BOOKS.
THE RUSSIAN CONQUEST.* WHEN the spiritual history of England during the early years of the twentieth century comes to be written, a very powerful influence in its development will be found to have been that of Russia. Yet, as Mr. Baring points out, in the little volume with which these lines are concerned, the average man is still supremely ignorant of Russian character, history, and life. To many of us the typical Russian is still the lynx-eyed, obsequious, treacherous, cultured savage of Mr. Kipling's "The Man Who Was"; to others be is an oppressed and heroic phantom, fighting for liberty under the shadow of Siberia and the knout; to others, again, he is a simple, sensual, fur-clad barbarian dwelling in a land of perpetual ice. Mr. Baring knows and loves Russia, and the object of this little book is to give us a more true and reasonable view of the history and conditions of the country. The author has already covered the same ground, on a more ample scale, in his volume on The Russian People, which was first published in 1911, but the new book, though it often reproduces the substance of the old, is in no sense a rechauffe. It is considerably shorter, omitting the long historical sketch which occupied the larger part of its predecessor, and substituting a detailed but lucid analysis of the existing political institutions of the country. Such an analysis should prove exceedingly valuable to English readers, for without a knowledge of the framework of political and social life it is impossible to arrive at any true idea of the nature and purpose of the life itself. And, in any event, the Russian polity is a thing which the English mind must find it extremely difficult to understand.
Suppose, for example, that some traveller were to describe to us a country in which there is neither a political nor a territorial aristocracy; where nobility is the reward of State service, and becomes hereditary only on the attainment of a certain grade; where the peasantry.are the most religious and in many ways the most conservative in the world, and actually have in their ownership at the present moment by far the larger part of the arable land of the country; where the middle class is the best educated in Europe and the most free of prejudice and the narrowing influences of convention and self-complacency; where the schools succeed without the use of corporal punishment, and art and thought are without the bondage of athleticism or the tyranny of the Nonconformist conscience. Most of us would decline to believe in the existence of such a country, or, if we had sufficient confidence in our informant to accept his statement, we should hardly look for the original of it between the Baltic and the Caspian.
Yet all these facts are true of Russia, and it was, perhaps, his realization of their truth and, above all, his devotion to the Russian peasant that made Mr. Baring's first book a little unjust to certain other elements of Russian life. That book was written at a time when the ignominious failure of the revolution of 1945 was still fresh in men's minds. It was the Intelligentsia, the cultivated middle class, whose energy and aspiration had been responsible for the movement, and whose lack of discipline and balance was responsible for its disruption. Landmarks, the famous volume in which Bulgakov, Struve, and others criticized the Intelli- gentsia so shrewdly, had just appeared. For the moment Stolypin's policy of "order before reform" appeared the only possibility. Mr. Baring's book inevitably took its tone, to some extent, from the prevailing note of despondency and resentment. He sees things nowadays at a slightly different angle. He sees that the revolution, though it failed, yet accomplished something, and something which is destined to bear further fruit in the future. He sees the logical develop- • The Mainsprings of Russia. By the Hon. Maurice Baring, London : T. Nelson and Sons. [2s. net.]
ment of the Stolypin policy in the miserable regime of sur- veillance which keeps even the Salvation Army out of Russia, and compels the programmes of concerts to receive police sanction; in the wretched system of executive interference which is gradually whittling away the substance of the many real reforms secured by the revolution. It is characteristic of this change of outlook that the political section of Mr. Baring's book closes with a paragraph of affectionate confidence in the Intelligentsia.
But for us it is not in the Intelligentsia that the secret of Russian influence lies. The Russian middle class has not yet spoken directly to us. The great writers whose works have so powerfully affected English thought during the last generation have sprung either from the nobility or the people, and it is with the ideals of their own society that they have made us familiar. The same, too, may be said, though perhaps less definitely, of the Russian music and theatrical art which are exercising a more recent but no less powerful fascination. The secret of this influence Mr. Baring's book to some extent explains. He himself has a wonderful affection for the Russian character. The good qualities of it, he says, " seem to me the most precious of all qualities ; and the virtues the most important of all virtues ; and the glimpses of beauty the rarest in kind ; the songs and the music the most haunting and most heart-searching ; the poetry nearest to nature and man; the human charity nearest to God." And elsewhere he says of the Russians that they have a "peculiar and unique gift of goodness and faith in the nature of their people, which it is difficult to match in any other country." It is this simplicity, spontaneity, and faith that have reached the spirit of the English through the broad and intellectual vision of Tolstoy and the burning, ascetic emotionalism of Dostoievski. Just as the Russian Church is nearest of all the Churches to the ritual of early Christianity, so the Russian, where he is not defiantly and obstinately irreligious, is nearer to the spirit of early Christianity than any other nation. It is the rediscovery in the Russian character of this power of simple faith and self-sacrifice and abnegation that has con- quered the oppressed and distracted spirit of industrial Europe. No doubt it is the Oriental element in the Russian character that has enabled the nation to keep so closely to the original spirit of its creed; the idealization of the fool or simpleton is characteristically Russian, and characteristically alien to the modern trend of Western thought. No doubt, too, the same element has contributed largely to Russia's power over ourselves. The quickening influence which has been at work on Western art during the past generation has been largely due to contact with Oriental art and the Oriental's power of disregarding the form for the spirit. Russia, which is (in spite of Mr. Kipling) essentially a Western nation, brings us the message of the East in an intelligible form.
But whether or no this be the true explanation of Russia's power (and it is certainly an explanation that should not be pressed too far), it is undeniable that that power exists, and that of all the nations of the world we, in spite of our ignorance, are at the present moment most susceptible to its influence. It is certain, too, that the more we understand the Russian spirit the greater the benefit we shall be able to derive from communion with it. We have, therefore, ample reason to welcome the clear and sympathetic study which this little volume contains.
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