CHAPTER XI
TOLSTOY THE BYZANTINE
I
THERE are a hundred and forty million peasants settled on the outskirts of Continental Europe, and rapidly taking possession of the Asiatic plain. It seems, in the fitness of things, that Russian expansion should move Eastwards, for it seems almost impossible to consider the Russian as belonging to the West. We are loth to admit him to the franchise of European civilization. "Scratch a Russian moujik" we are told, "and you find the Tartar." Let him, therefore, go back to Tartary, the cradle of his race.
The time-honoured saying about the Russian Tartar is only a sorry joke. For if it means that the Russian peasant, being engaged in a perpetual struggle with the hostile forces of Nature, with drought and cold, with hunger and plague, is nearer to elemental human nature, then it is only a commonplace and a misleading one. For elemental human nature is not Tar-
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