loved, and the affront to himself, were enhanced by the source from
which they came. He had a special horror of all revolutions, pursued to
his dying day by the nightmare of the conspiracy of December, 1825, the
tragedy which had inaugurated his reign. The revolutions of France were
odious to him. Never would he, in the fullest sense, accept either Louis
Philippe or Louis Napoleon as sovereigns equal with himself. Neither of
them would he address as “Monsieur mon frère.”
And now behold an upstart who was buffeting and opposing him in what he
looked upon as the most sacred of his Imperial duties as head of the
Church! The spiritual ambitions of the Tsars were hereditary. His father,
the Emperor Paul, had been anxious even to don the priestly robes and
celebrate the mass; but his wise and brave friend Rostopchin stopped him
with a clever conceit. “Sire,” said he, “you have no rights as priest. A
priest must only marry once; you have been twice married—you cannot be a
priest.” The mad Emperor was convinced and refrained.
On another occasion the Metropolitan boldly stopped him when he tried to
enter the Holy of Holies. Although not a priest, the Russian Tsar is head
of his Church, much as the English King is the head of ours, and Nicholas
took the position very seriously. It was, moreover, intolerable to him
that the firmans which had been wrung from the Porte in favour of the
Orthodox monks should be set aside as mere scraps of paper, on account
of the more binding powers of a treaty, musty with age, extorted more
than a century previously by French chicane from an unwilling or callous
Sultan. He was determined to resist, and Prince Mentschikoff was sent on
a special embassy to Constantinople to demand compliance with the Russian
claims on behalf of the Greek Church.
Deeply religious and full of zeal for his Church, Nicholas was animated
by the same spirit which spurred on the old Crusaders to face dangers and
hardships of which we in these days of easy transport can have no idea,
in order to wrest from the Moslem those very shrines for the guardianship
of which he was striving. No one can doubt that he was honest and sincere
in his pious aims. But there was something more. How could he divest
himself of the hereditary ambition of Russia? It is true that in his
conversations with Sir Hamilton Seymour he spoke only of the occupation,
as distinct from the seizure, of Constantinople; but if he once succeeded
in establishing himself there in the guise of Protector of the Greek
Church throughout the Sultan’s dominions, would his people ever allow
him to give up the city upon which the covetous eyes of all the Russians
had so long been fixed? Would he even be willing to do so himself? Only
think what it meant: the Black Sea changed from the position of an inland
lake; access to the Mediterranean through the Straits of the Bosphorus
and the Dardanelles; the potentiality of a huge navy ready to dart out
upon the world from hidden and unapproachable harbours; a strategic base
from which to attack all the maritime Powers of Europe. The temptation
would be great indeed. Kinglake summed up the position in a striking and
eloquent passage:
“The strife of the Church was no fable, but, after all, though near and
distinct, it was only the lesser truth. A crowd of monks, with bare
foreheads, stood quarrelling for a key at the sunny gates of a church in
Palestine; but beyond and above, towering high in the misty North, men
saw the ambition of the Tsars.”
It is not the first time in history that religion has been made to
subserve the needs of politics. Martin Luther was spiritually sincere in
his attack upon the clerical abuses of the Roman Catholic Church; but the
success of the movement was due to the adhesion of the semi-barbarous
German princes, who cared little for religion, but caught eagerly at the
chance of shaking off the temporal yoke of Rome in their states. So it
was in this case. Nicholas was no doubt honestly eager to establish among
the Sacred Places of Palestine the supremacy of the Church that he loved;
but he knew full well that even the most agnostic of his Boyarin would be
ready to draw the sword if Constantinople was the prize dangled before
his eyes.
One man, the most considerable personage in the Empire after the Tsar
himself, cared but little for the religious side of the contention. That
man was Count Nesselrode, the Chancellor. The squabbles between the Greek
and Latin monks interested him in no way, for he belonged to neither
faith. Curiously enough, he was a member of the Church of England,
having, in December, 1780, been baptized in the Bay of Biscay on board
an English man-of-war which had given hospitality to his parents, his
father being at the time Russian Minister at Lisbon; and in our communion
he gratefully remained till his death, continuing from time to time, as
occasion served, never less than once a year, as I have been assured, to
attend the services of the English Church. However indifferent he might
be to the claims of Orthodoxy, he had, nevertheless, to obey the dictates
of his Imperial—and imperious—master; and, of course, to him, as to every
Russian, Constantinople was an irresistible lure; still, there is no
doubt that his attitude in regard to the war was but lukewarm. He would
have avoided it had it been possible.
The historic embassy of Prince Mentschikoff showed the Tsar’s hand. The
matter at issue was no longer one confined to the custody of a key,
however sacred, or to the position of the feet on a crucifix. In the
Greek crucifix the feet are nailed separately; in the Latin crucifix the
feet are crossed. The Greek crucifix in the church at Gethsemane was one
of the matters in dispute. The Latin monks claimed that the crucifix of
the Greeks should give place to one with the feet crossed; but these
became minor questions when, in the most arbitrary fashion, the prince
demanded that the whole of the Christian subjects of the Sultan should
be placed under the protectorate of the Tsar. What this meant will be
understood when we remember that it was computed that there were some
thirteen millions of these out of a total of thirty-six millions of
people, and thus over something approaching a third of the Sultan’s
subjects the Tsar was to be King. The Porte, well advised by Lord
Stratford de Redcliffe, peremptorily refused. The Turk was ready to make
some concession as regarded the Holy Places, but he would not renounce
his sovereignty over any portion of his people. Foiled at every step,
Prince Mentschikoff left Constantinople, and the Tsar had once more to
see himself outwitted and bested by his old enemy, Lord Stratford.
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe has often been accused of having been the
cause of the Crimean War, that great calamity in which, as Lord Salisbury
said many years afterwards, “we backed the wrong horse.” Nothing could be
more false than this charge laid against Lord Stratford, and yet probably
nineteen out of every twenty Englishmen, imperfectly instructed as usual
in foreign affairs, believe it to this day. The man really responsible
for the war was the French Emperor, who, as so often happened during the
nineteen years of his reign, was in sore need of the counter-irritant of
a foreign war to calm the fever of his own subjects at home. Never was it
more needful to him than at the moment when the affairs of Turkey and the
religious demands of the Emperor Nicholas began to be discussed in the
chanceries of Europe.
Frenchmen, and, above all, Parisians (do not forget the old saying,
“Paris c’est la France”), were still under the terrible impression of
the massacres of the _coup d’état_ of the 2nd to the 4th of December,
1851. Nothing could better serve the purpose of allaying the smouldering
indignation than such a war as that which he saw he could foment,
especially if it were carried on in concert with England. Such an
alliance would immeasurably increase his prestige both at home and
abroad, and, if he could arrange a visit to Queen Victoria, for which he
was intriguing, would almost make it appear as if she approved or, at
any rate, condoned the wholesale murders of 1851.
As a matter of fact, at the very moment when Lord Stratford was
striving with all his might to save England from war, he received
instructions from home directing him to order the English fleet to go
to Constantinople in company with the French. This was in obedience to
the French Emperor, who seemed to have dominated the British Government.
Peace did not suit his plans; war did. From that moment Lord Stratford’s
endeavours were frustrated; war was inevitable.
In the meantime the angry Tsar had sent his army to occupy for the second
time Moldavia and Wallachia, those unhappy provinces, the Danubian
Principalities, as they were then called, upon which the curse of Cain
seemed to have settled for all time.
Those who have watched the landing of a crowd of Russian pilgrims at
Jaffa will realize the power which Nicholas had at his back in the
execution of his policy of fighting for the Holy Shrines. I have seen
the old people, men and women, the tears streaming from their poor tired
eyes, fall down upon their knees, to kiss the soil, the treading of which
was the reward of long lives of grinding labour, privation and parsimony.
I have seen an old peasant, with matted hair and beard, meanly wrapped
in a sheepskin robe, sobbing out his patient heart in an ecstasy of grief
at the Holy Sepulchre. In order to save up the money for this pious
errand they must stint themselves, they must almost starve themselves,
laying up kopeck by kopeck, looking with surety for their reward in
another, a better and a less grinding life. The Church has promised it,
and God will fulfil the promises of His Church.
Half a century and more has slipped away since I left Russia, and I
should have great hesitation in writing down my impressions of the
intensely religious character of the Russian people were it not that
recent writings by well qualified observers show that those long years
have wrought little change. Mr. Stephen Graham’s book, “The Way of Martha
and the Way of Mary,” is a most charming and sympathetic study of the
complex psychological question of the religion of the Russian. Indeed,
the only fault with which it can be charged is that the writer is almost
too enthusiastic—more Orthodox than the Patriarch. I call it a complex
question because it is so difficult to say how far it is pure religion
and how far it is only mysticism, but, be it religion or be it mysticism,
it is deeply ingrained in the soul of the Russian mujik; it is part
of himself, and is revealed in a veneration for which I have found no
parallel elsewhere. But the strange part about it is its powerlessness
for restraint from sin. The greatest criminal will obey the harassing
prescriptions of his Church as though his very life depended upon it.
In Lent he will submit to a fast which is nothing short of cruel even
the Mohammedans’ fast in the month of Ramadan is nothing to it, for
when sunset comes the pious Moslem is free to feast as he pleases. With
streaming eyes, in a frenzy of religious rapture, the Orthodox peasant
will adore the sacred shrines and cross himself before the ikon, the
blessed picture of his patron saint. But that is all. Piety and virtue
are two things. The old Budotchnik (night-watchman), who had his hut
upon the frozen Neva, would cut a hole in the ice, into which he might
throw the body of the wayfarer whom he had murdered, to be carried down
to the Baltic; but in the Budotchka (his wooden hovel) a lamp always
burned before the blessed ikon, in the presence of which he would count
his unholy spoil. The toper, reeling with the fumes of vodka, before the
days of that brave abstinence law of the present Tsar, would never be so
drunk as to forget the marks of obeisance due to the sacred image, whose
presence he would not hesitate to pollute by any crime. When Nicholas
raised the fiery cross of a holy war, he could count upon the fierce
valour of an army of fanatics. Death for his religion and for the soil of
Holy Russia opens to the Russian the gates of Paradise.
If the religious fanaticism of the people and the ambition of the
governing classes was great in Russia, here in England the political
frenzy was no less violent. For reasons which they would probably have
found it difficult to explain, the people took up the cause of the Turk
with the wildest enthusiasm, and the shibboleth, “Balance of Power,”
was continually in the mouths of men who were quite ignorant of its
meaning. In France the desire for war was, as I have hinted, confined
to the Emperor and his surroundings; but it was a sad disillusion for
the Tsar when he saw the temper of England and of the Government of his
friend Lord Aberdeen, a temper which that lover of peace was powerless to
resist, the man whom, when he was at Windsor in 1844, he believed himself
to have talked over to his views. Trusting to his conversations with
the then Foreign Secretary, the Tsar was firmly convinced that England
would not go to war, in spite of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, whom he
hated more than ever for his defeat of Mentschikoff, in spite of Lord
Clarendon, and in spite of the fact that at the Colonial Office there was
a Minister called Palmerston, who, more than any other man, reflected
the spirit of his countrymen, and who, by no great stretch of the
imagination, might be supposed to have some little influence in foreign
affairs.
During his whole life the chief hobby of the Tsar had been his army.
To increase its numbers, its smartness, and its imposing glitter was
the object of his most watchful care. But his military aptitudes were
confined to those of the drill-sergeant. Company drill, battalion drill,
a grand review were his chief joy—a shabby uniform, a button awry, a
mistake in some detail of kit were crimes to be suitably punished; no
stricter martinet ever existed.[20] But of strategy, tactics and the
science of war, he knew no more than the youngest drummer in one of his
pet regiments. Whenever he interfered in any of the wars in which he
engaged, he only hindered and hampered his generals.
When it became evident that his occupation of the Balkans was a strategic
mistake, he had to call in old Prince Paskiewitch, the hero of his
Persian War, to get him out of the scrape. Commissariat, equipment,
munitions, transport, and the various subordinate necessaries for his
army, were matters into which he did not deign to inquire. I do not
propose to treat of the Crimean War; I will only say this much: that when
I was discussing it one day, in 1863, with a Russian general, he told
me that the losses suffered by the Tsar’s army in the terrible marches
to the Crimea cost them more men than all the fighting put together.
Want of food, clothes, boots, medicine for the sick, the robberies of
commissariat and contractors, killed the soldiers by tens of thousands. I
was bound to confess that our men were not much better off, until my old
friend Billy Russell roused the indignation of the people.
In the autumn of 1854 the Tsar declared that he looked to “le Général
Février” to finish the war. It did, but not as he hoped. In the month
of February, 1855, he died suddenly and mysteriously. The stories which
have been published of a lingering death lasting several days, and of
touching farewell interviews with the Empress and the Tsarevitch, may be
dismissed as fables; I have dwelt upon this in my “Memories.” However
that may be, whether he died a natural death from influenza, or whether,
as many people believed, he took poison, it was a broken heart that
killed him. The army that he had loved, the army that he had made and
drilled, clothed and cherished, had failed him. Paskiewitch, whom he
thought invincible, had been compelled to raise the siege of Silistria;
the battle of Giurgevo had been lost; his troops, the bugbear of Europe,
had been driven across the Danube by the Turks. The heights of the Alma,
the night of Inkermann told the same tale. Sevastopol was doomed. The
proud man was beaten; there was nothing left to him in this life; he
laid him down and died—a man of many mistakes, but to the last the great
“gentleman” that he claimed to be.
Once again the angel of death was merciful. He was spared the misery
of the final and supreme defeat. His impregnable fortress fallen, his
button-perfect army on which he pinned his faith shattered, the whole
edifice of his hereditary ambition and his pious strivings crumbled to
dust!
That Nicholas was greatly feared by his people must be admitted; at the
same time, he was admired as something more than a man; and by those who
surrounded him, though none came so often under the stinging lash of his
displeasure, he was venerated and loved. His domestic life was perfect.
He adored his wife—as he once said: “The first time I saw her I knew that
I had met the guardian angel of my life.” She was the sister of that poor
King of Prussia who was chiefly famous for his dullness and his love of
champagne—le Roi Cliquot, as his Imperial brother-in-law was wont to call
him.
Russia had every right to look forward to a happy time under the milder
rule of Alexander the Second, who, as Tsarevitch, had greatly endeared
himself to the people by travelling through the country, taking pains
personally to ascertain what were the wants and aspirations of the
millions whom he was one day to rule, and interesting himself on behalf
of the political prisoners in Siberia, and endeavouring, so far as in him
lay, to soften their hard lot. One of his first acts on coming to the
throne was to release so many of the Dekabrists—the men of December—who
were still living.
[Illustration: THE EMPEROR NICHOLAS II.
_From a lithograph._
[_To face p. 284._]
It has been the fashion among writers upon Russia to depreciate Alexander
as a weak ruler. They are kind enough to accredit him with a heart
full of good intentions, but they taunt him with a lack of vigour of
character. It is a hard matter for a Tsar to satisfy the requirements of
historical critics. A Nicholas, with a stern hand, puts down a poisonous
rebellion which aimed at nothing less than by corrupting the army to
perpetrate the murder of the whole Imperial family. He is written down
and held up to execration as a bloody-minded, revengeful tyrant. Then
comes his son, who at once sets about a vast number of reforms for the
benefit of his people, such as the emancipation of the Law Courts from
the supreme power of the politicians, the publication of an annual
Budget, the establishment of provincial and district councils, and, above
all, the emancipation of the serfs, of which I shall speak later. All
these liberal benefits are ascribed to the feebleness of the Emperor,
who, as they say, had not the force to resist the persistent demands
of ministers. Such is the injustice of men and historians. Nothing
astonished me more when I was in Russia than the freedom of speech. I
had been brought up in the faith that to criticize the Emperor meant the
knut and Siberia. On the contrary, I found at the clubs and in Society
men talking, praising and blaming with all the confidence of truly free
citizens, little heeding who should hear them, and I soon became aware
that all the fables which I had heard of spies and reporters were just
moonshine. Even officials and officers in the army unsparingly criticized
the measures which they had to carry out and the men whom they must obey.
One of the shrewdest critics of international politics that I ever knew
was old Count Nicholas Pablen, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this
paper. A great traveller, and an excellent speaker of modern languages,
he had been for half a century intimately associated with all the chief
makers of the nineteenth century. He had, moreover, a marvellous memory,
of which I may give an example. One day I found him in a great state
of mind, fussing and fuming over some annoyance. I asked what was the
matter. He said: “I am losing my memory! I wanted to write down the
Knights of the Garter—I remembered twenty-four, but for the life of
me I could not recollect the twenty-fifth!” All of a sudden his face
brightened. “I have it,” he said, “the Duke of Westminster.” The honour
of his memory was saved. His memory for political facts never failed him,
and his judgment was not to be denied. His view of the state of affairs
at the end of the Crimean War is given in one of those delightful letters
with which Lord Granville used to keep Lord Canning posted in European
matters whilst the latter was Governor-General in India. Lord Granville
wrote, on the 3rd of August, 1856 (see “Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice’s Life,”
vol. I., page 185):
“Old Pahlen was the most irritable of all on this subject
(the Crimean War). He says it has done no one good; not to
the English, certainly not to the Russians—and has only been
of use to one man in France,[21] whom he is not, as you know,
fond of. He says that in England they considered him as merely
speaking like a Russian parrot when he said that the Emperor
Nicholas did not wish for war, and that he was considered in
Russia almost a treacherous Anglomane when he declared that
our Government did not wish it. He had been right in both
cases, and yet by extraordinary bad management the war had
come. He thinks it will take a whole generation to efface
the recollection of it. He attributes the hatred of us, and
comparative forgiveness of the French, not so much to the
destruction in the Baltic, not so much to our Press and our
public speaking, as to our having been old friends, and their
always having thought of the French as enemies. He does not
believe in any great changes in Russia. The Emperor has good
intentions, but there have always been good intentions at
the beginning of each reign. He has one great advantage over
his father. Alexander during his life told Nicholas nothing.
Nicholas, since his son has been of age, told him everything,
and the latter, being of a very amiable disposition, heard
everything that others did not dare tell his father. He is
supposed not to have military tastes, but he issued new
regulations about uniforms almost before his father was buried;
and he and Constantine appeared in new hussar jackets a day or
two afterwards, which were supposed to be foreign, instead of a
new dress which he had been in such a hurry to exhibit himself
in. He dismissed Klein Michel and another (two great robbers);
and when his mother remonstrated on the ground of their having
been his father’s friends, he made a good answer, which he had
probably previously prepared. He said: ‘I am not a great man
like my father. He could use such men as his tools—I am not
strong enough.’ He (Pahlen) lays much stress on the absolute
poverty of Russia in able men. He thinks Gortchakoff clever,
but indiscreet, vain, and not successful in things which he
undertakes. (This is confirmed by everybody.)
“Tolstoi, a great friend of the Emperor, by whom he is called
‘milord Tolstoi,’ has no ability.
“Kisseleff, who is named Ambassador to Paris, is clever,
but has never been a diplomat and is seventy years old.
Meyendorf, really clever, is done up. Chreptowitch is nobody.
Orloff himself clever, but perfectly ignorant. He says that
Gortchakoff laments to everyone this dearth of men to appoint.
So Bloomfield told me. Pahlen says that in England it does not
signify if we want a man, we can always pick up an intelligent
man in some rank of life or other who will soon master the
specialities of his business. In Russia those who are not
diplomatists by profession are profoundly ignorant of all that
relates to it.”
A long quotation—but the appreciation of the state of affairs in his own
country by so competent an observer as Count Pahlen, recorded, moreover,
by no less a man than Lord Granville, seems to me to justify and even
invite its insertion here. I myself knew almost all the men whom the
Count mentioned, and I can appreciate the accuracy of his estimate. In
two cases, that of the new Tsar and that of M. Tolstoi, I think he was
hardly fair. As it turned out, the reign of Alexander the Second, if by
no other measure than that of the liberation of the serfs, marked an
important step in Russian history; while M. Jean Tolstoi—the “milord”—who
was Postmaster-General in my time, proved to be a capable minister, none
the worse for having travelled and being an accomplished man of the
world. As Ambassador to England, Count Chreptowitch, a delightful old
gentleman, was not an eagle; and it was not long before the astute old
Baron Brunnow—with the