War And Peace

The man who has devastated France comes back to France alone, with no secret plan and no soldiers. Any policeman could arrest him, but by a strange contingency no one does; on the contrary, everybody gives a warm welcome to the man they were cursing only yesterday and will curse again within the month.

This man is still needed to vindicate events occurring in the last act of a collective drama.

The act is over. The last part has been played. The actor is told to take off his costume and wash off his powder and paint. He won’t be needed again.

And for several years to come this man, alone on his island, plays out his pathetic little comedy to himself as the only audience, scheming and lying over silly details in order to vindicate his actions when vindication is no longer required, and demonstrating for all the world to see the true nature of what had been mistaken for power when all the time he had been guided by an unseen hand.

The theatre manager has brought the drama to a close, and made the actor take off his costume. Now he shows him to us.

‘Look, this is what you have believed in! Here he is! I hope you can all see now that he hasn’t been moving you – I have.’

But, dazzled by the power of movement, the people take a long time to absorb this.

There is even greater consistency and inevitability in the life of Alexander I, the figure who stood at the head of the east-west counter-movement.

What qualities would be needed for a man to eclipse all others and stand at the head of an east-west counter-movement?

He would need a sense of justice, deep involvement in the affairs of Europe tempered by sufficient detachment to leave his view unobscured by petty interests. He would need moral superiority over his fellows, the other sovereigns of the day. He would need to have a gentle and appealing personality and also a personal grudge against Napoleon. And Alexander I satisfies these requirements, all of them prepared long before by an infinite number of chance contingencies arising in his earlier life, in his upbringing and early liberalism, in the advisers circulating around him, in Austerlitz, Tilsit and Erfurt.

While ever the war centres on his own country this character stands idle; he is not needed. But once the need for a pan-European war becomes inevitable this character, finding himself in the right place at the right time, brings the European peoples together and leads them towards their goal.

The goal is reached. After the last of the wars in 1815 Alexander finds himself at the very summit of human power. How does he use it?

Alexander, the peacemaker of Europe, the man who from early youth had striven for nothing but the good of his peoples, the first champion of liberal reforms in his own country, now the possessor of maximum power and therefore the opportunity of promoting the welfare of his people, behaved very differently from Napoleon in exile, who was busy concocting childish and duplicitous schemes for blessings to be showered on humanity if only he had the power. Alexander, sensing that his mission is now accomplished and God’s hand is upon him, and recognizing the paltriness of this mirage of power, turns away from it, hands it on to despicable creatures, men he despises and has only this to say:

‘Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy Name . . . !¹¹ I am a man, a man like you. Let me live like a man, and think about my soul and God.’

Just as the sun and every atom of ether is both a sphere complete in itself and also only a tiny part of an inconceivably vast whole, so every personality bears within himself his own aims whilst bearing them also in the service of generalized aims that lie beyond human comprehension.

A bee has settled on a flower and stung a child. And the child is scared of bees and says that bees are there to sting people. A poet admires the bee as it imbibes inside the sepals of the flower and says that bees are there to imbibe nectar inside flowers. A beekeeper, observing that the bee collects pollen and brings it back to the hive, says that the bee is there to collect honey. Another beekeeper, one who has studied the life of the swarm more closely, says the bee collects pollen to feed the young ones and rear a queen, and the bee is there for the propagation of its species. A botanist observes the bee flying over with pollen to fertilize the pistil on a diclinous flower and sees this as the purpose of the bee. Another one, observing the tendency for plants to migrate and the bee’s contribution to this process, feels able to claim this as the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, second or third purpose discernible by the human intellect. The higher the human intellect goes in discovering more and more purposes, the more obvious it becomes that the ultimate purpose is beyond comprehension.