The Greatest of Monarchs
Peter the Great. By Stephen Graham. (Bann. 21s.)
Mn. STEPHEN GRAHAM has written an absorbing biography of Peter the Great. So magnificent is his subject that it is no slight on the author to say that he could hardly have failed to do so. For, after all, Mr. Graham had the wit to see that there was a real place for a new biography of Peter.
Mr. Graham has given us one of those biographies to which we are becoming accustomed, dealing chiefly with the man rather than with contemporary history. But he sensibly and straightforwardly tells us quite enough contemporary history to allow us to see the immense significance of Peter's achieve- ments, even though we may be almost wholly unfamiliar with the history of that part of Europe. Incidentally, how narrow and provincial is still much of the history .Which is taught at the schools and universities of this country. A few years ago, at any rate, the schoolboy or undergraduate were informed of the turn of the seventeenth into the eighteenth century, almost as if it was marked by one 'great war alone the War of the Spanish Succession. " The Northern War," as contemporaries called it, the great triangular contest between Russia, Sweden and Poland, was, of course, mentioned, but its real significance was never brought home. Yet in the light of subiequent events, the defeat of Charles, the success of Peter, which was the beginning of the Westernization of Russia and the creation of the Russian Empire as one of the great, perhaps the greatest of European Powers during the early nineteenth century, was actually quite as important as the successful attempt in the West to prevent a French hegemony of the countries of the Atlantic coast. Mr. Graham, with pardonable exaggeration, says that the Northern War was even more important. We may scarcely admit that ; but certainly anyone who can bring home to us its true significance performs a real service to- wards a better understanding of Europe.
As we have said, however, the greatest part of the book is a study of its astonishing hero. Mr. Graham has no doubts about the importance of Peter.
" He was, without doubt, the greatest monarch in modern history. Napoleon rose from the ranks, but Peter voluntarily went down to the ranks. That was greater."
Mr. Graham is able to produce much to support this imposing claim. It rests, of course, essentially—and here we come to the central paradox of Peter's story—not on Peter as a General or as an autocrat, but upon Peter as a civilizer. It seems difficult to doubt that this one man alone by an exercise of the human will almost without parallel, dragged a whole vast country out of barbarism into the modern Western world. What the Renaissance and the Reformation combined were to the rest of Europe, Peter alone was to Russia. Russia is not an Asiatic country. She is, of course, a blend between the West and the East, but she much more nearly approximates to a Western than an Oriental country. And for this she has to thank one man, Peter. And she has to thank a quality in him which it is so rare, so startling, so incredible almost, to find in a man born to autocracy, that, once we have discovered it, there can no longer be any doubt of his blazing genius. That quality is, of course, Peter's unbounded willingness to learn, his unique capacity for hum- bling himself before even the humblest, if by so doing he may learn something of the art of life.
" ' Peter, do this ; Peter, do that,' says the shipwright on the Buitenzaan, and the most terrible autocrat in the world meekly does as he is bid. There was no humbug about his Dutch appren- ticeship. He passionately desired to be a workman in the yards, and he was one, dressed like one, lodged like one, worked like one. He took the utmost painii to preserve his incognito. . . . When his identity was discovered and the crowds began to annoy him, he quitted Zaandam and went to work in the docks of the East India Company, where he could be more free of annoyance. He and his suite all got themselves Dutch clothes. No doubt Peter was difficult to hide in clothes. The story is told of some foolish workman who came up to him and stared at him as if he were a museum specimen. The Tsar knocked him down on the spot. ' Hey, hey, Marzen,' his comrades said, ' you've been knighted.' Marzen picked himself up ruefully, but did not try to exchange blows. He was called The Knight' for the rest of his life. . . . Peter and Alexasha ' (Menshikof) worked on this vessel until it was completed. It was little more than car- pentering—carpentering with more and better tools. Peter was not satisfied. He wished to create—did not wish to carry out always other men's plans, or for ever to copy models. So he took lessons in designing. He filled a great many notebooks. But he diScovered that in shipbuilding the Dutch were unoriginal. They worked from models. New types of construction did not origmate there, but in England. The principles taught were principles in copying. Each model had to be studied individually.
and it would take years to gain a wide knowledge. When ho learned that in the British yards shipbuilding was done from
first principles, controlled by mathematical -theory and not by
models, his interest in Dutch craft vanished."
Peter seems to have preserved a sort of personal modesty right through his life. As late as 1700 we find him only taking the rank of captain in his own army. ' And again and again there are instances of his great caution in the field. He was not; and evidently did not consider himself to be, a great general. He was a great worker, a great organizer, a great modernizer, and that is something much rarer. This, as we have already said, is the central paradox of his life. That it should be poSilible to call this, man a great civilize; is astonishing, for in another capacity he was the most appalling barbarian, the most horrible savage imaginable. The tortures and murder of his son are, of course, notorious ; but what- it is harder to realize is that executions done by his own hands were quite ordinary events in his daily life. Mr. Graham gives us some extremely interesting personal details of Peter's life, showing him to have been a typical neurotic and sadist. He was tortured by dreadful night- mares, which, with extraordinary modernism, he took at one time to recording on paper when he woke in the morning.
Unfortunately Mr. Graham does not tell us if any of these documents have .been preserved. His sadism was obvious all through his life, and it is clear that it was not the brutal, callous cruelty of a great animal. It was the wild, tormented cruelty of a profoundly neurotic man. Indeed, Peter is a classical example of the neurotic of genius. His modesty, amounting at times to a lack of self-confidence, but more often producing only his magnificent capacity to learn from
others, proves beyond ,doubt that in some ways he was a sensitive man. On the other hand, Mr. Graham rightly says that he was perhaps the greatest, autocrat, the man whose will was leait bridled, who has ever lived
" The West has made a strong impression upon him, and he believes that by act of will and through implicit obedience to his command he can make Russia Western. There are no linfits to the possibilities of obedience. In Peter the sense of autocracy and power was greater than in any, other potentate in history:
Altogether, we have to thank Mr. Graham for a thrilling book.
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