War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [775]
But in that case, if the force that moves peoples is not in historical figures, but in the peoples themselves, what then is the significance of historical figures?
Historical figures, say these historians, express in themselves the will of the masses; the activity of historical figures serves to represent the activity of the masses.
But in that case the question arises: does all the activity of historical figures serve to express the will of the masses, or only some side of it? If all the activity of historical figures serves to express the will of the masses, as some think, then the biographies of the Napoleons and Catherines, with all the details of court gossip, serve to express the life of the people, which is an obvious absurdity; if only one side of the activity of a historical figure serves to express the life of the people, as other alleged philosopher-historians think, then, in order to determine which side of the activity of a historical figure expresses the life of the people, we must first know what the life of the people is.
Running into this difficulty, historians of this sort think up the most vague, intangible, and general abstraction, to which the greatest number of events can be accommodated, and say that this abstraction is the goal of the movement of mankind. The most usual general abstractions, accepted by almost all historians, are freedom, equality, enlightenment, progress, civilization, culture. Having posited some such abstraction as the goal of the movement of mankind, historians study those who have left the greatest number of memorials behind—kings, ministers, generals, writers, reformers, popes, journalists—to the extent that all these figures, in their opinion, have furthered or hindered that abstraction. But since nothing proves that the goal of mankind consists in freedom, equality, enlightenment, or civilization, and since the connection of the masses with the rulers and enlighteners of mankind is based only on the arbitrary assumption that the sum total of the wills of the masses is always transferred to the figures who are conspicuous for us, the activity of the millions of people who migrate, burn houses, abandon farming, and destroy each other, is never expressed in the description of the activity of a dozen figures who do not burn houses, are not concerned with farming, and do not kill their own kind.
History proves that at every step. Is the ferment among the people of the west at the end of the last century and their striving towards the east explained by the activity of Louis XIV, XV, XVI, their mistresses and ministers, by the lives of Napoleon, Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais, and others?
Is the movement of the Russian people to the east, to Kazan and Siberia, expressed in the details of the morbid character of Ioann IV and his correspondence with Kurbsky?4
Is the movement of people during the Crusades explained by studies of the Godefroys and Louis and their ladies? We still find incomprehensible the movement of people from west to east without any goal, without leadership, with a crowd of vagabonds, with Peter the Hermit.5 And still less comprehensible remains the ceasing of this movement once a reasonable, holy purpose for the campaign—the deliverance of Jerusalem—had been set by the historical actors. Popes, kings, and knights urged the people to liberate the Holy Land, but the people did not go, because the unknown reason that had prompted them to move earlier no longer existed. The history of the Godefroys and minnesingers obviously cannot contain the life of the people. And the history of the Godefroys and minnesingers has remained the history of the Godefroys and minnesingers, while the history of the life of the people and their motives has remained unknown.
Still less will the history of writers and reformers explain the life of the people to us.
The history of culture will explain to us the motives, the