Charles Sarolea

“ The political condition of Russia to-day is very like the political condition of France in 1789. To the Russian Revolutionists, the French Revolution is not a dead and distant past, it is a living present; it continues, and it will continue for a generation to come, to exert a subtle and profound influence which it is impossible to overrate. Even as the leaders of the French Revolution were haunted by the memories of ancient Rome, and by the heroes of Plutarch, the Russian Revolutionists are obsessed and possessed by the tragic events of 1789, and the heroes of the Terror. ”

“ We have already cautioned the student of Russian history against the axiom that every nation has the Government it deserves, and deserves the Government it has. That axiom is only true, and even then only partially true, when the people, as is the case in Prussia, have no profound sense of political liberty and of personal dignity, where they abjectly and willingly submit to that Government. It is only true where the subjects accept the full responsibility for the policy of their rulers, where they glorify, as the Prussians do glorify, every evil deed of the civil and military authorities. ”

“ They would like to persuade the world that the Russian people are engaged in the same struggle for freedom and equality, and that their triumph would inaugurate a new era for Russia and for mankind. They insist that the one event is as inevitable as the other, that resistance is equally futile, that any form of opposition will only make the ultimate triumph more decisive and more bloody, and that Russia is doomed to travel the same road as the France of 1789—from Despotism through Terror, towards Liberty. ”

“ The Jews are not a race, they are a nation. Wherever they have gone, they have remained a nation. We are too apt to forget that a nation is not a geographical expression. The Poles are a nation, and are not contained within geographical limits. Nor does a nation imply a common origin or blood relationship. The United States and the Russian Empire are made up of a score of different races. Nor does a nation even imply community of language, for the German-speaking Alsatians were, and still are, passionately French in sentiment, even as the French-Canadians have become loyal British citizens. ”

“ But Turgenev is still more; he is a master of European literature. He has neither the inspiration of Gogol, nor the epic grandeur or the prophetic breath of Tolstoy, nor the profound tragedy of Dostoevsky, nor the democratic sentiment of Gorky and Chekhov. His horizon is as limited and monotonous as the horizon of the steppes. He works with certain ever-recurring types of lovers, proprietors, peasants, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. If his talent remains personal and original, if he has not (whatever may be said against him) copied from his predecessors, he is for ever copying himself. ”

“ Would it then be true that the Slav people, so powerful in their literature and in their imaginative art, so original in their temperament, as soon as they apply themselves to political action are only capable of fitful impulses, and unable to strike out a path of their own? Would it be true that 180,000,000 of Russia people are only to be like puppets in the hands of a few thousand bureaucrats or a few hundred agitators, who pull the wires, think out the plot and apportion the parts? ”

“ The revolutionary forces are, no doubt, strong, but the Conservative forces are also formidable. It is not true that the less resistance is offered to the energies of destruction, the less bloody the revolution will be. It is not true that it is too late to prevent a catastrophe. No doubt it is so much easier to surrender one's will to the so-called "logic of events," to let the storm rage and pass, to "emigrate" like the French aristocracy, and to fly before danger, and if the catastrophe does break out, to make one man or one class the scapegoat of the national sins. ”

“ If there is one other lesson which the French Revolution teaches with irresistible persuasiveness, it is this: that a country confronted with the tremendous tasks of economic, political, social, and religious reorganization, exhausted by a colossal foreign war, and threatened by a no less ominous civil war, can only be saved by a strong government and a liberal despotism. No doubt, the tasks before Russia are very different from those which France had to solve, but they are even more Titanic. ”

“ In the first place there can be no religious schism, and therefore no religious war, which in France involved a life-and-death struggle, a war waged with all the fanaticism and horror of a crusade. In Russia the Church is a State department, not as in France, a state within the State: imperium in imperio. No religious passions will be stirred, for the hatred against the Jew is economic and racial, not religious.
In the second place, there can be no class war, for the simple reason that in Russia the aristocracy as a class has ceased to exist. ”

“ Is not the very existence of this wonderful language an obstacle in the path of civilization? Will it not for ever prevent Western culture from gaining access to the Empire of the Tsars? Will it not for ever keep Russia isolated from Europe? It is strange that while Nature has established no physical barrier between Eastern and Western Europe, and has made one unbroken plain extending for thousands of miles, men should have erected this formidable intellectual barrier of language between the Latin, the Teuton, and the Slav. ”

“ The one supreme and original contribution of the Russian mind to world literature is its power of psychological analysis, its broad humanity, its manysidedness, its understanding of every type of human character. Those qualities strike us equally in Gogol's "Dead Souls," in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," in Turgenev's "Sportsmen Sketches." And those qualities reach their maturity and perfection in Tolstoy's art.
His power of sympathy is unlimited. He understands the sinner, because he has been a sinner. He understands the saint, because he has aspired to be a saint. ”

“ For even the strongest Russian Government is not a match for the Jew. For the Jew is able to use against the Government all the driving power of hatred and revenge, all the resources of a subtle intellect, all the power of the Press, and he also has the power of turning against the established authorities the two most potent forces in the world—international finance and international opinion, as the allies are finding out to their cost. ”

“ The remedy is equal rights to all nationalities.
The evil is race fanaticism and race antagonism. The remedy is race co-operation and race harmony.
The evil is a narrow and shallow policy of obscurantism, sinning against the Holy Spirit.
The evil is the keeping of the people in ignorance. The remedy is the spread of popular education, the diffusion of sweetness and light.
But greatest of all political evils in the Russian Empire has been the insensate dream of religious unity, imposed by authority, the pagan confusion of spiritual and temporal power. ”

“ No doubt the peasantry may be got to rise in some bloody "jacquerie." They might be drawn into some agrarian revolution—like the Pougatchef revolt in the eighteenth century—which would satisfy their craving for possessing and extending the soil they cultivate. But the hunger for land once satisfied, the peasantry would again become conservative, like the French peasant proprietor after the French Revolution, and so far from joining any mere "intellectual" revolution, they would dread such a revolution as a possible reaction and as a menace to their newly acquired rights. ”

“ Although educated in the darkest days of political reaction, they all have the same generous and magnanimous belief in humanity. They all repudiate the gospel of Prussianism; they are all in communion and sympathy with the common people. And if we may judge of the aspirations of the Russian nation from the writings of her greatest sons, we can be left in no doubt as to the ultimate Orientation of the Russian people. ”

“ If it is entirely misleading to say that "to scratch a Russian peasant is to find the Tartar," it is entirely true to say "that if you scratch the Russian nobleman you find the Byzantine." And if it is pretty easy to understand the moujik, even though you may never have seen a single exemplar of the type, it is extremely difficult to understand a Russian Intellectual, even though you may have met him in every corner of Europe, either as a rich absentee or as a poor refugee. ”

“ And all those novels strike the same keynote of human misery. A martyr himself, he is the voice of Russian martyrs. The mere titles of his books—"Poor Folk," "The Insulted and Injured," "The Idiot," "The Possessed"—reveal the dreary monotony of the subject matter!
Yet Dostoevsky had not abandoned hope, for the depths of misery and degradation are illumined by faith in Christ and faith in humanity. ”

“ Of the many strange paradoxes in the romantic history of Israel not the least strange is this, that the Jewish nation should have found a home and refuge in that desolate and remote corner of Eastern Europe once ruled by the Jesuits, and that the destiny of the Jews should have become so closely associated with the fate of a Catholic people, which, like the Jews, has only an ideal existence; which, like the Jews, has been oppressed and suppressed, and which, like the Jews, has asserted its vitality in the face of economic degradation and political martyrdom. ”

“ Or again, tracing the action between cause and effect, Tolstoi has observed how at every stage the individual will is overruled by a Higher Will; how in the battlefield the leader does not lead, but follows; how victory and defeat are equally at the mercy of forces beyond human control. And thus we see the gambler and Bohemian of earlier years transformed into a Russian Puritan and a Christian Nihilist.
But although the burning problems of modern life are presented to us in all their aspects, Tolstoy is too much of an artist to obtrude his own theories upon his audience. ”

“ It is a tragic paradox that the very people who have been the one bulwark against Asiatic hordes and a protection against the Tartar invasion should still be denounced as a people of Asiatics and Tartars. It is a paradox that we should revile as barbarians the very nation whose sublime mission in history has been to win over the barbarians of Asia to Christianity and to European civilization. ”

“ But whether the existence of this formidable linguistic barrier is a blessing or a curse, whether we have cause to regret that, merely through the existence of the Russian language Russia can never be assimilated to Europe, or whether we have cause to rejoice that the existence of so difficult a language should maintain inviolate the originality and independence of the Russian people, one fact is certain, that the linguistic obstacle will be greater in the future than in the past. ”

“ Now, destruction is the same in all times and in all places. A building is pulled down very much in the same way in every country. Blasting and blowing up are universal processes, dynamite is cosmopolitan; it is only when a building rises above ground that the characteristics of national architecture begin to appear.
And, therefore, it is only when we begin to think of the possibilities of a constructive revolution in Russia that differences arise which are far more important than any analogies and which must entirely change our forecast of events. ”

“ For generations Russia had been advancing slowly but surely towards the ultimate goal of what she considers her "historic mission." Like a weary traveller, exhausted by a long march, and who, arriving near the end, wanting to make one supreme effort to hasten on the desirable consummation—falls down prostrate, in view of the promised land—even so the Russians, on the eve of achieving their dreams, after patiently waiting for centuries, were suddenly seized with a feverish impatience and tried to precipitate events. ”

“ It is only if both the opposition and the government prove unequal to the great crisis, if they both refuse to come to terms—then, but only then, the fatal logic of events will begin to unfold its consequences: but fatality will not have been in the events themselves, but in the weakness and stupidity of a government incapable of steering the country through the tempest, and in the folly of an opposition which sacrificed the welfare of their country to their metaphysical theories, and to their personal feelings of hatred and revenge. ”

“ The revolution is really managed by a mere band of intellectuals, journalists, professors, advocates, and students. It depends for its moral support on public opinion in Europe, and for its material support on the army of industrial labourers in the large cities. Nothing is more interesting to the foreigner than to observe the extraordinary power wielded by these few thousands of "intellectuals" and young students, and nothing is more significant to an Englishman than the fact that whilst in Great Britain the universities are wholly conservative, in Russia they are wholly revolutionary. ”