The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎576v] (43/239)

12
AUTOCRACY AND WAR.
insight and the courage to call Le Neant, has been the extir
pation of every intellectual hope. To pronounce in the face of
such a past the word Evolution, which is precisely the expression
of the highest intellectual hope, is a gruesome pleasantry. There
can be no evolution out of a grave. Another word of less scientific
sound has been very much pronounced of late in connection with
Russia’s future, a word of more vague import, a word of dread as
much as of hope—Revolution.
In the face of the events of the last four months, this word has
sprung instinctively, as it were, on grave lips, and has been heard
with solemn forebodings. More or less consciously Europe is pre
paring herself for a spectacle of much violence and perhaps of an
inspiring nobility of greatness. And there will be nothing of what
she expects. She will see neither the anticipated character of
the violence nor yet any signs of generous greatness. Her expec
tations, more or less vaguely expressed, give the measure of her
ignorance of that Neant which for so many years had remained
hidden behind the phantom of invincible armies.
Neant! In a way, yes ! And yet perhaps Prince Bismarck has
let himself be led away by the seduction of a good phrase into the
use of an inexact term. The form of his judgment had to be
pithy, striking, engraved within a ring. If he erred, then, no
doubt, he erred deliberately. The saying was near enough the
truth to serve, and perhaps he did not want to destroy utterly
by a more severe definition the prestige of the sham that could
not deceive his genius. Prince Bismarck has been really com
plimentary to the useful phantom of the autocratic might. There
is an awe-inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word Neant —
and in Russia there is no idea. She is not a Neant; she is and
has been simply the negation of everything worth living for. She
is not an empty void, she is a yawning chasm open between East
and West; a bottomless abyss that has swallowed up every hope
of mercy, every aspiration towards personal dignity, towards free
dom, towards knowledge; every ennobling desire of the heart,
every redeeming whisper of conscience. Those that have peered
into that abyss, where the dreams of Panslavism, of universal con
quest, mingled with the hate and contempt for Western ideas,
drifted impotently like shapes of mist, know well that it is bottom
less ; that there is in it no ground for anything that could in the
remotest degree serve even the lowest interests of mankind—and
certainly no ground ready for a revolution.
The sin of the old European Monarchies was not the absolutism
inherent in every form of government; it was the inability to alter
the forms of their legality, grow r n narrow’ and oppressive with the
march of time. Every form of legality is bound to degenerate into
oppression, and the legality in the forms of monarchical institu-