Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/119

 Rh worship and care of personal beauty, were, indeed, one of the features under which the æsthetic feeling of a still barbarous people, and its aspirations towards the superior forms of civilized life, were then revealed. For it must not be forgotten that the very men who wore these gorgeous garments lived in hovels, and I will not deny that, having used the spoon they carried in their belts for their soup, they eat the rest of their meals with their fingers! Very coarse they still were, in life and morals, under their splendid toggery. But here we note the usual march of civilization, proceeding from the individual, thus cultivated and ennobled in the simplest and narrowest sense, to idealizations of a more and more general and complex kind.

Let us pass on to their moral condition. As to this, all testimony is agreed, and it is not complimentary. Anything else would have been surprising. A high standard of morality concurrent with a low state of culture is a fiction which history constantly contradicts. It is well, nevertheless, to recollect that the testimony, in this case, is of foreign origin, and that a certain amount of ill-nature must be allowed for. The features on which it lays special stress are pride, roguery, incredulity, and bad faith. The Muscovites, in their simplicity, thought themselves superior to all other men. They were liberal with promises which they never dreamt of performing. No mutual confidence at all existed among them. The father doubted his son, the son believed nothing his mother said, and nobody would lend a halfpenny without security. These are the terms of the witness borne by two Germans, Buchau and Ulfeld, by Persson, a Swede, and Michalon, a Lithuanian. The worst of it is that the Englishmen, Fletcher and Jenkinson, echo these sentiments. 'It may be most truthfully said … that from the highest to the lowest, except in some rare cases, very difficult to discover, no Russian believes anything that is said to him, or says anything that is worthy of belief.' Now, these last witnesses, belonging to a race which at that period enjoyed a privileged position in the country, may be taken to be less dubious than their fellows. And they outdo them, adding another feature to the list, one to which I have already had occasion to refer—cruelty. Fletcher, it is true, excuses this by the following explanation: 'Harshly and cruelly used by the magistrates and the upper classes, the nation has grown harsh and cruel to its equals, and especially to its inferiors.'

This is the history of barbarism everywhere, and it was aggravated, in this particular country, by a climate which is not calculated to make men tender. The national historians have vainly striven to lay the blame in this particular, too, on the Mongol invasion, which, so they assert, corrupted the vanquished people's habits, and taught it cunning and violence.