The Impossibility of Perfect Judgment — War and Peace

Seven years have passed. The storm-tossed sea of European history has subsided within its shores and seems calm. Mysterious forces that move humanity, mysterious because their laws are unknown, still operate. Groups form and dissolve; kingdoms and displacements of peoples are in preparation. The sea is not driven from shore to shore as before. It seethes in its depths. Historic figures, who once reflected the movement of the masses by ordering wars, now seem to rotate on one spot, reflecting unrest by laws, treaties, and diplomatic combinations. Historians call this activity the reaction.

They sternly condemn the well-known people of the period, from Alexander and Napoleon to Madame de Staël, Photius, Schelling, Fichte, and Chateaubriand, according to whether they conduced to progress or to reaction. In Russia too, they say, a reaction took place, and the chief culprit was Alexander I, the same man they call the saviour of Russia and the cause of the liberal movement at the start of his reign. From schoolboy essayist to learned historian, everyone throws a little stone: he did well in 1812, badly by giving a constitution to Poland, forming the Holy Alliance, trusting Arakcheev, favouring Golitsyn and mysticism, then Shishkov and Photius, and by disbanding the Semenov regiment.

Do not the actions they praise, Tolstoy asks, flow from the same birth, education, and life as the actions they blame? A live man stood on the highest pinnacle of power, exposed to intrigue, flattery, and self-deception, feeling at every moment a responsibility for Europe, with personal habits and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth. He had not the same conception of humanity's welfare as a professor of books and lectures fifty years later. And that professor, after a lapse of time, will also turn out mistaken, because every year and every new writer changes what counts as good. At one and the same time some praise the Holy Alliance and others condemn it. Alexander's activity cannot be called useful or harmful, for it is impossible to say for what. Even if he had followed a later programme of nationality, freedom, equality, and progress, the opposition historians admire would never have existed. There would have been no life. If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed.