The Splendid Pageant of the Russian Mass--The Separateness of Russian
Religious Feeling From Modern Thought--Russia Mediaeval and Pagan.
MOSCOW, RUSSIA, _September 21, 1902_.
We have just been leaning over a guard rail of burnished brass,
peering down into the half twilight gloom, beholding ten thousand
Russian men and women bending their swaying bodies, as a wheat field
bends before the wind, crossing themselves in feverish fervor, even
bowing the forehead to the marble floor and kissing it rapturously in
the solemn celebration of the mass.
We drove in a _landau_,--all four of us and our Hungarian
guide,--through the narrow, crowded streets. "Drove," I say! Rather I
should say whirled, behind two mighty black Arab stallions, which no
man might hold, but only guide, and we never slackened our pace until
we dashed up to the great white granite stairway of the vast cathedral
of Saint Savior. Our Russian driver yelled, men and vehicles fled from
our path, and yet we ran over no one, we killed no one! Our furious
horses stopped short on their haunches. Two Russian soldiers now
held them by their heads. We drove like nobles. We must be grandees!
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF ST. SAVIOR, MOSCOW.]
The cathedral of Saint Savior has been nearly a century in building.
Founded in commemoration of the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, it has
been slowly raised by means of the multitudinous contributions of the
Russian people. It is a square cross in outline, as lofty as the
capitol at Washington, and surmounted by five oriental domes, the
central one bigger than the other four, all topped with Greek crosses,
and all covered with plates of solid gold, the burnished glittering
splendor of which dazzle the eyes long miles away. Within, the
interior is tiled with rare marbles of divers colors, while the walls
are decorated with priceless paintings by the most illustrious Russian
artists of the century, done by them at the command of the Czar, with
pillars of malachite and lapis lazuli, green and blue, standing
between the splendid pictures. There are altars of solid silver
covered with rare embroideries of gold and emblazoned with precious
stones. Close by each altar rests an Eikon.
A soldier in gold lace uniform opened our carriage door. He led us up
the long flight of white steps--white in the golden sunlight--and
pushed his way and ours through the bowing, crossing, sweating,
stinking (the Russian really never takes a bath) thousands, who, like
ourselves, sought to enter the precincts of the most magnificent
cathedral of "Holy Russia." We jostled against rich merchants and
their wives clad in splendid furs and silks and adorned with many
jewels; against military officers in long gray coats, high boots and
caps of astrakhan wool or fur; and peasants, in sheepskin coats,
belted at the waist, their legs wrapped in cotton cloth tied with
leathern thongs, their feet bound up in straw. These farmers from the
country are too poor to afford the luxury of socks and shoes. Through
all these the soldier with our _pourboire_ in his hand, forced his
way--not always gently--and led us up a winding flight of one hundred
steps to the series of galleries which run round the immense interior.
Here he again forced back the press of people until we might lean over
the great brass rail and gaze down below! And what a spectacle! There,
were ten thousand, twenty thousand,--I dare not say how many, men and
women; all standing; all bowing; all devoutly responding to the
intoning of the priests! Three hundred men and boys clad in red and
purple and golden vestments were chanting the melancholy music of the
Russian Church! No organ is there allowed, no musical instrument, no
instrument save that which God has made, the human throat! Then, from
the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctuary, comes out the Archbishop
of all the Russias, the Metropolitan of "Holy Moscow," clad in
vestments of gold and of silver, intoning the mystery of the mass!
Other priests stand close behind him, swinging censers of incense, and
also chanting in melancholy mournful harmony with the mighty melody of
the choir. Never have my senses apprehended such opulent, refulgent
splendor, such a pageant of gold and of purple, of jewels and of fine
linen, such clouds of incense, such glorious, mighty music from the
human throat! Such fervor, such frenzy, such exaltation as I now
beheld in the swaying, worshiping multitude! I was beholding the
fervant, fanatical, hysterical religious feeling of the Russian
people, a people mediaeval in their blind superstition, mediaeval in
their per-fervid ardor for their church!
What I am writing of can only be impressions, and yet perhaps the
impressions which I receive in my brief sojourn within the Russian
Empire may more vividly portray that subtle, almost indefinable,
atmosphere which broods over Russia and marks it from all the world,
than I might be able to do if I remained so long within her confines
that I should lose the power.
I have now sojourned in Russia barely seven days, yet I feel as though
I had spent a lifetime in another world than that of America. I hear
no sound which is familiar. I cannot even count in Russian. I see no
street signs which my eyes have before beheld; even the alphabet,
though Greek, is yet enigmatically Russianized. Nor do I find that
English or Danish, French or German is of much avail. In the largest
news emporium or bookstore, in St. Petersburg, upon the Nevsky
Prospekt, the other day, where twenty or thirty clerks were serving
the public, there was no one of them who spoke or even understood
either French, or German, much less English. In the chief bookstore
in Moscow, where a large trade is carried on, nothing is spoken but
Russian. After much search I did find one small bookshop where a clerk
spoke passable French, and another where the Jewish proprietor
understood German. And while it is true that the high Russian officer
who escorted us from St. Petersburg spoke fluently in German and in
French, and while it may also be true that among the bureaucracy, and
perhaps nobility, French is still generally understood, yet it is
equally true that the present tendency in Russia is to Russify
language as well as things, and that foreign tongues are less spoken
and less known to-day than they were thirty or forty years ago. The
Russian is absorbed in himself, he knows little of the outside world
and he cares less. The news of Europe and of America and of all the
earth only comes to him in expurgated driblets through the sieve of
the Censor. The saying that "there are three continents," the
"continent of Europe," the "continent of Russia" and the "continent of
Asia," is no mere jest. One feels it here to be a verity. One feels
that Russia, despite her pretensions to the contrary, is mediaeval,
that she is mentally and morally aloof from all the progress of the
present century, from all the thought of modern peoples, and utterly
remote from all touch with the progressive nations of to-day.
In Scandinavia, the world is abreast of the times, its peoples are
advanced and alert, but the instant you cross the dead-line and enter
Russia, you feel that the world has taken a back-set of five hundred
years, that Russian life is so far behind all modern movement that it
never can catch up.
Even the bigness of St. Petersburg carries with it an impracticability
that is itself mediaeval. St. Petersburg did not grow up because there
was need of a city on that spot. It was created as the deliberate act
of a despot. Peter the Great feared to live longer in Moscow. He had
murdered and tortured too many of its worthy citizens. He had, for one
job, hung eight thousand patriots in the Red Square; he had thrown ten
thousand more into dungeons, there to rot. Daring no longer to live in
Moscow, he founded the new capital, "Petersburg," on the banks of the
Neva, which should become a seaport, be protected from his own
subjects by the ships he himself would build, and house his government
as safe from domestic as from foreign foes. He laid out the city with
streets so wide that it has never been possible to pave them well. He
provided public buildings so huge that it has never been possible to
secure a foundation upon the Neva's miry delta solid enough safely to
hold them up. He drove the nobility into this quagmire city, and drew
the bureaucracy up to its unstable ground. To-day, St. Petersburg is a
city of a million and a half of inhabitants, but if the Russian Czars
should choose to reconstitute Moscow their permanent capital, St.
Petersburg would again become a wilderness, a waste of marshy
islands, desolate and bare. It is the hot-house plant of autocracy.
There is no natural reason for it to exist.
Everywhere in Russia one feels the certain so childish straining after
effect which is mediaeval and barbaric. In the palace of the Kremlin
lies the disabled and gigantic cannon which Catherine II commanded to
be cast, and which has never fired a shot for the reason that it was
so big they could never find a gunner to serve and handle it. Close
beside it lies the enormous bell, the "Czar Kolokol"--King of
Bells--cast by command of a Czar, so huge that it could never be
lifted up into a belfry and which, falling to the ground from a
temporary scaffold, cracked itself by sheer weight. It lies there a
fit commentary on overleaping ambition. The cars and locomotives of
the railways are uncouth from their very size. Russia is like a big,
loose-jointed, over-grown boy, a boy so constituted that he may never
become a veritable man.
The government arsenals and machine shops in Moscow are run by German
and English bosses. The Russian makes big plans, but he does not
possess the power himself to carry them to successful issue. The great
empire is so spread out that pieces of it are even now ready to break
off. An intelligent Swede with whom I voyaged from Stockholm, then
living in St. Petersburg, declared the day not far distant when not
only Finland, but the German provinces of Esthonia and Livonia and
Courland along the Baltic, as well as Poland, must inevitably crack
off. And he declared that from mere internal cumbersomeness the
Russian Empire must soon dissolve. It may be so. And one is here
impressed with the fact that Russia now chiefly holds together by
reason of the military might of her autocracy, whose strength and
permanence under serious defeat may vanish in a night.
Another thing I have become cognizant of is the fact that everywhere
the men who do not wear a uniform hate the men who do. The cleavage
parting the upper and the lower levels of Russian life is immense.
Apparently there is no sympathy between them. The _mujik_ upon the
street scowls at the uniformed official who drives by in his dashing
equipage. He looks with surly countenance upon the grandee who nearly
runs him down. He hates the men who so mercilessly wield authority and
power, and who order the Cossack to ride him down and knout and saber
him into terrified submission.
One morning we passed through a great square in Moscow containing
nothing but men--wild-eyed, long-haired, long-bearded men; men in
rags, most of them, and all of them compelled to come there and wait
to be hired to work. To that square must all working men go who seek
work. The city feeds them while they wait, a single small piece of
black bread each day. Some never leave that square, but wait there
their lifetime through. They gazed upon our handsome landau with
hungry and wolfish eyes. How glad would they have been to tear us into
pieces and divide what little spoil they might obtain! I never before
beheld so frightful, unkempt a company of hopeless, hapless, hungry
human slaves as these Russian workingmen who waited for a job.
[Illustration: A MOSCOW TRAM CAR.]
[Illustration: THE OUT-OF-WORKS.]