Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/371

 shades between social anarchy and social order as to mark it for exclusively human and his own. He never had known a complete union either in Church or State or Thought, and had never seen any need for it. The freedom gave him courage to meet any contradiction, and intelligence enough to ignore it. Exactly the opposite condition had marked Russian growth. The Tsar's empire was a phase of conservative Christian anarchy more interesting to history than all the complex variety of American newspapers, schools, trusts, sects, frauds and Congressmen. These were nature,—pure and anarchic as the conservative Christian anarchist saw nature;—active, vibrating, mostly unconscious, and quickly reacting on force; but, from the first glimpse one caught from the sleeping-car window, in the early morning, of the Polish Jew at the accidental railway-station, in all his weird horror, to the last vision of the Russian peasant, lighting his candle and kissing his Ikon before the railway Virgin in the station at St. Petersburg, all was logical, conservative, Christian and anarchic. Russia had nothing in common with any ancient or modern world that history knew; she had been the oldest source of all civilisation in Europe, and had kept none for herself; neither Europe nor Asia had ever known such a phase, which seemed to fall into no line of evolution whatever, and was as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture in the twelfth century, as to the student of the dynamo in the twentieth. Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy, Russia became luminous like the salt of radium; but with a negative luminosity as though she were a substance whose energies had been sucked out,—an inert residuum,—with movement of pure inertia. From the car-window one seemed to float past undulations of nomad life,—herders deserted by their leaders and herds,—wandering waves stopped in their wanderings,—waiting for their winds or warriors to return and lead them westward; tribes that had camped, like Khirgis, for the season, and had lost the means of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence. They waited and suffered. As they stood they were out of place, and could never have been normal. Their country acted as a sink of energy like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity of ice and snow. One Russian peasant kissing an Ikon on a Saint's day, in the Kremlin, served for a hundred million. The student had no need to study Wallace, or reread Tolstoi or Tourgueneff or Dostoiewski to refresh