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.”