Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/414

 390 Ivan was the first of the Russian Tsars, not only because he was the first to assume the title, but also and especially because he was the first to comprehend the realities corresponding with it. The theory was there, no doubt, and had been worked out, ever since the fifteenth century, in the literature of the country. But neither to Vassili nor to Ivan III.—the Great—had it occurred to lay hold of the concrete meaning of that theory—the idea of a Sovereign whose power came to him from God, and who was responsible to God alone for the way in which he used it, unaided, as the sole representative of the Divine will and the Divine wisdom, on whom no human assistance could be imposed, and who could not accept any control whatever.

To this theory Ivan added a personal commentary of his own of which none of his predecessors had thought, and which none of his successors were to adopt. Peter the Great was to regard himself merely as the first servant of the State; Ivan regarded the Sovereign's person as a kind of Divine essence, and boldly set it far above the State. 'We know,' he writes, after pouring abuse on Batory, 'what is due to the majesty of Princes. But the Empire is majesty, and above that majesty stands the Sovereign in his Empire, and the Sovereign is above the Empire!' (Note handed to Possevino in September, 1581, 'Historical Documents,' x. 223). Poland had won the day, and Muscovy was forced into submission. But the Tsar set himself above this necessity—he hovered in higher space, where no such outrage could reach him. The idea is a subtle one, but it is a feeling rather than an idea. Ivan's ideas and feelings have often been confused together, and a short analysis must be devoted to them.

Ivan the Terrible went through a great deal of suffering, and these sufferings, which he exaggerated as he exaggerated everything, have been rightly ascribed to a twofold moral cause—to his very lively consciousness of all the faults and vices of the political and social organization over which he had been called to rule, and an equally painful consciousness of his powerlessness to apply any efficacious remedy to them. This painful sensation was repeated in his own consciousness, in the midst of the personal weaknesses of which he recognised the shamefulness, and the useless acknowledgment of which he was perpetually multiplying. But it is a mistake, in the first place, to take all this for an exceptional case of self-distrust. It is the eternal history of the human race before Medea's video meliora proboque, and after it, for ever and ever. Historians of