In Russia, all that strikes the eye, every thing that passes around, bears the impress of a regularity that is startling; and the first thought that enters the mind of the traveller, when he contemplates this symmetrical system, is that a uniformity so complete, a regularity so contrary to the natural inclinations of men, cannot have been established, and cannot be maintained except by violence. Imagination vainly implores a little variety, like a bird uselessly beating its wings against a cage. Under such a system, a man may know the first day of his life all that he will see and do until the last. This hard tyranny is called, in official language, respect for unity, love of order; and it is a fruit of despotism so precious to methodical minds, that they think they cannot pay too dear for it.
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In France, I had imagined myself in accord with these rigorous disciplinarians; but since I have lived under a despotism which imposes military rule upon the population of an entire empire, I admit that I prefer a little of the disorder which announces vigour to the perfect order which destroys life.
In Russia, the government interferes with every thing and vivifies nothing. In that immense empire, the people, if not tranquil, are mute ; death hovers over all heads, and strikes capriciously whom it pleases: man there has two coffins, the cradle and the tomb. The Russian mothers, ought to weep the birth more than the death of their children.
I do not believe that suicide is common there : the people suffer too much to kill themselves. Singular disposition of man ! — when terror presides over his life, he does not seek death ; he knows what it is already. *
But if the number of suicides in Russia were ever so great, no one would know it; the knowledge of
* Dickens says — speaking of the solitary prison of Philadelphia — " Suicides are rare among the prisoners ; are almost, indeed, unknown. But no argument in favour of the system can reasonably be deduced from this circumstance, although it is very often urged. AH men who have made diseases of the mind their study, know perfectly well that such extreme depression and despair, as to change the whole character, and beat down all its powers of elasticity and self-resistance, may be at work within a man, and yet stop short of self-destruction."— American Notes for General Circulation.
The great writer, the profound moralist, the Christian philosopher from whom I borrow these lines, has not only the authority of talent, and of a style which engraves his thoughts on brass, but his opinion on this subject is law.
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numbers is a privilege of the Russian police: I am ignorant whether they arrive correct before the eyes of the Emperor; but I do know that no misfortune is published under his reign until he has consented to the humiliating confession of the superiority of Providence. The pride of despotism is so great that it seeks to rival the power of God. Monstrous jealousy ! into what aberrations hast thou not plunged princes and subjects ! Who will dare to love truth, who will defend it in a country where idolatry is the principle of the constitution ? A man who can do every thing is the crowned impersonification of a lie.
It will be understood that I am not now speaking of the Emperor Nicholas, but of the Emperor of Russia. We often hear mention made of customs which limit Iris power : I have been struck with its abuse, but have seen no remedy.
In the eyes of real statesmen, and of all practical minds, the laws are, I admit, less important than our precise logicians and political philosophers believe them ; for it is the manner in which they are applied that decides the life of the people. True ; but the life of the Russian people is more gloomy than that of any other of the European nations ; and when I say the people, I speak not only of the peasants attached to the soil, but of the whole empire.
A government that makes profession of being vigorous, and that causes itself to be dreaded on every occasion, must inevitably render men miserable. Wherever the public machine is rigorously exact, there is despotism, whatever be the fiction, monarchical or democratical, which covers it. The best government is that which makes itself the least felt;
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but such lightness of the yoke is only procured by the labours of genius and superior wisdom, or by a certain relaxation of social discipline. Governments, which were beneficent in the youth of nations, when men, still half savages, honoured every thing that snatched them from a state of disorder, become so again in the old age of communities. At that epoch is seen the birth of mixed institutions. But these institutions, founded on a compact between experience and passion, can suit none but already wearied populations, societies the springs of which are weakened by revolutions. From this it may be concluded, lhat if they are not the most powerful of political systems, they are the most gentle : the people who have once obtained them cannot too carefully strive to prolong their duration : it is that of a green old age. The old age of states, like that of men, is the most peaceable period of existence when it crowns a glorious life; but the middle age of a nation is always a time of trial and violence : Russia is passing through it.
In this country, which differs from all others, nature itself has become an accomplice in the caprices of the man who has slain liberty to deify unity; it, too, is everywhere the same : two kind» of scattered and stunted trees, the birch and the pine, spread over plains always either sandy or marshy, arc the only features on the face of nature throughout that immense expanse of country which constitutes Northern Russia.
What refuge is there against the evils of society in a climate under which men cannot enjoy the country, such as it is, for more than three months of the year?
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Add to this, that during the six most inclement of the winter months, they dare not breathe the free air more than two hours in the day. Such is the lot that heaven has assigned to man in these regions.
Let us see what man has done for himself: St. Petersburg is unquestionably one of the wonders of the world; Moscow is also a very picturesque city; but what can be said of the aspect of the provinces ?
The excess of uniformity engendered by the abuse of unity will be seen described in my chapters. The absence of soul betrays itself in every thing: each step that you take proves to you that you are among a people deprived of independence. At every twenty or thirty leagues the same town greets your eyes.
The passion of both princes and people for classic architecture, for straight lines, buildings of low elevation, and wide streets, is a contradiction of the laws of nature and the wants of life in a cold, misty country, frequently exposed to storms of wind which case the visage in ice. Throughout my journey, I was constantly but vainly endeavouring to account for this mania among the inhabitants of a country so different from those lands whence the architecture has been borrowed : the Russians cannot probably explain it any better than I, for they are no more masters of their tastes than of their actions. The fine arts, as they call them, have been imposed on the people, just as is the military exercise. The regiment, and its spirit of minntia, is the mould of Russian society.
Lofty ramparts, high and crowded edifices> the winding streets of the cities of the middle ages, would have suited better than caricatures of the
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antique, the climate, and the customs of Muscovy; but the country the wants and genius of which are least consulted by the Russians, is the country they govern.
When Peter the Great published from Tartary to Lapland his edicts of civilisation, the creations of the middle ages had long been out of date in Europe ; and the Russians, even those that have been called great, have never known how to do more than follow the fashion.
Such disposition to imitate scarcely accords with the ambition which wc attribute to them ; for man does not rule the things that he copies; but every thing is contradictory in the character of this superficial people: besides, a want of invention is their peculiar characteristic. To invent, there must be independence; with them, mimicry may b
e seen pervading their very passions : if they wish to take their turn on the scene of the world, it is not to employ faculties which they possess, and the inaction of which torments them ; it is simply to act over the history of illustrious communities: they have no creative power; comparison is their talent, imitation is their genius: naturally given to observation, they are not themselves except when aping the creations of others. Such originality as they have, lies in the gift of counterfeit, which they possess more amply than any other people. Their only primitive faculty is an aptitude to re-produce the inventions of foreigners. They would be in history, what they are in literature, able translators. The task of the Russians is to translate European civilisation to the Asiatics.
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The talent of imitation may become useful and even admirable in nations, provided it late developes itself; but it destroys all the other talents when it precedes them. Russia is a community of copyists: now, every man who can do nothing else but copy necessarily falls into caricature.
Hesitating for the space of four centuries between Europe and Asia, Russia has not yet succeeded in distinguishing itself by its works in the field of human intellect, because its national characteristics are lost under its borrowed decorations.
Separated from the West by its adherence to the Greek schism, it returns, after many centuries, with the inconsistency of a blind self-love, to demand from nations formed by Catholicism the civilisation of which a religion entirely political has deprived it. This Byzantine religion, which has issued from a palace to maintain order in a camp, does not respond to the most sublime wants of the human soul; it helps the police to deceive the nation, but that is the extent of its power.
It has, in advance, rendered the people unworthy of the culture to which they aspire.
The independence of the church is necessary to the motion of the religious sap ; for the development of the noblest faculty of a people, the faculty of believing, depends on the dignity of the man charged with communicating to men the divine revelations. The humiliation of the ministers of religion is the first punishment of heresy; and thus it is that in all schismatic countries the priest is despised by the people, in spite of, or rather because of the protection of the prince. People who understand their liberty
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will never obey, from the bottom of their hearts, a dependent clergy.
The time is not far distant when it will be acknowledged that, in matters of religion, what is more essential even than obtaining the liberty of the flock, is the assuring that of the pastor.
The multitude always obey the men whom they take for guides : be they priests, doctors, poets, sages, or tyrants, the minds of the people are in their hands ; religious liberty for the mass is therefore a chimera; but it is on this account the more important that the man charged with performing the office of priest for them should be free : now, there is not in the world an independent priest except the Catholic.
Slavish pastors can only guide barren minds: a Greek pope will never do more than instruct a people to prostrate themselves before violent power. Let me not be asked, then, whence it comes that the Russians have no imagination, and how it is that they only copy imperfectly.
When, in the West, the descendants of the barbarians studied the ancients with a veneration that partook of idolatry, they modified them in order to appropriate them. Who can recognise Virgil in Dante, or Homer in Tasso, or Justinian and the Roman laws in the codes of feudalism ? The passionate respect then professed for the past, far from stifling genius, aroused it: but it is not thus that the Russians have availed themselves of us.
When a people counterfeit the social forms of another community, without penetrating into the spirit which animates it — when they seek lessons in civilisation, not from the ancient founders of human
312THE STUDY OF ANCIENT MODELS.
institutions, but from strangers whose riches tliey envy without respecting their character—when their imitation is hostile, and yet falls into puerile precision—when they borrow from a neighbour whom they affect to disdain, even the very modes of dress and of domestic life, they become a mere echo, a reflection ; they exist no longer for themselves.
The society of the middle ages could adore antiquity without being in danger of parodying it; because creative power, when it exists, is never lost, whatever use man may put it to. What a store of imagination is displayed in the erudition of the fifteenth century !
A respect for models is the seal of a creative genius.
Thus it was that the studies of the classics in the West, at the epoch of their revival, scarcely influenced any thing beyond the belles lettres and the fine arts: the development of industry, of commerce, of the natural and the exact sciences, is solely the work of modern Europe, which has drawn nearly all the materials of these things out of her own resources. The superstitious admiration which she long professed for pagan literature has not prevented her politics, her religion, her philosophy, her forms of government, her modes of war, her ideas of honour, her manners, her spirit, her social habits from being her own.
Russia alone, more recently civilised, has been de^ prived by the impatience of her chiefs of an essential fermenting process, and of the benefits of a slow and natural culture.
The internal labour which forms a great people, and renders them fit to rule, has been wanting. The
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nation will for ever feel the effects of this absence of a proper life that marked the epoch of their political awakening. Adolescence, that laborious age in which the spirit of man assumes all the responsibility of its independence, was lost to them. Their princes, especially Peter the Great, paying no respect to time, suddenly and forcibly made them pass from a state of infancy to a state of virility. Scarcely yet escaped from a foreign yoke, every thing that was not Mongol seemed to them liberty; and it was thus that, in the joy of their inexperience, they accepted servitude itself as a deliverance, because imposed upon them by their legitimate sovereigns. The people, already debased by slavery, were sufficiently happy, sufficiently independent, if only their tyrant bore a Russian instead of a Tartar name.
The effect of such an illusion still remains: originality of thought has shunned this soil, of which the children, broken in to slavery, have only seriously imbibed, even at the present day, two sentiments, terror and ambition. What is fashion for them, except an elegant chain worn only in public ? Russian politeness, however well acted it may be, is more ceremonious than natural; for urbanity is a flower that can blossom only on the summit of the social tree: this plant will not graft; it must strike its own roots, and its stalk, like that of the aloe, is centuries in shooting up. Many generations of semi-barbarians have to die in a land before the upper stratum of the social earth gives birth to men really polite. Many ages, teeming with memories and associations, are essential to the education of a civilised people : the mind of a child born of polished parents can alone ripen fast
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enough to understand all the reality that there is in politeness. It is a secret exchange of voluntary sacrifices. Nothing is more delicate, or, it might be said, more truly moral, than the principles which constitute perfect elegance of manners. Such politeness, to resist the trial of the passions, cannot be altogether distinct from that elevation of sentiment which no man acquires by himself alone, for it is more especially upon-the soul that the influences of early education operate; in a word, true urbanity is a heritage. "Whatever little value the present age may place on time, nature, in its works, places a great deal. Formerly a certain refinement of taste characterised the Russians of the South; and, owing to the relations kept up during the most barbarous ages with Constantinople by the sovereigns of Kiew, a love of the arts reigned in that part of the Slavonian empire ; at the same time that the traditions of the East maintained there a sentiment of the great, and perpetuated a certain
dexterity among the artists and workmen ; but these advantages, fruits of ancient relations with a people advanced in a civilisation inherited from antiquity, were lost during the invasion of the Mongols.
That crisis forced primitive Russia to forget its history. Slavery debases in a manner that excludes true politeness, which is incompatible with any thing servile, for it is the expression of the most elevated and delicate sentiments. It is only when politeness becomes, so to speak, a current coin among an entire people, that such a people can be said to be civilised ; the primitive rudeness, the brutal personality of human nature, are then attacked from the
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cradle by the lessons which each individual receives in his family : the child of man is not humane; and if he is not at the commencement of life turned from his cruel inclinations, he will never be really polite. Politeness is only the code of pity applied to the every-day affairs of society; this code more especially inculcates pity for the sufferings of self-love : it is also the most universal, the most appropriate, and the most practical remedy that has been hitherto found against egotism.
Whatever pretensions may be made, all these refinements, natural results of the work of time, are unknown to the present Russians, who seem to remember Saraï much better than Constantinople, and who, with a few exceptions, are still nothing better than well-dressed barbarians. They remind me of portraits badly painted, but very finely varnished.
It was Peter the Great, who, with all the imprudence of an untaught genius, all the temerity of a man the more impatient because deemed omnipotent, with all the perseverance of an iron character, sought to snatch from Europe the plants of an already ripened civilisation, instead of resigning himself to the slow progress of sowing the seeds in his own soil. That too highly lauded man produced a merely artificial work: it may be astonishing, but the good done by his barbarous genius was transient, the evil is irreparable.
Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia Page 89
