If the German calls the Russian barbarous, he presumably means imperfectly civilised. There is a certain path along which Western nations have proceeded in recent times, and it is tenable that Russia has not proceeded
so far as the others: that she has less of the special modern system in
science, commerce, machinery, travel, or political constitution. The
Russ ploughs with an old plough; he wears a wild beard; he adores
relics; his life is as rude and hard as that of a subject of Alfred the
Great. Therefore he is, in the German sense, a barbarian. Poor fellows like
Gorky and Dostoieffsky have to form their own reflections on the scenery
without the assistance of large quotations from Schiller on garden seats,
or inscriptions directing them to pause and thank the All-Father for
the finest view in Hesse-Pumpernickel. The Russians, having nothing but
their faith, their fields, their great courage, and their self-governing
communes, are quite cut off from what is called (in the fashionable street
in Frankfort) The True, The Beautiful and The Good. There is a real sense in which one can call such backwardness barbaric, by comparison with the Kaiserstrasse; and in that sense it is true of Russia.
Now we, the French and English, do not mean this when we call the Prussians
barbarians. If their cities soared higher than their flying ships, if
their trains travelled faster than their bullets, we should still call
them barbarians. We should know exactly what we meant by it; and we
should know that it is true. For we do not mean anything that is an
imperfect civilisation by accident. We mean something that is the enemy
of civilisation by design. We mean something that is wilfully at war with
the principles by which human society has been made possible hitherto. Of
course it must be partly civilised even to destroy civilisation. Such
ruin could not be wrought by the savages that are merely undeveloped or
inert. You could not have even Huns without horses; or horses without
horsemanship. You could not have even Danish pirates without ships,
or ships without seamanship. This person, whom I may call the Positive
Barbarian, must be rather more superficially up-to-date than what I may
call the Negative Barbarian. Alaric was an officer in the Roman legions:
but for all that he destroyed Rome. Nobody supposes that Eskimos could
have done it at all neatly. But (in our meaning) barbarism is not a matter
of methods, but of aims. We say that these veneered vandals have the
perfectly serious aim of destroying certain ideas, which, as they think,
the world has outgrown; without which, as we think, the world will die.
It is essential that this perilous peculiarity in the Pruss, or Positive
Barbarian, should be seized. He has what he fancies is a new idea; and
he is going to apply it to everybody. As a fact it is simply a false
generalisation; but he is really trying to make it general. This does
not apply to the Negative Barbarian: it does not apply to the Russian
or the Servian, even if they are barbarians. If a Russian peasant does
beat his wife, he does it because his fathers did it before him: he is
likely to beat less rather than more, as the past fades away. He does
not think, as the Prussian would, that he has made a new discovery in
physiology in finding that a woman is weaker than a man. If a Servian
does knife his rival without a word, he does it because other Servians
have done it. He may regard it even as piety, but certainly not as
progress. He does not think, as the Prussian does, that he founds a new
school of horology by starting before the word «Go.» He does not think
he is in advance of the world in militarism merely because he is behind
it in morals. No; the danger of the Pruss is that he is prepared to
fight for old errors as if they were new truths.