War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [766]
“Did you do that?” he said, pointing to the broken-up wax and pens. “I loved you, but Arakcheev has given me orders, and I’ll kill the first one who moves forward.” Nikolenka turned to look at Pierre; but there was no longer any Pierre. Pierre was his father, Prince Andrei, and his father had no image or form, but he was there, and, seeing him, Nikolenka felt weak from love: he felt strengthless, boneless, and liquid. His father caressed and pitied him. But Uncle Nikolai Ilyich moved closer and closer to them. Nikolenka was overcome by terror and woke up.
“Father,” he thought. “Father” (though there were two portraits of a good likeness in the house, Nikolenka never pictured Prince Andrei in his human image), “father was with me and caressed me. He approved of me, he approved of Uncle Pierre. Whatever he says—I’ll do. Mucius Scaevola burned his hand.12 Why shouldn’t it be the same in my life? I know they want me to study. And I will study. But some day I’ll stop. And then I’ll do it. I ask God for only one thing: that it’s the same with me as with the men in Plutarch, and I’ll do the same. I’ll do better. Everybody will know me, love me, admire me.” And Nikolenka suddenly felt sobs seize his breast, and he burst into tears.
“Êtes-vous indisposé?”†757 Dessales’s voice was heard.
“Non,” replied Nikolenka, and he lay back on the pillow. “He’s kind and good, I love him,” he thought of Dessales. “But Uncle Pierre! Oh, what a wonderful man! And father? Father! Father! Yes, I’ll do something that even he would be pleased with…”
Part Two
I
The subject of history is the life of peoples and of mankind. To grasp directly and embrace in words—to describe—the life not only of mankind, but of one people, appears impossible.
All the ancient historians used one and the same method to describe and grasp the seemingly ungraspable—the life of a people. They described the activity of individual men who ruled the people; and this activity expressed for them the activity of the whole people.
To the questions of how individual men made peoples act according to their will, and what governed the will of these men themselves, the ancients answered the first question by recognizing the will of a divinity who subjected peoples to the will of one chosen man, and the second by recognizing that the same divinity guided the will of the chosen one towards a predestined goal.
For the ancients, these questions were decided by faith in the direct participation of a divinity in the affairs of mankind.
Modern history, in its theory, has rejected both of these propositions.
It would seem that, having rejected the beliefs of the ancients in the subjection of peoples to a divinity and in the definite goal towards which peoples are led, modern history should study not the manifestations of power, but the causes that form it. Modern history has not done that. Having rejected the views of the ancients in theory, it follows them in practice.
In place of men endowed with divine power and directly guided by the will of a divinity, modern history has put either heroes endowed with extraordinary, superhuman capacities, or simply men of the most diverse qualities, from monarchs to journalists, who guide the masses. In place of the former god-pleasing goals of the peoples—the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans—which the ancients took for goals of the movement of mankind, modern history has set up its own goals—the good of the French, the Germans, the English, and, in its highest abstraction, the goal of the good of all human civilization, usually understood as the people occupying the small northwest corner of a large continent.
Modern history has rejected the beliefs of the ancients without putting in their place a new view, and the logic of the situation has made historians, who fancied they had rejected