There is, however, yet another factor—a factor which, whilst accounting for the existence of an intelligentia, or a coterie of intellectuals, and of an utterly ignorant mass, will also throw some light upon the intellectual development of this very intelligentia and explain the reasons which compelled it to choose certain channels by which it sends forth the currents of its thoughts. This factor is the despotic government of the czars. If Russia's unhappy past and Peter's good intentions but great blunders produced the present state of intellectual development in that country, the government of the Reformer's successors has done its very best to preserve this condition.
The continuous policy of the Russian government to civilise by means of the knout has on the one hand brought about the result that not Russia but only a few Russians evolved intellectually and, on the other, it has given a certain direction to the thought and intellectual productions of these few. Even during the reign of Peter I or Catherine II, when the spirit of civilisation began to move its wings, independent thought has had to sustain a fierce struggle against authority. In the most civilised countries of western Europe ever and anon a cross-current of reaction traverses the stream of intellectual evolution: narrow-minded zealots, hypocritical bigots, false patriots, literary Gibeonites, gossiping old women arrayed in the mantles of philosophers, do their best to put fetters on the independent thought of man, to nip the free and natural intellectual development in the very bud by forcing it under the iron grip of tradition and authority. These reactionary tendencies of the lovers of darkness are only exceptions, and will lead thought for a while into a side channel, but cannot stop the triumphant march onwards. Not so in Russia.
In the empire of the czar thought is almost a crime and every means is employed to keep it within the boundaries prescribed by the governing power. To overstep these boundaries, to develop itself freely, and I might say naturally, is to declare war against authority, to revolt. The history of evolution of thought in Russia is therefore almost identical with the revolutionary movement. If whilst working on the construction of the temple with the right hand, the left has to wield the sword against a sudden attack of the enemy, the edifice can rise only very slowly. Renan says (in his Future of Science) that the great creations of thought appear in troublous times and that neither material ease nor even liberty contributes much to the originality and the energy of intellectual development. On the contrary the work of mind would only be seriously threatened if humanity came to be too much at its ease. Thank God! exclaims the Breton philosopher, that day is still far distant. The customary state of Athens, he continues, was one of terror; the security of the individual was threatened at every moment, to-day an exile, to-morrow he was sold as a slave. And yet in such a state Phidias produced the Propylsea statues, Plato his dialogues and Aristophanes his satires. Dante would never have composed his cantos in an atmosphere of studious ease. The sacking of Rome did not disturb the brush of Michael Angelo. In a word, the most beautiful things are born amid tears and it is in the midst of struggle, in the atmosphere of sorrow and suffering that humanity develops itself, that the human mind displays the most energy and activity in all directions. Renan was an individualist, and aristocratic in his teachings, and seems only to have in view the individual, nay the genius. Suffering and oppression, physical, intellectual and moral, are schools where the strong gather more strength and come forth triumphant, but where the weaker are destroyed. What is true for the elite, for the very limited number of the chosen few, does not hold good for humanity at large, which is not strong enough to think when it is hungry, to fight against opposing forces and to hurl down the barriers erected against the advance of thought. Few indeed are those who can carry on the struggle to a successful issue. The Russian government, with its Mongolian traditions of autocracy, threw the great nation, which remained behind Peter's forward march, back into complete indifference and apathy, into a state of submissive contentment, where, like a child, it kisses the rod that punishes it, sometimes cries like a child, and is lulled to sleep by the whisperings of mystic superstition and the vapours of vodki.
Has not the populace a terrifying example in the martyrs of Russian thought? A terrible destiny awaits him who dares to step beyond the line traced by the hand of the government, who ventures to look over the wall erected by imperial ukase. " The history of Russian thinkers," says Alexander Herzen (Russland's Sociale Zustande, page 136), "is a long list of martyrs and a register of convicts." Those whom the hand of the imperial government has spared died in the prime of youth, before they had time to develop, like blossoms hurrying to quit life before they could bear fruit. A Pushkin and a Lermontov fell in the prime of youth, one thirty-eight and the other twenty-seven years old, victims of the unnatural state of society. Russia's Beaumarchais, Griboiedov, found a premature end in Persia in his thirty- fifth year; Kolzov, the Russian Burns, Bielinski, the Russian Lessing, died in misery, the latter at the age of thirty-eight. Czerncevski was torn from his literary activity and sent to Siberia. ^ Dobrolubov sang his swan-song in his twenty-fifth year. Chaadaev, the friend of Schelling, was declared mad by order of the government. If such measures have kept the people in a state of ignorance and still lowered the already low level of civilisation, the autocratic rule has further, as it was unable to crush it, caused the intelli- gentia to turn its thoughts into a certain direction.