wer, but to drive back the billows of Huns or
Turks from fields where cities and a middle class must rise, to oppose
citizen-right to feudal-right, and inoculate with the lance-head Society
with the popular element, to assert the industrial against the baronial
interest, or to expel the invader who forages among their rights to
sweep them clean and to plant a system which the ground cannot receive,
then we find that the intense conviction, which has been long gathering
and brooding in the soul, thunders and lightens through the whole brain,
and quickens the germs of Art, Beauty and Knowledge. Then war is only a
process of development, which threatens terribly and shakes the locks
upon its aegis in the face of the brutes which infest its path. Minerva
is aware that wisdom and common sense will have to fight for recognition
and a world: she fends blows from her tranquil forehead with the
lowering crest; the shield is not always by her side, nor the
sword-point resting on the ground. What is so vital as this armed and
conscious intelligence? The pen, thus tempered to a sword, becomes a pen
again, but flows with more iron than before.

But the original intellectual life begins while the pen is becoming
tempered in the fires of a great national controversy, before it is hard
enough to draw blood. Magnetic streams attract each slender point to a
centre of prophesying thought long before the blood-red aurora stains
suddenly the midnight sky and betrays the influence which has been none
the less mighty because it has been colorless. Sometimes a people says
all that it has in its mind to say, during that comfortless period
while the storm is in the air and has not yet precipitated its cutting
crystals. The most sensitive minds are goaded to express emphatically
their moral feeling and expectation in such a rude climate, which
stimulates rather than depresses, but which is apt to fall away into
languor and content. This only shows that the people have no commanding
place in history, but are only bent upon relieving themselves from
sundry annoyances, or are talking about great principles which they are
not in a position, from ethnical or political disability, to develop.
Such is all the Panslavic literature which is not Russian.[B]
But sometimes a people whose intellect passes through a noble
pre-revolutionary period, illustrating it by impetuous eloquence,
indignant lyrics, and the stern lines which a protesting conscience
makes