During the first years of the reign of Alexander I., that is, when the
lessons of Laharpe[80] were still fresh in his memory and the lesson
given to all the monarchs in Paris and to the Russian autocrats in
particular in the Mihailovsky Palace[81] had not been forgotten, the
Emperor Alexander I. used to have literary soirées, and some of the
persons of the Tsar’s circle, well known as capable of reading and
writing, used to be invited to them.
At one of these evenings there was a reading which lasted a long time;
they read aloud a new tragedy of Schiller’s.
The reader finished and stopped.
The Tsar sat silent with downcast eyes. Perhaps he was thinking of his
own fate, which had so closely resembled the fate of Don Carlos, perhaps
the fate of his Philip. A complete silence lasted for some minutes. The
first to break it was Prince Alexandr Nikolayevitch Golitsyn; bending
down to the ear of Count Victor Pavlovitch Kotchubey, he said to him in
an under-tone, but so that every one could hear it: ‘We have our Marquis
Posa!’ Kotchubey smiled and nodded. The eyes of all the company turned to
a man of thirty who was sitting a little way off.
The Tsar started, looked at the circle about him, cast a distrustful,
searching glance upon the man who had become the object of general
attention, frowned, stood up, gloomy and displeased, took leave of his
guests and went out.
Prince Alexandr Nikolayevitch, the future Minister of Education and
Religion, the inquisitor and the freemason, the protector of Magnitsky
and Runitch, the President of the Bible Society and the Post Office
Department, the friend of the Emperor Alexander, who mercilessly
sacrificed him to Araktcheyev, the friend of the Emperor Nicholas, who
never gave him any commission of importance, smiled; he was satisfied.
Knowing Alexander’s suspicious character, he was certain that his words
had gone home—and he was not mistaken. Why he had injured the man he
could not have said: that lay hidden in his courtier’s nature; it is
never amiss to thrust aside a superfluous person.
There is no doubt that, at that moment, of all the company present only
two had a sincere and ardent desire for the good of Russia—the Tsar and
V. N. Karazin, who had been called the Marquis Posa.
These two personages—one ‘crowned and exalted’ in the Uspensky Cathedral
by the Metropolitan Platon, the man who had crushed Napoleon and was
himself crushed under the burden of glory and of helpless, hopeless
autocracy; and the other, the inexhaustible worker for the common weal
who undertook everything with extraordinary energy, pushing at every door
and meeting everywhere opposition, hindrances, and the impossibility
of doing anything real in those surroundings—these two personages cast
two melancholy gleams of light on the frozen wastes of Russia, in which
energy and character, talents and powers, were sunk, and are still sunk,
lost, unrecorded, in the swampy bogs, like the piles on which Petersburg
is built.
The character of the Emperor Alexander I. has never been fully explained.
Our historians could not write of him, foreigners neither could nor
can understand his tragic significance. This is not due either to his
rank as Tsar or to his personal misfortunes; on the contrary, he was
exceptionally fortunate as a Tsar, fortunate even after his death. No
ruler could stand out in greater relief than he does. To succeed Paul
was enough, apart from being succeeded by Nicholas. Between the tiger of
Gatchina butchered like a wild beast and the boa-constrictor buttoned up
to the chin who stifled Russia for thirty years, the stooping figure of
the Emperor Alexander is strikingly humane and mild, now lighted up by
the fire of Moscow, now by the illumination of Paris, now restraining
the princely German thieves, now checking the wild vengeance of the
conquerors when they had burst into their enemies’ capital.
And this figure of an Agamemnon, reconciling Europe, at the height of its
grandeur grows dimmer, visibly fades, and is obliterated behind the awful
shadow of Araktcheyev. It is lost in solitude on the shores of the Black
Sea, giving the hand of belated reconciliation to the woman whose whole
life, veiled in the Imperial purple, had been one humiliation, and who,
kneeling a lonely figure before the dying man, closed his eyes.[82]
Every inch[83] a heart-rending tragedy.
No need to seek the solution in the death of Paul; that may have added
another thread of gloom to his life, but the background is broader,
wider, deeper. Some implacable fatal element hovers over it and enfolds
it far and wide. In the surroundings there is a feeling of an ominous
breath, the presence of crime—not crime committed, not past, but crime
persisting and inevitable; it is in the blood, the walls are saturated
with it. Before birth, the blood has been poisoned in the veins. The air
which people breathe here is full of corruption; every one who steps into
it, whether he will or no, is sucked into a gulf of ineptitude, ruin,
sin. The path to every evil is wide open. Good is impossible. Woe to the
man who stops and thinks, who asks himself what he is doing, what people
are doing about him: he will go mad; woe to the man who within these
walls suffers a human feeling to enter his heart: he will be broken in
the struggle.
Well, the Emperor Alexander I. was among the Russian crowned heads the
first after Peter who did so stop and think. That is why he is the only
one of all the Romanovs who has been punished, punished humanly, by inner
struggle, punished before he was guilty, though he reached that guilt in
the end.
Compare his fate with the fate of Peter III., of Paul, of Nicholas, if
you like, and you will understand why that man, called the blessed, who
died in his bed and was never conquered, was a far more tragic figure
than all his predecessors. What is there tragic in the drunken idiot[84]
being killed and robbed by a dissolute woman? That is happening all the
time in the grimy houses of the dark London by-streets. Or what is there
tragic in the fact that a man defending himself from a madman[85] brought
a snuff-box down on the latter’s head and others finished him off? Those
were not tragic catastrophes, but acts of the criminal court and houses
of correction.
The tragic element is not given by pain nor bruises nor blows, but by
those spiritual conflicts that are independent of the will and run
counter to the reason, with which a man struggles but which he can never
overcome; on the contrary, he almost always yields to them, crushed
against the granite rocks of apparently insoluble contradictions. To
be shattered in that way needs a certain degree of humane culture,
needs a special grace of a sort. There are natures so commonplace,
so conventional, so narrow and mediocre, that their happiness and
unhappiness is trivial, or at any rate not interesting. The cold eyes,
the deadly prose, of the drill and discipline of Nicholas’ despotism,
his limited outlook continually fixed upon trifles and details, his
subaltern’s precision and partiality for straight lines, for geometrical
figures, exclude everything poetical. It is vain to try to make something
majestically gloomy out of his latter days. The man never stopped at
anything, never doubted of anything; he might hesitate, but he could not
repent; he had no ideals, he knew that he reigned by the will of God,
that the post of Emperor was a military officer’s, and he was completely
satisfied with himself. He did not suspect that the moral life of the
State was being degraded by him, that, shut in and robbed right and left,
he was leaving Russia on the edge of the abyss. When he did discover this
last fact, he saw with vexation that he was not equal to coping with his
first failure, and at once died of impotent fury. That was a lesson, an
example, a warning, but not a tragedy. If that is not so, one may make
a tragic type not only of every robber who is punished, but even of the
splenetic coward, Araktcheyev,[86] dying at Gruzino, hated and abandoned
by all, beside the foul grave soaked with the blood of a whole household
of servants.
The Emperor Alexander was very different. The Empress Catherine, who
concentrated upon him all the dynastic interest and the motherly feeling
she had never had for her own son, gave him a very humane education and,
as is common with old sinners, brought him up in ignorance of what was
going on around him. Alexander was a dreamer, a youth of romantic ideas,
with the vague philanthropy which was then in fashion, and which was a
sort of Aurora Borealis or cold glimmering reflection of that other,
warmer philanthropy preached in those days in Paris. But for all that,
his education ended early, and with Laharpe’s teaching in his head he
appears on the royal stage, surrounded by the grey-headed, putrefying
corruption of the last years of the reign of Catherine.
‘I am greatly dissatisfied with my position,’ he writes as Grand Duke to
Kotchubey on May 18, 1796, that is, when he was eighteen. ‘I am extremely
glad that the subject has come up of itself, or I should have found it
very hard to begin upon it. Yes, dear friend, I repeat: my position does
not satisfy me at all. It is too conspicuous for my character, which
finds pleasure exclusively in quietness and tranquillity. Court life is
not made for me. I suffer every time I have to appear on the stage of the
Court, and I am out of humour at the sight of the mean things done by
others at every step for the sake of gaining external distinctions, in my
eyes not worth a farthing. I feel unhappy in the company of such people,
whom I should not care to have as lackeys; and yet here they fill the
highest posts, as for instance, Z., P., B., both the S. M., and numbers
of others not worth mentioning, who are haughty with their inferiors
but cringe before those they are afraid of. In short, my dear friend, I
am conscious that I was not born for the high position which I endure
now, and still less for that destined for me in the future, which I have
inwardly vowed to renounce in one way or another.
‘This, dear friend, is a grave secret which I have long meant to tell
you. I think it unnecessary to beg you not to speak of it to any one, for
you will understand of yourself how dearly I might have to pay for it.
I have asked G. Garrick to burn this letter if he should not succeed in
handing it to you in person, and not to give it to any one else to pass
on to you.
‘I have considered the subject from every point of view. I must tell you
that the first idea of it had arisen in my mind even before I came to
know you, and that I was not long in reaching my present decision.
‘The disorder prevailing in our affairs is incredible; there is robbery
on every side, all departments are badly governed; order seems to have
been banished from everywhere—and in spite of that, all the energies of
the Empire are devoted to nothing but widening its frontiers. When that
is the position of things, it is scarcely possible for one man to govern
the State, even less so to reform the deeply rooted abuses existing in
it.... The task is beyond the powers not only of a man endowed like me
with ordinary abilities, but even of a genius, and I have always clung
to the principle that it is better not to undertake a task at all than
to perform it badly. It is in accordance with that principle that I have
taken the resolution I have mentioned to you above. My plan is, after
renouncing this difficult career (I cannot yet with certainty fix the
date of this renunciation), to settle with my wife on the banks of the
Rhine, where I shall live quietly as a private man, finding my happiness
in the society of my friends and in the study of nature.
‘You are at liberty to laugh at me and say that this design is
impracticable; but wait till it has been carried out and then pronounce
judgment. I know that you will blame me, but I can do nothing else, for I
make the peace of my conscience my first rule, and it can not be at rest
if I undertake a task beyond my strength. This, my dear friend, is what
I have long wished to tell you. Now when it has all been uttered, there
is nothing left for me, but to assure you that wherever I may be, whether
happy or unhappy, rich or poor, your affection for me will always be one
of my greatest comforts; mine for you, believe me, will end only with my
life.’
Catherine died. Paul dragged the body of Peter III. into the Peter-Paul
Fortress in a hard frost to bury it beside his dead mother, and made
Count A. Orlov[87] and Baryatinsky carry the former Tsar’s crown.
Alexander was moved one step nearer to that pinnacle surrounded by
the clouds of corruption of which he wrote. Everything was already
transformed by one death, everything grew even viler, though in a
different way. It was his lot to regret the courtiers ‘whom he would not
have cared to have for his lackeys.’ The spoilt and sated household of
the old mistress was filled with the army captains and _kammerdieners_
of her successor, who brought the atmosphere of the barracks and
servants’ hall into the palace. In place of the haughty palace robbers
there were thieves who were police spies; in place of the lackeys
there were hangmen. The palace was transformed from a brothel into a
torture-chamber. The orgy of sensuality was followed by an orgy of
ferocity and cruelty.
Overwhelmed with horror, the Tsarevitch stood in alarm and distress at
the foot of the savage throne; powerless to help and unable to get away,
Alexander wandered like Hamlet through the palace-halls, unable to decide
on anything; others decided for him.
With the same alarm and distress, and with a black stain, moreover,
on his conscience, he mounted to the dreadful pinnacle from which the
mutilated corpse of his slain father had just been thrown down. He wanted
the good of Russia and he was trusted. Men gazed on his mild and youthful
features with ardent hope; he too hoped that he would make a paradise of
Russia; he would give her his best years, his utmost strength, the people
should bless him; he would expiate the sin of his share in the bloody
deed, and then, like Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, he would do what he had
written to Kotchubey and retire to his vineyards on the banks of the
Rhine.[88]
Alexander was sincere in these dreams; he believed in them, and not he
alone, all Russia believed in them, that is, the Russia of decent people,
the Russia recognised as human. The _dark_ masses of Russia, the Russia
of the poor, had nothing to do with it. As at all celebrations and
holidays, they were excluded from the general rejoicing, and, indeed,
made no effort to take part in it, remembering their Little Mother, the
Empress, and seeming instinctively to divine that the new reign would
only pay for the blood of every twelfth man among them with the gift of
Araktcheyev’s military settlements.
It was easy to begin a new epoch supported by such love, such faith, such
joy at the death of the miscreant....
‘Now give me a man, O Creator....
Thou hast given me much: a true man
Is all that I ask Thee for now....
I pray for a friend; I am not such
As Thou the All-Knowing. The servants
Thou hast sent me, Thou knowest
Their hearts what they are,
For money alone do they serve me
Truth and faith is all that I ask.’[89]
Ten days had passed after the death of Paul. There was a great reception
in the palace; people with joyous faces, clothed in deep mourning,
came and went, bowing low, repeating slavish phrases. Alexander, shy,
unaccustomed to this job and to playing the part of a god, before whom
every one falls down, upon whom every one rests his hopes, went after the
reception exhausted to his study, and sank into an easy-chair before his
writing-table. On his table in his study, which no one dared to enter,
there lay a thick letter, sealed and addressed to him.
He broke the seal and opened the letter; as he read it, his eyes
filled with tears, his cheeks burned. He put down the letter, and big
tears still rolled down his cheeks. They were seen by Count Pahlen and
Troshtchinsky. ‘Gentlemen,’ the Tsar said to them, ‘some one unknown has
put this letter on my table; there is no signature; you must find out for
me who wrote it.’
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