MASTERS AND MEN.
Not in one town, in one province only, but in every town, we find two
nations living in presence of each other; just as we find them in
Finland and Livonia; an upper race and a lower; a foreign race and a
native; and in nearly all these towns and provinces the foreign race
are the masters, the native race their men.
On the open plains and in the forest lands this division into masters
and men is not so strongly marked as in the towns. Here and there we
find a stranger in possession of the soil; but the rule is not so; and
while the towns may be said to belong in a rough way to the German,
the country, as a whole, is the property of the Russ. The people may
be parted into these two classes; not in commercial things only, but
in professional study and in official life. The trade, the art, the
science, and the power of Russia have all been lodged by law in the
stranger's hand--the Russ being made an underling, even when he was
not made a serf; and it is only in our own time--since the close of
the Crimean war--that the crown has come, as it were, to the help of
nature in recovering Russia for the Russ.
The dynasty is foreign. The fact is too common to excite remark; the
first and most liberal countries in the world, so far as they have
kings at all, being governed by princes of alien blood. In London the
dynasty is Hanoverian; in Berlin it is Swabian; in Paris it is
Corsican; in Vienna it is Swiss; in Florence it is Savoyard; in
Copenhagen it is Holstein; in Stockholm it is French; in Brussels it
is Cobourg; at the Hague it is Rhenish; in Lisbon it is Kohary; in
Athens it is Danish; in Rio it is Portuguese. No bad moral would be,
therefore, drawn from the fact of a Gottorp reigning on the Neva and
the Moskva, were it not a fact that the Russian peasant had some
reason to regard his prince as being not less foreign in spirit than
he was in blood. The two princes who are best known to him--Ivan the
Terrible and Peter the Great--announced, in season and out of season,
that they were not Russ. "Take care of the weight," said Ivan to an
English artist, giving him some bars of gold to be worked into plate,
"for the Russians are all thieves." The artist smiled. "Why are you
laughing?" asked the Tsar. "I was thinking that, when you called the
Russians thieves, your Majesty forgot that you were Russ yourself."
"Pooh!" replied the Tsar, "I am a German, not a Russ." Peter was loud
in his scorn of every thing Muscovite. He spoke the German tongue; he
wore the German garb. He shaved his beard and trimmed his hair in the
German style. He built a German city, which he made his capital and
his home, and he called that city by a German name. He loved to smoke
his German pipe, and to quicken his brain with German beer. To him the
new empire which he meant to found was a German empire, with ports
like Hamburg, cities like Frankfort and Berlin; and he thought little
more of his faithful Russ than as a horde of savages whom it had
become his duty to improve into the likeness of Dutch and German
boors.
To the imperial mind, itself foreign, the stranger has always been a
type of order, peace, and progress; while the native has been a type
of waste, disorder, and stagnation. Hence favors without end have been
heaped on Germans by the reigning house, while Russians have been left
to feel the presence of their Government chiefly in the tax-collector
and the sergeant of police. This difference has become a subject for
proverbs and jokes. When the Emperor asked a man who had done him
service how he would like to be remembered in return, he said: "If
your Majesty will only make me a German, every thing else will come in
time."
Ministers, ambassadors, chamberlains, have almost all been German; and
when a Russian has been employed in a great command, it has been
rather in war than in the more delicate affairs of state. The German,
as a rule, is better taught and trained than the Russian; knowing arts
and sciences, to which the Russian is supposed to be a stranger, now
and forever, as if learning were a thing beyond his reach. Peter made
a law by which certain arts and crafts were to remain forever in
German hands. A Russian could not be a druggist, lest he should poison
his neighbor; nor a chimney-sweep, lest he should set his shed on
fire.
Such laws have been repealed by edicts; yet many remain in force, in
virtue of a wider power than that of minister and prince. No Russian
would take his dose of salts, his camomile pill, from the hands of his
brother Russ. He has no confidence in native skill and care. A Russ
may be a good physician, being quick, alert, and sympathetic; yet no
amount of training seems to fit him for the delicate office of mixing
drugs. He likes to lash out, and can not curb his fury to the minute
accuracy of an eye-glass and a pair of scales. A few grains, more or
less, in a potion are to him nothing at all. In Moscow, where the
Panslavonic hope is strong, I heard of more than one case in which the
desire to deal at a native shop had sent the patriot to an untimely
grave.
"You can not teach a Russian girl," said a lady, who was speaking to
me about her servants. "That girl, now, is a good sort of creature in
her way; she never tires of work, never utters a complaint; she goes
to mass on Saints'-days and Sundays; and she would rather die of
hunger than taste eggs and milk in Lent. But I can not persuade her to
wash a sheet, to sweep a room, and to rock a cradle in my English way.
If I show her how to do it, she says, with a pensive look, that her
people do things thus and thus; and if I insist on having my own way
in my own house, she will submit to force under a sort of protest, and
will then run home to tell her parents and her pope that her English
lady is possessed by an evil spirit."
The strangers who hold so many offices of trust in the country, and
who form its intellectual aristocracy, are not considered in Berlin as
of pure Germanic stock. They come from the Baltic provinces--from
Livonia and Lithuania; but they trace their houses, not to the Letts
and Wends of those regions, but to the old Teutonic knights. There can
be no mistake about their energy and power.
Long before the days of Peter the Great they had a footing in the
land; under Peter they became its masters; and ever since his reign
they have been striving to subdue and civilize the people as their
ancestors in Ost and West Preussen civilized the ancient Letts and
Finns.
No love is lost between these strangers and natives, masters and men.
The two races have nothing in common; neither blood, nor speech, nor
faith. They differ like West and East. A German cuts his hair short,
and trims his beard and mustache. He wears a hat and shoes, and wraps
his limbs in soft, warm cloth. He strips himself at night, and prefers
to sleep in a bed to frying his body on a stove. He washes himself
once a day. He never drinks whisky, and he loves sour-krout. A German
believes in science, a Russian believes in fate. One looks for his
guide to experience, while the other is turning to his invisible
powers. If a German child falls sick, his father sends for a doctor;
if a Russian child falls sick, his father kneels to his saint.
In the North country, where wolves abound, a foreigner brings in his
lambs at night; but the native says, a lamb is either born to be
devoured by wolves or not, and any attempt to cross his fate is flying
in the face of heaven. A German is a man of ideas and methods. He
believes in details. From his wide experience of the world he knows
that one man can make carts, while a second can write poems, and a
third can drill troops. He loves to see things in order, and his
business going on with the smoothness of a machine. He rises early,
and goes to bed late. With a pipe in his mouth, a glass of beer at his
side, a pair of spectacles on his nose, he can toil for sixteen hours
a day, nor fancy that the labor is beyond his strength. He seldom
faints at his desk, and he never forgets the respect which may be due
to his chief. In offices of trust he is the soul of probity and
intelligence. It is a rare thing, even in Russia, for a German to be
bought with money; and his own strict dealing makes him hard with the
wretch whom he has reason to suspect of yielding to a bribe. In the
higher reaches cf character he is still more of a puzzle to his men.
With all his love of order and routine, he is a dreamer and an
idealist; and on the moral side of his nature he is capable of a
tenderness, a chivalry, an enthusiasm, of which the Russian finds no
traces in himself.
A Russ, on the other side, is a man of facts and of illusions; but his
facts are in the region of his ideas, while his illusions rest in the
region of his habits. It has been said, in irony, of course, that a
Russian never dreams--except when he is wide awake!
Let us go into a Russian work-shop and a German work-shop; two
flax-mills, say, at one of the great river towns.
In the first we find the master and his men of one race, with habits
of life and thought essentially the same. They dine at the same table,
eat the same kind of food. They wear the same long hair and beards,
and dress in the same caftan and boots; they play the same games of
draughts and whist; they drink the same whisky and quass; they kneel
at the same village shrine; they kiss the same cross; and they confess
their sins to a common priest. If one gets tipsy on Sunday night, the
other is likely to have a fellow-feeling for his fault. If the master
strikes the man, it is an affair between the two. The man either bears
the blow with patience or returns it with the nearest cudgel. Of this
family quarrel the magistrate never hears.
In the second we find a more perfect industrial order, and a master
with a shaven chin. This master, though he may be kind and just, is
foreign in custom and severe in drill. To him his craft is first and
his workmen next. He insists on regular hours, on work that knows no
pause. He keeps the men to their tasks; allows no Monday loss on
account of Sunday drink; and sets his face against the singing of
those brigand songs in which the Russian delights to spend his time.
If his men are absent, he stops their wages--not wishing them to make
up by night for what they waste by day. In case of need, he hauls them
up before the nearest judge.
The races stand apart. A hundred German colonies exist on Russian
soil; old colonies, new colonies, farming colonies, religious
colonies. Every thing about these foreign villages is clean and
bright. The roads are well kept, the cabins well built, the gardens
well trimmed. The carts are better made, the teams are better groomed,
the harvests are better housed than among the natives; yet no
perceptible influence flows from the German colony into the Russian
commune; and a hamlet lying a league from such a settlement as Strelna
or Sarepta is not unlikely to be worse for the example of its smiling
face.
The natives see their master in an odious light. They look on his
clean face as that of a girl, and express the utmost contempt for his
pipe of tobacco, his pair of spectacles, and his pot of beer. Whisky,
they say, is the drink for men. Worse than all else, they regard him
as a heretic, to whom Heaven may have given (as Arabs say) the power
of the stick, but who is not the less disowned by the Church and cast
out from God.