War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [738]
IV
The movement of peoples begins to settle within its shores. The waves of the big movement flood back, and on the calmed sea eddies form, over which diplomats skim, imagining that it is precisely they who have brought about the calming of the movement.
But the calmed sea suddenly rises. To the diplomats it seems that they, that their disagreements, are the cause of this new upsurge of forces; they expect war among their sovereigns; the situation seems insoluble to them. But the wave which they can feel rising does not break from where they expect. The same wave rises from the same point of departure—Paris. The last backwash of the movement from the west occurs, the backwash that is to resolve the seemingly unresolvable diplomatic difficulties and put an end to the military movement of that period.
The man who devastated France, alone, without conspiracy, without soldiers, comes back to France. Any guard can arrest him; but by a strange chance, not only does no one arrest him, but everyone greets with rapture the man whom they cursed the day before and will curse a month later.
This man is still needed to justify the last joint act.
The act is performed. The last role has been played. The actor is told to undress and wash off his greasepaint and rouge: there is no more need for him.
And several years go by during which this man, in solitude on his island, plays a pathetic comedy before himself, pettily intriguing and lying to justify his actions, when that justification is no longer needed, and showing to the whole world what it was that people took for strength while an unseen hand was guiding him.5
The stage manager, having finished the drama and undressed the actor, shows him to us.
“Look at what you believed in! Here he is! Do you see now that it was not he but I who moved you?”
But, blinded by the force of the movement, people long fail to understand that.
Still greater consistency and necessity are presented in the life of Alexander I, the figure who stood at the head of the countermovement from east to west.
What does that man need who, overshadowing others, would stand at the head of this movement from east to west?
He needs a sense of justice, a concern for the affairs of Europe, but a distant concern, unobscured by petty interests; he needs a moral superiority over his associates—the sovereigns of the time; he needs a mild and attractive personality; he needs a personal grievance against Napoleon. And all this is there in Alexander I; all this has been prepared by countless so-called chances throughout his past life: his upbringing, his liberal initiatives, the advisers surrounding him, Austerlitz, Tilsit, Erfurt.
During the national war, this figure is inactive, since he is not needed. But once the necessity for a general European war appears, this figure at a given moment appears in his place and, uniting the peoples of Europe, leads them to their goal.
The goal is achieved. After the final war of 1815, Alexander finds himself at the height of all possible human power. How does he use it?
Alexander I, the pacifier of Europe, a man who from his youth strove only for the good of his people, the first initiator of liberal innovations in his fatherland, now, when he seems to possess the greatest power and therefore the possibility of doing good for his people, while Napoleon in exile makes childish and deceitful plans for how he would have made mankind happy if he had had power, Alexander I, having fulfilled his vocation and felt the hand of God upon him, suddenly recognizes the insignificance of this imaginary power, turns away from it, puts it into the hands of people he despises and who are despicable, and says only:
“‘Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy Name!’ I am also a man, like you; let me live like a man, and think of my soul and of God.”6
As the sun and every atom of the ether is