Initial commit of ebook 78697 filesHEADmain

1 files changed, 7825 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/78697-0.txt b/78697-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..23d7ae1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/78697-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7825 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78697 ***
+
+
+                                 THE TWO
+                                FRONTIERS
+
+                    A STUDY IN HISTORICAL PSYCHOLOGY
+
+
+                           JOHN GOULD FLETCHER
+
+
+                        PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY
+                           COWARD-McCANN, INC.
+                            IN THE YEAR 1930
+
+
+
+
+                           COPYRIGHT, 1930, BY
+                           COWARD-McCANN, INC.
+
+
+                         _Printed in the U.S.A._
+
+
+
+
+                                  _To_
+                               ELIE FAURE
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+  _Only strong personalities can endure history; the weak are crushed
+  beneath it._
+
+                                                            NIETZSCHE.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+
+The study of history, which in the nineteenth century became no
+longer the province of a few specialists, but an almost universal
+pursuit carried on in hundreds of schools, and seemingly essential
+to the welfare of the State, is only of value if we are able to use
+historical criteria, the values of the past, as a means not only
+of judging but also of directing the latent powers of the present
+and the future. In most cases, however, to-day, history is studied
+merely for the purpose of recovering the past; and in order to bring
+the past into relation with the present day, something more than the
+pure historical sense is needed. For the process called history is
+in reality irreversible; we cannot go back to any specific age in
+the past and live in it even if we would, for the simple reason that
+we are the past plus--or minus--something. The only conception of
+human progress that is philosophically correct is not a conception of
+objective external progress at all: actually it is probable that we
+exercise no more control over nature--and this despite our machines and
+labour-saving inventions--than our most remote and savage ancestors
+exercised with their magical rituals to ensure a supply of game, or
+the earth’s fertility. If we have progressed at all, it is solely in
+subjective curiosity, range of knowledge, and interest in our own
+destiny. Through progress in research, depth of speculation, we have
+become something different from the peoples of the past. We have added
+to their experience other experiences of our own. We now face larger,
+more complex, and more world-embracing problems than any Greek of the
+age of Pericles ever envisaged. We must think more,--though whether our
+thinking will lead to such good results may well be doubted--than any
+of our forefathers thought during the whole course of their lives.
+
+The superficial study of history on the other hand leads merely to
+the shallow modern view that history has already organised the world
+and done our thinking for us. We may develop this view optimistically
+or pessimistically, but the results are equally vicious. If we
+take the point of view that history has made us the heirs of the
+ages, and set us on the summit of human progress, we sink into a
+Philistine acceptance of evils that will lead inevitably to disastrous
+self-complacency and to such catastrophes as the recent European War.
+It was in fact in Germany in the nineteenth century that this view of
+history developed, under Fichte and Hegel, and against its optimism
+Nietzsche wrote the best of his early essays. But one can find much
+of this same Philistine complacency with what history has already
+achieved, in such countries as America to-day, and it is partly with
+the aim of destroying it, that I have embarked on this study. On the
+other hand if we regard history more pessimistically as a series of
+magnificent efforts which somehow came to nothing, we fall into no less
+serious an error. The outcome of such a belief is to beg the entire
+question of our present-day existence. We become nostalgically romantic
+over some specific period in the past, say Ancient Greece or the
+thirteenth century, and ascribe all our inability fully to recapture
+the period in question to something which we call “modern capitalism,”
+or the Renaissance, or democracy, or evangelical Christianity. In any
+case we transfer our own responsibility for the present day to the
+shoulders of some scapegoat--and thereby absolve ourselves. But no one
+is really ever absolved from taking part in history. The process of
+thinking of history in terms of the past alone, tends to an act of
+wish-fulfilment; by it we merely make of history that which we have
+already wished history to be.
+
+In order to correct this error in perspective, we must cease to regard
+history as a mere procession of events, and learn to look upon it from
+the standpoint of art and religion; these being not only humanity’s
+highest and noblest, but also humanity’s ultimate and most completely
+absolute values. From this standpoint the record of history is anything
+but a record of progress. Rather is it a series of fluctuations;
+periods of depression and stagnation alternating with periods of great
+hope and activity. That we have struck a period of stagnation to-day
+seems only too probable; the last thirty years of the nineteenth, and
+the first thirty years of the twentieth century have carried us far
+towards thorough-going religious and artistic chaos. But we cannot
+redeem that chaos by returning to an order and discipline of the mind
+which fitted the more limited intellectual and spiritual interests of
+yesterday, as so many of our academic critics would have us do. To
+revive humanism or scholasticism is useful, and to be commended as a
+valuable antidote to nineteenth century utilitarianism and naturalism;
+but all the scholasticism and humanism in the world cannot bring back
+the thirteenth century as it was, nor restore us to the fifteenth. We
+have to pick our way through the twentieth century degeneration of
+values and chaos with but this consideration to console us: that it
+was precisely when the values of the ancient world, in Greece, Rome
+and Judea, were at their most degraded and chaotic that Christianity
+was born. Certainly we no longer look forward to a repetition of that
+particular event; but the event towards which the world is at present
+tending may be at least of equal significance to man as the dawn of
+Christianity. Let us for the moment keep an open mind on the matter.
+
+Meanwhile, what we have to do is to read history with a fresh
+understanding of its symbolic import. To do this we need only
+concentrate attention on the values above-mentioned; the values of art
+and religion. We are best able in them to study the great cultures of
+the world in their symbolic relation to each other. We see in them
+how each culture has its own special symbol or set of symbols, that
+differentiates it from the whole. This science of comparative and
+symbolical history will inevitably lead us to the present day as the
+natural terminus of our investigation. Our object in studying history
+will become largely the task of sifting out the values of the past from
+the rubbish with which the present day has overlaid them. We will see
+that the past contains in essence the present, that the present merely
+repeats or transforms the past, and that where it fails to do so, it
+fails through a lack of understanding of permanent human values. By
+studying the essence of the past, we do our utmost towards redeeming
+the failures of the present, and directing the forces of the future.
+We may even some day become masters of the future, if we set ourselves
+resolutely to learn the fate of those forces that have been found
+hostile, in past ages, to the movement of life.
+
+
+2
+
+About no word of the historian’s vocabulary has there been so much
+argument and so little agreement as about the word “civilization.”
+There are those who, with Spengler, would take it to denote the final
+stage of every great culture; a stage of which the chief features are
+overcrowding in great cosmopolitan cities, decline of agriculture,
+predominance of finance, prevailing economic crises, and the rule
+of dictatorships and mobs; a rapid decline of the fine-arts into
+sterile repetition of worn-out patterns and formulas; religion as
+a mere question of conventional state worship, not as a creative
+popular force; an increasing search for banal pleasures and barren
+distractions; a growing economic distress caused by pressure from
+below. Others, even more radical than Spengler, would qualify
+civilization as a disease, and postulate a return to savagery as its
+only possible cure. But even savagery, as we know, is not without
+formal culture; and civilization, if we are to use the word at all,
+is a development of formal culture. Perhaps the best definition of
+civilization is that of Gobineau; “a state of relative stability, in
+which multitudes bind themselves to seek peacefully the satisfaction
+of their needs, and refine their intelligence and their morals.”
+The crucial point of this definition is to be found in the word
+“stability.” This stability is achieved by the general adoption of one
+system of religion, of one style of art and architecture, of one system
+of rule. Its nature is expressed alike in great public monuments, in
+details of domestic life, and in the preservation of written records
+and calendar-measurements. It is above all, a _state_; fluctuating
+according to economic conditions, invasions from without, expansions or
+contractions of effort, fresh racial intermixtures. And as such, its
+past manifestations display many of the leading characteristics of its
+recent manifestations which appear in every newspaper to-day.
+
+There is no doubt for example that ancient Babylonia and Egypt are,
+in comparison with such culture as their neighbours possessed, to be
+ranked as civilizations of a high order. Both achieved the state of
+stability that Gobineau postulates. And this state had as a basis in
+each case, a common geographical and racial element. Both were, above
+all, river cultures lying in close proximity to great desert wastes.
+Into the Nile valley, as into the flood region of the Euphrates and
+the Tigris, came an alien migration of Semitic culture. This Semitic
+element, strongly monotheistic in tendency, worked as an influence
+towards the final fusion of the local and tribal cults of the
+indigenous peoples into a common mythological and ethical structure
+which persisted for many centuries. But in each case the result was
+entirely different. In Ancient Egypt, the Semitic influence, which
+was exerted in successive waves of invasion from a period perhaps
+antedating history down to the Hyksos kings, found a very highly
+mixed congeries of races: in part dolmen-building pacific Berbers,
+in part lightly-skinned and more warlike Lybians, the whole more or
+less overlaying totemistic negro tribal confederations. The result
+was a civilization of monumental power and splendour, the remains of
+which had to wait for the dawn of the nineteenth century before being
+investigated, and whose renewed influence on the world at large now
+stands at a maximum. The leading characteristics of this civilization
+were, first, the universal belief in personal immortality, leading to
+a special cult of the tomb; second, the combined cult of the sun-disk
+and of vegetation, expressed in the two great official religions of
+Amen-ra and Osiris; third, the division of the country into forty
+districts or nomes, corresponding probably to ancient tribal divisions,
+and the sway exerted over each of these divisions by some entirely
+local god, usually of animal form, representing the vestigial cult
+of some totemistic deity. The greatness of Egypt rested therefore on
+the fusion of two religious ideas of a high order that sprung from
+without; the cult of the suffering vegetation-god, with its belief in
+immortality, Aryan in essence and mystical in expression, symbolised
+in the trinity of Osiris, Isis and Horus; and the sun-cult, highly
+rationalistic and warlike, Semitic in essence, symbolised in the disk
+and boat of Amen-ra. Both of these rested upon, without disturbing, a
+foundation of primitive African totemism.
+
+The development of the Babylonian belief sprang from an entirely
+different source. Here the Semitic invaders found an already rooted
+population probably of Mongolian stock, highly cultivated, and the
+comparison of the resultant Babylonian-Assyrian culture with the
+Egyptian is the comparison of that which is primarily Asiatic with
+that which is primarily European. There is a close parallel between
+the Babylonian ziggurat with its receding terraces and the great
+Asiatic terraced shrines, of which the Altar of Heaven in Pekin is the
+latest example; there is even closer parallel between the belief in
+elemental spirits, devas, and demons of the Babylonians and the same
+thing in the Chinese, Thibetans, and Japanese. There the austere and
+not specifically creative imagination of the Semite worked again as a
+precipitant, fusing the original non-tribal, non-totemistic diversity
+of cult into a pantheon of fixed superior powers. The oldest gods, Ea,
+the fish-shaped god of the waters, Anu, the god of the sky, Enlil (Bel
+of Nippur), god of the Earth, were left undisturbed; but their cult
+became less important than that of the later group, each of whom became
+associated with a planet. Sin, the moon-god, Shamash, the sun-god,
+Marduk, the conquering war-god of Babylon itself, who became associated
+with the planet Jupiter, Nebo, the god of divination, associated
+with Mercury, and Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, associated with
+the morning and evening star of Venus, were the chief divinities of
+developed Babylonian-Assyrian worship. Each of these represents some
+supernatural magical force of the heavens, rather than of the earth.
+The Babylonian faith paid little attention to personal immortality,
+much to obedience to law and custom. Its chief religious documents are
+magic incantations, moral precepts, epic tales of the creation and
+the destruction of the world. Shamanism, the cultivation of the magic
+powers whereby the priesthood strove to become one with the unseen and
+invisible world of spiritual influences, was universal in Babylon, and
+practically unknown in Egypt, where its place was taken by totemism.
+Thus one may say that the Babylonian faith was super-rational, the
+Egyptian a sub-rational one.
+
+These differences are no less climatic than racial. The plain of
+Mesopotamia, backed by the barren and terrible desert ranges of Persia
+and Armenia, lies at the mercy of the elements. Even the floods of the
+Euphrates and Tigris, that bring down the disintegrated loess from
+those mountains, and make thereby the rich soil of Mesopotamia, are
+uncontrollable torrents, which successive races have vainly tried to
+stem by constructing great irrigation and canal systems to obviate
+disaster. The climate itself is one of sudden sharp changes: torrential
+rains followed by intense heat, icy winds succeeding torrid blasts from
+the Persian Gulf. Under such conditions, the type of worship developed
+would be naturally that of the elements, regarded as superior powers:
+the “host of heaven” of the ancient Chaldees whose imagination so
+powerfully influenced the Old Testament. On the other hand, in Egypt
+the climate is uniform, the only outward change being the three months
+of flood followed by nine months of dry weather. Rain is practically
+unknown, and the surrounding deserts are for the most part adequate
+defence against invasion. The only danger is in reality internal;
+the danger of physical slackness and enervation brought about by
+interbreeding in a hot subtropical climate. The importation of fresh
+blood from without thus becomes from time to time a necessity to the
+Egyptian, as it is a danger of the first order to the Babylonian.
+During the course of ancient history from the first dynasty to the
+twenty-second, the Egyptians present the spectacle (except for the
+period of Amenophis IV) of a political and religious uniformity; in
+Babylonia the religious basis alone was uniform; politically the
+country was subject to violent and disruptive changes.
+
+
+3
+
+To an intelligent European coming to maturity on the threshold of the
+sixteenth century, the world must have seemed in a state of crisis
+and unrest comparable only to that which it had already gone through
+when the power of ancient Rome in the fifth century broke before the
+combined assaults of the barbarians. We, looking back on that age from
+the standpoint of our equally perplexing modern problems, regard that
+time as the culmination of the Renaissance; but to those who lived
+in it (if we except a few classical humanists and scholars) it must
+have appeared as if the end of the world, expected for many centuries,
+was at last at hand. The Middle Ages had passed away, with none of
+their hopes realised, or aims achieved. Not only had Christianity
+failed in wresting the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the infidel,
+but the infidel himself, in the person of the Turk, had succeeded in
+overthrowing the last shadowy power of the Eastern Roman Empire, had
+made himself master of Constantinople, and was now threatening Europe.
+The trade route with the East that had upheld the glory of Genoa and
+Venice was cut off by Turkish galleys; the boundaries of Europe stopped
+at the littoral of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. The old dream of
+the Middle Ages, which Dante had been the last to express, of a unified
+Holy Roman Empire, sanctified by the blessing of the Vicar of Christ,
+to take the place of the warring nationalities which the ancient
+Pagan Empire had left behind as wrecks in its wake, had now at last
+completely disappeared. France had become a powerful nationality, so
+powerful as to be able to invade Italy and dictate terms to the Church.
+The German Empire, always at war with its great feudal electors, was
+practically bankrupt. England, practical, hard-headed and inclined to
+heresy, had but recently settled a long feud between the rival houses
+of York and Lancaster, and was rapidly reviving in power under the sway
+of the shrewd Tudors. The only power that was not either indifferent or
+hostile to the claims of the mediæval faith was that of Spain, and that
+lay behind the barrier of the Pyrenees, and was further isolated by
+having to struggle with its own domestic Moorish problem.
+
+Moreover, along with the dream of the Holy Roman Empire, the opposite
+dream of making the Pope himself the universal ruler of Europe, had
+utterly vanished. The ambitious nobles of Italy were engaged in buying
+and selling the most exalted of all Christian offices, with the avowed
+aim of making themselves masters over the peninsula. At the present
+moment, the Borgia family, by means of wholesale bribery, violence, and
+outrage had seized upon the sacred office. One unyielding Dominican,
+Savonarola, had condemned them to the utmost from the very centre of
+Florence, but he had been silenced. Everywhere the attitude of mind
+that had been fundamental to the Middle Ages, that this world was but
+an anteroom and preparation for something far more important, eternal
+bliss or eternal damnation, was fading away. God had given the world to
+men; it was for them to enjoy it.
+
+Meantime, an enormous rift was about to appear on the face of European
+Christianity itself. The whole structure of the Christian faith whose
+foundations, soaked in the blood of martyrs, lay underneath the debris
+of the Roman Empire itself, and whose mighty walls had been guided
+upward by the great monastic effort of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh
+centuries; this whole structure which had burst forth into springing
+magnificence of vaults and pinnacles under the great popular Gothic
+awakening of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, now
+displayed a tiny rift at the summit. Within fifty years from the
+coming of the sixteenth century, everything lay in ruin. In the north
+the altars were stripped, the monasteries despoiled or destroyed, the
+vernacular psalms and the Bible took the place of the liturgy. In the
+south, the basilica of St. Peter, the most sacred shrine of mediæval
+Christianity itself, fell, to be replaced by a pompous shrine dedicated
+to the temporal splendour of that papacy that could no longer command
+obedience over half of Europe. The sombre prophecies of the Apocalypse
+seemed about to be fulfilled. The “abomination of desolation” stood in
+the holy place; or rather, there was no more a holy place that was not
+already become an abomination of desolation. Thanks to the invention
+of printing, the wary ambition of pushful princes, and the steady
+uprise of the merchant-classes to positions of rank and power, Mammon
+was gaining more adherents every day in his long battle with God.
+Savonarola had already called in question the authority of the Pope, an
+example which innumerable Protestants were soon to follow.
+
+Into this tortured, desperate, final scene of the mediæval world,
+in which the power that had directed the Middle Ages, the power of
+mystic, legendary Christianity was seeking fanatically for destruction
+in the embrace of death, while a newer more terrible Mars and Venus
+uprose from the past to dispute about the new-born Renaissance,
+there suddenly came the rumour of two tiny and inconspicuous events
+somewhere in the unknown territory that lay beyond the boundaries of
+men’s maps and minds. Three ships guided by an obscure Genoese pilot
+and a shrewd Spanish navigator, had gone out into the Atlantic to look
+for an island called Antillia which was rumored to exist somewhere
+westward of the Canaries; two of them had returned, having apparently
+not discovered this island, but with the knowledge of having sailed
+far beyond, stumbling apparently upon the further Indies, which no one
+had seen or heard of since Marco Polo had been there far back in the
+thirteenth century. And twenty years earlier, in 1472, an embassy from
+Ivan III, the quasi-independent ruler of a territory called Muscovy
+which lay somewhere beyond the forests and swamps of Poland, and about
+which nobody knew anything except that it was presumably of the Greek
+Orthodox faith, but had paid tribute to Tartar infidels for untold
+centuries, suddenly turned up in Rome and demanded the hand of Zoë,
+niece of the last Christian ruler of Constantinople, from the Pope,
+who had taken her under his protection. At this time the council of
+Florence was sitting, debating whether the Eastern and the Western
+Churches could not be re-united in view of the fact that the Turk had
+taken Constantinople and was threatening Europe itself. It was naïvely
+supposed that to marry Zoë to this Eastern schismatic would further
+this object. So Zoë was sent on her long journey to Moscow, with a
+Latin prelate, Cardinal Antonio, for a guide, to discuss the question
+of the re-union of the Churches. In the upshot, Zoë married Ivan,
+but there was no re-union, and Cardinal Antonio returned to Italy in
+discomfiture. From these two insignificant events--both, be it noted,
+engineered and pushed forward by Italians--we chart the entire course
+of what is known as modern world-history.
+
+
+4
+
+The difference between ancient, mediæval, and modern history is only
+a difference of degree, not of kind. Human beings, and what is still
+more, human experiences, have been essentially the same in all ages;
+and it is not the least of our romantic errors of adolescence to
+think of the Greeks or the Elizabethans as beings belonging to an
+entirely different species from the men we every day see about us.
+The differences between one type of man and another are everywhere
+differences in spiritual perception; and this has been always a
+question of a few exceptionally favoured individuals as against a
+commonplace and indistinguishable mob. It must be admitted, however,
+that Christianity did much to heighten the spiritual perception even
+of the multitude; historically Christianity enlarged the bonds of
+the spiritual by taking in more of the actual. Before Christianity,
+the gods were terrible powers to be placated, and human life had no
+relation to their life. The gift Christianity gave to the world was
+a dim and vague, but vast, notion that the roots of the physical
+and the spiritual lay closely together, insofar as God had already
+become Man for man’s sake. This perception, that perfection lay in
+and through Christ, culminated in the great spiritual climax of the
+Christian drama, the thirteenth century. After that period there was
+rapid and sure decline. There was not again to be the birth of another
+saviour through a Virgin, nor did the figure that the cathedrals had
+dimly foreseen as standing before their altars, the figure of the
+king-bishop, tiaraed with the three crowns of earth, purgatory, and
+heaven, and belted with the sword of justice, take shape in actual
+flesh. Instead of the bells and incense that were to usher in the Holy
+Grail procession, there arose the charnel-vault order of corruption,
+and the clank of bones beneath the armour of the knight; instead of
+the bridal song of the Lamb and the Church, Gothic arches resounded
+with the mocking psalmody of the _Dies Irae_ and the Dance of Death.
+Slowly but with irresistible power, men turned away from the Uprisen
+Judge that they had fancied would again come to judge the World; and
+in Italy, parent of civilizations, the Popes themselves began with the
+aid of Mars and Venus to dream of refounding Rome. In the jewelled
+crucifix that hung about the neck of Alexander VI was set an antique
+cameo, representing a nude Venus. Thus the old gods returned, not to
+be worshipped as material, but as spiritual powers. A few men here and
+there babbled strange news of new-found Indies, and remote Muscovy.
+These were perhaps the terrestrial paradise; the new heaven and earth
+proclaimed by the Evangelist.
+
+If we turn from the scene of the sixteenth century to the middle of
+the eighteenth, we find that the entire structure of Christian Europe
+is changed. The rift that was to shatter the whole work of the Middle
+Ages has developed, leaving Europe half Catholic, half Protestant. In
+each case, a full century of fanaticism has burned through, leaving
+rationalistic aches, tolerant scepticisms, polite lip-service to
+formula, or naked barbarism and desperation. The power of Ancient Rome
+has not been reborn in the person of the Pope; he may be pontifex, but
+not beyond the states of the Church itself. The true ruler of European
+mankind is now a periwigged, middle-aged Pallas, who has set aside her
+shield and helmet and is busy attempting chemical experiments, doing
+the grand tour, building baroque churches, and writing fugues and
+chamber-music. Meanwhile beyond the borders of Europe are barbarians
+with other gods: to the East the incalculable force of great Muscovy,
+sated with the blood of Sweden and Poland; to the West, the equally
+incalculable wilderness of the American Continent swallowing up hosts
+of migrating English, French and Spaniards. In them men will inevitably
+find again the spiritual symbols transformed and enlarged, whose
+ancient manifestations still sleep underground in the valley of the
+Nile and the Tigris. In them will re-awaken to rule over the earth the
+spiritual flame of Egypt and Assyria.
+
+Thus at the outset of our enterprise, to attach to our side all those
+who are willing to use their imaginations in the study of man, and to
+frighten away those who have no imagination and no need to use it for
+anything, we inevitably set a myth to take the place of human history.
+And indeed, could we in any case do better? What are the Greeks to
+us to-day but the myths of Prometheus, of the warfare between the
+Olympians and the Titans, of the Argonauts, and the fatal struggle
+around Troy? All the meaning of Hellas--perhaps the whole course of
+Hellenic history--is contained in these stories. What are the Romans
+but the story of the Sabine Women, of the geese of the Capitol, of the
+death of Regulus, of Horatius at the bridge? What is India but the
+great chaotic conflict between gods and men set out in the Ramayana?
+History is not alone the parroting of meaningless dates and facts, a
+mere branch of ethnology or economics, or the study of picturesque and
+powerful personalities. When all these are assimilated and done with,
+history emerges as a series of symbols each infused with profound
+spiritual meaning. It is through myth alone that man finds guidance in
+his weary march through the vale of despair and the heights of glory.
+Some day someone will write the great myth of our modern world: the
+story of man striving to tame the machine he has invented: some day
+there may even be recorded the myth of the entire planet we inhabit.
+Let it, like the myth we are about to spin, find rest at last in the
+archives of some superhuman and undying memory.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+
+The influence of geographical situation and of climate on human culture
+is a subject so vast and profound that only the combined industry and
+genius of a Humboldt or an Elie Reclus could possibly ever exhaust
+it. And even a perception of the fact that man everywhere responds
+to his environment, reflects his environment, adapts himself to and,
+in the end, identifies himself completely with his environment, does
+not account for all the profound racial differences between man and
+man. Setting these differences apart, we may nevertheless say that all
+human cultures derive from five recognizable types: river culture,
+largely pacific and agricultural; desert culture, largely nomadic and
+warlike; mountain culture, largely fluctuating between mysticism and
+realism, alternately conservative and adventurous; tropical-swamp
+culture, largely theocratic, conservative and defensive; and marine
+culture, largely democratic, inventive and adaptable. The best example
+of the first class is ancient China; of the second, the Persians or
+the Arabs; of the third, the Greeks, Etruscans and early Romans; of
+the fourth, the Hindus, Cambodians, Aztecs and Mayas; of the fifth the
+Cretans, Phœnicians and English.
+
+A glance at the map will show that the nature of the North American
+continent, as of Russia, was such as to insure that any culture either
+country achieved was destined to be largely of the river type. The
+central portion of the United States is occupied by the immense river
+system of the Mississippi and its tributaries. This system flows
+through immense plains, and its lower reaches are consequently subject
+to frequent and damaging floods, forming an immense delta of two
+hundred and fifty miles of intensely fertile black soil. To eastward
+the region of the Appalachians and of the Blue Ridge is heavily
+forested and of much poorer soil, but beyond these again, in the
+Atlantic seaboard, is a series of rivers, running generally southward
+and eastward, with good harbours at their mouths, and generally highly
+fertile in their lower reaches, though less subject to floods. The
+interior of the country, it is true, was not settled until after the
+winning of independence at the close of the eighteenth century; but
+the whole political development of the Colonies was an advance towards
+the type of government that was most suitable to the environment
+later found and assimilated in the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and
+Missouri regions: a preponderantly agricultural community, intensely
+suspicious of outside interference, deeply rooted in family sentiment
+and respect for the soil, narrowly conservative in outlook and largely
+ruled by primitive moral precept. Westward of the Mississippi stretches
+the open prairie region tending to break down this life into the more
+undeveloped forms of pure nomadism.
+
+The purest example of such a culture is, as has already been pointed
+out, the civilization of China. If we examine the moral and religious
+basis of ancient Chinese life, we find that everything is made to
+centre about the perpetuation of family life, and the maintenance of
+the fertility of the soil. All outward forms, from the ritual spring
+ploughing that the Emperor himself performed annually at the Temple
+of Agriculture in Pekin, to the precepts of Confucius, derive from
+the one prevailing desire to ensure an unchanging round of harvests
+with the least disturbance of outward conditions. Such a people
+is not predominantly warlike, and is better for defence than for
+conquest. They are better qualified to display the firm qualities,
+great endurance, immense solidarity, and a uniformity of style, than
+the feats of daring and mental adaptability displayed by mountain and
+marine peoples. In contrast with desert or tropical-swamp peoples,
+their mythology is undeveloped, their religious ardour halts at the
+frontiers of an ethical positivism.
+
+In contrast with the map of North America, the map of Russia shows
+even more clearly the characteristics of a featureless forest, an
+unmarked plain. Yet a glance at this map will show that here too,
+the development of culture has depended on the existence of great
+river systems. The Volga with its tributaries, the Oka, the Dnieper,
+the Western Dvina all have their headwaters within a few miles of
+each other, and all radiate from a common centre, where the black
+soil belt of central Russia, intensely favourable to agriculture,
+meets the forest belt of the north. The position of these rivers, and
+the direction in which they flowed, fixed inevitably the centre of
+the Ancient Russian commonwealth. The Volga and the Oka communicate
+with the Caspian; the Dnieper and its eastward neighbour, the Don,
+with the Black Sea; the Dvina, and its tributaries, the Lovat and
+the Volckov, flow into the Baltic. In the early Middle Ages this
+became naturally the great trade route between Persia and the Eastern
+Roman Empire, and the Hansa settlements, as well as the Scandinavian
+peoples. Its Scandinavian Viking origin is shown by the Varangian
+establishment of Kiev as the capital, back in the ninth century, with
+Novgorod and Smolensk as outlying centres; unfortunately the political
+unity that the converted Viking invaders were able to impose upon
+the timid, conservative, and heathen Slavonic masses, was dependent
+upon their ability to wage incessant war upon swarms of barbarians
+from farther east. From the Pechenegs in 862, down to the Polovtsy
+in 1238, the ancient Russian culture lay at the mercy of perpetual
+Tartar invasion from the desert plains of Central Asia: Kiev finally
+fell in 1238, and the insignificant independent principality of Moscow
+more northward only survived by its comparative difficulty of access
+and by the payment of a great tribute to the Tartar Khans. The first
+ruler of Muscovy who began to win out in the long struggle with the
+Tartars, a struggle which left the Russian people profoundly modified
+ethnologically in the direction of a Mongolian type, was precisely Ivan
+III, whom we have already seen sending to Rome to obtain the hand of
+the niece of the last Eastern Emperor; with his reign we begin Modern
+Russia which profoundly differs from, though it is the resultant of
+the physical and racial forces that shaped mediæval Russia. Here
+too we have a settled agricultural people, clinging to great river
+systems, apprehensive of foreign invasion, intensely conservative,
+strongly patriarchal, and primitively religious. The chief difference
+between these people and the first Anglo-Saxon settlers of America
+was psychological. In the case of the American colonies, social
+and political unity depended on each individual’s attitude to his
+neighbour; in the case of Russia, threatened on all sides with
+invasion, it depended on the purely military and arbitrary power
+exercised by a personal sovereign, the prince of Moscow.
+
+
+2
+
+The English-speaking colonies of America are generally supposed to
+have asserted their complete independence in 1776 and to have won it
+in 1783, when the fact is that they were completely independent almost
+from the beginning. In theory and in theory only, they were begun as
+an extension of royal property to the new-found continent. The Tudor
+sovereigns were as highly imbued with the idea of the divine right of
+kings as any other European sovereign of the time; their ideas on this
+subject were not different from the ideas of their enemy, Philip II
+of Spain. It will be remembered that the Spanish had pushed forward
+their conquests and settlements on the principle that the money raised
+to undertake them should be provided by the adventurers themselves;
+except in the case of Columbus, the crown itself was not financially
+interested in the exploits of the conquistadores of Mexico or Peru. But
+once the country was won, one-fifth of the revenue had to go to the
+crown. The Tudor plan was not very different. King James merely granted
+permission to explore and settle to the Virginia Company, which itself
+raised the funds; how much of the profits of the enterprise would
+return to him was left open. The profit was expected to accrue from the
+discovery of gold mines, or the exploration of a new trade route to the
+East Indies.
+
+The experience of the Virginia Company is particularly interesting in
+this connection. After five years of struggle and the expenditure of a
+great deal of money, it was found that the country contained nothing
+of value as regards mines, and could only be a source of revenue if
+developed agriculturally. Thereupon in 1612, King James gave way and
+permitted each settler henceforward to take out an assignment of land.
+The result was that the Virginia Company henceforward would at last be
+able to assimilate profits, not on the basis of prospective mineral
+discovery, but on the basis of exchange of commodities between the
+old world and the new. But in order to keep the colony prosperous, it
+was necessary to put its government in the hands of those who best
+understood and were able to cope with the novel conditions. Therefore
+some measure of self-government was permitted. Apart from the royal
+governor and six councillors appointed by the Company, a popular
+assembly was called together composed of two representatives elected by
+each town, hundred, or plantation. Laws passed by this assembly could
+be vetoed in England; but such a veto on the part of the King would
+lead to the passive but unalterable resistance which is well known to
+all students of early agricultural communities. For a few years after
+1612, King James did not dare to interfere, and the Virginia Company
+prospered by raising tobacco. Then, thanks to the whispers of sedition
+within the colony that were carried to his ears, as well as the
+protests of the Spanish Ambassador, who became more and more annoyed
+at the English establishing themselves in nominally Spanish territory,
+James decided to interfere. In 1624 he dissolved the Virginia Company,
+and the colony again became crown property. But he died the next year,
+without interfering with the popular assembly, which continued under
+his successor. Had this popular assembly not existed, Virginia would
+have probably become de-populated. The same type of popular assembly
+was formed by the other colonies, after the example of Virginia, and
+the history of the thirteen colonies up to the time of the Revolution
+is a story of the struggles between the colonists themselves and
+their royal governors; a struggle which culminated only with complete
+independence.
+
+The American colonies were not able to live and grow at all without
+this local self-government on the democratic model, to build roads, put
+up meeting-houses, make schools, fight the Indians, and impose tariffs
+and taxes on their own products. It will be remembered that in 1623,
+just before attempting to crush the Virginia Company altogether, King
+James had been persuaded, after a long struggle with popular opinion,
+to grant a monopoly on all tobacco brought to England to the Virginia
+settlers. This monopoly, long agitated for, and supported by the
+whole force of the powerful popular faction in the Virginia Company
+itself, which had already sunk some two hundred thousand pounds in the
+development of the new country, led to extravagant hopes on the part
+of the London merchants who had supported the Virginia enterprise from
+the beginning, of obtaining a great return from their investment. The
+corresponding downfall of the company, and the reassertion of royal
+authority, worked as a rapid cause of disillusionment with the power of
+the crown, and largely contributed to the popular revolution against
+the Stuarts which broke out in 1640.
+
+The New England colonies, even more than Virginia, began as settlements
+which had obtained nothing but a tacit permission to leave the country
+from the English crown. Massachusetts, the first of them, owed its
+being to the activities of certain English separatists, who finding
+no religious liberty in England itself, first went to Holland, and
+after six years, finally decided to cross the ocean to a spot where
+they would be entirely free from outside interference. To these
+Plymouth settlers, there were added in 1630 a great body of Puritans
+who nominally were members of the Church of England but in reality
+in complete revolt against Archbishop Laud, whose avowed aim was the
+destruction of the Low-Church party. The refusal of these numerically
+preponderant settlers to admit anyone to citizenship except members of
+their own particular communion led to the settlement, by the dissenting
+elements, of Rhode Island, and to the establishment of Connecticut,
+neither of which had any support from the English Crown and both of
+which were rooted in popular government. Meantime between these and
+the colonies of Virginia and Maryland (which again had been formed by
+religious refugees on a basis of tolerance) to the south, stood New
+Amsterdam, which the Dutch had organised on the old feudal system of
+making each great landholder responsible for the life and death of
+his tenants. The Dutch experiment was a painful failure and became
+assimilated into the other English settlements after 1664.
+
+Thus, the development of the American seaboard colonies under English
+auspices led to the creation of a number of practically independent
+republics, differing widely in their views as to the relation between
+politics and religion, owning a nominal sovereignty to the English
+Crown, but in reality highly suspicious and intolerant of outside
+interference, determined to support themselves with as little help from
+others as possible and altogether transforming themselves from being
+mere frontier trading posts to self-supporting but rival commonwealths.
+They were separated from each other by the fact that they had been
+originally planted near the mouths of navigable bays and rivers: the
+Chesapeake, the Delaware, the Hudson, the Charles. The intervening
+territory was still the no-man’s land of the Indian. The fact that the
+Indian had to be pushed off the land before it could be settled, and
+the fact that the Indian always resisted, gave the American colonies
+their only solidarity. This is shown by the New England Confederation
+of 1643 which came into being as a result of the Pequot War, and
+the general fear of a league of Indians to drive out the whites. It
+comprised the settlements of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and
+New Haven.
+
+The conditions in the interior were such as to make it certain that
+only the English idea of gradually pushing the Indians westward by
+means of a fringe of settlements could in any way prevail. The
+Spaniards in the south and southwest had deliberately come into the
+country only in order to exploit it; their interest was solely in
+finding El Dorado, and only a few devoted missionaries among them
+took any interest in the conditions of the Indian tribes, or tried
+to promote agricultural settlement. The fact that the Spanish cared
+nothing for anything but ostentation and conquest gave a superficial
+veneer of European civilization to their chief centres of settlement,
+but left the wilderness practically untouched between them. In fact,
+the Spanish attitude of complete exploitation helped in the long run
+the Indian cause, because the Spanish conquerors did not scruple
+to mingle their blood with that of the Indian captives with the
+result that a mixed race soon uprose, largely Indian in outlook, and
+ferociously independent, which was destined later to give endless
+trouble to the Spaniards themselves as to the people of the United
+States. And as the white race pushed westward, and the evidences
+of mineral wealth increased, while the prospective returns from
+agriculture correspondingly diminished, something of the Spanish
+attitude was naturally assimilated by the Anglo-Saxon pioneer stock,
+with the result that the Spanish philosophy of reckless daring and
+lazy indifference became the basis of the cowboy and “bad man”
+type of the far West. The French had scarcely done better; except
+for a few settlements of fisherfolk in Canada, they had contented
+themselves with building a chain of trading posts about the Great
+Lakes and the chief tributaries of the Mississippi, and had become
+a breed of trappers and fur-traders. They too had no race prejudice
+against intermingling their blood with the Indians. Thus, the idea of
+the English invaders to conquer by means of complete settlement and
+assimilation of the land to the forms of English culture was inevitably
+the only path by which the land could become permanently what is known
+in America as “a white man’s country”; but even in their case, as it
+happened, something of the Indian outlook and social system inevitably
+entered and modified the English colonial forms of life. This was
+due to religious as well as economic differences. The middle-class,
+mercantile, dissenting fanaticism of New England instinctively despised
+the planter aristocracy, strongly episcopalian and conservative, of
+Virginia and the Carolinas; the planter aristocracy equally hated the
+pioneer squatter type that developed in the valleys beyond the Blue
+Ridge; and this division of sentiment between the various sections of
+the community was destined to run like a discordant thread throughout
+the warp and woof of all later American life. It corresponded
+roughly to the long-standing tribal antagonisms of the dispossessed
+Indian tribes. Nor was this all. The investigations of American
+anthropologists have conclusively shown that the children of European
+immigrants, born in America, tend to take Indian characteristics, a
+taller stature and a more powerful physical development than their
+parents. Most notably is this the case in the change of head form. The
+Indian head with its high cheek-bones, heavy jaw, sloping forehead, and
+great development of the back and base of the skull, recurs, according
+to Professor Franz Boas, even in the children of immigrants who have
+only lived for a few months in America. So great is the influence of
+climate, and perhaps also of diet, upon the naturally conservative,
+slow-changing Anglo-Saxon. Moreover in the settling of America, the
+Celtic side of the English genius strongly manifested itself; and a
+considerable portion of the population, in the Southern colonies at
+least, were Celtic in type and in sympathy. The Germanic tradition of
+the town-meeting and the local assembly was curiously crossed with the
+Scots-Irish tradition of the family feud and the local uprising.
+
+We have now to compare this growth of the American settlements with
+the growth of the Egyptian social system, as set out in our first
+chapter. In the loose confederation of the geographically separate
+colonies, we have a parallel to the division of the Egyptian territory
+into separate nomes, under the sway of different tribes. In the
+rivalry between Upper and Lower Egypt, we have a rivalry akin to the
+rivalry between the Northern and the Southern colonies. In the shrewd
+practical pragmatic realism of the American frontiersmen, we have
+something that recalls the lack of space-feeling, the pastoral and
+agricultural conventions that inform Egyptian art. Even in the respect
+that the American colonies were to show for the royal charter, the
+legal document, the written word, we have much that recalls to mind
+the superstitious respect with which all the Egyptians regarded their
+hieroglyphic writing. Only a Pharaoh is needed to complete the picture,
+but the American colonies could not produce a Pharaoh, nor a priestly
+cult to support him; because instead of the single valley of the Nile,
+they were pushing up twenty great rivers; instead of a single dominant
+religion, they had a dozen different ones to choose from.
+
+
+3
+
+As we have already seen, Ivan III, who became the independent ruler
+of Moscow in 1462, and in 1472 married Zoë (who later took the name
+of Sophia), the niece of the last Christian ruler of Constantinople,
+was the first sovereign of Russia whose power became so important as
+to make some impression on the course of Western European History. He
+was the first to take the title of Sovereign of All Russia, and Czar,
+and his reign lasting down to 1505 is the record of his struggle to
+make that title good. In order to do so, he first had to deal with
+the Golden Horde of the heathen Tartars, encamped for three centuries
+on the lower Volga; but this power, which had continually kept Russia
+in subjection, was now breaking up of itself, thanks to internal
+dissensions about succession with the Tartars of the Crimea. Ivan’s
+chief enemies lay in fact to the westward, in the great military and
+feudal powers of Poland and Lithuania.
+
+These two powers had acted largely together ever since 1386. In each
+case the country was ruled by an independent sovereign, supported by
+great feudal nobles. These nobles, whether as bishops, barons whose
+castles commanded the trade-routes, landowners commanding the loyalty
+of hundreds of serfs, were one and all jealous of any independent
+action on the part of the king. And inasmuch as the sovereign in each
+country depended entirely on their support in the case of war, and
+the Tartar menace no less affected the security of Lithuania and of
+Poland than that of Russia, the stability of both countries depended
+on the continued loyalty and bravery, and the lack of inner causes of
+friction, among the gentry themselves. This gentry, the _szlachta_,
+was world-famous for its pride and fighting spirit. During the
+centuries that followed the downfall of the old principality of Kiev
+in 1226, the Lithuanian knights, backed by Poland, had absorbed the
+richest and most fertile portion of Russia, the plain of the Dnieper,
+including Smolensk and Kiev itself. To the north lay two independent
+mercantile commonwealths, important centres of trade between the Urals
+to eastward, and the Hansa towns of the Baltic to westward: Novgorod
+and Pskov. These were ruled by their own town councils of nobles, or
+boyars; they were more disposed to be friendly to Poland or Lithuania
+than to Moscow. Against them no less than these two usurping powers,
+Ivan III and his successor Basil III who died in 1533, had to make
+war, in order to recover that which he regarded as his lost patrimony:
+Russia itself.
+
+The process that these princes inaugurated was completed by the
+accession to the throne of Ivan III’s grandson in 1533, the most
+extraordinary and tragic of all Russian rulers, known to later history
+as Ivan the Terrible. During his long reign of forty-nine years the
+whole system of complete autocratic government, resting ultimately on
+the will of the Czar alone, that ruled Russia outwardly and inwardly
+down to the advent of the Bolsheviks to power in 1917, came into
+existence. When he came to the throne, his predecessors had already won
+back the Dnieper territory as far as Smolensk from Lithuania, but this
+was not enough. If the principality of Moscow, which now stretched from
+the Black Sea to the shores of the Gulf of Finland, and to the Urals,
+was to develop into a power capable of imposing its will on Europe,
+it must have access to the Baltic. The mineral wealth of the Urals,
+the sturgeon from the lower Volga, the furs and hides of the forest
+belt, were in as great demand now by Sweden and the Hansa Confederacy
+as the ancient products of Constantinople and the Levant that had
+penetrated through the same territory in the Middle Ages had been.
+Unfortunately the outlet to the Baltic lay through Livonia which was
+Polish territory; and Poland and the Hansa knights, their allies, were
+not disposed to let the Moscow Czars have sole control over this trade
+route. Under Ivan IV, the attention of Muscovy turned from Lithuania to
+Poland, and later to Sweden, which held Esthonia, the other outlet to
+the Baltic, and a struggle ensued which went on till 1582, ending in a
+complete check to the ambitions of the Moscow rulers. The outlet to the
+Baltic Sea and accordingly to a position where Russia could treat with
+the powers of Europe, as an independent equal, was not to be granted
+for a full century. Meantime, during this same reign, the Crimean
+Tartars who had succeeded the Golden Horde, and who had been friendly
+enough to support Ivan IV’s predecessor in his Lithuanian wars, became
+again hostile and turned to close alliance with the dreaded Turks who
+had effectively closed the Black Sea outlet. As late as 1574, Moscow
+itself was raided and burned by a force of 120,000, who took away over
+a hundred thousand captives. Although the Muscovy Czars now controlled
+the whole resources of the country from the frontier of Siberia to the
+Polish plain, they were powerless until by establishing sea-contact
+with Europe, they could obtain in exchange for their fish, furs and
+minerals, weapons, munitions, and an army on the European model to
+combat their enemies to the south and east.
+
+This necessity for finding an outlet to the sea controlled all
+of Russia’s later historical policy, as the necessity of warding
+off interference from overseas controlled the whole policy of the
+dawning American colonies. The necessity in each case was dictated
+by geographical situation, no less than by sociological conditions.
+A glance at the map will show that Russia is, strictly speaking, a
+country without a coastline, whose three outlets to the Ocean, through
+the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the White Sea, lie always at the mercy
+either of hostile powers or of the elements. On the other hand, America
+lies completely open on the Atlantic seaboard. There is entry through
+a score of open rivers and bays, and the ocean-path being the way by
+which settlement was made and maintained, it is easy to see how much
+the colonists (who were in continual conflict with the English crown
+over their scarcely won and jealously guarded liberties) longed to be
+able to close the way of access behind them; or only keep it open for
+those who would agree with their semi-agricultural, semi-nomad spirit
+of independence. But if we turn from this picture to the map of Russia,
+it is equally easy to see how, if the whole power of Muscovy was not
+to fall apart, and the country to revert to being in part a conquest
+of hostile Poland, in part a mere nomad dependency of Tartary, it was
+necessary to keep a sea-route open for the marketing of Muscovy’s
+products, and also necessary to enlist all the European aid possible
+in improving the general backwardness of the country. So as early as
+1547 we find Ivan the Terrible sending the Saxon Schlitte as emissary
+to Europe to obtain artisans and scholars; many of the churches of
+Moscow itself were the work of Italian architects; and the history of
+Ivan’s later negotiations with England for a commercial treaty (which
+as he said “weighed heavier on him than tribute”) and even for a bride,
+in the person of one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour, is well known.
+In order to maintain an insecure position between the two dangers of
+the Tartar Caspian and the Teutonic Baltic, the autocratic ruler of
+Muscovy had to call in the aid of Western Europe--and with it, the
+subversive radicalism that Western Europe was to later develop. In
+order to maintain their own insecure position between the danger of an
+Indian Confederation to westward, and the danger of Crown interference
+from overseas, the independently spirited colonists had to sink their
+own radical differences of outlook and religion and become artificially
+centralised about the most powerful classes in the community which
+were the merchants and landowners. Thus the two countries, so much
+akin in climate and physical features, and even in the highly mixed
+nomad population that inhabited them--not to mention the perhaps common
+Mongolian parentage of the underlying Tartar and Indian--early took the
+path of polar opposition in temperament. The one became more and more
+autocratic and despotic as the other became more and more democratic
+and egalitarian. In the one, the outlying districts were always
+swayed by a centralised power; but as this power depended on military
+conquest, loot and tribute for its maintenance, it was in continual
+danger of collapse. In the other, the separate colonies formed a loose
+confederation that would be likely to collapse of itself from without
+if it could not find a centre.
+
+Here in this opposition of social organisation we find what in
+Russia chiefly recalls Ancient Babylonia. Older than Egypt--for
+recent archæological researches into the Sumerian civilisation
+have left no doubt on that point--Babylonia was at first ruled by
+independent city-dynasties, as was Russia during the Varangian period.
+It only achieved unity under the dominance of a single city, which
+geographically stood at its centre, and whose local god-cult was made,
+probably under military pressure, the official state religion. Here we
+have a parallel to the position of Moscow and to the development of the
+official Russian church under Ivan the Terrible. This unity could only
+be maintained so long as the central sovereign was a man of powerful
+and strong personality: a Hammurabi or a Sargon. This condition also
+obtained in Russia, as anyone can see by consulting the next chapter
+of this book. The only thing in short lacking to this parallel is that
+Babylonia-Assyria achieved its own symbolic mythology, a symbolic
+mythology of great importance to the development of the Hebrews, and
+consequently of Christianity; while early Muscovy, and the later
+Russian Empire, only borrowed the essential basis of theirs from the
+already formulated system of Eastern Christianity. But this failure of
+the central intelligence of the Slav to distinguish independently the
+immediate needs of his own temporal destiny from the limitless drift of
+eternity, is characteristic; its psychological implications run like a
+red thread throughout the entire course of later Russian history.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+
+The English-speaking American colonies developed in comparative peace
+and tranquillity, except for Indian wars on the frontier, internal
+religious quarrels, and difficulties with their own harvests down to
+the close of the Puritan Revolution in England and the accession of
+Charles II in 1660. During the whole reign of Charles I, and later
+under Cromwell, the internal difficulties of the English State were so
+great, that no further attempts were made to interfere with the gradual
+growth of the colonies, or to check the spread of self-government.
+During the same period, Russia passed through its first and most
+terrible internal crisis; a crisis always to be known later as “the
+time of troubles,” and which was destined to fix immutably the
+political foundations of the country as an independent state.
+
+The aim of Ivan the Terrible was, as we have seen, to throw off
+the grip that Poland and Sweden held on the Baltic; and to destroy
+the power of Lithuania, which still, in alliance with a band of
+freebooters, the Zaporogian Cossacks, held fast to the outlets of the
+Dnieper in the Black Sea. There was also danger from the Tartars of the
+Crimea, which must be reckoned with. Russia was therefore committed
+to war on three of four sides; only on the side of Siberia could
+Moscow’s sway be carried peacefully beyond the Urals. Ivan, as we have
+seen, was checked in his ambitions to free the shores of the Baltic,
+though he won notable victories in the Crimea, opening up the Caspian,
+and overrunning a great deal of Siberia. But his chief troubles were
+internal, and sprang from the feudal organization which had hitherto
+supported the Princes of Muscovy on their thrones.
+
+The chief powers, next to the Czar himself, were the great landowning
+nobles, the boyars. It was this class alone that could vote taxes,
+support campaigns with their serfs, send their sons to take part in
+the state service. It was this class that now began to behave as the
+corresponding class had done centuries before them in Western Europe.
+They more and more attempted to put a check upon the power that was
+falling into Ivan’s hands. The Czar of Muscovy had, unfortunately, no
+middle class or merchant class to fall back upon, and so was forced
+either to trust the boyars or no one. The example of Poland was always
+before Ivan’s eyes. That warlike and once powerful kingdom was
+continually sinking into anarchy and impotence, thanks to the greed and
+independence of its gentry. After every reign there had followed an
+interregnum, and the kingship was so shorn of power that it practically
+had none left except that of punishing criminals, and making war.
+Several of Ivan’s leading nobles, suspicious of his growing autocracy,
+were now tempted into leaning towards Poland; and many of the former
+independent cities, notably Novgorod, were going in the same way. The
+fruits of freedom were becoming tempting to the Russians now that they
+had lost them. In this situation Ivan struck, and struck hard with such
+effect that his reign was ever after remembered as a time of terror.
+He established a secret police, chosen and paid by him personally, who
+were sworn to support the Czar at the cost of their lives, and by this
+means, systematically destroyed all the boyars who showed signs of
+independence. Tortures, murders, spyings, assassinations were the order
+of the day. Even the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, venerated in
+Russia as no man, protested against the régime of terror that Ivan set
+up, but paid for his protest with his life.
+
+Unfortunately, Ivan’s system proved workable only so long as there
+was a strong and ruthlessly determined man at the head of affairs to
+control it. As he left no successor, the leading boyars at his death
+decided to offer the control of affairs to one of their number, Boris
+Godunov. Boris was undoubtedly as suspicious of their power as Ivan had
+been, but utterly unable to do without it, and so the country rapidly
+fell into a condition of internal revolt directed and engineered from
+Poland. During the period of utter anarchy that followed, Poland
+might have acquired complete control over Russian affairs, had it not
+been for internal jealousies among the boyars themselves, and for the
+attitude of the Orthodox Church, which obscurely sensed and supported
+the popular demand for a Russian Czar, born in Russia. After Polish
+forces had vainly besieged the Kremlin itself, after Swedish troops had
+been called in to restore order, after the country had been overrun by
+looting bands of Don Cossacks from one end to the other, in 1613 there
+came at last peace. The boyars sank their differences sufficiently
+to elect Michael Romanov to the throne, and the influence of Poland,
+always hated and loathed by the Russians, came to an end.
+
+During these years, and increasingly under the first years of the
+new Romanov dynasty, the chief social phenomenon in Russia was the
+growth of serfdom. Serfdom had always existed, undisturbed from the
+Middle Ages, on the estates of the great landowners. These estates
+were continually increasing, as Ivan himself followed the policy of
+making enormous grants of crown land and peasants to the gentry he
+favoured. But as the country expanded and pushed its way over the
+Urals to Siberia, and into the Crimea to the Caspian, it became common
+for serfs to seek relief from intolerable conditions and burdens by
+escaping eastwards into freedom. This process became chronic throughout
+“the time of troubles.” Instead of fighting for some of the numberless
+pretenders of the time, or waiting to be ravaged by the Cossacks, the
+serfs simply abandoned their estates and went off to the frontier.
+Every Czar during “the time of troubles” attempted to deal with this
+problem. Strong decrees forbade the transfer of serfs from any of the
+estates of the Church, the Crown, or the Service gentry. Still stronger
+decrees made flight a criminal offence to be punished by lashing and
+branding; at first five years were given as a time-limit during which
+runaways could be hunted out, then ten, finally in 1646 the time-limit
+was abolished, and any fugitive became an outlaw. Meantime the practice
+of selling peasants apart from the estate, simply went on despite the
+law against it, and had finally to be legalised in 1675. The peasant
+had no power of redress, being forbidden to bring any complaint against
+his master except that of state treason; the master could beat him,
+starve him, force him to work like a dog for the state taxes, which
+were continually increasing, and he must still submit. The process was
+not the same as slavery, but was clearly even more cruel in its effects
+than slavery. A bad crop, an epidemic, or an outbreak of trouble
+among the rebellious Cossacks of the Southeast frontier was enough to
+literally ruin thousands of peasants. And since the peasant could not
+fly without becoming an outlaw, the subsequent history of Russia down
+to the nineteenth century is punctuated with constant and perpetual
+serf rebellions and peasant risings.
+
+The Russian government system of degrading its own independent
+peasantry down to the level of chattel slaves, was closely paralleled
+by the gradual growth of a dependent slave class within the nominally
+free American colonies. Negro slaves were brought into the Virginia
+Colony as early as 1619. Without their aid it is probable that the
+great tobacco plantations could not have been run at a profit. But the
+rapid extension of territory which tobacco-planting entailed led to
+the first outbreak of revolutionary class war in America in 1676. The
+occasion was an outbreak of trouble with the Indians on the northern
+frontier, which by that time had reached the Potomac. A rising of the
+Susquehannahs led to a demand on the part of the colonists for an armed
+force to destroy the Indians. The Governor, Berkeley, refused and
+proposed to build forts. But the colonists under Nathaniel Bacon simply
+refused to obey; and this struggle soon became a conflict between the
+old conservative and royalist landowning gentry and the newly arrived
+poorer settlers of the frontier. It was quelled; but over-production
+of tobacco in the years that followed led to much burning of tobacco,
+and a gradual transformation of Virginia, the most English in spirit
+of all the colonies, into a revolutionary democracy. In the Carolinas,
+where rice and cotton became the chief crops, negro slavery flourished
+better; and with the spread of American territory into the Mississippi
+Valley, it became rooted as an institution, despite the fact that,
+theoretically, it was in conflict with the spirit of the people.
+
+The New England colonies on their part did not need any urging to
+become thoroughly rebellious to England’s authority. Charles II on
+his return to the throne in 1660 had already concluded to make them
+more amenable to the common usages of England. These usages comprised
+a respect for the established church, which had never been recognized
+in Massachusetts, and toleration for the Quakers (whom Charles
+personally favoured) who had been repeatedly fined, whipped, and made
+to suffer banishment at the hands of the sectaries of Boston. In
+1676 Charles’ agent, Randolph, recommended that the Massachusetts
+charter be declared forfeit. This was done in 1684, and all the New
+England charters followed suit. Charles died before he could show the
+full scope of his intentions, but under James II, the whole of the
+New England region, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine,
+Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut fell under the sway of a
+single governor, who was to rule without an assembly, with the aid
+of a council. A meeting house in Boston was to be set apart for the
+Church of England. The governor whom James appointed, Andros, met with
+opposition from the outset. The people refused to pay the taxes which
+their own old assemblies had voted, now that they were demanded by
+Andros acting alone. Rebellion was rampant throughout New England and
+in New York, where Andros governed through a deputy, Francis Nicholson.
+The rebellion came to a head when in November 1688 the government of
+James II fell in England itself, and was succeeded by that of William
+of Orange, in which the Parliament and the Whig party of the middle
+class finally triumphed over the old loyal aristocracy. From that time
+on, the American colonies were resolutely bent on self-government, and
+in New England and Virginia at least, on pushing back the Indians,
+and gaining control of the interior, in which the French were now
+hoping to build up a great overseas empire. Between them lay the
+recently founded colony of Pennsylvania which alone, through the
+Quakers, took up a pacific attitude towards England. Southwards there
+was more loyalty in the newly-founded Carolinas; but there was also a
+semi-feudal agrarian society that, sooner or later, would challenge the
+North.
+
+
+2
+
+We have now come to the year 1688, which marks a turning point in
+American Colonial History, with the advent of the Whig oligarchy
+founded by the mercantile class, and supported by William III and
+the new House of Orange. In the same year, or a little later, Peter
+the Great who had been nominally ruler of Russia since 1682, finally
+got the power in his hands, by crushing the Streltsy and exiling the
+Regent. Henceforth the two countries were to run their course of
+development side by side.
+
+It may be that the kind of reader whose mind is absorbed in statistics,
+will here object: “There is really no parallel between a few
+insignificant English-speaking colonies, planted on the far side of the
+Atlantic, and consisting in 1690 of only two hundred thousand souls,
+with a frontier running only fifty miles away from the seaboard, and
+the older, more populous, if largely unformed realm of Muscovy.” But
+history teaches that the mere size of a country has nothing whatever
+to do with its importance in the story of human development. If size
+and power to wage war were the sole criterion of importance, the Roman
+Empire might logically be considered as having given more to humanity
+at large than the whole of Ancient Greece and Judea. We know that
+this is not so. Ancient Greece and Judea were each in their way more
+spiritually important than Rome for the original ideas that they gave
+to the common stock; and already in America, as in Russia, an original
+idea was at work, which was profoundly to influence Europe. It is as
+creators of new values that these two countries should be studied and
+understood by the historian; not as economic, geographic, and political
+entities. If we consider them purely under the latter heading, they
+have been of somewhat less importance to Europe and the world at large,
+than the South American Republics.
+
+The years that had passed in Russia since 1613, when the Romanov
+line first came to power, up to Peter’s full accession in 1689, were
+important chiefly as witnessing a fresh consolidation of power about
+the representatives of this new dynasty. Poland, which had been the
+chief enemy, pursued its path of disintegration into its component
+atoms, under the feudal system still in vogue. It was nominally
+ruled by an assembly of its gentry, which had the power of electing
+the King. Unfortunately the decisions of this national assembly had
+to be unanimous. In case the national assembly disagreed with any one
+of the delegates from the innumerable local assemblies, the delegate
+in question could interpose a free veto on any decision taken. The
+minority had also the right of combining for the sake of resistance
+against the majority, with the result that the whole country was
+continually racked by threats of civil war. Poland in short had carried
+the principle of feudal rights out to their logical end in a complete
+states’ rights government. It was in the same unhappy position as the
+American colonies themselves, in regard to its own central government,
+but unlike the American colonies, it had no body of independent
+merchants to fall back upon as a rallying point in its internal
+struggle. It consisted of nothing but the great landed proprietors
+who had become separate military establishments, intensely jealous of
+each other, and the peasants, who were in a worse condition even than
+the Russian peasants, inasmuch as their masters had full control of
+their labour, could parade them for extra work, could force them to buy
+their necessaries from them, refused their rights to make contracts,
+fixed their wages, and had over them the absolute power of life and
+death. All export trade was in the hands of the gentry and all rights
+of sitting in the local and national assemblies. The only exceptions
+were the despised Jews who had become the money-lending class, and were
+equally hated of noblemen and peasants.
+
+Against decaying Poland, Russia had step by step built up a great
+empire. But the Empire was worthless to her, unless she could obtain
+foreign tools and arms, trade and an outlet to the sea. Under the
+Romanovs the first great efforts were made to acquire these essentials.
+Arms were imported, first from Sweden, later from Germany. A whole
+colony of Saxons, Dutchmen, and other foreign artisans were brought
+to Moscow and established in the so-called German Suburb. In 1647 a
+western system of drill was introduced and foreign instructors were
+brought in to train Russian regiments. Articles of western luxury made
+their appearance: clocks, velvets, stone houses to replace wooden
+huts, schools, and theatres which gave plays in foreign languages. But
+transport was still difficult, bad, and toilsome, much in the same
+condition as it was and remained on the American continent up to the
+advent of the Industrial Revolution in 1840. The only difference was
+that the American colonies lay far apart, settled in river valleys
+running down to the coast, and separated by great stretches of
+uninhabited country, whereas in Russia, Moscow was still at the centre
+of affairs. The result was that in America’s case, each colony lived
+largely on its own specific products. Cotton and rice came from the
+Carolinas, tobacco from Maryland and Virginia, iron from Pennsylvania
+and New Jersey, furs from New York, fish and pine timber from New
+England. Trade abroad was more important than trade at home. In Russia
+the whole volume of trade--Siberian minerals and furs, Volga grain,
+Baltic pine, Persian carpets,--rolled and ebbed through the single
+heart of Moscow and its outlying city-states, bound together not by
+roads but by rivers.
+
+In neither country was there anything resembling a system of education,
+or any independent development towards general culture. In this respect
+indeed the American colonies for all their inferiority in numbers and
+scale, were ahead of the Russians. The Old Church Slavonic, which was
+for conversational or writing purposes totally dead, was still used for
+all Church services. The ecclesiastics were almost the only learned
+class, and the attempts of the Romanovs to reform the Church books
+merely led to the violent schism of the “old believers” who came to
+hold Peter himself as the Antichrist. The educated classes aimed to
+speak German or French, and despised their own language. Schools there
+were none, and most education was to be sought abroad. In the American
+Colonies, on the other hand, the desire for native education manifested
+itself early. Harvard College was incorporated as early as 1650; in
+Virginia, William and Mary followed in 1693; Yale in 1701. True, this
+education in the colonies had for the most part been inaugurated
+for the sole purpose of training candidates for the ministry, and
+had a strongly Puritan and theological tinge; but most Americans at
+least acquired an ability to speak and write good English, and some
+smattering of Latin.
+
+Meantime, in both countries, the throes of establishment were safely
+over, and the first great expansion of effort rapidly followed. The
+expansion was an expansion of land surface and population in America;
+the latter increasing from two hundred thousand in 1690 to one and a
+half millions in 1760. In Russia it was an immense expansion of power,
+reacting on everyone from the Czar to the humblest serf. Peter himself
+was, after Ivan the Terrible, the first great military leader the
+Russians discovered, and he made good at last the claim to the Baltic,
+and therefore to the open sea, against the country that was now, under
+the successors of Gustavus Adolphus, mistress of that ocean: Sweden.
+Meantime, in America, the colonies were not allowed to settle back into
+complete enjoyment of their local liberties, won and ratified by King
+William’s Government. During the next sixty years (1690-1750) they were
+to take part in no less than four wars, each waged against the power
+that had succeeded in penetrating further than any other into the true
+heart of the American continent: France.
+
+From the time that Champlain in 1603 had come into the St. Lawrence
+Valley and had established Quebec as a trading post controlling
+the furs of this region, down to the settlement of the mouth of
+the Mississippi in 1718, and the later establishment of St. Louis
+and Natchez as trading posts controlling the traffic of the great
+interior valley, the French had been by far the most active power in
+the exploring of the interior of the American continent. In contrast
+with the English who had clung conservatively to the seaboard, they
+had boldly penetrated the very heart of the country; in contrast with
+the Spanish who had cared for nothing but the evidences of mineral
+wealth, and had ruthlessly warred upon and decimated the Indians, the
+French had attempted to live on terms of friendship with the native
+tribes, and had sought for the basis of their sway in the great wealth
+of fish, furs, and game the country possessed. The St. Lawrence, the
+Great Lakes, the Mississippi had each in turn felt the impress of the
+French effort, and had there been any fever of colonization to back the
+hardihood of the French explorers, traders, and Jesuit missionaries,
+it is possible that to-day the French language, rather than the English
+tongue, might be the common speech over most of the United States.
+Unfortunately there was little disposition on the part of the French
+people to migrate to the new world. A mere meagre handful, some three
+thousand in all, including the fisheries of Nova Scotia, held the
+whole of Canada in 1660; in 1750 about six thousand persons inhabited
+the whole Louisiana territory. The French could not be induced to
+come and settle in the newly discovered territory; their own local
+instincts of traditional loyalty to their provinces, and their own
+internal stability, which have made of France the most economically
+self-contained country in Europe, forbade. But the mere existence
+of French trading posts throughout the St. Lawrence and Great Lake
+territory, the vague but shadowy grip that France had established upon
+the whole hinterland of the American continent, frightened King William
+and his ministers, and coincided with their determination to break
+the contemporaneous claim of France to leadership in Europe itself.
+There resulted the wars called King William’s War, 1690-1697, Queen
+Anne’s War, 1701-1713, King George’s War, 1745-1748, and the great
+French and Indian War which beginning in 1753 ended with the complete
+annihilation of all of France’s dreams of foreign empire in the Treaty
+of Paris of February 1763.
+
+The outcome of all these struggles was to leave the English masters
+of the American continent from the Gulf of Mexico to Labrador and
+westward to the Mississippi, including in their domain the chain of
+the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence basin. France retired from the
+American continent, leaving Spain--who had vainly allied herself with
+her in order to stop the English from invading Florida,--to keep a
+shadowy tenure on the western bank of the Mississippi. During the last
+phases of this conflict, the first great series of wars, except for
+Indian campaigns, waged on the American continent, Pennsylvania which
+had hitherto been pacific under the Quaker ascendancy, ranked itself
+alongside of the other colonies in the effort to break the French grip
+upon the headwaters of the Ohio. This was accomplished thanks largely
+to the persistence of one man, Benjamin Franklin. Meantime, Virginia
+had shown that in a young officer of militia, George Washington, it
+possessed a notable Indian fighter. Each colony in turn had raised a
+local militia to carry on the struggle to its triumphant success. Thus
+England had at last, through the alliance with the newly-born kingdom
+of Prussia, triumphed over France, destroyed her fleet, and succeeded
+in shaking off her hold on India as well as America. But in order to do
+this England had created something that was to be of the utmost danger
+to her as time went on. She had created American solidarity. Exactly as
+Peter the Great by his personal effort, created Russian solidarity.
+
+
+3
+
+The subsequent history of both countries moves along the lines we have
+already been tracing. Peter the Great’s most important achievement was
+not so much his successful wars against Sweden and Turkey, nor his
+establishment, as “a window looking on Europe,” of a new capital on
+the shores of the Baltic, but the creation of a new state-bureaucracy
+to take the place of the dominance of the old nobility, a
+state-bureaucracy bound by self-interest to support his system, and
+which completed its task by assimilating the old Orthodox Russian
+Church (which had hitherto been independent, under its own Patriarch)
+into the state-machine, under the direct control of a Procurator of
+the Holy Synod. By this act, Peter destroyed the last possibility of a
+moral opposition to his rule, and fixed the system of autocracy beyond
+possibility of change as the only political form possible to Russia,
+subject solely to the chance that his successors might not possess
+the same force of character that he had displayed. Peter, in short,
+assimilated European statecraft, only to become more powerful than
+Europe. Meanwhile the American colonies, separated completely from
+each other by large tracts of waste country, and still more separated
+by differences of soil, religion, and social organization, found a
+rallying point in the feeling that the great western territory west of
+the Appalachians was to be theirs, and were, at the same time, provided
+by England with a force not only to conquer it but to assert their own
+independence, in the shape of a local militia. This force removed the
+last hope that England could hold the country by a display of military
+power, inasmuch as in New England, where the administrative centre was
+the township, the militia could be turned out at a moment’s notice.
+Henceforth the South, whose administrative unit was the county, dropped
+back in the race for the supreme headship of the American continent.
+England, by creating a New England, had sown the seeds of her own
+downfall.
+
+During the years that followed, while the great Virginia planters were
+living on enormous feudal estates, worked by small armies of slaves,
+and disregarding or despising the fringe of poorer squatters and
+settlers that to westward were already pushing across the Appalachians,
+the New England merchants and backwoodsmen were engaged in a struggle
+with England that went on for years before exploding in an outbreak
+of open revolution. The first phase of the struggle was over the
+Navigation Acts, whereby England after 1650 had striven to control
+the growing trade with the Colonies. By the most severe of these Acts
+nothing could be shipped in or out of the Colonies except by English or
+Colonial vessels, and the Colonies themselves were forbidden to trade
+with any other power except England. This prohibition did not affect
+the Southern planter aristocracy, inasmuch as they had no manufactures,
+and no shipping, and sent out their agricultural products mainly and
+regularly in English vessels to England, obtaining therefrom, even
+in Washington’s day, their clothes, tools, and equipment. But the
+New England colonies, unagricultural and mercantile, opposed the
+Navigation Acts, necessarily. They had already become shipbuilding
+powers, and regularly exported enormous quantities of dried fish to
+Spain, Portugal, the West Indies, obtaining in return quantities of
+Spanish-grown cane sugar to be turned into New England rum, which again
+was exchanged for slaves in Africa, tea in China, silks and spices
+in the East. New England was growing into a competitive shipping and
+mercantile power alongside of England, so the Navigation Acts were
+continually being evaded in the Northern Colonies. The second phase
+of colonial opposition arose over taxation, notably over the taxation
+of tea which particularly affected the Northern Colonies. The story
+of the Boston Tea Party is too well known for me to have to refer to
+it. The last phase arose over the general bureaucratic meddling with
+the affairs of the colonies, expressed in the Stamp Act. In all these
+underground struggles, the New England Colonies took the lead, with
+the Southerners a bad second, and it is from this date that we must
+look to the New Englanders with their completely commercial morality,
+their Yankee cunning, and their fanatic dissenting Puritanism, as most
+expressive of the direction in which America was travelling.
+
+Thus while the drift of American sentiment gradually coalesced
+and hardened against England, more and more strayed from the
+ordered control of the Virginia planter aristocracy to the radical
+experimentalism of the New England merchant group, the drift of
+Russian sentiment was hardening in favour of Peter’s foreign-modelled
+civil service and military establishment. In both cases a radical
+and arbitrary minority was beginning to control the sluggish and
+conservative majority. Underground, in South Russia particularly,
+smouldered the popular feeling against the innovations of Peter and
+his successors. It could do nothing because it lacked the weapons
+wherewith to fight. Peter had taken good care to keep the army loyal
+to him. But during Peter’s reign it burst out in the revolt of the Old
+Believers; and in Catherine the Great’s period, which covered the years
+when the American Colonies made their successful stand against England,
+it exploded on the south-east Volga frontier among the Cossacks, in the
+open class-war rebellion of Pugachev. Both Russia and America came into
+power by building up systems of government that rested upon a profound
+inner dualism. The dualism in America came from a struggle between the
+aristocratic, agrarian, and conservative South, and the democratic,
+mercantile, and independently-minded North and East. In Russia it
+sprang from the opposition between the brilliant and sceptical
+state-machine, pursuing its warlike ambitions even further into Europe,
+and the inert, superstitious mass of the peasantry, particularly of
+the lower Volga region, which was groaning under the weight of taxes
+necessary to keep the state-service going, and unable--thanks to
+serfdom--to retaliate except by open rebellion.
+
+We have already pointed out that there exists a parallel between
+Egypt and Babylonia, in Russia and America. Here again that parallel
+must be alluded to. As in Babylonia, the state-religion was at the
+outset composed of a series of regional cults, only welded later by
+military force into the universal worship of the central Babylonian
+sun-and-war-god Marduk, so in Russia the force of dissenting regional
+sentiment contended against the deliberate state-policy of making the
+Czar central autocrat of all the Russias and sole head of the Church.
+As in Egypt, the religious struggle was between the sun-god, Ra of the
+North, whose symbol was a golden disk, and the vegetation-god, Osiris
+of the South, whose symbol was the tree of life, so in America there
+was always tension between the agricultural South and the industrial,
+gold-worshipping North. Russia could only keep going so long as the
+Czar was victorious; America could only keep going so long as the
+two divergent sections of its people fused into one. Unless we keep
+these differences in mind we cannot understand either country. And it
+is only by meditating upon them that we can fully understand all the
+world-transformations that were historically to come into being from
+the creation of Russia and the United States.
+
+The process that we have been following culminated in Catherine
+the Great and in Washington. These two historical and contemporary
+figures not only represent immense landmarks in human history, but are
+symbolical for long into the future, up to the threshold even of our
+own day, of the power that is Russia, and is America. In studying them
+as completely representative of the inner development we have been
+following, we become witnesses of a phenomenon not common to human
+history; the rise of two cultures side by side. This had happened
+before in antiquity in the parallel growth of the Babylonian-Assyrian
+and the Egyptian civilisations, which were, like Russia and America in
+later times, river countries, and which were divided by the land-bridge
+of Palestine and the Arab peninsula from each other. The later powers,
+Russia and America, faced each other across the whole world, and
+where Russia depended upon Europe for intellectual leadership, arms
+and appliances, America depended on Europe for physical support, and
+eventually for political independence itself. Nowhere is this more
+clear than in the period we have now to study; the period of Catherine
+in Russia, of Washington in America. Where Catherine interested herself
+at the outset of her reign in Voltaire and Rousseau, wrote plays
+herself in the French vein, was a brilliant leader of theoretical
+intellectualism, many-sided and fascinating at the outset, and ended
+as an ageing tyrant; Washington, the typical American of his time, was
+a plain, blunt, country squire, intensely practical, not particularly
+brilliant, with but one idea in his mind, the free expansion of
+the colonies westward, who, despite himself, was dragged into the
+current of Rousseauism and Voltairism practised by such spirits as
+Paine and Jefferson, and ended as a retired moderate and a private
+citizen. No more startling divergence could be found between countries
+so similar geographically and climatically. There is something even
+more interesting, psychologically and symbolically, in the fact that
+Catherine the Great was a woman who had begun as a needy adventuress
+without a drop of Russian blood in her veins, while Washington was
+a man who began as a wealthy landowner of the most conservative and
+long-rooted Virginian aristocracy. In both cases, the situation
+found the one figure that could control it. In order to conquer
+Europe, Russia had to find someone relentlessly efficient, utterly
+unsentimental, theoretically advanced, but so profoundly imbued with
+the desire to increase personal prestige as to be unwilling to bate a
+jot of power; this was Catherine. In order to prevent the separation
+from Europe from becoming a mere revulsion to anarchic chaos, America
+had to find someone broad-mindedly tolerant, aristocratically reserved,
+practical in outlook, so steady of purpose as never to be swayed by any
+personal misfortune. This was Washington. Catherine’s reign (1762-1796)
+led to the final destruction of Poland, brilliant military victories
+over Turkey, terrible peasant misery at home, and the establishment of
+Russia as the greatest military power threatening the whole of Europe;
+Washington’s period of ascendency as General and President (1776-1797)
+led to complete independence from England, immense expansion westwards,
+an ever-widening rift between the agricultural South and the commercial
+North, and the final establishment of America as a power completely
+isolated, and determined to seek no further “world-entanglements,” but
+to create its own political destiny.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+
+Up to a short time before America was discovered, and Russia emerged
+on the stage of the world’s affairs under Ivan the Great, Europe had
+been a social, moral, and spiritual unity. This unity, despised and
+blackened by the apostles of enlightenment in the eighteenth century,
+under the title of “the feudal system,” had been developing from the
+fourteenth century onwards in the wrong direction of nationalist
+monarchy, instead of in the only right one of such a popularly
+grounded, elective feudalism as we find foreshadowed in the writings
+of Plato, More, or Campanella. At its highest and best, it had not
+succeeded in preventing such purely political wars as the dynastic
+struggle of the later Plantagenets with France, or the heroic struggle
+of the Holy Roman Empire with the papacy, or the civil struggle between
+the burghers of the free towns and the feudal overlords; but it must
+also be remembered on the credit side of the balance, that it had also
+promoted the largely idealistic effort of the Crusaders, the unified
+social and moral enlightenment of monasticism, and had created as well
+a great common language of art, rooted in popular symbolism, a common
+faith unified in outward observance, and, in its great revival of
+Latin, a common speech whereby scholars from all parts of Europe might
+easily understand each other.
+
+These are compensation enough, in such minds as realize their complete
+lack of such rallying points to-day, for the failure of those days to
+achieve telephones or modern sanitation. The same order of thought that
+had re-established centres of culture and philosophy after the complete
+breakdown of the old Roman order in the eighth century, continued its
+effort almost unimpaired up to the close of the fifteenth. We still in
+a measure to-day partake of as many of its fruits as the failure of
+discipline, represented by the revival of nationalistic warring powers
+in the fourteenth, the revival of new learning in the fifteenth, and
+the Protestant and counter-Catholic reformations of the sixteenth,
+have left to us. At its apex, in the thirteenth century, life from
+the North Cape to Palestine, from Cornwall to the Carpathians, was
+of one piece throughout. As the next world was divided into the
+realms of heaven, purgatory, and hell, so this world was divided into
+its appropriate realms: the king’s palace, the feudal castle, the
+cathedral, the abbey, the market town, the guildhall, the peasant’s
+hut. Over all lay the spiritual sway of a unified ecclesiastic order,
+the solid power of Catholic Christianity. Towards the east lay the
+less intelligent, less rationally disciplined, more thaumaturgic and
+despotically absolute power of the Orthodox Greek faith, which had been
+completely separated from the western faith since the ninth century,
+and which revolved about the decaying court of Constantinople. With the
+fall of that capital in 1456 and the consequent driving of a wedge by
+the Turks into the heart of Christianity, the rift between the Eastern
+and the Western churches had become chronic, and the Eastern Church
+had grown more and more hidebound and static, remote from anything
+resembling forward-looking Christianity. A little before this event,
+there had come about--thanks to the failure of the Crusades and the
+spirit of growing commercialism--the rise of a new burgher class and
+their alliance with the purely political and dynastic ambitions of a
+nationalist monarchy, which took place first in France, and later in
+England.
+
+It is worth noticing that both these countries lay on the western
+borders of Europe. In Spain, too, a nationalist monarchy developed, but
+it was dependent on the support of the old feudal nobility rather than
+the bourgeoisie, had its own internal problems to settle in the fact
+that part of the country lay in the hands of the Mohammedans, and did
+not in any case exert much influence abroad earlier than the sixteenth
+century. Italy, unable to find a single ruler, was rapidly sinking
+into the gulf of anarchy through which the torrent of the Renaissance
+made its way, to peter out on the shoals of academicism and realistic
+sentimentality. But soon after 1492, the date of Columbus’ discovery
+of the New World, the most startling sign that a new order had come
+into being in the world was furnished by Germany. In 1517 in the very
+heart of the Holy Roman Empire of legend and heroic achievement for the
+Catholic faith, the Augustinian monk Luther posted his theses to the
+church door at Wittenberg. This was three years before Cortez completed
+his conquest of Mexico, or Magellan made the first circumnavigation of
+the globe. The subsequent process known as the Reformation, whether in
+its early Protestant or later Catholic manifestation, paid no heed to
+the great spiritual unity of the past. It rested entirely on social
+and economic factors. Consciously or not, it either supported or
+failed to combat the nationalist morality to which religion was to be
+subservient, of which morality we have reaped the latest fruits in the
+outburst of unspiritually motivated hatred that accompanied the Great
+War. Its chief result was the complete separation of Northern Teutonic
+and Southern Mediterranean Christianity.
+
+If we could construct a thought map as opposed to a nationalist map of
+Europe about the year 1550, we would find that Europe was no longer
+in any sense a unity. Europe then, as since, fell readily into two
+halves. The dividing line was never totally clear, but the northern and
+western part of Europe was predominantly Protestant, as the eastern
+and southern remained predominantly Catholic. In the western half of
+Europe, Spain was the strongest of Catholic outposts; but Spain had her
+last triumph in 1570, the year of Lepanto, and eighteen years later
+was to know her first heavy defeat in the destruction of the Armada.
+In opposition to Catholicism were England, the Scandinavian countries,
+a considerable portion of France, notably the south-western half, and
+practically all of northern and western Germany. Southern Germany, like
+Bavaria, remained Catholic, but Switzerland again became Protestant.
+On the other hand, Italy, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, remained
+Catholic to the core.
+
+Thus it came about that America became open--especially after the
+defeat of the Spanish Armada--to colonization from Western and
+Protestant European countries, while Russia, despite Ivan the
+Terrible’s attempt to find a _rapprochement_ with England, became
+open to influence from Eastern Europe, which was predominantly feudal
+and Catholic. The outcome was to make Russia more and more feudal
+and autocratic, while America became more and more _bourgeois_ and
+Protestant. After Peter the Great’s time, Russia presented to Europe
+the image of an autocracy of a little more logical and thorough-going
+stamp than the autocracy practised in France and Spain; after King
+William’s War, America became a democracy a little more advanced and
+complete than the type of successful commercial democracy governing
+England.
+
+Both countries, nevertheless, sought for a common ideal in the past.
+Russia, as refounded by Ivan the Great, proclaimed its kinship with
+Rome. It was the “third Rome,” the first being the Rome of Augustus,
+the second the Rome of Byzantium. The mystic idea that the _pallium_
+of world-empire had travelled from Rome to Constantinople and from
+Constantinople, in the wake of Ivan the Great’s bride, the Empress
+Sophia, to Moscow, where it was to be firmly established for ever,
+ruled Russian State policy from 1490 up to the outbreak of the
+Bolshevik revolution in 1917. It invested the Romanovs and their
+successors, who were not even Russian in essence, with semi-divine
+authority and mystery. It was perhaps the basis of such a startling
+stroke of policy as Catherine the Great’s offering open asylum to the
+Jesuits after their banishment from France and Spain. At the same
+time, the thirteen American colonies, newly established, began playing
+with the notion that they too were Rome--but Rome of the republic,
+Rome of the Latian league. This idea was markedly materialistic and
+rationalistic, as the Russian idea was markedly mystical and emotional.
+It grew to enormous proportions after the Revolution, when the infant
+Republic was shaken to its foundations by the revelations concerning
+the Society of the Cincinnati. Thus over the background of Russia and
+America, the patterns of different Romes grew and spread.
+
+That background was nomadic, centrifugal, primitive in both cases.
+In America it was a background of hunters and fishers, trappers,
+traders, and roving Redskins. It was Franco-Spanish, Spanish-Indian.
+The type of man that this background was producing--and continued to
+produce after the first Anglo-Saxons crossed the Alleghany barrier--was
+the self-assertive, independent, inventive, resourceful hunter and
+fighter. The fact that the country was wilderness, largely forested,
+with poor communications and few openings for trade, added to Spanish
+adventurousness, Norman-French daring, and Anglo-Saxon fanaticism a
+fresh tang. If people could not agree together under law on major
+points of religion or minor points of social observance, all that was
+necessary was to kill off or frighten away a few Indians with firearms
+and to live isolated, far apart. In this respect the North American
+family soon became a wandering tribe, liable to the most casual
+accretions from without and to the most arbitrary splits and divisions
+of sentiment, except in districts early settled, where the common bonds
+of a unified stock and better communications served to hold the clan
+together. In the middle and western colonies, the white colonist soon
+took on, in his dealings with his neighbours, and in his disposition to
+rove about, the colours of Indian life.
+
+The Russian too had his background, but the background was Tartar. It
+was a life either agricultural or nomadic, like the American life, but
+that which made and kept the country productive was not the independent
+desire to make fortunes and to seek new fields for themselves on the
+part of an active population, but a profound acceptance of inner
+necessity on the part of an inert one. The Tartar-Russian temperament
+was inert, or stung to sudden action under the pressure of crisis,
+while the American temperament was active, sinking to inertia only
+under the stimulus of growing prosperity. What drove the Russians
+to migrate was not the sense of a new horizon to be attained, or a
+new horizon to be conquered, but the mere desire to escape from an
+unchanging round, an inner need to stand aloof from the village and
+its elders, the landowner’s mansion and its barns, the bloodthirsty
+Cossack, or the life-sapping tax-gatherer. That was because from the
+beginning the Russian family had not been a family in the American
+sense, but a great collection of souls: feudal retainers, house and
+farm serfs, and distant tributaries. In Russia, and more particularly
+in the steppes of Southern and Eastern Russia, apart from the trading
+centres of the North Russia forest belt, the peasant tended continually
+to revert to the colours of pure Tartar and nomad life.
+
+Thus we may safely say, without fear of contradiction, that the
+European influence, transported to America, lost its ordered English
+characteristics, and became something more akin to Spanish buccaneering
+or the loose confederacy of Indian tribes; while the same influence,
+exerted on Russia from her western borders, made that country a
+Late-Latin imperium, greatly modified by the spirit of Tartar nomadry.
+This remarkable transformation was due, after all sociological, racial,
+religious factors have been weighed and dismissed, primarily to
+climatic and geological factors. In neither Russia nor North America
+is nature a friendly factor, nor is it possible there to look on man
+as an “addition to nature” nor as the “measure of all things” in the
+Greco-Latin sense. Both countries had climates of exceptional severity,
+vast stretches of soil of inferior productiveness, a population thinly
+scattered, and lacking, until the later growth of railways, in means
+of communication. The most fertile agricultural region of America, the
+Mississippi valley, lay far inland through enormous forests, at the
+mercy of floods and malaria, as the most fertile region of Russia, the
+Volga basin, lay on the remote Caspian frontier, at the mercy of steppe
+winds, and consequent famine and typhus. Psychologically, the Russian
+and the American reacted differently to this situation. In Russia, the
+influx of Tartar blood resulted in making the majority of the race
+fatalistic, sensual, lazy, with a tendency towards a curious mingling
+of pantheism and sacramental Christianity. In America, the influx
+of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism made the majority reckless, highstrung,
+extremely active, with a tendency towards a mingling of outward
+practical sense and inward moral fanaticism.
+
+From the date when America and Russia appeared on the horizon, we can
+trace the steady rise of European individualism. The revolutionary
+impulse of Europe has always been an affair of outstanding
+individuals, perhaps of small minorities: even the French Revolution
+was ultimately accomplished by a few outstanding clever politicians,
+centering on Paris. The revolutionary impulse, on the other hand, in
+both America and in Russia, has been an affair of mass-movements.
+Washington was intellectually merely the ordinary American landowner
+of his time; Lenin the ordinary provincial noble. Such revolutionary
+upheavals as Alexander Second’s freeing of the serfs, or America’s
+Civil War, came about not through the agitation of any single body
+of men, but by a combination of interests: economic and sentimental.
+In Russia, it was necessary for the emancipation of the serfs to
+take place, because the system of Nicholas I, which had relied on
+foreign conquest to ensure the prosperity of the country, had broken
+down; and the system of serfdom, which had really only flourished
+in the black soil belt of South Russia, was, as Alexander II said,
+“in danger of abolishing itself from below.” In America it became
+increasingly necessary to limit the field of the slave-holding class
+to the Lower Southern States, or the economic control of the financier
+and trading class in the North would be threatened by the irruption
+of slave-holders into the rich Western territory and the consequent
+creation of an agrarian imperialism. None of the changes that took
+place in American or Russian political life during the nineteenth
+century were so arbitrary as the violent cross-currents that, during
+the same time, affected Europe.
+
+The advance of Russia and America throughout the eighteenth and
+nineteenth centuries was not without its influence in Europe, or rather
+on the type of European genius that Europe was to produce. The rise
+of the Jesuit order within the Catholic church and the corresponding
+and opposed rise of mystical non-conformist sects such as swarmed
+in the latter eighteenth century,--for example, Wesleyanism and
+Swedenborgianism--were its first symptoms in the religious field.
+The corresponding decline in architecture into the extravagances of
+later baroque, or the frigidities of academic classicism, or the false
+romanticism of the Gothic revival, mark its influx in the field of
+architecture. Such individual geniuses as Voltaire or Kant, Blake
+or Beethoven, Carlyle or Nietzsche, Ibsen or Shaw, reveal the same
+splitting up of Europe into efficiently Americanised revolutionary
+and sceptically Catholicised reactionary as was going on elsewhere.
+Henceforth Europe, or European life, was no longer a unity; and only
+a unity can produce great social movements, such as had culminated in
+previous centuries in a Dante, a Shakespeare, an Aquinas, a Bach, a
+Cervantes, or a Racine. From the outset of the nineteenth century, the
+individual in Europe became more important than his age. It was only
+outside the frontiers of Europe, in Russia or in America, that the age
+was to remain more important than the individual.
+
+
+2
+
+It was through the deliberately exercised will of a minority that
+Russia and America became independent; and this minority consisted
+in both cases of people who had been largely Europeanised. Left to
+themselves, the Russians would have relapsed into nomad savagery;
+their unity was imposed on them by a long list of ambitious princes,
+from Ivan the Great down to Peter the Great, whose eyes were directed
+continually towards Europe. Left to themselves, the true Americans--the
+early Spanish, French, and English colonists--might have conceivably
+remained as divided and sparsely scattered settlements surrounded by a
+fringe of Indians and wilderness: their contact with the outer world
+was kept up by a long list of Puritan divines and southern aristocrats
+armed with muskets, law books, and Bibles, and busily transplanting
+into the wilderness the fundamental contrast between European Whig
+and Tory. Up to 1688, the date of the Whig revolution in England
+and its reverberation in the Colonies in the shape of King William’s
+War, the whole history of the American colonies was nothing but chaos
+and anarchy. The successive squabbles with governors, the successive
+acceptance and dismissal of royal proprietors, the successive guerilla
+wars with the Indians, form a complex labyrinth of greed, intrigue and
+baseness not easy to match anywhere. It was only through influence and
+pressure from without, from England, that any civilisation kept itself
+alive at all. Likewise in Russia, the small body of German, Dutch,
+Italian artisans, architects, engineers, scholars, soldiers of fortune
+and sycophants that filled the German suburb at Moscow from 1500 to
+1688, transformed Russia under Peter the Great, and continued to do so
+under Elizabeth and Catherine.
+
+The ruling minority in America curried favour with one or the other of
+the political parties that happened to be in the ascendant in England;
+in Russia, as the peasant was illiterate, the minority had to curry
+favour with the Czar himself. During the reigns of Peter, of Elizabeth,
+and Catherine, Russian literature--that is to say, literature
+written in the Russian language, as distinguished from Old Church
+Slavonic--made its appearance. The most potent weapon of civilisation,
+the written word, was snatched once and for all from the hands of the
+Orthodox monks and Metropolitans, whose chronicles had been hitherto
+the sole means of expression, and given to the secular powers, the
+outstanding nobles, upon whose support the safety of Czardom really
+rested. This literature, in both cases, was to take its intellectual
+tone from Europe, its sentimental pretexts only were Russian or
+American.
+
+The influence of such Republican speculations as James Harrington’s
+“Oceana” influenced the one, as the influence of the sentimental
+naturalism of Diderot and the Encyclopædists influenced the other. At
+about the same time, and under the same conditions, the power of the
+Old New England theocracy, and of the Byzantine family-order began to
+wane, and the control of expression of opinion began to pass to the
+thriving but new commercial communities of St. Petersburg, New York,
+Charleston and Odessa.
+
+To both new countries Europe was like a great land-bridge, representing
+an older, more powerful, more refined civilisation. The ideas that
+prevailed in America or in Russia were not only derived from this
+body of thought, but were applied to conditions that were totally
+different. In the case of Russia, the central authority of the Czar,
+the nobles and the bureaucracy, attempted to transform an inert mass of
+semi-Oriental serfdom into something resembling a modern nationalistic
+monarchy. In the case of America, the most prosperous classes, the
+independent merchants and bankers, attempted to fuse an inchoate mass
+of fanatics, planters and frontiersmen into a political unity which
+was democratic and federal. The ideas upon which both worked came from
+Europe; in the case of Russia the model sought after was the model of
+the unified French monarchy, the Prussian State, the Austrian Empire.
+In the case of America the model unconsciously followed was that of the
+Greek city-states, or of the principalities of the Italian Renaissance.
+
+Long ago, if we look far enough back in history, the empires of
+Babylonia-Assyria and of Egypt had been states dependent on great river
+systems for their unity. They had sprung up independently, while the
+land-bridge that lay between them, Palestine and Moab, being highland
+and desert, was not only at a lower stage of culture, but, under the
+Amorites and Hittites, became a body of traders, borrowing from each
+in turn, and profiting by their situation in the territory where lay
+the chief caravan routes between the two great centres of Babylon and
+Heliopolis, to develop finally an independent viewpoint and a composite
+race-unity for itself under the Semites. With Russia and America, the
+same process was reversed. Europe lay as a land-bridge between Russia
+and America. But this land-bridge, as a unified civilisation, had
+already passed its maximum, and was headed for decline. Now certain
+elements of that civilisation were to pass beyond Europe’s frontiers
+into two countries, hitherto undeveloped, which were founded upon
+river-systems. In Russia these elements were such as could seek a
+common centre about the Czardom of Muscovy. In America, these elements
+were such as could build themselves into harmony with the commercial
+classes of the Atlantic seaboard controlling the river-ways that led
+into the interior.
+
+
+3
+
+The “third Rome” that Russia proclaimed herself to be, at the time
+when the Muscovite Czars became predominant in its affairs, was
+essentially the mystical, inner Rome of the Byzantine Cæsars. Deriving
+its authority from seclusion, intrigue, separation between court and
+people, it accepted none as leader save he who had passed over the
+portal of the Cathedral of the Transfiguration and had received on his
+forehead the holy chrism from the hands of the Orthodox Patriarch;
+however much he may have despised that patriarch in his heart, as did
+Peter and Catherine. But America founded a Rome of another sort, and
+in this Rome, democratic and enterprising, none was to be accepted
+as leader save he who had turned his back upon the ruling party in
+England and maintained, in combined political and religious thinking,
+his independence of the motherland. Thus the two wings of the embodied
+Imperial idea persisted in separation beyond Europe’s frontiers; and
+the age of their uprise was the age of the decline of the Imperial idea
+in Europe. Both America and Russia came on the stage of the world’s
+affairs at the time of the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire; both
+rose to power during the period of intense nationalism that followed;
+and both played important parts in the final overthrow of Napoleon, who
+may be said to have attempted to restore an Empire by the power of his
+sword alone, when as a social and spiritual ideal, it was already dead.
+
+In order to understand the sort of Rome America founded, we must look
+back to the legendary sources of England. The study of legendary
+history is often more valuable to the sociological investigator
+than the study of actual events. The latter merely tells us what a
+people were able to accomplish under changes of weather and economic
+prosperity, the pressure of external influence, the million and one
+contributory causes which make up the life and state of well or
+ill-being of the community from day to day. Legendary history, on the
+other hand, reveals the goal steadily aimed at, the ideal to which all
+aspired, the psychical centre about which all this activity revolves.
+Thus we cannot understand the Greeks without a study of Achilles,
+Odysseus, Theseus. The fatalistic bravery, the wily shiftiness, the
+adventurous courage of a whole folk, are here summed up. Rama and
+Krishna tell us more about India than the pages of Indian history,
+which are, as a matter of fact, mostly blank; nor is America itself
+comprehensible without reference to such quasi-legendary figures as
+Parson Weems’ Puritanic fixation of Washington, Davy Crockett, Andrew
+Jackson, or Daniel Boone. The legendary history of England is to be
+found in the pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History; and as the story
+told therein is essentially representative of what many English minds
+of the twelfth century believed to have been the truth, desired to make
+the truth, it is necessary to look into it.
+
+According to this account, Britain was founded by a Trojan prince,
+a grandson of Æneas himself, founder of Rome. That such a thing is
+doubly impossible, we now know, and we are apt to laugh at Geoffrey for
+putting it forward. Yet even this legend may contain some substratum of
+truth. The Latian tribes, from which the Romans came, were undoubtedly
+subject to much Phœnician influence, and there is reason to suspect
+that the Western Britons, at least, were also subject to some early
+Phœnician influence. The “Trojans,” whoever they were, may have been
+a Phœnician people, or a legend retailed by the Phœnicians. At all
+events, we need not laugh at Geoffrey for his feeble arch spanning
+the abyss between little Britain and majestic Rome. The fact is, that
+almost everybody in England, rich or poor, (except perhaps a few
+clerics who are by nature adepts at concealing both the truth and
+their doubts) believed in Geoffrey’s time, and for several hundred
+years later, that the Britons were the descendants of the Trojans,
+and that under Arthur, their greatest king, they had conquered thirty
+other kingdoms, and had been on the point of conquering Rome itself
+when Mordred, Arthur’s nephew, seized crown and queen. This belief was
+so strong that Henry II, at the end of the twelfth century, was not
+only induced to rebuild Glastonbury, but his abbot, Henry of Blois,
+discreetly “found” the tomb of Arthur there, in order to put a stop
+to persistent rumors concerning the king’s possible reappearance. And
+the belief was renewed, when under the Tudors, a remote descendant
+of ancient British kings mounted the throne of his ancestors, thus
+fulfilling the prophecy of Merlin.
+
+The belief that prevailed in England after the Norman Conquest and
+throughout the Middle Ages--and this belief was all the more powerful
+because it was popular, unformulated, unrecognised by the rationalism
+of the ruling orders--was that England was once on the point of
+conquering Rome, and that under the new monarchy it would reassume
+its position as head of the world’s affairs. This faith came to its
+flower under the Tudors. Under Henry VIII the conquest of Rome became
+an accomplished fact. The poets, philosophers and divines of the time
+hailed the advent of Elizabeth in terms that made of her the equal, if
+not the superior, of any empress of antiquity. And it was precisely
+at this time that the newly-discovered realm of Virginia was thrown
+open; that Puritanic sectaries driven out of England by the machinery
+of the State Church which Tudors and Stuarts had set in action,
+Calvinistic upholders of that ascetic intolerance which the Catholics
+later were themselves to imitate, Congregationalist rebels against
+episcopal supervision, were to establish overseas a republican form
+of England--a third Rome. This feeling that the mother country, in
+alliance with Protestant and Colonial dissent, might become a primitive
+Roman commonwealth in opposition to the monarchial ideas of Renaissance
+Europe, prevailed throughout the great struggle of the Commons with
+Charles I, and the subsequent Cromwellian dictatorship. It is not for
+nothing that John Milton, before writing “Paradise Lost,” meditated
+an epic on the old Arthurian story. The “Cromwellian” tone of the old
+story lay closely akin to the rooted ambitions of his race.
+
+In short where Russia, by a process of unconscious assimilation,
+became the successor of Byzantium and thus a bulwark against Europe, a
+mystically isolated bulwark, which only such unorthodox Czars as Peter,
+Catherine, and Alexander II dared to ignore,--America rose to power
+precisely by consciously reverting to the Rome of the tribunes and of
+warring patricians and plebeians, a Rome that found its first test in
+a conflict with another country that had already previously risen to
+imperial power. England became America’s Carthage; Poland, Lithuania
+and Sweden became for Imperial Russia the analogues of the Greek
+city-states. From this fact, and from a host of subsidiary facts, arose
+the typical introverted attitude of the Russian and its opposite in
+the American. About the typical, one hundred per cent American one can
+learn everything but his feelings. His thoughts, his opinions, are all
+on the surface. America is to him the greatest of countries. American
+prosperity is the world’s prosperity, American life is the ideal life,
+America’s expansion is the expansion of the world’s democratic hope
+into backward Europe and remote, superstitious Asia. Over this simple
+creed a Whitman, a Jefferson and an Emerson can shake hands. About a
+Russian you know only his feelings. His opinions he is able to change
+with disconcerting completeness. A Tolstoy can change from the creed
+of “getting the best out of life for oneself and family,” to a creed
+of ascetic denial of all the world’s goods, with no loss of intensity;
+a Dostoevsky can somehow reconcile the inner conflict between mystic
+Slavophilism and underground rebellion against Christianity itself,
+without ceasing to be Dostoevsky. Only a completely exiled American,
+like Henry James, or one who hankers after exile, like Poe, Hawthorne,
+or Melville, can fully exploit his feelings; only a completely exiled
+Russian, like Herzen, or one who hankers after exile like Turgenev,
+Tchekhov, or Pushkin himself, can maintain any constancy in opinion.
+
+
+4
+
+But this is not the place to discuss the mental attitudes implied in
+being an American and a Russian. That will come out more fully as we
+go on. For the moment we must revert to the course of our interrupted
+historical analysis, which was abandoned at the moment that the
+Americans, under Washington, made themselves the sole masters and
+controllers of the wealth of an immense continent, left by England
+in their hands; while at the same time the Russians under Catherine
+became masters and controllers of the whole of Eastern Europe, and
+issued their first threat to shake off the power of the Turks from
+Constantinople. Each had accomplished this at the price of a daring
+alliance. Catherine had allied herself with Prussia, which in the
+preceding reign had been Russia’s most important enemy, in order to
+destroy Poland utterly; America had allied herself with France, which
+twenty years before had appeared as the colonists’ chief enemy, in
+order to conquer England. But the elaborate game of eighteenth century
+diplomacy that both had played, based as it was on balances of power,
+secret treaties, dynastic successions, bribings and spyings, and a
+cynical understanding of the foibles of human nature, was about to come
+to an end. In 1789 the French Revolution broke out, and the cause of
+eighteenth century monarchy collapsed in ruins. During the same year
+the first congress of the United States assembled, under the present
+American Constitution.
+
+During the years that had elapsed since the British Government withdrew
+from the colonies in 1783, America had hardened from a confederation of
+semi-independent commonwealths rather on the Polish model, completely
+lacking in internal unity, to a federal republic. This transformation
+had come about thanks to three converging causes. In the first place,
+England, despite the Revolution, still held a vague sway over the
+interior, and though promising to abandon her outposts in the Great
+Lake territory, refused to do so. This gave the colonists a reason
+for continuing to cling together, inasmuch as all were now equally
+interested in the hunger for land that possessed the settlers pushing
+forward beyond the Appalachian region. In the second place, without
+a central government, there was danger that the outlying settlements
+might be tempted by bribes and intrigue to throw in their lot with
+England again. Vermont actually attempted to do so; and in the new
+regions of Kentucky and Tennessee intrigue was going on with the
+Spaniards in occupation of Louisiana that boded equally ill. Moreover
+there was the question of the Indian tribes to settle; and the Great
+Lakes and Mississippi region not only provided the chief backbone of
+the Indian resistance, but were open to foreign agents ready to arm the
+Indians, against the Colonists. Lastly, the colonies had come out of
+the Revolution crippled with debt, and with a worthless currency. It
+was to the interest of the newly-born, independent banking community of
+New York, headed by Alexander Hamilton, to fund this debt and replace
+this currency with legal tender. Thanks to Hamilton and his associates,
+the Federal Union rested from the start upon the conservative money
+power. The outbreak of a local rebellion in Massachusetts, the
+increasing trouble on the frontier, served but to centralise and focus
+the aims of the Colonists upon Federalism, and hasten the adoption of a
+constitution.
+
+During the same time, the Russian autocracy under Catherine became more
+and more a question of the personal whim of whatever sovereign happened
+to be occupying the throne. Catherine had begun as theoretically
+liberal, but she had inherited a system that put unlimited power into
+her hands to play with, and the year before she came to the throne, the
+gentry were finally liberated from all obligations of state service.
+This left her free to carry on the machinery of government with the aid
+of any subordinates that would do her bidding absolutely, undeterred
+by patriotic, religious, or moral scruples. As Catherine was herself
+entirely without such scruples, and ruled alone by her passion for
+vanity and display, her favourites had the easy task of appealing to
+her baser side. Conquest was what Catherine wanted; whether it was to
+bedazzle Diderot and Voltaire, or to partition Poland, or to embark
+on a campaign with Turkey, she could not resist the lure of posing as
+the mistress of Europe. Frederick the Great, who from his desperate
+position as the leader of a forlorn hope, gradually built up Prussia
+into a power to be reckoned with, understood this perfectly, and was
+not sparing of his flatteries, while at the same time he watched with
+equal understanding the rise of the colonies, and wrote measured and
+intelligent eulogies of their leader Washington. The difficulty with
+Catherine’s system, was that it depended altogether on her iron will,
+and she could do nothing to ensure the same determination to over-ride
+opposition for her successors. In order to go on she had to overlook
+the desperate peasant-rising created by Pugachev, to break with one
+favourite after another, and to treat with contempt the terrible
+outbreak of cholera that occurred in Moscow itself during her reign.
+
+To both countries, the French Revolution came as a terrible shock.
+To Catherine it became apparent that unless the sovereigns of Europe
+acted in concert to save the French Monarchy, her own game was as good
+as lost. But unfortunately, the European sovereigns were indisposed
+to act together, and separately the Revolutionary armies easily beat
+them. To Washington and the most intelligent Americans, it soon became
+obvious that although America was in alliance with France, to maintain
+that alliance under new conditions would only lead to fresh European
+occupations of American soil, and to the condition that the colonists
+had already faced in the last years of the Revolution, when only the
+dwindling and ill-equipped Continental army stood between them and
+submission. In the outcome both countries, despite their previous
+embroilments in European politics, took a fresh step backward into
+isolation. In America that isolation was conscious and proclaimed; in
+Russia it was instinctive, subconscious, and uneasy. Its course in both
+cases, was charted and developed by the subsequent career of Napoleon.
+
+We cannot understand Napoleon’s character, nor the tragedy of his
+career, unless we grasp the fact that he was born in an atmosphere
+of local rebellion resembling exactly the rebellion of the American
+colonies under Great Britain. But in Corsica, this sort of thing was
+bound to fail, because the Corsicans did not have, like the American
+colonists, the undeveloped wastes and the boundless resources of
+a remote continent to fall back upon. Napoleon grew to manhood
+understanding that destiny would not consent to be on the side
+of European uprisings; and this understanding guided his mental
+orientation, first towards the idealistic Jacobins, whose real aim was
+a Constitutional and popular monarchy, then, when that hope failed,
+towards a military dictatorship. And this military dictatorship took on
+more and more the outer form of a Roman imperium divested of Byzantine
+ceremonial, in his own eyes. By combining theoretic liberalism with
+personal talent he thought he could revive ancient Cæsarism.
+
+The true turning point in Napoleon’s career came when from his camp
+at Boulogne, he turned East before learning of Trafalgar, and went
+off to fight Austria and Prussia. The star he then followed led him
+inevitably to the blazing streets of Moscow, and finally to utter
+self-destruction, because every step that he took upon the eastward
+path depended on his ability to create an atmosphere of overwhelming
+military prestige, in order to overawe all the monarchs of Europe into
+accepting him as their equal. In thus turning eastward, Napoleon had
+to go against his own inmost conviction that he was born to save the
+Revolution. Had he overcome England’s stubborn opposition to change
+(and there were many people in England half-disposed to pray that he
+might do so) there would have been nothing against his victorious
+forward advance but the Atlantic and the new American States, which
+were unknown quantities in opinion, but which were rapidly dividing
+into two parties under Washington and Jefferson. But in order to do
+this, Napoleon would have been obliged to depend on such maritime war
+genius as his country could bring forth, and since he had no ability
+or experience in naval war, this decided him. Napoleon must have known
+that he was not invincible on land--no general ever is--and yet his
+attempt to create a European empire depended on his being practically
+invincible, as he well knew. Hence his alternations of desperate hope
+and disillusionment, hence the tragic epic, logically insane, of his
+career.
+
+Whether Napoleon was right or wrong in the course he followed, his
+idea was destined to dominate Europe throughout the nineteenth century
+and to survive into the twentieth. With prophetic insight he charted
+the later course Europe was to follow, and laid the foundations of
+the personal Cæsarism of Mussolini and his followers, as well as
+anticipating in his continental system of Confederations, the reverse
+process that has led to the establishment of a League of Nations. But
+with European nineteenth century history it is not the purpose of this
+study to deal, nor even with the outward events of American and Russian
+history, except insofar as each bears upon, reflects and alters the
+course of the other. The history of Napoleon is, after all, neatly
+parallelled by the history of those Israelite kings who, caught between
+Egypt and the Assyrian empire, were forced to turn first against one
+and then the other. Our concern here is rather with the two forces
+beyond Europe’s frontier, now at work in Russia and in America; forces
+that were increasingly to direct the destiny not of Europe alone, but
+of the world.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+  _“There is an organic logic, an instinctive and dream-sure logic of
+  all existence, as opposed to the logic of the inorganic, the logic
+  of understanding and of things understood--a logic of direction as
+  opposed to a logic of extension.”_
+
+                                                OSWALD SPENGLER,
+                                                “Decline of the West.”
+
+  _“If the cause of the happiness of this country (America) was
+  examined into, it would be found to arise as much from the great
+  plenty of land in proportion to the inhabitants, as from the wisdom
+  of their political institutions.”_
+
+                                           ALBERT GALLATIN,
+                                           in the Congressional Debate
+                                           on The Land Bill of 1796.
+
+  _“Why is it that in Europe those who call themselves Democrats
+  always stand for the people, or at any rate always rely on the
+  people, while our democrat is often an aristocrat, nearly always
+  supports that which oppresses the power of the people, and ends by
+  becoming a despot?”_
+
+                              FEODOR DOSTOEVSKY,
+                              commenting on the Pushkin Address, 1881.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+
+Every race and every nation that has ever existed has achieved its
+destiny only by selecting out of the many paths open to it, one path
+peculiar to itself and following that, acquiring thereby the singular
+virtue that is a particularity of that way of life, and of none other.
+The choice of such a path is never either a deliberate act of will on
+the part of a few individuals or of the great majority. It is due to
+the operation of climatic, social, and political factors influencing
+the capacity and environment of the race itself so that before we can
+say what any organised body of men can achieve, we have to take into
+consideration the place where they settle, the sort of work they are
+best fitted to perform, and the psychological possibilities inherent
+in the race itself. Thus we can say of the ancient Greeks that their
+special virtue was a new kind of intellectual agility, due to their
+position in a rocky and infertile peninsula, as small farmers and
+shipmen; while to the east and south lay older and more long-settled
+states which did not share the peculiar strain of adventurous daring
+and natural sentiment that the original Dorian settlers possessed. The
+Romans on the other hand, thanks to their genius for collective action,
+as well as the necessity that was imposed on them from the outset of
+conquering and ruling from fortified central hill-towns a more fertile
+valley-land divided between warring and highly-varied racial stocks,
+acquired early the virtues of discipline, loyalty, and legalism. The
+ancient Hebrews, on account of their position as nomads, no less than
+the constant proximity of the desert, together with the ever-present
+fear of external conquest, developed into a race of religious seers,
+prophets, and hard bargainers with the surrounding peoples, who
+displayed greater resources of material power, but less spiritual
+resource than they. Thus they acquired the mingled virtues of patience
+and far-seeing desire for justice, and tempered their will to the
+absolute to a higher degree than either Greeks or Romans. This method
+of seeing each people not as an abstraction, but a living force, taking
+and giving colour to its environment, could be applied with equal force
+to all modern nations.
+
+Until we understand these psychological and ethical differences between
+nations, and are able to follow them from the highest historical event
+down to the daily life of the humblest individual, history is no more
+than a mere recital of names and dates. Waterloo, Trafalgar, Bunker
+Hill, Gettysburg, Tsushima and the Somme have no meaning unless we
+understand that behind every man and gun engaged there move the forces
+of unseen yet potent essences, swaying the result in their hands, now
+in one way, now in another. Homer was essentially right, artistically
+and philosophically, when he made his gods not only take an interest
+in the fortunes of the Trojan War upon earth, but also ready to take
+now one side, now the other, in that contest. It is of the nature of
+humanity to hold fast to that good which it realises to be necessary,
+in art as in life; and to seek to adjust both art and life to the
+most obvious reaction to necessity of the single soul, or of the body
+politic, under the underlying circumstances. Thus ethics and æsthetics
+are, psychologically speaking, essentially one and the same, and
+artistic or religious history is written fundamentally for a moral
+purpose. Even a Gibbon, despite his scepticism, was unable to avoid the
+moral implications of his theme in writing “The Decline and Fall.”
+
+Our problem here is not to settle the sociological differences
+prevailing among the nations of Europe, but rather to examine the
+peculiar psychology which has throughout controlled the behaviour
+of the two great frontier states that at the end of the eighteenth
+century began to react upon Europe’s destiny, Russia and North
+America. What we shall have to say about North America here applies
+also in the same measure to South America, in its interaction upon the
+Latin-Mediterranean world; but in this respect it was North America
+that was the teacher, and the Declaration of Independence that the
+thirteen English-speaking colonies, which later formed the United
+States, signed in 1776, was followed and copied thereafter throughout
+the whole extent of both American continents. Both Russia and America,
+in its most extreme and characteristic national form of the United
+States, have existed long enough and have maintained, if not their
+complete independence, at least their aloofness long enough to have
+acquired psychological characteristics and virtues entirely different
+from anything that European nations can show us. But if we go to the
+pages of European historians, or even to European novelists, poets,
+and philosophers prepared to ask the question: “What is an American,
+a Russian? In what way do they differ from anything European or from
+each other?”, we by no means obtain a satisfactory answer. The only way
+we can deal with such a problem is by a direct envisagement first, of
+all of the countries of Europe itself, in so far as they have common
+characteristics; and second, of the conditions under which Russia and
+America came to be what they are.
+
+Europe, psychologically speaking, is a great circle. The lower part
+of this circle--and since the downfall of Pagan Rome, the less
+creative, active and pioneering part--is coloured by the older
+Latin-Mediterranean civilisation, which thanks to its conquest of
+North Africa was able in antiquity to be the central force in European
+progress, but which lost this actuality after the seventh century,
+thanks to the uprise of Islam, and the renewed political power of the
+Germanic race. During the Middle Ages, the actually dominant force
+in Europe became the power of the northern half, and this Northern
+half has been controlled by two forces:--the boundless practical
+energy of the Teuton, the equally boundless intellectual curiosity
+of the Celt. If we follow these forces around the circumference of
+the circle which is Europe, through England, France, Spain, Italy,
+Austria, Hungary, Poland, Scandinavia, Scotland and Ireland till
+everywhere the boundaries merge with what is non-European,--be that
+either Moor or Turk or Lapp or Finn or Firbolg or Basque--we see that
+each European nation has grown up as a variation on the original
+Celtic-Teutonic-Latin chord; and that each has precisely what the
+other lacks, so that they complete each other. But this cannot be
+said of the great congeries of peoples that inhabit the Russian plain
+from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Here the original Slavonic--that
+is to say largely Scandinavian and East-European element--became
+overlaid with Tartar racial colour, to such an extent that only the
+intellectual top stratum, not the sentimental race-basis underneath,
+remained European. Nor can we define Northern America as fundamentally
+European, either. Apart from the Spanish influence, which so completely
+merged itself with the native Red Indian race and atmosphere as to
+become inseparable from it, we find that in America everywhere the
+original variations--such as French, Scottish, Scandinavian, English,
+Irish,--have tended not to remain distinct but to mingle with each
+other to such an extent that the result is a racial composite,
+continually becoming more and more flexible, which is solely united
+by common bonds of language and economic association, not of defined
+racial instinct. The result is that only the diminishing appeal of old
+sentimental association, not the fundamental present-day adjustment to
+the situation, makes the American something akin to the European. In
+order therefore to understand either America or Russia we have largely
+to dismiss Europe as a culturally fixed entity from our minds, and
+plunge into a wilderness of conflicting forces, guided only by the
+sense of historical movement and by our knowledge of the course that
+history has already taken, together with our instinct for soil and
+scenery and climate. When we arrive at the goals we are seeking, we
+will perhaps find that our most valuable tools will not after all be
+the fine pencil of the artist, but the plough of the economist, the axe
+of the social statistician.
+
+
+2
+
+The fundamental quality of the American took its origin at the outset
+from an overwhelming passion for land. The innumerable shiploads of
+people that have sped westward across the Atlantic from Columbus’ first
+voyage, down to the latest ocean liner, have sought to find land, to
+achieve land, to settle land, to overrun land, to subdue land. Even
+the Indian tribes that inhabited that interior before the white man
+came shared this feeling for land to a considerable extent. Most of
+them were nomads, practising little agriculture, and incapable of any
+lasting combination against the whites, because of their incurable
+habit of appropriating the hunting grounds of their neighbours. The
+most effective combinations, such as that of the Aztecs in Mexico or
+the Iroquois in the northwest, were very active despotisms, continually
+raiding the territory of weaker tribes and holding them to tribute.
+The whites, on attaining America, as they penetrated the interior,
+increasingly tended to drop their European powers of combination and to
+take on the nomadism and the local jealousies of the savage. One sees
+this in the eternal quarrels of the Spanish conquistadores over their
+spoil, no less than in the struggles of the separate colonies that
+preceded and continued throughout the Revolution, over the development
+of the western territory. The Revolution itself was less a war to put
+an end to British oppression than a successful attempt on the part
+of the colonial landholding aristocracy to attain to an indefinite
+expansion to the westward without British interference. It was directed
+by Washington who was himself one of the largest landowners of the
+period, and whose whole life was motivated by the passion for acquiring
+new land, notably in the Ohio region. From the Revolution through the
+Civil War and down to the fantastic scenes of the Florida land boom of
+a few years ago, the passion for land has been the motive force--one
+might almost say the virtue--of the great majority of Americans. For
+land spells to them security, and security means wealth, and wealth
+leads to power. The American race--if we can speak of such a thing--is
+a race of land-seizers and land-exploiters. The sinister prominence of
+the lawyer in American life, even on the frontier, from the beginning,
+was due to the innumerable wrangles about land-grants and land-claims.
+The entire subdual of the American continent by the whites, which took
+barely fifty years to accomplish, was accompanied by such a waste of
+the public domain as has been rarely paralleled in history. It is not
+for nothing that America has been referred to over and over again in
+the words of its orators and writers as “the land of promise,” “land of
+the Pilgrim’s pride,” “land of the free and home of the brave,” “the
+land of to-morrow.” One meets with something of the same sort for the
+first time in the glowing accounts of Columbus and the earliest Spanish
+explorers.
+
+The sensation which inspired these accounts that in America one finds
+a fabulous and unexplored region of wealth, can still be experienced
+by almost anyone making a voyage westward across the Atlantic. Owing
+to the fact that the prevailing winds are westerly and that the Gulf
+Stream runs east, the journey to this day, even under modern steamer
+conditions, is frequently more rough and productive of discomfort than
+the passage from America to Europe. The westward coasts of Europe drop
+abruptly to the sea in great cliffs; the craggy coast of Cornwall, the
+sombre cliffs of Ireland, the great headlands of Portugal and Spain.
+Beyond that, there is nothing but waves and wind--wind always opposing
+further progress. And America does not make its presence known, until
+just before one reaches it. Two days before New York one encounters the
+Gulf Stream, that strange region of low-lying clouds, of heavy rain
+squalls, of intensely dark blue seas lifting and falling under crowns
+of heavy white foam. These seas are weedy, and the gulls become more
+frequent here, so that the whole has an effect of being a No Man’s
+Land of fantasy, a world before the creation gave bounds to chaos, a
+region where nothing is living except the ship. Then one comes out of
+the Gulf Stream into greyer, shoal water. All the rest of the way lies
+through shoals--long stretches of the sea more often shrouded in fog
+than shaken by storms, flat, unstirring, that invite one ever further
+and further onward. Europe is cut off, once and for all. The land--the
+unknown land--is taking possession of us. And the first thing one sees
+of this strange unknown region beyond Europe is a long empty sandbank,
+inviting one further still.
+
+On the other hand, in travelling towards Russia, one has the impression
+that the land itself, like the ocean on the trans-Atlantic voyage,
+will never really come to an end. Long before one has finished rolling
+over the monotonous Polish plain, Europe is left behind. The endless
+distances, the sombre pine woods, the starveling villages, the scraggy
+fields, simply succeed one the other. Before such a landscape one
+has the fear of being cut off--of not being able ever to return to
+habitable scenes. Napoleon must have faced such a feeling when he
+hesitated on almost every stage of his journey to Moscow before going
+on; and even when one has gone on and crossed the frontier, the plain
+is still the same, the desolation and loneliness are only a little
+more intense. There is no Russia, nothing but a frightful distance
+of wilderness left behind which we must recross in order to find the
+social compactness of Europe. One is sick of land, sick of these
+endless horizons long before reaching Moscow, where at last one finds
+Russia. And when one reaches Russia at last, the mysterious face of the
+country is hidden behind the red walls of the Kremlin.
+
+The passion for land then which made America what it is, is not the
+same passion that has made Russia what it is. Before the monotony
+of Russia the educated Russian shrugs his shoulders, the uneducated
+peasant spits. There is nothing here of the enthusiasm with which each
+American tells you excitedly that his is “God’s own country.” Nothing
+at all. The Russian is far more likely to assure you that his is “a
+dark people” living in “an unhappy country.” The passion that moves the
+Russian is at bottom something equally simple, and explicable, as the
+passion that moves the American. It has different psychological roots,
+and a different manifestation in form. But it isolates itself just as
+completely from Europe as the American identification of land and
+prosperity.
+
+The Russian craves for power. This is comprehensible when one
+understands that Russia, with her enormous population, lay helpless and
+powerless under the Tartar invasion from the twelfth century till the
+sixteenth, when Ivan the Great and his successor, Ivan the Terrible,
+took the first steps towards independence, and consolidation. And even
+after that time, long after Russia had become a unified whole under
+the sole sway of Moscow, there were very few with power sufficient to
+keep this unity together. This is the true significance of the “time
+of troubles” that followed Ivan the Terrible’s end. His remaining
+legitimate son, a minor, was mentally incapable of rule; the choice of
+the leading nobles, Boris Godunov, was strong and capable, but could
+not prevail against the idea--rooted in the hearts of the people--that
+the power of the Czar should descend in unbroken succession from one
+anointed sovereign to the other. It was easy for a perfectly obscure
+man to impersonate the legitimate heir (who was actually dead), obtain
+Polish support, and finally by bargaining with the other nobles, who
+were jealous of Boris, make himself Czar. The subsequent history of the
+next twenty years reads like a nightmare. A succession of pretenders
+to the throne uprose, in each case giving out that they were sons,
+legitimate or illegitimate, of Ivan; and anarchy and disruption grew
+so rapidly that in the end in Moscow itself the nobles took two sides,
+now upholding one party, now the other. Only the intervention of the
+Church itself--at that time and for long later revered by the peasant
+and noble alike as being the one source of supernatural and united
+power,--saved the country’s independence, and allowed the Romanov line
+to ascend the throne. The same troubles broke out after Peter the
+Great’s reign. Having put his only legitimate heir to death, Peter
+announced that on each successive Czar after his time devolved the duty
+of naming his own successor. But he himself died before he did so.
+The result was a fresh series of impersonations, and more disorder,
+which rose to a climax in Catherine’s reign, in the peasant rebellion
+of Pugachev, a Cossack, who gave out that he was the legitimate Czar,
+the husband murdered by Catherine’s orders, and moreover gave names of
+well-known courtiers to his peasant officers.
+
+Thus, for over two centuries and a half, from the time when Ivan the
+Great assumed the title of Czar of all the Russias at Moscow, down
+to the time of Peter the Great, the idea had grown and spread in the
+Russian mind that security, order, life and happiness itself were
+dependent on the maintenance of power. This power was spiritual in
+its essence; power to command and to be able to enforce one’s command.
+That explains why successive pretenders to the throne, after Peter
+the Great’s time, were at pains to have their cause blessed by some
+prominent prelate of the “Old Believers,” the anti-reform party which
+Peter himself had driven from the official Church, and which still
+persisted despite his edicts. It also explains why in every Russian
+house, before the Revolution, there was always to be found a shelf
+containing icons. It is not that the Russian is more superstitious
+than other people. It is simply because the saints are above all
+miracle-workers. They have, it is felt, supernatural powers. They and
+they alone can protect the sacred centre of the hearth from external
+disorder. After the Revolution, when the saints were shown to be
+powerless, the icons were taken down, and portraits of Lenin took
+their place. The Russian, whether peasant or noble, reactionary or
+revolutionary, seeks above all to command respect--and only the man
+with unlimited power can do this, in his eyes. The hero of Dostoevsky’s
+“Memoirs from the Underground” is illuminating in this respect. He is
+ready to reject the offer of any Utopia, unless he is given the liberty
+of “putting out his tongue at it,” and prefers to live in a hencoop
+instead. The American would make no such mistake. He would live loyally
+in the Utopia or the hencoop provided he were given a million dollars
+or its equivalent in steel-works, oil or water power leases.
+
+It may perhaps be argued that the American of the present day has not
+the same passion for land-exploitation that his forbears had, but is
+apt, as in the above example, to lay stress on the importance of making
+money, of doing “big business.” This, however, is due less to any
+transformation of his original impulse than to the prevailing effect of
+the industrial system. Stocks, bonds, and factories have simply become
+substitutes for the broad acres of undeveloped fertility that his
+forefathers knew. Despite them, few Americans continue to live in the
+homes that their ancestors built. They are migrants, seeking something
+else. What they seek is a place where they can really feel at home, and
+this they cannot find without liberty and prosperity. Of that liberty
+and prosperity an individual domain is the actual symbol. It is not for
+nothing that so many wealthy Americans acquire old estates in Europe.
+Here they can for the first time feel that they are part of a settled
+land-tradition. They belong somewhere; they have a home, not simply
+a piece of soil only differentiated from the surrounding prairie by
+having a house on it. They are henceforth free to indulge their passion
+for possession to the utmost.
+
+Power, then, means land, wealth, possessions to the American: to the
+Russian it means simply absolute and arbitrary freedom to do as he
+pleases. That is the psychological attitude that rules over the average
+man in both cases. The average American believes himself to be a
+product of “God’s own country” and only seeks an opportunity to prove
+it; the average Russian believes himself accursed by fate and thwarted
+by life, but is determined to make others respect his arbitrary whim.
+And the intellectuals only differ from the average by the degree to
+which they pursue these aims. It is impossible to show fully how this
+is so without anticipating matter that, properly speaking, belongs to
+another section of this study. We may however take two important and
+highly illuminating examples to illustrate our thesis.
+
+
+3
+
+Let us take the case of the completely uprooted Russian and the
+completely uprooted American. In such a case, if the obsession of
+the two minds were towards power and land as we have just stated, we
+should normally expect this obsession to be even more evident than it
+is in the case of the stay-at-homes. The nineteenth century provided
+two notable examples of this type, in the cases of Turgenev and Henry
+James. Here were two men of high intelligence and artistic capacity who
+spent their lives out of their respective countries. Since they were
+nearly contemporaries (though Turgenev was the elder) and moneyed men
+to boot, they practically came under the influence of the same type and
+period of European civilisation; and there is also a close kinship in
+their art, Turgenev having spent his life in refining upon the lyrical
+realism of Gogol, while Henry James spent his in refining upon the
+psychological realism of Hawthorne. Yet if we examine their careers
+there is nothing that presents a greater contrast.
+
+The motive that guided Henry James was a search for a fatherland.
+He sought deliberately to build himself into the scheme of social
+relationships offered him by the country of his choice, which was
+England. In order to satisfy this passion for possessing a country, he
+set himself the task of assimilating the past of England, of which he
+knew little, and forgetting the past of America, of which he knew much.
+The result was that he fell into a cosmopolitanism which was neither
+English nor American; which was intensely artificial since it was the
+result not of the working of social, moral or religious factors, but
+of an æsthetic parasitism. Since James was a highly conscientious
+artist, he could not help making the most of this material, but its
+indecisiveness, its detachment from the cruder but more essential
+issues of life gradually sapped the source of the power with which he
+presented it. Even the common kinship of language which had perhaps
+chiefly appealed to him in taking up his residence in England, became
+a treacherous double-edged weapon, to be handled gingerly, rather than
+as an ally in this struggle. It has been said that Thomas Hardy once
+remarked sardonically that Henry James when he wrote about Washington
+Square wrote well, but that when he wrote about England, “did not
+know the difference between a rectory and a parish.” James himself
+probably felt this, and it explains his increasing apologeticalness,
+his increasing love of qualification, which makes his later style so
+much of a painful maze and puzzle. In the search for a country--a
+country that could never be totally his and yet must be made his--he
+sacrificed everything: vigour and directness, independence of judgment,
+breadth of vision, even his own life. The desire to become part of
+England became the ruling passion of Henry James’ life; it became so
+engrossing as to wipe out of his mind all earthly love affairs, and to
+assume the proportions of a grand passion, pursued with the ardor of a
+specialist. He attained his end, but only to die.
+
+Turgenev did not go in this direction; he renewed by visits his own
+sense of the physical appearance, the psychological reality of Russia.
+But he sought just as persistently for some power greater than Russia
+to which he might give himself. Ardently believing in freedom, liberal
+in mind and in politics, he spent most of his life in revolt against
+the crudeness and crassness of the Russian world he had known; nor was
+he able to accept at its face value what the European State was ready
+to put into its place, as his pamphlet, “The Execution of Troppmann”
+bears witness. The only power, it seemed to him, was in the detached
+individual; and this drew the aristocratic landowner Turgenev towards
+the nihilists and the anarchists. He was the first to draw the portrait
+of a nihilist in his novel, “Fathers and Sons.” This conclusion too
+with its unsentimental realism, shocked Turgenev’s own conscience; with
+the result that he became the great portrayer of indecisive souls, of
+“superfluous men,” of hesitating, Hamlet-like, impotent characters
+to be found in the whole range of Russian literature. His complete
+erotic enslavement to the singer, Pauline Viardot, only increased
+this tendency. Here was a power that at least was greater than his.
+In his old age, in the “Dream-Tales” and “Poems in Prose,” Turgenev
+became a confirmed pessimist, feeling that all power lay totally beyond
+man’s grasp, in the divine indifference of nature and fate. Shortly
+after a final visit to Russia, during which he was applauded by the
+cosmopolitan literary salons, with their sentimental liberalism, but
+critically attacked by the most powerful Russian writers of his own
+generation, Turgenev died.
+
+There are other points of parallelism between these two remarkable
+figures; such, for example, as the curious preference both displayed
+for female characters. But enough has been said to show that the
+power-land antithesis, which is here set down as the key to the
+Russian and American character persists even in the most refined,
+uprooted and highly subtle specimens of the race. If it persists in
+these, what must its strength be in the most native and elemental
+specimens? To find this question answered, the reader must turn to a
+later section of this study, where the antithesis will be more fully
+discussed in the works of Tolstoy and Whitman, Melville and Dostoevsky.
+Meanwhile it is sufficient to note once again that this antithesis
+is, in fact, a likeness. What the American and the Russian both seek
+is essentially freedom to do what they like--the freedom of which the
+American Jefferson wrote when he said the human being mostly wants to
+be let alone. The Russian seeks this freedom by means of attempting
+to despotically impose himself upon others; the American by means of
+acquiring the wealth or the estate that will enable him to set himself
+apart from his neighbours. The outer means only are different; the
+tendencies in their inner nature are essentially the same, springing
+as they do from an inner revolt against the modified “freedom in
+restraint” discovered and practised in Europe.
+
+
+4
+
+Before quitting this side of our subject it may be worth while to
+discuss one of the most notable examples of a revolter against this
+European “freedom in restraint” which America has produced. I refer
+not to Whitman, who indeed is an extreme though later and more logical
+example, but to Emerson. For Emerson was the pioneer in the path that
+Thoreau and Whitman later followed, and the more scholarly bent of his
+mind, together with the philosophical tinge he was able to throw over
+his doctrine, make of him a figure of supreme importance in American
+literature. There is no parallel to Emerson in Russian literature, no
+such single figure as he to paradoxically span the whole field of
+thought and give tone and direction to all that followed. For as he was
+on the one side pantheist mystic, upholding a contemplative ideal very
+different from the feverish pioneer effort on every side about him,
+so he was on the other side equally practical Yankee, foreshadowing
+the “practical truth” of the Pragmatists, and preferring activity to
+thought.
+
+The basis of his doctrine might be described in these words from the
+longer of his two essays on “Nature”: “Why should not we also enjoy
+an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry
+and philosophy out of insight, not of tradition, and a religion by
+revelation to us?... The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and
+flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us
+demand our own works and laws and worship.”
+
+It must be noted that these “works and laws and worship” were all to be
+derived afresh from nature by the Americans who--by the simple accident
+of transporting themselves into a new and undeveloped country--were
+suddenly going to find them out for themselves, without external help
+from the past. Emerson’s own attitude towards the past is highly
+paradoxical. In one breath, he admits that the past contains much
+that is of value: Plato, and Jesus and other “representative men.”
+But in the next, he repudiates utterly the lesson of the past and
+declares the measure of history to be the ordinary man. Why? Because
+the Americans were individualist pioneers, and far from toning down
+their individualism, Emerson would make it still more acute. His chief
+ethical doctrine is self-reliance to the uttermost. And self-reliance
+to him meant in reality reliance on nature and external brute fact, as
+it must in every pioneer and rapidly-developing community. In other
+words, Emerson’s theory logically meant that the backwoodsman was
+equally if not more important to the scheme of things than the sage,
+the poet, and the scholar. It is true that Emerson tried to save his
+own position as one of the best read men in America, by positing in
+everyone’s breast a vague, mystical, and rather woolly “oversoul,”
+which at its appropriate time and place would bend down and whisper in
+the vulgarest being’s ear how much akin he was to Socrates or Marcus
+Aurelius. But this check on his favourite self-reliance is altogether
+the weakest and least important part of Emerson’s teaching and for its
+obscurantism deserves to be ranked along with the infantile mystery
+mongering of American pseudo-oriental cults and secret societies.
+
+In his soberer moments, Emerson did indeed realize that there were two
+laws abroad in this world: the “law for man and the law for thing” and
+that while the “law for thing” had much the best of it, in practical
+affairs, it was destructive of human worth and dignity in the long
+run. But unfortunately, he never decided in his own mind whether to
+give his support to human dignity, or to the “law for thing” which was
+having its own way in the America of which he wrote. So he salved his
+conscience by supposing that nature would help his fellow-countrymen
+to find their own laws. But so far as nature is concerned, man is
+probably of less importance, certainly of far less permanence, than the
+tree that stands in the midst of the field and sucks its life strength
+directly from the bosom of the earth and the oceanic vastness of the
+air. But man comes and cuts down the tree to build himself a cabin, and
+when he has built it makes a law of a sort which nature never knew, to
+the effect that no one who crosses its threshold shall ever come armed
+to kill him, and that the woman who sleeps with him on its wolf-pelt
+bed for one night shall remain to serve him and his needs both night
+and day. That is the law for the man, and it goes on, whether the wind
+that rocked the tree, lays flat the cabin, or the earth that suckled it
+swallows it up. Yet Emerson fondly supposed that some wonderful new
+law could be made by simply transporting man out of a peasant’s cottage
+that had stood for centuries in Europe, and giving him a log hut in the
+wilderness. He flattered the vanity of the Americans, by telling them
+that their prosperous growth would not only develop the body but the
+soul. It was a false theory, doing incalculable harm.
+
+Emerson’s philosophy was entirely a philosophy for pioneers and with
+the vanishing of the pioneer type its influence and the influence
+of the vague mystical land-hunger of the frontier--that marvellous
+realm where wonderful things were always to be done, but never
+accomplished--began to diminish in American life. Yet with its
+insistence on individual self-reliance and on possession, Emerson
+struck the keynote of the American philosophy of to-day with its
+“go-getter” shrewdness, its refrain of “getting as much as you can
+and giving as little as you can,” its assumption of superiority based
+on individual cunning, its vague and pernicious subsidiary hankering
+for what is mysterious and occult and esoteric, whereby its crudeness
+is leavened. All this America owes to one man, to Emerson, and it is
+obvious that we must forgive this man the enormous damage he did by
+recollecting continually, how just before his day, America had passed
+through the most inchoate period of her national development, a period
+of democratic chaos, out of which neither an intelligent institution
+nor an organized political state could have evolved had it not been for
+the conservative moneyed classes. Let us also remember that Emerson, in
+his private capacity, loved chiefly to appear as a scholar, in order to
+distinguish himself from the community; much as Tolstoy, in his desire
+to set himself apart, loved to pose as a peasant and wear birch-bark
+shoes.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+
+Nothing is more illuminating of the contrasted power-land psychology
+prevailing in Russia and America than the attitude taken up by both
+nations in regard to the difficult and insistent problem of the
+Jews. Since the beginning of Christianity, the Jews have been both
+powerless and landless; whether in their dispersal they have aimed
+at reattaining power or at reattaining land is a question that at
+first sight seems almost impossible to answer. A certain amount of
+knowledge of Jewish social conditions is necessary before we can even
+begin to find the reply. The great Dispersal, following upon the fall
+of Jerusalem, led the rabbis who thereby became in fact as well as in
+theory, the heads of the people, to concentrate the attention of their
+fellow-religionists on one point; a thorough understanding and detailed
+obedience to the Law. The compilation of the Talmud, that strange
+heterogeneous commentary, was the immediate result. As regards the
+possession of land, all hopes that the Jew might have in that respect
+were relegated to the distant future, when the Holy Land, by some
+miracle, would be restored to him. The teaching of the rabbis was,
+that to maintain his status as a Jew, every member of the community
+must, above all, observe the law in the minutest particulars; beyond
+this, he could hold any political creed he liked. Jehovah would restore
+Zion to him in due time without his making an effort to attain it.
+
+The later development of Judaism has in the main followed out this
+principle. Zionism as a political faith has never been highly popular
+amongst better-class Jews, and may be said to appeal mostly to those
+who are least patient of the moral and intellectual despotism forged
+by the rabbi-class throughout the Middle Ages to maintain their order.
+Zionism often goes hand in hand with dangerously unorthodox political
+and religious theory. It appeals more to the Chassid mystic, than to
+the orthodox rationalist. The Jews who survived the Dispersal and the
+early persecutions of the Romans, tended continually to become more
+and more members of large city populations, handcraftsmen, traders, or
+bankers, on the eve of the Middle Ages. During that period, the process
+of making the Jews a parasitic, financial class, was accelerated. The
+one trade that the Middle Ages left to them was that of jeweller or
+money-lender. Progressive persecution, the need to keep all wealth in
+movable form, the eternal migration from one country to another, more
+and more concentrated the mind of the race on movable capital as a
+source of power. Except for a few Ghettos, contemptuously permitted,
+the Jew had no land.
+
+The history of the Jews in Russia properly begins with Catherine’s
+partition of Poland and the consequent establishment of the Pale
+of Settlement in 1791. From that time on it has been a tale of
+uninterrupted oppression and persecution. This oppression and
+persecution was carried to fantastic lengths not only by the Czars
+themselves but still more by their subjects. Pogroms were openly
+applied to the unfortunate Jews by successive governments under
+Alexander III and Nicholas II. It is now generally admitted that
+these attacks were carried out by the armed population, with the open
+connivance and aid of police officers. The military authorities in many
+cases unsuccessfully protested against the inflammatory pamphlets,
+underground propaganda, and other methods employed by the police
+and the Ministry of the Interior to bring these massacres about.
+Pogroms were, therefore, though encouraged from above, unmistakably
+mob-movements and as such, in the overcrowded Jewish Pale, highly
+popular. They corresponded to something essential in the character
+of the Russian people themselves--an intense hatred and suspicion of
+the Jew, combined with a desire to seek a scapegoat for intolerable
+conditions of taxation and oppression.[1]
+
+This suspicion arose undoubtedly through fear of the power the Jewish
+race might possess if allowed to live and flourish in impunity.
+The talk of “ritual murder” which motivated many pogroms was but a
+symptom of this underlying belief common to the illiterate Russian
+masses that the Jew had some hypnotic magic ability that set him apart
+from other men. The fact that the Jews were highly literate, that
+they frequently adopted the profession of doctors, money-lenders, or
+something analogous--requiring brain work--struck the Russian peasant
+as peculiar. His favourite receptacle of mystic power was the orthodox
+Church, and above the Church the Czar, whom the Church alone could
+sanctify. The Jew rejected the Church; in consequence, the Czar had
+confined him in the Pale, and by successive edicts, forbidden him even
+to attend the universities and obtain an education. The reason must be
+that the Jew had some power greater than the Czar, the church, and even
+God. He must be in fact, an ally of Satan. The pogrom followed as a
+matter of course, and the most intense nationalism became allied with
+the most rabid anti-Semitism.
+
+When the régime of the Czars collapsed in the Revolution of 1917,
+and the Bolsheviks came into power, it was noted by many that among
+these Bolsheviks were several that were Jews. That Lenin himself was
+a Jew--adopted by a family of provincial nobles to take the place
+of a son lost in infancy--became one of the legends soon spread by
+enemies of the new régime. There was however no evidence of this, and
+the Jewish members of the new political party into whose hands Russia
+fell, were not less hostile to Judaism in the orthodox sense than to
+any other religion. And this naturally so, for the rabbis had again and
+again insisted that only God Himself had the power and the ability to
+deliver His people, and restore their sway. The later development of
+the Bolshevik revolution has shown once again that the Russian people
+have an instinctive hostility to everything Jewish in tone. The Jewish
+members of the Soviet Council have been progressively eliminated, or
+passed over; so that in Russia to-day the influence of Jewish ideas
+is less than it ever was. Even Marx, whose theories gave Lenin his
+impetus, is considered to-day less important than Lenin; and there
+is growing an increased cult for Darwin and Ford rather than Marx
+within the bosom of the Bolshevik party. The Bolshevik movement has
+been in its essence, the development of an heretical religious faith,
+based on the creed of Western naturalism and utilitarianism of the
+Darwin-Herbert Spencer type. As such it is equally hostile to orthodox
+Christianity or to orthodox Judaism.
+
+
+2
+
+The attitude of the American colonies towards the Jewish emigrants who
+came to them was the very reverse of this. From the first settlements
+of Jews in Newport, Charleston, Savannah, New York, these exiles were
+allowed to take positions of honor and affluence. There has never been
+a Ghetto in American life, and the only Ghettos that exist have been
+created fairly recently by housing conditions and by the overcrowding
+of some of the great Eastern cities. The Jews were among the most
+prominent supporters of the American Revolution itself; and there
+is irony as well as illumination in the fact that the one man who
+may be said with truth to have founded the Federal Union, Alexander
+Hamilton, was possibly half a Jew.[2] The fact that America supplied
+a land of promise to the Jew, from the days when Cromwell first tried
+toleration down to the present, has been tacitly admitted by the
+increasing tide of Jewish emigration that has gone on from 1660 down
+to the present day. The one thing that has possibly restrained it has
+been the fact that the Jews are no longer fitted for an agricultural
+life, but are apt to become members of those large-town mobs which
+Jefferson and the other founders of the Republic so profoundly hated,
+and which now represent so large a proportion of American society. A
+few attempts were made by the colonies at the beginning to keep the
+franchise from the Jews; but apart from that fact, there has been no
+organised opposition to Jewish influence on the part of any class of
+the community down to the close of the Great War.
+
+The result is that the Jews, indifferent to land, have concentrated
+more and more on the element which the early American neglected: the
+element of power. The uprise of the Jewish power in America took
+place during the great change from agricultural to industrial life
+that coincided with the Civil War and which developed into the famous
+“gilded age” of the seventies. During that period the Jewish community
+in the New World split into two classes. The upper class became those
+who, through the power conferred on them by wealth, grew more and more
+closely allied to the dominant financier class, and became thereby more
+and more closely American, abandoning the two qualities that had made
+them specifically Jewish: the intense particularism of their creed
+which had made them consider themselves a race set apart by God, and
+the not less intense determination to remain a separate nation though
+exiled and scattered among other nations. The lower class, increasing
+at a great rate after 1880, when Alexander III began his long reign
+of oppression in Russia, brought with them to America nothing but an
+ingrown determination to stay what they were: and it is only among them
+that anywhere in America to-day one can find that “mystic quality” that
+in the words of Waldo Frank, makes the Jew what he is, and which once
+lost, destroys his Judaism.
+
+The Reform Movement in Judaism, as a double attack on the intolerant
+particularism of the Jewish faith as the one faith blessed by God,
+and on the sentiment of Jewish nationalism alike, owes its success
+entirely to the support given by American rabbis in 1885. The greater
+part of the wealth of the American Jewish community has gone to the
+support of Reform Judaism. That this form of the Jewish faith is merely
+a transition stage, and unsatisfying after all to the human desire to
+live within the ordered limits of an absolute faith, which the Jews
+have felt perhaps more profoundly than any other people, is shown
+by the drift of many intelligent and unworldly-minded adherents of
+reformed Jews out of their faith into Christian Science, theosophy, or
+any one of the dozens of fantastic cults that flourish in America. The
+only thing that Reform Judaism has given the American Jew is a feeling
+that his forefathers were on the wrong track, not that he is on the
+right one. When his faith becomes merely a local peculiarity, to be
+tolerated as any other local peculiarity is tolerated, and no longer
+_the_ faith, sole, absolute, and eternal; when his citizenship becomes
+not a question of kingship in Zion but of possessing a vote and paying
+taxes to the latest corrupt political gang that happens to be governing
+America, then the Jew is alike homeless and rudderless, an atom in the
+modern chaos. He has no longer unified personality nor spiritual power
+of any kind. He is only a cog in an immense machine that does not move
+in any direction, but which simply goes around and around, grinding
+human lives and hopes to dust in the process.
+
+The paradox of American Judaism is that America, by liberating the
+Jew, has completely destroyed him. The paradox of Russian Judaism is
+that Russia by oppressing the Jew, has only intensified his original
+character. Zionism appeals to the Russian Jew mainly, and it is largely
+through the support of Russian Jewish colonisation that Zionism is now
+being tried out in Palestine. The Russian Jew in poverty has kept his
+legends, his folk poetry, his contact with a mystic patrimony given
+him by Moses. Moreover, the Russian revolution, with its consequent
+liberation of the Jew from the old constraint, has enriched Russian
+literature with a new strain of Jewish genius, reflected alike in
+such works as Ansky’s “Dybbuk” and Babel’s “Horse Army.” The American
+Jew on the other hand, to the degree that he becomes more wealthy and
+powerful, becomes less intellectual, and usually pretends to despise
+his own people. One finds dozens of Americans who quite obviously are
+racially of the Semitic type, and who socially and religiously are at
+but one remove from the faith of the Ghetto, ready to assert their
+anti-Semitism. And even among those who still retain some vestiges of
+respect for the attitude of their forefathers, one finds an increasing
+disposition to mingle in the ranks of Gentile society, and to handle
+facetiously the topic of their own race and religion, as if it
+represented only a passing craze of the remote past, which they have
+fortunately outgrown. As regards imagination, they tend increasingly to
+respect the shibboleths of American business life.
+
+
+3
+
+The attitude of the average American, the “one hundred per center”
+of the middle west and the industrial east, who is and must remain
+the backbone of America culturally and socially, towards the Jewish
+phenomenon, has considerably varied during the most recent years. To
+this average individual nothing has mattered since the Civil War, so
+long as the country remained prosperous. So long as his land bore
+“bumper crops,” capable of being sold at high prices, so long as the
+“melting pot,” by laying the stress on the Jew’s adaptability, went on
+functioning properly, and transforming mediæval mystics and fanatics
+into modern business men, all was well; no thinking about the future
+was necessary. It is natural to the American temperament--a “free
+soil” temperament long before Lincoln’s day--having linked up land and
+liberty as it has done, not to wish to worry about the future, not to
+do any more thinking than is absolutely necessary. Thinking is indeed
+dangerous. It may lead to a suspicion that the Revolution was a mistake
+and that the Constitution was only a new form of tyranny. America’s
+awakening in this respect to a whole world of intimate problems that
+she must settle, came for the most part, only after President Wilson
+told his people that they must enter the World War. And then America
+suddenly realised that the Jews had a great deal of power as well as
+a great deal of cleverness, and were likely to use both for ends that
+were far from being “one hundred per cent” American.
+
+The resultant wave of anti-Semitism that swept the United States
+was something practically unique in American history. There had
+been before outbreaks of anti-Jewish feeling, notably in some of
+the Southern States, but nothing of this nationwide character. From
+mob-outrages engineered by the revived Ku Klux Klan to the declaration
+of lofty Harvard University that it proposed to limit the number of
+Jewish students, the campaign of hatred swept the country for a few
+months, and then dissolved in a gale of laughter. It represented
+nothing fundamental to the American character and temperament. It
+undoubtedly arose from a feeling of suspicion that the cunning Jew
+might intellectually be opposed to the American Constitution, which
+is considered as the sacrosanct basis of American faith, much as the
+Egyptian “Book of the Dead” was considered the sacrosanct basis of
+Egyptian faith. Moreover, the Jew might secretly be in sympathy with
+some of the dangerous anarchistic or other radical doctrines that had
+recently come into such prominence, thanks to America’s deep-rooted
+and insuperable objection to the war. The coming and passing of this
+momentary wave of anti-Semitic sentiment coincided curiously in date
+and duration with the period during which Russia, having cast off her
+old values and not yet settled in her new ones, elevated many Jews,
+who happened to be members of the victorious Communist party, to power.
+
+
+4
+
+The case is quite different when we come to the Catholics. Successive
+Russian sovereigns from Catherine the Great who offered asylum to the
+expelled Jesuits, down to the present day have shown partiality to
+the Catholic faith; and to this day the Bolsheviks, in their war on
+religion, have left the Catholic church largely undisturbed, hoping
+perhaps to gain recruits to atheism out of the conflict between the
+rival sects of Catholic and Orthodox.[3] This toleration of Catholicism
+was formerly partly due to the fact that in Poland and Livonia, the
+Czar ruled over thousands of Catholics; partly to the law that forbade
+anyone born in the Orthodox faith to become a convert, on penalty of
+exile and loss of estate. But in America a passionately intolerant
+anti-Catholic feeling has existed since, at least, the New England
+Colonies opposed James II and his nominee, Andros, and has known
+numerous revivals since the “Native American” movement began opposing
+the extension of the franchise to the Irish immigrant back in the
+thirties. Economically and socially it has persisted, and even spread
+from New England to the south and west. This anti-Catholic feeling
+provides the basic strength of the recent post-war revival of the Ku
+Klux Klan. And during the period while this book was being written, its
+strength was again successfully tested in an important presidential
+contest.
+
+The fundamental American feeling about Catholicism is that it
+forms, politically an _imperium in imperio_; that by its insistence
+on parochial schools, instead of the usual public schools, by its
+establishment of convents, monasteries, church-owned foundations,
+everywhere, it becomes an extra-political power, secret in its methods,
+ready to invade the United States from within and seize the better
+part of her domain. This belief (whether it has any foundation in fact
+or not is not material to this inquiry) has been largely strengthened
+by the extraordinary solidarity of the Catholic communities in the
+industrial regions, composed as they are, mainly of toiling foreigners;
+and by the redoubtable power of ecclesiasticisms further southward, in
+Mexico. Whether this feeling about the Catholic church is destined to
+disappear--now that Mexico has an anti-clerical government, and even
+the Vatican itself has taken on a Republican tone--is, for the moment,
+uncertain; but there is no possibility of writing an intelligent
+history of America without reference to its existence. A profound
+distrust of Catholicism as a secret body subversive of Americanism
+has again and again shown itself to be a mainspring of American
+middle-class action. It explains a very great deal that is highly
+popular in America, from the flourishing condition of freemasonry and
+other semi-secret societies, down to the zeal for closing the saloons,
+which were favourite meeting places for that purely Irish and Catholic
+creation, the ward politicians. Now and again, as in the “Native
+American” movement above mentioned, the later “Know-Nothing” movement,
+the cry “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” the revived Ku Klux Klan, the
+opposition to Governor Smith, it shows itself openly in the field of
+political life.
+
+The complete reason for the toleration of Catholicism under Czar and
+Bolshevik alike, in Russia, in the very heart of a community that
+in numbers at least has been openly the chief rampart of Eastern
+Orthodoxy for centuries, and for the mistrust of the same faith
+shown in America, despite the fact that America can boast of a large
+percentage of Catholics, can only be discovered by examining more
+fully the underlying attitude of the Russian and the American to all
+religion. It suffices to say here that, to the American, Republicanism,
+that is to say the liberty gained by local prosperity and by complete
+ownership of one’s own property, is more important than any other form
+of religion; while under successive Russian governments, Autocracy,
+rooted in communal feeling, and in unworldly faith, has since the time
+of Peter the Great at least, directed religion towards the ends it
+proposed for itself. It is the considered opinion of most intelligent
+observers that the Bolshevik government, in this respect, has acted
+precisely as the governments that preceded it. It has warped religion
+to its own ends; or, rather, it has created an altogether new religion
+out of a few phrases of Marx and the life and example of Lenin. It is a
+mummified body--Lenin from his mausoleum in the Red Square--that rules
+Russia to-day. After all, did he not wear a peasant’s cap, and did
+he not order electric light to be extended to every village, besides
+giving the common workman bread, peace, and liberty? The cult of Lenin
+as a new saint, or rather as a new Messiah, has some curious sides.
+But the most curious side of all is to note how little distinguishes
+this figure from the celebrated figure of Christ wandering as “a serf
+throughout the Russian land, blessing it,” that so much inspired the
+early Slavophils. Meantime the Central Presidium of the Soviet--the
+new Autocrats of Russia--having achieved this version of Orthodoxy,
+uses its power to persecute successfully the followers of every former
+religion.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+
+There is a certain obvious parallel between religion in North America
+and religion in Russia, because both countries are, and have been, for
+centuries, fundamentally Christian. Yet the dissimilarities on the face
+of it, are so manifest that it might seem to a visitor from another
+planet that the religious life of the two countries sprang from sources
+as opposed as the religion, let us say, of Ancient Egypt and Ancient
+Assyria. What American Christianity accepts, Russian Christianity
+rejects, and vice versa.
+
+In both lands, Christianity came from without, and was an entirely
+foreign creed to the animism practised by the natives before its
+advent. But where American Christianity emerged from what has been
+called Protestantism, that is to say the right of the individual
+to decide on questions of faith for himself, Russian religion came
+from the Orthodoxy of the Byzantine church, with its submission of
+the individual intelligence to a super-personal, wonder-working
+power transmitted by consecration from patriarch to patriarch. The
+differences in form and outward observance all spring from an inner
+difference in psychological attitude. To the American, the soul of
+the individual believer is alone important, and his salvation is the
+one desirable aim; to the Russian the communion of believers is alone
+important, and the individual soul only retains his hold on salvation
+by virtue of his complete adherence and loyalty to it. Consequently
+in America, religion exalts the moral standard of the individual good
+life; in Russia it upholds the spiritual standard of the communal
+believing life. The one exalts conduct, the other faith.
+
+It has not escaped the notice of shrewd historians that the American
+makes a constant attempt to prove that his great men were intensely
+moral and respectable in character. Washington is exalted above
+Jefferson on the basis of a few legends like that of the cherry tree
+or the other story, not less unhistorical, to the effect that the
+great Revolutionary leader prayed at Valley Forge. Paine, who by his
+inspired polemic probably did more to precipitate the Revolution than
+any other publicist of the time, is tacitly ignored as being “a dirty
+little atheist.” Recently, attempts have been made to show that Lincoln
+was exaltedly religious; attempts that rest on exceedingly flimsy
+foundations. And if Woodrow Wilson maintains any favour in America, it
+will be rather because of his unbending Presbyterianism than because
+of his eminent ability as a statesman. It is because Roosevelt, his
+great rival, upheld the motto of “Fear God and take your own part” and
+led the life of the normal husband and father, that he is immensely
+popular among millions of his fellow-countrymen to-day.
+
+The Russians go to the exactly opposite extreme. Their heroes are
+precisely those whose lives were heroic examples of disregard of moral
+conduct. Ivan the Terrible, blood-soaked, sensual, and incapable of
+achieving any faith beyond the basest superstition; Peter the Great,
+mocking the church-ceremonies with drunken parody, making and unmaking
+patriarchs, the accursed Antichrist of the Old Believers; Pugachev,
+the outlaw who despoiled nobles and monasteries alike; Tolstoy, the
+great heretic and excommunicate, such are the sort of men Russia
+unconsciously honours. Against them the Church can put nothing in the
+field but a handful of monks and thaumaturgists.
+
+That morals can be separated from faith has been consistently denied
+throughout the history of European Christianity, by some of the most
+intelligent men that European Christianity has produced. Whether this
+denial is valid or not, there can be no doubt that Nature in itself is
+morally indifferent, just as it is æsthetically indifferent. One can,
+unfortunately, believe in life without believing in any specific moral
+code; and the result is that what we call Christianity has been divided
+into warring sects, those that exalt the observance of the feasts and
+sacraments prescribed by the Church above moral discipline, and those
+that exalt the achievement of lofty moral character above all feasts
+and ceremonies. The former in the main, is the way taken by Russia;
+the latter the way taken by America. In Russia one asks first whether
+so-and-so is a believer or an atheist; in America whether so-and-so is
+or is not “a good man.”
+
+
+2
+
+Every religious system (not excluding polytheism) defines Godhead
+now in terms of outward nature, now in terms of man’s own inner
+comprehension of himself. Religion is the meeting-place of objective
+fact and subjective psychology; it is therefore the most comprehensive
+and at the same time the least definable of all human activities.
+Until we understand this fact we are in the position of a great many
+nineteenth century free-thinkers, who for the life of them could not
+understand why people should want to make such a pother about religion
+when they could build factories instead of cathedrals, and amass
+worldly wealth instead of seeking for the kingdom of heaven. To such
+people, religion in itself seemed too childish and unprogressive to
+be considered important. As a matter of fact, it was precisely these
+nineteenth century materialists and unbelievers who were childish in
+their faith in human progress, as the Great War proved.
+
+Religion, in its most complete sense, might almost be defined as the
+“most complex and mature attitude it is possible to take towards
+reality.” This attitude comes from a fusion of all our faculties:
+animal as well as intellectual, moral as well as æsthetic, individual
+as well as social; organised on the plane of the individual will. This
+fusion combines the boundless and at bottom irrational faith in life
+that must guide us if we are to live at all, with the limited and
+rational faith in a common moral code of conduct. It is because of
+this combination of opposites that religion exists in some measure,
+even among the irreligious; while the most highly religious being only
+achieves it imperfectly. It attempts to reconcile both the absolute and
+the relative, the single individual’s relation to the infinite, with
+man’s whole relation to society.
+
+From such a standpoint, both Russia and America have been incompletely
+religious. In the one case, religion has relied altogether on its
+thaumaturgic power over nature. One gets an impression, from reading
+much Russian history, that the whole people have spent most of their
+lives for centuries in making pilgrimages, praying to icons, visiting
+monasteries, crying “Christ is risen!” on each successive Easter Day,
+despite the fact they were living all the time in inimitable dirt,
+disorder, oppression, and misery. Russian literature, being, for the
+most part, an intellectual revolt against the pre-intellectual instinct
+that dictated these practices, and aiming also for the most part at a
+source of power that is far beyond the grasp of religious semi-magic
+ritual, has largely disregarded these plain obvious facts, but they
+remain in history. When we read that in Catherine the Great’s day,
+the Moscow mob raised riots because the government proposed to remove
+from its place a celebrated wonder-working image of the Madonna,[4]
+at the foot of which the people were dying of cholera in heaps; when
+we read that, in the revolution of 1905, one of the heroes was Father
+Gapon who led the starving and striking mob into the square before the
+Winter Palace, and bade them kneel there, where they were promptly
+shot down by the Czar’s troops (it later transpired that Father Gapon
+was an _agent provocateur_ in government employment); when we read
+of the enormous prestige of Rasputin, then we realise that to every
+Russian religion is something vast, mysterious, miracle-working.
+Only Dostoevsky has brought out this quality of the Russian mind; his
+great work, “The Brothers Karamazov,” essentially defines the attitude
+towards God of all its characters. And God is primarily to all, power,
+a force divorced from good or bad alike, that which will give each of
+these characters the desires of his own heart. Even old Karamazov,
+monster of immorality that he is and incapable of any redeeming action,
+in this sense worships God.
+
+One is even more impressed at this emphasis on the magic power of
+religion made by the Russian mind, when one realises that the Church
+not only blessed the fields, agricultural implements and cattle
+of the peasants in the past, but also, according to Tolstoy, the
+government-owned vodka factories and the brothels. So strong was the
+feeling that religion gave to its professors a power of superhuman
+and super-moral healing and blessing, that a Rasputin could under the
+cloak of religion, carry on his shameless erotic practices undisturbed.
+The feeling that everything in religion was necessarily sacrosanct,
+accounts also for the rise of the Old Believers, who could not accept
+Peter the Great’s and the Patriarch Nikon’s reform of the spelling of
+the Church books. The Church, even in its errors, was so much above the
+world that the world must not interfere with it. The Word of the Church
+was sacred, and must be held so at whatever cost to logic.
+
+The typical Russian peasant would therefore have agreed with Blake that
+“everything that lives is holy” without adding thereto the corollary
+that the tradition of the Church was not a living thing, but was merely
+a dead tradition stifling the free spirit of independent inquiry. And
+even the thorough-going attack on religion and the Orthodox Church
+engineered by the Bolsheviks, has partaken of the same fanatic faith in
+the magic power of rites and phrases. The body of Lenin was substituted
+for saints and icons; and faith in Marxian formulas took the place of
+faith in Church ceremonies. We will not understand Bolshevism if we
+continue to think it irreligious. In all essentials it is simply a new
+religion--or if one prefers, a new heresy. It is rooted in the same
+fanatic faith in magic practices that the Russian mind has everywhere
+displayed, from the time that Ivan the Great spoke of the _pallium_ of
+Rome being transferred to Moscow.
+
+
+3
+
+We are accustomed to think of America as primarily the land of
+religious toleration; but we are apt to forget that this toleration was
+only born after nearly a century of complete intolerance, in which
+New England itself, then at the head of American colonial effort, took
+the lead. The American historian, Brooks Adams, in his “Emancipation
+of Massachusetts,” has given us a useful summary of this period,
+dating from the foundation of the Massachusetts Colony down the eve
+of the Revolution; and has shown us how the founders of New England,
+Endicott, Winthrop, and the rest, aimed at a thorough-going theocracy
+which would permit neither religious dissent nor liberty of conscience.
+The tale of executions, whippings, imprisonments, outrages and threats
+executed upon unfortunate Antinomians, Quakers, Episcopalians, and
+other sects dissenting from the “established faith” of New England
+Congregationalism makes painful reading.
+
+As a matter of fact, American toleration rests and always has rested
+on respect for established property rights. The Puritans who founded
+New England had obtained a charter from the King enabling them to make
+a settlement in Massachusetts territory. They constrained this to mean
+that no other opposing Protestant sect would be allowed either to enter
+or to preach in their territory; while the Catholics in Maryland,
+the Episcopalians in Virginia behaved not very differently. Their
+religion became to them the symbol of their possessions--possessions
+that they guarded jealously not less against all Indian attempts to
+recover them, but against Royal and Parliamentary interference alike.
+The result was that it was only such sentimental deists as Jefferson,
+or such sentimental Quakers as Franklin, who realised the necessity
+for toleration. They were in a minority. To most Americans religious
+toleration has been but a phrase for moral intolerance.
+
+To this day in America, great educational foundations which enjoy
+enormous endowments, prestige, and power, are outwardly identified
+with certain religious sects. Nothing can be taught in them except
+what these sects prescribe as “moral.” To the traveller in America,
+interested in education, it is often puzzling to be told that such and
+such a university has a chapel to which all students are compelled to
+go, although they may subscribe to some totally different religious
+creed. Thus Princeton is Presbyterian; Yale, Congregational; the
+University of Chicago, Baptist; Vanderbilt and dozens of other southern
+colleges, Methodist; and so on. The non-sectarian college or university
+is the exception, rather than the rule. And that is because religion
+and moral teaching go hand in hand.
+
+The American, it must be understood, maintains the attitude of
+complete inner spiritual liberty only at the price of outward moral
+conformity. In this respect he stands at precisely the opposite
+pole to the Russian, whose steady maintenance of inner spiritual
+obedience is frequently belied by furious outward revolts in the
+direction of complete moral license. Each has one half of a religion
+and each neglects the fact that every lasting religious body is a
+great compromise between the external and internal character of man,
+representing alike an outward discipline and an inner assent. To the
+American the assent is all that matters, not the discipline. Thus even
+so respectable a member of the Catholic faith as Governor Alfred Smith
+of New York could recently declare that he believed in the complete
+separation of the Church and State, and assert that the Church had
+no right to interfere with politics, without realising that in thus
+upholding the private assent of the citizen above all religious
+discipline, he completely destroyed the ancient Roman Catholic
+opposition to right of private judgment and thereby fully justified the
+long revolt of Protestantism.
+
+In such a state as America presents to the world, religion becomes a
+question not of “By what power is God going to save me?” but of “How
+am I to behave, so as to do right?” This question lies at the root of
+the American conscience. If England is, as Frenchmen have said, the
+land of moral fog, America is the land of moral blindness. It has not
+escaped foreign observers that America is ruled by sermons and by
+preachers. Here, indeed, American literature has little to reveal to
+us, as Russian literature has little to say about peasant superstitions
+concerning icons and saints’ days.[5] But from Jonathan Edwards to
+Channing, from Channing to Henry Ward Beecher, from Beecher down to the
+recent Billy Sunday and Aimee McPherson, all America--vulgar as well
+as intelligent--waits every Sunday morning on its favourite preacher
+in order to obtain moral guidance for the ensuing week in its affairs.
+The sermon is to the American what the sacrament and the benediction
+is to the Russian--a special talisman, something enabling him to carry
+on his life, get his business done, clear up his relations with women,
+regulate his activity. Hence the enormous popularity in recent America
+of sermons dealing with the conduct of one’s business. Hence the
+upholding of Jesus and the Apostles as typical “go-getters” and even
+efficiency experts; the culmination of which is in such a recent book
+as “The Man Nobody Knows” where Christ becomes the prototype of the
+typical American advertisement agent!
+
+The typical American therefore conceives of everyone as being “free and
+equal” in Jefferson’s phrase without adding thereto the corollary that
+everyone should be free to behave as it pleases him. On the contrary,
+the more you meddle with your neighbour’s conduct the better for both
+him and you. The Americans tend more and more to substitute “uplift”
+in the place of religion--and the hankerings of the mystically-minded
+(mostly the least literate and least economically independent,
+therefore the least powerful) among them, pass unheard. Most Americans
+would readily subscribe to Mark Twain’s dictum that man is “worthless
+unless he is regulated,” and far from agreeing with Matthew Arnold
+that conduct is three-fourths of life, they would make conduct all of
+it. The belief that has emerged out of such a creed, resolutely held,
+may be briefly summarised as a faith that the increase of business,
+higher wages, and more prosperity on the American model will definitely
+save the world. This belief has already its apostles, chief of whom
+is perhaps Henry Ford. It, like Bolshevism, is a heresy, which we
+must nevertheless reckon with as America’s chief contribution to the
+solution of the great religious problem which vexes the world. Instead
+of demanding that the oppressed proletarians everywhere must unite
+to conquer the world, it says simply, “Make your fortune quick. In
+prosperity lies happiness.”
+
+
+4
+
+It is impossible to leave this subject of religion and of America’s
+and Russia’s peculiar angle of approach to it, without some reference
+to the reciprocal influence America and Russia have had on religion
+as practised in Europe. For both countries obtained their religions
+ultimately from this source, though in the one case it was Byzantine
+Orthodoxy that was borrowed, while on the other, it was Puritanic
+Northern Protestantism.
+
+To the average American any European form of religion is not good
+enough. He demands a standard of conduct that is morally speaking,
+egalitarian. What shocks him in religion as practised in European
+countries is its disregard of the standards of living that he is
+accustomed to at home. The picturesque dirt and disorder of Italian
+lazzaroni, Spanish beggars, the promiscuity of English slums, the
+grossness of German or Dutch peasants--all this shocks him as a
+manifestation of moral blindness. He would gladly see all these peoples
+washed, sanitated, above all made literate: his own respect for “law
+and order,” shown in the popularity of sermons, is proof of this.
+The ideal of useful citizenship which he maintains as substitute for
+the mystic experience of Godhead, or the no less mystic experience
+of repentance and reconciliation, makes him intolerant of any creed
+that refrains from interference with the individual. His insistence
+upon moral conduct has made him frequently uncharitable to his own
+neighbours--as anyone who has lived for long in an American small town
+can testify. This uncharitableness he extends in even fuller measure
+to the stranger within and without his gates. The hordes of European
+immigrants that come into his own country, the hosts of unwashed and
+unregenerate foreigners without are not respectable--they do not
+regulate their lives by his standards. His solution of the problem
+upholds a great hope, but it is a hope without charity.
+
+The average Russian, on the other hand, looks on European religion as
+deficient not in goodness, but in truth. Catholicism has merely become
+a branch of state-service, and Protestantism is too deeply tainted
+with moral hypocrisy. But what is important to the Russian to know is
+this; whether it is true that by any sacrament, prayer, or magic ritual
+men become united to God? Is it true that Christ really did rise from
+the dead for all mankind and manifests himself to them? Then let us
+make trial of that possibility. In the days before the downfall of the
+Romanovs, thousands of Russian peasants annually made the pilgrimage to
+Palestine, and thought themselves lucky if they died on the banks of
+the Jordan, believing that by this magic act they would be immediately
+transported to Paradise, whatever their previous sins. And the whole
+basis of Dostoevsky’s teaching, and to a great extent that of Tchekhov
+and Tolstoy, was that “everything must be forgiven.” The whole of
+Russia demanded a miracle, and perhaps it was because the Bolsheviks
+promised such a miracle, that Russia accepted the Bolsheviks. Above all
+the miracle must come from without, and the Bolsheviks came from abroad
+bringing with them a new gospel. That was enough to convince millions
+who were utterly unprepared to accept the historic materialism, or the
+opposition to religion that lay at the root of Bolshevik teaching.
+The question the Russian continually asks--even the most open and
+avowed atheist among them asks it--is, by what means can man obtain
+the superhuman power to make himself akin to God? The Russian, in his
+desire for power, is willing to disregard every standard of ordinary
+moral conduct in order to become united to Godhead. The American, in
+his insistence on the Mosaic code which is motivated almost altogether
+by respect for property, is willing to take up the most intolerant
+Puritanism, rather than suffer interference with his property. Unlike
+the American creed of moral conformity to the community for the sake
+of material gain, the Russian religion has infinite charity to the
+sinner, despises the wealth of the world, and produces outlaws,
+anarchists, schismatics continually. That is why to the Russian mind
+of to-day, a few words of Karl Marx or of Darwin may become equally
+important as a Gospel as anything in the Bible; it equally explains why
+to the American mind of to-day, a Bruce Barton or a Billy Sunday are of
+superior importance to Saint Augustine or the Apostles.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+
+The difference in attitude which the Russians and the Americans have
+displayed in regard to faith and moral conduct--a difference which
+rests, as we have shown, on a power-property antithesis--corresponds
+also to a not less illuminating difference in the field of intellectual
+speculation, and the fine arts generally. Neither country, it may
+be noted, took any part in the intellectual and social movement
+that is known as the Renaissance. The average Russian of the ruling
+landowning aristocracy, was violently thrown from the Middle Ages
+into the state politics of post-Reformation Europe, thanks to Peter
+the Great’s reforms. The average American of the ruling New England
+mercantile caste began as post-Reformation Puritan of the English type,
+and steadily moved away from his early European environment into a
+primitive background of local politics that recalls the quarrels of the
+early Greek city-states.
+
+Intellectual contact with Europe was begun and kept up at two removes
+in each case. In Russia as we shall see, European romanticism, in
+its cult of the Gothic and feudal, was the most powerful influence
+in precipitating a national literature; in America the same contact
+was kept up through the influence of the English eighteenth century
+moralists, such writers as Addison, Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, Pope,
+finding abundant imitators and followers in the Colonies.
+
+Before the problems of Europe, and indeed the problems of the world
+generally, the Russian is likely to ask the question, “Why is this?”
+while the American asks the question, “How did it come about?” It is
+obvious that both questions are necessary, and both are justified
+at their proper time and place. The normal, untaught human being,
+before undertaking any action, customarily and humanly asks “Why?”
+His interest is primarily in the value of an action as such, not in
+the means whereby it is to be performed. Then when he has decided on
+performing the action, he is able to ask “How?” and thereby acquire
+the full technique necessary to accomplish it. But the untaught
+Russian, by asking “Why?” after, as well as before, undertaking action,
+simply fosters his own attitude of nihilism and inertia; and that
+the Russian has literally to be driven into action by intolerable
+circumstances, and then generally goes too far, is the chief lesson to
+be derived from the perusal of Russian history. The American, on the
+other hand, by asking simply “How?” without examining beforehand the
+value of the act or its consequences, acquires a superior technical
+and executive skill at the expense of his ability to sort out what is
+worth undertaking from what is less worth undertaking. Neither regard
+“Why?” and “How?” as somehow complementary; neither are capable of the
+ordered development of investigation into causes combined with study of
+technique that goes on in European cultured circles.
+
+The question “Why?” as opposed to the question “How?” when applied to
+life in the way that the Russians and the Americans apply them, leads,
+it is obvious, to diametrically opposing results. The Russian in his
+eagerness to find the underlying cause of every phenomenon, is apt to
+act, if at all, for a bewildering multiplicity of reasons; ranging from
+the desire to reform the world, or the desire to ensure his personal
+salvation, down to the mere desire to create mischief or relieve
+himself from boredom (like the heroes of Dostoevsky’s “Memories from
+the Underground” and Sologub’s “Little Demon.”) The American, in his
+hope to master the technique of every possible form of human activity,
+is apt to apply his question, “How is this done?” to a bewildering
+multiplicity of ends. So much is this the case, that nothing is
+commoner in American life than to find men who drift from one
+profession to another without mastering any. This is markedly the case
+even in American literature: Emerson transferred his activities from
+those of the pulpit to those of essay-writing; Mark Twain was pilot,
+gold-prospector, and author; Hawthorne and Melville were custom-house
+clerks, in their spare time, and so on--without any apparent loss of
+individuality. The versatility of the American mind, and its ability to
+turn from one thing to another, is perhaps its most outstanding quality.
+
+This technical versatility not only explains America’s undoubted
+primacy in the field of public works and of engineering, but it also
+provides an explanation for the complete lack of moral sense now and
+then shown by Americans; a lack which, on the face of it, strongly
+contradicts the lip-service which America still largely pays to the
+Mosaic and the Puritan code. Take for example, the notorious murder
+which agitated the American press a few years ago, when two youths,
+undoubtedly responsible for the murder of a friend, declared they had
+done it as an experiment, in order to see how it felt to be a murderer!
+These youths were only carrying to its logical extreme a tendency far
+too common in American life as a whole. The leading impulse of the
+American is to want to try something, to start something, to play at
+being something. It is for this reason that so many Americans start
+in life as desiring to be authors or artists, only to find the attempt
+far beyond their capacity, and to realise later that they are better
+equipped as business men. For technical capacity alone, divorced
+from all preoccupation with ulterior aims, tends merely to exalt the
+executive faculties above the creative; it helps to make the majority
+of men into business men. The creative artist, equipped as he is with
+the imagination that concerns itself primarily with elemental cause and
+effect, learns his difficult technique by mastering the resources of
+his given material. The business man denying as he does any underlying
+purpose in himself or others except the purpose of making profits,
+applies to the whole of human life the prevailing standard of an easy
+and simple technique. And because this technique is simple and easily
+acquired, it becomes increasingly popular, so that the development
+of the arts and culture suffers from lack of those who will apply
+themselves to them.
+
+It is for this reason that American life appears so standardized to
+foreign observers. This standardization is due to the fact that very
+few Americans are concerned with the question of the thing to be
+done, and most are concerned with the question of the technique of
+doing; and the simplest and easiest technique to master in America is
+that of making money. As regards the value of the money, once made,
+Americans have no more conception of that than they have of the value
+of most things. In their lavishness and prodigality, they deserve to
+be called, for the most part, the spendthrift nation of the world. But
+having mastered the technique that is appropriate to their position
+as inhabitants of an economically prosperous country, they are as yet
+unwilling to master the technique that would make them great in other
+fields. And this concentration on the technique of money-making which
+has led to so much of America’s standardization--and incidentally also
+to so much of its recent crime and moral callousness--is powerfully
+upheld by the present mechanical industrial epoch, with its decline
+in handicrafts, and the opportunities it offers to any business man
+to become the possessor, simply by buying a few specimens, of the
+best that the art of the past has already produced. It is for this
+reason that the average American tourist sees in Europe, not Europe’s
+intensely persistent energy, nor the vitality of her ideas, nor the
+continual conflict between tradition and innovation, but only her cash
+value as a market for antiques.
+
+
+2
+
+The Russian attempt to find a single central idea to explain the
+universe, leads naturally to the exaggerated respect in which the
+Orthodox Church has been and is still largely held among a great many
+Russians--a respect which it took a Tolstoy to question, and which far
+surpasses the respect shown to the Roman Catholic Church even in the
+most Catholic countries. For the Orthodox Church represented a central
+idea, hallowed by tradition, and fortified by all the apparatus of
+miracle-working superstition. Most of Russian literature has been,
+however, the product of minds that are, consciously or unconsciously,
+in revolt from the Orthodox idea, and determined to find a central idea
+outside of it, in some reconciliation with European tradition, or in
+some reversion to Asiatic atavism. In this respect it is perfectly just
+to apply to the whole Russian intelligentsia class the epithet that
+Dostoevsky applied to the Western wing of it, the epithet of “uprooted.”
+
+This uprootedness, this inability to find a fixed centre, leads not
+only to the fantastic nihilism of much Russian literature and thought,
+but to its prevailing tone of tension and cruelty. It is a common
+complaint among European readers that Russian literature is morbid and
+gloomy. This complaint is, however, ill-founded. A reading of such
+European pessimists as Lucretius, Leopardi, Schopenhauer, or Thomas
+Hardy, reveals depths of accepted despair unknown to the Russian soul.
+But Russian literature and thought is intensely direct and cruel, as
+all great metaphysical dialectic is cruel. The monstrous pantheon of
+Indian divinities and the pessimistic nihilism of the Upanishads is
+something not foreign to the Russian, as it is foreign to the European
+mind. Above all, Russian thought tends to display itself in startling
+contrast; to paint in bright, glaring primary colors. Here we have
+again an Oriental trait, and a strongly marked one. There are few
+nuances in Russian literature, and the writers who showed themselves
+masters of the nuance are, like Tchekhov and Turgenev, more highly
+appreciated abroad than at home.
+
+American literature and thought, on the other hand, being largely
+concerned with technique, is apt to respond not to the idea, but
+to the formula. The figure of Sam Slick, the Yankee clockmaker and
+peddler, who certainly never thought for one moment whether clocks
+were of much use to his customers, but who knew all about how they
+were made, and could take them apart and put them together better
+than anyone, inevitably recurs to the memory when we try to envisage
+the typical American mind. How much of American political theory and
+activity, North and South, how much of the truly American passion for
+local laws, state and city ordinances, constitutional amendments,
+legal innovations, has been due to this passion for meddling and
+tinkering--to this intensive study of technique! And the same passion
+reappears in the field of literature. In this respect the figure of Poe
+is particularly noteworthy. We can scarcely classify Poe as one of the
+greatest forces in American literature, because philosophically he had
+nothing whatever to say that had not already been said before him by
+the English romantics and the New England transcendentalists. But if we
+regard him as a virtuoso pure and simple, a virtuoso of technique, he
+immediately becomes perhaps the most important of all American authors.
+Poe was so intensely concerned with technique and technique alone, that
+he broke new literary ground in half-a-dozen different directions,
+without saying anything essentially new. He developed the lyrical
+refrain to a point unknown before his day. In “Ulalume” and “The Raven”
+he practically invented symbolism. He transformed the experimentally
+onomatopœic prose of De Quincey into the perfect prose poem. He
+invented the detective story. In his “Voyage of Arthur Gordon Pym” and
+other pseudo-scientific tales, he became the father of the scientific
+phantasy later developed by H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and others. In
+his “Eureka,” he even tried to reconcile scientific cosmogony and
+myth-making--a daring attempt that had to wait till the post-Einstein
+period before it found imitators. It was this despised American hack
+whom most of the New England leaders of thought considered as a
+charlatan, who became the technical teacher of the whole generation of
+later symbolists and æsthetes in France and England; just as it was
+the purely moral and non-technical influence of Tolstoy that helped to
+produce much of the anti-æsthetic literature of the ‘social document’
+type (Zola, Romain Rolland), later throughout Europe.
+
+Poe was, however, not the only example of an American author concerned
+with formulæ. The prevalence of manner over matter may be observed
+in most American authors, and becomes overwhelmingly important when
+we turn from the field of literature proper to the field of public
+debate and political oratory. This field has been practically unknown
+in Russia, thanks to the activities of the censorship, and the general
+suppression of free speech, but such documents as have come down to
+us, such as for example, Dostoevsky’s celebrated Pushkin speech, or
+Lenin’s speeches, do not reveal any very great oratorical ability.
+Compare them with the rolling periods of Webster or even with such
+comparatively simple efforts as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and the
+contrast is flagrant. The difference is that the Russian makes only a
+single vast generalisation, that the Russian is omni-human in destiny
+and is appointed by God to reconcile all the nations of the earth, and
+attempts to illustrate it prosaically by carefully chosen selections
+from Pushkin’s or Marx’s works.
+
+But in the case of Webster, or of the Gettysburg Address, the whole
+speech is more or less a tissue of highly poetical generalisations.
+Specific argument there is little or none--the less the better. The
+influence of such oratory in its substitution of the telling phrase,
+the resounding but intellectually empty statement, upon social life in
+America is much more vast than can ever be imagined by most Europeans,
+and has been an almost unmixed evil. Its pernicious effects were again
+seen in the recent tragedy of President Wilson when confronted with
+the realities of the European situation, and the still more obvious,
+but lesser known, tragedy of the whole public and private career of
+the late William Jennings Bryan. This oratorical temperament which is
+so common in America, attempts to heal profound and rooted differences
+of race, religion, politics, society, by the application of a few
+telling phrases, a handful of brilliant slogans. The few great public
+speakers that Russia has produced, such as Lenin, have made no such
+fatal mistake. Their efforts, however lacking in the wholly technical
+qualities that sweep audiences off their feet, were masterpieces of
+close realistic, _terre-à-terre_ argument.
+
+
+3
+
+America has already had three well-marked cultural and intellectual
+periods, each followed by a corresponding decline. The first--if we
+exclude, as we have a right to do, the stirrings of intellectual life
+in the Mathers and other purely colonial figures--began about the
+middle of the eighteenth century, culminated in the Revolution, and
+produced its last figures in Irving and Cooper. It was predominantly
+political and rationalistic. The second, beginning about 1840, the year
+before the publication of Emerson’s first series of Essays, reached
+its climax in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, and died
+away in the seventies. It was romantic and sentimental. The third,
+stirring the dry bones of respectability with the wind of a new realism
+about 1890, is still continuing at the present day. In each case, the
+movement towards culture was halted by an external war, and dissolved
+later in a period of growing financial prosperity. The first period
+came to a full close by 1830, though Irving and Cooper were to survive
+it; the second stage was virtually at an end in 1875, when the growing
+power of industrialism took the stage, challenging Emerson, Whitman
+and Melville; the third epoch may have already reached its culmination
+in the years following on the Great War. In each case, the successful
+wars in which America engaged, the Revolution and the War of 1812, the
+Mexican and Civil Wars, the Spanish War and the European War, diverted
+energy from American culture, and transferred it to the commercial,
+financial, and industrial field.
+
+Like America, Russia has had three periods of culture. The first, under
+the leadership of Pushkin and Gogol, began with the Napoleonic struggle
+and ended about 1836--though Gogol himself was to survive it for a few
+years. It was predominantly romantic and revolutionary. The second
+began approximately with the Crimean War of 1854, culminated in the
+liberation of the serfs in 1861 and went on through the seventies. Its
+leaders were Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. It was predominantly
+realistic and political. The third, beginning about 1890, has continued
+down to the present day. It is almost entirely symbolical in feeling.
+
+In each case, Russia’s foreign campaigns, whether successful or not,
+seem to have shaken up her pervading inertia and spiritlessness. The
+struggle with Napoleon gave rise to the brilliant generation of
+Pushkin; the Crimean War inspired Dostoevsky and Tolstoy; the building
+of the Transsiberian Railway and consequent Japanese-Russian War, may
+be said to have created the school of the symbolists, which, as Prince
+Mirsky has said, dominated the first decade of this century. By the
+fluctuations of campaigns fought at a distance, as opposed to civil
+wars, Russia has been bettered: America has been spoiled by them,
+and has never stood so high in culture as she did during the brief
+years of her own civil war. That is because war abroad enlarges man’s
+horizon, war at home limits it. The Russian type, prisoner to its own
+centrality, requires to escape continually from its petty and hampering
+environment; the American type, boldly going forth from itself into
+ever new regions, needs some force that will hold it at home and make
+it create a local centre of indigenous culture.
+
+One can trace the same characteristics in the strong centralisation of
+Russian literary and spiritual culture, as opposed to its boundless
+diffusion in America. In Russia, all intellectual movements have
+gravitated from the beginning to Moscow and to Petrograd; in America,
+Concord, Richmond, Charleston, San Francisco, Chicago, Nashville,
+have all promoted new movements, each in a sense more important than
+anything achieved by New York. New York has been only a market-place,
+a place where literary people may come together and drift apart, a
+temporary haven for those wearied of provinciality and wishing to
+assert their cosmopolitanism. American culture, in order to be itself,
+to find spiritual roots, has to flee from the mock cosmopolitan
+Europeanism of its capitals and to become provincial, rooted in the
+backwoods, solitary and remote, as were Thoreau and Hawthorne. Russian
+culture, on the other hand, in order to be itself, has to tend towards
+a definite centre. The European is freed from these distressing
+choices; the division between city-dweller and country-dweller is for
+him less sharp and severe. He is, if highly cultivated, a member of a
+mystic body which ignores national boundaries and has, in the largest
+sense, unity of purpose. He absorbs a certain quantity of American and
+Russian culture, but only to produce, under normal circumstances, its
+cleverly-compounded antidote.
+
+From the centralised condition of Russian culture, and its opposite in
+America, it follows that the cultivated Russian who lives abroad, tends
+to become more democratic in his outlook, while the cultivated American
+under similar circumstances, tends to become more aristocratic. A
+centralised culture is impossible without an aristocracy to support
+it. Unless the ranks of society are graded and defined from above, the
+meanest workman can become, economically and socially, the equal, if
+not the superior, of the finest scholar, the highest creative artist.
+Such a condition is what America definitely aspires towards. The
+condition which Russia tends to create is that no one, not the greatest
+artist, nor the finest scholar, should ever consider himself the equal
+of the mysterious ruler who, deriving his power from heaven alone, sits
+apart in the Kremlin. In America, the will being free, the quality of
+thought does not matter; in Russia, the will being subordinate, all
+can aspire to be thinkers. When a Russian goes abroad, the resultant
+liberation of his will enables it to act in harmony with his mind
+for the first time, so that he becomes an advanced radical; when an
+American takes up his residence in Europe, the freeing of his thought
+that takes place limits for the first time his boundless will, so that
+he usually becomes a traditional conservative.
+
+But in thus entering upon and attempting to define the influence
+America and Russia have had on the whole field of intellectual
+and æsthetic effort we are at once challenged by more important
+distinctions. American thought tends to the rounded and static, Russian
+thought tends to lose itself in the eternal flow of harmony. Now if
+we try to make a scheme of the arts according to those which are more
+plastic and those which are more harmonic in their outlook on reality,
+we will get a figure somewhat as follows:
+
+       Plasticity -------- Harmony
+                     |
+                   Ritual
+        (under which comes dancing)
+      Painting                 Drama
+    Sculpture                    Literature
+  Architecture                     Music
+
+Unless we do construct such a scheme in our minds, we can have no clear
+conception of what art is. For no other human concept has been so badly
+handled and blunderingly misunderstood as has this concept of art; and
+by none more than by the æstheticians. One is almost tempted to retort
+to the followers of Croce, who declare that all art is a pure abstract
+intuition of the artist, a reality apart from physical fact, that, on
+the contrary, art as an abstract concept has no reality, and that there
+is no such thing as art, there are only arts, each being a synthesis
+of certain aspects of objective reality. Art synthesises reality, as
+science analyses it; and the synthesis alters in outlook whether we see
+it from the aspect of time (which in the arts is music and corresponds
+to pure mathematics in the sciences) or from the aspect of space
+(which in the arts is architecture and corresponds to physics in the
+sciences). Which of the arts we take as more fundamental or important
+than any other depends, after all, on the quality of our psychological
+outlook, not on the degree of our æsthetic appreciation. There can be
+no doubt that in an ordered state, the arts progress from the space
+organisation of architecture to the time organisation of music; just as
+in a disordered state, the fact that all the arts tend towards music is
+taken by æsthetic theorists to mean that music is the greatest of all
+arts.
+
+It is interesting to attempt some application of this classification
+to the phenomena we have been discussing, of Russia and America. In
+these countries the art of ritual, which we have set at the summit of
+our pyramid, inasmuch as it contains elements of all the other arts
+and depends on them all for its own existence, stood at opposing poles
+from the very outset. There can be no two types of religious service
+more opposed in essence than the Orthodox Russian communion service
+and the Congregational, Methodist or Baptist “Sunday meeting.” The one
+culminates in the invisible priest’s taking of the sacrament behind the
+closed and veiled iconostasis, while the congregation without humbly
+wait on their knees; the other, culminating in sermon and offertory, is
+an act taken part in by the whole congregation, to whose willingness
+the minister is entirely subsidiary. How far these two types of ritual
+have affected the arts of America and Russia is a question that only
+future manuals of æsthetics can settle. For the need of the moment
+is an æsthetic based on fruitful psychological principles, and not a
+purely theoretic æsthetic such as Croce offers us. But for this we may
+have to wait for another century.
+
+Neither America nor Russia has been able to express to the full their
+native genius; they could only have done so had the French Revolution
+and Napoleonic wars been followed by a complete collapse of Europe. But
+it is probable that the direction of the American genius lies towards
+architecture, sculpture, and painting; the direction of the Russian
+genius lies towards drama, literature and music. Thus does art attempt
+to redress the balance which the social organisation overweights in the
+opposing direction. For the American continually tends to disintegrate,
+to be individualised, to evade the centre; while the Russian
+continually tends to reintegrate, to become centralised and feel the
+appeal of the universal. Art, seeking for a strongly-opposed principle
+of spiritual unity in each case, in America finds a plastic motive in
+organised space-architecture; in Russia it finds a dynamic motive in
+the harmonic time-rhythm of folk-song. Anyone who has seen an American
+skyscraper or who has heard a well-trained Russian choir sing, will
+realise more fully than my words can tell him the implications of this
+statement.
+
+The most characteristic new American contribution to art is probably
+the recessed skyscraper, of which an archetype was already produced
+before the white man saw the American continent, by the Pueblo Indians.
+The most characteristic new Russian contribution to art is probably
+the ballet, a mingling of movement and song, of which the archetype
+was to be found in the fairs and local feast days of old Russia. In
+both countries the connection between the arts, and notably between
+literature and painting, is closer than elsewhere. A Tolstoy could
+justify the increasing ethical tone of his art by an appeal to the
+practice of such painters as Jules Breton or Defregger; a Whistler
+could defend the increasing æstheticism of his by a passionate appeal
+to what is essentially literature and poetry. Neither country has
+arrived at the extreme limit of sophisticated culture to be found in
+Europe, with its chatter of vapid specialists.
+
+
+4
+
+When America and Russia started on their course as independent
+entities--which process beginning about 1688, only reached its
+consummation in a century--the style of architecture which prevailed
+in both countries was remotely akin. The Russian style had previously
+been the Byzantine as modified by Levantine and Swedish influences. The
+American style, if we omit the Mayas, began as the colonial baroque,
+as developed by the architects who followed Sir Christopher Wren.
+Peter the Great, however, built his new capital in the baroque style,
+the style of Versailles and The Hague, and his influence contributed
+towards the relegation of Byzantine influence to the hinterland. It is
+this link of Baroque architecture that bridges a great gap between the
+mind of Russia and that of America.
+
+Baroque architecture has been called by an English critic the
+“architecture of Humanism.” It might equally be called the architecture
+of absolutism. For its leading æsthetic aim, which was, in the words
+of the same critic, to convey a sense of overflowing and exuberant
+strength, might be used, and in fact was used by two widely different
+political parties. It might convey a sense of overflowing and exuberant
+strength on the part of an oligarchical but popular republic, as in
+the case of the Salute at Venice; of a dramatic but popular creed, as
+in the case of the Church of St. Peter’s; of a corrupt but prosperous
+administration as in the case of the houses of the great Whigs who
+ruled England. Or it might convey monastic seclusion, absolute
+obedience, complete autocracy, as in the case of the Jesuit churches,
+the Escorial Palace, or Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles.
+
+The later classical revival under the Empire, too, was double-sided.
+It might signify the sternness of unbending republicanism, or the
+dictatorship of Cæsarism. It was the former aspect that appealed to
+America; the classic there quickly overbore the baroque, and has
+persisted down to this day. On the other hand, the craze for baroque
+ornament and decoration persisted in Russia down to the time of the
+Great War. The early stage sets for the Russian ballet, notably the
+work of Benois and Bakst, are its last expression.
+
+If we pass from architecture to painting, we get another set of
+contrasts. The ideal of Russian painting up to the close of the
+nineteenth century seems to have been the great historical panorama
+(Repin, Vereshchagin). On the other hand, the ideal of American
+painting has been since the days of Stuart, the portrait. Here we have
+again the contrasted principles of anarchic autocracy and republican
+individualisation that we find elsewhere. That neither Russian nor
+American painting amounted to much proves nothing, nor can we gain a
+point by saying that neither was highly aware of what was going on in
+Europe. American painters proved themselves to be good characterisers,
+but bad decorators; Russian artists had the will and desire to execute
+great decoration, but character was beyond their grasp. Similarly
+Russian sculpture tends to the eccentric, the unbalanced; American to
+the static and commonplace.
+
+The contrast is still more marked when we come to the art of
+literature. Throughout Russian literature the noblest character is
+frequently shown as doing the weakest and most ignoble things. American
+fiction, on the other hand, tends to exalt the ignoble, to give the
+most dignified actions to the character one would suppose least capable
+of them. This will appear more fully in the later analysis.
+
+In drama the taste of the American public has always been for
+melodramatic situations and broad handling; in Russia for inconclusive
+and complex situations and subtle handling. One need only compare the
+spectacular heaviness of the later O’Neill plays with the extreme
+subtlety of Tchekhov.
+
+To conclude with the art of music, we may say that in America the
+composer has tended to construct well, but to characterise poorly;
+in Russia to construct badly but to characterise well. All these
+differences in art-practice arise from the fact that in both countries
+the system of society is greater than the will of any individual to
+support it. But the system itself in Russia is autocratic, centralised,
+bureaucratically ordered; therefore the individual who revolts from
+it, revolts upon impulse. He is instinctively an anarchist; his protest
+is of the heart, not the reason. The system in America is anarchic,
+decentralised, dependent solely on individual enterprise; therefore
+the individual who revolts, acts upon reflection, he is intellectually
+and spiritually an aristocrat (even when he calls himself a radical),
+his protest is one of reason and commonsense humanity. Thus we see
+that art in both countries exists not as an expression of tradition,
+but as a protest against a political and social tradition that is felt
+in some way hostile to life. For this reason art in both countries is
+in essence revolutionary; it does not aim at correcting and changing
+tradition so much as destroying it.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+  _“Russia began by asking Europe for the finished products of
+  western civilisation, to meet the requirements of her state
+  service. It was not in this offhand way that Europe had been able
+  to produce these finished products, which had behind them a whole
+  background of civilisation. Gradually the Russian customer was
+  driven backwards to a fuller and closer appreciation of what he
+  really lacked. He began by asking for weapons and went on to ask
+  for military training. He began by asking for clocks or any other
+  fascinating machinery and went on to ask for technical service.
+  He began by asking for ready-made books on given subjects, and
+  went on to ask for education. He began by asking for knowledge and
+  inevitably, however slowly, he was compelled to recognise the need
+  for that training of character which can alone produce competent,
+  self-respecting and honest servants of the state. He began by
+  asking for the end and went on with infinite inner conflicts and
+  searchings of heart to ask for the beginnings.”_
+
+                                              PROFESSOR BERNARD PARES,
+                                              “A History of Russia.”
+
+  _“Our America to-day I consider in many respects as but indeed a
+  vast seething mass of materials, ample, better (also worse) than
+  previously known; eligible to be used to carry towards its crowning
+  stage and build for good, the great ideal nationality of the future
+  ... no limit here to land, help, opportunities, mines, products,
+  demands, supplies, and with--I think--our political organization,
+  national, state, and municipal--permanently established as far
+  ahead as we can calculate, but so far no social, religious, or
+  æsthetic organizations consistent with our politics.”_
+
+                         WALT WHITMAN,
+                         Preface to 1872 Edition of “Leaves of Grass.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+
+Apart from the influence of politics, the greatest spiritual influence
+that Russia and America have had on the world for a century past
+has been manifested through their respective literatures. It is to
+this field that we must now turn, for the most striking series of
+our parallels. This literature has been, in both cases, something so
+entirely apart in its inner development from anything produced in
+Europe before the end of the eighteenth century, that we cannot apply
+to it the traditional standards of European criticism. Unlike what has
+been the case in European literatures, the literary form itself has not
+emerged from the sociological and moral factors generally prevailing at
+the moment. Rather has it been used as a weapon of protest, as a means
+for overcoming the stultification of the environment, in both America
+and Russia. It has been essentially revolutionary, dictated by a small
+protesting minority, rather than rooted in the traditional lore of the
+soil.
+
+At the close of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, the mind of
+Europe became divided between the rival claims of absolutism and
+of radicalism. A wave of romantic sentiment, of revolutionary storm
+and stress, with its longing for a past that could no longer exist,
+together with its intense democratic feeling for the forgotten folk
+sources of art, swept over England and Germany, and began to appear
+in France. It made impossible henceforward the frigid artificialities
+of form displayed in the poetry of Pope and Johnson, the dramas of
+Voltaire, the essays of Addison and Fontenelle, the epic of Klopstock.
+And it was from this rising wave of Romantic sentiment that both
+America and Russia started on their careers as independent producers
+of literature. They have continued on their way as literary countries
+thanks altogether to nineteenth-century romanticism. Without some
+understanding of the struggle between romanticism and realism, their
+literary history does not make sense, it has neither cohesion nor
+development. It is true that both countries have produced devotees of
+classical form, but for the most part in the shape of critics, not
+creators. The underlying genius of both countries has been unable
+to accept the European tradition, even when it was imitated; it has
+forced itself into alien moulds only to burst them. One cannot deny for
+example that Whitman’s poems are poems, nor that Dostoevsky’s novels
+are novels. Only they correspond to nothing either in form or content
+or mental attitude that was done before them as poems and novels.
+The word itself, freed from considerations of economy, tradition,
+and classical usage, makes here its own form; arbitrary, intensely
+personal, always stumbling and shambling on the brink of incoherence.
+
+It is therefore impossible to write a just and final literary history
+of either country. In this field everyone is a partisan. According to
+whether the critics’ prepossessions are for literature that reflects
+that social struggle, or for finished beauty of form, or for profound
+and tragic revelation of unsuspected depths of life; according to
+whether the critic of Russian and American literature is primarily a
+social reformer, an academic humanist, or an advanced radical theorist,
+the judgment will fall. Kropotkin cannot endure the later Dostoevsky;
+hundreds of American professors cannot endure Whitman. The utmost that
+can be done is to let one literature illuminate the other, to show how
+the same psychological factors produce often closely corresponding
+results, to draw parallels between those portions of the literature
+of both countries that have most closely affected Europe. So only
+do we get any insight into the mysteries of the Slav and American
+soul. Only in literature is so close an insight possible; in American
+painting and architecture, and in Russian dance and music, we have
+also national expressions, but limited, tentative, and owing to their
+fundamental differences in formal approach (the static and plastic as
+against the auditory and agitated) very difficult of comparison. It is
+possible in some respects to bring the products of the written word in
+each European country together; we can for example set up a comparison
+between the drama of Lope de Vega and Calderon, the drama of Corneille
+and Racine, the drama of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. But it would be
+far more difficult if we tried to compare sculpture and painting as
+practised in the three countries mentioned over that period. So in the
+case of Russia and America, we must concentrate on the written word as
+being the most accessible and comprehensible means of comparison.
+
+We may admit at the outset that to most observers modern Russian
+literature is far richer in individual talent, and in works of high
+ability, than American literature has hitherto been. This is due to the
+working of three very important factors. In the first place, Russia
+from the outset had a racial, soil-rooted language of its own and was
+not forced to transform traditional English modes of expression to fit
+an altered environment, or to teach an immigrant population. In the
+second, the fact that political discussion of every sort was forbidden
+in Russia during most of the period under review, while America has
+lived in a perpetual atmosphere of constant political agitation,
+made many more choose the profession of authorship in Russia, while
+in America it tended to make many who might have been writers, into
+politicians, orators, publicists. In the third place, before beginning
+to create a modern literature on her own account, Russia had already
+a rich folklore and legendary history of the past to draw upon. In
+the case of the Americans, the folklore and traditions of the early
+Indians, even of the French and the Spanish settlers, were in a sense
+so foreign to the dominant English-speaking psychology, that they could
+not be used, except as exotic colour. The result was that to this
+day the American writer, with all the ability in the world, has less
+material to his hands. Homer could not have been Homer had he come to
+Greece from, let us say, Egypt, without understanding or appreciation
+of the past. The American writer is more frequently found in that
+predicament than the Russian. He has neither a tradition of folklore to
+fall back upon for the past, nor essentially an individual experience,
+out of which to build up his present day. Only too frequently in
+America a usable past (to borrow the phrase of a well-known American
+critic) and a meaningful present fail to coincide to produce the
+literary masterpiece.
+
+Yet a parallel between both countries is not only necessary, but
+psychologically illuminating. This parallel will follow the lines of
+the historical parallel, already tentatively traced for the outward
+events, in the first book of this study. Here too we will see two
+forces starting from opposite poles approaching a coincidence only
+to diverge and to again approach coincidence. Here too we watch the
+interplay of the same underlying climatic and soil factors on extremely
+mixed races that start life under widely different political and social
+constants. What is more, this parallel supplements and completes the
+other. It enables us to disentangle the essentially Slavic element from
+the essentially American element of the two cultures. It may even show
+how these two forces operating freely in the world for a century and a
+half, like the opposing poles of an electric battery, may ultimately be
+reconciled, if not in the field of the practical, at least in the field
+of the ideal; how they not only closely correspond to each other, but
+ultimately become one.
+
+
+2
+
+The first stirrings of independent American literature (as distinct
+from Colonial literature, or Red Indian traditions) appear most
+clearly in the writings of Benjamin Franklin. The first stirrings
+of Russian literature as distinct from a few court writers such as
+Derzhavin in the Catherine period, to whom might be added Catherine
+herself (although she wrote in French), and the remnants of old
+Slavonic traditions, appear in the writings of Krylov. What strikes us
+instantly about these two writers--the penniless American journalist
+who steadily climbed the ladder of success until he reached the top,
+and the son of the poor army officer who likewise spent a lifetime
+in journalism to emerge at last as a sort of social lion--is the
+curious impression of shrewd, canny and independent worldly wisdom
+that emerges from the pages of both. Neither is a literary hero, nor
+an independent creator, nor a prophet. Both have a utilitarian side,
+a leaning to moral teaching, closely allied to a great deal of homely
+common sense. It is true that Franklin spent much of his energies in
+political agitation and in scientific research, which detracts from
+his magnitude as an author. But as has already been pointed out, the
+same field was not open to the Russian, with the result that his satire
+is both sharper and tenser. Yet Franklin’s “Autobiography” is a fable
+of the industrious apprentice making his way through the ranks of
+Colonial society, as Krylov’s so-called fables are real pictures of
+the artificial and vain social order (shaken by the French Revolution)
+in which Krylov, the idle and pleasure-loving, found himself. Both
+contain elements of poetry, but these elements are of small importance
+as compared to the prose content. And both were, precisely because they
+limited their aims to what was immediately possible, rather than to
+what was the ideal statement, immensely popular.
+
+From such small beginnings American and Russian literature emerged on
+the world’s stage with Alexander Pushkin and Washington Irving. It may
+seem to the casual and purely objective observer that no parallel is
+at all possible between these two men. Irving was simply an agreeable
+minor writer, with a prose style of considerable urbanity and charm,
+who happened for a time to be ranked above his merits abroad as at
+home, and who now is conveniently forgotten; whereas Pushkin was above
+all a great and original poet. Yet this verdict which might be passed
+by nine out of ten European literary critics is, quite possibly, a
+false one. Of the two writers it is Irving who is the most original, as
+he had none of the stock of folklore or of ancient tradition to go on;
+all that had been swept away from under his feet by the Revolution, and
+had to be discovered or invented afresh. He was in the position of an
+artist who has to paint a new picture on a blank canvas without either
+brushes or colors. On the other hand, Pushkin could simply use the old
+material that lay to his hand, and his task was merely to interfuse it
+with a new revolutionary spirit. If we can think of Irving as detached
+from European literature as Pushkin was; if we can remember that living
+on the Hudson, he was as socially remote from the world of Addison and
+Goldsmith, whom he admired, as Pushkin in the Caucasus was remote from
+Byron and Sterne whom he worshipped, we can reach a juster estimate of
+the achievement of both men.
+
+There is a feeling of nostalgia for the past that, particularly in
+autumn, assails one in such a new country as America with even greater
+force than anywhere in Europe. To the European, especially to the
+dweller in a cosmopolitan city, the relics of the Middle Ages, the
+richness of the Renaissance, the courtliness of the eighteenth century
+are, after all, dead and vanished remnants of a force that has long
+since flowed into other channels. But to the American who has never
+known them, these things appear under their most Utopian aspect, as
+examples of a life full of leisure, where work was despised, people
+were free, natural and gracious, and harmony with inner and outer
+nature was achieved. The American is afflicted therefore with an
+incredible nostalgia for the past, the European past, but the country
+he sees about him offers no past at all but that of the wilderness,
+of the pioneer and the Indian. He therefore aims, according as he
+is sensitive to beauty, or fundamentally in discord with his own
+surroundings, either to transfer the riches of Europe bodily to his
+shores and to strive to live in the midst of them; or to revert to pure
+and simple savagery. The first path was that trodden by Irving; the
+second was that chosen by Cooper.
+
+The quality that made Irving a classic author during his lifetime and
+that kept him so, arose from his overwhelming grace of expression.
+Around the poor and threadbare material of folklore at his disposal he
+threw the beauty of an incomparable style, a manner of telling that
+makes of him still the most readable of American authors. “Rip Van
+Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “The History of New York” are
+all minor incidents of life, enlarged and expanded to their utmost
+limit, avoiding the tensity of great tragedy, but crammed with the
+humor of a disillusioned romanticism. They are not, like the works of
+their contemporary Scott, direct assimilations and fresh re-creations
+of the material of the past. Irving stands aloof from his own fantasy,
+and warns us that this is how life may have been once lived, but
+that after all life cannot go on in this way. Thus an undercurrent
+of melancholy is unavoidable to the careful reader of these stories.
+When Irving’s heart is more closely engaged, as in his fantasies of
+the Alhambra, he becomes at once even more supreme as an artist, but
+less human in range. He seems to be thinking always that all this
+enchantment is purely imaginary, and that his people are not real
+men and women. His Alhambra is not so much a castle in Spain, as a
+castle in the air. Later Irving tried to remedy this defect by writing
+objective history, and busied himself with the life of Columbus, of
+Washington, of Astor. But even here he was dogged by the curious
+unreality that is the fate of the romantic who cannot find romance in
+the world that is about him, or in his own immediate race-memories.
+His Columbus is a mediæval stained-glass saint. His Washington is a
+classical plaster-cast. Only his Astor has any reality. Thus Irving’s
+later works are inferior to his earlier. He was not equipped to draw
+men of action but only such dreamers as Rip Van Winkle and Wouter van
+Twiller. And an underlying mistrust of women--explainable by the fact
+that Irving was a bachelor with several unsuccessful love-affairs to
+account for--emerges equally from these classically built pages.
+
+The problem that Pushkin set himself to solve was, in all essentials,
+similar to the problem that bothered Irving. Only in Pushkin’s case
+there was no lack of material for his talent--rather the reverse,
+which explains why, in his short and disordered life, he was able
+to turn out so much that is memorable. Pushkin’s question was how to
+put this material into classic form, how to make it appear light,
+graceful, easy and charming. That he solved this question, and wrote
+works of great exhilaration and formal perfection in his youth, in a
+language which was before his day barely more than a barbaric dialect,
+is the considered verdict of everyone who knows Russian. But this
+achievement did not satisfy Pushkin. He did not believe in the world
+that he himself had created, and an endless succession of folk-heroes,
+of Russians and Ludmillas, could not satisfy him for long. His private
+attitude was atheistic and what is more anarchistic, as is indicated by
+the obscene Gabriliad and many another youthful poem. As he grew older
+he tried more and more to find a world in which to believe, with the
+result that this scion of the nobility took to posing as a peasant,
+and cultivated an air of heroic misanthropy, derived from Byron. The
+two forces flowed together in “Eugene Onegin,” which is the one work
+of Pushkin that has united all his qualities. Here under the mantle
+of Byronism which he had wrapped round himself, and which essentially
+belied his own care-free temper, we get a world which is real but
+detestable, and in which the bitterness stands close to the surface.
+Yet this world, from which neither Pushkin nor any other later Russian
+has found escape, was in a sense forced on him by outer circumstances,
+particularly by the great early emotional crisis of his life, which
+came from his secret sympathy with the Decembrist uprising in 1825
+(when he was twenty-six) which he later had to disavow in order to
+escape Siberia. This crisis was fatal to Pushkin’s harmony, in the same
+way as Irving’s early emotional crisis, his engagement broken by death,
+was fatal to Irving. The remainder of his work is a prolonged emotional
+dissatisfaction, much on the lines of Irving’s half-humorous stories.
+Pushkin became a realist despite himself, as Irving a romanticist
+despite himself. Each is therefore a classic in the Russian or American
+sense, but not in the European.
+
+
+3
+
+With James Fenimore Cooper we approach a very different problem. This
+honest, stern and embittered man, at war with society and himself,
+whose best writing was done at the latest period of his development,
+is perhaps to-day the least known and least appreciated of American
+writers. This is due to the fact that about much of his work he
+deliberately threw the false glamour of an idyllic romanticism. Hating
+the frontier as he did, hating equally the time-serving and vulgar
+democracy of his own period, he sympathised at heart with nothing
+but the already remote past of the Indian scout (of whom he has left
+us an immortal portrait in Leatherstocking) and fundamentally the
+Indian himself. An aristocrat to the bone, he threw himself repeatedly
+back upon the eighteenth century. In his love of what was already a
+remote and murky past, he recalls the Russian historian Karamzin, who
+similarly after an early period of political polemic, went back to the
+past and strove to glorify it. And the result was much the same in both
+cases. Karamzin’s Russian history is, in the opinion of most critics
+of standing, not really a history at all, but a marvellous portrait
+gallery of living men and women held together by a flowing stream of
+narrative tending to idealise and prettify the details of the picture
+he was presenting. Cooper’s romances are similarly not romances at all,
+but wonderful pictures of bygone events, storms at sea, revolutionary
+battles, adventures in the wilderness, similarly vitiated by a tendency
+to write idyllically about the past. And as Cooper influenced Melville
+and hundreds of other American writers of adventure tales, so Karamzin
+influenced Gogol and Dostoevsky. Cooper was indeed more important as an
+influence than as an actual creator. Where he was great was in Uncas
+and Chingachgook and Leatherstocking; his noble and persistent belief
+in character saved him from incredible sentimentality of incident and
+a viciously mannered style. The untold glory of the already vanishing
+heroic age of American life when men took their lives in their hands
+and lived alone with the wilderness, fired Cooper. He was scarcely
+adequate to the tragic implications of his own theme.
+
+Here we reach a point that is important for us to understand if we are
+to grasp the real nature of the underlying contrast between American
+and Russian culture, and the common causes of their failure. Under the
+system of levelling democracy such as America adopted and practised,
+men could not combine together to wrest a meaning and significance
+from frontier conditions except by making sacrifice of some part of
+their own personality. The complete personality, therefore, as such,
+stood outside the bounds of American organised society, and became
+inarticulate, unformed, illiterate, and to all intents and purposes,
+a pariah and an outlaw. A Daniel Boone, a Leatherstocking, or in a
+later age, a Kit Carson, or a Huckleberry Finn, are the authentic
+“originals” of the American landscape. In their presence everything
+else becomes feebly Colonial; an imitation of remote European manners
+and traditions. Only in the South, where some elements of settled
+aristocracy had rooted themselves, could culture and personality
+exist side by side in the same individual, and this culture took
+social and political, rather than literary forms. The North and the
+ever-widening frontier of the West were incapable of producing a
+single personality of the intellectual range and poised character
+of Jefferson. At the other end of the scale, under the increasing
+centralisation and autocracy of the Muscovite Czars, no one could have
+independent personality except the Czar himself and a few important
+nobles of his entourage. The system of abolishing local independence
+worked, as a leveller of the mass, with equal efficiency as the system
+of mob-democracy. Only a few of the older Slavonic and Baltic nobility
+resisted, and it was within their ranks that literature was cultivated,
+as it was within the ranks of the better-bred families of America that
+the first attempts at an indigenous culture took place.
+
+
+4
+
+In both Russia and America, therefore, the rage for imitation of
+European ways of life and thought early became of equal importance with
+the suppressed desire to shape life according to local conditions. This
+fact explains the popularity of such figures, for instance, as Bryant
+and Zhukovsky. Bryant simply transported bodily the nature feeling of
+Wordsworth to the American scene, as Zhukovsky tried to interfuse the
+idyllic sentiment of Parny and Chenier into his aboriginal background.
+Both spent a large part of their lives as translators; a task far
+easier to the Russian than to the American, as the Russian could not
+fail to enrich his material (chosen frequently from third-rate European
+sources) by contact with far deeper and more lasting earthborn springs
+of inspiration, whereas the American impoverished his by a scrupulous
+and Puritanic zeal for correctitude. Both translated Homer, but while
+Zhukovsky’s translation became and remained a Russian classic, Bryant’s
+translation is a monument of Puritanic austerity and plainness and is
+likely to abandon the mind of the cultivated English-speaking reader
+in favour of the surging violence of Chapman, the artifice of Pope, or
+the rich and tender idyllism of Butcher and Lang. But for all that,
+Bryant’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” are Greece as seen through American
+eyes, and their homespun dignity are more valuable, because more
+native, to the American critic than any European version. The impulse
+both Bryant and Zhukovsky gave to translations has persisted throughout
+the whole range of Russian and American literature; it is symptomatic
+of the fact that culture in both countries is not a natural growth,
+but something that has to be propped up and supported by continual
+reference to what goes on without, in lands where authors are born to
+more settled traditions.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+
+There comes a moment in the history of every people when, by some
+almost imperceptible inner growth of cultural self-consciousness, a
+great, new, and original art is born among them. This moment coincides
+with the first slackening of the impulse that has made the particular
+people whose history we are surveying, free and victorious in their
+long struggle for unity and liberty. The period that follows in every
+case depends upon an emergence from early political upheaval and chaos,
+and in its frankness and joyousness, resembles the coming of spring. A
+slackening of unified political effort takes place, and a corresponding
+increase of individual talent in other fields. Italy reached this
+moment with her pictorial arts and literature early in the fourteenth
+century; France under Ronsard and the Pleaid; England under the Tudors.
+In Russia and America the old cultural background, such as it was,
+blocked the path of a new birth down to the period at which we have now
+arrived in the course of our study. Russia’s Renaissance and America’s
+Renaissance coincided; both began about 1830. The first great figures
+that these two Renaissances produced in the field of literature were
+Gogol and Hawthorne.
+
+Let us look for one moment at the social conditions under which these
+two men came to maturity. In Russia the whole period is covered by the
+reign of Nicholas I. Alexander I, who had succeeded in 1794 and whose
+reign had led to a complete triumph over Napoleon after Moscow, died
+in 1825. His reign had strengthened the hold of the autocracy upon the
+great mass of the population, and had enormously increased as well
+the prestige of Russia in Europe, but had successively alienated the
+more enlightened nobility, who were all for the contemporary remedy
+of Western liberalism--a constitution. His death was the signal for
+the abortive uprising of the Decembrists, who were one and all nobles
+and could command little support in the army. The aim of Nicholas
+was to preserve everything exactly as it had been left by Alexander.
+Personally friendly as he was to liberal thought at the beginning,
+patron of both Pushkin and Gogol, possessed of great native courage
+and invincible determination, the movement of events in Europe from
+1830 to 1848 forced him little by little into the camp of the extreme
+reactionaries, and the close of his reign found even the Slavophils in
+opposition to the Czar. By his personal interference in the affairs of
+Poland and Turkey he drew down upon him the enmity of Austria, England,
+and France, at that time the three greatest European powers. In regard
+to literature and the spread of ideas, his reign was marked by a
+steady growth in the power of the censorship, tending to abolish every
+manifestation of original thought.
+
+All during this time, the pressure of Russia on its westward frontier,
+the frontier of Europe, was enormous, as during the same period
+America exerted immense pressure on its own westward frontier--the
+frontier that led through the Spanish colonial possessions, to the
+Pacific. The increase in repressive autocracy in Russia, under
+Nicholas I, was counterbalanced in America by a great increase in
+expansive democracy. The period opens with the disappearance of the
+last of the old Federalist “dynasty” among the Presidents, which had
+ruled (with the slight interregnum of Jefferson’s presidency) from
+Washington’s presidency down to 1829. At that date John Quincy Adams
+went out of office. He was succeeded by Andrew Jackson who was not
+only a democrat, but a backwoodsman, a Southerner, and an apostle of
+the common people. The only opposition Jackson need fear was from the
+aristocratic and older South, in the person of John C. Calhoun, and to
+a slight extent from the Northern Whigs. The latter party were soon
+conciliated, and for the rest of that period under review, down to the
+Civil War, we have a series of presidents whose democracy, slightly
+tainted with Whiggism, leads to a remarkable series of compromises
+between the agricultural and slave-holding South and the industrial
+and trading North, and the ever-expanding Western territory which in
+theory (but not in fact) lay equally open for both sections--Northern
+and Southern--to settle upon and inhabit. What makes this period
+remarkable in American history is first, the constant succession of
+characterless and feebly respectable presidents--Van Buren, Fillmore,
+Pierce, Buchanan--so characterless and feeble that a single Calhoun who
+spent his lifetime in opposition to the whole system resembles a giant
+by comparison; second, the increasing pressure on the southwest, on
+Mexico, which resembles Nicholas First’s increasing pressure on Turkey;
+and third, the growth of literature in the midst of a system which was
+politically corrupt and persisted wholly on the principle of “to the
+victors belong the spoils,” yet did such lip-service to respectability
+that Hawthorne himself dared scarcely mention directly the word
+“adultery” in his masterpiece. We would do well to recall the Russian
+censorship in this connection, as also the fact that under Nicholas I,
+government bribery and corruption (as revealed by the Crimean War)
+reached a level only paralleled later under Nicholas II.
+
+Under such conditions, the genius of Gogol and Hawthorne came to
+flower. So close were they, not only in the themes upon which they
+worked, but in their personal psychology, their inmost successes and
+failures, that it matters little which we take first. But inasmuch as
+to the English-speaking Occidental, the Russian’s art illuminates by
+contrast that of the American’s, whereas the reverse is less likely to
+be true, we will take first the career and activity of the unhappy man
+who more than any other, made Russian literature what it specifically
+is.
+
+
+2
+
+Nikolay Vasilievich Gogol was born on March 19, 1809, in a market town
+of Sorochintsky in the province of Poltava. He came from a family of
+Ukrainian Cossack gentry. The district in which he had been born he
+himself immortalized in his story of “Taras Bulba.” It was the district
+beginning about two hundred miles south of Moscow, embracing Kiev and
+the dangerous shallows and rapids that encumber the course of the
+lower Dnieper, which was the important “river road” leading to what
+throughout the Middle Ages was Russia’s main sea frontier: the frontier
+of the Black Sea. In the words of an able American commentator on
+Russian affairs this district, known as the Ukraine, was “the Border
+Marches. Naturally it has varied, in different epochs, just as our
+western frontier (pretty nearly its exact equivalent) varied at
+different periods throughout the history of the United States, and was
+pushed further and further from the eastern centre of civilisation. In
+the case of Russia, Moscow represented that centre.”[6]
+
+In this district, then, Gogol was born. His people were the Ukrainian
+Cossacks. This word meant to the Russian mind not an independent
+race, but an independent class: the freebooter, the military nomad
+of the boundless plain, the man whose home was the saddle, and whose
+roof was in the sky, the exact counterpart of the Western American
+“bad man.” But unlike the “bad man” of the West, these Cossacks had
+been deliberately sent to populate the Ukraine by the policy of the
+government. In the reign of Ivan the Terrible, it became necessary to
+have a military force on this southwest frontier, in order to hold back
+the Crimean Tartars, who were continually threatening Moscow through
+advance from the Kherson peninsula. Czar Ivan thereupon collected
+all the young men of adventurous disposition and warlike tendencies
+that could be found for this purpose. Most of them were, in fact,
+criminals--a body of men, warring alike upon Pole and Turk, who lived
+in semi-monastic state in a movable capital on the banks of the
+Dnieper, and who had become so great a menace to the Czar himself that
+after Pugachev’s rebellion in the reign of Catherine the Great, they
+were suppressed. It was from this group Gogol sprang.
+
+He was, in fact, the last flower of the old Cossack independence of
+spirit. After a sensitive, sickly, and morbid boyhood, he drifted to
+St. Petersburg at the age of twenty, equipped with nothing but a bad
+idyllic poem and a boundless ambition and vanity. Here he was taken up
+by literary society and his first book of Ukrainian tales, “Evenings
+on a Farm near Dikanka,” made such a sensation that he rapidly became
+a social lion. He produced more tales and attempted to become a
+teacher of history with small success. But he became increasingly the
+idol of the more idealistic Russian intellectuals whose spiritual
+home was Moscow, and whose aims were Slavophilism. Towards this group
+he gravitated increasingly. His comedy, “The Government Inspector,”
+was an immediate and unqualified success of mingled admiration and
+disparagement, and he was now able to go abroad, choosing Rome as a
+place of residence. From there, he came back to Russia, with the first
+part of his masterpiece “Dead Souls” (published 1842). But life abroad
+and still more the homage paid to him, had convinced him that he must
+have some greater mission than merely to be a writer. He must become
+a prophet, and regenerate Russia spiritually. His first attempt in
+this direction took the form of the religious prose polemic, “Select
+Passages from a Correspondence with Friends.” In this book, he throws
+overboard the St. Petersburg Liberals and the Moscow Slavophils alike,
+and reveals himself shamelessly as a preacher of nothing but dumb
+obedience to the Czar, ready to transform his mission of regeneration
+into the rôle of an upholder of complete reaction in religious and
+political matters. Only an intense egotist could have written such
+a book, with its attacks on all who had helped him in the past, and
+henceforth Gogol had no friends. He could not find peace either
+within or without Russia, and pilgrimages to the Holy Land, restless
+self-abnegations, tormented repentances, were alike in vain. In 1852,
+he died having by his own act destroyed the greater portion of the
+manuscript of the second part of his “Dead Souls.”
+
+The inner history of Gogol is that of a man who seeks freedom
+everywhere but can find it nowhere in the self-satisfied, petty
+bourgeois civilization of his epoch, with its scum of semi-concealed
+political corruption floating on the top of artificial manners, its
+apeing of foreign fashion, its sentimentality and sordidness. All this
+comes out very strongly in the novel which is Gogol’s unquestioned
+masterpiece, his “Dead Souls.” The hero of this book, Chichikov,
+is a sort of picture of Gogol himself, in his aimlessness, his
+self-satisfied inferiority, his timidity with women. He has conceived
+a brilliant plan, of obtaining an heiress in marriage by representing
+himself as a large landowner with a great number of serfs. To carry
+this plan into effect, he buys up from the landowners of a certain
+district, the serfs that have recently died or run away, and whose
+names, not having been struck off the census rolls, still leave
+their owners liable to payment of poll tax for them. Equipped with
+this list of “dead souls” he intends to pose as a wealthy man, but
+his scheme fails through his own impudence. Gogol certainly meant to
+make Chichikov attractive, and even to show his “regeneration” in
+the second part, which was never finished; but Chichikov remains at
+best a mean-spirited busybody, at worst a base adventurer with an
+undeveloped moral sense. What the book is chiefly remarkable for is
+its extraordinary portrait gallery of characters each set in their
+appropriate surroundings of Russian landscape. As Chichikov drives
+hither and thither on his enterprise of cheating, we are treated to
+a panorama of Russian landscape and of Russian life, and each is as
+dreary as the other. This novel has been compared to “Pickwick Papers,”
+but the laughter of “Dead Souls” is bitter and harsh and menacing. One
+cannot avoid a feeling as one reads on and on that the dead peasants
+whom Chichikov absorbs were at least once men, fully alive, unspoilt
+and integral (however degraded their conditions of existence); but
+that the living landowners who possess them--with the exception of
+the half-crazy old maid Korobotchka who gives the plot away, and the
+embittered miser Plyuskin,--are neither wholly alive nor honest. They
+are walking ghosts, horrible simulacra; rotting away within, the
+degenerate self-satisfied scions of all manner of public and private
+corruption.
+
+“Dead Souls” remains valuable therefore chiefly as satire--a bitter
+satire by a “soul” itself in peril of death; one who had come to
+central Russia from the freer, wilder atmosphere of the frontier,
+and who had there earnestly sought for truth and beauty only to find
+stifling mediocrity, hypocrisy, and corruption. From this strain
+of satire, Gogol himself vainly sought escape; escape into the
+wild heroism of the old Cossack life vividly described in “Taras
+Bulba,” escape into peasant folklore, escape into morbid religious
+introspection. Gogol is usually credited with being the first
+thorough-going Russian realist, but in fact realism was to him always
+the enemy. On its face appeared the grin of the evil one, or the smirk
+of the hypocrite. Only once is Gogol the objective realist in his play
+the “Government Inspector.” Here he merely set down the facts, and gave
+his skill in dialogue a free run. The result was equal to the most
+bitter and cruel of all his satires; all the bitterer because here
+there is no fantasy to fly to, no charm of sentiment to colour it. For
+the whole of his life, Gogol struggled like a man in a net. He must
+speak the truth, but the truth only hurt him. He must create beauty. He
+had the courage to call “Dead Souls” a poem, and his whole career was
+like a boldly planned and beautifully conceived raid of a daring chief
+into the heart of a hostile country. But when he had arrived at the
+summit of his career, beauty still mocked him from far away. Gogol left
+Russian literature neither romantic nor realistic; he mingled humor
+with bitter earnest, and magnificence with sordidness. In the end he
+could not write any more. The warring forces within his soul tore him
+to pieces.
+
+
+3
+
+The career of Hawthorne, if we set aside slight differences in early
+environment and upbringing, was startlingly parallel. In his inner
+life, Hawthorne was the exact counterpart to Gogol. He was born in
+1804 of what might be called America’s radical aristocracy, the long
+line of Puritan legalists, divines, and shipmasters that had been the
+bulwark of the attacks against England’s unifying and centralizing
+tendencies, from 1629 to the Revolution. An ancestor had taken part in
+the hanging of witches and whipping of Quakers; just as an ancestor
+of Gogol probably took part in the scenes of raid and rapine that are
+so vividly told in “Taras Bulba.” A delicate childhood, a melancholy,
+secretive and hypochondriac disposition, a precocious desire to
+write, complete the picture. But unlike Gogol, Hawthorne did not have
+to travel from his home to attain fame as a writer. He was born and
+already established at the centre where all movement of ideas took
+place: within sight of Boston. In his day, the force that had made the
+Revolution a success, and had given New England the intellectual and
+moral primacy of the New World, was already weakening. Further and
+further off the frontier was moving, across the Mississippi. As each
+new barrier interposed by nature was passed, the power of New England
+waned. Already its trade and shipping were passing into the hands of
+New York. Its population, moving out to the richer agricultural lands
+of the Middle West, were maintaining all the faults of the Puritan
+system, the greed, avarice, stiffness, and ugliness, without the
+redeeming Puritan mental discipline. Hawthorne was therefore almost
+the last flower of idealistic New England; the last flower of the old
+stock that was to produce the first fine fruit of American literature.
+And like Gogol, Hawthorne was primarily a humorist; but whereas Gogol’s
+humour is lit up by savage hatred (which blazes to a great flame in
+“Dead Souls,” despite Gogol), Hawthorne’s humor is made poignant by
+the nostalgic hopelessness of regret. Behind Gogol’s mask is a sneer;
+behind Hawthorne’s face one sees the terrible infinite vanity of all
+earthly things.
+
+It is instructive in this respect, to compare Hawthorne’s finest novel,
+“The House of Seven Gables,” with Gogol’s masterpiece, “Dead Souls.”
+Where Gogol adopts a setting that seems to take in its sweep the
+whole of the Russian landscape, Hawthorne confines his action to the
+precincts of a single house. Yet in this small compass of space, with
+the use of barely more than half-a-dozen characters, he conveys the
+sense of a past stretching back to infinity; a past so remote, awful
+and unchangeable that the present day of his novel is but a feeble
+echo of its long-appointed doom. Over this thought of the past, as an
+event that cannot be recalled or redeemed, Hawthorne returns again and
+again, as Gogol returns again and again to his motive that the souls
+of his characters are really dead and can only be brought to life in
+the future. The ruin of a people is here summed up in the downfall of
+a single family within the four walls of a house, as in Gogol the same
+ruin pursues Chichikov everywhere. Both novels are novels about what
+are literally “dead souls”--Hepzibah and Clifford and old Uncle Venner
+and the daguerreotypist Holgrave are as impotent to break the doom that
+weighs upon them as any of Gogol’s landowners. But the doom here is
+concentrated on a single point, whereas in Gogol it is widespread and
+diffused.
+
+In his admirable study of Hawthorne, Henry James suggests that the
+“House of the Seven Gables” is more like a prelude or unfinished
+sketch for a novel than a complete story. We know that Gogol was
+unable to finish his novel, though he schemed that Chichikov should be
+regenerated. Hawthorne did finish his, but the last chapters are an
+anticlimax after what is the real end; the death of Judge Pyncheon, and
+the flight of Hepzibah and Clifford. The real end is the railway: “At
+one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the next a village
+had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it had vanished ...
+the spires of meetinghouses seemed set adrift from their foundations;
+the broad-based hills glided away.” This flight into the external
+world away from the accursed house which held them, is a liberation;
+it is a removal without an aim, a complete escape from “what we call
+real estate--the solid ground to build a house on--which is the broad
+foundation on which nearly all of the guilt of the world rests.” This,
+and not the weak anticlimax by which the story actually ends, is the
+real conclusion, so far as there can be any conclusion, in Hawthorne’s
+mind. To get away from property--to get away from land, to own
+nothing--that is Hawthorne’s solution, his magic charm for breaking the
+spell of the past.
+
+In Gogol’s novel, the same flight motive, which Hawthorne introduces
+with skilful effect as a liberation from the House of Seven Gables,
+rotting into ruin, is introduced and maintained throughout the story.
+Chichikov moves hither and thither, forever aimless, forever wandering,
+seeking to obtain something lasting; a mythical estate, imaginary
+domain lures him on. He cannot be regenerated until he settles down and
+heroically transcends his sordid past. Hawthorne’s characters cannot be
+regenerated until they fly away from the past and become nonentities.
+
+
+4
+
+Here we see in its purest form the workings of that power-land
+antithesis that we have already described as lying at the root of
+the contrasted Russian and American psychology. The land on which
+Hawthorne’s own characters pursue their existence warps their
+characters; the power that the Russian helplessly desires to achieve,
+warps the minds not only of Chichikov, but of all the other landowners
+about him. Hawthorne himself could no more escape his heritage than
+Gogol. He attempted to escape, in brilliant excursions into folklore,
+such as “The Scarlet Letter,” in faintly objective comedy such as
+“The Blithedale Romance,” finally even in life abroad. But in the end
+he too had to confess himself beaten. The life of which he was so
+fine a recorder became more and more a regretful memory of tradition;
+and meantime the flood of democracy surged irresistibly past him to
+other aims. Hawthorne could only be outwardly, but not inwardly, a
+democrat. His political support of Franklin Pierce, and consequent
+upholding of the rights granted to the Southern States at the time of
+the making of the Constitution--including the right to hold slaves, and
+to extend their territory--made him anathema to his own neighbours,
+the abolitionists, to whom the Mexican War had become a shameful
+memory, and who were about to give their support to the mad fanatic,
+John Brown. Hawthorne went abroad after this, where he remained, very
+indecisive in his attitude and writings till the eve of the Civil
+War. That event disillusioned him completely. He declared publicly
+that he considered that John Brown had been justly hanged; and that
+the American’s allegiance, in the nature of things, was always to
+one’s own native state, rather than to the country as a whole. These
+remarks, duly deprecated by the editor of the paper in which they
+appeared, only served to show that Hawthorne was now as much of a
+disillusioned aristocrat as Gogol had been before him. He died, in
+a fit of black melancholia, after making several abortive attempts
+at writing a romance which would deal with the subject of a supposed
+elixir of life,--attempts which came to nothing. Like Gogol, he was
+one who had sought for happiness within his own country, and later
+without, and had found it nowhere; but could not abandon the idea that
+somewhere there existed a magic talisman that would set things right
+and make life worth living. Because of the bitter fanaticism of this
+hope--a hope which Europe from time to time also entertains but always
+abandons--Gogol and Hawthorne were the first supremely great figures in
+their national literatures.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+
+In the preceding chapter it was necessary, in speaking of Gogol, to
+make some passing reference to Moscow Slavophilism. It was also hardly
+possible to speak of Hawthorne without some reference to New England
+Transcendentalism. These two great currents of thought, though they did
+not of themselves produce the talent that was attracted to them, were
+of such importance in the history of Russian and American culture that
+it is impossible to write a summary of either without some reference to
+them. It is the more necessary to do so, since these two forces both
+took their rise from popular mysticism.
+
+Mysticism is a constant factor in the development of any nation. Only
+in most European countries, especially in Latin and Catholic countries,
+the aim of the spiritual rulers has been to keep mysticism in check, to
+give it practical and constructive aims. This has been only possible
+insofar as the Christian Church has itself assumed the discipline
+and ordered ranks of the Roman army. The breakdown of discipline
+before the Reformation led not, as Catholic historians would have
+us believe, to any orgy of license, but to an unchecked explosion of
+popular mysticism. This mysticism did not differ in kind, but only
+in degree, from the famous mysticism of the Middle Ages. It was less
+architectural, less social in essence; it depended more and more on an
+individual and personal approach to God, on what the Catholic critic
+would call “private judgment.” This “private judgment” was not long in
+invading the Catholic Church itself. Compare for example St. Augustine
+with Saint Theresa. The former is just as mystical at bottom as the
+latter; but he constructs his “City of God” objectively, as a refuge
+for all men. In Saint Theresa, on the other hand, all depends upon
+personal approach, everything is transformed into a subjective relation
+between the soul itself and its Maker, and all this has no end, no
+beginning; it is an ecstasy equally out of time and place. Small wonder
+that the theologians of Saint Theresa’s day thought her doctrine
+suspect, if not highly heretical.
+
+Transcendentalism is simply a carrying to its logical end of this
+doctrine of personal and popular mysticism. In New England, for a
+century and a half before the Revolution, a battle had been waged for
+the rights of the individual conscience, which had successively been
+held to be superior to the organised church, to the combined church and
+state, and ultimately to the law itself. To the Transcendentalists
+there remained no longer any barrier between man and God; and Emerson’s
+doctrine of self-reliance as well as his notion of the oversoul,
+practically said “Let us be God.” It is well known how the Emersonian
+oversoul led directly to the superman of Nietzsche; the only difficulty
+that the Transcendentalists had in making themselves into supermen was
+a lack of training. It was suddenly discovered, by whom it does not
+matter, that the Hindoo ascetics possessed such training. The only sure
+method therefore of transforming New England yokels and small-town
+tradesmen into thorough-going “oversouls” was to become as Hindoo as
+possible. Everyone went about reciting the Bhagavad-Gita; and Emerson
+was able to refer in his Journal to the New England summer as being a
+“Hindoo day.”
+
+It escaped the attention of the Transcendentalists that the Hindoo
+ascetics whom they strove to imitate had not at all proclaimed the
+liberty of conscience and the complete right of self-reliance which the
+Americans asserted. The Hindoo ascetic accepts the idol of the meanest
+of his compatriots, as authentically representing a god. This the
+Transcendentalists were not prepared to do. They were individualists,
+yet so democratic in theory as to suppose that merely by saying to
+quite ordinary people, “Here is Emerson; go and make yourself more
+like him,” the ordinary people would all be magically transformed
+into New England Brahmins. Unfortunately human nature is not like
+that--as Thoreau, at once the shrewdest and most sincere of the
+Transcendentalists, admitted.
+
+Transcendentalism was therefore a brilliant pose, and its leaders soon
+showed its lack of root in reality by upholding the fanatic minority
+of the abolitionists, as well as by defending the conduct of such born
+outlaws and desperadoes as John Brown. The same remark may be largely
+applied to Slavophilism. This movement began as an aristocratic,
+idealistic, sentimental movement on the part of the more intelligent
+Moscow nobility to preserve authentic Russian culture against the
+onslaughts of western European materialism. It therefore had distinct
+leanings towards the Orthodox Church, and the maintenance of the Czar’s
+power. Unfortunately, the Orthodox Church had become, since Peter
+the Great, merely another branch of the State bureaucracy, under the
+control of a Procurator of the Holy Synod, from whom the Patriarch took
+orders; and the Czar himself had no idea of improving the system, or
+of helping Russian culture, but only of maintaining his power intact.
+The Slavophil movement therefore tended to play into the hands of the
+reactionaries, and its belief in “Holy Russia” was as much a pose
+as the belief of the Transcendentalists in Brahmin New England. It
+nevertheless produced interesting minor figures, notably Aksakov, who
+presents a curious parallel to Thoreau, which we here lack space to
+discuss.
+
+These two movements, both mystical in essence, both quasi-oriental
+in approach--for Slavophilism derives something from Buddhism, as
+Transcendentalism owes much to Hinduism--produced between them the four
+greatest geniuses that Russia and America have given to the world.
+These four geniuses bridged in their life and work the great crises of
+the sixties; the crisis marked by the Civil War between the States in
+America, in Russia by the liberation of the serfs, and the tragic reign
+of Alexander II. The value of these four great men, and still more
+their failure, give us more than a merely political and social picture
+of their respective epochs, a true insight into the measure of the
+problems that Russia and America were given to contend with. We will
+take the two men who made the more objective approach to these problems
+first: Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoy.
+
+It is utterly impossible to treat Tolstoy and Whitman apart for the
+purposes of this study. Both were so completely and aboriginally a part
+of their country in outlook that neither resembles anything whatsoever
+European. Tolstoy’s natural view of European art and culture was
+that everything in it was artificial, morbid, false, and above all,
+sexually provocative--and Whitman persisted throughout his lifetime in
+the error that European art simply glorified the airs and trappings
+of outworn feudalism. Both turned away from an elaborate and complex
+culture to the simplest native elements they could find; in Whitman
+the dock-labourers, stage-drivers, longshoremen, and common workmen,
+and in Tolstoy the shrewd and simple Kutuzov, the Cossack bandit, the
+peasant saint. Apart from the fact that Whitman wrote in a rhythmical
+poetry that was to be like no other poetry ever conceived, having
+nothing of the stock poetical touches, the heightened style of the
+old masterpieces, alternating from a direct realism to a vague and
+incoherent mysticism, while Tolstoy wrote in a prose that at its best
+is unparalleled for direct powers of keen observation, and at its worst
+is dry and tedious like a Government report--apart from this fact,
+Whitman and Tolstoy present precisely the same problem to the critical
+intelligence. Both were divinely gifted amateurs, natures of immense
+animal vitality and range of experience, imbued with a perpetual
+itch for self-expression; pioneers and path-breakers of an art that
+was to be at once popular and folk-art, and yet was to disdain all
+the background of mythological fantasy on which folk-art ultimately
+rests, and remain cold, clear, and rational. They combined together in
+two unique and practically interchangeable individualities the most
+elemental and earthern mysticism of the unspoilt, savage, and the
+completely practical aim of the modern scientific philanthropist.
+
+There are, it is true, certain minor and slight differences between
+them. Neither, despite their intense nationalism, was racially
+completely assimilated to the country in which he lived and worked.
+Tolstoy’s ancestry goes back to a Baltic, possibly East Prussian
+strain; Whitman, as is well known, had Dutch blood in his veins. This
+slight foreign element perhaps explains the self-centred aloofness
+of either from the main intellectual current of their times. The
+idealistic Orthodoxy of the Slavophil movement made no appeal to
+Tolstoy; and Whitman, after a period in which he came under the direct
+influence of Emerson, threw overboard Transcendentalism, with its
+insistence on scholarship and intellectual culture. One may say also
+that Whitman’s best work was all done before his breakdown in 1872, was
+in fact done by the time of the close of the Civil War in 1865, while
+Tolstoy’s best work was all done after that date down to his death.
+This was to a certain extent due to the fact that Whitman was by nine
+years the elder, but also due to the working of social and personal
+factors that it will be part of our task to examine. Apart from this,
+and apart from some minor differences such as the fact that Whitman’s
+was fundamentally a feminine nature, glorifying sex theoretically as a
+biological function, but in practice apt to dwell almost to the point
+of mawkish morbidity on the magnetic charm of athletic masculinity,
+while Tolstoy was so profoundly masculine as to despise women utterly
+and yet to be always swayed by their sexual attractiveness--apart from
+this purely personal divergence, the two forces in their literary
+resultant, are interchangeable. Each represents an unalterable granitic
+insensitive residue of final perception, at war with all outside
+influences, rejecting every European refinement, and struggling to
+spread itself over the world. These two, Tolstoy and Whitman, stand
+alone in the history of their country’s thought as neither barbarians
+nor decadents, but something far more elemental. They were essentially
+backwoodsmen.
+
+Both had what is only common to the backwoodsman and the savage:
+absolutely Adamic vision. If we can suppose a stage in human
+consciousness when man is not subjective, does not project his longings
+into the past or the future, is not concerned with what follows upon
+death or what is the purpose of life, lets reason follow upon impulse
+without any ulterior speculation as to whether reason is adequate
+to explain, or impulse adequate to guide his effort--if we can
+suppose such a stage, then Tolstoy and Whitman both stood in it from
+the beginning. Whitman has marvellously described this stage in his
+poem “There Was a Child Went Forth,” and Tolstoy in a passage of his
+autobiography, and to this stage they both returned again and again.
+Both stood on the same level of undifferentiated animal consciousness.
+The intellectual development of both was fragmentary, the spiritual
+evolution always at the mercy of some catastrophic “conversion.” What
+Tolstoy describes himself as being at twenty he remained at fifty,
+and the Whitman of the earliest “Leaves of Grass” is the same Whitman
+that wrote “Specimen Days” twenty years later. To live in this fashion
+is extremely difficult under modern civilised conditions, and Tolstoy
+might have easily passed through a physical breakdown similar to that
+which cut short Whitman’s career, had he not married an able and
+efficient woman, and been the inheritor of a large estate. For the
+Adamic vision, as I have described it, neither looks at things with the
+practical materialistic vision of most modern men, nor at them with
+the idealistic vision of the minority. It sees at once both sides, and
+neither. To it a tree is not only a symbol of grateful shade, greenness
+and eternal retreat from men, but also so much mere wood to be cut
+down and burnt, and ultimately only a tree. The civilised man sees now
+one side, now the other; the primitive man, the true Adamite sees both.
+
+It would be very easy to show how passage after passage in Tolstoy’s
+work corresponds with other passages in Whitman’s work in this
+quality of Adamic vision. One need only contrast the horse race in
+“Anna Karenina,” the battle-fields or the burning of Moscow in “War
+and Peace,” or that marvellous scene (also in “Anna Karenina”) where
+the peasants mow the grass, and the proprietor of the fields takes
+part in their labour, with many a passage out of Whitman--the superb
+description of late afternoon in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the
+passage beginning “I am the mashed fireman with breast-bone broken” in
+“Song of Myself,” the completely captured sense of flight in “To the
+Man-of-War-Bird,” the amazing rhythm and pulse of the sea-shore in “Out
+of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and many another poem. These two men
+were so completely innocent and indifferent as regards intellectual
+aspirations and metaphysical struggles that when confronted with
+nature in its grandest and simplest aspects (which too is innocent and
+indifferent) they at once felt at home, and gave us not “nature seen
+through a temperament,” so much as nature itself.
+
+It is important also in this connection to note that both possessed a
+supreme power of painting war. Whitman doubtless inherited a dislike
+of war from his Quaker ancestry, and Tolstoy certainly opposed
+war theoretically as being contrary to his favourite doctrine of
+non-resistance. Yet it was precisely these two non-resisters who
+gave us the most supreme war documents that we possess. The battle
+scenes in “War and Peace” are unmatched in all literature except by
+Whitman’s own “Drum-Taps.” Nor is there anything strange in this. To
+the non-resistant, the man whose soul has learned a wise passivity,
+the upholder of “vegetable life,” such as Whitman and Tolstoy were,
+war is simply the spectacle of nature seen at its highest moment:
+casually beautiful, unconsciously cruel, monotonous, arbitrary,
+heedless of both good and evil. It is the logician, the metaphysician,
+who escapes from this viewpoint and regards war as purposive action,
+or as purposeless savagery. Neither Whitman nor Tolstoy were able to
+take this attitude. To both war remained a Dionysiac orgy of nature, in
+which they were able to merge their own passivity, and neither had the
+slightest notion of the aims for which the side to which they happened
+not to be attached was fighting for. Whitman supposed that the North
+in the Civil War was fighting nothing but the “southern slave power,”
+forgetting that the ranks of the South were filled not by mercenaries
+(which every slave-power supports) but by free mountaineers in
+butternut homespun, who had never owned a slave in their lives, were
+utterly undisciplined in their ideas of freedom, and loved the cause
+of local independence more than their lives; while the northern armies
+increasingly became full of conscripted German and Irish immigrants
+without the remotest attachment to their adopted country. And Tolstoy
+equally marred the whole plan of his “War and Peace” with a portrait of
+Napoleon that is nothing but spiteful and partisan caricature--he makes
+Napoleon little short of idiotic, forgetting utterly that the Napoleon
+who crossed the Russian frontier was a Napoleon who had acquired the
+fatal habit of hesitation--extremely common in Russia--and that the
+army he led had equally acquired the habit of indiscipline--another
+Russian trait.
+
+
+2
+
+But this is not the place for a complete estimate of these two great
+men. Otherwise, we would be obliged to take into account the fact
+that Tolstoy began as a psychological analyst, and progressed through
+ever broader objectivity to his final transformation into a moral
+feuilletonist, while Whitman exactly reversed the process. Our object
+here is a more difficult one; to examine the type of mind likely to
+be produced by such frontier civilisations as America and Russia, and
+thereby to estimate their influence on other minds. The problem is
+psychological and social, rather than cultural and literary. Therefore
+we must pass on from the great achievements of these two men to the
+narrower and more purely personal foundations of æsthetic theory on
+which those achievements rested.
+
+The aim of the Transcendentalists was to transform native New England
+independence of character into something culturally significant by
+interfusing it with pantheistic mysticism derived alike from Hindu
+and American Indian sources. The aim of the Slavophils was to exalt
+the primitive folk culture and institutions of the Russian peasant by
+similarly emphasising its mystic and Orthodox Christian side. The one
+rested on the zemstvo of the Russian village; the other on the New
+England town meeting. Each was in fact nothing more than a theory based
+upon the assumption that the Russian, or American, was as such superior
+to the European.
+
+To this theory Whitman and Tolstoy responded by making a practical
+experiment. What they said in effect was this:--“You say the ordinary
+bark-shoed peasant, the ordinary New England backwoodsman, is capable
+of finer shades of feeling than any that Europe can show. Very well
+then. We will be respectively in our lives a backwoodsman and a
+peasant, and thereby transform ourselves into the greatest artists of
+our country.”
+
+Viewed from this standpoint Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas” and his
+Preface to the first edition of “Leaves of Grass” are the most
+important of his writings, as Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” and his later
+polemics are the most important of his. Both artists started from
+themselves, and tried to deduce a general law from a particular
+instance. Whitman’s proposition (to take that first) was, if we
+disengage it from the vague phraseology in which he chose to wrap it,
+as follows:--
+
+“America differs from anything either European or Asiatic in the fact
+that it is politically entirely a democracy. Yet this democracy will
+never come to anything unless it produces forms of art, literature,
+religion to correspond to its native institutions. These forms of art
+can only grow on this soil, in their appropriate atmosphere, and to
+make them grow I will produce poems such as I think any democratic
+person can truly read and enjoy. These works or works akin in spirit to
+them must become, in the future, the perfect canons of form.”
+
+To this specious plea American democracy responded by twice prosecuting
+Whitman’s work for alleged indecency; by almost literally starving
+him to death--if he had not been maintained by special European
+financial support after his breakdown in 1872, this starvation might
+have been an accomplished fact--and by neglecting him in his life and
+afterwards. It is true that Whitman took compensation in his last years
+by surrounding himself with a small group of adulators who went to the
+extent of comparing him to Buddha and Christ. But his own work and his
+life suffered. If he had not mistakenly thought his own message (with
+all its blunders) more important than any life he might live, he might
+perhaps have married Mrs. Gilchrist or another, and have recovered
+strength enough to give us a second masterpiece, equal to “Leaves of
+Grass.” His achievement, with its very human traits, has suffered
+woefully from being concealed in the clouds of incense cast to heaven
+by a tiny minority of Whitman-idolaters. As a matter of fact, not one
+in ten thousand or a hundred thousand Americans is ever able to get
+anything out of his poetry, or to realise that his theory is anything
+but an utter confusion of art and morals. Whitman has had no successor
+in his own country, and the chief influence of his work has been abroad.
+
+Tolstoy’s problem was very similar. He, too, as a combination of
+mystic and rationalist, set himself the task of practically realising
+the programme of Slavophilism; but the path he had to pursue to this
+end was in itself very different from that which the Slavophils
+followed. He had first of all to forget the fact that he was born a
+landowner, with all the caste prejudices and conservative impulses of
+the agricultural nobility; and he had to become as nearly as possible,
+inwardly and outwardly a peasant. It took Tolstoy a long time, and in
+the end left him with a much clearer, albeit a more radical message,
+than Whitman. This message he sets out in his famous “What is Art?”
+
+The basis of Tolstoy’s æsthetics is contained in the following
+sentences:--“Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man
+consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others
+feelings that he has lived through, and that others are infected by
+these feelings and also experience them.” And further “Art is not, as
+the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of
+beauty or of God; it is not, as the æsthetic physiologists say, a game
+in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the
+expression of man’s emotion by external signs, it is not the production
+of pleasing objects, and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a
+means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings
+and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of
+individuals and of humanity.”
+
+It is worth noting, in regard to the first part of this definition,
+that apparently an art which has ceased to infect humanity with its
+feelings, has ceased to become art in Tolstoy’s eyes. Let us take for
+example the well-known example of Cretan art. Undoubtedly, this was
+art, and infected people with its feelings at one time. The Cretan
+civilisation however perished, and remained unknown till the late
+nineteenth century. During all this time, the Cretans according to
+Tolstoy’s definition, were not artists since their art infected no
+one with its feelings. Suddenly, after Sir Arthur Evans’ discoveries
+the Cretans became artists again. In other words, Tolstoy takes the
+capacity of art to influence others for good or ill, for art itself.
+Precisely the same mistake was made by Whitman. He too supposed that
+poetry, simply because it was poetry, would have the capacity to
+breed a “huskier race of orators and bards,” would unite America in
+“the manly love of comrades,” would even be eugenic in its effect of
+producing the ideally perfect type of woman. The error in both cases is
+rather like that of a man who has mistaken the programme of a concert
+for the effect of the music upon him.
+
+But there is still a more serious error behind Tolstoy’s doctrine.
+He declares, in revolt against the “art for art’s sake” doctrine
+fashionable in his time, that “art is a means for union among men,
+joining them together in the same feelings.” He might have reflected
+that the only art that had historically done so was, like the
+cathedral-art of the Middle Ages, rooted entirely in a religious
+doctrine accepted by all ranks of society, and it was this religious
+and moral doctrine, and not the quality of the work itself, that made
+it “a means for union among men.” But Tolstoy in his rationalistic
+fervour, had already rejected the mystical solution of the Orthodox
+faith, and unlike Whitman, did not hope to replace the older attitude
+towards religion with any new outlook. Consequently he argued that
+art which did not teach human unity and brotherhood was not art at
+all, and devoted himself to demolishing Shakespeare and Wagner, the
+nineteenth century Frenchmen, and ultimately his own best work. He
+tried to transform art into a moral tract for peasant consumption; and
+supposed that unless he became a peasant himself, he could not any
+longer be an artist. The error was enormous. It is not by wearing bast
+shoes and plowing one’s own fields that one acquires the range of power
+and feeling necessary to create an epic like “War and Peace” or the
+“Iliad.” To behave as Tolstoy did, is simply to mistake the outward
+means of life for its end in inner spirituality. A Saint Francis, a
+Lao-Tze, could cast away the whole apparatus of luxury and vanity and
+remain great artists, because the feeling of such men remained on the
+same plane of transcendental human understanding as that of Beethoven
+or of Shakespeare. But Tolstoy did not ultimately understand or share
+anyone’s feelings but his own, and he made war incessantly upon his own
+nature. Therefore he drew upon himself Dostoevsky’s profound criticism
+that he was like “an animal who runs in a certain direction till he has
+to turn his head, and cannot do so without turning his entire body,
+and running in the opposite direction.” And the profound criticism of
+Whitman is to be found in the writings of a Southerner, Lanier, who
+remarked that just because the Mississippi River or Niagara Falls were
+great, Whitman thought he could become equally great by writing about
+them.
+
+
+3
+
+Whitman and Tolstoy both failed in their aims, but Whitman’s enforced
+admission of failure wrung from him in the end an attitude that is more
+attractive, humanly speaking, than Tolstoy’s final inhuman rejection
+of all human contact. It was fortunate, however, that both died before
+they saw the inevitable end to which their theories led. Whitman’s
+glorification of the average American, instead of the rare exception,
+developed a race of human beings of which Mr. Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt”
+is the type; the completely self-satisfied, idea-hating, greedy
+and noisily vulgar herd-man of the Middle West, without æsthetic
+imagination or spiritual depth of any kind. Tolstoy’s ideal of a
+peasant aristocracy no less in the end developed the “kulak,” becoming
+familiar to us since the Bolshevist accession to power:--the peasant
+who having made his bargain with the community, becomes so inert and
+rooted in his power that he will not even grow a grain of corn more
+than is necessary to feed himself, nor acquire the education that is
+offered him beyond the extent that his own interests dictate. The two
+types closely resemble each other and we may have more to say about
+them. For the present it is enough to observe that Tolstoy and Whitman
+sacrificed their lives and strength and talents (which were not small
+ones) towards the establishment of states of society and of human
+types that, if either were alive to-day, they would be the first to
+reject. The reason why this result came about was due, however, not to
+some personal fault of their own, but to mistaken premises on the part
+of great masses of their own countrymen. The Transcendentalists had
+exalted self-reliance, which in the end comes down to a bare personal
+preference by which the Philistine is the equal of the artist and
+above all social discipline. Whitman simply led this hypothesis to its
+natural conclusion. The Slavophils had mistaken the rooted inertia and
+conservatism of the peasant for a superior spiritual faith; Tolstoy
+showed that this faith could not subsist on the same terms as the faith
+that had produced the masterpieces of higher culture. Each made what
+was essentially the same mistake. Both overlooked the fact that we
+cannot make man better, or nobler, or happier in the last resort--we
+cannot lift life above the level on which it stands--merely by
+multiplying the common denominator of the needs and desires of humanity.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+
+The Civil War in America and Alexander Second’s freeing of the serfs
+in Russia, which took place at the same time, were very different
+in their effect upon the two countries. The Civil War, as the most
+intelligent of the Transcendentalists, Thoreau and Hawthorne, foresaw,
+was not likely to turn out into a victory of New England mysticism
+over Southern rationalism and materialism. The desperate gallantry and
+lost-cause chivalry with which the South flung itself into the struggle
+and maintained it for the first two years, soon disabused everyone
+but the politicians. The real balance of power lay with the northern
+industrialists, busily making munitions and army equipment, and with
+the population of the yet unformed border communities of Illinois,
+Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas. After 1862 the victory, if victory was to
+be won, would fall with its spoils, not to the abolitionists (the
+most honest of whom, William Lloyd Garrison, was in favor of letting
+the South go) nor to the small group of learned and cultivated New
+Englanders, but to the steel magnates of Pennsylvania, the squatter
+immigrants of the prairie, rapidly building Chicago, their true
+capital, where the name of Emerson was unknown. The Civil War was the
+first heavy defeat for American culture, and it is doubtful if America
+has ever completely recovered from it. Coming as it did, before either
+the North or the South had reached their fullest mental development,
+and while the West was still mentally and physically undeveloped, it
+only transferred power to the frontier and provided another episode in
+the progressive decentralisation and deculturisation of America.
+
+Far otherwise was it at the other end of the scale. Alexander’s action
+in liberating the serfs, and his own liberal tendencies, sent a wave of
+hope over everyone in Russia, and not least over the Slavophils. Their
+programme was about to be accomplished. The next twenty years following
+1860 is the richest and most remarkable period in Russian literature
+until we reach the period that beginning about 1900, covers the present
+day. During this time not only Tolstoy did his best work, which we have
+already dealt with, but these years also covered the entire mature
+achievement of another great Russian, who in his absolute uniqueness as
+a spiritual force, surpasses even Tolstoy: Feodor Dostoevsky. One of
+the few figures that we can remotely set beside him (and that we can do
+so even remotely is a fact in itself of some significance) is that of
+his American contemporary Herman Melville.
+
+There can be little basis for comparison between the outward careers
+of the son of the poor Russian doctor (with Volhynian, perhaps remote
+Polish blood in his veins) who came to St. Petersburg at the age of
+twenty-two to make a literary sensation with his first story, and who,
+three years later, having taken part in meetings of a group of young
+Socialists of markedly westernizing tendencies, was sent off to penal
+servitude in Siberia, where he remained for ten years; and the life
+of the scion of two of the proudest and most aristocratic of American
+colonial families, who became stricken with poverty at twelve, ran away
+to sea, tried school-teaching for three years, shipped aboard a whaler
+at twenty-two, returned at twenty-four, married, poured out literary
+work for about ten years, and relapsed again into the silence of
+complete oblivion for over twenty years. When one adds the detail that
+Dostoevsky’s period of imprisonment and exile in Siberia very nearly
+corresponds to Melville’s sole period of creative work (1849-1859 in
+Dostoevsky’s case, and 1847-1856 in Melville’s) one realises that
+neither time nor space can be used as a basis of comparison. The
+true comparison lies inward: in the unique spiritual torment, the
+unsatisfied thirst for perfection that made Dostoevsky and Melville
+what they were.
+
+In the history of every great nation there comes a time when the need
+of men to find what may be called the Golden Age becomes acute. This
+search for the ideal, as it influences literature, is often attacked
+by modern literary critics under the name of Romanticism. Nevertheless
+nineteenth century Romanticism has very little in common with this
+particular striving, which probably affected the Greeks just when they
+touched high-water mark in the fifth century, certainly was present
+with the Romans from Virgil onwards, and woke again with the first
+stirrings of the Italian Renaissance. It seems as if man cannot create
+his highest flights of beauty and imagination without the longing for
+some marvellous Utopia to be finally achieved to lure him on. In the
+case of the English race, the prospect and aspiration towards this
+Golden Age in dream and in reality spanned the age of the Tudors, and
+Shakespeare speaks its last farewell in “The Tempest’s” air-borne
+music. To the Americans and the Russians the hope of a new birth,
+arising from the ashes of the past, had existed as we have seen, from
+the beginning; but their literature had been born prematurely old and
+disillusioned in regard to what was the faith, not of the cultured few,
+but the majority. Hawthorne had turned away from the life of his epoch
+to brood on the shapes evoked for him by ancestral memories. Gogol had,
+after a brief attempt to show the heroic past in its tragic splendor,
+turned aside to acridly and bitterly satirize the present. But the
+forces of Transcendentalism and Slavophilism had shown that however
+evil the present might be, life and literary work would be impossible
+in Russia and America, without hope and trust in the future. This
+hope Tolstoy and Whitman tried to turn into hard, rational, everyday
+reality. Melville and Dostoevsky on the other hand were not concerned
+with what was practical reality--their aspirations were too great for
+that--but with the vaster if more indefinite world of human hearts and
+souls. They sought to go beyond the gospel of Transcendentalism and
+Slavophilism into a search for the ultimate perfection of the human
+type.
+
+
+2
+
+Feodor Michaelovitch Dostoevsky was born on October 30, 1821, at
+Moscow. His father was an army doctor, who combined in his life the
+vices of alcoholism and of avarice. The family was well-to-do, and
+possessed estates in the country, together with a certain number of
+serfs, but the elder Dostoevsky (who had many of the characteristics
+of old Karamazov) not only denied his family support, but behaved in
+such an insupportable manner towards his own peasants, that while on
+a visit to one of his estates, he was smothered by the serfs with the
+cushions of his own carriage. This tragic event haunted Dostoevsky
+through all his later life. About the mother (who appears to have been
+an ineffectual, harmless personage) we know little. Young Dostoevsky
+was sent with his brother to St. Petersburg at twenty-one, to join
+the Government Corps of Engineers, but soon abandoned this to take up
+writing. Already he was afflicted with a mild form of epilepsy, which
+was aggravated by his disorderly and riotous mode of existence. His
+first novel, “Poor Folk,” created a mild sensation; the “literature
+of pity,” the sentimental novel of the Dickens type was in the air,
+and Dostoevsky’s work was of the sort to please the public taste. He
+became acquainted with Belinsky and Nekrassov, the leading critic and
+poet of the time, and was hailed as the true heir of Gogol’s tradition.
+He soon became familiar with the advanced literary circles, which
+were extremely radical in politics, and this led to his downfall. He
+joined the political group of one Petrachevsky where the questions of
+constitutional government on the English model, abolition of serfdom,
+and freedom of the press were ardently debated. The whole group was
+arrested, and after having the death-sentence passed on them, were
+led into the prison yard to be executed, when a messenger came forward
+announcing that this sentence had been commuted to imprisonment and
+exile in Siberia. There Dostoevsky remained for ten years, till 1859.
+
+It was not until after his return to Russia, and after his marriage
+which took place in Siberia had proved a total failure, and after a
+violent and lacerating love affair with a demoniacal and coldly proud
+woman, that Dostoevsky found himself as a writer. The book in which
+he found himself, though it has not the fame of the greater novels,
+is in reality the key to his life and thought. It is called “Memories
+from the Underground,” and was written in 1862. It was followed by
+“Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “The Gambler,” “The Possessed” (to
+give it its English title; the Russian title is, properly speaking,
+“Devils”), and “The Brothers Karamazov.” During these later years,
+Dostoevsky’s life was not less harrowing than during the earlier. His
+second marriage, with a young unspoilt girl who was devoted to him,
+gave him some happiness, but his later years were harassed by constant
+money troubles, and from 1867 to 1874 he had to live abroad, as a
+penniless bankrupt. This state of affairs was further aggravated by a
+mania for gambling which possessed him, and by his epileptic seizures,
+now grown acute. His complete break with the Western liberals of
+his youth, and his whole-hearted adoption of a mysticism resting on
+Orthodoxy, alienated his early friends; and the Slavophils with whose
+doctrines he now sympathised were repelled by his rudeness of manner,
+his contempt for good society, and a sort of masked anarchism that
+they perceived in him. Nevertheless, his “Brothers Karamazov,” which
+appeared in the year before his death, made Dostoevsky popular, and his
+Pushkin address, delivered a few months before the end, was a sort of
+apotheosis. He died suddenly, as the result of an aggravated quarrel
+with some relatives over money affairs, early in 1881.
+
+Dostoevsky’s thought may be thus summarized: The human soul was to
+him of incommunicable, unique value. And not only the human soul of
+the higher ranks of society, but that of the lower, the “injured and
+oppressed,” those who had been warped and embittered by the world and
+by man. Dostoevsky knew well that he was such a warped individual, and
+that nothing could heal him except some miracle of divine and earthly
+harmony. This miracle could only be brought about by the production of
+some superior human type, who would at once be “master of the world,”
+a superman and yet one who sympathised and understood the lowest and
+most degraded of men. But the trouble was that such types, the Father
+Zossimas, the Alyosha Karamazovs, the Prince Myshkins, stood aloof from
+the world and innocent of its temptations, they were ineffectual pure
+fools, and in the world’s eyes, “Idiots.” On the other hand the world,
+and Russia in particular (in whose destiny Dostoevsky forced himself
+to believe with the anguished fervor of one who had been made to
+suffer by it, and yet who had no other country) was likely to progress
+in the exactly opposite direction and to produce the anti-Christian
+“superman,” the serene monster, cold-bloodedly dabbling in ultimate
+iniquity. Dostoevsky’s major work is a vast descent into the abyss
+of human perversion, at the bottom of which stood hell, like a “cold
+bathhouse filled with spiders.” If Tolstoy was as Adam before the fall,
+Dostoevsky was Adam after.
+
+Herman Melville, on the other hand, was born in the inner circle of
+America’s colonial aristocracy. His father, a descendant of English
+landowners and Revolutionary patriots, travelled abroad as a young man,
+was highly cultivated for his time, but allowed the family fortune
+to slip through his fingers. He died when Melville was only twelve
+years old, leaving his family bankrupt. His mother, a cold, proud, and
+essentially selfish descendant of the most notable of the colonial
+Dutch settlers who had rallied to Washington’s side, did nothing
+to mitigate the poverty of her family, and at the age of seventeen,
+Melville shipped before the mast as a common seaman on a voyage to
+Liverpool. This voyage, later described in “Redburn,” seems to have
+opened Melville’s eyes to the cruelty and injustice of the world. He
+returned after a painful experience as a penniless waif in England, to
+America, and tried school teaching for a number of years. Meanwhile
+he was writing, desultorily and badly. In 1840, when twenty-one years
+of age, he again, in a fit of desperation, went to sea, this time on
+a whale ship bound to the South Seas. How he deserted his ship at the
+Marquesas, lived for a time with cannibals, returned to Tahiti, saw the
+inside of a jail, and finally became a common seaman aboard an American
+man-of-war which brought him back to his native country, is all fully
+told in his first two books “Typee,” “Omoo,” and their later successor
+“White Jacket.” The return to America in 1846 enabled Melville to
+devote himself to literature, and his first book “Typee,” recounting
+his adventures in the Marquesas, made a sensation in England and
+America, being a “success of scandal” in the latter country on account
+of certain passages not complimentary to the missionaries in the South
+Seas. After writing its successor, “Omoo,” Melville married. The
+marriage, with a woman of wealth and position, brought only further
+disillusionment, as it is apparent that Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of
+the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, had neither imagination nor tact
+to sympathise with her husband’s work nor his sensitive temperament.
+A family of children soon engrossed her, and Melville was forced to
+struggle on alone in the effort to support not only his wife, but his
+mother (who despised him heartily) and his wife’s sister as well. There
+followed in rapid succession, “Mardi” (1848), “Redburn” (1848) and
+“White Jacket” (1849) written to support his waning fortunes. In 1849,
+he went to England, which had begun to take very favourable notice of
+his work, and he might have become there a minor literary lion, but
+family concerns, and perhaps also his own aloof independence of spirit,
+soon recalled him. The first fruits of his return were “Moby Dick” and
+“Pierre,” the two masterpieces of the mature Melville. A disastrous
+fire at his publishers which destroyed the plates of his works, the
+hostility of the reviewers to “Pierre,” Hawthorne’s defection from
+friendship, the increasing lack of understanding of his own family, and
+ill-health, all conspired to embitter him. After one or two further
+attempts, and a second trip abroad on which he wrote the poem “Clarel,”
+which could not even find a publisher, Melville retired from the field.
+His last years were spent as collector of the customs of the port of
+New York, where he died in 1891. His death passed absolutely unnoticed,
+and it is only in the last decade that he has begun to emerge into the
+fame that life denied him.
+
+Melville’s work began as a continuation of the adventure story as
+practised by Cooper. “Typee” and “Omoo” are largely what they purport
+to be; a sublimation of actual experience of a white man amongst
+strange countries and savage peoples with a considerable dash of
+idyllic and exotic colouring. But Melville’s attitude towards the
+savages of the South Seas (to which he came, be it noted, after the
+disillusionment and shattering of early romantic hopes recounted in
+“Redburn”) was very different from the skilled idealisation of the
+remote practised by Cooper. He was the first man to ask himself and
+others the question, “If this savage life is so much more rational and
+sensible than Christianity, why pretend to be Christian?”--a question
+to which to this day there has remained no answer. Thus he early became
+profoundly suspicious of the virtues of his own countrymen, while at
+the same time (like Dostoevsky) he knew himself innately bound to his
+own country by unbreakable ties. He thus affirms the sole achievement
+that Christianity really has to its credit, the conquest of the world
+by democracy, while at the same time his eyes are open to all the
+evil done daily in the world in the name of democracy. This profound
+division of self, this inner warping grew up early in him, and the
+struggle was but intensified by his boyish adoration of his selfish,
+purse-proud, and beautiful mother, which turned to disgust after his
+father’s death. Thus he interjected into the sea-story elements which
+had nothing whatever to do with realistic experience; elements derived
+from his profound knowledge of the ways of humanity, intensified by
+his own loneliness and aloofness from mankind. Very early he seems
+to have traversed the waste of German metaphysics, and to have
+become a transcendentalist, if not before Emerson, at least coeval
+with Hawthorne. Each of the major novels, “Redburn,” “White Jacket,”
+“Moby Dick,” “Mardi,” is less the description of an actual voyage
+than a terrible allegoric record of spiritual defeat and despair.
+Even “Redburn,” the one most based perhaps on actual experience, is
+haunted by the figure of Jackson, a vision of pure unadulterated evil;
+and the two last are desperate flights of imagination away from the
+world. In all his best work, except “Pierre,” Melville makes us walk
+a ship’s deck, which should be the breeding ground of the most mystic
+whole-hearted democracy on earth, and in every line and passage he
+shows us how this fair scene, seen from within man’s soul, is only hell.
+
+
+3
+
+It is customary among literary critics to devote attention to
+Melville’s remarkable style, and to stress the point that Dostoevsky’s
+major novels are nothing but glorified detective stories. It is true
+that Melville possessed a style that in its measured eloquence was the
+equal and sometimes the superior of his models, De Quincey and Sir
+Thomas Browne, and that--at its best--makes the style of Hawthorne
+shrivel into insignificance. It is true also that all of Dostoevsky’s
+great works centre about a commonplace murder, and that he uses the
+most elementary devices of suspense and horror to heighten our interest
+about this murder. But the significant thing is that neither Melville’s
+long purple passages, surcharged with descriptive power, by which he
+makes you see every detail of his scenes in an unearthly light, nor
+Dostoevsky’s interminable hysteric conversations, in which each of
+his characters tries in turn to lay bare the inmost criminal secret
+of his or her soul, are anything more than skilful devices to set out
+the heart of the subject, which is in both cases the complete, candid,
+and terribly disillusioned revelation of the workings of the naked and
+helplessly-entangled human soul. Both carried pure character-creation
+to a point beyond that which any other writer has attempted, except
+perhaps Shakespeare in “Hamlet”; and both, like Shakespeare in
+“Hamlet,” were obsessed by their characters, and obsessed above all by
+the “mystery of iniquity,” the infinite perversion and moral deformity
+of humankind.
+
+It is possible to show how this is so only by a direct comparison of
+the masterpiece of both men. “The Brothers Karamazov” is outwardly, at
+least, the story of the murder of a wealthy landowner by his sons. But
+a moment’s examination of the character of old Karamazov, the landowner
+in question, will convince us that no such man as old Karamazov could
+possibly exist in actual flesh. He transcends all human limitations.
+He is not only a coarse wine-bibber, and an avaricious miser with his
+money, like Dostoevsky’s own father, but an unbridled sensualist, a
+cynic, a sentimentalist, and a buffoon--none of which Dostoevsky’s
+father ever was. He is, in short, an encyclopædia of all Russian vices,
+is in fact, a symbol of that Old Russia which Dostoevsky saw had to
+be put to death. And as such, he triumphs in life and death over his
+sons. The oldest, Ivan, who is also the noblest, sees his faith in
+God and man destroyed by the monstrous conduct of his father, and
+goes insane; the second, Dmitri, follows a crooked path of sensuality
+and sentimentality, but is redeemed by some traits of generosity for
+which he has to suffer; the youngest of all, Alyosha, fancies that he
+has gained redemption and become “a new man” by entering a monastery,
+but in the end has to admit that he too is in essence “Karamazov.”
+The actual murder is consummated by Smerdyakov, the unacknowledged
+offspring of Karamazov himself and a gutter-drab; he hangs himself, and
+Dmitri has to suffer the penalty. The end of the book leaves Dostoevsky
+questioning alike human and divine justice; there is no solution,
+except perhaps in suffering, and the shout of “Hurrah for Karamazov!”
+with which the story closes, may conceal an even deadlier irony.
+
+Melville’s “Moby Dick” is very different as regards setting, but its
+import is even more clear. Here we have what purports to be the story
+of a whaling-cruise. But in fact the story from beginning to end is
+pure allegory, thinly disguised with masses of irrelevant detail about
+whales and whaling. Moby Dick, the White Whale, whose killing is the
+special aim of the ship’s cruise, is nothing but a symbol: a symbol of
+the unearthly, unconquerable, superhuman--and after all is said and
+done, strangely beautiful--power of evil. He exists in every sea of the
+world, but it is precisely in the “Pacific,” in the heart of a noonday
+calm, that he is found. He has been sighted before, but never without
+disaster; has been hunted by others, but has always escaped. Captain
+Ahab, master of the ship that is now seeking him, has been disabled by
+him, in a previous encounter, having lost one leg. This Captain Ahab is
+Melville’s symbol of the human will in its highest and most courageous
+aspect; the human will that, not having been able to conquer evil by
+fair means, in direct battle, now strives to do so by unhallowed ones.
+By a stroke of superb genius, Melville makes him master even of the
+souls of simple savages; his three chief harpooners are respectively a
+South Sea Islander, a Negro, and an American Indian. His control over
+his three mates, all of whom represent some shade of manly courage, is
+also practically absolute. Moby Dick is duly hunted, and destroys the
+ship and Ahab alike in a scene whose magnificence of prose and mounting
+terror alike have no parallel in anything written by man. The only
+person who has foreseen the inevitable tragedy is an idiot boy, to whom
+no one pays attention; the only one who survives it is the outcast,
+Ishmael, who tells the story.
+
+Here, too, the parallel with Shakespeare is inevitable. As Dostoevsky
+recalls “Hamlet,” and in part “Othello,” so Melville recalls the
+Shakespeare of “Macbeth” and “King Lear.” If we can suppose a Lear
+endowed with superhuman force, who instead of wandering out upon
+the heath and raving, feeds his insanity with the steady thought of
+revenge, and at last sets out, backed by others, to accomplish it,
+we get in this Lear a complete picture of Ahab. He is undaunted, so
+long as his ship lasts, ready to match weapons with God Himself. Only
+when his ship goes down before the battering onrush of the superhuman
+power behind Moby Dick does Ahab momentarily give way; and then but to
+recover and hurl another unavailing harpoon at his antagonist. Ship
+and captain alike go down in the struggle, and the last thing seen is
+a topmast pennon floating above the waters, with a sky-hawk entangled
+in its folds: “And so the bird of heaven with his whole captive form
+enfolded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship which, like
+Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of
+heaven along with her, and helmeted herself in it.” “Then all collapsed
+and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand
+years ago.” To the problem of evil Melville has no more an answer,
+then, than Dostoevsky. He can but suggest that if evil conquers, it
+is so much the worse for God who lets evil conquer; a solution to
+which Dostoevsky might have answered in the words of Kirillov in
+“The Possessed,” that God in that case was dead, and man must become
+God. That Melville adds his favourite tag “all is vanity,” to this
+conclusion would seem to Dostoevsky an impertinence. “We have to live
+nevertheless,” he might have retorted; a fact poor Melville often
+neglected to take into account.
+
+Before Melville arrived at this conclusion, that the world was more
+evil than good, he too had striven to portray the ideal human type of
+his dreams. Jack Chase in “White Jacket” (who is significantly made an
+Englishman) is the apotheosis of Melville’s type; the bluff, hearty,
+pleasant Anglo-Saxon blend of Pagan and Puritan. Perhaps it was his own
+wavering between England and America (where the bluff, hearty, pleasant
+type is but too frequently in practice a hypocrite and a bully to boot)
+that made Melville select for his life’s loyalty, this sort of being,
+and not continue his search into the deeper waters of the human soul;
+certainly it was his own reticent prudery in sexual matters--a prudery
+not shared by the great Russian with whom his name is here linked--that
+made him hesitate before what must have been the final statement of his
+problem. What that statement might have been, “Pierre” exists to show;
+Melville in the end meant to portray evil as seductive but ruinous, and
+good as purely negative and helpless. The public would have none of
+this, and Melville decided to keep silent about the dangerous secret
+of his own philosophy. That he did not continue to write was America’s
+second great disaster in the field of culture; following on the Civil
+War, it was a double fatality scarcely paralleled elsewhere, and
+certainly not in Russia. But in his transformation of the realistic
+adventure story into the “allegory of Good and Evil” Melville perhaps
+pointed the way to American authors as yet unborn.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+
+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.
+
+The watchword of the twentieth century for America was “uplift”; a
+determination to exploit the resources of the country up to the limit,
+and to preserve the Puritan outlook on life that had led to such
+important results, although the Puritan strain itself was steadily
+declining in numbers and ability. Abroad, America was determined to
+make her influence felt as at home; and the shadow of the dollar began
+to extend itself not only over the American continent, but in the
+remote regions of Europe and the Far East. The watchword for Russia
+during the same period was suppression of everything that stood in the
+way of the continuance of the Romanov dynasty, and suppression of the
+underground struggle for power by all other sections. The combined
+forces of Church and State would struggle on for a time longer, though
+deprived of every vestige of intelligent support. There was nothing to
+do but to wait on fate. When Crown and Church fell, they would fall
+together. Abroad, Russia had little influence; all she asked for from
+her new ally France was not a hand in policy, but capital to enable
+her to meet the expenses of the immense military establishment she was
+compelled to keep up in order to avert an explosion at home. Though
+facing the East, she was drawn into the orbit of European nationalist
+diplomacy by her economic needs. In America, on the other hand, no one
+need ask Europe for financial aid. But there had to be an increasing
+economic penetration of Europe to counterbalance industrial tension at
+home.
+
+
+3
+
+Meantime, while these tremendous events were preparing, the nations
+of the European continent pursued the path that had been left open to
+them by Napoleon’s collapse, the path of a final intensification of
+separate effort, backed by the combined forces of industrialism and
+parliamentarism. It is possible that never to the average individual
+had European life appeared on the surface so promising, so rich in
+its complexity, as during the first decade of the twentieth century.
+Despite the upheavals of 1848, despite the recrudescence of war that
+had broken out in the years 1866-1870, the continent that was the
+home of man’s ripest and maturest forms of civilisation had made
+an astonishing recovery. The old and the new had been skilfully
+combined. Except in France, the trappings of royalty persisted side by
+side with keen-witted Parliaments, whose members, inflamed by fiery
+patriotism and the carefully fostered sense of nationality, vied with
+each other in demanding more and more factories and better armaments.
+Thanks to the triumphs of science, the ever new discoveries that had
+been made in the realm of invention, the spread of electric light,
+telephones, railways, sanitation, medical skill, literacy, with the
+rapidly approaching advent of the motor car and the aeroplane in
+the offing--thanks to all these things, and the possession of the
+franchise, the future was held to be a rosy one. England in particular
+fêted the culmination of the Victorian age, and her last triumph over
+the Boers. France threw wide the doors of a great exhibition in Paris
+to celebrate a century of progress. Italy had reawakened as by magic
+from her decay, and was becoming a modern nation, without losing her
+ancient picturesqueness. In Austria, despite internal difficulties, the
+veteran Franz Joseph still firmly held together the various parts of
+his ramshackle Empire. Even backward Spain, newly defeated by America,
+might aspire to a new Empire in Morocco. As for the Far East, that too
+was giving way before the dominating force of the white man; in the
+Philippines, where America was proving herself the heir to England’s
+colonial ability; in China, where the Boxer rising had been quelled;
+in India, which England held firmly; and on the continent of Africa,
+parcelled out into colonies, and ruled by a dozen different nations.
+Yes, the future was full of hope, a great hope for the white man.
+
+Such was the picture that Europe presented to the superficial observer
+at the close of the century. But underneath, things were very, very
+different, as a few lonely Europeans--men like Ibsen and Nietzsche--had
+learned to their cost. The aggressive nationalism that had gone on
+unchecked throughout the nineteenth century had proven the real enemy
+of progress. Every European nation had its own army, its own fleet;
+and these immense military establishments were not only expensive,
+but dangerous. Peace was outwardly maintained by means of a complex
+web of diplomacy and treaties. The Triple Alliance balanced the
+Triple Entente; but day by day this web became stretched to finer
+tension, nearer to the breaking point. What was still worse was that
+a generation of unchecked industrial competition, taking as its tacit
+watchword its own interpretation of Darwin’s law of “the struggle
+for life and the survival of the fittest,” had created immense city
+slums, huge industrial areas of unrelieved hideousness, festering
+plague-spots where drink, crime, misery, disease--varied only by
+strikes and discontent--stalked open and unabashed. The protests of a
+few idealists, a few æstheticians, such as Ruskin and William Morris,
+had passed unheeded. Religion itself could do nothing to mend matters,
+inasmuch as it was mostly State-religion, paying lip-service to the
+established powers. When it condemned, it did so mostly for wrong
+reasons, as in the case of Zola, whose only too honest and accurate
+social novels proved meat far too strong for ecclesiastical stomachs.
+
+To the radical minority of impartial and intelligent observers,
+whether these called themselves socialists, anarchists, communists,
+or simply honest men, something in the cardboard edifice of European
+nationalistic prosperity was certain to give way; whether it was
+the perpetual military establishments, or the intensive industrial
+competition, or the futile and stupid madness of “patriotic”
+Parliaments, or the mob-spirit already manifesting itself as latent
+in democracy. But though the radicals saw the abyss yawning beneath
+their feet, they could not arrest the earth-tremor that was shortly
+to precipitate them and their respective nations into it. The régime
+of mechanical competition and of intensified nationalist effort had
+taken too firm a hold ever to be checked by words, however eloquent
+and far-seeing. As many intelligent men realised this fact, a sort
+of _fin de siècle_ weariness sprang up through the nineties, spread
+itself throughout Europe, and after taking the various forms of
+decadentism, symbolism, exoticism, finally immobilised itself in the
+cynical lightness of an Anatole France. Meanwhile, the web of diplomacy
+was re-spun, re-stretched, half ruptured at a touch and again tied
+together. Every year brought new threats of war, balanced by new
+projects of peace, until most people dreamed that war might never
+come. The sound of a revolver-shot in the sleepy town of Serajevo at
+last proved sufficient to shatter the fabric of a century of European
+diplomacy. A sort of convulsion passed over the face of the world, and
+the next moment, the nations that had maintained the fiction of armed
+peace ever since 1870 suddenly found themselves involved in the vast
+cataclysm of another European war.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+
+Fifteen years since the outbreak, and eleven years since the cessation
+of European hostilities have passed away; but the question is not yet
+fully settled of responsibility for the war. Fortunately the question
+need not here be asked; for it would lead us too far into the maze of
+treaties and of safeguarding diplomacy by which the European nations
+strove to make innocuous that national sentiment they themselves had so
+outwardly fostered. Our concern here is not with moral responsibility,
+but with tendency and result. The tendency in Europe, for a century of
+European history, had been to prepare for war and to strive to maintain
+outwardly the peace by diplomacy. There came a time when the machine
+of war, carefully prepared and oiled, went forward simply of itself.
+The brakes of diplomacy refused to work any longer. That moment came in
+August, 1914.
+
+The ultimate decision for war no doubt came from the fact that Russia,
+having mobilised her armies, in response to Austria’s insulting
+ultimatum to Serbia, refused to withdraw the mobilisation order and to
+allow Kaiser Wilhelm to make his eleventh-hour appearance in the rôle
+of peacemaker. But to say that thereby Russia was solely responsible
+for the war, is to utter the most pernicious nonsense. One might as
+well say that America--who began and furthered the negotiations in the
+person of President Wilson--was solely responsible for the peace, as
+embodied in the Treaty of Versailles. From the moment when the Czar
+and his advisers decided not to tolerate any further Austro-German
+interference with the Slav nationalities of the Balkans--interference
+which had already completely alienated Bulgaria and had transformed
+Rumania from a friendly people to a sullenly hostile one--from that
+moment the issue was already as good as settled. The Russian people
+awoke as by magic from the stupor of their long nightmare, and walked
+forth in the sunlight of a clear racial policy. Henceforward there
+were to be no more mad attempts to penetrate into distant Asia, while
+ignoring the plaint of the neighbour lying wounded at their own doors.
+The dream of uniting the oppressed western Slavs of Europe into one
+great free confederation under the headship of orthodox Moscow--a dream
+which had been Russia’s up to Peter the Great’s day, and which had
+revived under Nicholas I and Alexander II--needed but the touch of the
+Russian ultimatum to Austria to start afresh from the soil. The “third
+Rome” was to be no more a lost ideal but an accomplished fact. In the
+fervour of a mystical re-conversion to an ideal which had somehow been
+lost sight of, all party differences, all scars and injuries were
+forgotten, and immense throngs again kneeled before the Czar. Only
+the tram operatives of St. Petersburg and Moscow, indifferent to any
+feeling but that of class, persisted for a time in a crippling strike,
+at the same time the ultimatum went forward to Austria and her ally,
+Germany. A small defection, but one pregnant with ominous possibilities
+for the future.
+
+Having mobilised his forces on the frontier, ready to move forward
+in case Austria persisted in enforcing the terms of her outrageous
+military and political demands upon helpless Serbia, the Czar refused
+to countermand the order, despite Kaiser Wilhelm’s belated and hysteric
+attempts to extricate himself from a position in which he had already
+placed himself. Had Russia done so, what would have been the result?
+The infuriated armies of Russia, withdrawn from the frontier, and
+doubly tricked by their rulers, from accomplishment of an aim that
+seemed to them perfectly just, might have perhaps marched upon Moscow
+and deposed the Romanovs. No doubt this consideration was also present
+in the minds of the Czar and of his chief advisers. It was necessary
+at least to make an armed demonstration of goodwill to the Slav peoples
+in general, in order to save their faces. Moreover, there was France
+to be considered; France, which had solely stood by Russia during the
+dark years since 1905, and which was burning with the hope of revenge
+on Germany. So the time-limit of midnight August 1st expired, and the
+world blundered into war.
+
+The fact that Russia, despite her immense awakening of enthusiasm
+for the cause of her fellow-Slavs, and despite her determination to
+fight on to the bitter end--a determination which she proved over and
+over again--was, after all, badly led and shamefully equipped, was no
+handicap at the outset. Had the East Prussian campaign which was halted
+at Tannenberg, not been fought, the allies could not have stood firm,
+and stemmed the German onset at the Marne. This campaign, in the end
+disastrous to the Russians, was nevertheless of equal moral effect on
+the ultimate result as was America’s intervention three years later. In
+the one case as in the other, it was not skill, but the mere weight of
+numbers that finally decided the issue. The French troops, badly beaten
+in their first attempt to seize upon Alsace-Lorraine, and supported
+only by a meagre skeleton force of British, fell back steadily upon
+Paris, until suddenly the pressure upon their crumbling front relaxed
+and the desperate stand upon the Marne was transformed into an advance
+to the Aisne. And this policy had been dictated to the German general
+staff by the trail of smoking farmsteads and ravaged towns that the
+Russians were making in the Hohenzollern province of East Prussia. The
+well-directed thrust of the German armies to get between the desperate
+French troops and Paris itself, and to cut off one from the other,
+failed because two army corps had to be detached to aid Hindenburg to
+trap the advancing Russians at Tannenberg. Thus the true agent of the
+so-called “miracle of the Marne” was neither France nor England, but
+Russia--that Russia whom her allies abandoned and repudiated three
+years later in the time of her bitterest humiliation.
+
+Despite the appalling loss of eighty thousand effectives at Tannenberg,
+the great masses of the Russian people undoubtedly felt that they
+could go on waging war indefinitely. Austria on the Carpathian-Polish
+frontier proved as easy for them to invade as East Prussia was
+impossible. All that they needed to accomplish the ultimate result was
+a steady supply of munitions and supplies from the better-equipped
+allies. But this feeling was not shared by the more intelligent heads
+of affairs in the allied countries. One of the most far-seeing, the
+English war secretary, Kitchener, had spoken of three years as being
+the probable duration of the contest. It would take that time, he
+thought, to stem the German advance through Belgium into France and
+to train and equip armies sufficiently strong to coöperate with the
+Russians elsewhere, and thus to force Germany to abandon the struggle.
+By a miracle which was even greater in its total effect, though less
+popularly acclaimed, than the “miracle of the Marne,” England barely
+managed to save the Channel Ports through her stand at Ypres, and thus
+effectively blockaded Germany--though this miracle was accomplished at
+the price of all her fighting effectives. The war became, after the
+first winter, a war of attrition with only one outstanding question:
+how long would it take the Allies, backed as they were by the immense
+wave of enthusiasm that was sweeping England and her colonies, to raise
+the enormous forces required to throw back Germany in the West, and to
+bring relief in the East to Russia, who was now equally blockaded--her
+only effective port being Archangel. For by this time Germany had
+persuaded Turkey to enter the war on her side.
+
+The question was not long in being answered. In the spring of 1915
+England committed herself to an attack upon the Gallipoli peninsula.
+Had that attack been pressed home, and Constantinople fallen, the war
+would certainly have ended then and there. For Germany could not then
+have halted the immense supply of munitions and equipment that England,
+confident of her financial resources and Still mistress of the seas,
+was now cleverly procuring for herself and her allies through the
+factories of outwardly neutral America. But as regards Russia, Germany
+was already doing her work pretty thoroughly. Though the supplies were
+pouring into Archangel, they were for the most part never allowed
+to leave the wharves, or mysteriously disappeared _en route_ to the
+Russian armies. For by now a small group of sycophantic courtiers and
+corrupt administrators of the Czar’s own inner circle, taking their
+tone from Berlin, and possibly also from the imperious and self-willed
+Czarina, were asking themselves the question, “What should happen, if,
+after all, we won? Would we not have put into the hands of the people
+the very weapon whereby to destroy our power?”
+
+Thus through outward delay and inner treachery, the Allies themselves
+threw away their chief opportunity of forcing a decision upon Germany.
+The Gallipoli advance, thanks to divided counsels in England and in
+France, was never pressed home in time. The Russian armies, which
+despite their terrible shortage in munitions, had fought their way
+into Galicia in the spring of 1915 and delivered their last effective
+threat to Vienna, crumbled away helplessly before the new policy
+Germany had conceived of standing like a wall in the West, and sweeping
+down all opposition in the East. From the foothills of the Carpathians
+and the Hungarian plains to the Pripet marshes that lay two hundred
+miles behind Warsaw, the Russian armies retreated, fighting with sticks
+instead of rifles, and having back of them not sufficient reserves of
+ammunition even to feed their batteries for a day. The outcome was that
+the Grand Duke Nicholas, an able hard-bitten soldier, was deposed from
+command of the Russian armies, and the Czar, now more than ever swayed
+by the evil influences of his consort and Rasputin, took command.
+Russia’s doom was sealed.
+
+At the same time, England, misled by the French into thinking that the
+German effectives were wasting away more rapidly than those of the
+Allies in the West, withdrew from Gallipoli and launched a disastrous
+attack at Loos, which was completely abortive, and served only to sweep
+away a great portion of the new armies which Kitchener had summoned
+into being. Henceforward, stalemate was practically certain, and by
+this stalemate Germany in the end stood ready to profit. For she could
+now move towards the East whenever and wherever she pleased. Bulgaria
+was brought into the war on Germany’s side to counterbalance Italy’s
+defection to the cause of the Allies, in 1915; and from Antwerp to the
+Persian Gulf, Kaiser Wilhelm now ruled supreme. Russia had utterly
+collapsed in the East, and the iron wall of troops still stood firmly
+planted on French soil. That was the prospect that uplifted all German
+hearts to face, in 1916, another year of war.
+
+
+2
+
+So the first act of the great drama ended with Germany everywhere
+triumphant in the East and the Allies unable to force a decision
+anywhere on their own chosen ground of the West. But this result had
+only hardened the Western allies to persist. Their very lives were now
+at stake, and they still held the German lines immobilised, and the
+German coasts in the grip of the blockade. Economically, Germany could
+persist no more than Napoleon had persisted, in bearing the strain. She
+still had two military weapons whereby she might be able to bring her
+last two opponents, France and England, to the ground. These were her
+own power of making munitions, a power which had been tested and proven
+successful in pulverising the Russians in the spring of 1915; and in
+addition, the submarine which might eventually starve out England.
+Both weapons were launched on the world in full strength in 1916.
+
+The million of shells which the German armies showered on Verdun
+in the first twelve hours’ bombardment of that fortress, and the
+million tons of shipping which England began losing every month,
+proved, however, equally ineffective to bring the war to its close.
+The first led directly to open discontent behind the lines in Germany
+itself; the latter led indirectly to America’s entry into the war. For
+despite the wave of horror that had swept over her at the loss of the
+_Lusitania_, America now learned with amazement that the Germans had
+no intention whatever of abandoning the submarine, with its constant
+threat to neutral traffic. The outcome was to bring America into the
+struggle as a fresh factor of incalculable strength against an already
+disillusioned Germany.
+
+Yet this decision was not taken immediately. Apart from two strongly
+vocal minorities, one of which insistently upheld the cause of the
+Allies, while the other just as clearly pointed out the tremendous
+triumphs of the German military machine, the great bulk of the American
+people were still indifferent. They had, and they desired, no quarrel
+with the people of Germany. On this basis, the sentimental basis of
+“having kept America out of the war,” President Wilson was re-elected
+in November 1916. He knew, and had given indications that he knew,
+that the business of American neutrality was played out. But this
+knowledge was not shared by the great majority of his people, who
+fondly hoped to continue to profit at the expense of both sides in the
+struggle, by maintaining a prosperous neutrality.
+
+With incredible folly, the military leaders of Germany, blind to the
+harvest of suffering they were creating in the homes and hearts of
+their own people, played completely into the American President’s
+hands. They issued a proclamation pointing out the devastation that
+the German arms had already caused (a devastation real enough when
+we consider that a million Russians had been slaughtered, another
+million were prisoners in German hands, and that great tracts of land
+had been left desert in Northern France, Poland, and the Balkans) and
+demanding that this destruction should now cease. Let the Allies come
+to the council table, and they would learn Germany’s demands. In the
+swollen phrases of this threatening note, the American President found
+his opportunity. He issued an appeal to the Allies to state their war
+aims. The reply was unexpectedly moderate, but official Germany gave no
+indication that she would accept it. Instead, while Wilson spoke openly
+of a peace without victory, based on the cessation of interference
+by one nation in another’s affairs, government by the consent of the
+governed, freedom of the seas, and limitation of armaments, Germany
+unsheathed her last weapon. On January 31st, 1917, she proclaimed a
+blockade of England, France, and Italy, closed the ports of Europe
+to neutral shipping, and declared that her submarines would sink
+henceforward all ships that endeavoured to trade with the belligerents
+at war with Germany. The answer was prompt and immediate. The American
+government severed diplomatic relations with Germany.
+
+Thus America came into the war in defence of the same principle of
+freedom of the seas about which she had once before fought England in
+1812. The leaders of Germany, had they possessed any intimate knowledge
+of American history, or the American character, might have foreseen
+this result. For the American nation as a whole lives and flourishes
+by, and wages its greatest struggles over, the application of certain
+very simple shibboleths and slogans. It was so in 1776, in 1812, in
+1861, and it was again to prove so in 1917. Unlike the Russians, who
+can always change their outward principles completely, without losing
+any of their inner characteristics, the Americans have no special inner
+characteristics (as they have no aristocracy) but make up for this lack
+by their whole-hearted obedience to certain primary ideas and taboos
+which are to them sacred. The threat which Germany delivered to the
+cherished right of America to trade freely with all the nations of the
+earth, and thereby to end the whole edifice of American prosperity,
+proved sufficient to unite all sections of the American people; and
+never did President Wilson speak more surely on behalf of the entire
+nation than when, paraphrasing Luther, he declared that America “could
+do no other” than fight.
+
+Thus it happened that America, immense in untouched power and resource,
+united to defeat Germany at the same moment when Russia, bleeding and
+defeated, with an internal revolution on her hands, reeled out of the
+struggle. For the first time--if we except the opening up of Japan in
+which each had taken previously a hand--the two nations whose effort
+was to dominate the future, met on a common ground. Like an electric
+flash, or the torches that the Greek runners had carried in their
+races long gone by, an impulse flashed from one to the other. That
+impulse may have differed in origin, but not in aim. What Russia by her
+concentration of power into a vacillating but central ruling class,
+could not do, America, by her diffusion of power into a self-reliant
+bourgeoisie, accomplished. Russia had crippled the European nationalist
+military machine; America overwhelmed the economic. And not only the
+liberated Slavs of Eastern Europe, but also the Mediterranean powers,
+owe their existence to-day to the action of two nations, neither of
+which stood to profit thereby: America and Russia.
+
+
+3
+
+The impulse that had pushed the two great frontier nations forward
+to their momentary encounter on the blood-soaked and devastated soil
+of Europe, was unquestionably the same in essence, though differing
+profoundly in origin and in ultimate result. In the case of Russia, the
+unconscious weight of public opinion, holding steadily to its ancient
+dream of a great Pan-Slav Empire, had literally pushed from behind
+the vacillating and enfeebled Czar. In the case of America, an aloof,
+cautious, and essentially undemocratic President had found at last a
+democratic formula to which popular opinion, holding firm to its old
+dream of liberty for all peoples, could respond. The situation of 1688,
+of 1776-89, of 1860-65 was thus repeated, on a larger scale, and with
+the world itself for background; and the repercussion of both events in
+their respective countries led to the same profound and far-reaching
+changes.
+
+In America, the principles which President Wilson had enunciated in
+his celebrated Fourteen Points--principles which the Allies promptly
+accepted as a basis for negotiation with a Germany, now ready to
+acknowledge its defeat, and which they conveniently forgot immediately
+afterwards--came into open and direct conflict with the outstanding
+notion which had guided America in its foreign relations since the days
+of Washington; that there was to be above all, aloofness from Europe,
+no entanglement in European affairs. The result was that the American
+President, who had been unquestionably empowered by his people to wage
+war, found himself unable to make peace. The moment he stepped upon
+European soil, President Wilson ceased to represent the American people
+and became only representative of himself. Thus the declaration of
+the Armistice led not to peace and sheathing of the sword, but to the
+last act of the world struggle, an act in which America was obliged to
+play the part of striving to rehabilitate Europe economically, while
+standing aloof politically.
+
+At the other end of the scale, it is necessary to note that since the
+spring of 1917, Russia had been in revolution, a revolution which took
+an extreme form in the Bolshevik seizure of power in November of that
+year. Lacking a Czar, abandoned by its Allies, utterly disillusioned
+about the war, leaderless, and incapable of continuing the struggle,
+the country now presented an opportunity to any clever opportunist who
+could, under the guise of promising to the peasants bread, peace and
+land, effectively usurp the central power of the Czar. Lenin alone
+saw this opportunity and was ready to seize it and bend it to its
+purposes. A new alliance equally deadly to avowed Czarists and liberal
+intellectuals was forged between factory-worker and mujik; and from the
+achievement of this alliance we date present-day Russia. The situation
+had found the sole man, ruthless, undemocratic, efficient, who could
+guide it. In America, Wilson had skilfully manœuvred his people into
+a position where further retreat into neutrality was, as he thought,
+impossible. He had created his own opportunity, instead of waiting
+for it to come to him; and having created it, he immediately supposed
+that he could personally master it, and that it would follow him
+blindly. He did not count on the revulsion of horror that would follow
+upon America’s awakening to the fact that the country was enmeshed
+in European diplomacy, the determination on the part of his people
+to remain an independent frontier. Thus the American and the Russian
+crises followed very different courses.
+
+There is much in the career of Woodrow Wilson that recalls the tragic
+life-story of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Amenophis IV, known to later
+ages as Akhnaton. Like the Egyptian king who strove to transform
+the religion of his people from a tribal polytheism into a pure and
+universal form of monotheism, Wilson strove to formulate finally the
+American creed as it affected the world. But the American creed is too
+loosely held, too vague a sentiment, to be formulated. A Californian,
+though he may belong to the same racial stock, cannot have the same
+outlook as a New Englander; a New Orleans Creole cannot share the
+attitude to life of a Scandinavian settler in Northern Michigan.
+America owes its continuance solely to the fact that all these diverse
+racial and geographical stocks assume that their pooled effort will
+make America sufficient to itself, and that “government of the people
+by the people for the people” will still persist in bestowing the
+fruits of middle-class prosperity. But it is obvious that this simple
+creed--or superstition--cannot be maintained if once any attempt is
+made to apply it to the more complex European situation. Once America
+backs any side in the European struggle, then that side has to become
+outwardly, if not inwardly, American; that is to say, it has to abandon
+all the traditional differences that distinguish it from its European
+neighbours. Wilson strove to reconcile the psychology of America with
+the remoter psychology of Europe, in the same way as Amenophis strove
+to identify all forms of Egyptian worship with his own personal and
+individual creed. In striving thus to simplify the situation, he merely
+complicated it. And the result was, as in the case of the Egyptian
+Pharaoh whom he resembled, a personal tragedy of immense magnitude,
+which left the American President an outlaw and heretic in his own
+country, and pursued him to his death with rancour and misunderstanding.
+
+Russia in repudiating the war and the Romanovs had to repudiate
+Europe, and this despite the Bolsheviks themselves, whose dream was
+probably a Marxian version of Peter the Great’s Empire. It became
+again a peasant country facing the East. America, by its repudiation
+of Wilson, was driven also to repudiate Europe, and this despite the
+most intelligent classes of Americans who were aware that the one hope
+of the maintenance of European peace lay in the establishment of an
+European concert of nations. America became again a land of opportunist
+industrialism, facing westward. Thus the two nations, having like two
+planets revolved in opposing orbits up to the moment these orbits
+coincided, resumed again their former course, but not without the hope
+of some further encounter in the future. The optimistic idealism of
+President Wilson, ready to accept the most outrageous provisions of
+the Versailles Treaty for the sake of preserving his conception of
+a League of Nations bound to respect the fundamental principles of
+democracy, was finally rejected not by Europe, but by America. The
+fatalistic materialism of Lenin, ready to swallow complete defeat at
+Brest-Litovsk for the sake of creating a proletarian world-empire,
+broke equally before the lack of European support and the obstinacy
+of the Russian peasantry. With Wilson’s final retirement and Lenin’s
+new economic policy the issue of the great drama was largely settled
+as regards the two chief protagonists of Russia and America. But the
+third, Europe, caught in the cleft of the dilemma, unable to decide
+for either democratic capitalism or demagogic dictatorship, has as yet
+found no clear issue out of the impasse.
+
+This position, which is the world position of to-day, was enforced on
+Europe by the successive abandonment of the European situation on the
+part of both Russia and America. In the case of Russia, the abandonment
+was perhaps more absolute, because it was more deeply psychological.
+The Russian asked Europe for a new fetich, a new sacred talisman, to
+replace the old fetich of the Orthodox Czar which was utterly worn out,
+and impotent to protect him longer against misfortune. Such a belief
+in the power of a fetich, a cult-object, is Oriental, and indeed the
+Russian is fundamentally Oriental. The fetich of success had been
+imported formerly from abroad, by Peter the Great, by Catherine, by
+Alexander II, by Witte. Now it was no longer forthcoming. Even the guns
+and the gold that the Allies had promised and provided, were turning
+against the Russians themselves. A new talisman would have to be found
+within. Lenin was the sole man who could provide it. A workman’s cap,
+a few words from Marx, education and electric light for all, would be
+sufficient. Russia could scramble out of her impasse, secure in the
+conviction that she henceforth could control her destiny alone, while
+undermining the nations of Europe with their own revolutionary ethic.
+
+But America, too, abandoned Europe for causes that, however economic
+they may appear on the surface, have a firmly-grounded psychological
+foundation. Unlike Russia, all the talismans, wealth, power,
+prosperity, were in her hands. But she was uneasy because she could
+not discover a verbal formula that would cover equally her own
+political union and the diversity of disunited European nations. This
+belief in a formula--which expresses itself in Egyptian hieroglyph,
+in Aristotelian syllogism, in algebraic equation--is Occidental, and
+America is fundamentally Occidental. Even the arguments of the most
+enlightened European statesmen, prepared to back up President Wilson
+in his demand for a League of Nations, turned against America itself. A
+League of Nations--what did that mean but a confederation of sovereign
+and independent states such as had threatened to disrupt the economic
+alliance between North and Middle West during the fateful years of
+1854-65? What else did it mean, but that the Americans themselves, in
+so far as they were still sentimentally attached to Europe, could still
+feel themselves to be Europeans? The whole process of “Americanization”
+was threatened by such a programme. Common standards of Puritan
+conduct, of business dealing, of economic prosperity were threatened by
+such a step. Wilson’s words, however close they seemed to Lincoln’s,
+would effectively destroy all that the armies invoked by Lincoln had
+fought for. They would destroy Americanism, and make Europeans equal
+in every respect, to Americans. Let them be anathema! America hastened
+to scramble out of her impasse, fearful that the European nations were
+plotting against her, and determined henceforth to undermine them by
+means of the “peaceful penetration” of mass-production.
+
+Nations have their phobias and complexes no less than individuals. In
+the case of America and Russia, a complex and a phobia were to take the
+place of the natural growth of tradition, and to strive to overcome the
+world.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+
+For the past ten years the situation of Europe has been both grotesque
+and tragic. Had she made her exit from the stage of world-politics with
+the gesture of tragic dignity that marked the downfall of the ancient
+Roman Empire, had she been overwhelmed by a new wave of barbarians,
+the historian of to-day might have a more pleasant and profitable task
+to fulfill. But unfortunately nothing of this came to pass, nor did
+Europe really recover from the death-blow of the war. Since 1921, when
+the French armies marched into the Ruhr, she has become like a patient
+suffering from shell-shock who acts irresponsibly and has no coherent
+purpose in life. Apart from the tenuous hope of a League of Nations
+which has not been able to prevent fresh combinations of power, such
+as have been clearly revealed by the various naval pacts, nor fresh
+outbursts of rabid nationalism, such as France, Italy and various
+Balkan nationalities have displayed, Europe has done little, either
+morally or politically. Of the two new world-philosophies offered her,
+she has chosen neither.
+
+The American world-philosophy, in the ultimate form that it has taken
+since the close of the war, is a rough-and-ready simplification of
+the far more complex but equally individualistic social philosophy
+of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. It exalts the physical liberty
+of the individual at the expense of his general social and moral
+responsibility. Immediately after the close of war, the labour
+situation in America became again acute. The great industrial trade
+unions, realising the immense part they had played in carrying the
+Allied effort to a successful conclusion, had long begun to agitate
+for an overthrow of the existing form of government and for such a
+seizure of power as had been effected in Russia. The American system
+of democratic capitalism, reverting into the hands of the great
+industrialists and their allies and servants, set itself to the
+task of destroying this opposition. Its two outstanding means were
+mass-production and coöperative capitalism. It set itself to the task
+of manufacturing more quickly and of giving the worker a share in
+the product. Thereby it created a new prosperity and a standardised
+happiness. Any protest became in the eyes of its leaders a crime
+against true Americanism. To enforce this unalterable Americanism upon
+the immense masses of citizens of foreign descent, it was necessary to
+stop the flow of immigration; and this was promptly done. To prevent
+the country lapsing into a state of sheer moral anarchy, such as was
+foreshadowed by the post-war revivals of the Ku Klux Klan, the fierce
+recrudescence of race-hatreds cutting athwart all sections of American
+life, it was necessary to concentrate solely on a more intensive
+development of that industrial prosperity that had characterised the
+war years. The South was industrially invaded as well as the North,
+the East and the West became more firmly linked together by the
+great money and manufacturing interests. Finally, to ensure that the
+reëstablishment of the country was to be permanent, on the old basis of
+complete aloofness from both European radicalism and European idealism,
+it was necessary to stifle or suppress freedom of spirit, freedom of
+thought, freedom of public utterance, and to concentrate altogether
+on the immense material achievements that America had already
+accomplished--the improvement in living conditions, the provisions of
+schools, hospitals, roads, and scientific inventions for all sections
+of the population. Accordingly, the study of American patriotic views
+became an important part of school curriculums. Anyone who thought
+otherwise than these views taught, must either hold his peace or accept
+exile and poverty. During the years that immediately succeeded the war,
+a new body of American intellectuals again took the road to Europe,
+not to mention those who were forcibly cast out upon Soviet Russia.
+
+The Russian world-philosophy, as formulated by the leaders of the new
+Bolshevik régime, was also a comprehensive simplification of what was
+formerly a much more complex social position. It skilfully provided
+an outlet for public enterprise, while maintaining the power in the
+hands of a specially chosen and selected class. Unquestioningly the
+Bolsheviks accepted the postulate, which America had been foremost in
+proclaiming, that all power derives ultimately from the lowest ranks of
+the people, from the peasants and factory workers. This happened also
+to be the postulate of Karl Marx, and accordingly Marxism became a new
+State religion to take the place of the old, which had delegated this
+power of the people themselves into the hands of the Czar and of the
+Orthodox Church. But in its application to the situation created by
+the Russian débâcle, this dogma proved to be just as much of a check
+upon free activity as had all the old restrictions of the Czar. It
+exalted the moral and social responsibility of the individual at the
+expense of his physical liberty. Everyone, whether Communist or not,
+must henceforth behave in the way laid out for him by the heads of the
+Communist party, who though representing an even smaller proportion
+of the entire people than the American Wall Street magnates,
+nevertheless had now all the power in their hands. The masses would be
+fed, housed, educated, on condition only that they did not undertake
+counter-revolutionary propaganda, and the Communist Secret Service
+was there to enforce this law, on penalty of death or imprisonment,
+against all who attempted to modify the existing political system. A
+new revolutionary army, recruited among the peasants, and backed by
+firm discipline, arose to take the place of the old; but the field
+of its activity was to be limited to helping the foreign proletariat
+to overthrow their own capitalist Imperialist governments, and to
+maintaining Lenin’s system intact at home. All foreign influences,
+whether in the shape of very limited concessions to foreign capital,
+or works of art with a definitely anti-communist tendency, were to
+be severely supervised and ruthlessly suppressed. Thus freedom of
+activity outside the bounds of the Communist dogma became as impossible
+in Russia during the years after the war, as freedom of thought
+outside the bounds of the Capitalist assumption became in America.
+The underlying aim of the Russians became to create an army of young
+Lenins; that of the Americans to achieve a million Henry Fords.[8]
+
+It is quite obvious that none of the European nations could
+whole-heartedly accept either the American or the Russian solution.
+To follow the Russian idea out in all its logical implications meant
+the suppression of the Parliamentary régime to which Europe had been
+accustomed, and the transformation of all the European countries from
+constitutional monarchies to proletarian dictatorships, in which
+the will of a single man, or a small committee of men reinforced
+and balanced through the establishment of local advisory councils
+controlled all industrial production. To carry out in detail the
+American idea, it was necessary for Europe to abolish all gradations
+of rank and responsibility, such as a constitutional monarchy implies,
+and to concentrate entirely on demagogic parliamentarism, backed and
+controlled by the industrial interests which have everything to gain
+from an increase of individual production and prosperity. To follow
+out this ideal proved quite as impossible for Europe as to Russianise
+their existing populations. The traditional conservatism which dreads a
+complete break with the past, the already established forms of social,
+moral, and religious usage, and the lingering remnants of nationalist
+pride and sentiment, stood everywhere in the way. Only in one country,
+Italy, was the combination effected of proletarian demagogy and
+autocratic dictatorship. Thanks to a chapter of accidents, Mussolini
+and his henchmen took over the rule of that country from the hands
+of the conservative Catholics and the anti-clerical Liberals alike.
+For the rest, the European countries tended to fall into the same
+alignment that had been theirs upon the first appearance of America
+and Russia upon the stage of the world. Western Europe, led by England
+and reconstructed Germany, tended to become more and more American and
+parliamentary; Eastern Europe, under the leadership of Italy, Hungary,
+Poland, tended to become more and more arbitrary and swayed by the
+dictates of revolutionary militarism.
+
+
+2
+
+The modern world, which we are examining from the perilously close
+range of participators in, rather than spectators of its effort, is
+essentially the fruit of two streams of influence, emanating from
+beyond the European frontier, and expressing themselves logically
+in the solutions of the social problem which America and Russia
+have found. These two streams of influence have been at work upon
+Europe, and in a different way upon the Far East, for at least two
+centuries past. At the present moment they are rapidly approaching
+their culmination. In order to understand this culmination it is
+necessary to turn aside from the field of outward political action and
+to state, as far as such things can be finally stated, the fundamental
+psychological characteristics that go to the making up of what may be
+called the typical Russian and the typical American.
+
+The Americans, taken as a class apart from Europeans or Asiatics,
+tend to have no interest whatever in thought for its own sake. Their
+special delight is not in thought, but in purely physical activity.
+This refusal to think maturely, to speculate even remotely about the
+ultimate problems of the world and of humanity, has frequently led
+European observers to characterise the American people as a young
+nation, a nation not grown up. But it was possibly quite as evident
+in the days of Washington as it is now; the only difference being
+that it has by now grown a dominating characteristic of all parts
+of the country, whereas in the early stages it was confined mostly
+to the frontier, and obscured from view by the influence of the
+better-educated colonial seaboard settlements, still under the spell
+of European ways of thinking. The whole course of American history may
+be summed up as the history of the spread of the pioneer and of his
+type of mind into every department of human effort. The pioneer type
+is always a man too busy with cutting away virgin forests, building
+roads, cultivating land, opening mines and factories, inventing
+machines, making automobiles, gambling with stocks, devoting himself
+to social “service,” to stop and ponder upon the æsthetic values of
+art and religion, or the metaphysical problems of human destiny.
+Such questions cannot enter into his pragmatic scheme of material
+effort directed towards immediate ends. For him the sheer delight of
+making suffices, not the value of the thing made. So habitual, so
+universal has this cult of activity for its own sake grown to the
+Americans, that it is constantly employed by all ranks of the people
+as a substitute for thought. The American uses leisure itself, not as
+a valuable opportunity for self-examination, but only as a stimulus
+to some new kind of activity. Sports and games, travel, book- and
+picture-collecting, education itself, become for him simply fresh
+pretexts for employing some more of his surplus energy, for taking
+part in some new form of mental distraction. For example, the European
+lecturers who annually go to America in such great numbers may be under
+the illusion that they are somehow guiding or directing the American
+mind into more fruitful channels; their American audiences are under
+no such illusion. Their aim is at the best merely to rapidly get
+firsthand information about some new fact that puzzles them; at the
+worst, to momentarily accept the lecturer’s own views as a substitute
+for creative and independent thinking of their own, whereby they share
+the illusion that they are actually participating in some form of human
+thought-process.
+
+Even when the American is in repose, he must somehow feel that his
+body, if not his mind, is exerting itself. The fundamental symbol of
+American life is not, as many observers have held, the skyscraper,
+with its busy activity, nor the athletic field with its gladiatorial
+baseball and football games, nor even that puritanic symbol of the
+pitcher of melting ice-water which makes its inevitable appearance
+equally upon the tables of the humblest lunch counters and the desks
+of bank presidents and statesmen. The true, the classic American
+symbol is the rocking-chair. It symbolises alike domestic comfort, and
+nomadic restlessness. In the rocking-chair one need not speak and yet
+one must continue to move to and fro. In the rocking-chair activity
+becomes a soothing narcotic, and absence of mental purpose a stimulus
+to further effort. The rocking-chair removes all the necessity for
+the contemplation of the great cosmos of justice and injustice, truth
+and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, to plant man firmly in the lesser
+cosmos of his personal individuality, his simple animal “reaction” to
+practical truth. In the rocking-chair one can “loaf and invite one’s
+soul” for an endless journey. The goal does not matter. This is true
+on every weekday, and on Sunday the activities of the rocking-chair
+are supplemented by the Sunday newspaper supplement, providing another
+substitute for thought.
+
+On the other hand, the Russians, as opposed to the Americans, tend to
+have very little interest in physical activity. A fund of Mongolian
+inertia, concealed at the roots of the Russian character, probably
+accounts for this; but it is impossible to understand the tragic
+disorder of many Russian lives,[9] as well as the strange crisis of
+feverish and misdirected fury that traverse Russian history, unless we
+admit at the outset that the Russian is in some way prejudiced against
+activity for its own sake. If he undertakes activity at all, it must
+be for some object that lies beyond activity. Thus we find the Russian
+peasant becoming a tramp in order to “save his soul”; the Russian
+intellectual indulging in all forms of drunken debauchery in order to
+acquire the “experience that is necessary to an artist”; the Russian
+Czar making war on Oriental or European nations in order to prove that
+he is “by the Grace of God, leader of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.”
+Nor has the Russian Revolution brought about any change in this state
+of affairs. Lenin himself, although he displayed while in power a
+quite remarkably un-Russian ability to make rapid decisions, owed
+his advent to power largely to his ability to hold his ground without
+altering his position. His own pedantic and doctrinaire Marxism shows,
+no less than his stoic fatalism, the fact that mere obstinate adherence
+to a theory was to him more important than practice, for many years
+before the moment that he suddenly found Russia at his feet. And Lenin
+owed, though perhaps he himself would never have admitted it, a great
+deal to the fiery Jew, Trotsky, who was profoundly un-Russian, indeed
+American, in temperament. The Revolution owed its success entirely to
+a few clean-cut practical actions thrown athwart a raging torrent of
+unpractical ideas and theories; Lenin and Trotsky rather saved Russia
+from herself, than created a new Russia. And since the Revolution the
+stream of endless discussion of theoretical ideas, has merely flowed
+on, like water under a bridge, leaving the structure of the state
+intact. A wise and witty French observer, Luc Durtain, who has seen
+Russia since the Revolution, has remarked that the Russian conversation
+is, in times of food shortage, in itself equal to meat and drink.
+
+What, then, is the specific symbol of Russian life? It is not the
+immobile gleam of the ikon in the corner of the house, nor the
+strangely drifting, tentative and slow-gathering mass-demonstrations
+of the people, nor the oddly mechanical governmentally-ordered
+demonstrations, nor the curiously vivid splashes of gay and exotic
+colour that contrast with the sombreness of the landscape. The specific
+symbol of Russia is probably the samovar. Ready at all times of the day
+and night to provide hot water, it stimulates but does not nourish,
+like the endless Russian conversations. It is the essential element
+of every Russian social gathering, and yet at the same time is only a
+pretext for meeting and wasting one’s energy in talk: as much a pretext
+as Moscow, Russia itself, life, or the Universe in Russian eyes. It
+does not provide tea in itself. For that a teapot is still necessary.
+It only provides the hot water that may be used or not to produce tea,
+as you will. In short, it is as perfect a symbol of inactive power as
+anyone is ever likely to find. And, like Russia herself, it has fire
+in its belly: fire hidden away from too prying eyes, under an outward
+shell of servility and conformity.
+
+
+3
+
+The conflict that is being fought out to-day between America and
+Russia is a psychological one. It is a subjective conflict between two
+opposed conceptions of the destiny of mankind, rather than an objective
+conflict between armies and directly political aims. And the two
+fields of its activity are the European and the Asiatic world.
+
+Both Russia and America have achieved within their borders what to them
+is the perfect mode of existence. They have arrived at the Utopian
+state of complete optimism and confidence for the future. Despite the
+activities of one set of European prophets, the Soviet system has not
+broken down. It is more secure, after ten years, than the system of
+Czardom that it replaced. Despite the activities of another set of
+prophets, American democratic capitalism has not broken down either. It
+apparently possesses inexhaustible reserves of prosperity and energy.
+But Europe, scarcely recovered from the horrors of its own internecine
+struggle, cannot follow the course of either country. Europe is like
+the ancient Hebrew monarchy divided between the imperialist tolerance
+of the kings of Israel and the narrow particularism of the kings of
+Judah. To the working classes the Russian solution, in its trenchant
+logic, immediately appeals; but this drives the capitalist classes only
+further towards embracing the ideas of America. To the intellectuals,
+the American solution is a monstrous vulgarisation; but this only means
+that they must either become reactionary, or accept the revolutionary
+message of Russia. Europe, caught between the intellectual and
+moral millstones of two great powers which were originally of its
+own creation, but which have gone their own ways without accepting
+the nineteenth century compromises, is awaiting a new political
+Messiah with a clear message; hence the popularity of such a figure
+as Mussolini. But whether Europe, in its decadent cosmopolitanism,
+will ever achieve anything resembling the unity of which its poets
+only dreamed, is doubtful. It is far more likely to pass, by gradual
+infiltration of influence and direction, completely under the sway of
+the United States.
+
+But it is not only in Europe that the world-struggle is being waged.
+The balance of power, ultimately, lies in the Far East, and its
+enormous reserves of natural resources and of population. And during
+the past ten years the Far East has shown clearly the direction it
+proposes to follow. It is ready to accept the material achievements of
+the West, without in the slightest degree altering its own racial and
+social traditions. Thus it is ready to turn the weapons of the West
+against the West itself, while remaining at heart far more akin to the
+spirit of non-individualistic fatalism which has successfully guided
+Russia. The most outstanding example of this recent development in the
+East is Japan, which in the words of a modern Russian writer, “wishes
+to take her machinery from America, her spiritual culture from Russia.”
+China and India are likely sooner or later to take the same path,
+thanks to the awakening of Asiatic racial pride, actively fomented
+by Europe’s glaring administrative blunders and internal political
+divisions.
+
+
+4
+
+The parallel lines that we have drawn between the two great frontier
+nations are now complete, and the whole world finds itself in the
+dilemma of having to make either a choice or a compromise between the
+ideals of America and of Russia. At the present moment, the tendency is
+probably towards a compromise of some sort, the war years and post-war
+years having too profoundly shaken mankind. But this tendency is only
+temporary, and is due to the slow disappearance of the generation that
+lived through the crisis of the war, a generation that emerged from the
+conflict profoundly sceptical of itself and of others, and incapable of
+the supreme unreason of an absolute creed.
+
+If Russia succeeds in consolidating its moral gains in the Far East,
+while America no less succeeds in its clever policy of economic
+penetration into Europe--a policy to which European newspapers,
+theatres, hotels, shops and social usages are gradually but
+unmistakably responding--if these two achievements come about, another
+world-conflict is almost certain to take place before the close of
+the twentieth century. For between an industrialised and proletarian
+East and an industrialised and plutocratic West, the population
+problem will rapidly become as acute as it already is in Japan. Nor
+will the sporadic and necessarily individualistic propaganda of birth
+control mend matters here. Under the present conditions controlling
+this propaganda, the better, finer and more harmonious sections
+of the population simply tend to die out, while the lower, baser,
+and least intelligent, go on increasing--thus destroying the aim
+of eugenics and inverting the true course of human evolution. This
+inversion of evolution is now powerfully aided by the mushroom-like
+growth of industrial capitalism, ready to exploit the lower levels for
+its own purposes, and also by all so-called “religious” propaganda,
+which has unfortunately always an equally “practical” end in view,
+whether directed by the ideals of Communist Bolshevism, Catholic
+Ecclesiasticism, or American Rotarianism. Thus the only hope for
+avoidance of a conflict between the two forces loosed on the world
+by Russia and America, becomes some shadowy proposal for complete
+disarmament, or the limitation of competitive industrialism and the
+breeding of a new aristocratic élite to control the economic and social
+life of the various nations. Such a proposal lies apparently outside
+the sphere of “practical” politics, and only the idealist philosopher
+Plato has dealt fully with its implications.
+
+The fact that most intelligent Europeans have come to despair of the
+prospect, and have practically abandoned any further attempt to control
+the two opposing forces let loose upon the world, is shown by the
+extraordinary revival, within recent years, of intellectual interest
+in the eighteenth century. Such people realise that the nineteenth
+century, with its compromise between materialism and idealism, failed
+to liberate humanity, so they yearn to go back to a happier, more
+harmonious time, before instinct and reason conflicted, when neither
+Russia nor America interfered with the course of human existence. This
+movement towards the eighteenth century is however merely a final
+gesture of world-weary romanticism, impotent to create any new values
+for humanity. It cannot postpone by a single day the conflict that is
+increasingly approaching between the unloosed forces of America and
+Russia.
+
+The only factors that may prevent that conflict from taking on an acute
+phase in the not distant future, exist not in hyper-intellectual and
+creatively sterile Europe, but in Russia and in America themselves.
+Russia’s attempt to get the East completely on her side by stirring
+up the Asiatics against the Caucasians may perhaps prove abortive,
+for the reason that the heads of the Communist party take at the
+same time no pains to conceal their immense contempt for all forms
+of transcendent and organised religion save their own. This side of
+Bolshevik propaganda may possibly fail to appeal very strongly to the
+other-worldly millions of the Orient. At the same time, America’s
+effort to control Europe through intensive financial and economic
+penetration may possibly fail because of the inferior intellectual
+character of the envoys she sends to Europe, or because Europe may
+still place a higher value on leisure, culture, and beauty, than upon
+any of the energy-wasting devices America has to offer her. But apart
+from this, there seems very little doubt that America and Russia are
+destined to bulk more and more largely in the world’s affairs, until
+the inevitable clash between them takes place. Europe has no longer the
+economic force nor the creative will to resist America. Asia has no
+longer the spiritual fervour nor the unified faith to hold back Russia.
+
+If such a conflict as we have envisaged should take place, what would
+be the result? The crisis of the European war would simply be repeated
+on a larger scale. Russia, together with her Eastern allies, would
+possess incalculable reserves of man-power; and the fact that the
+Soviet Republic has shown a determination to maintain in existence a
+highly-efficient and disciplined army of considerable numbers, would
+give her an initial advantage, in case the first attack in the opening
+stages of the contest came from her side. But America and her European
+allies would undoubtedly possess a preponderance of machinery, greater
+financial resources, and a far superior naval and aerial force. After
+the first year of battle, their effort would only increase, while
+Russia’s effort would almost necessarily diminish. Russia’s only hope
+would be in a short rather than in a long war.
+
+On the other hand, even should the Western Allies hold the coasts
+of Russia, together with the Far East, in a complete blockade, a
+Russo-Mongolian combination could continue the struggle almost
+indefinitely. The immense reserves of food, land, and man-power at the
+disposal of the Soviet war lords would insure this. Russia cannot be
+completely beaten by a blockade (even when that is aided by internal
+famine) as the Allies found out in 1919. Nor can she be beaten by
+land-invasion, as Napoleon found out in 1812. The only hope for the
+West of obtaining a decision in their favour would be to invade and
+terrorise Russia through the air. Such a campaign, if the West had
+sufficient preponderance in the air to carry it to a successful
+conclusion, might eventually lead to an admission of physical defeat
+on Russia’s part. But hers would nevertheless remain a moral victory of
+enormous importance to the future of the human race.
+
+The dangers of a war of this nature, especially if the forces engaged
+are anywhere near equal, can scarcely be overstated. The recent
+European war gave those who took part in it a faint foretaste of them.
+There would be continuous bombing of enemy capitals, communications,
+granaries, food and munition depots. Armies would operate at enormous
+distances from their base of supplies, with resultant tension and
+spirit of mutiny ready to flame up every moment. Ocean-going submarines
+would defy the blockade, and spread death and destruction on the high
+seas. Governments might have to meet and be conducted from secret
+places underground in order to escape destruction from poison-gas and
+other lethal weapons. Spying and counter-spying would be universal.
+Such a state of affairs might well lead the world rapidly back to a
+state of sheer anarchy, and undo in a few years the finest effort of
+five thousand years of civilisation. The break-up of the Roman Empire,
+or the recent chaos in China, offers but a feeble picture of what such
+a world would be like. The end of such a conflict might well be such a
+state of famine, disorder and exhaustion as to leave no hope to mankind
+for the future.
+
+Under these circumstances, the duty of every intelligent Russian and
+every intelligent American of to-day becomes clear. Since salvation is
+not to be looked for either from the old civilisations of the East nor
+from the more recent European civilisations; since both are now rapidly
+and inevitably in decay after their last great creative period (which
+was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than the eighteenth
+or nineteenth); since, above all, no revival of unified religious faith
+is to be looked for either among the Western Christian sects, or the
+great Oriental religions, we must either find some hope of salvation
+in ourselves, or admit our defeat, and with it the ultimate defeat
+of mankind. Step by step, inch by inch, we must oppose the tides of
+Bolshevism and of Americanism that are now sweeping over the world. We
+must save America and Russia from themselves. That is our mission and
+our purpose. But how can we fulfil this mission that our time--perhaps
+the most tragic time in all human history--imposes upon us? We can
+not fulfil it separately, for that is a task beyond the powers of any
+single man, or body of men. We must strive to inform both America and
+Russia with a purpose alien to their whole historical development.
+Against these two attempts to impose on mankind a purely mechanical and
+material conformity, we must uphold, perhaps for the last time, the
+values of an ideal and supra-physical unity of spirit, not of function,
+of a humanism that is at once scientific and æsthetic, and of a world
+outlook that reconciles both man’s desire to achieve “the good life”
+for himself on this planet, and his overwhelming sense of awe and
+wonder at the superhuman processes of the universe. Perhaps this task
+is altogether beyond our feeble and intermittent powers. Yet it is the
+one remaining task left to humanity to accomplish in our age. And after
+all, it is a problem that only education can solve, and we must leave
+it to the teachers to accomplish. It is Russia, not America, that needs
+an Emerson to lead it towards individual self-reliance. It is America,
+not Russia that needs a Dostoevsky to show it the value of common
+submission to the mysterious powers that govern the development of all
+spirituality.
+
+                                              _April 1927-August 1929._
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+The list that follows is not intended to be exhaustive. To cite, for
+example, all the literary works of the authors discussed in Book III
+would be a wearisome and a fruitless task. The list here given will be
+found valuable to the student who seeks to expand his mental horizon by
+reading further on the topics discussed in these pages.
+
+
+_GENERAL WORKS_
+
+A History of Russia, by Sir Bernard Pares. 1927.
+
+The Oxford History of the United States, by S. E. Morison. 2 vols. 1927.
+
+Main Currents in American Thought, by Vernon Louis Parrington. 1927.
+
+  Vol. I. The Colonial Mind (1620-1800).
+
+  Vol. II. The Romantic Revolution (1800-1860).
+
+A History of Russian Literature to 1881, by Prince D. S. Mirsky. 1927.
+
+Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881-1925, by Prince D. S. Mirsky.
+1926.
+
+  (These two books contain valuable bibliographies of works
+  translated into English.)
+
+Panorama de la Littérature Russe Contemporaire, by Vladimir Pozner.
+Paris. 1929.
+
+The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler. 2 vols. 1926-9.
+
+Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humains, by Count Arthur Gobineau. 2
+vols. Paris. 1884.
+
+The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, by Henry Adams. 1919.
+
+The Law of Civilization and Decay, by Brooks Adams. 1921.
+
+The Revolutions of Civilization, by Flinders Petrie.
+
+History of Religions, by G. F. Moore. Vol. I (Egypt, Babylonia,
+Assyria, etc.). International Theological Library, 1914.
+
+The Amarna Age. A Study of the Crisis of the Ancient World, by Rev.
+James Baikie. 1926.
+
+The Emancipation of Massachusetts, by Brooks Adams. Revised and
+enlarged edition with new Preface. 1919.
+
+Middletown, by Robert S. and Helen Merrill Lynd. 1929.
+
+The Golden Day, by Lewis Mumford. 1926.
+
+
+_WORKS ON SPECIAL TOPICS_
+
+George Washington, the Image and the Man, by W. E. Woodward. 1928.
+
+Catherine the Great, by Katherine Anthony. 1925.
+
+Hawthorne, by Henry James. (English Men of Letters Series) 1879.
+
+Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, by Raymond M. Weaver. 1921.
+
+Whitman, An Interpretation in Narrative, by Emory Holloway. 1926.
+
+Walt Whitman, by Basil de Sélincourt. London. 1914.
+
+Dostoevsky, by André Gide. Paris. 1923.
+
+Tolstoy as Man and Artist, by Dmitri Merejkowski. 1902.
+
+The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks. 1922.
+
+Stephen Crane, by Thomas Beer (with a preface by Joseph Conrad). 1923.
+
+Anton Chekhov, by Leon Shestov, 1916.
+
+Woodrow Wilson, by William Allen White. 1926.
+
+Woodrow Wilson: A Character Study, by R. E. Annin. 1924.
+
+Lenin, by Valeriu Marcu. 1928.
+
+Geist und Geschichte der Bolschewismus, by Réne Fülop-Miller. 1927.
+
+L’Autre Europe. Moscou et Sa Foi, by Luc Durtain. 1928.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+[1] The threat of pogroms has by no means disappeared under the
+Bolsheviks. See Luc Durtain’s “L’Autre Europe” for details.
+
+[2] His mother’s name was Rachel Levine. His father is unknown. Mrs.
+Levine might have been a Christian married in a Jewish family but the
+name of Rachel is not common among Christians.
+
+[3] This statement may perhaps be questioned by some Catholics.
+Apparently, Catholics are not allowed to undertake missionary activity
+in Russia. But the church cult has not been suppressed.
+
+[4] This same image was recently removed by the Bolsheviks, apparently
+without any opposition whatever. Such are the paradoxes of Russian
+history.
+
+[5] A notable exception is the sermon in Melville’s “Moby Dick.”
+
+[6] Isabel F. Hapgood. Introduction to “Taras Bulba.” New York, 1915.
+
+[7] It has been estimated that during the fifty years between 1870
+and 1910, America added to her previous population of forty million,
+twenty-five million foreign settlers.
+
+[8] See on this point, “The Diary of a Communist Schoolboy,” by S.
+Ignatyev. Also “American Prosperity” by Paul M. Mazur.
+
+[9] For example, the life of Pushkin or of Dostoevsky.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78697 ***