Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/257

 Rh of the great Northern Empire upon the track of modern life.

By his rank, Ivan might have scorned the offered provocation, and his overweening pride would have seemed to make such a course most probable. But his own temperament, and, added to that, his modern instinct, gained the day, and to this circumstance we owe, not only a most precious historical document, but a remarkable writer. I do not refer to Kourbski. His style is diffuse, confused, and dull. Ivan's is more prolix still; he sheds no light on the dispute, and shows no more anxiety than his opponent to bring it back to its proper limits. His pleading, like Kourbski's, is all one-sided, and he limits his replies and his own attacks to facts and interests of quite secondary importance. Did he have such a boïar killed in church or in his dungeon? Did he or did he not attempt Kourbski's life? All this is not really important. But, still, the Tsar invests his arguments, in part at all events, with that which the other never succeeded in putting into his. Not style indeed—Kourbski's style is bad, but Ivan has no style at all—but spirit, vehemence, sustained energy, words that tell, phrases that hit the mark like an arrow from the bow. 'You who call yourself just and pious, how came you to fear death so much that you sold your soul to save your body?' And he proves his learning, too—gives us bits of Scriptural exegesis. This is a controversy between two learned men! Kourbski has quoted Scripture to prove that a monarch ought to listen to his counsellors. Has he forgotten Moses, then? He has denounced the executions ordered by Ivan as crimes. And how about King David? As to the right of departure, put into practice by the noble fugitive, as to the other privileges claimed by him and his adherents, not a word. The sole political theory the meaning and formula of which the Tsar condescends to evoke and set forth, is that of the absolute power. 'We are free to punish and to reward as it seems good to us, and no Russian Sovereign has ever given an account of his actions to anyone on earth.'

I have already pointed out, and shall again have to show, in the political history of the Moscow of that period, a sort of tacit agreement whereby realities were concealed under appearances, and which sometimes ended by completely disguising facts and persons, and the parts these persons played. These two adversaries, though they crossed pens in public, as I have said, were to observe an agreement of this kind, and, to the very end, to avoid tearing the veil asunder, though under its shadow they dealt each other mighty blows. To defend himself against the mass of quotations with which the Tsar sought to crush him, Kourbski appealed to the superiority