Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/412

 388 him down with his own booklore, convinced, and rightly so, no doubt, that the other will be quite incapable of verifying the accuracy of his quotations. But, knowing him as religious as he is lettered, he does not forget to address himself to this weak point, and we find him calling up a picture of the fugitive boïar helping the Poles to destroy the Orthodox churches, trampling the holy ikons underfoot, and presiding, like a second Herod, over massacres of innocent children. … He weeps over the victims and their executioner, for he loves the lyric, and by no means despises the pathetic. Kourbski has said something about the blood he has shed in the Tsar's service. 'And I,' replies Ivan, 'have I not shed my blood too? If not from wounds made on my body, at all events in the tears of blood your treacheries have drawn from my eyes! …'

We may agree with Monsieur Klioutchevski ('Course of History,' i.) that this rhetoric betrays more artifice than conviction, more phosphorescent brilliance than heat; but it is an anachronism to seek in the sixteenth century, close to the Scholastics, all the sincerity and emotion the modern soul has learnt, since those days, to put into its external manifestations. As for taking the Tsar's letters to be a collective work in which his favourites were his collaborators, this conjecture, borrowed by Monsieur Mikhaïlovski, an acute but biassed critic, from the author of an inferior novel ('Prince Kourbski,' by Fédorov, 1843), will not bear even a superficial examination of the document, in which Monsieur Mikhaïlovski himself recognises the existence of a perfect unity of style and composition, and in every line of which the author's hall-mark, his personal touch, is evident.

Ivan certainly does not hold the first place in the intellectual movement of the period, and the part he played in the struggle then going on between the moral idea elaborated in the hermitages of the north, and the coarse corruption prevalent among the great majority of Russians, was neither the best nor the worst. This conflict had brought two eccentric types face to face and into bitter conflict. There were solitary ascetics on one side and heroic bandits on the other, and both classes lived on the outer margin of society. Ivan remained in the middle. Highly gifted as he was, his mind was not sufficiently ripened by study, nor, above all, was his soul so filled with generous impulses, as to enable him to represent the noblest tendencies of a chosen few. He went to the Stoglav firmly intending to support the reform party, and he failed to adhere to his intention, less from lack of energy than from want of conviction. In religious matters he continued, at heart, to belong to the old school, in which the wearing of the full beard