The truth is, too, that there is not in the world a more religious
people than the Russian--a people more submissive to what they conceive
(not always wisely) to be the will of the Almighty, the governance of
the unseen forces. As opposed to the average German intellect, which for
the past fifty years has been struggling day and night to materialize
the spiritual, the Russian intellect seems to be always trying to
spiritualize the material. No one can doubt this who has seen the
Russian peasants on their pathetic pilgrimages to the Holy Land,
standing (among the lepers, uttering their clamorous lamentations)
before the gates of the Garden of Gethsemane, or trooping in dense
crowds down the steep steps to the underground Church of the Virgin. The
literature of Russia, too, reflects this trait of the Russian soul, and
not only in the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tourgeneiff, Tolstoy,
Repin, Dostoyevsky, and Glinka, or yet in Kuprine, Gorki, Anoutchin,
Merejkowsky, and Baranovsky, but in those simpler and perhaps cruder
writings which speak directly to uneducated minds, the same striving
after the spiritual is everywhere to be seen. Books like Treitschke’s,
Nietzsche’s, and Bernhardi’s would be impossible in Russia, not, heaven
knows, because of their “intellectual superiority,” which is another
name for braggadocio, but because of their moral insensibility, their
glorification of the physical forces of the body of man, which the
Russian mind sets lower than the unseen powers of his soul.