Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/407

 Rh the presence of Devlet-Ghireï's envoy, he consented to treat with the Khan. This is a true picture of the man. For if there was no method in his madness, he had constant recurrences, at all events, of the most perfectly lucid reason, and the very same irascible despot who raised his staff to strike the Protestant pastor who dared to compare Luther to St. Paul in his presence was soon to be seen calmly arguing with Rokita.

Judging by his constant fits of rage, one might fancy him imbued with that insensate fury which afflicted the Norsemen, according to the Sagas, and under the influence of which they would spend their strength against trees and rocks, when there was no living adversary within their reach. But this passionate being did not war with mountains, nor yet with windmills. He was no Norseman—he was a Mongol, rather, cold in his anger, and as perfidious as he was cruel, full of artifice and hypocrisy, but knowing what he wanted, and only wanting reasonable things, or which seemed so to him, considering the circumstances, subtle, refined, full of a universal curiosity.

If he sometimes overshot his mark, it was because he did not know how to control his temperament; and if he made more victims than he had enemies, it was because, as Lombroso remarks, and very truly this time, 'Once the horrible delight of shedding blood has been tasted, the necessity for slaughter becomes so imperious that no man can master it.' And he adds, 'It almost seems as if physical love were often connected with this phenomenon, and as if the sight of blood imparted a special stimulant to this passion. … These sanguinary scenes are almost always followed by shameful fits of debauchery' (L' Uomo Delinquente, i. 389).

This explains the Sloboda of Alexandrov.

And here, too, the historical surroundings must not be allowed to slip out of sight. Soloviov was certainly wrong when he quoted the example of St. Philip as a rehabilitation of the habits of his period. Saints have always been the exceptions everywhere. Was Ivan an exception in the opposite sense? The docility with which the massacres he ordered were endured would seem a proof to the contrary. There is no doubt that by their means he aggravated the savage atrocity of the instincts and habits of those about him, and sowed the Russian soil with a seed of blood, whereof the murder of his younger son at Ouglitch, the reign of the false Dmitri, and the horrors of the 'troublous times' were the harvest. But the Chouïskis and the Kourbskis only reaped what they themselves had sown by teaching him who was to become their executioner to disdain human dignity and human life, and scorn all justice and every law.

And Ivan’s education bore a much closer resemblance than