Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/411

 Rh along with Abimelech and Gideon, Æneas beside Genseric, King of the Sauromates (sic)—Ivan writes his name Zinzirikh—swarming with the most improbable anachronisms, and in which the boldest political aphorisms rub shoulders with the most unexpected philosophical considerations. And yet, in spite of Kourbski, who calls all this literature 'old woman’s talk,' this confused tumult of memories and impressions, this chaos of imagery and confusion of ideas, forms a solid whole, bound together, evidently, when we look at it closely, by a thin but always visible thread, which connects it all with one sole and only object, the theory of sovereign power as the author conceives it—supreme and absolute, Divine in its origin and superior in its essence. And little does it matter, in all truth, that the self-taught writer confuses dates and events, talks of the division of the Empire under Leo the Armenian, makes a mistake of two centuries as to the period of the conquest of Persia by the Arabs. His trumpery barbarian's learning is a thing of nought. It is the ideas and feelings that live in it and use it which are important, and when we see the fiery despot juggling with things of which his father and grandfather knew nothing at all, and turning them into arguments in favour of a theory of which they never dreamt, or to which, at all events, they never gave a thought, we realize that a new world has come into being, and that to have been conscious of that fact is in itself sufficient to make the glory of the extraordinary man who, in spite of his lack of modern science, was the first, in his own country, to acquire the instinct, the taste, the passion, for modern progress.

On this impressionable nature, indeed, memories acted like events. To such an extent did they take hold of Ivan's thought and rule his speech that the erudition he had gathered up so confusedly in his mind was a law to him as much as it was his servant; it dragged him perpetually from one subject to another; it suggested the most unforeseen digressions to him, and at the same time the eagerness he threw into everything, like the rage that almost always shook him when he was writing, rendered him incapable of using his knowledge with discernment, weighing the elements he drew from it, and considering how he should employ them.

And though he may be fond of showing off what he knows, or fancies he knows, he is, speaking from the literary point of view, above all things a controversialist, wordy and prolix to excess, but skilled, amidst all his digressions and circuitous ways, in finding out his opponents' strong and weak points, and bent, most especially, on striking home. Kourbski, according to the fashion of those times, was a learned man—in other words, a man of wide reading—and the Tsar breaks