THE APPETITE OF TYRANNY

The German Emperor has reproached this country with allying itself with “barbaric and semi-oriental power.”  We have already considered in what sense we use the word barbaric:  it is in the sense of one who is hostile to civilisation, not one who is insufficient in it.  But when we pass from the idea of the barbaric to the idea of the oriental, the case is even more curious.  There is nothing particularly Tartar in Russian affairs, except the fact that Russia expelled the Tartars.  The Eastern invader occupied and crushed the country for many years; but that is equally true of Greece, of Spain and even of Austria.  If Russia has suffered from the East she has suffered in order to resist it:  and it is rather hard that the very miracle of her escape should make a mystery about her origin.  Jonah may or may not have been three days inside a fish, but that does not make him a merman.  And in all the other cases of European nations who escaped the monstrous captivity, we do admit the purity and continuity of the European type.  We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain.  Copper-coloured men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion and patriotism of Spaniards.  Yet I have never heard that Don Quixote was an African fable on the lines of Uncle Remus.  I have never heard that the heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro ancestry.  In the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognise the resurrection of a Christian and cultured nation after its age of bondage.  But Russia is rather remote; and those to whom nations are but names in newspapers can really fancy, like Mr. Baring’s friend, that all Russian churches are “mosques.”  Yet the land of Turgenev is not a wilderness of fakirs; and even the fanatical Russian is as proud of being different from the Mongol, as the fanatical Spaniard was proud of being different from the Moor.

The town of Reading, as it exists, offers few opportunities for piracy on the high seas:  yet it was the camp of the pirates in Alfred’s day.  I should think it hard to call the people of Berkshire half-Danish, merely because they drove out the Danes.  In short, some temporary submergence under the savage flood was the fate of many of the most civilised states of Christendom; and it is quite ridiculous to argue that Russia, which wrestled hardest, must have recovered least.  Everywhere, doubtless, the East spread a sort of enamel over the conquered countries, but everywhere the enamel cracked.  Actual history, in fact, is exactly opposite to the cheap proverb invented against the Muscovite.  It is not true to say “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar.”  In the darkest hour of the barbaric dominion it was truer to say, “Scratch a Tartar and you find a Russian.”  It was the civilisation that survived under all the barbarism.  This vital romance of Russia, this revolution against Asia, can be proved in pure fact:  not only from the almost