The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎576r] (42/239)

autocracy and war.
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possible to assign to it any rational origin in the vices, the mis
fortunes, the necessities, or the passions of mankind. This despot
ism has neither an European nor an Oriental parentage; more, it
seems to have no root either in the institutions or the follies of this
earth. What strikes one with a sort of aw^e is just this something
inhuman in its character. It is like a visitation, like a curse from
Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon the immense plains of
forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of two continents :
a true desert harbouring no spirit either of the East or of the West.
This pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, suffering
from an awful visitation for which the responsibility cannot be
traced either to her sins or her follies, has made Russia as a nation
so difficult to understand by Europe. From the very first ghastly
dawn of her existence as a State she had to breathe the atmosphere
of despotism ; she found nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure
autocrat at the beginning and end of her organisation. Hence
arises her impenetrability to whatever is true in Western thought.
Western thought, when it crosses her frontier, falls under the spell
of her autocracy and becomes a noxious parody of itself. Hence
the contradictions, the riddles of her national life, which are looked
upon with such curiosity by the rest of the world. The curse had
entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing else in the world, has
moulded her institutions, and with the poison of slavery drugged
the national temperament into the apathy of a hopeless fatalism.
It seems to have gone into the blood, tainting every mental activity
in its source by a half-mystical, insensate, fascinating assertion of
purity and holiness. The Government of Holy Russia, arrogating
to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the bodies of
its subjects like a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to those
whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation. The
worst crime against humanity of that system we behold now
crouching at bay behind vast heaps of mangled corpses is the
ruthless destruction of innumerable minds. The greatest horror of
the world—madness—walked faithfully in its train. Some of the
best intellects of Russia, after struggling in vain against the spell,
ended by throwing themselves at the feet of that hopeless
despotism as a giddy man leaps into an abyss. An attentive survey
of Russia’s literature, of her church, of her administration, and
the cross-currents of her thought, must end in the verdict that the
Russia of to-day has not the right to give her voice on a single
question touching the future of humanity, because from the very
inception of her being the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth,
of rectitude, of all that is fruitful in human nature has been made
the imperative condition of her existence. The great govern
mental secret of that imperium which Prince Bismarck had the
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