War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
at once. This simultaneous discussion of all sorts of everything, far from marring any clarity of perception, was the surest guarantee of their mutual understanding.
In a dream everything is uncertain, senseless and contradictory except the overall feeling that directs the dream; similarly in this form of communication, which offends against every law of reason, it is not the flow of words that is clear and coherent, but the feeling behind them.
Natasha had much to tell: the details of her brother's lifestyle, how much she had suffered without him (it was no kind of life), all about her ever-growing fondness for Marie, and the fact Marie was better than her in every way. Even as she said this Natasha was perfectly sincere in acknowledging Marie's superiority, but at the same time she expected Pierre to prefer her to Marie and all other women, and now, especially after seeing so many women in Petersburg, to remind her of that. In response to Natasha's words Pierre told her that the soirees and dinners with all those ladies in Petersburg had been absolutely intolerable.
'I can't talk to ladies any more,' he said. 'It's just boring. All the more so because I was so busy.'
Natasha gave him a close scrutiny, and went on. 'Marie is so wonderful!' she said. 'She's so good with children. She seems to see right down into their souls. Take yesterday. Mitenka was being naughty . . .'
'Just like his father, isn't he?' Pierre put in.
Natasha knew why he had made a comment about the similarity between Mitenka and Nikolay. The argument with his brother-in-law was still rankling, and he was dying to hear what she thought about it.
'It's one of Nikolay's failings that he won't agree to anything unless everybody accepts it. Whereas what you like, as I well know, are fresh fields and pastures new,' she said, repeating one of Pierre's old phrases.
'No, the thing about Nikolay,' said Pierre, 'is that for him thoughts and ideas are a diversion, just a way of passing the time. There he is, building up a library and he's made it a rule not to buy a new book until he's read the last one he bought - Sismondi, then Rousseau, then Montesquieu . . .' Pierre added with a smile. 'Of course you know how much I . . .' He was beginning to soften his criticism, but Natasha interrupted him, making it clear that he didn't need to do that.
'So you say he treats ideas like a diversion . . .'
'Yes, but with me it's the other way round. All the time I was in Petersburg it was like seeing people in a dream. When I've got an idea in my head everything else seems a frivolous waste of time.'
'Oh, I'm sorry I missed your meeting with the children,' said Natasha. 'Who was most pleased to see you? I bet it was Liza.'
'Yes, it was,' said Pierre, and he went on talking about what interested him. 'Nikolay tells us not to think. But I can't help thinking. Not to mention the fact (I can say this to you) that in Petersburg I felt the whole thing was falling apart without me. They were all pulling in different directions. I did manage to bring them together, but then my way of thinking is so clear and straightforward. I don't say we ought to oppose X and Y. We might get things wrong. But I do say this: let those who believe in goodness come together hand in hand, and let us march under the banner of virtue in action. Prince Sergey is a splendid man, and so clever.'
Natasha would never have doubted that Pierre's idea was a great idea, except for one thing that bothered her. He was her husband. 'Surely such an important man, a man of such value to society, couldn't also be my husband? How could it have happened?' She wanted to share this doubt with him. 'What man, what men could decide whether he really is so much cleverer than everybody else?' she wondered, and in her imagination she ran through the people Pierre admired. To judge by all the stories he had told there was no one he admired more than Platon Karatayev.
'Do you know what's just crossed my mind?' she said. 'Platon Karatayev. How would he have reacted? Would he have approved of what you're doing?'
Pierre was not at all surprised by this question. He could see his wife's train of thought.
'Platon Karatayev?' he said, and thought for a while, evidently making a genuine attempt to imagine what Karatayev's verdict would have been on this subject. 'He wouldn't have understood it, and yet - maybe he would.'
'Oh I do love you!' said Natasha all at once. 'I love you! I love you so much!'
'No, he wouldn't have approved,' said Pierre, when he had thought about it. 'But I'll tell you what he would have approved of - our family life. He looked for decency, happiness and peace in everything he saw, and I'd have been proud to shown him all of us. You talk about what it's like when we're apart, but you wouldn't believe what I feel for you when we're back together again.'
'And anyway . . .' began Natasha.
'No, listen. I never stop loving you. And I couldn't love you more than I do - it's very special. I think I . . .' His voice tailed off when their eyes met; there was nothing more to be said.
'You know it's stupid,' said Natasha suddenly, 'all this business about honeymoons, and happiness being right at the beginning. It's not right. Now is the best time. Oh, if only you wouldn't go away. Do you remember how we used to quarrel? And it was always my fault. It was, you know. What did we quarrel about? I can't even remember.'
'Always the same thing,' said Pierre smiling, 'jealou . . .'
'Don't say that word. I can't stand it!' cried Natasha, with a sudden chilly glint of nastiness in her eyes. 'Did you see her?' she added after a pause.
'No, and if I had, I wouldn't have recognized her.'
For a while neither of them spoke.
'Oh, I've got something to tell you. When you were talking in the study I was watching you,' said Natasha in a rather obvious attempt to scatter the dark cloud that was threatening them. 'And do you know, you're like two peas in a pod, you and the boy.' (That was what she called her baby son.) 'Oh dear, I suppose I ought to go to him . . . My milk . . . It's a pity I have to go now.'
They were both silent for a few seconds. Then suddenly, at exactly the same moment, they turned to each other and started to speak. Pierre's tone was complacent and passionate, Natasha began with a gentle, happy smile. They clashed, stopped, and each waited for the other to go on.
'No, what were you going to say? Go on.'
'No, you tell me. Mine was only a bit of nonsense,' said Natasha.
Pierre said what he had been going to say. It was a continuation of his rather smug reflections on his success in Petersburg. At that moment he felt he was destined to give a new direction to Russian society as a whole, and the world in general.
'I was just going to say that all ideas that have a huge impact are always simple ones. And my idea comes down to this: if all the bad people can get together and show strength in unity, honest men must do the same. You see - it's as simple as that.'
'Yes.'
'What were you going to say?'
'Oh, nothing, just a bit of nonsense.'
'No, tell me . . .'
'Oh, it's nothing. I'm just being silly,' said Natasha, though her broad smile was broader than ever. 'I was only going to tell you about Petya. Nurse came to take him from me today, and he laughed and wrinkled his little face and snuggled up close - I'm sure he thought he was hiding away. He's such a sweetie . . . That's him crying. I must be off!' and she walked away.
Meanwhile, downstairs in young Nikolay Bolkonsky's bedroom the little lamp was burning as always. (The boy was afraid of the dark and couldn't be cured of this weakness.) Dessalles was asleep, propped up high on his four pillows, and snoring steadily through his Roman nose. Nikolay had just woken up in a cold sweat, and he was sitting up in bed, wide-eyed and staring. He had been woken up by a bad dream. He had dreamt that he and Uncle Pierre were wearing helmets like the ones in his illustrated edition of Plutarch. He and Uncle Pierre were leading a huge, marching army. The army was one mass of white threads slanting through the air like those floating autumn spider-webs that Dessalles called gossamer. Ahead of them lay glory, thread-like itself though a bit more substantial. The pair of them - he and Pierre - were speeding along, getting nearer and nearer to their goal. Then suddenly the threads that worked them became droopy and tangled. It was heavy going. And suddenly there was Uncle Nikolay, grim and menacing, waiting for them.
'Did you do this?' he said, pointing to a pile of broken sealing-wax and pens. 'I used to love you, but now I'm under orders from Arakcheyev, and I shall kill the first one of you that moves.' Nikolay looked round for Pierre, but Pierre wasn't there. Pierre had been replaced by his father - Prince Andrey - and his father had no shape or form, but he was there, and the moment he saw him Nikolay felt weak at the knees with love, he turned to jelly like a man with no skeleton. His father took pity and cuddled him. But there was Uncle Nikolay bearing down on them, getting closer and closer. Nikolay felt a great wave of horror - and woke up.
'My father!' he thought. (There were two very good portraits of Prince Andrey in the house, but Nikolay had never thought of his father in human form.) 'My father was with me. He gave me a cuddle. He was pleased with me; he was pleased with Uncle Pierre. I'll do anything he says. Mucius Scaevola20 put his hand in the flames. But why shouldn't that kind of thing happen to me one day? I know they want me to study. And I will. But one day I'll have finished, and then I shall go out and do things. I ask only one thing of God: let what happened to Plutarch's men happen to me, and let me do what they did. No, I'll do more. Everybody will know me and love me and admire me.' And suddenly Nikolay's chest was choked with sobs, and he burst into tears.
'Are you feeling ill?' came the voice of Dessalles.
'No,' answered Nikolay, and he sank back down on his pillow. 'He's such a nice, kind man. I do love him!' He was thinking of Dessalles. 'But Uncle Pierre! Oh, what a wonderful man he is! And then there's my father. Father! Father! Yes, I'm going to do something even he would have been pleased with.'
PART II
CHAPTER 1
The subject matter of history is the life of peoples and humanity. To catch hold of and express in words, to describe directly, the life of a single people, let alone the whole of humanity, is beyond possibility.
Ancient historians all employed the same technique for catching the apparently uncatchable - describing the life of a people. They would describe the activities of individual rulers and accept these activities as an expression of the activity of an entire people.
Questions arose. How did these individuals compel whole nations to act in accordance with their will? And what was it that directed the actual will of these individuals? The answer to the first question was that the will of a Deity subjected a people to the will of one chosen person; and the answer to the second question was that the same Deity directed the will of the chosen person to a predetermined end.
For the ancients these questions were resolved by a belief in the direct intervention of the Deity in human affairs.
Both propositions are now unacceptable to modern historical theory.
You might have thought that modern history, having rejected the ancients' belief in man's subjection to a Deity, and the direction of peoples towards predetermined ends, would have turned away from the outward manifestations of power to look for the causes that lie behind it. But modern history has not done that. It has rejected the views of the ancients in theory, while continuing to follow them in practice.
In place of men imbued with divine authority and directly controlled by the will of God, modern history has created either heroes endowed with extraordinary, superhuman powers, or simply men of widely differing qualities, from monarchs to journalists, who have become leaders of the masses. Modern history has replaced the 'divinely ordained' aims of various peoples - the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans - which ancient historians saw as the progressive aims of humanity as a whole, by new aims of its own - the well-being of the French people, the German or the English, or, in the most abstract terms, the single, noble aim of civilizing all of humanity, by which is usually meant the inhabitants of a small north-western corner of a large continent.
Modern history has rejected the ancient creeds without putting any new ideas in their place, and the logic of their position has forced the very historians who claim to have rejected the old beliefs in a divine right of kings or fate to come back by a devious route to the point where they started, and to two basic premises: (1) that nations are directed by individuals, and (2) that there is such a thing as a goal towards which nations and humanity in general are proceeding.
In everything written by modern historians from Gibbon to Buckle,1 for all the ostensible differences between them and their ostensibly original approaches, everything is underpinned by these two ancient and inescapable premises.
In relation to the first of these, the historian describes the activities of certain individuals who in his opinion are leaders of humanity (one of them will limit this accolade to monarchs, military generals and ministers of state; the next will bestow it on monarchs and orators, but also on cultivated reformers, philosophers and poets). In relation to the second one, historians always know the goals towards which humanity is being conducted. For one of them this goal is the aggrandizement of Rome, Spain or France; for the next it will be freedom, equality or the imposition of some sort of civilization on that little corner of the world known as Europe.
It is 1789 and Paris is in ferment. The ferment grows, spreads and manifests itself in a movement of people from west to east. This eastward movement repeats itself several times, clashing with a counter-movement coming from east to west. In the year 1812 it reaches its furthest point, Moscow, and then, with incredible symmetry, the east-west counter-movement gets under way, drawing along behind it all the people in the middle, just as its predecessor had done in the other direction. The counter-movement returns to the starting point of the first movement, Paris, and then subsides.
Throughout this twenty-year period a vast number of fields go unploughed, houses are burnt down, trade flows in different directions, millions of men grow poor, get rich or migrate, and millions of good Christian folk who claim to love their neighbour go about murdering each other.
What does it all mean? Why did it happen? What can have induced these people to burn houses down and murder their fellow creatures? What were the causes of these events? What force impelled men to act in this fashion? These are the simple and honest questions that leap to mind when humanity comes across memorials and traditions stemming from that bygone age of turmoil.
Commonsensical humanity turns for answers to the science of history, the object of which is the bringing of nations and of humanity to self-knowledge.
If history had clung on to the ancient creeds it would have said that the Deity, wishing to reward or punish His people, gave power to Napoleon and directed his will for the attainment of His own divine ends. A clear and complete answer. You could believe in Napoleon's divine significance or not, but for a believer the entire history of that period would have been comprehensible and beyond contradiction.
But modern history can no longer respond like that. Science now repudiates the old idea of a Deity intervening in human affairs, so other answers must be found.
In answer to these questions modern history says, 'Do you really want to know the meaning of this movement, where it came from, and what force produced these events? Listen to this.
'Louis XIV was a very proud and arrogant man; he had such and such mistresses, and such and such ministers, and he ruled France badly. Louis' successors were weak men as well, and they ruled France badly. And they had such and such favourites, and such and such mistresses. But at that time a few men started scribbling in books. At the end of the eighteenth century a couple of dozen men in Paris began to hold forth about men being equal and free. This led to murder and mayhem all over France. These men killed the King and a lot of other people. But at that time there lived in France a genius by the name of Napoleon. He conquered everybody everywhere, or at least he killed a lot of people because he was a great genius. And for reasons best known to himself he went off to Africa to kill people there, and he killed them so effectively, and he was so bright and clever, that when he got back to France he ordered everyone to obey him, and everyone did. Setting himself up as Emperor, he marched off with the intention of killing a lot more people in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And this he did. Meanwhile in Russia there was an Emperor called Alexander who declared war on Napoleon with a view to getting some order back into Europe. In '07 he made friends with him quite suddenly, but they fell out again in 1811 and started killing lots of people. Whereupon Napoleon brought six hundred thousand men into Russia and conquered Moscow, but suddenly he ran away again and Emperor Alexander, advised by Heinrich Stein et al., united all of Europe against the disturber of her peace. Every one of Napoleon's allies suddenly became his enemy, and the new force marched against fresh troops raised by Napoleon. The allies defeated Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to abdicate and exiled him to the Isle of Elba, though without stripping him of the title of Emperor and continuing to show him the greatest respect, despite the fact that five years earlier and one year later he was universally regarded as a villain and outlaw. At which point Louis XVIII came to the throne, even though he had been until then a laughing stock to France and all her allies. Napoleon shed a few tears before the old guard, renounced the throne and went off into exile. Along came the clever statesmen and diplomats (especially Talleyrand, who was the first to grab the famous armchair, sit in it and thereby extend the frontiers of France), and they chatted for a while in Vienna, as a result of which nations emerged happy or unhappy. Suddenly the diplomats and monarchs all but fell out again and they were on the point of telling their armies to go off and kill each other again when Napoleon raised another battalion and invaded France, and the French, who had only just begun to hate him, gave in. But this infuriated the allied monarchs and they set off yet again to fight the French. And Napoleon, the genius, was defeated, proclaimed a villain at long last and shipped off to the island of St Helena. And in that rocky place the exile died a lingering death, cut off from those dear to his heart and
In a dream everything is uncertain, senseless and contradictory except the overall feeling that directs the dream; similarly in this form of communication, which offends against every law of reason, it is not the flow of words that is clear and coherent, but the feeling behind them.
Natasha had much to tell: the details of her brother's lifestyle, how much she had suffered without him (it was no kind of life), all about her ever-growing fondness for Marie, and the fact Marie was better than her in every way. Even as she said this Natasha was perfectly sincere in acknowledging Marie's superiority, but at the same time she expected Pierre to prefer her to Marie and all other women, and now, especially after seeing so many women in Petersburg, to remind her of that. In response to Natasha's words Pierre told her that the soirees and dinners with all those ladies in Petersburg had been absolutely intolerable.
'I can't talk to ladies any more,' he said. 'It's just boring. All the more so because I was so busy.'
Natasha gave him a close scrutiny, and went on. 'Marie is so wonderful!' she said. 'She's so good with children. She seems to see right down into their souls. Take yesterday. Mitenka was being naughty . . .'
'Just like his father, isn't he?' Pierre put in.
Natasha knew why he had made a comment about the similarity between Mitenka and Nikolay. The argument with his brother-in-law was still rankling, and he was dying to hear what she thought about it.
'It's one of Nikolay's failings that he won't agree to anything unless everybody accepts it. Whereas what you like, as I well know, are fresh fields and pastures new,' she said, repeating one of Pierre's old phrases.
'No, the thing about Nikolay,' said Pierre, 'is that for him thoughts and ideas are a diversion, just a way of passing the time. There he is, building up a library and he's made it a rule not to buy a new book until he's read the last one he bought - Sismondi, then Rousseau, then Montesquieu . . .' Pierre added with a smile. 'Of course you know how much I . . .' He was beginning to soften his criticism, but Natasha interrupted him, making it clear that he didn't need to do that.
'So you say he treats ideas like a diversion . . .'
'Yes, but with me it's the other way round. All the time I was in Petersburg it was like seeing people in a dream. When I've got an idea in my head everything else seems a frivolous waste of time.'
'Oh, I'm sorry I missed your meeting with the children,' said Natasha. 'Who was most pleased to see you? I bet it was Liza.'
'Yes, it was,' said Pierre, and he went on talking about what interested him. 'Nikolay tells us not to think. But I can't help thinking. Not to mention the fact (I can say this to you) that in Petersburg I felt the whole thing was falling apart without me. They were all pulling in different directions. I did manage to bring them together, but then my way of thinking is so clear and straightforward. I don't say we ought to oppose X and Y. We might get things wrong. But I do say this: let those who believe in goodness come together hand in hand, and let us march under the banner of virtue in action. Prince Sergey is a splendid man, and so clever.'
Natasha would never have doubted that Pierre's idea was a great idea, except for one thing that bothered her. He was her husband. 'Surely such an important man, a man of such value to society, couldn't also be my husband? How could it have happened?' She wanted to share this doubt with him. 'What man, what men could decide whether he really is so much cleverer than everybody else?' she wondered, and in her imagination she ran through the people Pierre admired. To judge by all the stories he had told there was no one he admired more than Platon Karatayev.
'Do you know what's just crossed my mind?' she said. 'Platon Karatayev. How would he have reacted? Would he have approved of what you're doing?'
Pierre was not at all surprised by this question. He could see his wife's train of thought.
'Platon Karatayev?' he said, and thought for a while, evidently making a genuine attempt to imagine what Karatayev's verdict would have been on this subject. 'He wouldn't have understood it, and yet - maybe he would.'
'Oh I do love you!' said Natasha all at once. 'I love you! I love you so much!'
'No, he wouldn't have approved,' said Pierre, when he had thought about it. 'But I'll tell you what he would have approved of - our family life. He looked for decency, happiness and peace in everything he saw, and I'd have been proud to shown him all of us. You talk about what it's like when we're apart, but you wouldn't believe what I feel for you when we're back together again.'
'And anyway . . .' began Natasha.
'No, listen. I never stop loving you. And I couldn't love you more than I do - it's very special. I think I . . .' His voice tailed off when their eyes met; there was nothing more to be said.
'You know it's stupid,' said Natasha suddenly, 'all this business about honeymoons, and happiness being right at the beginning. It's not right. Now is the best time. Oh, if only you wouldn't go away. Do you remember how we used to quarrel? And it was always my fault. It was, you know. What did we quarrel about? I can't even remember.'
'Always the same thing,' said Pierre smiling, 'jealou . . .'
'Don't say that word. I can't stand it!' cried Natasha, with a sudden chilly glint of nastiness in her eyes. 'Did you see her?' she added after a pause.
'No, and if I had, I wouldn't have recognized her.'
For a while neither of them spoke.
'Oh, I've got something to tell you. When you were talking in the study I was watching you,' said Natasha in a rather obvious attempt to scatter the dark cloud that was threatening them. 'And do you know, you're like two peas in a pod, you and the boy.' (That was what she called her baby son.) 'Oh dear, I suppose I ought to go to him . . . My milk . . . It's a pity I have to go now.'
They were both silent for a few seconds. Then suddenly, at exactly the same moment, they turned to each other and started to speak. Pierre's tone was complacent and passionate, Natasha began with a gentle, happy smile. They clashed, stopped, and each waited for the other to go on.
'No, what were you going to say? Go on.'
'No, you tell me. Mine was only a bit of nonsense,' said Natasha.
Pierre said what he had been going to say. It was a continuation of his rather smug reflections on his success in Petersburg. At that moment he felt he was destined to give a new direction to Russian society as a whole, and the world in general.
'I was just going to say that all ideas that have a huge impact are always simple ones. And my idea comes down to this: if all the bad people can get together and show strength in unity, honest men must do the same. You see - it's as simple as that.'
'Yes.'
'What were you going to say?'
'Oh, nothing, just a bit of nonsense.'
'No, tell me . . .'
'Oh, it's nothing. I'm just being silly,' said Natasha, though her broad smile was broader than ever. 'I was only going to tell you about Petya. Nurse came to take him from me today, and he laughed and wrinkled his little face and snuggled up close - I'm sure he thought he was hiding away. He's such a sweetie . . . That's him crying. I must be off!' and she walked away.
Meanwhile, downstairs in young Nikolay Bolkonsky's bedroom the little lamp was burning as always. (The boy was afraid of the dark and couldn't be cured of this weakness.) Dessalles was asleep, propped up high on his four pillows, and snoring steadily through his Roman nose. Nikolay had just woken up in a cold sweat, and he was sitting up in bed, wide-eyed and staring. He had been woken up by a bad dream. He had dreamt that he and Uncle Pierre were wearing helmets like the ones in his illustrated edition of Plutarch. He and Uncle Pierre were leading a huge, marching army. The army was one mass of white threads slanting through the air like those floating autumn spider-webs that Dessalles called gossamer. Ahead of them lay glory, thread-like itself though a bit more substantial. The pair of them - he and Pierre - were speeding along, getting nearer and nearer to their goal. Then suddenly the threads that worked them became droopy and tangled. It was heavy going. And suddenly there was Uncle Nikolay, grim and menacing, waiting for them.
'Did you do this?' he said, pointing to a pile of broken sealing-wax and pens. 'I used to love you, but now I'm under orders from Arakcheyev, and I shall kill the first one of you that moves.' Nikolay looked round for Pierre, but Pierre wasn't there. Pierre had been replaced by his father - Prince Andrey - and his father had no shape or form, but he was there, and the moment he saw him Nikolay felt weak at the knees with love, he turned to jelly like a man with no skeleton. His father took pity and cuddled him. But there was Uncle Nikolay bearing down on them, getting closer and closer. Nikolay felt a great wave of horror - and woke up.
'My father!' he thought. (There were two very good portraits of Prince Andrey in the house, but Nikolay had never thought of his father in human form.) 'My father was with me. He gave me a cuddle. He was pleased with me; he was pleased with Uncle Pierre. I'll do anything he says. Mucius Scaevola20 put his hand in the flames. But why shouldn't that kind of thing happen to me one day? I know they want me to study. And I will. But one day I'll have finished, and then I shall go out and do things. I ask only one thing of God: let what happened to Plutarch's men happen to me, and let me do what they did. No, I'll do more. Everybody will know me and love me and admire me.' And suddenly Nikolay's chest was choked with sobs, and he burst into tears.
'Are you feeling ill?' came the voice of Dessalles.
'No,' answered Nikolay, and he sank back down on his pillow. 'He's such a nice, kind man. I do love him!' He was thinking of Dessalles. 'But Uncle Pierre! Oh, what a wonderful man he is! And then there's my father. Father! Father! Yes, I'm going to do something even he would have been pleased with.'
PART II
CHAPTER 1
The subject matter of history is the life of peoples and humanity. To catch hold of and express in words, to describe directly, the life of a single people, let alone the whole of humanity, is beyond possibility.
Ancient historians all employed the same technique for catching the apparently uncatchable - describing the life of a people. They would describe the activities of individual rulers and accept these activities as an expression of the activity of an entire people.
Questions arose. How did these individuals compel whole nations to act in accordance with their will? And what was it that directed the actual will of these individuals? The answer to the first question was that the will of a Deity subjected a people to the will of one chosen person; and the answer to the second question was that the same Deity directed the will of the chosen person to a predetermined end.
For the ancients these questions were resolved by a belief in the direct intervention of the Deity in human affairs.
Both propositions are now unacceptable to modern historical theory.
You might have thought that modern history, having rejected the ancients' belief in man's subjection to a Deity, and the direction of peoples towards predetermined ends, would have turned away from the outward manifestations of power to look for the causes that lie behind it. But modern history has not done that. It has rejected the views of the ancients in theory, while continuing to follow them in practice.
In place of men imbued with divine authority and directly controlled by the will of God, modern history has created either heroes endowed with extraordinary, superhuman powers, or simply men of widely differing qualities, from monarchs to journalists, who have become leaders of the masses. Modern history has replaced the 'divinely ordained' aims of various peoples - the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans - which ancient historians saw as the progressive aims of humanity as a whole, by new aims of its own - the well-being of the French people, the German or the English, or, in the most abstract terms, the single, noble aim of civilizing all of humanity, by which is usually meant the inhabitants of a small north-western corner of a large continent.
Modern history has rejected the ancient creeds without putting any new ideas in their place, and the logic of their position has forced the very historians who claim to have rejected the old beliefs in a divine right of kings or fate to come back by a devious route to the point where they started, and to two basic premises: (1) that nations are directed by individuals, and (2) that there is such a thing as a goal towards which nations and humanity in general are proceeding.
In everything written by modern historians from Gibbon to Buckle,1 for all the ostensible differences between them and their ostensibly original approaches, everything is underpinned by these two ancient and inescapable premises.
In relation to the first of these, the historian describes the activities of certain individuals who in his opinion are leaders of humanity (one of them will limit this accolade to monarchs, military generals and ministers of state; the next will bestow it on monarchs and orators, but also on cultivated reformers, philosophers and poets). In relation to the second one, historians always know the goals towards which humanity is being conducted. For one of them this goal is the aggrandizement of Rome, Spain or France; for the next it will be freedom, equality or the imposition of some sort of civilization on that little corner of the world known as Europe.
It is 1789 and Paris is in ferment. The ferment grows, spreads and manifests itself in a movement of people from west to east. This eastward movement repeats itself several times, clashing with a counter-movement coming from east to west. In the year 1812 it reaches its furthest point, Moscow, and then, with incredible symmetry, the east-west counter-movement gets under way, drawing along behind it all the people in the middle, just as its predecessor had done in the other direction. The counter-movement returns to the starting point of the first movement, Paris, and then subsides.
Throughout this twenty-year period a vast number of fields go unploughed, houses are burnt down, trade flows in different directions, millions of men grow poor, get rich or migrate, and millions of good Christian folk who claim to love their neighbour go about murdering each other.
What does it all mean? Why did it happen? What can have induced these people to burn houses down and murder their fellow creatures? What were the causes of these events? What force impelled men to act in this fashion? These are the simple and honest questions that leap to mind when humanity comes across memorials and traditions stemming from that bygone age of turmoil.
Commonsensical humanity turns for answers to the science of history, the object of which is the bringing of nations and of humanity to self-knowledge.
If history had clung on to the ancient creeds it would have said that the Deity, wishing to reward or punish His people, gave power to Napoleon and directed his will for the attainment of His own divine ends. A clear and complete answer. You could believe in Napoleon's divine significance or not, but for a believer the entire history of that period would have been comprehensible and beyond contradiction.
But modern history can no longer respond like that. Science now repudiates the old idea of a Deity intervening in human affairs, so other answers must be found.
In answer to these questions modern history says, 'Do you really want to know the meaning of this movement, where it came from, and what force produced these events? Listen to this.
'Louis XIV was a very proud and arrogant man; he had such and such mistresses, and such and such ministers, and he ruled France badly. Louis' successors were weak men as well, and they ruled France badly. And they had such and such favourites, and such and such mistresses. But at that time a few men started scribbling in books. At the end of the eighteenth century a couple of dozen men in Paris began to hold forth about men being equal and free. This led to murder and mayhem all over France. These men killed the King and a lot of other people. But at that time there lived in France a genius by the name of Napoleon. He conquered everybody everywhere, or at least he killed a lot of people because he was a great genius. And for reasons best known to himself he went off to Africa to kill people there, and he killed them so effectively, and he was so bright and clever, that when he got back to France he ordered everyone to obey him, and everyone did. Setting himself up as Emperor, he marched off with the intention of killing a lot more people in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And this he did. Meanwhile in Russia there was an Emperor called Alexander who declared war on Napoleon with a view to getting some order back into Europe. In '07 he made friends with him quite suddenly, but they fell out again in 1811 and started killing lots of people. Whereupon Napoleon brought six hundred thousand men into Russia and conquered Moscow, but suddenly he ran away again and Emperor Alexander, advised by Heinrich Stein et al., united all of Europe against the disturber of her peace. Every one of Napoleon's allies suddenly became his enemy, and the new force marched against fresh troops raised by Napoleon. The allies defeated Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to abdicate and exiled him to the Isle of Elba, though without stripping him of the title of Emperor and continuing to show him the greatest respect, despite the fact that five years earlier and one year later he was universally regarded as a villain and outlaw. At which point Louis XVIII came to the throne, even though he had been until then a laughing stock to France and all her allies. Napoleon shed a few tears before the old guard, renounced the throne and went off into exile. Along came the clever statesmen and diplomats (especially Talleyrand, who was the first to grab the famous armchair, sit in it and thereby extend the frontiers of France), and they chatted for a while in Vienna, as a result of which nations emerged happy or unhappy. Suddenly the diplomats and monarchs all but fell out again and they were on the point of telling their armies to go off and kill each other again when Napoleon raised another battalion and invaded France, and the French, who had only just begun to hate him, gave in. But this infuriated the allied monarchs and they set off yet again to fight the French. And Napoleon, the genius, was defeated, proclaimed a villain at long last and shipped off to the island of St Helena. And in that rocky place the exile died a lingering death, cut off from those dear to his heart and