army," have little or nothing to do, even less in primitive
life than in modern. It is the old people, the old women at
times as well as the old men. Again it is the old men who are
leaders in the exclusion of the women. In control of the
initiation of the youths, they separate them from their mothers
or sisters and often decree for the initiates a ceremonial
avoidance of all women for a set time. The penalties they
threaten--sickness, decrepitude, effeminacy--are too dire to
pass unheeded. This "avoidance" has been explained as due to
the monopolistic spirit of the elders. With their women they
want no interference by the youths. But a far more plausible
explanation, I think, takes the avoidance as a concentration
rite, so to speak, a symbol, if you like, of the life ahead,
the life in which the boys, "made" men, are going to have
little to do in public with women. For even after the special
avoidance of the initiation period ends, the segregation of the
sexes continues. Men keep together and away from women in their
club-houses, and in all the places of assembly which are
differentiated from the primitive club-house--the church, the
council, the workshop, the gymnasium, the university, the
play-house. And from all the interests which center in these
places men have from time to time excluded women, they have
excluded them from magic and religion, from arts and letters,
from games, from politics and, let me add, from war.
Why are men so exclusive? Because--the reason will seem almost
too simple, I fear, for acceptance--because now and always men
do not want to be bothered by women. Women get in our way, they
say, women are a nuisance. Almost anywhere away from home women
are a nuisance--in church organization, in the university, in
business, etc. Of course if women can be kept apart from us in
these activities and will stay in their place, if they join an
order of nuns or deaconesses, if they go to a separate college
in the university, if they will become good stenographers, we
don't mind having their cooperation, we welcome it. Women may
even go to war--as an absolutely separate division of the army,
said the men of Dahomi, as non-combatant pahia women or workers
of magic, said the Roro-speaking tribesmen of New Guinea, or as
Red (dross nurses, say the men of Europe and America. If we men
can be sure women will not interfere with us, we really do not
mind. Women have only to give us that assurance of
non-interference to make us doubt the assertion we sometimes
make that in going to war they are interfering with the order
of nature.
AN INTERPRETATION OF SLAVOPHILISM
BY ARTHUR D. REES
PHILADELPHIA, PA.
THERE are good reasons for believing that the Russians are
practically the greatest peace people in Christendom. They are
the least commercial in the competitive sense, the least
capitalistic also, and as a people, the least combative in
Europe, despite the wrecks of warring dynasties that ten
centuries have left upon their plains and the miscellaneous
strifes and calamities of all kinds that have beset them.
Always expanding along lines of least resistance; absorbing by
comparatively petty conquests, decaying or scanty peoples;
reaching Kamchatka in the Far East with more ease than she
reached the shores of the Baltic; never flinging her legions
far and wide victoriously as did Rome, Spain, France or Great
Britain--Russia remains to-day, for the most part, humble, and,
in reality, a conquered people, living, dreaming and preaching
a morality born both of this humility and of the physical
environment that has helped to foster it. All Muscovy can not
be judged by those few who live in the saddle--the Cossack
population, men and women, numbers only about two million--nor
by the pitiable pageant of despotism the observer beholds in
their land: pogroms, poverty, disease, distress, militarism,
orthodoxy and Pan-Slavism. Russia has a soul in spite of these;
a gentle and beautiful soul, only half revealed, and too much
concealed by her dilapidation and her dilemma; a peaceful soul,
abnormally humble and devout, and in respect to these qualities
unequalled in Christendom.
Since the age of Vladimir the Holy, "The Beautiful Sun of
Kief," in the tenth century, Russia has had the tradition of
international peace. Vladimir wandered over the country, sword
and battle ax in hand, like a reincarnation of Thor, armed with
his mighty and wondrous hammer. Then came his yearning for a
new religion--something to inspire his life better than
Perun--Russia's old god of thunder--and the other idols, and a
little later, the picturesque investigation of his peripatetic
commissioners having been completed, he became a Christian of
the Greek church, was baptized with many fine and grand
ceremonies, compelled his docile people to do likewise, and,
like a true Northman that he was--the great grandson of Rurik
of the Baltic wilds--he so impressed his frowsy hordes, half
Scythian and half Slav, that now in the hearts of their
descendants, in their popular songs and legends, in those
concerning Kief especially--a beautiful and pathetic strain of
music eight centuries old--he, Vladimir, is still the central
heroic figure; once a man, but now a kind of god, sent from
Heaven to rule, enlighten and bring peace to his people and be
known in story and song as "Vladimir the Holy, the Beautiful
Sun of Kief."
An old chronicle describes for us how his hordes drank their
cup of trembling at his hands. There, around about the low
hills of the southern Dnieper River, probably on the crumbling
sandstone cliffs of Kief--the city, studded with jewel-like
legends and famed for its "golden palaces," stood his
candidates for baptism; near by were priests from
Constantinople, gorgeously arrayed, chanting, in strains
unknown to the populace, the Greek church baptismal service.
Then the democratic immersion!--rich man, poor man and all, at
Vladimir's command, wade into the baptismal waters, some up to
their knees, some to their waists, some to their necks, and,
thus finding a new faith from Heaven, they crossed themselves
for the first time as the thunder rolled on high! Here is
Russia remembering her Creator in the days of her youth--and
forgetting Him ever since; from then on, Holy Russia! Possibly
Holy Vladimir, at any rate, for becoming, with that ceremony,
peaceable, except for self-defence, he gave up all of his idols
and his aggressive sword. The former he scourged and cast into
the river, the latter he sheathed in its scabbard. And all this
about 988--the first peace movement of Holy Russia. The faith
of it, and its vision and dream came early in her history and
have not yet gone out or been extinguished.
Before the next such movement, time enough passed by to give
the seasons and the winds and rains full opportunity to whittle
down old Kief's storied sandstone hills. In 1815, the
much-expanded realm of Muscovy, then a partner in the holy
alliance, proclaimed under Alexander the First, the ideal of
peace. This Czar declared he would rule as a father over his
children and in the interest of "justice, charity and peace,"
and, in so doing, created the leading precedent for the peace
program of Nicolas the Second.
Alexander, who in the first half of his reign ruled liberally
for the days of Napoleonic supremacy, no doubt was sincere in
his desire to govern in the "spirit of brotherhood," but in the
latter years of his power, he fell sadly short of this
standard.
Alexander the Second, the emancipator of forty-six million
serfs, may have had some world peace ideal in mind when he in
1874 promoted a conference in Brussels to codify the usages of
war, but the reaction from his earlier liberalism was setting
in about this time and, growing worse, led to his assassination
in 1881.
The next move in the direction of peace came, as the world
rather well knows, through the present Czar, Nicolas the
Second, who on ascending the throne in 1894, proclaimed that
Russia would rule in the interests of peace and would cultivate
the arts of it. In 1898 followed the first call for a World
Peace Conference, and in 1899 came another circular with a
similar object.
But it is out of the kind heart of Muscovy, and from the
troubled, humble and penitent soul of Russia that the real
peace movement of her land has arisen. For many centuries
calamities have been pouring upon her plains, profusely
pouring--drought, famine and invasions without number; now
Rurik and his Northmen to start the empire out of its
prehistoric lethargy; their dynasty of conquering blood still
sharing in the rulership of the land to-day; now the Tartars,
remnants of whom with their high cheek bones are still visible
in the Baltic provinces; particularly and always and ever
poverty beyond description; poverty, disaster and conquest,
like triple demons to humiliate the soul of Russia and keep her
dumb for many centuries, except for the beauty of her unending
song.
And out of these conditions of life has grown the peace
morality that is native to the Russian people; out of their
sorrows and their conquered plains, out of their broken hearts
too, although the economic genesis of it all is very apparent.
The Russian people's Russia has ever been under the overlords
heel, downtrodden years without number, and yet it is a land
which has never produced a system of military tactics and
training--forever dependent for these creations upon her
neighbors; a land which has produced scarcely one great naval
or military commander who to-day holds a place in history as do
those of other nations; a land whose people have been usually
led to slaughter like sheep by Northman or Teutonic or Polish
generals; whose armies have never been noted for their great
campaigns, and always have been poorly drilled, managed and
fed, and never yet successful in any foreign wars. Surely from
such a land as this, no widespread war-morality or
world-conquering legions could come.
In fact the very reverse has come to pass: the philosophy of
Slavophilism has arisen in Muscovy, yet not so much arisen as
it has developed with the Russian soul, not as a thing apart,
but as a quality thereof, blossoming somehow with all other
Russian things, out of the primitive Scythian darkness. The
rebellious spirit having been crushed out of the generations
since, what is left but non-resistance? Yet in these latter
years a resisting spirit, nursed and suckled largely in western
Europe, has falsely made it appear that all Russia was in arms,
storming with chaotic unity at the church, the state and the
army, deluging their ancient customs with the destructive and
re-creative might of radicalism. Far and wide of the truth is
this! Let no one think the vast heart of Russia has changed!
Only the few have cast away the ancient quiet; only the few
have the modern consciousness instead of the medieval,
theocratic one; only the few are not at heart Slavophiles in
feeling and in morality.
This philosophy existed long in the national or social mind
before it was crystallized into public doctrines, and exists
even yet largely in its more primitive unworded or instinctive
form, although it was Peter the Great who unconsciously awoke
the latent and then unexpressed Slavophilic feelings and
moralities when he, like a civilizing Pied Piper, charmed the
chieftains of industry of Western Europe to follow his trail
into Muscovy, his "Empire of Little Villages," and there
regenerate them.
Therefore at about the end of the seventeenth century in
Russia, the "dumb silent centuries" gradually became articulate
in expressing their opposition to all things western. This is
the heart of Slavophilism, and no one can truly fathom the
Russian soul before understanding its philosophy. It is the
Muscovite theory of the simple life, still crying out against
the Great Peter's work and recalling the devotees of western
culture to its idealization of medieval, theocratic, autocratic
Russia.
Despite this reaction, however, it has a great meaning, a
tender beauty, and a message of depth and power for our western
world. Primarily Russia is a peasant and an agricultural land,
and there is a colorless monotony in her vast plains. Indeed
land and people are alike; as in the average peasant there is
patience, resignation and submission, so there is in the very
land itself. Open and prostrate it lies beneath the torrid sun
of the south, and the arctic winds of the north; subdued and
downtrodden for centuries, it and its people have always been
at the mercy of ruthless men and rainless winds.
Thus passive endurance has become one of the saving qualities
of the Russian's soul. The peasant's nature is one that has few
wants and little rebellious power. The Greek church of the
simple gospel is his and a government of the Czar's will. His
power of self renunciation is one which in Slavophilic thought
gives him true liberty. Therefore ask the followers of this
doctrine, what need is there of the constitutional liberties of
the west, or its republics or limited monarchies, or its
differences in ecclesiastical faith and structure? Slavophilism
declares that Russia has the only true freedom, faith and
brotherhood, which other lands sadly lack. In addition she has
the ancient and splendid heritage of the communal land system,
wherein the inherent justice of the Russian peasant's heart is
shown by his voluntary division and re-division of the land
among his brothers at stated times.
What need therefore, Slavophilism asks, for the degenerate
justice of the west? None! Away with Europe then!--the Europe
of competition and gruesome factories! The Europe of
destructive forces, of greedy land grabbers, of capital and
labor wars, where society is held together, not as in Russia by
the ties of affection, brotherhood and communal interest, but
only by money and greed, and where free thinkers, atheists and
materialists abound, whose lives and thoughts would unsettle
the holy, orthodox feelings of Russia, disturb her ancient
conscience and poison her humility with murmurings of
discontent and rebellion.
Away with the books of the west, too! And its agricultural
implements! Wooden ploughs instead of chilled steel! Outdoor
work and not indoor prisons called factories! Peasants working
for centuries beneath the uncanopied sun, and on the floors
without walls, will not let doors and brickwork thumbscrew
their souls in confinement thus! Indoors awhile in winter will
they labor, but spring airs shatter the moralities of the
time-clock and away to the fields they rush; in the spring to
sow and sing, in the summer to sing again and at the harvest
time too, and then to plait the bearded stalks into wreaths and
crown the maidens with sheaths of corn; the hymns for the
"death of winter" and the "birth of spring," marriage songs and
funeral dirges and chants of olden times well intermingled with
the labor of their hands.
Herein the poetry of agricultural, peaceable Russia clashes
with the prosaic efficiency of the west, the efficiency of
commercial wars, strikes and class struggles which peasant
Muscovy has known so little.
And again, Slavophilism, with its theory of successive
civilizations, culled perhaps from the philosophy of Hegel,
each civilization superior to its forerunner, comes to show us
a vision: the gradual displacement of one type of society by
another, but continuing what is best in the preceding until
nothing except what is good remains and universal peace
results, thus portraying the displacement of national
civilizations by universal ones, from which ultimately an
idealistic world policy will result, and the federation and
peace of men.
Some Slavophiles saw even in Peter's work a process of
progressing from nationality to universality. In his time there
was the same yearning toward its peaceful ideal. The "Old
Russia" party wanted Peter to renounce war and conquest.
Alexis, his own murdered son, worked with this element which
was very largely representative of the nation. To them, St.
Petersburg, then a new and growing capitol, was typical of
change, unrest and falsity; Moscow was in their hearts the only
capital, typical of Russia's old comfort and quiet. Many nobles
antagonized Peter, but he swept them aside, imprisoning them or
sending them to the gallows. Like Russia's slight resistance to
Rurik and others, and to the Tartars, so was her feebleness
before Peter the Great, who was himself, however, by no means
an accomplished military leader, but an enlightened barbarian,
dealing with a people whom writers and observers declare to be
endowed with conspicuous traits of humility, scarcely found in
the Christian nations of the western world.
Russian fiction represents its people in the same way.
Unaggressive characters, who talk and think but do not act,
fill its novels; they dream of the great age of the "Universal
Idea" that shall come for all and regenerate the "rotten west,"
where "rationalism is the original sin"; the typical west that
Slavophilism condemns--the west of the struggles between the
rulers and the ruled; between Scripture and tradition and the
upper and lower classes. The Slavophile idea, in theory at
least, leaves no room for this. Christian love and humility and
peasant communes, where rationalism, strife and rebellion are
unknown, must be instituted in the west; then the "Universal
Idea" of Russia will create Millennial times. This was the
"Messianic hope of Slavophilism," and perhaps is yet to a great
degree destined in the minds of its devotees to give the last
feature to the development of the world, so that the love and
feeling of the east would appease the discord of the west,
diluting its discipline and its logic with true religious
intuition and humility, and eventually the idealized
relationship of autocracy for the Czar and self-government for
the people--the old system so rudely strained by Peter the
Great--would permeate the ruled and rulers of the world.
Here then is Slavophilism! And pacific Russia--the heart and
soul of her, claiming this to be the true ethical and spiritual
ideal for her people, and censoring her upper class, with its
foreign culture, materialism, and infidelity, as being the only
real traitor to this saving morality of the ancient regime.
Among the prominent advocates of this philosophy might be
mentioned, first, Constantine Aksakoff, Russia's Rousseau, who
in the middle of the nineteenth century, was a virtuous
propagandist of the doctrine. He earnestly, even religiously,
preached the return of Russia from the allurements of western
Europe, unto her own theory of national salvation, declaring
that "the social order of the west is on a false foundation"
and that Slavophilism would offset its degeneracy, if only
Russia would free herself from the false class leadership for
whose origin the Great Peter stands the convicted sponsor! Thus
Slavophilism, under the leadership of Aksakoff, instead of
leading forward with the great liberal movement that came after
the Crimean War, resulting finally in the emancipation of the
serfs, would lead backward to the stagnant hours of medieval
Russia. Then there were no German words to disfigure the
Russian language! Then there were no German divisions of rank
among the officials to strangle life by their formality. No,
none of these, nor the disturbing importations of Peter; in
Aksakoff's variation of the gospel, the Russians are the
"beyond men" and need them not. Thus before Peter's reign all
was Slavophilic!--a religion of the simple Christian gospel, a
church considering itself the only true ecclesia, a government
of the Czar's will, a life of passive humility; creating
freedom of conscience and speech for the peasants, and freedom
of activity and legislation for the rulers, unknown in modern
corrupted Russia!
And thus was old peaceable-hearted Muscovy of the past
centuries pictured as the metropolis of true political and
individual morality.
Herzen, too, an able pamphleteer in revolutionary things,
preached something similar, crying from his pulpit at home or
in exile, that Russia would solve all her problems and lead the
human race by the simplicity of the Slavophile ideal. His early
and rabid westernism was greatly tempered on contact with the
west. Disillusion and disgust overcame him. The mercantilism of
the bourgeoisie there drove him into Aksakoff's fold, and he
too thereafter found faith alone in the "regenerative power of
Russia," and her system of the mir, the central sun of the
Slavophilic state, the village commune, self-governing and
self-contained. And then from that, this was to ensue: the
whole world made of village communes as in Russia, perhaps even
their log cabins too, and fresh mud to go with them on their
walls! But this did not deter the vision of these evangelists.
The commune was to be indefinitely extended; national and
international ones were to be organized, all self- governing,
and then would follow as the night the day, universal peace
wherever these communes were found.
This is the Utopia Russia has given to the world to stand
beside Plato's, or Sir Thomas More's or Morris's or Bellamy's.
This was the dream of pacific Pan-Slavism.
Dostoievsky himself is of it, and is luminous not with a mere
facet flash of its philosophy but with the whole orb of it. To
him the Russians "are more than human, they are pan-human."
Count Tolstoi too must be listed with these preachers. He,
making his own shoes and cutting his own and the peasants'
grain, lived it, showing how he thought the world's work ought
to be done. What were factories or the culture of the west to
him in later years--Shakespeare or no Shakespeare? Destructive
ideals of life. Competition, money and land greed,
self-assertion--all things that are the anthitheses of
Slavophilism--he shunned; mocking the palsied heart and
poisoned ideals of the west, and indeed of the "upper class"
section of his own land as no other Slavophile did. And
following its teaching, he journeyed through self-renunciation
to freedom and communal life, after repentance for his
wanderings, expiation and regeneration.
Dostoievsky, on the other hand, reached this philosophy largely
by being born to it among the humble people who lived it.
Melancholy-minded by nature--a sort of a Russian Dante but
living in actual infernos and purgatorios, Siberia and prison
cells, he came at last to worship his fellow countrymen and
their ideals as almost nothing else in heaven or earth, and
bowed down before them "as the only remnant left of Christian
humility, destined by Providence to regenerate the world." Here
is Slavophilism in a fervid extreme. "The Down-trodden and
Offended," "Memoirs of a Dead House," "Crime and Punishment,"
"Poor People,"--these, the titles of his novels, show the
predilections of his own soul. He died in the mystic frenzy of
this enthusiasm.
Here then, in this philosophy and in the lives of these men, is
something of the soul of Russia, beautiful in its humility, yet
not so humble that it is not ambitious to embrace the world in
the folding arms of its peace, its communal government and its
morality. Pan-Slavism of this nature is the only kind that in
truth can ever come from Russia. Pan-Slavism of the military
sort, with musketry, bribery and all other diabolic black arts,
miscalled government, rests on such a slim foundation that it
need be but little apprehended.
It was this brotherly humble soul of Russia that greatly helped
to put an end to the Russo-Japanese war: not merely failing
finances and lack of transportation. The feeling of a kindly
people for their own and a neighboring race caused widespread
mismanagement, opposition and wholesale desertions from the
army, among both the officers and the men. The Romanoff family
and official Russia caused the conflict, but human Russia,
humble and poor, was a great factor in its conclusion.