NATION OF IDEALISTS

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2515, 17 July 1915, Page 10

NATION OF IDEALISTS

THE TEMPER OF THE RUSSIANS Tliere is a picture in tho Imperial Palace of Arts, at Petrograd which, writes Mr. St. J. G. • Ervino in tha "Daily Mail," represents a strange incident in tho course of one ot : the wars waged in Persia by Russia. This is tho story. A detachment of artillery was' passing through a remote district when it came to a deep fissure in the road, over which it was impossible to take the guns. Tho road was very rocky, and thero was no loose earth 01- timber with which to fill the gap. Tho officer in charge of the detachment could not see any way out of his difficulty until, in desperation, ho asked whether some of his men would volunteer to lie down in the hole and allow tho guns to bo drawn over their recumbent bodies. Twelve men stepped out of tho ranks and, without, a word, laid themselves down in tho fissure, and then t'lio heavy guns were moved forward. . . . Tlioir bodies were horribly mangled, but it was sufficient for them that the guns of their Little Father the Tsar liad been carried over the gap to bo at tho service of tho Emperor. The story sounds incredible in Western ears. The sacrifico was so coldly made and tiho suffering involved in it was 50..-needless (for tho officer might have saved- all of it by sliooting tho volunteers before the cannon passed overthem) that one had difficulty in accepting the story as anything else than » legend, 'And yet, the story, is not any morel.remarkable than that of the Japanese soldiers who in the RussoJapanese war deliberately impaled themselves on Russian bayonets, so that their comrades following after them iniight pass on in safety. Have we not heard, too, of Indian devotees throwing themselves beneath the car of Juggernaut? Does one not see in the self-sacrifice of • the Belgian ' people something of that spirit which led the twelve Russian soldiers to make a bloody roadway of their bodies ? . story illustrated by the picture in the Imperial Palace of Arts in Petrograd may not be true in fact, but it is certainly true in spirit'; for the force which moved those twelve, soldiers in Persia to endure _a. cruel. death with fortitude is precisely tho same force which moved the entire Russian nature to abjure vodka at the beginning of present wax. It was the force of an idea.

Russian and Englishman.

All idea is more to a Russian than a human life is. If I were asked to state broadly the difference between an Englishman and a Russian, I should say that the Englishman values life inordinately _ and ideas not at' all, while the Russian values ideas inordinately and life not at all. ■ Both states of mind, of course,_ are full of danger. A Russian will not move himself to save a man from death merely to save life, as an Englishman will; but he will endure any agony for . the sake of his country or his religion. Until this war began vodka was corroding the Russian soul; but it was impossible to persuade a Russian to give up this liquor on the pica that he would bo a better man without it ; The Russian would not give up his vodka for his own sake; but when the war began, and lie was told' that abstention from tins potato spirit would be good for Russia, then the entire nation consented to the prohibition for ever of its mauufacturo. That act is perhaps one of the greatest acts that 1 has ever been performed in the_ history of the world. You cannot move a Russian by any personal appeal. Ho is. impervious to suggestions that such arid' such' things will be to his personal advantage; Hedoes not care about his personal advantage to any great extent, certainly not to tho extent, of putting himself to any inconvenience. But lie does care about impersonal things. His country and his faith are two intimate-ly-related things. He does not separate them. He does not speak of the church and tho State: for the church, in the eyes of a Russian, is the State, and tho State is the church. For his country and his faith a Russian will do anything, and a great deal of the failure of tho progressive movement in Russia is duo to tho fact that the advanced thinkers; the intellectuals, have been out of_ sympathy with the normal Russian attitude in these respects. The intellectual who has forsaken the Orthodox .church and abandoned patriotism has at tho same time abandoned all hope of moving tho ; moujik. : Doestoevsky, the great Russian novelist, one of the greatest novelists of Europe, was as nearly representative' of the average Russian as any man could be. Russia had .the same mystical meaning for Doestoevsky, that Japan has • for the Japanese, although Russia, in his youth, used him very sorely. He quarrelled with Tuigencv, Ihis great compeer, because: Turgenev sometimes mocked Russia, regarding tho spirit of internationalism as of greater value than the spirit of nationality. In Doestoevsky's eyes Europe was of less consequence than Russia; in Turganev's eyes Europe alone mattered.

Simplicity of the peasantry,

The student of Russian literature soon learns to seo Russians as children. Perhaps a hotter expression would be "simple." TJio Russian peasant has something of the simplicity of an apostle in his character, lie will .perform somo finely religious act in exactly the maimer in which one would expect an early Christian to perform it. At the same time he will behave in practical affairs with the futility of an imbecile. Ido not wish to be misunderstood. I do not wisli to 1 imply that all Russians behave ill' practical affairs like idiots. I do imply,' however, that the. Russian is |Capablo at times of behaving like a person of poor wits. Princo Myslikin, in Doestoevsky's novel, "The Idiot," and Aloyslia in the same novelist's "The Brothers Karamazov," are characters in whom tho spiritual and tho fatuous are strangely mingled. But with all its fine spiritual quality, its power of devotion to ideas, its selfa.bnegation, the Russian people has failed to spiritualise Europe; it has failed also to spiritualise Russia-; and the secret of its failure lies, I think, in the fact that its spirit has no direction. _ It is like a boat-without, a rudder : it drifts with the wind and the tide, which may carry it safely to harbour or may throw it on somo barren or rocky, cpast.