are similar. But the pressing needs of Portugal are a competent
administration, public order and social discipline, which Germany
possesses to a remarkable degree, and admiration of these has laid
Portuguese Conservatives open to the charge of being pro-German.
Many of them judge from experience that the desiderata I refer to
cannot be secured in a democracy, while a few of them have gone so
far as to desire a German triumph, because they foolishly thought
that the Kaiser would restore the monarchy. None of them, I
think, sympathize with German methods; but they have suffered from
a century of revolutions, dating from 1820, and attribute these
disasters to the anti-Christian ideas of the French Revolution. In
America that great movement had beneficent results, as I understand,
which only shows that one man's drink is another's poison.
Divergent ideals and other considerations led Portuguese Conservatives
to throw their influence into the scale in favor of neutrality,
but now that their country is at war they have accepted the fact
and can be trusted to do their duty. At the front political and
other differences are forgotten and the soldiers, whatever their
creed, are honoring the warlike traditions of their race and reminding
us of the days when Wellington spoke of Portuguese troops as the
"fighting-cocks" of his army.
By organizing with great efforts and sending a properly trained
and equipped expeditionary force to France, the Government of the
Republic has deserved well of the country and the Allies, and I
believe that it has unconsciously been the agent of Divine Providence.
The men, when they return will bring with them a firmer religious
faith, the foundation of national well-being, and a higher standard
of conduct than prevails here at present; they may well prove the
regenerators of a land which all who know it learn to love, a land,
the past achievements of whose sons in the cause of Christianity and
civilization are inscribed on the ample page of history. Portugal
which produced so many saints and heroes, which founded the sea
road to India and discovered and colonized Brazil, cannot be allowed
longer to vegetate, for this in the case of a country means to die.
[signed] Edgar Prestage
Roumania
An Interpretation
A Serbian politician, conversing with a traveler from Western Europe,
mentioned the words "a nice national balance;" and when the other,
bored to death with the everlasting wrangle of the turbulent
Balkans, tried to lead the conversation to Shakespeare and the
Musical Glasses, away from Macedonia and Albania and "komitadjis"
and Kotzo-Vlachs, the Serbian remarked with a laugh that the nice
national balance of which he was speaking was not political, but
economic and social.
"You see," he said, "we Serbians are born peasants, born agriculturists,
men of the glebe and the plow. The Roumanian, on the other hand,
is a born financier. Gold comes to his hand like fish to bait.
He comes to Serbia to make money--and he makes it."
"But," said the Western European, "isn't that rather hard on the
Serbian?"
"No! Not a bit! For it is the young Serbian who marries the
Roumanian's daughter, and the young Serbian girl who marries the
Roumanian's son. Thus the Serbian money, earned by the Roumanian,
is still kept in the country. You know," he added musingly, "the
Roumanians are a singularly handsome, a singularly engaging people.
I myself married a Roumanian."
"A rich Roumanian's daughter, I suppose?"
"Heavens, no! A poor girl."
And he added with superb lack of logic:
"Who wouldn't marry a Roumanian--be she rich--OR poor!"
WHO WOULDN'T MARRY A ROUMANIAN?
The secret of the Balkans is contained in that simple rhetoric
question.
For, clear away from the days when the Slavs made their first
appearance in Southern Europe and, crossing the Danube, came to
settle on the great, green, rolling plain between the river and
the jagged frowning Balkan Mountains, the proceeded southwards and
formed colonies among the Thraco-Illyrians, the Roumanians, and
the Greeks, to the days of Michael the Brave who drove the Turks
to the spiked gates of Adrianople and freed half the peninsula for
a span of years; from the days when gallant King Mirtsched went
down to glorious defeat amongst the Osmanli yataghans to the final
day when the Russian Slav liberated the Roumanian Latin from the
Turkish yoke, the Roumanian has held high the torch of civilization
and culture.
Latin civilization!
Latin culture!
Latin ideals!
Straight through, he has been the Western leaven in an Eastern
land.
Geographically, the Fates were unkind to him.
For he stood in the path of the most gigantic racial movements
of the world. His land was the scene of savage racial struggles.
His rivers ran red with the blood of Hun and Slav, of Greek and
Albanian, of Osmanli and Seljuk. His fields and pastures became
the dumping-ground of residual shreds of a dozen and one nations
surviving from great defeats or Pyrrhic victories and nursing
irreconcilable mutual racial hatreds.
But the old Latin spirit proved stronger than Fate, stronger than
numbers, stronger than brute force. It proved strong enough to
assimilate the foreign barbarians, instead of becoming assimilated
by them. It was strong enough to wipe out every trace of Asian and
Slavic taint. It was strong enough to keep intact the Latin idea
against the steely shock of Asian hordes, the immense, crushing
weight of Slave fatalism, the subtleties of Greek influence.
The Roumanian is a Roman.
His cultural ideal was, and is, of the West, of Rome of France--AND
of Himself; and he has kept it inviolate through military and
political disaster, through slavery itself.
Roumania has remained a window of Europe looking toward Asia as
surely and as steadily as Petrograd was a window of Asia looking
toward Europe.
The Roumanian is proud of his Latin descent; and he shows his ancestry
not only in his literature, his art, and his every day life, but
also, perhaps chiefly, in his government which is practically a
safe and sane oligarchy, modeled on that of ancient Florence, and,
be it said, fully as successful as that of the Florentine Republic.
Latin, too, is his diplomacy. It is clean--AND clever. It is the
big stick held in a velvet glove. It is supremely able. He seeks
a great advantage with a modest air, in contrast to the Greek who
seeks a modest advantage with a grandiloquent air.
He seeks no "réclame," but goes ahead serenely, unfalteringly,
sure in his knowledge that he is the torch-bearer of ancient Rome
in the savage Balkans.
[signed] Achmed Abdullah
The Soul of Russia
There is a strange saying in Russia that no matter what happens to
a man, good results to him thereby. No matter what hair-breadth
escapes he has, what calamities he faces, what hardships he undergoes,
he emerges more powerful, more experienced from the ordeal. Danger
and privation are more beneficial in the long run than peace and
joy. A nation of some fifty different races gradually melting into
one, a country covering a territory of one-sixth of the surface
of the earth and a population of 185,000,000, the Russians have
remained to the outside world the apaches of Europe, wild tribes
of the steppes. In the imagination of an average American or
Englishman, Russia was something Asiatic, something connected with
the barbaric East, a country beyond the horizon. It was considered
as lacking in culture and civilization, and as a menace to the
West. "Nichevo, sudiba!"--(It doesn't matter, everything is fate)
replies a Russian, crossing himself. The whole psychology of the
Slavic race is crystallized in these two impressionistic words.
What John Ruskin said in his famous historic essay applies to
Russia: "I found that all the great nations learned their truth of
word and strength of thought in war." Every great Russian reform
has taken place suddenly as a consequence of some nation-wide calamity.
The Tartar invasion united Russia into one powerful nation; the
Crimean War abolished the feudal system; the Russo-Turkish War
gave the judicial reforms and abolished capital punishment; the
Russo-Japanese War gave the preliminary form of Constitutional
government in the Duma; the present war is opening the soul of Russia
to the world by giving an absolute democratic form of government
to the united Slavic race. The present war will reveal that Russia
the known has been the very opposite extreme of Russia the unknown.
The outside world is wondering how the Russian character will fit
in with the aspirations of democracy. They cannot reconcile the
Russia of pogroms and Serbia with the Russia of wonderful municipal
theaters, great artists, writers, musicians and lovers of humanity.
The world has known the tyrants like Plehve, Trepoff, Orloff and
Stolypin, or others like Rasputin, Protopopoff and forgets that
Russia has also produced geniuses like Dostoyewsky, Turgenieff,
Tchaikowsky, Tolstoy, Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Mendeleyeff
and Metchnikoff. The world has looked at Russia as a land of
uncultivated steppes, of frozen ground, hungry bears and desperate
Cossacks, and forgets that in actuality this is the Russia of
the past very extreme surface and next to it is a Russia of great
civilization and the highest art, unknown yet to the West generally.
One of the strangest peculiarities of Russian life is that you
will find the greatest contrasts everywhere. Here you will see the
most luxurious castles, cathedrals, convents, villas and estates;
there you will find the most desolate huts of the moujiks and lonely
hermit caves in the wilds of Siberia. Here you will meet the most
selfish chinovnik, the most fanatic desperado or reckless bureaucrat;
there you face the noblest men and women, supermen, physically
and mentally. You will find that all Russian life is full of such
mental and physical contrasts.
This is the dualism that confronts like a sphinx the foreigners.
In the same way you will find that the Russian homes are full of
contrasting colors, bright red and yellow, white and blue. The
Russian music is the most dramatic phonetic art ever created; it
reaches the deepest sorrow and the gayest hilarity and joy. Dreamy,
romantic, imaginary, simple, hospitable and childlike as an average
moujik, is the soul of the people. Nowhere is there a hint of
those qualities which are thrown up as dark shadows on the canvas
of his horizon. While with one hand Russia has been conquering the
world, with the other she has been creating the most magnificent
masterpieces of humanity. In the same generation she produces a
Plehve and a Tolstoy, both in a way, true to national type.
In the popular American imagination, which invariably seizes upon
a single point, three things stand out as representative of Russia:
the moujiks, the Cossacks and the Siberian penal system. The vast
unknown spaces between these three have been filled in with the
dark colors of poverty and oppression, so that a Russian is looked
upon as an outcast of evolution, an exile of the ages.
the Russia of the dark powers is past; thus soon will pass the
Russian chinovnik, the Russian spy and the Russian gloom, who have
been a shadow of the Slavic race. From now all the world will
listen to the majestic masterpieces of the Russian composers, see
the infinite beauty of the Russian life and feel the greatness
of the Russian soul. Not only has Russia her peculiar racial
civilization, her unique art and literature, and national traditions,
but she has riches of which the outside world knows little, riches
that are still buried. The Russian stage, art galleries, archives,
monastery treasuries and romantic traits of life remain still a
sealed book to the outsiders. Take for instance, Russian music, the
operas of Rimsky-Korsakoff, the plays of Ostrowsky and the symphonies
of Reinhold Gliere or Spendiarov and you will have eloquent chapters
of a modern living Bible. No music of another country is such a
true mirror of a nation's racial character, life, passion, blood,
struggle, despair and agony, as the Russian. One can almost see
in its turbulent-lugubrious or buoyant-hilarious chords the rich
colors of the Byzantine style, the half Oriental atmosphere that
surrounds everything with a romantic halo.
The fundamental purpose of the pathfinders of Russian art, music,
literature and poetry was to create beauties that emanated, not
from a certain class or school, but directly from the souls of the
people. Their ideal was to create life from life. Though profound
melancholy seems to be the dominant note in Russian music and art,
yet along with the dramatic gloom go also reckless hilarity and
boisterous humor, which often whirl one off one's feet. This is
explained by the fact that the average Russian is extremely emotional
and consequently dramatic in his artistic expressions. Late Leo
Tolstoy said to me on one occasion: "In our folksong and folk
art is evidently yearning without end, without hope, also power
invisible, the fateful stamp of destiny, and the fate in preordination,
one of the fundamental principles of our race, which explains much
that in Russian life seems incomprehensible for the foreigners."
Thus the Russian art and soul in their very foundations are already
democratic, simple, direct and true to the ethnographic traits of
the race. In the same way you will find the Russian home life,
the peasant communities, the zemstvoe institutions, offsprings of
an extremely democratic tendency, perhaps far more than any such
institution of the West. Instead of the rich or noblemen absorbing
the land of the peasants, we find in Russia the peasant commune
succeeding tot he property of the baron. An average Russian
peasant is by far more democratic and educated, irrespective of
his illiteracy than an average farmer of the New World. He has
the culture of the ages in his traditions, religion and national
folk-arts. Russia has more than a thousand municipal theaters,
more than a hundred grand operas, more than a hundred colleges and
universities or musical conservatories. Russia has a well-organized
system of cooperative banks and stores and a marvelous artelsystem of
the working professional classes which in its democratic principles
surpasses by far the labor union systems of the West. Herr von
Bruggen, the eminent German historian writes of the Russian tendency
as follows: "Wherever the Russian finds a native population in
a low state of civilization, he knows how to settle down with it
without driving it out or crushing it; he is hailed by the natives
as the bringer of order, as a civilizing power."
I have always preached and continue to do so in the future, that
Russia and the United States should join hands, know and love each
other, the sooner the better. Russia needs the active spirit,
the practical grasp of the things, which the people of the United
States possess. Nothing will help and inspire an average Russian
more than the sincere democratic hand of an American. A dose
of American optimism and active spirit is the best toxin for free
Russia. On the other hand, the American needs just as much Russian
emotionalism, aesthetic culture and mystic romanticism, as he can
give of his racial qualities.
The old system having gone, Russia is free to open her national,
spiritual and physical treasures. For some time to come neither
Germany nor other European countries, will be able to go to Russia,
for even if the war does not last long, its havoc will take years
to repair. Endless readjustments will have to take place in each
country affected by the war. Russia, being more an agricultural,
intellectual-aristocratical country, will fell least of all
the after effects of the past horrors, therefore has the greatest
potentialities. There is not only a great work, adventure
and romance that waits an American pioneer in Russia, but a great
mission which will ultimately benefit both nations. It should be
understood that the Russian democracy will not be based upon the
economic-industrial, but aesthetic-intellectual principles of life.
It is not the money, the financial power that will play the dominant
role in free Russia, but the ideal, the dramatic, the romantic
or mystic tendency. Money will never have that meaning in Russia
which it has in the West. It will be the individual, the emotional,
the great symbol of the mystic beyond, that will speak from future
democratic Russia only in a different and more dynamic form, as it
has been speaking in the past.
As Lincoln is the living voice of the American people, thus Tolstoy
is and remains the glorified Russian peasant uttering his heart to
the world. The voice of this man alone is sufficient to tell the
outside world that the Russian democracy is a creation not of form
and economics but of spirit and aesthetics.
[signed]Ivan Narodny
Author of "Echoes of Myself," "The Dance," "The Art of Music," X
Volume, etc.
The American Bride
Petka had been for years a village tailor but he had never been
able to save enough money to open a grocery-store. He hated his
profession and hated to think that he could never get anything higher
in the social rank of the place than what he was. While the name
of a tailor sounded to him so cheap, that of a merchant flattered
his ambition immensely. But there was no chance to earn the five
hundred rubles, which, he thought, was necessary to change the
profession.
"If I marry a poor peasant girl like Tina or Vera, I'll never get
anywhere," soliloquized Petka and made plans for his future.
Petka knew a girl with two hundred ruble-dowry, but she was awfully
homely and deaf; and he knew a widow with three hundred rubles, but
she was twenty years older than himself. It was a critical situation.
One day Petka heard that the daughter of an old peddler had a
dowry of five hundred rubles, exactly the amount he needed. After
careful planning of the undertaking he hired a horse and drove
to the lonely cottage of the rag peddler to whom he explained as
clearly as he could, the purpose of his visit.
"My Liz ain't at home," the old man replied. "She is in that
distant country called America. Good Lord, Liza is a lady of some
distinction. If you should see her on the street you would never
take her for my daughter. She wears patent-leather shoes, kid-gloves,
corsets and such finery. Why, I suppose she has a proposal for
every finger, if not more. She is some girl, I tell you."
Petka listened with throbbing heart to the thrilling story of the
old man, scratched his head and said:
"I suppose that she is employed in some high class establishment
or something like that?"
"Of course, she is," grunted the peddler proudly. "She might be
employed or she might not. She has written to me that she is a
lady all right."
"What is her special occupation?"
"She is employed as the waitress in a lunch-room on the so called
Second Avenue corner at New York. And her salary reaches often
thirty dollars a month, which represents a value in our money of
something over sixty rubles. Now that is not a joke. She has all
the food and lodging free. Why, it's a real gold-mine."
"Has she saved already much?"
"She has five hundred dollars in the savings bank, and she has all
the hats and shoes, and gloves and such stuff that would make our
women faint. So you see she is the real thing."
The happy father pulled the daughter's letter from the bottom of
his bed and reached it over to the visitor. Petka read and reread
the letter with breathless curiosity. In the letter which was
also a small snap-shot picture of the girl. Petka looked at the
picture and did not know what to say. To judge from her photograph,
she was a frail spinster, with high cheekbones, a long neck and a
nose like a frozen potato. But the trimming of her hair, her city
hat with flowers, and her whole American bearing made her interesting
enough to the ambitious tailor. For a long time he was gazing at
the picture and thinking.
"Do you think that Liza would marry a man like me? I am a well
known tailor. But I have now a chance to become a merchant in our
village. I need some money to make up the difference, and why not
try the luck? Liza might be a well known waitress in New York,
but to be a merchant's wife is a different thing. Don't you think
she might consider my proposal seriously?"
The old peddler puffed at his pipe, walked to the window and back
as if measuring the matter most seriously.
"It all depends--you know Liza is a queer girl--it all depends on
how you strike her with a strong letter. You could not go to New
York and make the proposal personally. It has to be done by mail.
It all depends how well the letter is written, how everything is
explained and how the idea of being a merchant's wife strikes her.
She is a queer girl, like all the American women are."
"Can your Liza read and write letters?"
"Of course, she can. Liza is a lady of some standing. She can
write and read like our priest. She is a highly educated girl."
"So you think a strong letter will fix her up?"
"Exactly. And tell her everything you plan to do."
Petka took Liza's address, drank a glass of vodka to the success
of the plan and left the old peddler still harping on his daughter.
All the way home and many days afterwards Petka could think of nothing
else. It seemed to him the greatest opportunity in the world to
marry a girl from America. But now and then he got skeptical of
his ability to get such a prize. However, he decided to try. He
admitted that the whole success lay in the shaping of a strong and
convincing letter and sending it to her properly. Petka knew how
to write letters, but the question was would his style be impressive
enough to influence a girl in America to come to Russia and marry
a man whom she had never seen? However, Petka knew Platon, the
village saloon-keeper, as the most gifted man for that purpose.
But in a case like this he hated to take anybody into his confidence.
After arriving home Petka began to practice, writing a love letter
every day. But nothing came of it. One letter was too mild, the
other too extravagant. Finally he gave it up, and whispered his
secret to the inn-keeper, saying:
"Now, old man, do me the great favor and I'll fix you up when I get
her dowry. I want the letter to be strong and tender at the same
time."
The inn-keeper consented. But Petka had to tell all the details
and the specifications. Evan Platon admitted that it required some
skill to write the letter. When he had thought the matter over
carefully, made some notes and discussed the subject with Petka
from every angle, he took a long sheet of paper, glued a rose in
the corner and wrote as follows:
"Highly respected Mademoiselle Liza:--You have never been in our
village, but it is a peach. I am the cream of the place. I have
here all the girls I need. I have a house and my business. But
the point is I want to open a store and need a wife with experience.
We have all the money. But I need some capital to begin. As you
have all that and besides, I have fallen in love with you, I lay
the offer before your tender feet. Your beautiful image has haunted
me day and night, and your wonderful eyes follow me in my dreams,
oh, you lovely rose! If you are ready to marry a merchant like
myself, do not waste any time, but come over and let's have a marriage
ceremony as the world has never seen here. However, before you do
come, send me an early reply with a rosy yes. Most affectionately
and respectfully, Petka Petroff."
"It's bully, it's superb," praised the tailor. "But it lacks the
tender touch. It lacks that style which the city women like."
"I put in the punch, but you can add a love poem from some school-book
if you like," protested the inn-keeper. "The city girls are funny
creatures. Sometimes they like the finger, other times the fist.
Who knows the taste of your Liza! The waitresses of big cities
are usually broad-minded and highly educated."
After the poem was added and another rose glued on the corner of
the letter, it was mailed, registered, with a note "highly urgent,"
and Petka breathed freely, like one who had survived a great ordeal.