War and Peace
of natural forces; they anticipate war between their sovereigns; the
position seems to them insoluble. But the wave they feel to be rising
does not come from the quarter they expect. It rises again from the same
point as before—Paris. The last backwash of the movement from the west
occurs: a backwash which serves to solve the apparently insuperable
diplomatic difficulties and ends the military movement of that period of
history.
The man who had devastated France returns to France alone, without any
conspiracy and without soldiers. Any guard might arrest him, but by
strange chance no one does so and all rapturously greet the man they
cursed the day before and will curse again a month later.
This man is still needed to justify the final collective act.
That act is performed.
The last rôle is played. The actor is bidden to disrobe and wash off his
powder and paint: he will not be wanted any more.
And some years pass during which he plays a pitiful comedy to himself
in solitude on his island, justifying his actions by intrigues and lies
when the justification is no longer needed, and displaying to the whole
world what it was that people had mistaken for strength as long as an
unseen hand directed his actions.
The manager having brought the drama to a close and stripped the actor
shows him to us.
“See what you believed in! This is he! Do you now see that it was not he
but I who moved you?”
But dazed by the force of the movement, it was long before people
understood this.
Still greater coherence and inevitability is seen in the life of
Alexander I, the man who stood at the head of the countermovement from
east to west.
What was needed for him who, overshadowing others, stood at the head of
that movement from east to west?
What was needed was a sense of justice and a sympathy with European
affairs, but a remote sympathy not dulled by petty interests; a moral
superiority over those sovereigns of the day who co-operated with him;
a mild and attractive personality; and a personal grievance against
Napoleon. And all this was found in Alexander I; all this had been
prepared by innumerable so-called chances in his life: his education,
his early liberalism, the advisers who surrounded him, and by
Austerlitz, and Tilsit, and Erfurt.
During the national war he was inactive because he was not needed. But
as soon as the necessity for a general European war presented itself he
appeared in his place at the given moment and, uniting the nations of
Europe, led them to the goal.
The goal is reached. After the final war of 1815 Alexander possesses all
possible power. How does he use it?
Alexander I—the pacifier of Europe, the man who from his early years
had striven only for his people’s welfare, the originator of the liberal
innovations in his fatherland—now that he seemed to possess the utmost
power and therefore to have the possibility of bringing about the
welfare of his peoples—at the time when Napoleon in exile was drawing
up childish and mendacious plans of how he would have made mankind happy
had he retained power—Alexander I, having fulfilled his mission and
feeling the hand of God upon him, suddenly recognizes the insignificance
of that supposed power, turns away from it, and gives it into the hands
of contemptible men whom he despises, saying only:
“Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy Name!... I too am a man like the
rest of you. Let me live like a man and think of my soul and of God.”
As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and
yet at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to
comprehend, so each individual has within himself his own aims and yet
has them to serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man.
A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid
of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the
bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the
fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from
flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey.
Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely
says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear
a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices
that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil
fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee’s
existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the
bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the
bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first,
the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The
higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes,
the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our
comprehension.
All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to
other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historic
characters and nations.
CHAPTER V
Natásha’s wedding to Bezúkhov, which took place in 1813, was the last
happy event in the family of the old Rostóvs. Count Ilyá Rostóv died
that same year and, as always happens, after the father’s death the
family group broke up.
The events of the previous year: the burning of Moscow and the flight
from it, the death of Prince Andrew, Natásha’s despair, Pétya’s death,
and the old countess’ grief fell blow after blow on the old count’s
head. He seemed to be unable to understand the meaning of all these
events, and bowed his old head in a spiritual sense as if expecting and
inviting further blows which would finish him. He seemed now frightened
and distraught and now unnaturally animated and enterprising.
The arrangements for Natásha’s marriage occupied him for a while. He
ordered dinners and suppers and obviously tried to appear cheerful, but
his cheerfulness was not infectious as it used to be: on the contrary it
evoked the compassion of those who knew and liked him.
When Pierre and his wife had left, he grew very quiet and began to
complain of depression. A few days later he fell ill and took to his
bed. He realized from the first that he would not get up again, despite
the doctor’s encouragement. The countess passed a fortnight in an
armchair by his pillow without undressing. Every time she gave him
his medicine he sobbed and silently kissed her hand. On his last day,
sobbing, he asked her and his absent son to forgive him for having
dissipated their property—that being the chief fault of which he was
conscious. After receiving communion and unction he quietly died; and
next day a throng of acquaintances who came to pay their last respects
to the deceased filled the house rented by the Rostóvs. All these
acquaintances, who had so often dined and danced at his house and had so
often laughed at him, now said, with a common feeling of self-reproach
and emotion, as if justifying themselves: “Well, whatever he may have
been he was a most worthy man. You don’t meet such men nowadays.... And
which of us has not weaknesses of his own?”
It was just when the count’s affairs had become so involved that it was
impossible to say what would happen if he lived another year that he
unexpectedly died.
Nicholas was with the Russian army in Paris when the news of his
father’s death reached him. He at once resigned his commission, and
without waiting for it to be accepted took leave of absence and went to
Moscow. The state of the count’s affairs became quite obvious a month
after his death, surprising everyone by the immense total of small
debts the existence of which no one had suspected. The debts amounted to
double the value of the property.
Friends and relations advised Nicholas to decline the inheritance. But
he regarded such a refusal as a slur on his father’s memory, which he
held sacred, and therefore would not hear of refusing and accepted the
inheritance together with the obligation to pay the debts.
The creditors who had so long been silent, restrained by a vague
but powerful influence exerted on them while he lived by the count’s
careless good nature, all proceeded to enforce their claims at once. As
always happens in such cases rivalry sprang up as to which should get
paid first, and those who like Mítenka held promissory notes given them
as presents now became the most exacting of the creditors. Nicholas was
allowed no respite and no peace, and those who had seemed to pity
the old man—the cause of their losses (if they were losses)—now
remorselessly pursued the young heir who had voluntarily undertaken the
debts and was obviously not guilty of contracting them.
Not one of the plans Nicholas tried succeeded; the estate was sold by
auction for half its value, and half the debts still remained
unpaid. Nicholas accepted thirty thousand rubles offered him by his
brother-in-law Bezúkhov to pay off debts he regarded as genuinely due
for value received. And to avoid being imprisoned for the remainder, as
the creditors threatened, he re-entered the government service.
He could not rejoin the army where he would have been made colonel at
the next vacancy, for his mother now clung to him as her one hold on
life; and so despite his reluctance to remain in Moscow among people who
had known him before, and despite his abhorrence of the civil service,
he accepted a post in Moscow in that service, doffed the uniform of
which he was so fond, and moved with his mother and Sónya to a small
house on the Sívtsev Vrazhók.
Natásha and Pierre were living in Petersburg at the time and had no
clear idea of Nicholas’ circumstances. Having borrowed money from his
brother-in-law, Nicholas tried to hide his wretched condition from him.
His position was the more difficult because with his salary of twelve
hundred rubles he had not only to keep himself, his mother, and Sónya,
but had to shield his mother from knowledge of their poverty. The
countess could not conceive of life without the luxurious conditions she
had been used to from childhood and, unable to realize how hard it was
for her son, kept demanding now a carriage (which they did not keep) to
send for a friend, now some expensive article of food for herself, or
wine for her son, or money to buy a present as a surprise for Natásha or
Sónya, or for Nicholas himself.
Sónya kept house, attended on her aunt, read to her, put up with her
whims and secret ill-will, and helped Nicholas to conceal their poverty
from the old countess. Nicholas felt himself irredeemably indebted
to Sónya for all she was doing for his mother and greatly admired her
patience and devotion, but tried to keep aloof from her.
He seemed in his heart to reproach her for being too perfect, and
because there was nothing to reproach her with. She had all that people
are valued for, but little that could have made him love her. He felt
that the more he valued her the less he loved her. He had taken her at
her word when she wrote giving him his freedom and now behaved as if all
that had passed between them had been long forgotten and could never in
any case be renewed.
Nicholas’ position became worse and worse. The idea of putting something
aside out of his salary proved a dream. Not only did he not save
anything, but to comply with his mother’s demands he even incurred some
small debts. He could see no way out of this situation. The idea of
marrying some rich woman, which was suggested to him by his female
relations, was repugnant to him. The other way out—his mother’s
death—never entered his head. He wished for nothing and hoped
for nothing, and deep in his heart experienced a gloomy and stern
satisfaction in an uncomplaining endurance of his position. He tried