Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/405

 Rh a man as Louis XI., with the faculties everyone recognises him to have possessed. Put him down into the nineteenth or twentieth century, and ask yourself whether he would be capable, now, with his inherent caution, of falling into the snare laid for him by Péronne, and letting himself, with all his cunning, be conducted right up to the walls of Liége, there to witness the destruction of a town that was under his own protection. Surely not! Then, why was he guilty then of this twofold piece of folly, aggravated, in the second case, by downright infamy? Because he was the man of his own time, of a half-barbarous period during which we see, even at the very top of the intellectual ladder, a lack of that arrangement and discipline of the mental faculties which years of hereditary intellectual culture have now made a common thing, even in a much lower order of intelligence. Louis XI. was a man of impulse, like most of his contemporaries, and like certain eccentric persons of our own day, who owe the quality to certain atavisms which make them 'throw back' to former generations. Apply this elementary clue to the person and career of Ivan the Terrible, and you will have gone a long way, in my opinion, towards finding the desired solution.

Even oftener than in Louis XI.'s case, Ivan obeyed his impulses. Some of these came from without—the result of impressions produced by the men or the events about him; others came from within, and these he owed to his birth and education. Combined with his grandfather's intelligence—though his own was broader—and his energy—though his was weaker—the Tsar, whose father's influence on him was nil, possessed his mother’s passionate and violent heart. His action was often taken with a jerk, in most irregular fashion. But the man who conceived the idea of the Opritchnina and put it into execution cannot be said to have been lacking either in will or in sequence of ideas. I have already shown the value of the theory according to which he always made over his power to other people, because he did not know how to use it himself. But Adachev and Sylvester were no more the masters of Russia between 1548 and 1560 than the Tsar Simeon was from 1575 to 1576, though the Sovereign was pleased, in the first case, to give himself out as the victim of his favourites, and in the second, to play a farce with his phantom Sovereign for the world's benefit.

Ivan, according to Printz von Buchau—a really reliable witness, the most faithful of them all—was violent-tempered to such an extent that the smallest annoyance made him 'foam like a horse.' Often he quite failed to restrain and master his rage. But often, too, as during his struggle with Batory, he showed himself extraordinarily pliant. In this case, when