Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/409

 Rh between Ivan the Terrible and a certain cardinal celebrated for his jovial gestures and talk. He is also struck by the extreme mobility of the Sovereign's countenance and attitudes; the very expression of his eyes and his voice changing from one minute to the next. The Tsar would be talking with some of the gentlemen about him, his language might be gentle and his gestures kindly; but supposing one of the persons with whom he was conversing was slow to understand his meaning, his words instantly became rough and his manner threatening, and everybody was in expectation of some outburst. And with all that, so the same witness tells us, there was something about him which would have marked him out as a great personage, at all events, if he had been put in the middle of four hundred peasants, and dressed exactly as they were dressed.

In him, as in most men, the mania for putting himself forward was a form of pride—a pride which in his case was overweening, though by no means so extravagant as it has been taken to have been. Acquainted as he was with both history and geography, he may very naturally have believed himself superior to all the other European Princes—to the Emperor himself, who was only an elective Sovereign, or to the Sultan, who could not trace his family and titles back to the Romans. Did not a Pharaoh of the twentieth dynasty claim to be master of the whole world? And do not certain Sovereigns in the Far East still betray symptoms of a similar infatuation?

This pride, too, had something to do with Ivan's dislike of risking his own person in the tumult of battle, which might have placed his hierarchic Majesty in too dangerous a position. And in this, as I have already observed, he was only obeying the traditions of his race. Ivan, like his grandfather, was no hero in the commonly accepted meaning of that word. Such men as Alexander, Hannibal, Gustavus-Adolphus, Charles XII., Napoleon, come and go like meteors. For labour which is to endure, men like the Rurikovitchy are far more reliable. It is true that Louis XI., though he had nothing in common either with Alexander the Great or with Napoleon, exposed his own person bravely at Montlhéry, but then Louis XI. was not a semi-Oriental Sovereign.

Ivan was Oriental, too, in the ease with which he would pass from the heights of insolence, in prosperity, to the depths of humility when evil fortune overtook him. And yet he is not broken down by adversity. He bends his back, he crawls, but he is always ready to rise up again. The qualities of the European and the man of culture reappear in some other features. He does not like coarse flattery. The following anecdote, reported by Guagnino, the probability of which is strengthened by several others of the same nature, would