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THE COMMOTION among the peoples begins to subside. The waves of the great
tempest begin to abate, and eddies begin to be formed about the calmer surface
where diplomatists are busy, fancying the calm is their work.
But all at once the quiet sea is convulsed again. The diplomatists imagine
that they, their disagreements, are the cause of this fresh disturbance; they
look for wars between their sovereigns; the position seems insoluble. But the
storm they feel brewing does not come from the quarter where they look for it.
It rises again from the same starting point—Paris. The last backwash of the
westward movement follows—the backwash which was to solve the seemingly
inextricable diplomatic difficulties, and to put an end to the military unrest
of the period.
The man who has devastated France comes back to France alone, with no
project, and no soldiers. Any policeman can arrest him; but by a strange freak
of chance no one does seize him, but all meet with enthusiasm the man they have
been cursing but a day before, and will curse again within a month.
That man is needed for the last act winding up the drama.
The act is performed.
The last part is played. The actor is bidden to undress, and wash off his
powder and paint; he will be needed no more.
And for several years this man, in solitude on his island, plays his pitiful
farce to himself, intrigues and lies, justifying his conduct when a
justification is no longer needed, and shows all the world what the thing was
men took for power when an unseen hand guided it.
The stage manager, when the drama was over, and the puppet stripped, showed
him to us.
“Look what you believed in! Here he is! Do you see now that it was not he
but I that moved you?”
But blinded by the force of the movement men for long could not perceive
that.
Even more coherence and inevitability is to be seen in the life of Alexander
I., the personage who stood at the head of the counter-movement from east
westward.
What was needed for the man who, to the exclusion of others, should stand at
the head of that movement from the east westward?
There was needed a sense of justice, an interest in the affairs of Europe,
but a remote one, not obscured by petty interests, a moral preeminence over his
peers—the sovereigns of the time; there was needed a gentle and attractive
personal character; there was needed too a personal grievance against Napoleon.
And all that is to be seen in Alexander I.; it was all prepared beforehand by
the innumerable so-called chance circumstances of his previous life, by
his education and the liberalism of the beginning of his reign, and the
counsellors around, and Austerlitz, and Tilsit, and Erfurt.
During the war in defence of the country this personage is inactive; he is
not needed. But as soon as a general European war becomes inevitable, at the
given moment, he is in his place, and bringing the European peoples together he
leads them to the goal.
The goal is reached. After the last war of 1815 Alexander finds himself at
the highest possible pinnacle of human power. How does he use it?
While Napoleon in his exile was drawing up childish and lying schemes of the
blessings he would have showered on humanity if he had had the power, Alexander,
the pacifier of Europe, the man who, from his youth up, had striven for nothing
but the good of the people, the first champion of liberal reforms in his
country, now when he seemed to possess the greatest possible power, and
consequent possibility of doing good to his people, felt his work was done, and
God's hand was laid upon him, and recognising the nothingness of that semblance
of power, turned from it, gave it up to despicable men, and men he despised, and
could only say:
“Not to us, not to us, but to Thy Name! I too am a man like all of you; let
me live like a man, and think of my soul and of God.”
Just as the sun and every atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and
at the same time is only a part of a whole inconceivable to man through its
vastness, so every individuality bears within it its own ends and yet bears them
so as to serve general ends unfathomable by man.
A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child dreads bees, and
says the object of the bee is to sting people. A poet admires the bee, sipping
honey from the cup of the flower, and says the object of the bee is to sip the
nectar of the flower. A beekeeper, noticing that the bee gathers pollen and
brings it to the hive, says that the object of the bee is to gather honey.
Another beekeeper, who has studied the life of the swarm more closely, says the
bee gathers honey to feed the young ones, and to rear a queen, that the object
of the bee is the perpetuation of its race. The botanist observes that the bee
flying with the pollen fertilises the pistil, and in this he sees the object of
the bee. Another, watching the hybridisation of plants, sees that the bee
contributes to that end also, and he may say that the bee's object is that. But
the final aim of the bee is not exhausted by one or another, or a third aim,
which the human intellect is capable of discovering. The higher the human
intellect rises in the discovery of such aims, the more obvious it becomes that
the final aim is beyond its reach.
All that is within the reach of man is the observation of the analogy of the
life of the bee with other manifestations of life. And the same is true with the
final aims of historical persons and of nations.
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