Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/101

 Rh on one's own servants, though they are in the right, and strike them, even, to avoid a quarrel; to try to please everybody; and above all things, not to neglect recipes for good Lenten dishes.

The author of this book understood nothing, it is quite clear, of the spirit of Christianity, devoted as he was to its forms. His great idea was to compose a manual of opportunist philosophy, and with all his assiduous study of the Scriptures he got no further, in some matters, than the Old Testament. There was more of the Pharisee than of a disciple of Christ about him, for the Christian life he suggests as an example is his own. And this is not merely hinted. He takes care it shall be known that he has freed his serfs and brought up many orphans, and that the well-merited floggings he has inflicted on his servants have won him their universal love and esteem. This chapter, in Sylvester's own hand, is an Imitation of Sylvester. We shall see its author did not invariably succeed in pleasing everybody.

Taking the book as a whole, it combines the evangelical ideal, that of humility and love, with the Biblical ideal, that of the power of the family, which it makes the motive principle of every relation, social or domestic. And in this respect the Domostroï gives us an exact conception of a society in which the family is not the centre only, but the sole rallying-point of social life, ruled by a head in whose person that family is summed up and absorbed. The head of the family is not only the master, to whom everyone owes obedience, but the being to whom everything is referred and on whom everything depends. And this was precisely the state of things existing, not only at Novgorod, but at Moscow, in the sixteenth century. The Domostroï, though partly an exposition of manners and customs, is also a code of laws. It imposes certain restrictions on the all-powerful will of paterfamilias. We have seen, alas! how frail and inconsistent these restrictions were. The absolutist spirit of Moscow made short work of them.

The book, in spite of its Novgorodian origin, is essentially Muscovite. Similar features may have been noted in Vladimir Monomachus' 'Instruction' (twelfth century); in the Dottrine dello Schiavo di Bari (thirteenth century); in the Treatise drawn up by Egidio Colonna for Philippe le Bel, in Francesco Barberini's Regimento delle Donne' (fourteenth century); in the Paris Ménagier (circa 1393); in certain Tchek writings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and even in the Indische Hausregeln published by Fr. Stengler. The human race is very much the same through all the ages, whatever the degree of its civilization or the latitudes it inhabits. But all this notwithstanding, we are in presence, here, of a society of a very special kind, in which we look in vain for the delicate and sentimental relations between husband and wife depicted by the Italian