Such, in broad outline, is the history of the revolutionary movement which
is still so greatly misunderstood in England. It was not the uprising of an
oppressed nation, which successful for a brief while was finally crushed by
the brute force of reaction; it was a civil war between two sections of
a small educated class, in which the sympathies of the nation after
fluctuating for a time eventually came down heavily against the
revolutionaries. There is in truth every excuse for misunderstanding
amongst English people, especially if they belong to the party of progress
in English politics; for the obvious things about Russia are so deceptive.
All that one saw on the surface were, on the one hand, an irresponsible
bureaucracy using the knout, the secret agent, the _pogrom_, and Siberia
for the suppression of anything suspected of threatening existing
conditions; and, on the other, a band of devoted reformers and
revolutionaries risking all in the cause of political liberty, and dying,
the "Marseillaise" on their lips, with the fortitude of Christian martyrs.
But, beneath all this, something immensely bigger was in progress,
which can only be described as a conflict of two philosophies of life
diametrically opposed or, if you like, a life-and-death struggle between
two civilisations, so different that they can hardly understand each
other's language; it is a renewal of the Titanic contest, which was decided
in the West by the Renaissance and the Reformation, the contest between
the mediaeval and the modern world. To the modern mind no period is so
difficult to grasp as the Middle Ages; our dreams are of progress which is
another word for process, of success which implies perpetual change, in
either case of "getting on" somewhere, somehow, we know not where or how;
our very universe, from which we have carefully excluded the supernatural,
has become a development machine, a huge spinning-mill, and our religion,
if we have one, a matter of "progressive revelation." We look before and
after, forwards to some dim utopia, backwards to some ape-like ancestor who
links us with the animal world. Our outlook is horizontal, the mediaeval
outlook perpendicular. The mediaeval man looked upward and downward, to
heaven and hell, when he thought of the future, to sun and cloud, land
and crops, when he thought of the present. He lived in the presence of
perpetual miracle, the daily miracle of sunrise, sunset, and shower; and in
the constant faith in resurrection, whether of the corn which he sowed in
the furrow or of his body which his friends would reverently sow in that
deeper furrow, the grave. And his life was as simple and static as his
universe; the seasons determined his labours, the Church his holidays.
Books did not disturb his faith in the unseen world, for he was illiterate;
nor the lust of gold his contentment with his existence, for commerce was
still confined to a few towns. Russia to-day is in spirit what Europe was
in the Middle Ages.[1] The revolutionaries offered her Western civilisation
and Western philosophy, and she rejected the gift with horror.