Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/415

 Rh the school of George Samarine are certainly mistaken when they take Ivan to be a man who lived lonely and misunderstood. He alone, according to their theory, recognised that the habits of his period were full of terrifying symptoms of decomposition and awful omens for the future, and, finding nobody would share his scorn and hate of all these things, he grew so bitter in his loneliness that he struck out blindly at everything around him, because he did not know how to separate the evil from the good, either in himself or his surroundings, and also because his will was not so strong as his intellectual superiority was great. This judgment wrongs the Sovereign and his period. Ivan knew and frequented the company of men far more capable than himself of conceiving the necessity, and also the conditions, for a renovation of morals. In this particular the disciples of Nil Sorski aimed at a much higher ideal than his. On the other hand, the Tsar, in his struggle with his boïars, knew right well what he was doing, and the objects at which his blows were struck. To represent him, as Bestoujev-Rioumine has represented him, as a sort of Hamlet, constitutionally inclined to abstract reflection, and stumbling hither and thither at every step. the moment he entered the world of realities, is an historical absurdity. The Opritchnina was not an abstract idea, and Hamlet would certainly have been quite incapable of playing the most delicate of games with the most finished of diplomatists of his time.

Ivan had a will of his own. Some people have thought they perceived a proof of the weakness of his will in the instruments he chose to carry out his plans—instruments which he constantly destroyed because he could not find suitable ones, and which he nevertheless replaced, because, being himself unable to give form to his own ideas, he could not do without them—a man of meditation, not of action, a theorist, an artist too, who could conceive what was good and beautiful, but had not the skill to pass from conception to realities; and a man, also, who sought sensation and picturesque effect even in the horrors of the torture-chamber. … This is the theory put forward by Constantine Akssakov. It seems to admit the possibility, for the head of a State, of doing everything himself. In this even Peter the Great could not succeed, and he has been blamed, with some show of justice, for having lost himself in details. The great man could not find enough helpers. Ivan's helpers were inadequate, like Biélski, or vile, like Skouratov; but he set to work in his own person, and put his own hand to the task, oftener, indeed, than he should have done.

Like Peter the Great, again, he was a carrier on of a previous work. He followed in his grandfather's footsteps, and was, like him, the champion of similar interests—moral,