Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/246

 222 In the Tsar's case, as I have already admitted, there was some admixture of intoxication and even of frenzy; but both the person and the policy of Ivan have their admirers, and his work has been by no means doomed to come to nought. Some of his reforms even yet impart their special and recognised character to Russia, and to her political and social organization.

We have quite as much difficulty in recognising him in the tragic actor, for ever seeking picturesque poses and dramatic effects, depicted by Constantine Akssakov ('Works,' 2nd edition, i. 114, etc.), as in the base and vulgar despot stigmatized by Kostomarov, or the mere maniac ranked by Mikhaïlovski ('Critical Essays,' 1895, p. 112) as a common lunatic. From his ancestors, Ivan inherited a State the archaic basis of which was in process of transformation. Certain principles of the old appanage system he sought to eliminate, but others he sought to maintain, subject to their being brought into harmony with the necessities of modern existence. From his intellectual masters, from Joseph Volotski and Vassiane Toporkov, he learnt that his power, divine in its essence, could not be circumscribed, nor divided, nor controlled; and Nature, to conclude, had endowed him with a headstrong temperament, violent and irritable, a fiery and disordered imagination, and a mind, quick, subtle, penetrating, and ingenious, but ill-balanced, most unsettled, and prone to exaggeration and excess.

The peculiar way in which he understood his part and played it was the outcome of all these things. He felt it to be very great, and concluded that everything else must be subordinated to it. When he met resistance he broke it down, as his fathers had done before him; but his effort was greater, because the resistance was more powerful, and his violence was greater, too, because he was violent by temperament.

He did not admit, any more than his ancestors had done, any encroachment on his will in the form of unsolicited advice; but the practice of his own will and pleasure, which he followed like them, was mingled with a certain roughness and extravagance, because he was rough by nature, and of a most fanciful mind. Yet his fancies, as I shall endeavour to show, never went so far as to lead him out of his path, and though he persevered in it—if not in everybody's teeth, in the teeth of the majority at all events—he claimed to be no despot at all. In this particular, realist as he was in practice, he had built himself up a theory borrowed from the most transcendental ideology. What was it all about, and for what reason was the Tsar imposing this severe law, or that effort, on his subjects, who were trying, some of them,