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The flood of nations begins to subside into its normal channels.
The waves of the great movement abate, and on the calm surface
eddies are formed in which float the diplomatists, who imagine
that they have caused the floods to abate.
But the smooth sea again suddenly becomes disturbed. The diplomatists
think that their disagreements are the cause of this fresh pressure
of natural forces; they anticipate war between their sovereigns;
the position seems to them insoluble. But the wave they feel to
be rising does not come from the quarter they expect. It rises
again from the same point as before- Paris. The last backwash
of the movement from the west occurs: a backwash which serves
to solve the apparently insuperable diplomatic difficulties and
ends the military movement of that period of history.
The man who had devastated France returns to France alone,
without any conspiracy and without soldiers. Any guard might arrest
him, but by strange chance no one does so and all rapturously
greet the man they cursed the day before and will curse again
a month later.
This man is still needed to justify the final collective act.
That act is performed.
The last role is played. The actor is bidden to disrobe and
wash off his powder and paint: he will not be wanted any more.
And some years pass during which he plays a pitiful comedy
to himself in solitude on his island, justifying his actions by
intrigues and lies when the justification is no longer needed,
and displaying to the whole world what it was that people had
mistaken for strength as long as an unseen hand directed his actions.
The manager having brought the drama to a close and stripped
the actor shows him to us.
"See what you believed in! This is he! Do you now see
that it was not he but I who moved you?"
But dazed by the force of the movement, it was long before
people understood this.
Still greater coherence and inevitability is seen in the life
of Alexander I, the man who stood at the head of the countermovement
from east to west.
What was needed for him who, overshadowing others, stood at
the head of that movement from east to west?
What was needed was a sense of justice and a sympathy with
European affairs, but a remote sympathy not dulled by petty interests;
a moral superiority over those sovereigns of the day who co-operated
with him; a mild and attractive personality; and a personal grievance
against Napoleon. And all this was found in Alexander I; all this
had been prepared by innumerable so-called chances in his life:
his education, his early liberalism, the advisers who surrounded
him, and by Austerlitz, and Tilsit, and Erfurt.
During the national war he was inactive because he was not
needed. But as soon as the necessity for a general European war
presented itself he appeared in his place at the given moment
and, uniting the nations of Europe, led them to the goal.
The goal is reached. After the final war of 1815 Alexander
possesses all possible power. How does he use it?
Alexander I- the pacifier of Europe, the man who from his
early years had striven only for his people's welfare, the originator
of the liberal innovations in his fatherland- now that he seemed
to possess the utmost power and therefore to have the possibility
of bringing about the welfare of his peoples- at the time when
Napoleon in exile was drawing up childish and mendacious plans
of how he would have made mankind happy had he retained power-
Alexander I, having fulfilled his mission and feeling the hand
of God upon him, suddenly recognizes the insignificance of that
supposed power, turns away from it, and gives it into the hands
of contemptible men whom he despises, saying only:
"Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy Name!... I too
am a man like the rest of you. Let me live like a man and think
of my soul and of God."
As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in
itself, and yet at the same time only a part of a whole too immense
for man to comprehend, so each individual has within himself his
own aims and yet has them to serve a general purpose incomprehensible
to man.
A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child
is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people.
A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and
says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper,
seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the
hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who
has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee
gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and
that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that
the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes
the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee's existence.
Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee
helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose
of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted
by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind
can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery
of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate
purpose is beyond our comprehension.
All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life
of the bee to other manifestations of life. And so it is with
the purpose of historic characters and nations.
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