The last chapter of our study of the two literatures--Russian and
American--has, in its study of four great figures, brought the story
to a climax. Nothing is more characteristic of the mental history of
the two countries than the way in which under Whitman and Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky and Melville, the whole problem of democracy in relation to
art, and the whole problem of human aspiration in its strife with evil,
was examined and investigated. But the generation that followed was not
able to profit by their example. The great climax was succeeded by an
anti-climax; and Russian literature, no less than American literature,
after the seventies, assumes the picture of a sterile and uncultivated
plain.
This state of affairs was due to the operation of social and economic
causes. The great reforms adopted in Russia by Alexander II to
signalise his advent to the throne were halted; first, by an attempt
at assassination made in 1866; second, by the sort of advance _en
masse_ which always takes place in Russian history after a period of
increasing internal peace and prosperity. The surplus population of
released serfs and discontented landowners now swarmed east across the
Urals and opened up the whole of the fertile lands of Siberia to the
borders of Mongolia. This expansion was followed by the usual reaction
in the shape of a war with Russia’s old enemy Turkey (1877); a war
in which Russia gained nothing, and which disillusioned everybody,
including even the Slavophils.
The course of events in America was not essentially different. The
close of the Civil War marked an enormous expansion of the American
territory westward, and the whole region, from the foothills of the
Rockies to the Sierras and beyond to the Pacific became inhabited. The
first transcontinental railway was built in the shape of the Missouri
Pacific; and the period of the seventies was a period of furious
speculation, of fierce political tension, of steady industrial growth
and agricultural expansion. In this “Gilded Age” of America’s new-won
prosperity, the question of a native culture and of the fine arts were
largely lost sight of. The only part of the country that resisted the
general drive towards increasing economic and industrial development
was the South, and that lay fettered and bound by the Reconstruction
Acts, and was unable to do anything for itself until after 1876--the
date of the Tilden-Hayes election.
The prevailing characteristic of this period is the increasing
influence of Europe upon the two countries. Alexander Second’s action
in liberating the serfs had thrown the gates open to all the ideas of
European liberalism. The opening up of the western plains and the vast
region between the Rockies and the Pacific with its wealth in minerals,
as well as its cattle-raising possibilities, opened the gates no less
to the countless hosts of European settlers. The Irish had already been
coming since the terrible famine years of 1845-7, and the Germans too
had come over ever since the forties. By the outbreak of the Civil War
the original native-born population had begun to be outnumbered by the
hosts of immigrants that passed steadily through the Narrows. After
1870, with the Prussian monarchy in complete control over Germany, the
House of Savoy in control of Italy, and England less disposed than
ever to give the Irish Home Rule, the swarms of immigrants increased,
fed by thousands whose ancestors had fought and died in the cause of
Republicanism in some part or the other of Europe, and by millions who
were attracted across the Atlantic simply by the steamer-agent’s tales
of Western prosperity. The Italians, notably, soon became as prominent
as the Irish and the Germans; and to all these races were added
Scandinavians, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Poles from the eastern
frontiers of Europe, and Jews from every part of the world. The three
states of the remote northwest, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho increased
their population from 282,000 in 1880 to 763,000 in 1890 and to two
millions in 1910; while California which contained only five hundred
thousand people when the first transcontinental railway was finished
in 1869, added more than half the same number to its inhabitants in
the next decade. In twenty years after 1870, the population of Kansas,
Nebraska, and the Dakotas was increased sixfold. The city of Chicago
which had only 350 population in 1833, by 1840 contained over four
thousand, and in 1870 had swollen to the enormous figure of three
hundred thousand! Thus while Russia added to its power by spreading
a homogeneous population over immense tracts of unsettled country
eastward, America obtained a firm grip on its own domain by importing
heterogeneous populations into the vast tract of unsettled country
westward.[7]
It is impossible, therefore, in the thirty years that followed 1865,
to construct anything resembling a cultural history of either Russia
or America. At least, literature will not serve so completely as an
index to the flow of ideas that took place in this period. The Russian
genius during this period manifested itself best in music; this was
the period of Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin. In
America the genius of the race took up architecture, and it was the
Golden Age of Richard Morris Hunt, of Richardson, Root, McKim, Louis
Sullivan, and of the craftsmen like La Farge and St. Gaudens who worked
with them. In each case, it was a period of eclecticism. In Russia
the German-Italian form of symphony and opera was borrowed, and was
filled with a content that was essentially rooted in folk-emotion; in
America the style of the Beaux-Arts or of Ancient Rome or the Early
Middle Ages was equally borrowed, to be infused with native-born force
and energy. The most original--because the least foreign--elements
in this development had the most difficult task to survive. They had
to learn how to speak their message of purely native inspiration in
a language that, through derivation from European tradition, was
completely alien to them. One might draw a not uninstructive parallel
between Mussorgsky, the most Russian of Russian composers, and the
gifted but unfortunate Louis Sullivan. Each had much to say to their
generation that no one would accept. But this is not the place for such
a comparison, inasmuch as we have from the outset decided to confine
our critical investigation to the limits of a single art, that of
literature.
2
American literature during the period of the seventies and eighties
was entirely dominated by the figure of Samuel Langhorne Clemens,
known to innumerable admirers as “Mark Twain.” At first sight, his
work is on so much a lower level than that of Hawthorne, Henry James
or Whitman as to be unworthy of consideration in the opinion of the
few culture-saturated critics who mostly arrange and settle the merit
of authors. And it is worth noticing that Clemens carried out his work
without any particular encouragement from such intellectual critics.
Their encouragement only came to him at the close of his life, when he
was already writing sentimental and feebly grotesque satires on life
in general, and vainly setting up as a philosopher with his assault
on Christian Science, and the desolatingly mechanistic view of life
set out in “What is Man?” The fact is, that for the latter part of his
life, Mark Twain, profiting by an immense popularity, wrote nothing but
superior journalism or feeble echoes of his own inimitable early self.
That early self left an immortal residue in only three volumes--“Tom
Sawyer,” “Huckleberry Finn,” and the first twenty chapters of “Life
on the Mississippi.” If we add to this the figure of Colonel Mulberry
Sellers in the book appropriately called “The Gilded Age,” and a few
chapters of “Roughing It,” we obtain all of Mark Twain that posterity
will presumably read and cherish.
Mark Twain is the perfect type of the backwoodsman in letters. His
early training as a newspaper man gave him sufficient command over
the written word to express himself clearly, and an early roving
life, with its picturesque experience, did the rest. In so far as he
had any philosophy of life at all, it was a doctrine to the effect
that the uncultivated and native present day is worth all the feudal
past, and that homely shrewdness and simplicity is better than
spiritual and intellectual mastery. This doctrine has its affinities
to the glorification of the “average man” preached by Whitman, and
in the later Mark Twain one finds as it were, Whitman simplified and
caricatured:--the Yankee is superior to King Arthur, democracy is
superior to aristocracy, machinery is more than great painting and
music, woman is inevitably a superior _genus_ to man. But no one reads
Mark Twain for his philosophy nowadays, though thousands have read him
for his unsurpassed pictures of frontier types, for his description
of an America that has vanished before the advance of the modern
mechanical civilisation which it brought in its train. The finest
of his works, “Huckleberry Finn,” and “Life on the Mississippi,”
are immense picaresque epics of irresponsible adventure. To find
anything resembling them one has to go back to Europe of the sixteenth
century. They represent a stage of history Europe had long outgrown;
a youth-time in a world which was innocent alike of culture and of
morality. Mark Twain himself said of his finest book that it had
no moral, and that “they who find a plot in it, shall be shot.” In
“Huckleberry Finn” there is no plot but only happenings: a mad, gay,
and cruel _reductio ad absurdum_ of life itself, as lived under
frontier conditions, with the incurable nostalgia for romantic and
picturesque escapades (witness Jim’s release from the lock-up, or the
episode of the false Dauphin and the Duke) leading the story on.
The proper parallel here is with Nicholas Leskov (or Lyeskov). This
author, practically unknown out of Russia, owed his popularity among
the uncultivated public to the astounding freshness of his rendering
of remote Russian life--the life of priests in tiny villages, of
fishermen and hunters, of tramps and vagabonds. It is only of recent
years that foreign critics have observed that in reading Lyeskov, we
are reading the most Russian of authors. Dostoevsky’s Russia is a
distorted picture, tinged with his own spiritual struggle; Tolstoy’s
is a great epic warped by his own perverse intellect; but Lyeskov is
observer pure and simple. He too, like Clemens, had to suffer from an
early period in which his work was utterly despised by the literary
intelligentsia--who were more highly polished and socialistic, in
a materialistic sense, in their work. He also had a late period in
which he comes nearer and nearer to the sentimental side of Tolstoy,
as Clemens had a period in which he apes Whitman. But the essential
Lyeskov is the unsurpassed portrayer of the Russian frontier, and of
its cruel, care-free, and purposeless life. His masterpiece, “The
Enchanted Wanderer,” recently translated into English, is even in
its translation a work of immense sane humanity and humour. Like
“Huckleberry Finn,” it is a picaresque novel, and like that book it has
neither plot nor moral. It is folk-tale pure and simple, stripped of
all accretions of superstition, symbolism, and magic, and with nothing
but the rounded note of a persistent religious nostalgia (akin to Tom
Sawyer’s nostalgic longings for romance and adventure) to give it
coherence.
It would be a mistake however to suppose that either Lyeskov or Mark
Twain were anything more than exceptions in the course of their
respective literatures during this period. The whole epoch from 1870
down to the end of the century is marked by a progressive drifting
apart of the two countries which had so nearly coincided in spirit
in Whitman and Tolstoy, Melville and Dostoevsky. This drifting apart
was marked by an increasing outward standardisation of effort. It
was during this period that the standardised Russian revolutionary,
mouthing all the catchwords of advanced European materialism, began
to appear, to be matched by his contemporary, the standardised
American business man. Each class consumed the sort of literature
that was suited to its palate. In Russia there flourished the peasant
novel of highly socialistic tendencies, the works of Gleb Uspensky,
Pissemsky, Korolenko, and the bitterer and more intellectually upright
Saltykov-Schedrin. In America the type of fiction most in demand dealt
mainly with cultivated, well-to-do people, was generally optimistic in
outlook, but was no less surely an article prepared to satisfy popular
demand. Its best output was in the tales of Howells, Cable, Thomas
Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, Mrs. Wharton. The honest peasant of the
one matches pretty completely the upright capitalist (usually the last
scion of an old southern or New England family) of the other. But the
line of advance, which was to produce the most revolutionary fruit in
the nineties, lay through the short story.
3
The short story as practised in the Occident throughout the nineteenth
century, is in fact a typically oversophisticated and decadent
art-form. To the mind of the highly cultured but impotently sensitive
reader it presents not the great curve of emotion that the finest
poetry offers, not the “allegory addressed to the intellectual
imagination” of great prose, not even the panoramic viewpoint of outer
action or of spiritual abysses that the novel reveals, but a cool
complete piece of minor architecture, a fragment of life, a detached
statement that has neither past nor future implied in it. The short
stories of the East are largely different. They are popular epics, and
different also in their moral earnestness and immense range in short
compass are the short stories of Balzac, Flaubert, Hawthorne. The
technically perfect modern short story has no moral earnestness, no
message, it merely is an incident revealed so completely as to leave no
loophole for the imagination. It is objective reporting, informed by
a mood; and no one carried the art of short story writing further in
these respects than the American Stephen Crane and the Russian Anton
Tchekhov.
The comparison between the methods of Crane and Tchekhov has been made
before, but it is one that will bear reiteration. It extends even to
personal and social characteristics. Both were descendants of old petty
bourgeois families, long settled on the soil. Both graduated through
journalism into their art. Tchekhov began by writing quite commonplace
and feeble comic stories, and Crane wasted a great deal of his time on
hackwork. Both were irregular workers, and were men of feeble health.
Indeed the only difference is that Tchekhov, thanks to his life as a
country physician, matured later and gained a greater final mastery
over his material than Crane.
The aim of both was an entirely impersonal and objective presentation
of life. This has been called realism, but in both Crane’s and
Tchekhov’s case, it came nearer impressionism than realism. Each
was at the mercy of a single mood which is reiterated in their
stories _ad nauseam_. In Tchekhov’s case the mood is deliberately
low-toned, sombre, and neutral--a mood of resignation, of quiescence,
of Buddhistic absorption into Nirvana. In Crane’s case the mood is
one of racketing excitement, fierce and brutal display of energy.
On these two moods each exhausted the resources of their art: Crane
his color vowels, and sudden startling comparisons; Tchekhov his
monotonous deliberately prosaic effect. But in each case, the mood
flows out of an attitude towards life that is the same. To both the
world, and particularly nature, is deliberately hostile, alien to the
human spirit. Before this tragic fact, Tchekhov counselled acceptance,
endurance; Crane on the other hand advocated a furious display of
heroic energy. Thus Crane is most completely the artist when his
frequently violent satiric intention is laid aside, and he can play the
part of the poet of action, as in the superb “Red Badge of Courage,”
which first won him fame, and which is free from his stoical fatalism.
Tchekhov is, on the other hand, at his best in his plays, notably “The
Cherry Orchard,” where he loses sight of his own sentimentalism, and
works with at least some underlying satiric intent. Neither, however,
ever wrote a complete masterpiece, nor were they capable of doing so.
Despite the activities of the Tchekhov cult we must insist that the
American at his best frequently appears the finer artist, as in this
story already mentioned, or in “The Open Boat.” He at least had a
supreme power of visualising a scene, and a trick of individualising
his characters by one outstanding trait or peculiarity which the
Russian lacked, though this is perhaps counterbalanced by Tchekhov’s
more complete mastery over architectural form.
Both were minor writers, because they were fatalists. To the great
writer life is a fatality, frequently a tragedy, but not a tragedy
preordained. But this sense of being doomed by external fatality, by
the insignificant fact, is the very basis of Tchekhov’s work--and
the same sense haunted Crane in his brief, agitated life. They were
both, it is possible, depressed beyond the normal in their personal
temperaments. But still more certainly, the period in which they lived
was one in which major art was not possible. In America the plutocrats
of the Gilded Age were going down in a blaze of glory. Outrageous and
shameless coarseness and corruption was mingled with hypocritic parade
of lip-service to genteel virtue; European snobbery walked arm in arm
with a pretence of democratic simplicity. In Russia, the dreary record
of reaction under Alexander III was trailing to its unhonoured grave in
the sink of official corruption under Nicholas. Both Crane and Tchekhov
were victims of their times, and both held the art for art’s sake
theory far more sincerely probably than their European contemporaries.
Both with supreme skill showed that even when held sincerely, it but
resulted in the best cases, in something philosophically incomplete; at
the worst, in a personal tic, a mannerism.
4
The high technical level to which Crane and Tchekhov had brought their
art, combined with their avoidance of philosophic content, were both
symptoms of the gulf down which the American and the Russian spirit
had descended since the high-water mark in the sixties. Multitudes
of men now knew that something was wrong; but few could suggest a
remedy. Two men, however, by their personal effort, attempted at least
to stay or fix the retrograde movement of the spirit by attempting
the _Weltanschauung_ of a formal philosophy. These men were Vladimir
Soloviev and William James.
Before their coming, neither country had known anything resembling
a formal philosophy. Emerson, it is true, had raised himself to the
dignity of being ranked as one; but Emerson was in truth at bottom
partly a mystic poet, partly a shrewd detached commentator on events.
His best work bears as little relation to philosophy definitely so
called, as the more pessimistically colored--but not less philosophical
in content--poetry of Tyutchev bears to the German transcendentalism
of his time. In any case, James did not derive his philosophy from
Emerson, but from an attitude much more matter-of-fact. He obtained it
from the New England practical spirit, the “desire to get on in life,”
the everyday common sense that was, when he wrote, proving so morally
inadequate to deal with the ever-increasing problems of capitalism and
industrialism. In his insistence on practicality, on the “truth that
works,” on “the cash-value of thought,” William James was nearer to the
needs and demands of the average man as posited by Whitman; and much
of his democratic outlook, his homely honesty of phrase was in fact due
to Whitman. Similarly Soloviev drew his own preoccupation with moral
problems, not from any preceding thinker, but direct from the piercing
analysis of Dostoevsky.
Both James and Soloviev were educated and spent much of their lives
abroad. The substance of their thought was derived in part from
European, in part from American sources. The aim in each case was
to reconcile two divergent streams of thought, to bring them into
harmony. James after an early career in which he had tried to be an
artist, engineer and physician in turn, turned to psychology. But
his real interest lay outside the bounds of psychology--at that time
dominated by the methods of the purely psycho-physical school. His
early upbringing as a Swedenborgian, as well as a highly sensitive
temperament, drew him to the investigation of religious phenomena, and
all his life he strove to reconcile the higher ranges of mysticism,
ecstasy, union with God, heroic self-sacrifice, with the plain
common-sense of the average American type. Thus he was led to attempt
to find a common ground between “radical empiricism”--the search for
the usable truth, the trial-and-error, rule-of-thumb, method of the
pragmatist--and the utterly unpractical absolute standpoint of the
visionary. In order to do so, he had to attack the point of view of
the earlier idealists of the Kant and Hegel type, men who had inherited
something of the old methods of scholasticism. He had to treat human
life and aspiration not as an end, but an instrument; and to regard the
universe not as a finished article, but as a pluralistic chaos. That he
still strove to redeem that chaos consequently became merely a personal
gesture, and not at all a question of final significance. In this, too,
he resembles his spiritual progenitor, Walt Whitman.
Vladimir Soloviev was trained as a historian. He absorbed the
historical sense from his father who had written a history of Russia,
and his early work was devoted to Church History. In examining the
history of Christianity he was struck by the fact that the Eastern and
Western Churches had separated, and that neither was in agreement with
Protestantism. This schism seemed to him to show that Christianity had
somehow failed to fulfil the aim of its Founder, and he set himself
the task of preaching the necessity of an undivided Church. This was
the substance of his book “Russia and the Universal Church” which with
its definitely Romanising tone was forbidden by the Russian censorship
and had to appear first in a French translation. But even the Roman
Church could not hold him for long. Christianity itself was worthless
as a revelation of God’s purpose to man, except where based on a
universal moral law, the “natural religion” of the eighteenth-century
deists. To find this moral law seemed to him the aim of science; to
invest it with all the grandeur of a revelation from on high was the
purpose of religion. Thus Soloviev was led to try and reconcile the
evolutionary theory of the West with the Eastern Orthodox tradition. In
so doing he was forced to oppose the theories of the Schopenhauer and
Tolstoy school which would strip religion of all its magic and mystic
significance, and reduce life to passive non-resistance; a tendency
which as he pointed out, was Buddhist, not Christian.
Moreover there remained for Soloviev the outstanding question which
was, “If there is a universal moral law and if the Church itself can
teach that law better than the Tolstoyan rationalist, why is there so
much evil in the world, and what is the way to get rid of this evil?”
The answer was that the evil was permitted by God, and that the only
way to get rid of it was through ascetism, mortification of the flesh.
There can be no doubt that Soloviev through the adoption of ascetic
practices, deliberately shortened his own life. He was led therefore
more and more to a position in which the whole history of the world
appears as simply a gigantic conflict between Good and Evil. This
position is not Christian; it is in reality, Manichean. There is not
one God, but two; God and Satan divide mankind between themselves,
until the end of the world. Thus Soloviev ultimately found his problem
unsolvable, and lapsed into a pluralism more logical and definite, and
far more honest and despairing than the optimistic pluralism of James.
It seems a great tragedy that the American in the end gave his
adherence to the philosophy of Bergson, with its aimless yielding to
the endless flux, and its refusal of all stability to the intellect;
while the Russian in his turn, preoccupied with the problem of evil,
saw in the end Tolstoy as a precursor of Antichrist and wrote the
half-insane rhapsody of the end of history which fills the last
pages of his “Three Conversations.” But in reality this tragedy was
inevitable in both cases. The endless flux of Bergsonism bolstered
James in the last of his illusions, the illusion that all good
Americans are born and die with, the illusion that in the race of
modern progress, America is ahead of the world and the world will be
saved through her; while Soloviev’s ultimate denial of moral progress,
apart from the established Orthodox faith, saved the last of his
illusions, the typically Russian illusion that Russia by remaining
backward and resisting the West, will yet save the world. Each of
these men is a standing proof that outside the frontiers of Europe,
impersonal thought, thought that is detached from daily circumstances
is utterly impossible. Each is a vivid, embittered, and intensely
honest and typical commentary on the hollowness and pretentiousness of
European philosophy, when applied to conditions of life that remain
outside the orbit of purely European interests.
5
With the onset of the twentieth century, we witness America and
Russia taking up the same weapons in their rearguard battle with
cosmopolitanism and Europeanism. The weapon in each case is that of
realism. Thus in each country a school of writers sprung up to whom
literature was largely a protest against unequal social conditions,
injustices in the body politic, the yawning cleft between the rich
and the poor, and the moral decay consequent upon the general
nineteenth-century “_laissez-faire_” attitude. It is profitable to
compare the school which is represented by Gorky, Kuprin, Bunin, in
Russia with the group whose leading members in America were Edith
Wharton, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Robert Herrick. But we cannot
really distinguish these writers on the basis of literary merit. They
gave us naturalistic documents rather than artistic interpretations.
Their work was interesting as protest mainly: the _Weltanschauung_
of these writers, if they possessed one, was pure naturalism, and as
naturalists pure and simple they produced documents but not art. Some
exception might be made for Gorky and Mrs. Wharton’s “Ethan Frome,” but
except for the fact that the Americans chose their favourite heroes
from business men enmeshed in their own toils, and the Russians from
tramps and outlaws, there is but little otherwise to choose between
them.
It is more instructive to note the damage which the theories of this
group did to highly talented individual artists, like Leonid Andreiev
and Jack London. Both might, under happier auspices, have been poets
and it is worth noting that whenever either dealt with the material
most known to them, the life of little insignificant out-of-the-way
villages in the case of Andreiev (“The Governor,” or “In the Fog”) or
the life of the untamed frontier in the case of London (“The Call of
the Wild,” “Burning Daylight”), each wrote something that might be
called a minor classic. But Andreiev’s pretentious and melodramatic
insistence on the “madness and horror,” the void of life, together
with his heavy sentimentalism (derived from doses of Schopenhauer and
Tolstoy) is as meaningless to us as was London’s confused minglings
of Nietzschean master-morality with crude Socialistic strivings.
London’s “Sea Wolf” is, as a character, as much a bit of pasteboard
as Andreiev’s “Lazarus.” Both London and his Russian contemporary,
were supremely honest men, who rejected with contempt the hypocritical
lip-service to theory paid by the social reformers of their days; both
preferred to be immoralists rather than sentimentalists, and it is for
this that we must respect them, rather than for any good work. For it
is obvious that both had their heads turned by early successes, and
were victims of their own love of melodramatic excess. That two such
men should have lacked moral stability sufficient to keep them from
drinking themselves to death, shows how far the social order in America
and Russia of their time was on the way to the abyss.
After their day the drive to naturalism continued, but on a lower
level, having largely thrown overboard the general flavour of moral
teaching that still persisted in the work of the earlier naturalists.
The figure of the “business superman” appeared in America as the
figure of the “sexual superman” appeared in Russia. Theodore Dreiser
became responsible for the one, and Mikhail Artzybashev for the
other. Whether there is really very much to choose between them as
art-products is a question that time must settle. It is more important
to note that this phase did not in any case last long. Between the
year 1900 and the outbreak of the great war there rose up in both
countries a revolt against the “social document,” and the naturalistic
attitude towards life. This revolt took the form mainly of a more
symbolical treatment of facts, and it expressed itself not in prose
but in poetry. Thus Robinson, Frost, Lindsay, Sandburg, Miss Lowell,
Conrad Aiken and Robinson Jeffers had their counterparts in time and
aim in Balmont, Bryusov, Blok, Bely, Viacheslav Ivanov and Pasternak.
The value of their work becomes more doubtful, as the younger, more
savagely objective, post-war generation takes the field to-day. What
is important to observe is that while cosmopolitan Naturalism held
the field in 1900, by 1915 the situation was reversed and a new and
more native symbolism, combined with a groping mysticism, derived from
very primitive sources, and strongly dashed with sexual imagery, took
its place. This even affected the prose writers such as Sologub and
Sherwood Anderson.
This extraordinary reversal of literary taste, which took place in the
limits of one half a generation, is a tragic indication of the fact
that the mentality of Russia and America had already grown unstable.
Instead of the long quarrel between upholders of mystic orthodoxy and
advanced materialists, between Slavophils and Westernizers, literary
conservators and outlaws, being settled, it had grown more acute until
the whole structure of society was rent by it from top to bottom. In
the early twentieth century both Russia and America had to choose to
break again with their past, to become something essentially different,
as they had chosen in 1688, between 1773 and 1790, and in 1860. To show
what the break was, and its results, it is necessary to turn back to
the course of our interrupted historical survey.
BOOK IV
_“The union of Russian revolutionary inspiration with the American
practical spirit; this is the essence of practical Leninism.”_
JOSEPH STALIN.
_“Machinery, the modern Messiah.”_
HENRY FORD.
Chapter XIV
The history of the nineteenth century is the history of the decline and
fall of Europe. The logical madness of Napoleon’s attempt to transform
by the power of the sword and the brilliance of his individual genius,
a group of mutually jealous and innately suspicious nationalities,
differing in language, religion and local tradition, into a single
unified power, failed as soon as Napoleon became old enough to lose
grip on his peculiar gifts. In this defeat both America and Russia,
as we have seen, had their share. Russia exhausted Napoleon’s armies,
as England--the true parent of America, and of America’s achieved
Teutonic-Celtic compromise between apparent political liberty and
actual spiritual conformity--exhausted his ideas. During this very
period England and America drew together again, and again came into
closest spiritual contact, despite the prolonged agonies of the
Revolution, the memory of which smouldered less in the hearts of its
leaders, such as Washington and Jefferson, than in the depths of the
raw new settlements on the Indian frontier. Indeed, had it not been
for another characteristic piece of blundering diplomacy on the part of
England, enshrined in what is known as Jay’s Treaty, the two countries
which had opposed each other so long and desperately, might have
come into firm alliance. The prevailing sentiment in England, after
all her wars, successful and unsuccessful, has usually been to shake
hands with her late foe; but this refusal on the part of the people
to bear a grudge is not always shared by the brilliant diplomats and
the aristocratically educated politicians of that paradoxical island.
What is won by the simple courage of her yeomen, England throws away by
the clever stupidity and superiority of her politicians, who are for
the most part far too cynically sophisticated to place any reliance on
human nature. This was again the case after the Napoleonic struggle:
America and England had to remain politically isolated--though in
fact, all their interests were shared in common--for the simple reason
that the Englishman could only envisage empire in terms of trading
posts separated by oceans, while the American saw his empire as new
settlements spreading ever westward across unpopulated land-wastes.
On the other and eastern frontier of Europe, where the steppes of the
Ukraine unchangeably roll up to the gates of Moscow, the armies of
Napoleon had but recently passed, strewing with the evidences of the
most disastrous defeat in history the snow-covered plains. The outcome
of Napoleon’s titanic failure was soon to be apparent here not less
in the spiritual than in the military sphere. Russia moved again, and
still more sharply, away from Europe, as America had but recently and
once again moved away from England. Czar Alexander I, who might now
pride himself on the fact that his climate, if not his armies, had
defeated Napoleon, was not in the least disposed to undervalue the
historical importance of the appearance of that personage. To England,
whether the England was that of the yokel or the poet, of Hodge or
of Byron and Shelley, Napoleon was merely a temporary and absurd
tyrant--a Corsican ogre feasting on the sufferings of slaves groaning
beneath his whip-lash; one who had betrayed the spirit of liberty for
a personal whim. To Alexander I and the whole Russian people, Napoleon
was the French Revolution itself, _in propria persona_, the Promethean
fire-bringer of liberty, the logical incarnation of a spirit opposed
to historical continuity. The fact that he wore a military uniform
and called himself Emperor, as did the Czar, did not matter. What
mattered was that one of common birth, owning no power of descent
save that conferred on him by his own ability, the representative
of the dispossessed, the opponent of religion, and the overthrower
everywhere of monarchy, should dare to measure swords with the
consecrated Czar himself, whose will was sacred. This was sufficient
to identify Napoleon as Antichrist in the eyes of Alexander and his
meanest subjects alike. And the subsequent history shows that the Czar
was prepared, by all the traditions of his breed and office, to act
upon this hint up to the limit. In order to maintain his power intact,
he had to see to it that Europe begot no more Napoleons. His one idea
for the regeneration of the world was the establishment of a Holy
Alliance, of absolute monarchs with the aim of upholding everywhere
the sacrosanct traditions of religion and monarchy, and everywhere
keeping down the incoherent but vital drive to liberty that Napoleon
had striven to transform into a weapon of self-aggrandisement. Great
was Alexander’s disillusionment when he discovered the chief opponent
to this project was to be England itself, which had but recently fought
Napoleon to the death; still greater was his despair when he learned
through the formation of the Decembrist conspiracy, that his own
intelligentsia would not follow him. With dramatic suddenness the vain,
obstinate, fickle and shiftily brilliant creature who had saved Europe
from republicanism, died; or, according to Russian legend, did not die,
but walked out upon the road as a pilgrim under an assumed name, in
expiation of the crime of parricide by which he had come to the throne.
In any case, he left Russia to a more ruthless successor, determined
alike to uphold his personal prestige and totally undisposed to play
with the dangerously liberal notions of Europe.
Here we must again remind the reader that it is not the primary purpose
of this study to provide a detailed and objective history of either
Europe, America, or Russia as they manifested themselves throughout
the nineteenth century. Rather our aim is to pierce everywhere through
this tangled surface of objective facts to the more permanent realm of
subjective results. The story of the nineteenth century in Europe is,
as far as the European peoples are concerned, the story of the final
emergence of an intense and peculiarly aggravated form of bourgeois
nationalism. The French Revolution, Napoleon, and the industrial
revolution, as political factors, alike conspired to intensify and make
acute this mob-drift; romanticism and realism alike, in the field of
the arts, fanned its fires. The nineteenth century proved that Europe
no longer existed as a great political and spiritual possibility.
In its place were only a group of mutually jealous and competitive
units, whose local quarrels, to be healed only by exhaustion, would
recur again and again. In compensation, the nineteenth century, if
it could not produce a rebirth of Mediæval Europe, gave us for the
first time since the Middle Ages, Europeans. Through Goethe and
Heine, Stendhal and Flaubert, Ibsen and Nietzsche, Havelock Ellis and
Verhaeren, Unamuno and Ferrero the line of the great Europeans has
gone on, embracing all the European nations in the persons of certain
representatives, in a mingled blend of love of country combined with
love of mankind, cultivation of local traditions fused with total
abhorrence of war. Perhaps the noblest task that America and Russia
have accomplished in the world, has been that they have sometimes,
albeit unconsciously, aided and abetted in the production of true
Europeans. For without such, Europe at the present day would be what
she has been for a century past, a desert.
2
The significance of the nineteenth century to America is that it
precipitated and made acute the struggle between the commercial and
industrial North, the agrarian and conservative South, and the vast
mass of raw pioneers who, in the Middle West, actually held the balance
of power. The North, in the outcome easily won, less on account of its
numbers, and certainly not because of any intellectual brilliance, but
because of the plain fact that the South and the Middle West could
not even agree among themselves as regards essentials. The New England
minority, men like the Transcendentalists, Fourierites, Abolitionists,
regarded the perfect form of civilisation as a collection of industrial
bourgeois city-states, strongly practical in aim, egalitarian in
essence, dependent on absolute liberty of the citizen. To achieve this
aim it was necessary for them to agitate for the abolition of negro
slavery, which had existed in the South since the Colonial Period.
The Southern minority, on the other hand, envisaged the perfect state
as a collection of loosely-combined agrarian communities, maintained
precisely by the development of slavery as an institution, and governed
by an élite of aristocrats, whose activities, released from manual
toil, could flow into intellectual channels. The balance of power
between these two tendencies, which were incompatible from the outset,
lay in the hands of the frontier squatter class of the Middle West and
Far West. Their only concern was, which side could provide them most
quickly with manufactured articles in return for their raw products.
Garrison meant as little, spiritually, to them as Calhoun. America was
their oyster, and all they cared for was the eating; in other words,
they measured everything precisely by its value in dollars and cents to
themselves. Since they were mostly poor men, dependent on their labor,
and not economically tied to any particular section of the country
(the whole history of the American frontier is a history of continual
migration) they looked askance at slavery, which was decidedly the
sort of game only a settled, rich man could play. Since New England
idealism meant rather devotion to culture than to goods and chattels,
they were equally indifferent to the most radical ideas of the New
England reformers. They preferred to steer a middle course, and neither
to accept slavery nor transcendentalism, realising that they had a
continent to develop and their fortunes to make, and that the balance
of power lay in their hands. From their emergence on the American stage
in the person of President Andrew Jackson in 1829, we may date the
typical shibboleths of “union” being held more precious than liberty,
the constitution as impervious to logic, cheap money and big business
as more important factors in life than either leisure or high thinking.
The situation in Russia differed in form, and in form only. In
essentials it was precisely the same. Once again we have a majority
of unintelligent peasants, a tiny minority of intelligent radicals,
and between them the theoretically unlimited power of the Czar. The
difficulty with the radicals was that they could not even agree among
themselves. Some were absorbed by the materialistic socialism of the
West, which was to be elevated to the rank of a dogma by the work of
Karl Marx in this very epoch; still others were non-resistant idealists
and anarchists; still a third group were mystic reactionaries,
strongly tinged with the Oriental communism that lies at the heart
of Christianity viewed in its most primitive aspect. The Czar was
quite frequently ready to listen to them; in fact, the sole redeeming
traits in the character of Nicholas I, who was Alexander’s successor,
were his befriending of radical Russian authors (including Pushkin
and Griboedev), his personal courage, and his determination to make
decisions for himself. But the balance of the Czar’s power lay with
the immense mass of uneducated, coarse and dirty peasantry; so long
as their superstitions were not meddled with, so long as Russia could
wage successful wars abroad, thus keeping up the price of foodstuffs,
so long as the authority of the landowners and the burden of taxes lay
not too heavy on their shoulders, all would be well. Nicholas’ system
of maintaining, as far as possible, the internal _status quo_ while
outwardly posing as the champion of Christianity and the upholder of
the oppressed Slav race (which at this time was striving to get free
from the yoke of Turkey) broke down badly in the ill-success of the
Crimean War. The system of maintaining power by pressing upon Europe,
and doing nothing within, could not go on. Czardom itself could
not survive, so long as serfdom persisted as an institution. Under
Nicholas’ successor, Alexander II, serfdom was abolished by a stroke
of the pen, and thenceforward all Russians were theoretically free. To
reach the same result, at the same moment, America had to go through
the agony of four years’ civil war.
The outcome of this momentous decision was the same in both cases.
In America, the Southern aristocracy was swept away, but with it
went the last remnant of New England idealism. The “go-getter” type
of American definitely appeared, and has dominated the scene ever
since, despite every effort to uproot him. The seventies became for
America the dawn of the “gilded age”; an orgy of land speculation, of
feverish devil-may-care industrialism, of stock exchange gambling and
political corruption swept the country. The South could not protest,
being enslaved by the corrupt reconstruction government; the protest
of the surviving New England idealists went unheeded. Culture was only
important in so far as it represented an acquisitive value and the aim
of all Americans became to acquire the essential wealth that could
enable them to purchase culture, and so show themselves superior to
their neighbours.
Meantime the country was filling up with impoverished but ambitious
European immigrants, from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, the
Balkans, who were ready to barter their share in European traditions
for a hand in the melting-pot, which was to transform them all from
disillusioned idealists into one hundred per cent wage-slaves. The
nineteenth century in America thus proved a tragic triumph of the
“divine average” which Whitman had so mistakenly hymned. It left
America at the close of the nineties industrial in essence, ruthlessly
efficient, contemptuous of Europe, and essentially vulgar. Out of the
strivings of Virginia aristocrats and New England radicals had emerged
a land of bumptious barbarians. The last heirs of the old intellectual
tradition, men like Henry James, Whistler, Stephen Crane, even Mark
Twain, began coming to Europe and staying there, in voluntary exile.
The outcome in Russia was equally disastrous to the spiritual health
of the nation at large. The result of the alliance between Czar and
mujik was but to strengthen the hostility to all ideas, especially
to European ideas, and to drive the minority of the intelligentsia
still further along the path that led to desperate nihilism. After a
brief interlude of liberalism under Alexander II, Russia again took
the path of repression, and the reign of his successors, Alexander III
and Nicholas II, are noteworthy only for the complete suppression
of all thought, the relentless persecution of every form of protest
against the established trinity of orthodoxy, autocracy and Don Cossack
brutality. Even Dostoevsky, who regarded himself as the special
prophet of the old dispensation, was obliged in his famous Pushkin
address, delivered at the close of his life, to utter a protest against
the prevailing dirt, corruption, inefficiency and criminality, and
to uphold the work of the revolutionaries, by speaking of Russia’s
“pan-human mission,” and the ideals of the “Russian wanderer.” For the
rest, persecuted, outlawed, butchered and oppressed, Russian thought
scarcely dared lift up its head. Nicholas II succeeded, and nothing was
changed. The end of the century found Russia sinking into a quagmire
of corruption; and literature, which had maintained its protest since
Pushkin, began to give up the struggle by taking on the colours of
a defeated pessimism--the sensational pessimism of Andreiev, the
neutral pessimism of Tchekhov, the immoralist Nietzschean pessimism
of Artzybashev. The one outlet left to the Russian spirit was an
illimitable despair.
The nineteenth century in America concluded with a great economic
crisis followed by a foreign war, the first war in which America had
been engaged since the Civil War had closed thirty years before. The
nineteenth century in Russia closed also, a few years later, with a
foreign war in the Far East, which coincided with an economic and
political crisis at home. These two events were the logical outcome
of the previous development we have already traced, and which had
apparently fully settled the _status quo_ in both countries, without
really settling anything. In both countries the unsolved questions
of the relation between industrialism and agrarianism, monopoly
and free ownership, foreign expansion and home reform, came almost
simultaneously to a head. In 1898, following on the panic and great
strike of 1893-4, America went to war with Spain; in 1904 the Russian
government, which had steadily pursued, since the Crimean War, an
ambitious advance through Siberia and Manchuria to the point where it
was prepared, through possession of the spearhead of Port Arthur, to
challenge Europe’s growing interest in China and Korea, found itself
surprisingly halted by the outbreak of a struggle with Japan.
3
It is necessary here to go back a little, and to ask the question
why these two movements which ushered in the twentieth century, did
not coincide in date in both countries, inasmuch as they derived
ultimately from the same tragic division of opinion between rulers and
ruled, intelligentsia and peasants, though the intelligentsia in the
one case were a handful of thinking radicals striving to break down the
strangle-hold of the big business bosses and protectionist monopolies,
and in the other an even more desperate handful of writers and
publicists vainly protesting against the unholy alliance of Czardom,
corrupt civil service, and secret police.
The answer to this question is to be found in the unequal incidence of
the industrial era in point of time upon both countries. America had
become industrial, except for the South, as early as 1840. After 1865
industrialism was everywhere paramount, and its sway was undisputed.
But in Russia industrialism did not really begin until after 1892, when
Sergius Witte became Minister of Finance and of Communications. As a
direct result, the Transsiberian railway was built, thus giving Russia
at last full opportunity for expansion in the only direction in which
expansion was left open to her, namely, the Far East. Russia thereby
followed the path of full industrialism, a path which had been open
to the United States ever since the first transcontinental railway,
the Union Pacific, had been opened in 1877. It is interesting to note
that, once again, what was in the latter case the result of the steady
influence of millions of new settlers upon a Federal government
impotent to direct or interfere (for the Union Pacific was begun during
the upheaval of the Civil War) became in the latter, the action of only
one man, backed by the authority of the Czar.
In this delay of about a generation may be found the reason why Russia
postponed the internal crisis that in her case, as in America’s, was
to mark the slow transition from spiritual adolescence to dangerous
maturity. Industrialism, in both cases, provided the lever that set
in motion, once for all, the vast and ponderous machine that had been
created. In the one case, it solidified, in the other it disrupted;
and we need not invoke either Slav stupidity or Yankee smartness to
explain the psychological causes of the crisis of 1904-5 or that of
1893-1898. In essence the two movements were similar, it was only
in their results--as is practically always the case in American and
Russian social life--that they could be thought of apart. In America
the régime of free competition in industry supported by protective
tariffs, and outward lip service to the Federal constitution as the
sole God-given means of developing and fulfilling the destinies of
the United States, had steadily built up the cities at the expense of
the agrarian interest, until a succession of bad crops unconsciously
restored the balance. The result was, first, trade depression; then
reduction of wages; then a great strike at Chicago, which had, as
the second American city, only just finished flamboyantly hailing the
fourth centenary of Columbus’ discovery by means of a World’s Fair;
lastly, blundering interference by the Federal Government which helped
nobody and a smouldering agitation, freshly dividing the country into
sections, arousing the discontented farmers for cheap money, and the
discontented industrialists for an overseas empire, to absorb their
surplus products. The result was that the inevitable demand for
expansion of America beyond the ocean borders found its first moral
pretext in the insurrection of 1895 in Cuba.
Turn from this to the situation in Russia, where to balance the
American trinity of industrialist, agrarian and sentimental radical,
we have the three already familiar elements of Czar, mujik, and
intelligentsia nobility. Since 1861 the mujik had been nominally
free, and their village zemstvos, or local assemblies, were growing
inevitably in power and influence. The Czar owed the continuance of
his power entirely to the support of this peasant class. But because
of their continued increase in numbers, it was impossible to keep them
contented without finding for them continually new lands whereon to
settle; and such lands could only be opened in Siberia, Manchuria,
Turkestan, the Far East. By building the Siberian railway and by
concentrating on industrial development, Witte simply speeded up the
outcome of this logical process. Thereby he split up the radical
intelligentsia into three groups; those who, working through the
zemstvos and the landed classes, were demanding free speech and a
parliament; those who, working through the industrialists, were all for
a physical force revolution and Marxian socialism to follow; and those
who, working through the newly created and prospering middle classes,
were all for protecting their rights by a conservative parliament on
the English model. By deliberately driving Russia to take the path of
industrialism and eastward expansion, in order to maintain the alliance
between Czar and peasant, Witte proved himself not the least important
servant of the Crown; but his service led directly to two results. It
created an urban proletariat, of the utmost future danger as a hotbed
of political radicalism, and inevitably forced on the Japanese-Russian
War.
In either case, the policy followed was an attempt to resolve by
an arbitrary act certain difficulties that could only be attacked
from within. The average Middle-Western farmer took no interest in
an economic protectorate over the Caribbean; the average Russian
provincial noble had no quarrel with Japan. In the one case, it was
only through the support of the great Eastern industrialists that the
Union could be preserved in permanent form; in the other the central
government was obliged to absorb a certain proportion of surplus
peasant population, every year, either by creating an industrial class,
or by promoting emigration to Siberia, in order to avoid civil war.
The result of the movement of 1893-1898 was to make the industrial
capitalist class the dictators of American policy, domestic and
foreign; that of the parallel movement of 1893-1904 was to create a new
industrial class, only awaiting a leader and an opportunity to take
over the reins of government from the weak-kneed Czar and his advisers.
That the one movement accomplished its ends largely by peaceable
economic penetration, and that the other movement grew on account of
its arbitrary and violent character matters little. Each violently
wrenched a whole country out of its national orbit of development, and
set it upon a path that inevitably brought it into conflict with other
countries. In America’s case the conflict was to be with Europe, in
Russia’s with Japan.
Thus both countries, for the space of about thirty years, had
simultaneously explored the path of pacific expansion, and in both
cases that means failed. That is the lesson we must keep in mind as
once more we find America and Russia confronting each other across
the space of Europe at the close of the nineteenth century. Since 1865
America’s entire policy had been maintenance of freedom of contract,
protection of home markets, industrial expansion. The policy fell of
its own weight because a glut of manufactured articles and the growing
inability of the farmers to wring heavier crops from the soil, created
a financial crisis of the type that recurs throughout American history.
Since the disastrous Crimean War, and still more since the Treaty of
Berlin in 1878 had robbed Russia of the fruits of her last victory over
the Turks, the policy of the Czar and his advisers had been avoidance
of all foreign ideas and radical notions combined with expansion of
foreign markets and improvement of domestic communications in order to
link up the most outlying parts of the Empire. This policy, too, fell
of its own weight and came to nothing because in its zeal to foster
commerce and industry it created an industrial urban class determined
to take no orders even from the Czar, and because in its hurried race
eastward, it finally dashed the trace-pole of the Russian troika
against the immovable foundation stones of the Great Wall of China.
Chapter XV
At the close of the nineteenth century, the American people were
opportunistic, optimistic, and prosperous; the Russian people were
gradually sinking back from the status of a warlike, daring and
adventurous nation into a state of sluggishly Oriental passivity
and fatalism. In the one case, the power and resources of the West,
exploited by the great Eastern financiers, had overwhelmed the last
remnants of dying New England idealism, and had dragged the South,
incapable of resistance, after it. In the other, the arbitrary will
of the central government, backed by an army of corrupt bureaucrats,
and by another army of illiterate peasants wearing the Czar’s uniform,
had slowly radiated from Moscow through the veins of an immense
country until it reached the far distant Pacific at Vladivostok and
Port Arthur. Had Washington or Catherine the Great been permitted to
revisit the scene of their labours again at the close of the century,
they might well have been amazed at the work of their descendants.
Both would have been astounded at the immense expansion of what had
been originally a very simple idea. Washington in particular would
have been hard put to discover his small, and almost poverty-stricken
country, almost all English-speaking, with its scant three millions
of inhabitants, and frontiers scarcely one hundred miles removed from
the seaboard, in the vast congeries of races, ninety millions strong,
industrialised up to the hilt and flaunting their wealth, that swarmed
over America. But Catherine, too, though she would still have found
herself at home among the superstitious mujiks, would have missed
the intellectual brilliance of her court and have thought the state
bureaucracy overcrowded. Though she might have admired Witte and his
special creation of the Transsiberian railway, she would have shrunk
back in horror from Tolstoy as from a monstrosity. And what Catherine
would have thought of the special qualities of will and character
manifested by her descendant, Nicholas II, had best perhaps be left to
the imagination. In short, though nothing apparently had been changed,
everything in reality was different. America was waxing, and Russia was
waning rapidly, like two moons revolving in opposite directions.
The same phenomenon, with the same result, had happened long ago in
the ancient world. We have referred before to Egypt and Babylonia as
providing an instructive parallel to the two cases of America and
Russia. It is necessary now again to recall them to memory, and to
note that the period of Egypt’s greatest economic supremacy coincided
precisely with the period of the supine Kassite rulers of Babylonia.
That the Kassites were foreigners, is a fact perfectly well known,
but it is also fair to point out that the Czar was in a very special
sense a foreigner in his own realm. Catherine herself was purely
East German; and the habit of marrying petty German princesses had
persisted so long in the Romanov house that Nicholas II was himself
the grandson of a princess of Hesse-Darmstadt and the husband of
another. As in Babylonia, Russia was being bled white to support the
supremacy of a foreign class. Meantime, America, holding for the most
part to the dominant Republican party dynasty which had settled itself
into power on the heels of the Civil War, had swept into its system
of standardised ethics, mass-patriotism and business psychology, race
after race from the old world. The situation was becoming not very
different, after all, from that which confronted the Ancient World
when Amenophis IV, later known as Akhnaton, mounted the throne of
the Pharaohs. And the part that the Hittites had played in the drama
of 1500 B.C. was to be played by Prussia; for this is the period of
Prussia’s ultimate greatness on the world’s stage.
The drama began in America with the outbreak of the Spanish-American
War. The farmers of the South and West were already in revolt against
the increasing cost of living which high protective tariffs had brought
in their train. They were preparing to sweep the entire country under
the leadership of Bryan. The industrial workers of the East had already
threatened to follow them, in the great strike of 1893. If they had
done so, the country would have split up in three sections, even less
geographically definable than the boundaries of the North and South
had proven at the time of the Civil War. The great industrialists of
the East, and the millionaires of Wall Street with their hands on
the pulse of the country, took fright. The election of 1896 proved
the turning point. The nominee of the industrialist republicans
was William McKinley, an affable, ingratiating, hard-working, but
essentially spineless Ohioan; but the real power, the power of the
campaign funds, lay in Wall Street, which lavishly poured out its
treasure to aid the Republican Party to victory. The result was
that the less-organised forces of Bryan failed; and McKinley became
President. But the industrial outlook was none too rosy. In order to
prevent a glut of manufactured products, and the repetition of such
a crisis of unemployment as had already taken place in 1893-6, it
was necessary not only to maintain domestic protection, but to find
foreign markets. And foreign markets in America’s case meant inevitably
foreign war. The pretext came when the battleship _Maine_ blew up in
Havana harbour. At the price of a war with Spain, a war almost lost
through America’s incapacity for military leadership, yet bound to be a
victory in the end because of her opponent’s even greater helplessness,
America acquired an overseas dominion in the Philippines, and practical
certainty of headship in the Caribbean in the not remote future.
The results were momentous, socially and psychologically. America had
proven once and for all that she could defeat a European power in the
field. That the power chosen for this experiment was Spain, which
was antiquated in equipment, weak in leadership, and inefficient in
diplomacy, mattered not a jot. The fact that various European countries
had half-heartedly shown the Spanish some sympathy was enough to set
fire to the powder-magazine of American jingoism. A vast subterranean
echo of England’s old Armada victory shook the Anglo-Saxon foundations
of the country, trailed through the yellow press, and infected every
woman and every schoolboy. This was truly the legendary age of
American history, and its chosen hero became Theodore Roosevelt, the
millionaire turned cowboy, the “trust-buster” with the big stick
who defied equally Wall Street and the trade unions, who was ready
apparently to ride and tame together the two wild horses of industry
and agriculture, and to implant in every American breast the triumph
of the average man. Under his leadership America jumped overnight in
the eyes of the world from the status of a gawky, awkward, shambling
frontiersman of the Lincoln type, to that of a big overgrown schoolboy
with a book in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, equally ready
to lecture and to bully the world. One need only be respectful to
the “basis of prosperity” on which all American institutions rested
at home, and ready to pounce upon any European nation that dared to
interfere abroad, in order to be great.
2
Turn now from this picture to that of Russia during the close of the
twentieth century. The construction of the Transsiberian railway,
and the consequent industrial régime that Witte had fostered, led to
a momentary return of prosperity. His creation of a gold standard
backed by a gold reserve, together with the state monopoly that at
this time was imposed on the manufacture and sale of vodka, happily
combined with Alexander Third’s open policy of neutrality in Europe
and of rapid penetration to the Far East. The outcome was a hectic
period of urban development and factory construction. Meanwhile, the
peasantry, especially in the overcrowded region of the Lower Volga, had
to continue to suffer, despite their emancipation. Their zemstvos, or
local councils, were given no power of legislation; and they were still
paying in taxes for the costs of their own liberation back in 1861, and
were to continue to pay up to 1910. A succession of bad crops on the
Lower Volga in 1891 and 1893 did the rest, and famine drove them into
the factories of the large towns, where they rapidly became transformed
from illiterate and untrained agriculturalists, with all the earth-born
superstitions of their class, to active revolters and plotters against
Church and State, greedily swallowing Marx as their new gospel.
In the midst of this situation Alexander III died, to be succeeded
by the helplessly fatalistic and spineless Nicholas II. He soon fell
under the spell of the young wife who had been brought from Germany
for him by his father, and who had first appeared before the Russian
people in Alexander’s own funeral procession. This new accession,
in 1894, simply meant that Alexander’s policy would continue to be
followed blindly, but without the determination and efficiency that
the Czar had shown in pursuing it. More and more the peasants were to
be encouraged to emigrate; Siberia soon filled up with a new class of
desperate adventurers, and those who did not take this path crowded
into the factories of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where they were
rapidly converted by the steady preaching of the fanatics of Marxism.
Their motto was “Wait until the hour is ready when we may strike, and
then throw down your tools.” Meanwhile the government proved blind
to this new development, and contented itself with further driving
the intelligentsia underground or into exile, and making half-hearted
attempts to limit the hours of work, and the age at which the people
were to be employed in the new factories.
The clash came finally in 1904. In that year, Japan, taking fright
at the steady penetration of Russian influence and trade through
Manchuria to Korea, China, and the Pacific, suddenly moved her armies,
without the formality of a declaration of war, against Port Arthur.
The result was to find Russia utterly unprepared. East of Lake Baikal,
where the Transsiberian railway had a gap of one hundred miles which
could be traversed in summer by steamers, but in winter had to be
crossed on sledges, Russia had only eighty thousand field troops, with
twenty-three thousand garrison, and thirty thousand railway frontier
guards. Japan, on the other hand, could throw in one hundred and fifty
thousand line troops at once, and held all the advantages of lines of
communication. Russia was doomed to defeat from the outset; and this
defeat, for the first time in her history, came not from the invading
forces of Europe, but from her own invasion of Asia, which had been
followed up to the point where she came into conflict with the one
Asiatic nation which had westernised itself, and which was determined,
thanks to its own population and trade problem, to keep a firm hold
on the Pacific coast lands. But what made this defeat inevitable was
the lack of enthusiasm that the Russian people themselves displayed
towards the war. Since Nicholas, on his accession, had dismissed the
appeal of the zemstvos for a parliamentary constitution as “senseless
dreams,” the landowners themselves had become hostile; and the new
urban proletariat was indifferent to the demands of any class but its
own, and waiting for its opportunity.
The outcome was to prove to anyone but the vacillating and incapable
Czar, whose head had been completely turned by the large doses of
flattery administered to him by Emperor Wilhelm II (who for his part
secretly cherished ambitions towards Europe similar to Russia’s Asiatic
dreams) that the continuance of power in the hands of the Romanovs,
which had been the sole means of holding the Russian Empire together
since the days of Peter the Great, would cease, if once deprived of
the support of the united Russian people. Despite the blessings of
the Orthodox Church on the new crusade against the Japanese, despite
desperate attempts to whip up patriotic sentiment, Russia was defeated
not only in Manchuria, but on the home front. The Japanese War
concluded not only with military defeat, but with a firm promise on the
part of the Czar to open a Duma. This was wrung from him by the great
strike of 1905, which paralysed the entire country, and by the passive
but effectual resistance of the agrarian class themselves. The war with
Japan was rapidly wound up by the intervention of Witte, who made the
best bargain he could under the circumstances, in August, 1905; and the
attention of the Russian government henceforward was directed towards
dealing with the desperate situation at home.
Nicholas might in this crisis have abdicated and passed on the
succession of the throne to someone equipped with more will-power and
sense of the situation than himself, but for the fact that the Czarina
had at last, on the outbreak of the war, presented him with a son. His
one object henceforward was to transmit the patrimony of the Russian
Empire as intact as possible to his heir; and in this aim his wife
completely seconded him. The drift of his policy was to summon the
Duma, make only such concessions as could be wrung from him, and if
the situation proved too dangerous, to reassert his autocracy. It was
a policy of desperation, which needed such a supreme Machiavellian as
Catherine the Great to carry out successfully; and the conditions--not
to speak of the ability involved--under which it was now undertaken
were entirely different. In order to keep an eye on the insistent
smouldering rebellion of the new factory class, Nicholas’ Government
had adopted the policy of setting secret revolutionary agitators to
work in industrial districts, in order that the expected uprising
when it came might be known beforehand. The result had only been to
completely paralyse the country in the strikes of 1905; and once the
safety-valve of the Duma was constructed, it was not likely, despite
the Czar’s secret hopes, to merely blow off in talk.
There followed ten years of fantastic nightmare for Russia. While in
America, the country grew more and more consolidated in its power and
prosperity, more and more ready for the date when it might emerge into
the leadership of the world, under the successful compromise between
“big business” and free competition discovered by Roosevelt; in Russia
an outworn and scandalously patched together system tended more and
more to break down under its own weight, as Napoleon long ago had
accurately foreseen and predicted. The first Duma was suppressed, only
to give way to one more radical. The elections were then purged so as
to insure a conservative majority, but still the drift to revolution
could only be temporarily stayed. What made matters still worse and
finally transformed the most conservative landowning class into open
opponents of the autocracy, were the scandals concerning the Czar’s
own court and heir. The wretched child for whom Nicholas had staked
everything, proved a congenital invalid, with no hope for cure from
legitimate doctoring. In this resort, the thoughts of the monarch and
of his consort turned to the apparatus of miracle which, they fondly
believed, lay somewhere in the country itself. The result is well
known to the world at large. From the day when the animally cunning
and unholy Rasputin first left the trail of his dirty boots across the
Czar’s carpet, Nicholas himself was doomed.