Welsh Journals

OUR ALLIES AND OUR ENEMY THERE can be no doubt that for the past six or I seven years a considerable body of the most advanced opinion in this country has been strongly opposed to the policy of the Triple Entente. Democrats have found it impossible to approve of partnership with Russia, while the Imperialist has been hannted with the fear of Russia in the East. a memory of the Crimea intensified by Mr. Kipling. Then there was France, friendship with whom must, since 1870, mean a direct menace to Germany. Why, it was said, should we ally ourselves with these nations, one our hereditary foe, and one our main rival in the East and absolutely alien in blood, against Germany, the Continental nation whose language and thoughts and ideals are perhaps nearest to the English ? It was merely panic, or commercial jealousy and when Mr. Norman Angell shewed that war was no less economically injurious to the conqueror than to the conquered, the case against the Entente was com- plete. Since the publication of the famous white paper this opinion has changed rapidly and almost com- pletely. To-day there can be very few people who are not convinced that, however great the folly of war in general, we have been driven into war, and that our policy during the past decade has been a wise prepar- ation for a calamity which our enemies had deter- mined to make inevitable. It is not however my purpose to deal in this article with the political aspect of our alliance. I wish simply to call attention to certain spiritual aspects of it which our Intellectuals, who should have been the first to recognize their value, have been apt to overlook. If one asks oneself with what nations we have found most spiritual kinship during the present century, there can be no doubt about the answer-Russia and France; Russia where revolution is still encouraged by the agent provocateur and suppressed by the abrogation of law, and France, whose government has driven religion from their country and whose ideals we have come to regard as the arch enemies of domestic morality. The statement has an air of paradox, but it is none the less true. The influence of Russian literature during the past generation has developed with extraordinary rapidity. First came Turgeniev, perhaps the least strictly indigenous of Russia's great writers, then Tolstoi, whose philo- sophic and religious ideals gave him an appeal hardly less general than that of Turgeniev, and lastly the most Russian of all Russia's prophets, Dostoievski. For many people their first introduction to Dostoi- evski has been a spiritual revelation, and the nature of his appeal shews most clearly what Russia has to give us. Dostoievski's novels are, as compared with those of Tolstoi, almost formless. As compared with Turgeniev, his writing is clumsy and without distinction. Moreover there is a feverish quality about his emotion, which suggests disease, and his not infrequent reactions result in pages of uninspired prolixity. Yet there breathes in everything he wrote a spirit which rises above the grace and sentiment of Turgeniev, and the tremendous grasp and earnest- ness of Tolstoi. Behind the fantastic visions of epileptics, imbeciles and murderers, which his strange fancy shews us, there glows the genuine spirit of Christianity, which finds in him perhaps the most poignant and most universal expression, which it has found since the days of its first foundation. And Christianity speaks thus strongly to us through Dostoievski (and in a lesser degree through Gorki also) simply because Religion is in actual fact a more real force in Russia than in any other European country. Just as the Russian Church has preserved more than any other the ritual of the Early Christians. so the Russian people have more than any other preserved the real spirit of Christ. The great primal emotions of self sacrifice, submission, and charity, are the great virtues of the Russian people to-day. True, the middle class is beginning to fed the influence of European culture and European materialism, and to shew the effect in a display of defiant atheism. But the middle class has not yet found means of addressing us in art. The peasant is both economically and spiritually the dominating element in Russia. Agriculture is the mainstay of Russian life, and the peasant already owns the greater part of the agricultural land of the country. More- over his power is said to be increasing rather than de- creasing, and it is he, and those who have come most closely into contact with him, the landed aristocracy. who have up till now spoken most clearly to us here in England. And it is because the peasant has been able to give us the one thing which at this moment we most need, that his influence has been so great. We have insensibly grown weary of the limitations of the Nineteenth Century outlook, of its insistence on mechanical efficiency at the expense of spiritual truth. The hero of Russian imagination is the simpleton, the fool, the man who is in direct and mysterious contact with reality, whose instinct is so often right when the logic of the intellect fails. It is an ideal very like that which Wordsworth opposed to