iron-grey Classical Civilization; the issue lay between Principate and Caliphate. Antony's victory would have freed the Magian soul; his defeat drew over its lands the hard sheet of Roman Imperium. A comparable event in the history of the West is the battle between Tours and Poitiers, A.D. 732. Had the Arabs won it and made "Frankistan" into a caliphate of the North-east, Arabic speech, religion, and customs would have become familiar to the ruling classes, giant cities like Granada and Kairawan would have arisen on the Loire and the Rhine, the Gothic feeling would have been forced to find expression in the long-stiffened forms of Mosque and Arabesque, and instead of the German mysticism we should have had a sort of Sufism. That the equivalent of these things actually happened to the Arabian world was due to the fact that the Syro-Persian peoples produced no Charles Martel to battle along with Mithradates or Brutus and Cassius or Antony (or for that matter without them) against Rome.
A second pseudomorphosis is presented to our eyes to-day in Russia. The Russian hero-tales of the Bylini culminated in the epic cycle of Prince Vladimir of Kiev (c. A.D. 1000), with his Round Table, and in the popular hero Ilya Muromyets.[1] The whole immense difference between the Russian and the Faustian soul is already revealed in the contrast of these with the "contemporary" Arthur, Ermanarich, and Nibelungen sagas of the Migration-period in the form of the Hildebrandslied and the Waltharilied.[2] The Russian "Merovingian" period begins with the overthrow of the Tatar domination by Ivan III (1480) and passes, by the last princes of the House of Rurik and the first of the Romanovs, to Peter the Great (1689-1725). It corresponds exactly to the period between Clovis (481-511) and the battle of Testry (687), which effectively gave the Carolingians their supremacy. I advise all readers to read the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours (to 591) in parallel with the corresponding parts of Karamzin's patriachal narrative, especially those dealing with Ivan the Terrible, and with Boris Godunov and Vassili Shuiski.[3] There could hardly be a closer parallel. This Muscovite period of the great Boyar families and Patriarchs, in which a constant element is the resistance of an Old Russia party to the friends of Western Culture, is followed, from the founding of Petersburg in 1703, by the pseudomorphosis which forced the primitive Russian soul into the alien mould, first of full Baroque, then of the Enlightenment, and then of the nineteenth century. The fate-figure in Russian history is Peter the Great, with whom we may compare the Charlemagne who deliberately and
- ↑ See Wollner, Untersuchungen über die Volksepik des Grossrussen (1879). [A convenient edition of the Kiev Stories is Mary Gill, Les Légendes slaves (Paris, 1912). — Tr.]
- ↑ The former is dated about 800, the latter about 930. — Tr.
- ↑ These two figures — the one an authorized Mayor of the Palace before he was Tsar, the other a crude usurper — dominate the period of Russian history called the "Period of Troubles" — i.e., that between the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584 and the election of Michael Romanov in 1613. — Tr.
