbelieves in it, why
should he give it?”
“But what makes you think he disbelieves in it?” asked the Liberal.
“His present action,” remarked the student.
“His past actions,” said the Zemstvo representative. “Why did he not
support Prince Mirsky’s reforms? And apart from this, has he not said in
the past, again and again, that a strong autocracy is the only
Government suitable for Russia?”
“He is quite right there,” said the man of business.
“Then you agree with me,” said the Zemstvo representative, “in thinking
that he does not believe in a Constitution. I think myself that a
capable and wise autocracy may very well be the ideal Government. But
the position now is that the autocracy has for a long time past shown
itself to be neither capable nor wise, and therefore the enormous
majority of thinking Russians are quite determined to do away with it.
‘Absolute Princes,’ Dr. Johnson said, ‘seldom do any harm, but those who
are governed by them are governed by chance.’ We are tired of being
governed by chance. We may be unreasonable, but we are determined to try
something else.”
“We will see,” said the man of business, “assuming what you say to be
true, who is the stronger, you and your giant food of ideas and moral
laws, or Count Witte and his practical sense. We have the bayonets on
our side.”
“The bayonets of a defeated army,” said the Zemstvo representative. “We
will see how long you will be able to sit upon them.”
“I do not pretend to be a prophet or a philosopher,” answered the man of
business, “but I note certain facts; one of these is this, that ever
since October I have been told by your friends that Count Witte’s
position is untenable, and his resignation a question of hours. It has
not come about yet. He still retains the direction of affairs. Should we
meet in five years’ time I will discuss Count Witte’s policy with you.
At present we are too near to it.”
“And it too far from us,” said the student.
Towards the end of this conversation, a man who belonged to no party
came into the room and overheard the talk. When they had finished
talking he said: “As to Witte, the question seems to me to lie in this:
is he acting consciously and with foresight or is he merely making the
best of chance? We are all praying for a genius to appear in Russia.
But, when geniuses do come, nobody ever recognises the fact until it is
too late and they are dead. If Witte is acting consciously then he is a
genius indeed. If he has foreseen all along what would happen, and, in a
few years’ time, is President of the Federation of Russian United
States, having decentralised what he has so capably centralised, then I
think he will be one of the greatest men who have ever lived; but, if he
is merely acting as the occasion presents itself, I do not rate him
higher than a Boulanger with a head for figures.”
“In any case,” said the Zemstvo representative, “he will provide
glorious food for discussion for the future historian, and even at
present the world would be a duller and greyer place without this
enigmatical chameleon.”
ST. PETERSBURG, _February 17th_.
I have frequently heard the opinion expressed that the Russian
Revolution can inspire nothing but disgust owing to the fact that it has
produced no great men, and to its lack of big, stirring epic events, in
contradistinction to the French Revolution, which was so rich in all
these things. It is, therefore, interesting to note what impression the
events of the French Revolution produced on impartial foreign
contemporary opinion.
We derive one definite impression of the French Revolution by reading
Carlyle, or Mignet, or Taine; but the foreign contemporaries who were
not themselves mingled in the tragic events received a very different
and far more fragmentary series of impressions. Horace Walpole, in his
letters, gives us interesting glimpses into the contemporary opinion of
the period. At the time of the storming of the Bastille he wrote as
follows: “If the Bastille conquers, still is it impossible, considering
the general spirit in the country, and the numerous fortified places in
France, but some may be seized by the _dissidents_, and whole provinces
be torn from the Crown? On the other hand, if the King prevails, what
heavy despotism will the _États_, by their want of temper and
moderation, have drawn on their country! They might have obtained many
capital points, and removed great oppression. No French monarch will
ever summon _États_ again if this moment has been thrown away.” It is
interesting to note how doubtful he considers the success of the
revolutionaries to be. Again, he adds in the same letter: “One hears of
no genius on either side, nor do symptoms of any appear. There will,
perhaps; such times and tempests bring forth, at least bring out, great
men. I do not take the Duke of Orleans or Mirabeau to be built “du bois
dont on les fait”; no, nor M. Necker. He may be a great traitor if he
made the confusion designedly; but it is a woful evasion if the promised
financier slips into a black politician.” A criticism similar to that
passed on Necker I have myself heard applied to Count Witte on several
occasions in St. Petersburg.
In July, 1790, he again returns to the charge: “Franklin and Washington
were great men. None have appeared yet in France, and Necker has only
returned to make a wretched figure.... Why, then, does he stay?” This is
the question which the _Russ_, the anti-Governmental newspaper, is
asking every day in like terms about Count Witte. In August, 1790, he
says about the French: “They have settled nothing like a Constitution;
on the contrary, they seem to protract everything but violence as much
as they can in order to keep their louis a day.” This might be applied
not without appositeness to certain of the Bureaucrats here. In
September, 1791, Horace Walpole is even more pessimistic. He thinks that
twenty thousand men could march from one end of France to the other. But
he apprehends the possibility of enthusiasm turning to courage against a
foreign enemy. What he disbelieves in is a set of “military noble lads,
pedantic academicians, curates of villages, and country advocates amidst
the utmost confusion and altercation amongst themselves” composing a
system of government that would set four and twenty millions of people
free. “This, too,” he adds, “without one great man amongst them. If they
had had, as Mirabeau seemed to promise to be—but as we know that he was,
too, a consummate villain, there would soon have been an end of their
vision of liberty. And so there will be still, unless, after a civil
war, they split into small kingdoms or commonwealths. A little nation
may be free.... Millions cannot be so; because, the greater the number
of men that are one people, the more vices, the more abuses there are,
that will either require or furnish pretexts for restraints.” It is
plain from the above quotations that whatever contemporary foreign
writers thought of the French Revolution there was one thing which they
did not think, and that was that the prominent actors in it were big
men; or that the whole movement was anything but disgusting and futile.
Later, in 1793, Horace Walpole’s horror and disgust, as was natural,
knew no bounds. He thinks, moreover, that the proceedings of the French
Republicans had wounded the cause of liberty and shaken it for
centuries. Now the popular atmosphere of legend that has grown up round
the Revolution takes as its keynote a phrase of Victor Hugo’s: “Les
hommes de 1793 étaient des géants.” In Russia we have not got so far as
1793. We are still at the beginning of 1789, and it is quite possible
that the future Carlyle who writes the history of this period will say
the men of 1905 were giants. The Duma will give opportunities for
popular tribunes, and apart from and in contradistinction to great
orators or tribunes, it may be doubted whether revolutions, while they
are going on, ever produce great men. The great men come afterwards.
But when people point to the seemingly effectual repression that is now
taking place here, and ask how it is possible for the Revolution to
continue, they forget that there is a difference—a small but vastly
important difference—between the present state of affairs and the period
of the late M. Plehve’s _régime_. The difference consists in the fact
that before the general strike and the October Manifesto, before even
the taking of Port Arthur, Prince Mirsky opened a little window in the
tight-closed room of Russian politics by relaxing the stringent Press
regulations and letting loose public opinion. The light came in like a
flood, and nothing can now drive it out. Repression when public opinion
was crushed was a very different thing from repression when every case
of it is reported in detail in the newspapers, as now happens. For
people can say what they like about the unreality or the non-existence
of the liberty of the Press; one has only to buy the Radical newspapers
to be convinced that if the Press is not free it is certainly more
explicit and more unrestrained in its violence than the Press of any
other European country, and some of the comic satirical newspapers might
have Marat for editor.
Somebody once said that he would have given anything in the world to
have half an hour’s private interview with the late Lord Beaconsfield
with a pistol, and to obtain from him under the threat of death an exact
and complete account of his views and convictions. It would be
interesting to perform a similar experiment on Count Witte; whatever the
result of it might be, I doubt if there would be found a trace of the
placid optimism which is sometimes attributed to him. Count Witte may be
attacked for many things; he cannot be accused of a lack of
clear-sightedness: not, that is, if he be judged by the utterances which
he is known to have made before the outbreak of the war, or by those
which he made publicly before entering office, and while the war was
still going on. Mirabeau was, in the opinion of Horace Walpole, a
ruffian; he was certainly distrusted by both parties, but we know now,
though the fact escaped the notice of his contemporaries, that he gauged
the forces at work and the probable trend of events with surprising
accuracy. We now consider Mirabeau to have been something like a great
man. Count Witte has perhaps inspired among all parties a greater
distrust than that which was the lot of Mirabeau; but in times such as
these clear-sightedness, self-confidence, and capacity for hard work are
precious qualities indeed. Nobody denies the possession of these
qualities to Count Witte. It is not, therefore, impossible that the
future historian may place him in the same niche as Mirabeau in the
Pantheon of the world. This, as Horace Walpole says, is speculation, not
prophecy. And I revert, or rather arrive, at these conclusions, that a
lull in events does not necessarily imply their final cessation; that so
far in Russia revolutionary matters have succeeded one another, if
anything, with greater rapidity than they did in France, and that what
seems to be the unmistakable dawn of revolution to the historian may
very well appear to be a false dawn to the contemporary observer; and
that, whatever happens, nothing can ever shut the little window which
Prince Mirsky opened.