Chapter LXXII, Concerning Snakes.

There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century literature in Russia was like the snakes in Iceland. Nor can it be said that the new development which took place early in that century was a _rinascimento_ such as sprang into being in Italy, in France and in England. A new birth implies a previous state of existence, and it cannot be said that the old chronicles which the dryasdusts of Kiev—the old head-quarters of such monkish learning as existed—still less a few embryonic attempts at versification and dramatic writing, could be dignified by the inspiring title of literature. “The Russian language”—to quote Mr. Baring—“was, as has been said, like an instrument waiting for a great player to play on it, and to make use of all its possibilities.” The fables of Kryloff—a playwright whose dramas have long since been forgotten—were published in 1806, and these remain a classic. Out of the two hundred fables which he left at his death in 1844, forty were translations, or, rather, “recreations,” as Mr. Baring puts it, of La Fontaine; seven were suggested by Aesop; the remainder were original. As in all fables, these contain an element of satire; that here and there the satire should be tinged with even a spice of political acidity did not hinder their popularity. I should like to say, in passing, that the few pages which Mr. Baring devotes to his account of Krylov contain passages of great beauty—passages which could only have been written by a man gifted with the keenest appreciation of the poetry which is part of himself.

It was in 1816, that with Karamzin’s monumental work, “The Chronicles of Russia,” the literature of that country burst into existence, like Pallas Athene fully armed from the head of Zeus. “Not only were the undreamed-of riches of the Russian language revealed to the Russians in the style, but the subject matter came as a surprise.” Pushkin, the greatest Russian poet that ever lived, or probably ever will live, was the next great star that appeared upon the firmament, and he declared that Karamzin had revealed Russia to the Russians, just as Columbus discovered America. To Karamzin’s glorious prose and to Pushkin’s immortal verse belong the first honours in the _belles-lettres_ of Russia.

Fifty years and more have passed since I read Gogol’s “Dead Souls” in the original. The strivings and hard work of a somewhat strenuous life have swept away the little that I knew of Russian authors and literature. I am now obliged to walk upon the crutches of translations, though now and then a faint memory is in some mysterious way awakened, and the interest, at any rate, has not faded.

Such names as Turgeniev, whom I once met, Dostoieffski, and the two Tolstoys, have still a magic charm for me. Besides, all the world can prate of them. Of the host of lesser novelists, mostly translated by ladies, in my judgment the less said the better. The work of obviously coarse, uninstructed men, they often, both in their narration and in their imagery, deal with subjects which are unwholesome and which common consent rejects as unsuitable. Literature does not scramble about in midden heaps.

And the great ones—what is their place in the history of the world’s achievements? I very much doubt whether there be any among the most patriotic enthusiasts who would claim even for his beloved Pushkin a seat on Parnassus beside Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Voltaire. That Karamzin’s prose was of the very first order is proved by Pushkin’s appreciation of him. Unfortunately it can only appeal to a very small public. Twelve volumes of chronicles, essential to the Russian student of his own country’s story, will hardly be faced by the average foreigner.

Pushkin’s activities were phenomenal. That in the thirty-seven years of his tragically short life he should have wrought what he did, and that he should have been so uniformly good, invests him with a glamour which is all his own. He was a meteor, and, like a meteor, he appeared as it were for a moment in the sky, and then vanished into space. And yet half a century ago, among the men who were the leaders of thought in Petersburg, there was far less talk of Pushkin than there was of Dante, Shakespeare, or Voltaire—not to speak of many other foreign authors.

It has taken many years to create the revival of the interest of Russians in Russian work. It has come at last, and now the only danger is lest, under much flattery and patting on the back from abroad, the true advance of public taste should not be rather hindered than furthered. Pushkin, be it remembered, was highly cultivated, a man of wide reading. He recognized the fact that in order to write well a man must read well, and study the best models. Some of his criticisms of Shakespeare and of Byron, under whose influence he was until Shakespeare dethroned his idol, are masterpieces.

It seems to me that the State encouragement of Russian studies will be of high value as promoting facility of intercourse—especially in the case of the Services, naval, military and civil. A far higher, even world-wide importance attaches to the establishment of schools of modern languages all over Russia. It is of less moment that the literature of Russia, in its present condition, should travel westward than that the literature of the West should gradually influence the mind of the Slav. Just as in music the wild barbaric outbursts of his gayer moods, the tender sadness of his dirges, have been enshrined in the harmonies of his own classic masters without losing one spark of their fire, one sob of their pathos, so the untutored writer of to-day, chastened by study, will be able to give us the freshness and zest of a life which is not ours, shorn of all its crudities, not to give them a worse name. Let me not be misunderstood. What I think is of consequence is that the startling audacity, the rough ore of the Slav mind, should be passed through the purifying furnace of the higher education it was in Pushkin’s case—all honour to him—and then you will have something worthy of the praise which is being rained upon the shameless translations by ladies, themselves ill-equipped by classic culture, of the cubism of literary art.

VERBA COMPOSITA

In the first volume of my “Memories” there is a print of a drawing by William Evans, of the inglenook in the picturesque dining-hall of his house at Eton. Above the stone screen in which it was held was a legend in Gothic letters: “Favus mellis verba composita.” The words had disappeared for many years when I went to place my son with Miss Evans—so long that she had even forgotten their existence when I asked the reason why. To us old boys it seemed a pity, for the inscription had derived a certain sanctity from the scholastic storm which raged round it. The learned would not accept the legend. No one could say whence the quotation or proverb came. Dr. Hawtrey, to whom the pure well of Latin undefiled was almost a religion with which to tamper was little short of sacrilege, declared that it was a barbarism, a piece of dog, or, what was perhaps to him as bad, monkish Latin. He maintained that it was untranslatable; but we, audacious monkeys, rushing in where scholars feared to tread, declared that if the words were obscure, the meaning was clear as crystal: “Sweet as the honeycomb is the talk of friends in council.” Here I would fain break off for a moment to pay a slight tribute to the memory of that most generous of men, William Evans, drawing-master and, though one of the most masculine of mortals, technically a “dame.” He was a big, burly man, of a jovial and rubicund aspect, a combination which earned for him the nickname of Beeves. He was a vigorous painter in water-colours, a member of the old water-colour society, and one of the best of good fellows.

A sportsman, too, for he was the friend of the late Duke of Atholl, spending most of his summer holiday at Blair, where he was always welcome as an enthusiastic stalker. Indeed, “Scrope’s Deerstalking” was the only book that I remember ever to have seen him read. I went to see him once as he lay in bed, very feeble, at the beginning of his last long illness. On the wall, at his right hand, was hanging his dearly-loved rifle, his powder-flask, and the other paraphernalia of those pre-breechloader days. In his youth he had been a great oarsman, and, indeed, the river was his joy till quite late in life.

He took the greatest interest in all that concerned boating and swimming, and it was owing to his influence, in conjunction with that of the noble Bishop Selwyn, of whom Eton is still so proud, that the law was passed by the authorities forbidding boys to enter a boat until they should have “passed” in swimming. Of the good bishop a story is told of the time when he was a private tutor at Eton which is worth preserving. He was sculling in a wherry amid a crowd of boats, when he was run into by some unskilled oarsman. Seeing that shipwreck was inevitable, he stood up, and, quoting Ovid’s description of the discreet death of Lucretia, exclaimed:

“Tunc quoque, jam moriens, ne non procumbat honeste Respicit, hoc etiam cura cadenti erat.”

Fasti II., 831.

And so, with a header as graceful as the quotation was apt, the amphibious bishop that was to be, dived into the Thames amid the plaudits of the multitude, who already recognized in him the heroism of which he was to give proof in New Zealand and elsewhere.

Evans’ was a very happy house, and the good old man spared nothing for the comfort of his boys. The table which he kept was excellent, the Sunday dinner quite a little feast, with a glass of sherry for each boy at plum-pudding time—not altogether wise we should perhaps think nowadays, but so kind and so hospitable. Rarely, too, would be fail to invite one or two boys to stay for dessert. The traditions of the house were nobly carried on by Miss Jennie Evans after her father’s death in 1877. And now she, too, has disappeared, the last of the dames, the last of one of those dear old institutions which were part of the mystery of Eton.

To remember is to wander, and when I begin to think of Eton—the Eton of seventy years ago—it is easier to ramble on than prudently to stop. But to-day I have only to deal with “Verba Composita.” It is of them that I was thinking this morning as I sat in my Veluvana, and, indeed, there could hardly be a more pregnant thought than that of the talk of friends in council.

How perfect is the feeling with which, in the company of a familiar friend of our own choice—we wander through the shaded paths and sweet groves of our sanctuary. Nor is it necessary that the chosen comrade should be himself a botanist or a gardener. Sympathy is all that is asked of him, and that he will not deny. Indeed, there is something in the worship of the great god Pan, and in the living, growing temples which are raised in his honour, which makes for all that is best in the intercourse between man and man.

A beautiful view, a discreet arrangement of flowers and graceful foliage, will rouse congenial memories of books, of poetry, of pictures, and sometimes even of melody. The sight of a plant recognized even by the unskilled as an old friend of some distant clime, seen again after many years, will excite a whole train of recollections fragrant with the perfume of half-forgotten travels and adventures. So may two greybeards sit happily in some remote nook, the home of fairies and dryads, where the trees whisper old thoughts and call up sympathetic talk, broken and yet stimulated afresh by “brilliant flashes of silence.”

All the better is this _solitude à deux_ if there should be the tinkling music of a tiny stream, with the electric gleam of a kingfisher darting across some idle sunlit pool. All these wield that magic power which, for the nonce charming away the wrinkles of time, transports us across the long years back to the days when the world and we were young and life meant hope. Rare, indeed, and very precious are such dreamy talks and silences. We can hardly rate their value too highly. The crazy poet-philosopher Nietzsche was not far wrong when, in a letter to Erwin Rohde, he wrote: “Eternally we need midwives in order to be delivered of our thoughts. Most people go to a public-house, or to a colleague whose mind is solely occupied with the interests of their calling, and there, like so many small cats, they tumble about all their thoughts and tiny schemes. But woe to us who lack the sunlight of a friend’s presence!”

It was a fine thought of his to elevate friendship to the rank of a goddess. But, alas for the inconsistencies of genius! Few of Nietzsche’s hot friendships had any lasting power. Rohde himself, Rée and others faded out of his life. But no change was so violent as that which occurred in the relations between the philosopher and the tone-poet Wagner. The historic friendship—born of an admiration for Schopenhauer shared by both, and of an adoration by Nietzsche of Wagner’s music—ripened so quickly and was so beautiful, that it ought to have lived with their lives; but this alliance between a budding youth and an older, already famous man came to the saddest end.

Suddenly the fruit grew mouldy and fell from the tree, and the love, which had seemed to be built upon a rock, the worship which was so full of pious conviction, were changed into a hatred which was nothing short of venomous, and which not even the death of Wagner could compel to silence. They had first met at Leipsic, at the house of Professor Brockhaus, and Wagner, touched by the boy’s enthusiasm, took to him at once, petted him, and encouraged him to go and visit him, which he did a few years later at Triebschen, Wagner’s retreat under the shadow of Mount Pilatus.

Wonderful gatherings, indeed, have been held throughout the ages in groves and gardens. Imagine the Baghavat, the Blessed One, surrounded by his Bikshus, as poor as the first followers of St. Francis, preaching the doctrines of truth and humility in those parables that are dear to the Eastern, seated in one or other of his beloved gardens. Think of the sages of ancient Athens gathered together in the groves of the Akademia discussing the deep problems of existence. How much more instinct with the poetry of life must such grave and reverend companies have been than the boisterous though delightful tavern symposia in which Christopher North, Tickler, the Ettrick Shepherd and their friends slung Doric wit and wisdom over the toddy glasses! We can easily conceive how the interchange of thought between the great trio, Wagner, Frau Cosima and Nietzsche, in a lovely Swiss garden, surrounded by the majesty of the Alps, must have been enshrined in such memories as those over which the philosopher mourned so long as the lamp of life burned in him.

When the other day I was reading Dr. Mügge’s account of the trio at Triebschen, Wagner, Frau Cosima and Nietzsche, and of their deep interest in one another’s ideals, the old motto, “Sweet as the honeycomb is the talk of friends in council,” of which I had not thought for many a decade, came back to me, and I understood how Nietzsche, long years after he had quarrelled with Wagner—indeed, shortly before his death—declared that “he would resign all human intercourse, but at no price would he give up the pleasant memories of those days spent in Triebschen.” The honey of those Verba Composita was still sweet in the comb.

For the quarrel between the two men there may be explanations and excuses; such changes are not without precedent. The first link between them was, as I have said, devotion to Schopenhauer. “Nietzsche called his connection with Wagner his practical course in Schopenhauer’s philosophy.” When Nietzsche began to dream of a philosophy of his own, the tie between him and the poet-composer was weakened; there was also perhaps some feeling that he was being made use of, that he was being patronized and made to play second fiddle to a man whom he was beginning to look down upon as a mere play-actor—a mummer—a child of the theatre.

Mügge throws out a hint that in breaking with Wagner, Nietzsche was possibly fleeing from himself, and he quotes a note from him to Frau Cosima: “Ariadne, I love you! Dionysus.” Whatever may have been the cause, or the many causes, of the rupture, its violence was, at any rate on Nietzsche’s side, maniacal. His venom was not less poisonous than that which Devadatta poured out upon the Buddha. Not content with having hurled his Jupiter, as he called him, from his throne on high Olympus, he must needs pursue him into the depths, trampling on him, and covering with mud the man whom he had once beslavered with the most fulsome adulation. Strange litanies for the high priest of the goddess of Friendship to intone!

Far less intelligible is the change of front in regard to Wagner’s music. That the man who, for the apotheosis of Wagner’s art, wrote “The Birth of Tragedy in Music,” should so completely eat his words as to the worth of the music because he had ceased to love the musician is almost unthinkable.

In the first period he tells us that: “From a novice trying his strength, Wagner became a thorough master of music and of the theatre.... No one will any longer deny him the glory of having given us the supreme model for lofty artistic execution. The renewer of the simple drama, the discoverer of the position due to art in true German society, the poetic interpreter of old views of life, the philosopher, the historian, the æsthete and critic, the master of languages, the mythologist and the myth poet, who for the first time included all these wonderful and beautiful products of a primitive imagination in a single Ring, upon which he engraved the runic characters of his thoughts—what an abundance of knowledge Wagner must have had in order to have become all that!”

Again: “Over the coming of Wagner there hovers a necessity which both justifies it and makes it glorious.” “Wagner, in his capacity as supreme master of form, points out the way, like Aeschylus, to a future art.” “In the life of this great man, the period over which as a golden reflection there is stretched the splendour of a supreme perfection.... He produces _Tristan and Isolde_, this _opus metaphysicum_ of all art; the _Meistersinger of Nürnberg_; the _Ring of the Nibelungs_; his work of Bayreuth.”[17]

There is much more in the same strain, but when we come to the second period it is another Nietzsche who speaks. He now attacks his former idol with the most ferocious rancour, for which only insanity could account; and yet that he was not then mad is proved by other utterances of his in regard to that same art of music. For instance: “Mendelssohn was the beautiful interlude of German music, quickly admired and then quickly forgotten. Schumann was the last who founded a school. Though incessantly glowing with happiness or throbbing with impersonal suffering, he was a purely German event, and not, as Beethoven and Mozart had been, a European phenomenon.”

That—although I should not agree as to Mendelssohn being forgotten—appears to me to be, as regards Schumann, a fine piece of criticism. Apparently it was only when thinking of Wagner that he was up to that time insane. Then he could lash himself into a fury! Witness: “I call the Wagnerian orchestration the Sirocco; Bizet’s” (of whose success Wagner was supremely jealous) “orchestral music is almost the sole orchestration that I can still endure.... Schopenhauer was the philosopher of decadence. His art is morbid.... Wagner has been ruinous to music. Was Wagner a musician at all? He was at least something else in a higher degree—that is to say, an unsurpassable _actor_. Wagner was, above all, a stage-player, and he excels in ubiquity and nullibiety.... Parsifal is a candidate for divinity with a public-school education. We are so far pure fools already ... a typical telegram from Bayreuth: _Bereits bereut_ (rued already)! Ah! this old _thief_! This old _magician_! This _Cagliostro_ of modernity!... Wagner is a Romanist, and he made the poor devil, the country lad Parsifal, a Roman Catholic. I despise every one who does not regard Parsifal as an outrage on morals.”

Perhaps Wagner’s faithful disciples were right when they ascribed all outpouring of the vials of wrath to _jalousie de métier_; for Nietzsche, too, was not only poet and philosopher, but composer, and when he submitted an opera of his own to Wagner, the great man, as the Eastern saying is, made sour noses at it.

It is dangerous to carry a book with you into a garden; it will make your mind wander much further than your feet. Here have I been rambling on, carried away not so much by any feeling for Nietzsche, who is, after all, not much more than a name to me, as by the interest which attaches to all that concerns Wagner. For, let his enemies say what they will, he was a man of genius, of most compelling genius, and who that ever had speech of Frau Cosima could avoid being bewitched. To me it has only been given to know her in her old age, but I fell at once under the spell of that most sweet and dainty personality. Very feeble in health, and unable to speak for long, she had retained all the serene charm which, in the heyday of her youth and beauty, earned for her the name of “the unique woman.” I felt how bright a part she must have played in the brilliant trio at Triebschen, and how sad it is that there should be no record of the symposia of the sunny days of that happy friendship before it was disturbed by mad envy and malice.

Of Nietzsche and his tragic end, of the influence which his restless brain exercised upon men and upon letters, this is not the place to speak. Is it he, as his disciples maintain, who has taught Germany and, through Germany, the world to think? The great anti-moralist, as he has been called, is dead. Let him rest in peace. We can leave this Batrachomyomachia, this battle of the frogs and mice, the squabbles of German professors and philosophers, coming back with some relief to the sweeter fragrance of our flowers. It was the thought of Triebschen and its Verba Composita which led us to Nietzsche, and his clever saying that seemed to give value to the thought of friendship in a garden.

Days of happy talk are delightful—never more so than in a garden; and yet it is when we are alone, when our plants are the companions of our solitude, that we really enter into sympathy with them. Then it is that we hold true communion with them, and, giving the reins to our imagination, try to read the hidden secrets of their being—hidden secrets, not those scientific arcana which your professor loves to clothe in slipshod Latin and shabby Greek, but those inmost idiosyncrasies in which our fancy, wildly playful, seems to detect vestiges of the same characteristics and emotions which rule as tyrants in our own nature. Nor when we note the movements of plants, so strangely purposeful, does it involve any inordinate strain upon our conceptive power to see in them something more than chance, something which resembles the exercise of a dominant will. These may be thoughts at which science laughs, and which the inexorable demon Commonsense hounds out of court—thoughts that are no more than poor little waifs and strays, coming to us from Fancyland, and yet not without their humble value if they do but make us watch and seek for things undreamt of in our philosophy.

That certain flowers and plants are, as it were, types of various qualities is an idea as old as the hills upon which they grow. The strength of the oak, the grace of the willow, the flaunting pride of poppies, the virginal purity of lilies, the stateliness of hollyhocks like courtiers drawn up in a row at the levée of a mighty king, the modesty of the violet—all these and a hundred others are images from the wallets of poets of all lands and of all time. It is not of these that I speak, but rather of the behaviour of plants, often very various and capricious, according to circumstances, yet in which we seem to see a kinship with reasonable motive, a suggestion that in similar conditions we might have done the same.

See yonder crimson water-lily queening it in all the majesty of her amazing beauty among the humbler reeds and rushes and sedges and the rest of her water-loving subjects. To-day she is in the zenith of her state, like the king’s daughter all glorious within. Does she rejoice in the stateliness of her queenship? It would almost seem so, for to-morrow she will feel that her reign is over. She will bow her lovely neck, and, coyly folding her petals together round the golden aureole of her stamens, will disappear under the flood, too proud to let herself be seen when her regal beauty is on the wane. Is not that something like the pride of which we read in the life of the peerless Countess Castiglione, who hid herself from the gaze of men before her charms had faded, as she knew they soon must? Having reigned supreme among the fair women of the world, she would not consent to be degraded into a has-been—a thing of the past. I have told in my “Memories” of the first time that I saw her on the terrace at Holland House, a miracle of loveliness, when all London was crowding on tiptoe to catch a sight of the haughty queen of beauty and do homage to her majesty. My nymphæa tempts me to repeat myself. The last time was a few years later. I was sitting with Mario and Grisi in their garden at Fulham when she was announced. She came in robed in deepest black, her face hidden by a thick veil of sable crêpe. She remained a little while and talked gaily enough, but her face remained hidden all the time; not for one moment did she lift that funereal veil. She had forsaken the world—abdicated—like my coy crimson water-lily, and in the waters of Lethe she hid her beauteous head.

Have plants their friendships, their affinities? Certain it is that there are some plants which seem to thrive best when familiarly associated with certain others. I have heard some gardeners say, for instance, that lilies of the valley and Solomon’s seal are never so happy as when they are planted together. That may be true, but it probably means no more than that both need the same soil and surroundings, and so make the bravest show when they are side by side. I much doubt whether a weak clump of lilies of the valley would be strengthened by adding to it a cluster of plants of its friend, or vice versa.

On the other hand, it is a scientific fact capable of demonstration, that there are trees which press into their service certain humbler non-flowering plants, compelling them to furnish their roots with water and such mineral salts and foods as are needful for their well-being. These become slaves, like the hewers of wood and drawers of water working for the lords of creation.

Many years ago I received a consignment of _Pinus cembra_, the Arolla pine, which is the common growth of the Alps. The trees arrived late in the afternoon, and we unpacked them at once, for the days were at their shortest, and I was eager to get them all planted—there were a dozen or more—before nightfall. To my dismay I found that the roots were all covered with a network of grey film, the mycelium, as the learned would call it, of some fungus. My gardener and I were not a little indignant with the nurseryman who sent out the plants in so filthy a condition. We sent for a bucket of water and washed clean as many of the trees as we could; mercifully there was not daylight enough left to purge them all of their dirt. To our amazement, the trees which we washed soon began to show signs of sickness; they dwindled for three or four years and looked as if they must die; slowly, very slowly, the invalids recovered. Their unwashed mates never flinched for a moment, made roots gaily, and took quite rapidly to their new home. The puzzle was great, until a few years later I received Kerner’s great book, “The Natural History of Plants,” and then the mystery was cleared up. The sorrows of the washed trees were those of the planters of the West Indian Islands. Like Mr. Wilberforce, we had deprived them of their slaves. Luckily, the humus of the plantation in which they were placed must have contained the spores necessary to the formation of the fungoid growth, otherwise they would doubtless have died.

Kerner’s chapter on the _Symbiosis_, or social union of plants, is curiously interesting. He gives a list of flowering trees and plants which are absolutely dependent upon what he called the mycelial mantle with which fungi cover their roots for the absorption of their daily food. Limes, roses, ivy, pinks may be propagated by cuttings which will root in pure sand. No such method is possible in the case of the oak, the beech, firs, broom, rhododendron, and a host of others, which demand an admixture of soil containing a proportion of mycelia, without which they are unable to feed themselves; and so, like babies, with neither breast nor bottle they perish.

Kerner’s opening words on this _symbiosis_ are worth quoting: “In describing the vegetation of a limited area, botanical writers are apt to designate the various species of plants as ‘denizens’ of the country in question. The conditions under which the plants live are likened to political institutions, and the relations existing amongst the plants themselves are compared to the life and strife of human society.” He goes on to speak of the interdependence upon one another of these plants living in the same community; he shows how necessary they are to one another; how they sometimes fight for food, light and air; how some are preyed upon and oppressed by others, “and how not infrequently quite different species join together in order to attain some mutual advantage.” And so he comes to the curious history of the lichens.

Some forty or fifty years ago there arose a furious battle around the lichens, humble little creatures enough, plastered on almost every rock and stone and tree in creation. During the ’sixties of the last century Schwendener, a Swiss botanist—professor successively at Basle, Tübingen and Berlin—wrote a number of papers in scientific publications, in which he proved to his own satisfaction that lichens are not individual plants, but compound existences consisting of an alga and a fungus. His investigations were followed up by one Bornet, and he had a numerous following largely attracted by the charm of novelty and the ingenuity of invention. Kerner went so far as to say that “the continued study of lichens has tended only to secure for the Schwendenerian theory a more wide and universal recognition.” Dr. Cook, however, the great authority on cryptogamic botany, laughs at this mystic union as a “fairy tale.” He treats it with the same contempt that St. Paul, in his letter to Titus, expressed for “Jewish fables.” He says: “The high priest Schwendener thus expressed his dream: ‘As the result of my researches, all these growths (lichens) are not simple plants, not individuals in the ordinary sense of the word; they are rather colonies, which consist of hundreds and thousands of individuals, of which, however, one alone plays the master, whilst the rest, in perpetual captivity, prepare the nutriment for themselves and their master. This master is a fungus of the class ascomyceter, a parasite which is accustomed to live upon others’ work; its slaves are green algæ, which it has sought out, or, indeed, caught hold of, and compelled into its service. It surrounds them, as a spider its prey, with a fibrous net of narrow meshes, which is gradually converted into an impenetrable covering; but whilst the spider sucks its prey and leaves it dead, the fungus incites the algæ found in its net to more rapid activity—nay, to more vigorous increase.’”

Dr. Cook goes on to say: “This may be all very poetical, but it is not very explicit, and needs a commentary;” and then he proceeds to demolish the whole theory based upon the supposition that the gonidia, green spherical cells, which are found in the thallus of lichens are algæ. Lichens, Dr. Cook tells us, consist normally of a thallus, or vegetative system, which is in many species a tough, bark-like expansion, horizontal or vertical, attached to rocks, stones, wood and other substances, but not deriving nourishment from the object to which it is attached. Inside this thallus are the minute green gonidia, and, in addition, there is the reproductive system, consisting of discs borne upon the thallus, containing the reproductive organs (asci and sporidia). The Schwendenerians contend that the thallus and reproductive system are not only fungoid, but actual fungi, while the green gonidia are algæ upon which those fungi are parasitic.

One of the proofs which Dr. Cook brings forward in support of his contradiction of the theorists is the permanence of lichens, whereas the fungi are, as we all know, very short-lived, many of them little more than ephemeral—here to-day and gone to-morrow. To the lichens we must pay the respect due to the most venerable antiquity. Dr. Cook, speaking with all the authority with which he is endowed, tells us that “some species, growing on primitive rocks of the highest mountains of the world, are estimated to have attained an age of at least a thousand years. Is it not marvellous to think of these mean little vegetable scabs feeding upon air, outliving the monarch oaks and almost all the trees of Creation?”

But I am in danger of rushing in where the angels of science hardly dare tread. Let me go back to my beloved nonsense. Beloved? Yes, for, after all, what is more lovable than nonsense? What a joy their nonsense must have been to Dean Swift, to Lear, or to the little dry chip of a man who was our Cocker, our mathematical tutor, at Christ Church. I wonder whether, when Dodgson, that double personality, always associated in my memory with a blackboard, a piece of chalk and _x y z_, was writing up his mystic algebraical puzzles, his mind did not sometimes wander, and he himself become transformed for a minute into Lewis Carroll seeing visions of Alice, the Carpenter, the Mad Hatter, the Walrus, and all the crazy _dramatis personæ_ of his delicious phantasy. He is dead now, and many years ago the lovely child, for whose delectation the wonder book was invented, was laid in an early grave in the Christ Church cloisters. Only Alice lives, and will live as long as the English language remains.

If your garden be upon the slope of a hill, there is one human instinct which you will surely, if you watch them carefully, recognize in your plants. They are so ambitious. Those among them which have creeping roots or rhizomes will almost invariably travel uphill. They are as fain to climb as Sir Walter Raleigh himself. Take the rhizomatous bamboos, such species among the arundonarias as Somoni, Japonica Layœkerd, Spathiflora and others, Phyllostachys fastuosa, Bambusa Palmata. Rarely, indeed, will you find a new culm below the parent plant; all the growth is upwards. And so it is with many other genera. I think the reason of it is pretty plain. You need but to mark the trees above a railway cutting or on the high banks of a deep lane, to see how shallow in proportion to their height are the roots even of the greatest of them. There are exceptions—the vine and the laburnum, to wit—but the oak itself loses its so-called tap-root, which withers and rots away as soon as it has fulfilled its duty of tying the tree in its place. The roots seem to remain as near as possible to the plane of the bottom of the main stem. The same rule applies to plants of lesser stature. Now if the roots of a hillside plant were to move down-hill in the same plane as the axis of the stem, it is manifest that they must very soon peer out into the open and be deprived of all those foods which are necessary to plant life. So they choose the wise course of journeying upwards, where they are sure, on the contrary, of an increasingly richer diet. If on its travels the growing point of a bamboo rhizome encounters a stone or other obstacle, it will not dive down to avoid it, but will take a direction upwards and then down again into the earth, forming one of those hoops, like croquet hoops, which are such a snare to trip up wayfarers in bamboo forests. Sometimes the ambitions of plants, like those of men, are fatal. The root-stock, originally set in the best conditions, must needs climb higher and higher, until it may perhaps reach some uncongenial place in which it is starved or choked. Then farewell, a long farewell, to all its greatness! By degrees the parent plant becomes exhausted and dwindles away, while the scions which should have carried on the dynasty are hoped for in vain, and so some precious treasure is lost for ever.

If plants have ambition, there is one vice closely allied to it which they do not possess. Jealousy is confined to animals. Men, dogs, cats and horses are jealous. There is no evidence to lead us to suppose that plants are afflicted with that horror of horrors. They may have their loves and their hatreds; they will, as we have seen, help one another, and they will strangle and murder one another. They will even rob one another; but the torture of jealousy seems to be unknown to them. They will attack their neighbours with the pitiless savagery of the old Rhineland robber knights. No vampire could with more ruthless cruelty suck the blood of a fair maiden than certain malignant fungi, which fasten upon great trees and shrubs, and draw out the sap of their noble lives in order to nourish their own ignominious bodies. Then there are the saprophytes, plants as unlovely as their name, vegetable horrors, which, like the ghouls of the “Arabian Nights,” are found feasting upon death and decay. _Non ragionam di lor! Ma guarda e passa._

In the part of the world where I live the old thorn trees are, with the oaks, the glory of the countryside. One year, to my dismay, I saw that all my thorns in which I took so much pride were apparently dying. In the middle of summer their leaves withered and wilted, and they presented a piteous sight. I wrote to Kew for advice. Kew is a never-failing help in trouble. The answer came back: Have you any savin juniper bushes? If so, examine them. You will probably find them covered with a yellow slimy sort of jelly, which is the first stage of a fungus which, in its second stage, fastens upon the thorn. The letter went on to advise a merciless destruction and holocaust of the savin bushes, and prophesied that the fungus on the thorns would die and not renew itself, so that no permanent harm would ensue. Sure enough, in my ignorance, I had planted a number of bushes of savin, which I found, as Kew prophesied, to be covered with an ugly yellow mucilaginous substance. My inquisition was followed by an _auto da fé_ of the junipers; when their enemies were burnt, the thorns recovered and I had no more trouble.

How most other plants hate the beech and the ash! How resolutely they refuse to grow under their shade! And yet even the best hated men have their friends, who will smile to them and seek their company. Lords of beech woods wanting covert for their game should try planting Laurus Colchica and Laurus rotundifolia. The pheasants love their shelter, and they are quite happy even under old-established beeches.

There are plants of prey just as there are beasts of prey and birds of prey. These are plants which live upon animal food just as we do, setting traps and snares for them with all the cunning shown by one of Richard Jefferies’ phenomenal gamekeepers or poachers. What, by the by, is the exact dividing line which separates the poacher from the keeper? Does the one develop into the other as does the chrysalis into the butterfly? I remember a little old Highland stalker, a veteran of the “hull,” as brown and rugged as a russet apple; we had been watching deer a long way off all the morning—the wind wrong for a stalk—and he confided to me all those secrets of deer life which seemed as familiar to him as if, like the Buddha, he had been himself a stag in some previous stage of existence. “How long have you been a stalker, Hughie?” I asked. “Maybe twenty years,” he answered; but then, looking up, his eyes twinkling with a craft worthy of Autolycus, he added, “but I was a shepherd for many years before that.”

There was a whole folio volume of predatory but illicit sport in the words. Some plants, like the various pitchers of Nepenthe and others, remain still and are content to rely upon the beauty of their colours to tempt the game to its doom. Caught in the trap, the victims are held tight by some glue like birdlime, or kept from finding their way out by fingers of sharp teeth like the knives of the Iron Virgin of Nürnberg. Others, innocent, humble little creatures, look “as if they would not hurt a fly.” But let the fly beware, and keep out of their grip—“foxes in stealth, wolves in greediness,” they are armed like the butterwort (_pinguicula_) with glands which become active at the touch, and secure the prisoner, or as the sundew (_drosera_), equipped with tentacles which close in upon him like a horror in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. How these creatures feed and how they digest their meat is told in Darwin’s “Insectivorous Plants” and elsewhere. These are facts, not fancies. But what gastronome could take offence if he were accused of being as greedy as sundew!

There is one human quality, the power of enjoyment, which, above all others, we seem to recognize in our plants. It is impossible to look upon the daffodils in a field dancing in the sunlight of an early April day, without feeling that here is the very embodiment of gladness—of the _joie de vivre_; and as the months speed on and flower after flower bursts into life, meeting the renewed glories of the sun, we have before us a roundelay of gaiety and happiness which only quite ceases when the first grip of winter comes to choke and kill the melancholy glory of autumn. Then, when the dahlias hang their stricken heads, and the blue clouds of the Michaelmas daisies fade and shed their seed, we are conscious of the fact that they, too, have their sorrows, though the tragedy of so many has passed unnoticed when rivals, each one more beautiful than the last, have been springing up to take their place. A greater than I am has noticed the pleasure that plants take in the act of living. A friend sends me these lines of Wordsworth’s:

“The budding twigs spread out their fan To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there.”

And so we linger on in our Veluvana until the sun is setting in the west. There is an end of light and heat for this day, and the plants, like the birds, must sleep and even dream, if Keats be right.[18] Theirs is perhaps not the sleep which we know, but nothing is more certain than the change which they undergo in darkness. In some plants the leaflets curl downwards, in others upwards; in many the flowers close altogether, and are folded almost as they were when buds. But all green plants show one phenomenon. Whereas under light the leaves take up the air in the little mouths on the underside of their leaves, and after working up the carbonic-acid gas into carbon for the building of their stems and branches, return the rest in the shape of pure oxygen, purifying and sweetening the air; when night comes the process is reversed. Then they retain the oxygen and exhale carbonic-acid gas only, and that is why careful nurses, though they may not know the reason, turn plants out of a sick-room when the night comes on. It has been calculated that of those little stomates on the underside of a beech leaf, little kitchens or laboratories in which the tree prepares its food, there are no fewer than a million. Yes, the plants must sleep—all save certain disreputable night-blooms, which, like owls and bats and witches, hate the light and haunt the darkness. In a few hours the first glimmer of dawn will break; the rosy-fingered goddess will rouse her choir of birds, and they, with their morning hymn, will awaken the trees and the flowers; the blessed dew will fall, distilling the sweet scents of woodland and gardenland, and the joy of the world and of the plants will spring into the birth of a day.

If I were able to accept, as do the pious Buddhists, the doctrine of rebirth and the transmigration of souls, I, noting what I have called the purposeful movements of plant-life, should be inclined to go a step further than they do. If a man may have been in a previous state of existence a stag, a monkey, or a snake, why should he not equally have been a tree, a shrub, or a poisonous creeper? The stately dignity of the oak, the sweet virtues of the rose, the venomous juice of the deadly nightshade, are qualities which might be traced in many a reincarnation. The image, at any rate, is found in Ezekiel: “Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches and with a shadowing shroud and of an high stature, and his top was among the thick boughs” (Ezekiel xxxi. 3).

When all is said and done, is it so very foolish, as we sit wool-gathering and drinking in the sweetness of a summer’s evening amid the fragrance of our Veluvana, to let our thoughts run riot among the many-coloured clouds of fancy, tracing some faint signs of kinship between the moods of men and the moods of plants? And if, in the indulgence of these whimsies, treating the search for knowledge, not as we English are supposed to take our pleasures—_moult tristement_—we should chance to strike some tiny spark of truth hitherto hidden from us, may we not call in Horace as counsel for the defence and ask:

“——ridentem dicere verum Quid vetat?”

Enshrined, as it were, in a temple of secular oaks, and other grave and reverend trees, there stands a small mulberry tree, very humble and inconspicuous, having hardly as yet reached the dignity of a shrub. In the late spring and early summer it is surrounded by flaming azaleas, white and deep purple lilacs, and other flowering Japanese maples, with their coral buds bursting into crimson leaves—all the “embroidery” of the Japanese forests, which look as if they had been planted to do honour to the little waif, the radiance of whose pedigree, indeed, outshines all their glory. It is like the beggar-maid at the African King Cophetua’s court, but, like that humble maiden, worthy of royal favour above all the flaunting beauties who surrounded that “magnanimous and illustrate” monarch’s throne; for that little tree, or tree that, by the grace of Pomona, shall yet be, is an undoubted scion of the tree which Shakespeare planted in the garden of the new home which he built for his prosperous retirement at Stratford-on-Avon. The story is complete in all its details. It has been told by Malone in his life, and recently by Sir Sidney Lee in the admirable new edition of his life of the poet, and is confirmed by what Dr. Johnson told Boswell when they visited Mrs. Gastrell.

In the year 1597 Shakespeare, minded to end his days in his native town, as should become an Armiger of good means, bought New Place, which had been the most considerable house in Stratford; but the buildings were in ruins, and the poet built himself a new house with three gables, the centre of which carried a shield with the spear, which he adopted as his coat-of-arms. “Shakespeare paid for it,” writes Sir Sidney Lee, “with two gardens, the then substantial sum of sixty pounds. A curious incident postponed legal possession. The vendor of the Stratford Manor House, William Underhill, died suddenly of poison at another residence in the county—Fillongley, near Coventry—and the legal transfer to the dramatist was left at the time incomplete. Underhill’s eldest son Fulk died a minor at Warwick next year, and after his death he was proved to have murdered his father. The family estates were thus in danger of forfeiture, but they were suffered to pass to the felon’s next brother Hercules, who, on coming of age in 1602, completed in a new deed the transfer of New Place to Shakespeare.” Sir Sidney goes on to say that the poet does not appear to have permanently settled at New Place until 1611. In the meantime, he had been busy rebuilding the house and planning his garden. And now for the history of the famous mulberry tree.

Soon after his accession to the throne King James the First appears to have been fascinated by the idea of establishing the cultivation of silk in this country. There was a Frenchman, a native of Picardy, of the name of Forest, who, in the year 1608, “kept greate store of English silk-worms at Greenwich, the which the King, with great pleasure, came often to see them worke; and of their silke he caused a piece of taffeta to be made” (Malone’s “Life of Shakespeare”). This led to the King’s planting many hundred thousand mulberry trees in this country, those destined for the Midland Counties being distributed by a Frenchman named Véron. But the King also planted a number of trees south of Hyde Park, at the western end of what now are Buckingham Palace Gardens. These trees gave the name to the famous “Mulberry Gardens,” of which I shall say a word later.

It seems that on his return from one of his annual excursions to London, Shakespeare brought back with him a young mulberry tree, and with his own hands planted it in his garden, in which tradition says that he loved to work. What more natural than that the courtier-actor, who was as much petted by King James as he had been in the previous reign, should wish to enrich his Eden with a specimen of the latest botanical craze? After passing through various hands, the house passed back to Sir Hugh Clopton, whose family had formerly possessed it. Sir Hugh pulled down Shakespeare’s three-gabled and ugly house, and built one more suitable to his position, where, in May, 1742, Malone tells us that he hospitably entertained Garrick, Macklin and Delane under the poet’s own mulberry tree. In 1790 the father of Mr. Davenport’s clerk, then ninety-five years old, told Malone that as a boy he lived in the next house to New Place, and that he had often eaten of the fruit of the tree, some branches of which overhung his father’s garden; that it was planted by the poet, and the first mulberry tree to be seen in the neighbourhood.

In 1752 Henry Talbot, son-in-law and executor of Sir Hugh Clopton, sold New Place to a clergyman of the name of Gastrell, a man of fortune and Vicar of Frodsham in Cheshire, apparently an ill-conditioned, quarrelsome man, who was soon in hot water with his neighbours. He had a dispute with the town over assessments, in which, by the by, he was utterly in the wrong, and he so resented the desire of sightseers to be admitted to view the famous mulberry tree, that to spite them and the townsfolk he, in 1758, cut down the tree, his wife urging him to the impious act, as Dr. Johnson told Boswell. She, the Lady Macbeth of this “withered murder,” was a daughter of Sir Thomas Aston and sister to Mrs. Walmesley, the wife of Johnson’s first patron, and to the lovely Molly Aston, whose beauty so stirred the inflammable Dr. Johnson that the groves and woods of Staffordshire and Derbyshire rang with its praises sung by an elderly Tityrus in a bush-wig. The grand old amorist never wearied of celebrating the charms of his lovely ladies. Even the Island of Skye was forced to resound with the perfections of his Thralia Dulcis in one of the worst Sapphic odes that ever brought wrath upon a fifth-form boy.

At last the vandal parson, irritated beyond measure by his own bilious spite, declared that the house should pay no more assessments, so he pulled it down and broke it up for sale of the building materials. As Shakespeare’s own house had been long since destroyed by Sir Hugh Clopton, that did not signify so much, but the murder of the sacred tree was another matter. We may be sure that when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth finally turned their backs upon Stratford, their departure was not bemoaned by their neighbours.

Blessed are the enthusiasts. It is true that they are sometimes egregious bores, but they are never so bad as the iconoclasts, and they do much good in the world. Before the murder of the famous mulberry tree Edward Capell, the Shakespearian commentator, whose work rather fell under the cruel lash of Dr. Johnson, had managed to secure a cutting of it, which he carried to Troston Hall, his place in Suffolk, and planted in his garden. There is no easier tree to propagate than the mulberry; in that respect, it is like the willow. Cut a branch of it and stick it in the ground, and when the spring comes it will begin to show signs of life. Lurking in mysterious hiding-places in the bark are myriads of tiny unsuspected buds, full of life and vigour, which in due season will send down little slender fibres till they reach the soil, whence they derive nourishment; in time the buds will burst their prison of bark, and before many years are past a new tree will bear fruit. So Mr. Capell’s cutting throve amazingly and gave birth to a little colony of offshoots. How or when I know not, Troston passed into the possession of Mr. Lofft, and he, when about to let the place and disperse his collection of plants, wrote to Sir William Thiselton Dyer, October 6th, 1896, offering “some scions of Shakespeare’s tree” to Kew. I at once wrote, begging for one of these scions, that it might be planted in Buckingham Palace Gardens—the site of the old mulberry plantation of King James. What more appropriate home could be found for it? There still stands, by the by, in the Palace grounds a venerable mulberry tree which must be the one last relic of King James’s attempt at silk-worm cultivation.

The mulberry gardens were soon converted into a pleasure resort after the manner of the Vauxhall and Cremorne of my youth. Both Evelyn and Pepys mention them and give them the worst of characters. Evelyn calls them (May 10th, 1654) “the only place of refreshment about the town for persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated at, Cromwell and his partisans having shut up and seized on Spring Gardens, which till now had been the usual rendezvous for ladies and gallants at this season.” Pepys, in his outspoken way, went further in his condemnation some years later. His spades were always spades—yet the sly old dog confessed to having amused himself greatly there. There is in especial a very characteristic account of a dinner there, given by Mr. Sheres, at which Pepys was introduced to a Spanish Olio, “a very noble dish, such as I never saw better or any more of. This and the discourse he did give us of Spain, and description of the Escuriall, was a fine treat.” The entertainment seems to have been managed with an eye to economy, for after dinner they all went off to Brentford, ordering the waiter to set on one side what had not been eaten, and they would come back and have it for supper. What would the head waiter at the “Ritz” or the “Carlton” say to such an order as that? But the evening was spoilt by the sudden indisposition of poor Mr. Sheres, the amphitryon of the Olio, probably the cause of the trouble—to which Pepys appears to have returned to the “noble dish” with appetite, issuing unscathed from the temptation.

Sir Charles Sedley, the profligate wit and brilliant writer, of whom Charles the Second said that “Nature had given him a patent as Apollo’s viceroy,” and that “his style, whether in writing or discourse, would be the standard of the English tongue,” wrote a play called the _Mulberry Garden_, which Pepys, a great playgoer and probably a good judge, damned with faint praise. The “Tribullus of his age,” as Dryden dubbed him in his dedication to “The Assignation,” for once had failed to score.

The story of Shakespeare’s mulberry has led me far astray, and when we get to Evelyn and Pepys it is difficult not to wander on. But I must curb my prolixity. I think I have said enough to show that the Troston plants have a pedigree which it would defy all the sagacity and learning of the College of Heralds to demolish. Kew, always generous, has continued to propagate from them, and as Sir David Prain, the present director, writes to Sir Sidney Lee: “We have sent plants to places where there are memorials of Shakespeare, and to people interested in matters relating to him.” It is to the kindness of Sir William Thiselton Dyer that I owe my special treasure.

I do not know upon what authority is based the statement that the tree now growing in New Place is a scion of the old tree—probably it is. But, in any case, there are offshoots enough propagated by the pious care of Kew from the Troston stock to do away with any fear lest the dynasty should die out.

RUSSIA

The time which I spent in Russia in 1863-64 was a transition period. Transition periods in history are always difficult to describe, and still more difficult to explain. It is comparatively easy to tell the story of some great concrete fact, a world-encompassing war, a revolution, the upheaval of a dynasty; but to set out the causes which, working during a period of externally unruffled calm, are brewing the hell-broth; to show the hidden powers which are silently operating under the surface to bring about a mighty change—that is a task before which even those who have the best information may well hesitate.

Every skilled newspaper correspondent will, without much difficulty, write a brilliant description of an earthquake with all the harrowing and soul-stirring horrors of the upheaval; but even the most experienced seismologist hardly dares to set on paper his estimate of the mysterious hidden forces, which, battling in the bowels of the earth, unseen and unsuspected, burst out in their wrath to wreak the tragedies of Lisbon or of Catania. So it is with transition periods in history. They are generally marked by peace and prosperity. There are often no outward signs to sound the alarm that there is trouble ahead.

The political catastrophe, like the earthquake, comes without warning; like the wrecking typhoon, it may be preceded by a dead calm. It will be said with justice that these violent similes do not fit the case of Russia. There has been no great epidemic of violence, no fierce upheaval like that of the French Revolution. Individual murders there have been. The pages of Russian history are stained by cruelty and murder, culminating in the barbarous tragedy of the death of the Emperor Alexander the Second; but the changes which have taken place have been wrought without disturbing the atmosphere of the world at large. None the less, the revolution here has been far-reaching.

The Russia of to-day differs _toto coelo_ from the Russia of a hundred years ago. Absolutism died with the Emperor Nicholas, and no Russian Tsar will ever again be able to rule, or even try to rule, without taking into account the will of his people. The relations between the sovereign and his subjects are for that very reason happier than they ever were, and the events of the last two years have shown that loyalty has not perished because autocracy has given up the ghost. The strength of Holy Russia to-day, in the face of the German war of aggression, lies in the determined attitude of the people—in their pious love for their country, in their almost fanatical belief in their Church, and in their veneration for the great White Tsar who is the head of that Church.

The nineteenth century opened darkly enough for Russia. The Emperor Paul had been on the throne for four years—a gloomy, unhappy man, not without ability, not without the wish to do what was right, until his mind was unhinged by madness. The first acts of his reign were worthy of all praise. He showed kindly feeling, clemency, and even generosity to the Poles, setting free those that had been imprisoned, and making ample provision for their heroic leader, Kosciusko. His edict enacting that the succession to the throne should be determined, not by the will or caprice of the reigning sovereign, but by a fixed and certain law of primogeniture, was a wise measure, calculated to save his country from the intrigues and bloodshed under which she had suffered so long.

But the early days of his reign were embittered by the knowledge conveyed to him by his Vice-Chancellor, Count Bezbarooks, that it had been the intention of his mother, Catherine the Great, to exclude him from the succession in favour of his own son, Alexander. Apart from that, he was a haunted man. Haunted by the murder of his father, Peter the Third, knowing full well that if the hand was the hand of Orloff, the dictating voice was the voice of his mother, Catherine.

Haunted by suspicion, unable to trust any living soul—if a curtain rustled, stirred by the wind, a murderer stood hidden behind it; if two courtiers spoke in a whisper, it was a conspiracy; a cough was the signal to a confederate; once when the Empress was talking in a low voice to a foreign ambassador, he bade her speak up, saying: “You may be prepared to play the part of Catherine, but I would have you remember that in me you will not find a Peter the Third.” A terrible speech, showing what he knew of the past, what he dreaded in the future!

His wife, his ministers, his officers, were all under suspicion. He looked upon his Court as a hotbed of treason, conspiracy and murder. It was not to be wondered at that in a brain so tortured, the seeds of hereditary madness should have been swift to germinate. Then came all those grotesquely savage edicts which could only be accounted for by insanity. The wearing of trousers, or of a round hat, were crimes to be punished by the knut; short hair without pigtails constituted a criminal offence; ladies must stop their carriages and step out into the snow and mud to salute him when his sleigh or carriage came in sight. Three ladies who disobeyed the order—one of whom was hurrying to fetch a doctor to her dying husband—were seized by the police, carried off to the guard-house, stripped, shaved and whipped. It was clear that the man was as mad as Bedlam, but there were no Anticyræ for Tsars.

Russia took the law into her own hands. A conspiracy was formed, with Count Peter Pahlen, Minister President and Military Governor of Petersburg, at its head, to put an end to despotism—a cruel weapon in the hands of a lunatic. The conspirators were men of the highest rank by birth and by virtue of office—Pahlen himself, prime minister and the trusted friend of his Sovereign, who delighted in loading him with honours. In the night of the 24th of March they forced their way into the Michailow Palace, surprised the unhappy Emperor in his bedroom and strangled him with his own military sash. He fought with the demoniac fury of a madman, for he was of strong and muscular build, and it was no easy matter to overpower him. He tried to burst into the Empress’s apartments, which adjoined his, but here his distrust of her proved his undoing—he had caused the door which led to her rooms to be hermetically fastened. His suspicions closed to him the one possibility of escape, the one refuge with the wife who would not have failed him in his sore need.

Paul’s foreign policy was feeble. He detested the French Revolution, and yet threw himself into the arms of Napoleon; at other times he was prepared to flirt with England. The most noteworthy of his acts was the edict in regard to the succession to which I have alluded above. Its importance lay especially in the fact that it drove the first nail into the coffin of absolutism. It is evident that an “absolute” monarch, who has been deprived of his omnipotence in any one particular, ceases _ipso facto_ to be flawlessly absolute. Certainly, absolutism did not finally die till fifty-five years later. But a rift in the panoply of the Tsars had been made by the Emperor Paul.

I heard much about the reign of the mad Tsar when I was at St. Petersburg in 1863. There were still some old people who could talk about those days. Count Peter Pahlen had been long dead; after the murder he betook himself to his country place and disappeared from public life. But I had to represent my chief at the funeral of his brother, who commanded the cavalry against Napoleon in 1812, and with a still younger brother, Count Nicholas Pahlen, I was intimate in London for several years. Another link with that time was old Countess Rasumowski, who had been divorced and banished from the Court, but forgiven and taken into favour again by Paul. It was one of his acts of clemency. She was sister-in-law of Beethoven’s friend to whom he dedicated the famous quartets. How old she was I know not, but she was a great figurehead in Russian society, and on her name-day all St. Petersburg, from the Emperor downwards, flocked to her house. I had to go, as my chief had a cold, and I represented him. The dear naughty old lady was sitting in state, dressed all in white like a bride, with a wreath of pink roses round her head. That and the rouge with which she had plastered her poor withered cheeks made her look quite antediluvian. She must certainly have been near a hundred. The memory of Count Ribeaupierre, who was Grand Maitre de la Cour, and with whom I was also acquainted, went even further back. He had been page of honour to the Empress Catherine, who died in 1796. These are names only worth mentioning, in order to show that some of my impressions of the unhappy Tsar’s reign were drawn at first-hand.

Judging from the accounts given by the few old people who themselves remembered those times, and from the talk of younger men who had heard from their own fathers—perhaps actors in the crime—the whole history of that midnight murder, the outrage did not arouse any excitement commensurate with the horror of the deed. Men had become callous; they had grown used to seeing the rulers of the reigning dynasty disappear by violent or mysterious deaths. What really would have startled them would have been to hear that a Tsar had died a peaceful death in his bed, for murder had come to be looked upon as the natural end of a Romanoff. On the morning of the 24th of March St. Petersburg, awakening to the gruesome news of the night, heaved a sigh of relief, and went about its business. That business was the accession of a new Tsar.

Alexander has been accused of being privy to his father’s murder, but from all the evidence which I was able to gather, this was a calumny. There is no doubt that he was in touch with the conspirators, and that he was a consenting party to his father’s removal from the throne. Paul’s state was such that not even a son could wish to see his father remain vested with the terrible power of the autocrat of all the Russias. But murder, let alone parricide, was not in his nature. All the acts of his reign gave the lie to so hideous a charge. The man who set free the political exiles in Siberia, who abolished torture from the criminal code of his country, who made it illegal to hold sales of serfs, who helped to extend the blessings of education by founding universities, was a wise and humane ruler. Even the policy which made him countenance the conspiracy against his father was in the interests of humanity. Had he known the extremity to which that plot was to be pushed, we may be sure that he would have fought rather than not interpose his authority.

At the outset of his reign the young Emperor was hypnotized by the glamour of the fame of Napoleon, who was then First Consul and seemed to be destined for the dictatorship of the world. But that crime, and worse than crime, that mistake, as Talleyrand put it—the murder of the Duc d’Enghien at Vincennes in March, 1804—aroused the greatest indignation in the mind of Alexander, and the Russian chargé d’affaires at Paris was instructed to express that feeling in no measured terms. The First Consul’s reply was, in effect, a request that the Emperor would mind his own business. A further note was sent, recapitulating the claims and remonstrances of Russia, and M. d’Oubril asked for his passports.

The tragedy of Vincennes had provoked the anger of Alexander; the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor by the Pope summoned from Rome to do his bidding, on the 19th of November in the same year, called up a totally different but no less hostile feeling. That a Corsican adventurer should robe himself in the Imperial purple and pretend to equal rank with himself, was something which the proud Romanoff could not brook. The disgust and indignation engendered by Napoleon’s cruelty and pretensions were enhanced by his territorial encroachments. Alexander threw himself heart and soul into the combination against the French, and Europe was once more ablaze with war until the Peace of Tilsit in 1807, when on board a raft anchored in the river Niemen, the two Emperors fell into one another’s arms, kissed, and swore eternal friendship.

It would be outside of the purview of my task to dwell upon this event were it not for the interest attaching to the secret treaty entered into upon that occasion, an instrument the conditions of which were not made public until the year 1834, but which so clearly illustrated the ambitions of both nations. Napoleon undertook that Russia should become possessed of European Turkey, with Constantinople and the outlet into the Mediterranean, and pursue her conquests in Asia as far as she chose, India being, of course, understood as the objective. France was to have Egypt, Malta, the assistance of the Russian fleet in the capture of Gibraltar—the navigation of the Mediterranean being confined to French, Russian, Spanish and Italian ships. There were other provisions and much detail, but the above were the chief points. The amusing feature of this still-born treaty was that neither party honestly meant business. Each thought that he was jockeying the other, with the firm intention of carrying out no more of it than was for his own advantage. Tomini, who was aide-de-camp to Napoleon,[19] wrote and told Paris that Alexander had been made to swallow a strong dose of opium, which would keep him quiet for some time, while Boutourlin told St. Petersburg that the terms of the treaty imposed such liabilities upon Russia that it must only be looked upon as a means of gaining time.

Alexander was present at the meeting of the German princes called together by Napoleon at Erfurt in the following year. Napoleon had provided for the entertainment of what it would be irony to call his guests, by summoning from Paris the famous Talma with his troupe of actors. One of the plays chosen was Voltaire’s _Œdipe_, and when the player came to the line:—

“L’amitié d’un grand homme est un bienfait des Dieux,”

the gigantic Russian Emperor leant over and theatrically seizing Napoleon’s hand, said “Je n’ai jamais mieux senti!” The stage effect missed fire, for the great little friend was quietly dozing, and had to be aroused to consciousness of what was happening. The “parterre de Rois,” the “pit of Kings,” smiled and applauded, but the demonstration was a fiasco.

The “bienfait des Dieux” was not long lived. In four short years after the meeting at Erfurt Napoleon made the greatest mistake of his life. He was at Moscow, and there we may leave him, standing on the Sparrow Hill in his favourite attitude, his arms folded, his brows bent, looking upon the barbaric splendour of the fantastic pink towers and battlements of the Kremlin, waiting for the delivery of the keys of the citadel—the keys which never came.

The mystery of the burning of Moscow will never be cleared up. Was the city fired by Rostopchin? Did he even connive at the deed? He himself denied it in a pamphlet published at Paris in 1823, but in my day nobody with whom I spoke on the subject believed him. The general opinion was that this great act of patriotism, which was the beginning of Napoleon’s downfall, was indeed his work. He burnt his own country house and destroyed his property, so that nothing should fall into the hands of the enemy—what more consistent than that he should deprive them of all supplies and all communication by burning the sacred capital after removing as many of its inhabitants as was possible. I have called the fire an act of patriotism. I ought to have said Russian patriotism. The attachment of the Russian to the soil is something sacred. The Mujik has two religions—the religion of God and the religion of the soil. Holy Russia is to him not a mere jingle of words, and Rostopchin, when he punished the sacrilege of the invader, knew that he could count upon having with him the most sacred feelings of his fellow-countrymen. He was, indeed, the typical Russian of his time. The placard which he put on the village church, the only building on the property which he left standing, is characteristic:

“For eight years I have been embellishing this place, and I have lived here happily in the bosom of my family. At your approach the seventeen hundred and twenty inhabitants of this property are leaving it, and I set fire to my house that it may not be polluted by your presence. Frenchmen! I have left you my two houses in Moscow, with their contents worth half a million roubles; here you will find nothing but ashes.”

This, of a surety, was a brave, a determined and patriotic man—a true Russian. He had been a great favourite of the Emperor Paul, and by his sage advice saved that unhappy man from many follies. It was said that had he been at St. Petersburg on the fatal 24th of March, 1801, the murder might not have been committed. During the early years of Alexander’s reign Rostopchin was out of favour. But there came a time when the Emperor became aware of his worth and courage, and made him Lord Chamberlain and Governor of Moscow. He was a descendant of the Great Mongol warrior of the twelfth century, Genghis Khan, and so he described himself in the following lines:

“Je suis né Tatare, Je voulais être Romain. Les Français m’ont fait barbare, Et les Russes Georges Dandin.”

There is an excellent article on Rostopchin in the “Biographie Générale,” the book that Carlyle used to prize so highly.

The Emperor Alexander the First died in 1825 in circumstances which gave rise to some suspicion. He had left St. Petersburg in the month of December, with the Empress, who was ailing, his object being to take her to a warmer climate. He seems to have been for some time depressed and haunted by the sinister idea that his death was not far off. He was always more or less dominated by the spell of mysticism, and, indeed, it was under the influence of a mystic, a certain Madame de Krüdener, that he was induced to found the Holy Alliance. Before leaving St. Petersburg it is said that he went to the Church of the Convent of St. Alexander Nevski and caused a funeral service to be read. As he left the town he stopped his carriage to cast a last yearning look upon the city where he had been born and which he loved so well. He left the Empress at Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, and went to the Crimea, where he caught a fever, hurried back to Taganrog and died, not before he was made aware of the discovery of a plot to murder him and the whole Imperial Family.

It is difficult to understand why any Russian should have wished his death. Educated as he had been by his Swiss tutor, the famous La Harpe, in the most liberal principles, in his domestic policy he devoted himself heart and soul to the good of his people. Early in his reign he abolished serfdom in Esthonia, Livonia and Kurland. He introduced reforms into the older universities and created new ones. He promoted the study of science, and gave his active patronage to all the educational institutions in the Empire. He did away with the so-called Secret Tribunal, a sort of Star Chamber, for the arbitrary trial of political offences. Commerce and industry were special objects of his care. He built new harbours and made roads, and in 1818 extended to the peasants the right of establishing manufactories and commercial undertakings, a privilege which up to his time had been confined to the upper classes.

If, later in his reign, he seemed rather inclined to go back upon these liberal principles, it must be ascribed to the poor and unsympathetic return with which his endeavours were met. The country was hardly ripe for his audacious programme—certainly not for parliamentary government, which at one time he had in view. His own wish was to substitute a constitution for the absolutism which had existed up to his day. He was before his time. Napoleon might sneer at his duplicity and call him “un Grec du bas Empire,” but he recognized his talent and his capacity for governing. The vast majority of his people adored the handsome giant, but treachery and treason were plotting underground, and rebellion broke out, as we shall see, as soon as his soul had left his body. That sorrow he was mercifully spared, though the knowledge that it was coming arrived to embitter his last days.

The Emperor Nicholas came to the throne at a moment when a political storm of the greatest violence was ready to burst. More than one division of the army was known to have been tampered with and to be disaffected, and many of the chief nobles were conspiring for a constitutional government. The warning—or was it more than a warning?—received by the dead Emperor was sufficient to prove this, and there were at that moment special circumstances in the succession to the throne which were markedly favourable to revolution.

Alexander, deeply imbued, as I have said, with mysticism, had a foreboding that he would not be long-lived. He deposited with the Council of the Empire a packet, the seals of which were not to be broken without his command except in the event of his death, in which case it was to be opened at once and acted upon forthwith. As he died without issue, the Imperial Crown would, in accordance with the law of succession fixed by his father Paul, devolve upon his next brother, Constantine. He, however, was unwilling to reign. He preferred to remain as he was, governor and practically sovereign of Poland. Tsar of all the Russias he would not be. The mysterious packet was found to contain a letter from him, renouncing his claim to the throne in favour of his younger brother Nicholas. As soon as this was known, Nicholas most scrupulously did all in his power to induce his brother to alter his determination. He even went so far as to proclaim Constantine Emperor. The latter, however, in spite of repeated appeals from his brother, held to his fixed purpose, and Nicholas became Emperor against his own will and endeavours.

The conspirators found in these difficulties a rare opportunity for the attempt to carry out their plans. The interregnum had lasted fifteen days, and it was not till the 24th of December that Nicholas took possession of the Imperial Palace. On the 25th of December he read to the council the final renunciation of the Crown by Constantine, and on the following day he was proclaimed Emperor. That day the conspirators and the rebels assembled in the huge square—the Isaac Place—and shouted for Constantine and “his bride, the Constitution,” the soldiers believing in their innocence that “Constitution” was the name of the Grand Duke’s real wife. Nicholas, unarmed, but attended by General Milarodowitch, the Governor of St. Petersburg, and a battalion of faithful grenadiers, and accompanied by M. de la Ferronays, the French Ambassador, left the Palace and faced the rebels. The general, who was greatly beloved by the whole army, went forward and tried to speak with them, but he was at once bayoneted and shot.

The new Emperor showed the greatest courage and patience, and it was not until near nightfall that, the rebels having fired the first shot, he ordered his artillery to put an end to the trouble. Some two hundred men were killed by grape and canister. The five ringleaders were taken prisoners, tried and hanged some months later. One of the Princes Troubetzkoi, who had been foremost in his threats against the Emperor’s life, being sent for by the Tsar, threw himself at his feet and implored his pardon. “Sit down,” said Nicholas, “and write to your wife at my dictation.” The Prince sat down and the Tsar dictated: “My life is spared.” The Prince was so overcome that he could write no more. “Now seal your letter and go,” said the Tsar; “take your life, and spend it in remorse and repentance.”

The remainder of the conspirators, men of noble family, were sent to Siberia—so many of them as were still alive were pardoned and set free by that generous and noble sovereign, Alexander the Second, on his accession to the throne thirty years later. With the Dekabrists, the “men of December,” as they were called, the cry for Constantine was a mere pretext—the seizing of a possible chance. The real object was the abolition of Royalty and the proclaiming of a constitution. Nicholas has sometimes been accused of taking too stern measures against the Dekabrists. With that judgment I cannot agree. He was attacked with armed force, his murder and that of his whole family being the object; he did not strike the first blow. He could not expect to quell a formidable revolution in the army with rose-water. It was no sudden, passionate outburst of a people aching under the sense of wrong. The murderous plot, long meditated and carefully prepared, had been executed in cold blood. His brother lay dead at Taganrog. He and his dearly-loved boy, whom he had left entrusted to sure hands in the palace, were to have been the next victims. The whole conspiracy lay revealed as in an open book. It was all the more dangerous in that it was not a mob riot, but a conspiracy of men of high birth, education and position, corrupting the army itself. Put yourselves in his place. That he was horror-stricken at the massacre was proved by the pathetic cry which he uttered to M. de la Ferronays, the French Ambassador, who never left his side throughout that cruel day: “Ah! quel commencement de règne.” It was to him the skeleton at the feast throughout his life.

Shortly after his accession to the throne the Duke of Wellington was sent to Russia as special ambassador, nominally to congratulate him, but also with the object of inducing the new Tsar to adopt a conciliatory attitude towards the Sultan, between whom and the Greeks there was much trouble. The irony of Fate made the Duke take with him as Secretary of Embassy, Lord Fitzroy Somerset (Lord Raglan), the general whose victories twenty-nine years later in the defence of Turkey were to break the proud heart of that same Tsar. It was during these negotiations that Nicholas formed his estimate of the Duke’s character, and caused him to cherish in his heart the memory of the great soldier as of a model to be copied. It was then, too, that he first declared that he had no higher ambition than to be a “gentleman,” using the English word; and whatever may have been his faults, whatever his ambition, a truthful, honest gentleman he remained to his life’s end. To the Duke of Wellington he made no secret of his determination to allow no foreign Power, or Powers, to interfere between himself and the Porte. That was his lifelong consistent policy. If Nicholas was reactionary, if he hated education and opposed the spread of science, if he strained the powers of absolutism almost to the breaking point, he did so openly, and it was the tragedy of his accession which poisoned his many fine qualities.

During his reign the ship of State was seldom in smooth waters. He sent Prince Mentschikoff to Persia to announce his accession to the throne, with instructions to enter into negotiations for the settlement of the frontier questions which were in dispute. If the maintenance of peace be the proper aim of diplomacy, Mentschikoff was not a successful ambassador. His mission to Persia ended in war, as did his embassy to Turkey more than a quarter of a century later. The Russians, under Prince Paskiewitch, were victorious, and the province of Erivan was added to Russia.

Poland was the chief thorn in his side in 1828; two years after his coronation at Moscow he caused himself to be crowned King of Poland at Warsaw. The ceremonial was gorgeous, and the King-Emperor, invoking the Supreme Majesty of Heaven, prayed that he might govern for the happiness of his people. He also wrote to the Pope, thanking His Holiness for the reception given to the Tsarevitch, promising to “protect the well-being of his Catholic subjects respecting their convictions,” etc. That he was sincere in these undertakings admits of little doubt. Unfortunately he was represented at Warsaw by his brother Constantine, who, as his elder, and as having renounced the throne in his favour, had more influence than an ordinary governor would have had. The revolution in Poland broke out in 1830, and Prince Sanguszko, the head of one of the noblest families in the country, people whom I afterwards knew, was one of the leaders. He was taken prisoner and degraded, and his estates were forfeited. It was said that when he was sent to Siberia, the Emperor, with his own hand, wrote that the journey was to be made on foot. When I was in Russia many years later, I had reason to believe that this was not true. The troubles in Poland lasted for many years—indeed, were never extinguished—and they led to gross exaggerations.

I was in Paris as a small boy in 1845, and I well remember hearing all the horrors that were hawked about there, and all the stories of cruelty. Especially I recollect one day how when certain news came to one of the Prince de la Moskowa’s concerts—he was the son of Marshal Ney and an accomplished musician and conductor—the pious Roman Catholics present lashed themselves into a fury of emotion over the sufferings of the nuns of St. Basil. It was affirmed that they had been stripped naked, flogged and tortured, and that when they were starving and begged for food their mouths were filled with earthworms. Those were the lies by which the indignation of their co-religionists was aroused by Polish agents. The best informed people did not believe them. That the Poles were cruelly treated, and harshly misgoverned, was certainly to be laid to the charge of the Grand Duke Constantine. He had inherited the still-living hatreds and the memory of Moscow in the beginning of the seventeenth century. There were old scores to be settled, and his doctrine was an eye for an eye, the _lex talionis_ in its greatest rigidity. It would have been a hard matter in any case for the Tsar to bring Russia and Poland into harmony. With Constantine at Warsaw it was impossible—yet the Grand Duke had married a Polish lady.

The affairs of Poland were an apple of discord between France and Russia. The military successes of Nicholas were really confined to the Persian campaign, for although in his subsequent operations on the Danube in 1828 (poor Wallachia and Moldavia), his troops had some success, and even took Varna, the expedition served no great purpose, while it effectually showed the Tsar’s incapacity as a leader, for having taken the field in person, he had to return to St. Petersburg a pronounced failure—recognized as such by his own generals.

A civil triumph was the codification of the Russian law, begun in 1827 and finished in 1846, by which the peasants greatly benefited; was the chief feat in internal administration by which his reign was distinguished.

In 1844 the Emperor Nicholas came to England and visited Queen Victoria at Windsor. The object of his visit was twofold. The Queen had received Louis Philippe, whom he hated and despised, and he was determined to see whether he could not counteract the wily old King’s influence. Secondly, the Convention of London of 1841 placed the Ottoman dominions under the protection of the Powers, and this manifestly did not suit the Tsar’s book. He had his own views as to the Sublime Porte, and would brook no interference between himself and the Sultan, whose Christian subjects he wished to place under his own shield. That was for him a principle of religion. It was a momentous visit, destined to bear bitter fruit ten years later.

Sir Robert Peel was at this time Prime Minister, and Lord Aberdeen Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. It was only natural that the Foreign Secretary should have much conversation with his Sovereign’s illustrious guest, and Lord Aberdeen was, by his gentle and conciliatory manners, the man, above all others, fitted to charm the Tsar, who to the last retained an affectionate admiration for him. Perhaps Lord Aberdeen’s deportment towards the Emperor was a little too deferential; at any rate, he left Nicholas convinced that the Russian views as to Turkey were shared by the British Government, and it was with unfeigned joy that in 1852 the Emperor learnt of the accession to power as Prime Minister of a man whom he flattered himself that he had talked over to his way of thinking, and whose peace-loving disposition would never allow him to go to war on behalf of the autonomy of Turkey. That he honestly believed that he had had such an assurance from Lord Aberdeen cannot be doubted.

In its main features the story of the Crimean War will never be forgotten. The storming of the heights of the Alma, which Nicholas believed to be impregnable, the beating back of the tidal wave of Russian infantry at Inkermann, when my old friend, Billy Hewitt, ordered to spike his guns and retire, answered, “Spike be damned!” and went on firing till they were red hot and the enemy were in retreat—just one gallant deed among many of that bloody battle; above all, the heroic charge of the six hundred at Balaclava, are feats of arms which must set men on fire as long as they have pulses to quicken. But how many men are there nowadays who could give any account of the causes which led to the war?

The quarrels between the monks of the Greek and Latin churches in Palestine seem trivial enough reason to have started so great a catastrophe. The custody of the key of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, the right to worship in the Church of the Virgin near the Garden of Gethsemane, and the custody of the Sanctuaries of Jerusalem, were the first pretexts of hostilities. That there was in the mind of the Emperor Nicholas a far wider-reaching motive, hardly suspected perhaps even by himself, will be seen presently.

In the year 1740 a treaty concluded between Louis XV. and the Porte, practically gave the care of the Sacred Places to the Latin Church. To the Greeks certain similar concessions had been made later on by firmans, or edicts of the Sultan, which, however, could not technically be held to over-ride the solemn treaty with France. Louis Napoleon took up the cause of the Latins, and his ambassador, M. de Lavalette, insisted with some violence on the exclusive rights of the Latin monks. The French people at large probably cared little for these squabbles between the rival creeds. But to Louis Napoleon they furnished an opportunity for securing to himself, as Defender of the Faith, a powerful friend in the Church. He wished to arrogate to himself those sacred rights of primogeniture which had been the pride of the Kings of France. It was, moreover, an outlet for that feverish activity which his home policy had made a necessity for him. In the month of December, 1852, a silver star, graven with the arms of France, was deposited in the church at Bethlehem with much pompous ceremonial, attended by the Turkish officials, and the Latin Patriarch with triumphant joy received the coveted keys of the church and Holy Manger.

The fury of the Tsar was terrible. The insult to his Church, which he 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.

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

“Baroness Brunnow who looked like Juno”

of the “Ingoldsby Legends”—appeared once more as pilot of the diplomatic ship among the rather difficult shoals of British waters.

Nor at the outset of the new reign was English diplomacy any too strong. England, as Count Pablen pointed out, was in bad odour at St. Petersburg, and it needed all the exquisite tact of Lord Granville, when he went as special ambassador for the coronation, to conciliate the Emperor, while at the same time firmly giving His Majesty to understand that he must insist upon being received with the courtesy and consideration due to the Queen’s personal representative. Lord Granville’s letters to Lord Canning, quoted by Lord Fitzmaurice, tell the story in the most interesting way.

The glove was of velvet, but the hand was of steel. It was no easy task, for Count Pahlen was quite right when he warned Lord Granville that the Emperor was deeply prejudiced against England, and had quite thrown himself into the arms of France—a strange infatuation, considering that it was Louis Napoleon’s personal ambition and aggressive policy which raised the question of the Holy Places, and was the cause of the war, whereas England did her best—a bad best, it must be admitted—to preserve the peace. Yet France was in high favour, while for us there was as yet no forgiveness. At any rate, Lord Granville’s special embassy was a great success, and for years afterwards the Russians spoke with enthusiasm of the English _grand seigneur_ who had conquered _à force de plaire_ and upheld the dignity of his country. If in some future decade, century, or æon, I, on the eve of a new incarnation, should be consulted by the gods as to the quality with which I should prefer to be endowed, I should have little hesitation in asking to be blessed with the tact of Lord Granville.

Lord Wodehouse, afterwards Earl of Kimberley, who was our Minister at St. Petersburg, was a man of great ability, singularly well read and thoroughly posted in diplomatic lore. He knew his trade, but he had not the secret of treating business with charm. His talents were better fitted to the fuliginous atmosphere of Downing Street than to the bright sparkling air of the Russian capital. It was single-stick, very doughty single-stick, against the light play of the foils. The contrast with that skilful fencer, Lord Granville, was great. But the victories gained by the latter could only be temporary. He had to go, and Lord Wodehouse remained, a brilliantly dull man—or would it be better to say a dully brilliant man?—quite out of his element in the glittering gaiety of a Russian _salon_. Those who knew his solid worth appreciated his wisdom and scrupulous honesty. But he was rather a great parliamentarian than a courtly diplomatist. When he opened the flood-gates of his talk, it was a Niagara that issued forth, carrying all before it, not to be stopped or stayed, and this deluge was made even more overwhelming by a doctoral or donnish manner, which absolutely staggered the delightfully smart and rather cynical Prince Gortchakoff. As for the Emperor, the voluble envoy frankly bored him. Lord Wodehouse could earn respect for England, but not affection.

Nor was England much better served when his place was taken in 1858 by Sir John Crampton, a most delightful personality, but, in spite of his long experience, little fitted for such a post as St. Petersburg. The truth is that he was a Bohemian of the Bohemians, a man who loved his ease and to whom the donning of a fine coat and a star was little short of torture. I knew him well, for he was a contemporary of my father’s in the service, and there were few days—when he was on leave in London—on which he did not knock at our door. He had all the gifts of the Irish raconteur, and his stories were enhanced by the charm of a musical speaking voice—a great, handsome, leonine figure, with his silver hair and beard, whose advent we always hailed with joy. Probably he was at his best in his beautiful Irish home near Powerscourt, where, with a congenial friend or two—notably old Sharpe, the eccentric Dublin artist—he could sit and smoke after dinner in the same frieze coat that he had worn all day. With us and very few other friends he would sit by the fire, a great tame cat, purring the livelong winter afternoon. However great his personal attractiveness might be, he was certainly not successful as a diplomatist.

When he was at Washington, President Peirce broke off relations with him on account of his recruiting activities—when there were men wanted for the Foreign Legion in the Crimean War. It was the one case in which he overcame his constitutional indolence, and it was not lucky. He had to leave the United States, but Lord Palmerston, always the generous defender of his subordinates, stood up for him, and sent him as Minister to Hanover, at the same time decorating him with the K.C.B., and thence he was transferred to St. Petersburg, a post where the members of the diplomatic body, unless they were prepared to face all the requirements of a delightful but rather exacting society, were bound to become mere cyphers.

That is what happened to Sir John Crampton, and that, too, at a moment when it was very important to bury the hatchet and establish relations of cordial friendship and sympathy with the Tsar and his ministers. It was at last the tame cat nature to which I have alluded above brought about his retirement from Russia in 1860, and his transfer to Spain, where at that moment there was little urgency for activity. In an unlucky moment for all concerned, Balfe came to St. Petersburg, with his beautiful young daughter Victoire, who had been engaged at the Opera. Naturally the Irish Minister and the Irish composer forgathered, and Balfe’s rooms were a delightfully congenial place, where, when the young lady was not singing at the theatre, Crampton could pass the lazy evenings, free from the cramping fetters of a tailcoat and from all the irksome restraint and exigencies of a diplomatist’s life. Balfe, whom I knew well for many years, was himself endowed with all the fascination of Irish wit and bonhomie, while his daughter was as attractive as youth, beauty and talent could make her. They must have been a delightful trio—but the lotus-eating was not to last. There came a day when Balfe, in the character of the _père noble_, told Sir John that his visits must cease—the old story, his daughter’s happiness was at stake—and so the veteran diplomatist hoisted the white flag, surrendered unconditionally, and January and May were united for a very brief time, at the end of which the marriage was annulled, and the lady married the Duc de Friar, a grandee of Spain.

When I reached St. Petersburg in 1863, and went through the archives of the Embassy, which were in my charge, I found that there was a dispatch missing. No trace could be found of it and no one had ever seen it. I wrote to London, asking the Foreign Office to send out a copy. When it came, it turned out to be a severe wigging from Lord Russell, scolding Crampton for not keeping him better informed on Russian affairs. Crampton had burned the dispatch! It was easy for him to do this, for the messenger arrived about ten o’clock at night, and he was in the habit of opening the bag himself, and only sending down its contents to the Chancery on the following morning. This particular document he kept to himself. In 1869 he left the service, and from that time lived chiefly at his Irish home in County Wicklow, where he died, full of years and comfort, in 1886, greatly regretted by all of us who knew him as a dear, kind, affectionate old friend.

Never was there a happier appointment than that of Lord Napier, who succeeded him in Russia in 1860, with the more exalted rank of Ambassador, seconded by an ambassadress who seemed to have been born for the position. The British Embassy soon became the most popular centre of society in Russia. John Lumley—afterwards Lord Savile—was First Secretary (what would now be called Councillor), and he was a most valuable aide-de-camp socially to his chief. In these happy circumstances the prestige and influence increased every day, until at the end, when Lord Napier, in 1864, was transferred to Berlin, the Emperor Alexander wished to give him the Order of St. Andrew, the Garter of Russia, but unfortunately in those days the acceptance of foreign Orders was strictly forbidden. Queen Victoria was like Queen Elizabeth, who said that she would not allow her dogs to wear any collar but her own.

Few men ever had a much more difficult task than that with which Lord Napier was confronted when he took possession of the Embassy. Not only did he conjure into life a new popularity out of the ashes of the dead indifference, and worse, in which England was held, but he succeeded in winning the personal love and affection of all with whom he came in contact; and this he did in spite of the emasculate meddlings in Polish affairs which were the favourite pastime of Lord Russell and the cynical amusement of Prince Gortchakoff.

It must not be supposed that Lord Napier did not himself openly condemn much that was going on in Poland; but he did so with tact, as an onlooker, and not like Lord Russell, with the appearance of impertinent interference in the internal government of a friendly country. There were, as I have shown in my “Memories,” many Russians in high positions who were outspoken in their detestation of General Muraieff, whom Prince Suvoroff did not hesitate to call a “hangman” in the Tsar’s presence at a banquet at Tsarskoe Selo. Lord Napier would have cried “Amen” to that. But though he was an uncompromising critic, he never forfeited the goodwill of the court to which he was accredited.

The honour and reputation of England were safe in his hands, and he enjoyed an influence which had been vouchsafed to none of his predecessors. What Prince Gortchakoff and all other Russians resented in Lord Russell was the schoolmaster tone of his dispatches. That Prince Suvoroff’s condemnation of the cruelties of Warsaw did not meet with an Imperial reproof was significant enough, and an English ambassador would find plenty of men who would applaud a similar reproof from him. But none of them, even of those who were loudest in their blame, would accept Lord Russell’s sermons and prescriptions. The Polish Revolution was a terrible first act in the drama upon which the curtain was to fall in so tragic a fashion.

The liberation of the serfs in 1861 was manifestly the greatest achievement of Alexander’s reign—indeed, it was one of the greatest and noblest achievements in the whole history of Society. It was a great upheaval, far more wide-reaching and searching than the abolition of negro slavery which rewarded the humane labours of Clarkson, Sharp and Wilberforce. That only affected the planters of the West Indies. There were no negro slaves in London, Edinburgh, or Dublin. In Russia, on the contrary, serfdom was universal. There were serfs even among the tradesmen of St. Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw, and all the great towns—men who had raised themselves by industry and knowledge into a higher status than that of the drudge or labourer, the hewer of wood and drawer of water, but who yet remained serfs, and had to pay a share of their gains to their lords. The fortunes of rich Boyarin were calculated in the souls of men. There had been more than once talk of putting an end to this horror, but it was left to the generous and good Tsar to carry the reform into execution. He was ably seconded by M. Valouieff, Minister of the Interior, who worked out all the details of the scheme. It was no easy task to carry out so mighty a change, for, of course, the vested interests were powerful and the mighty ego was on guard, as ever; but the Tsar was in deadly earnest, and in spite of all opposition, twenty-three millions of dead souls were born again into life.

It was an audaciously bold piece of statesmanship. Even an autocrat is dependent upon the will of others for his power. He cannot stand up in the Agora, and, like a god, proclaim himself “I am that I am!” He needs support, and in Russia at that time, when the proletariat had not yet even the semblance of political existence, the only prop upon which the Tsar could rely was the _noblesse_, and it was precisely their privileges that he was attacking. It needed moral courage, it needed physical courage, to set such a machinery in motion. Remember who and what were the men who murdered the Emperor Paul. Not a gang of revolutionary _carbonari_—Turgénieff was not yet born and the word “Nihilist” had not yet been coined[22]—but a band of powerful nobles, headed by his own prime minister. Remember who were the leading Dekabrists, men bearing historic names, proud of their descent from the sacred stock of Rurik. It was men of that importance who would be the most affected by the change, and whose opposition was to be feared. No weak man would have braved them. It is true that emancipation had long been in the air, and that a great number—perhaps even a large majority—of the landed aristocracy had pledged themselves to it. But there was a dangerous leaven of discontent, and none could say how far the taint might have penetrated.

M. Valouieff, the minister who was the Tsar’s right-hand man in this difficult business, was a remarkable personality. Strikingly handsome, tall and dignified, with all the characteristics of blue blood, he was not dwarfed even by the mighty stature of his Imperial master. When, two years after the liberation of the serfs in Russia, the measure was extended to Poland, I was present, as I have related in my “Memories,” at the reception of the Tsar of the peasants’ deputation who came to St. Petersburg to thank the Tsar. It was impossible not to be struck by the commanding aspect of the Emperor and his minister, both sons of Anak, towering above the rest of the crowd.

The emancipation of the serfs was, of course, Valouieff’s masterpiece in statesmanship, but he had several other measures of first-class importance to his credit. It was he who in 1864 established the Zemstvo—elected bodies for the local conduct of provincial business—and another of his achievements was the regulation of the laws relating to the Press. He, moreover, had something of a literary reputation as the author of two or three novels. But these were rather amateurish, and it is upon his statesmanship that his fame must rest.

Like the Chancellor, Prince Gortchakoff, he was very kind to me, and whenever we met in Society, he always had a friendly word for me. When I got back to London, he was next to Prince Gortchakoff, the Russian statesman in whom I found Lord Palmerston and Lord Clarendon the most interested. They fully appreciated the greatness of his work in the emancipation business, and were glad to have some first-hand impressions of his very remarkable personality.

The emancipation was a colossal task. It is not possible by a mere stroke of the pen to revolutionize the lives of twenty-three millions of men. The serfs were to be freed—that is easily said; but the interests of the landed aristocracy must also be taken into consideration, and it says much for Valouieff’s statesmanship and wisdom that the measure should have been carried into effect practically without any friction.

It was impossible suddenly to deprive of its labour the whole of the agricultural land of that vast empire. There had to be a transition period during which the peasants, though no longer serfs, still remained under certain obligations to their former masters; but within the space of two years the landlords were bound to make over to them their houses with suitable allotments of land against a fair rent, with the further privilege of purchase, with the consent of the proprietor. The obligations of the peasant and his rent were capitalized on a basis of six per cent. Of this capital, twenty per cent. was to be paid at once to the landlord, while the Government gave him the remaining eighty per cent. in Government bonds bearing five per cent. interest, the Government recouping itself for this advance in forty-nine years by a payment of six per cent. from the peasant. The purchases might be effected by single individuals or by partnerships. This would be facilitated by the Russian communal system, by which the members of each commune were able to combine for the redemption money and other expenses.

It was calculated that about one-third of the property of the landed aristocracy, equal to 390,886 square kilometres, was made over to the peasants. This is Brockhaus’ calculation. He goes on to point out that for various reasons, chiefly the ignorance and intemperance of the peasants, there were not a few troubles arising out of the great economic change. Although in some instances land soon rose in value fifty per cent. above the estimate of 1861, in others it suffered great deterioration.

There is one feature in this great economic change which is worthy of note. If we read the lives, memoirs and correspondence of the ministers who have ruled England in modern times, it is impossible not to recognize an underlying element of personal ambition in all their contentions. That, I take it, is inseparable from a constitutional Government where the “Outs” are always struggling to become “Ins.” Here there was no such motive possible. A Tsar of Russia could become no greater than he already was, and even the minister who did his behest had nothing to fear or to gain from the _arbitrium popularis aurae_. The Emperor had, and could have, nothing in view but the good of his people, and for that those who saw him at work knew that his efforts were untiring. It is strange that it should have been precisely in the reign of so good a monarch, a real benefactor of the world over which he ruled, that the seeds of the poisonous plant of Nihilism should have germinated, spreading like the virus of cancer, which, cut out of one place by the surgeon’s knife, still travels through the system and reappears in some new spot.

Nihilism was not confined, as has been popularly supposed, to the students of the universities and a few clever but discontented literary men and artists. As a matter of fact, it had invaded all classes. The civil service, the army, the police—even the secret police—were infected.

* * * * *

The diplomatic negotiations which took place at St. Petersburg in the winter of 1863-64 were big with the fate of Europe and of the world. It was the result of the grievous blunders made by Lord Russell that Prussia was enabled to take the first step in that career of plunder and aggrandisement which has wrought such terrible tragedies. I have dealt with that story fully in my “Memories.” I was at St. Petersburg at the time, and owing to my confidential relations with Lord Napier, and to the kindness of Prince Gortchakoff and other Russian ministers, I had the opportunity of being well posted, not only in what took place publicly, but also in the feeling which was prevalent in Russia in regard to the Danish war.

In his brilliantly fascinating fourth volume of the “Life of Lord Beaconsfield,” Mr. Buckle[23] revives the time-honoured fallacy that Russia was not ready to join hands with us in defence of Denmark. That fallacy can only owe its existence to the careful handling of persons whose aim it was to whitewash Lord Russell. It is true that his blustering and bullying in the Polish Revolution—followed by the eating of the leek with appetite—had made England very unpopular in Russia; but in regard to Denmark there was another motive at work, and a very powerful one, in the prospective marriage of the Princess Dagmar to the Tsarevitch.

In principle, Russia did not want to go to war, but she was ready to sacrifice her wish for peace if only England would join in with her and cry “Hands off!” to Prussia and Austria. England did not want war in July, 1914, but on the 4th of August war was declared. The cases are exactly similar. In both cases a “scrap of paper” was torn up by Prussia, who only a few months earlier had guaranteed the integrity of King Christian’s dominions. In 1914 mercifully Lord Russell had been long “resting and being thanked” over the mischief he had wrought. Sterner and more chivalrous doctrines prevailed, and this time England was ready to draw the sword for a principle of honour.

It is, I know, an absolute mistake to suppose that if we had carried out the policy indicated by Lord Palmerston in Parliament at the end of the Session of 1863 we should have stood alone. Russia would have been with us. Our position, supposing we had gone to war, would have been all to our advantage—as Lord John Manners pointed out, it would have been “the most popular, the easiest and the cheapest war (for it can be managed by our navy alone) of the century.”[24] Lord John Manners was quite right. We should have sent our navy to Danish waters, and we need not have sent out a single soldier.

To march upon Berlin would have been a mere holiday task for the Russian army, a sort of picnic, like our march upon Magdala. But I can assert that it was the firm conviction of the best informed diplomatists of Europe that the mere knowledge that England and Russia were determined to uphold the rights of Denmark would of itself have sufficed to avert war. I have written elsewhere how, when Lord Napier had to tell Prince Gortchakoff that England would not join with him, the Prince answered: “Alors, milord, je mets de côté la supposition que l’Angleterre fasse jamais la guerre pour une question d’honneur.” That was the conviction which guided him in all his subsequent dealings with England, the advances in Central Asia, in defiance of all treaties, until the gates of Afghanistan were reached, and in 1870, when France was crippled, the tearing up of the Black Sea Treaty obligations of 1856.

Mr. Buckle is so clear-minded a critic of foreign politics that I should hesitate to differ from him were I not possessed of absolute knowledge not from hearsay. A study of the “Origines diplomatiques de la guerre de 1870” can only confirm what I have said; and that exhaustive publication proves up to the hilt my contention that since the origin of the war of 1870 was due to the betrayal of Denmark in 1863-64, it is to the grave political blunders then made that we must ascribe the outrage of 1914.

Free of England and Russia, Bismarck was able to carry out his full programme: (1) Kiel and a navy. (2) The crippling of Austria. (3) The humiliation of France. (4) Who can doubt what that was? The destruction of England’s sea power, and the world under the heel of Prussia.

Lord Russell’s meddling and muddling in the affairs of Poland had, it is true, estranged Russia and France. But the former Power was, nevertheless, keenly in favour of Denmark; as regards France, there was perhaps another consideration which was not without its influence. It is a matter of common knowledge that Louis Napoleon was very ambitious to build up a navy which should be able to hold its own with ours. In the “Origines diplomatiques” there is published a dispatch from the French chargé d’affaires at St. Petersburg, M. de Massignac, a very clever man, with whom I was intimate, urging upon M. Drouyn de Lhuys the expediency of furthering the views of Prussia. He pointed out that the success of Prussia would give her Kiel, and enable her to build a navy which might, in given circumstances, help the other Continental Powers to destroy England’s preponderant supremacy at sea! I am inclined to think that this view may have had more restraining influence with Louis Napoleon even than the snubbing with which Lord Russell met his proposals for a conference or congress at Brussels. We know, moreover, that the Emperor had a distinct leaning towards Prussia, which he looked upon as making for progress in contradistinction to Austria, which in his eyes was antiquated and retrograde.

It was, then, at St. Petersburg that the fate of Denmark was sealed and the first triumph of Bismarck’s policy secured. The Danish Duchies were stolen by Prussia, and, as my old friend M. de Massignac had foreseen, the foundations were laid of a navy which up to that time had been a dream in Cloudcuckooland. For the shameful abandonment of Denmark we are now, fifty years later, paying the just penalty.

THE END

_Printed at The Chapel River Press, Kingston, Surrey._

FOOTNOTES

[1] See my “Garter Mission to Japan,” pp. 193-203.

[2] Max Müller, “Chips from a German Workshop,” IX., 178.

[3] Max Müller, _ut supra_.

[4] Even the famous Laws of Manu were only held to be Smriti—tradition.

[5] See Max Müller’s “Ancient Sanskrit Literature,” pp. 57 and 80.

[6] How like a passage in one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s prayers written at Vailima: “We thank Thee, Lord, for the glory of the late days and the excellent face of Thy Sun.”

[7] “Chips from a German Workshop,” Vol. I., p. 13.

[8] Max Müller’s “Chips,” Vol. I., pp. 36-37.

[9] _Picea pungens glauca._

[10] The Japanese, following the horology of the Chinese, used to divide the day of 24 hours into 12 periods, each of which had its sign, something like the sign of the Zodiac.

Midnight until 2 a.m. was the hour of the Rat 2 a.m. ” 4 a.m. ” ” Ox 4 a.m. ” 6 a.m. ” ” Tiger 6 a.m. ” 8 a.m. ” ” Hare 8 a.m. ” 10 a.m. ” ” Dragon 10 a.m. ” 12 noon ” ” Snake 12 noon ” 2 p.m. ” ” Horse 2 p.m. ” 4 p.m. ” ” Ram 4 p.m. ” 6 p.m. ” ” Ape 6 p.m. ” 8 p.m. ” ” Cock 8 p.m. ” 10 p.m. ” ” Hog 10 p.m. ” midnight ” ” Fox

[11] See my “Tales of Old Japan: the Loves of Gompachi and Komurasaki.”

[12] _Morning Post_, May 8th, 1915.

[13] Quoted in the _Spectator_, May 8th, 1915.

[14] Lord March, afterwards “Old Q.”

[15] The Duke of Queensberry.

[16] Mr. Thrale’s profits from the brewery were estimated at £30,000 a year.

[17] Mügge, pp. 131, 134.

[18]

“As when upon a trancèd summer night Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-chainèd by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir.”

HYPERION, I., 72.

[19] Tomini later quarrelled with Napoleon and entered the service of Alexander.

[20] The craze for absolute uniformity was exemplified in the Kurros (snub-nosed) Grenadier Regiment of the Emperor Paul. Not only was every nose in the regiment tip-tilted, but the meter-like brass shakos of the old pattern seen in Hogarth’s pictures—“The March to Finchley,” for example—each has a bullet-hole exactly in the same place. This was to commemorate an attempt on the Tsar’s life. The bullet missed him, but found its billet in the shako of one of his guards. Whether the snub-noses and the shakos still exist I know not. They were very conspicuous in my time.

[21] The Emperor Louis Napoleon.

[22] The word, “Nihilist” first appeared in Turgénieff’s story, “Fathers and Sons,” in 1861.

[23] “The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield,” Vol. IV., p. 342.

[24] Buckle’s “Life of Disraeli,” _ut supra_, Vol. IV., p. 343.

INDEX

INDEX

Abdul Hamid, Sultan of Turkey, 138, 274.

Aberdeen, George H. Gordon, 4th Earl of, 269, 270.

Abrantès, Junot, Duc d’, 173-4.

Addison, Joseph, 114.

Albert, Prince Consort, 141-2.

Alexander I., Emperor of Russia, 247-8, 253 _et sq._, 258 _et sq._

Alexander II., Emperor of Russia, 264, 284 _et sq._, 296.

Allard, Father, 87.

Ananda, 25, 35, 40, 42.

Anatha Pindaka, 35.

Angeli, Von, 144.

Arnold, Sir Edwin, 18, 23.

Aryans, The, 49 _et sq._, 59 _et sq._

Asōka, King, 18, 51.

Aston, Molly, 241.

Aston, Sir Thomas, 241.

Bacon, Francis (Lord Verulam), 62, 189.

Bagatelle, 162-3, 175, 190-1, 193, 195.

Balfe, Michael William, 294.

Balfe, Victoire, 294-5.

“Bamboo Garden, The,” Lord Redesdale’s, ix.

Barbosa, 49.

Baring, Maurice, 203-4.

Barlaam and Josaphat, The Story of, 27 _et sq._

Batsford, x. _et sq._, xviii., xix., xxi.

Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of, 304.

Beal, Samuel, 23.

Beethoven, 151-2, 218, 251.

Benares, King of, 37.

Benfey, Theodor, 60 _et sq._

Berghaus, Heinrich, 52.

Bernhardt, Sarah, 152.

Bezbarooks, Count, 248.

Bhikshus, The, 42 _et sq._, 214.

Bimbisara, King of Maghada, 12, 32, 35.

Bismarck, Prince, 307-8.

Bizet, Georges, 218.

Blümml, Emil, 130.

Bodhisatva Maitriya, 37 _et sq._

Bonjean, M., 87.

Bopp, Franz, 60.

Boutourlin, 256.

Brahmans, The, 48 _et sq._, 65, 68-9

Brockhaus, Professor, 214.

Broughton, John Cam Hobhouse, Lord, 45.

Buckingham, Richard Grenville, 2nd Duke of, 186.

Buckle, George Earle, 304, 306.

Buddha, The, 8 _et sq._, 46 _et sq._, 65 _et sq._, 96, 233.

Bunsen, Baron, 54 _et sq._

Burnouf, Jean Louis, 60.

Byron, Lord, 45, 207.

Cambridge, xx.

Canning, Lord, 287, 290.

Canning, George, 167.

Capell, Edward, 242-3.

Carlisle, Lord, 171-2.

Carlyle, Thomas, 259.

Caste, 48 _et sq._

Castiglione, Countess, 222-31.

Castlereagh, Lord, 167.

Catherine the Great, 248-9, 252.

Cavell, Nurse, 93.

Cellini, Benvenuto, 155.

Chandana, 26.

Charles VI., Emperor, 137, 145.

Charles X. of France, 175.

Chandra Mukherji, 13-14, 18, 30.

Chelsea Hospital, 97.

Chreptowitch, Count, 289, 290.

Christian, King of Denmark, 305.

Cimarosa, Domenico, 151.

Cissey, General, 91.

Clair, Father, 87.

Clarendon, George Villiers, Earl of, 301.

Clarkson, Thomas, 298.

Clopton, Sir Hugh, 240 _et sq._

Commune, The, 78 _et sq._

Confucius, 33, 52-3.

Constantine, Grand Duke, 262, 267-8, 288.

Cook, Dr., 227-8.

Courbet, Gustave, 83 _et sq._

Cowes, Royal Yacht Squadron Castle, xii. _et sq._

Crampton, Sir John, 292 _et sq._

Crawley, George, 79.

Crimean War, 270 _et sq._

Dagmar, Empress of Russia, 304.

Dandapani, 24.

Dante, xix. _et sq._, 206.

Darboy, Monseigneur, Archbishop of Paris, 87 _et sq._

Dasson, M., 180.

Daudet, Alphonse, xxiii.

Daudet, Ernest, xxiii.

Davids Rhys, 23, 31, 37.

Davis, Mr. Charles, 198.

Devadatta, 24-5, 35-6, 40.

Dietrichstein, Count, 134.

Dodgson, Rev. Charles, 229.

Domenichino, 183.

Donay, General, 91.

Dostoieffski, Feodor, 205.

Drummond, Messrs. G. & E., 158.

Ducondray, Father, 87.

Duplessis, Isabella, 132.

Dyer, Sir William, 243.

Edward VII., 93, 200.

Elizabeth, Empress, 132.

Ellis, Sir Arthur, 201.

Enghien, Duc d’, 254.

Esher, Reginald Brett, 2nd Viscount, 189 _et sq._, 199.

Eton College, 209 _et sq._

Eugénie, 94.

Evans, Jennie, 209, 211.

Evans, William, 209 _et sq._

Evelyn, John, 243.

Fagnani, Marchese, 165 _et sq._, 172.

Fagnani, Marchesa, 165 _et sq._

Fagnani, Maria. _See_ LADY HERTFORD.

Fa Hsien, 13.

Faraday, Michael, 53.

Ferronays, M. de la, 263-4.

Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmond, 287, 290.

Fragonard, Jean, 112, 175.

Francis of Assisi, St., 47, 54 _et sq._, 214.

Francis I., Emperor, 134, 137-8, 142, 147.

Fraser, Sir James, 125.

Frederick the Great, 143, 146.

Friar, Duc de, 295.

Fryatt, Captain, 93.

Fuchs, Gräfin, 133.

Gainsborough, Sir Thomas, 101, 172.

Gaisman, 145.

Gallifet, Marquis de, 91 _et sq._

Gallifet, Madame de, 93.

Garrick, David, 241.

Gastrell, Rev. Mr., 241-2.

Genghis Khan, 258.

George IV., 167, 184.

Gluck, Christoph, 145.

Goethe, 152, 206.

Gogol, Nicolai, 205.

Gopā (wife of the Buddha), 18, 24-5, 35.

Gortchakoff, Prince Alexander, 289, 292, 296-7, 301, 306-7.

Graham, Stephen, 279.

Granville, Lord, 287 _et sq._

Greiner, Herr von, 147 _et sq._

Grimm, Jakob, 60.

Grisi, 223.

Grousset, Paschal, 85.

Guerry, Abbé de, 87.

Gurwood, Colonel, 159, 191.

Halloy, Omalius d’, 60, 62.

Hawtrey, Dr., 207.

Haydn, 145, 151-2.

Hearn, Lafcadio, 120 _et sq._

Heine, Heinrich, 138.

Hertford, Francis Seymour, 2nd Marquis of, 186.

Hertford, Francis Charles Seymour, 3rd Marquis of (Thackeray’s “Lord Steyne”), xx., xxi., 155, 166 _et sq._, 173, 176, 186, 191, 193.

Hertford, Francis Seymour, 5th Marquis of, 163, 194-5.

Hertford, Richard Seymour, 4th Marquis of, xx., xxi., 155, 157 _et sq._, 173 _et sq._

Hertford, Lady Maria, 159 _et sq._, 192 _et sq._

Hicks-Beach. _See_ ST. ALDWYN.

Hieronymus, Lieutenant Friedrich, 131-2.

Hieronymus, Charlotte, 131 _et sq._, 138 _et sq._, 144, 147 _et sq._

Hogg, James, 215.

Homer, 62, 206.

Houdon, Jean, 180.

Hsi, Emperor-King, 67.

Hsüan Chwang, 11, 13, 68.

Humboldt, Baron von, 60.

James I., 239, 240, 243.

Japanese Gardens, 2 _et sq._, 102, 106; customs, 118 _et sq._; legends, 121 _et sq._

Jefferies, Richard, 233.

Jéta, Prince, 35.

Jétavana, 35.

John of Damascus, St., 27 _et sq._

Johnson, Dr., 203, 238, 241 _et sq._

Joseph II., Emperor of Austria, xxiii., 135, 140.

Kalanta, 11.

Karamzin, Nicholas, 205-6.

Kassapa the Prince, 37, 40.

Keats, John, 235.

Kennedy, Mr., xxii.

Kerner, Andreas, 225.

Kew Gardens, 243 _et sq._

Kimberley, John Wodehouse, Earl of, 291-2.

Kisseleff, Sergius, 289.

Kosciusko, 249.

Krüdener, Madame de, 259.

Krylov, Ivan, 204-5.

Kshatriya, The, 48.

Kusinārā, 42, 44.

Laboulaye, M., 29.

Ladmisault, General, 91.

La Harpe, Jean, 260.

Laking, Sir Guy, 201.

Lamington, Baillie Cochrane, Lord, 157.

Lancret, Nicolas, 112.

Lansdowne, Henry Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquis of, 201.

Lao Tze, 52.

Lamballe, Princesse de, 78.

Landseer, Sir Edwin, 144.

Latham, Robert Gordon, 60, 62.

Lavalette, M. de, 271.

Lee, Sir Sidney, 238-9, 245.

Leighton, Sir Frederick, 144.

Lemoyne, 180.

Leopold II., 147.

Lhuys, M. Drouyn de, 307.

Lissauer, Herr, 138.

Liszt, Abbé, 152.

Lofft, Mr., 243.

Louis XV., 271.

Louis-Philippe, Emperor of the French, 184, 269, 272.

Louise, Princess (Duchess of Argyll), 144.

Lowell, John Russell, 99.

Lumbini Garden, 16, 18 _et sq._, 26, 44.

Luther, Martin, 47, 274.

MacColl, Mr., 180 _et sq._, 202.

Macklin, Charles, 241.

Maintenon, Madame de, 193.

Malet, Sir Edward, 85, 201.

Malone, Edmund, 240-1.

Manners, Lord John, 305.

Maria Theresia, Empress of Germany, xv., 129.

Mario, Signor, 223.

Marie Antoinette, Queen, 133-4, 145, 175.

Marlborough Club, xvii.

Massignac, M. de, 307-8.

Mawson, S., 178 _et sq._, 187-8.

Maxwell, Sir John Stirling, 201.

Maya, Queen of Kapilavastu (mother of the Buddha), 15 _et sq._, 30, 40.

“Memories,” Lord Redesdale’s, ix. _et sq._, 283, 297, 304.

Mendelssohn, 54, 218.

Mentschikoff, Prince, 266, 273, 276.

Mercier, Karoline, 135.

Metastasio, 134.

Metternich, Madame de, 93-4.

Meyendorf, 289.

Milarodowitch, General, 263.

Millais, Sir John, 144.

Milton, John, 206.

Mitford, Major the Hon. Clement, xi.

Moffat, Mary Maxwell, 143, 145.

Mohammed, 33.

Montaigne, xxi.

Moore, Sir John, 143.

Moskowa, Prince de la, 267.

Mowatt, Sir Francis, 200.

Mozart, 145, 151-2, 218.

Mrighadeva, The, 32, 44.

Mügge, Dr., 215-16.

Muraieff, General, 297.

Murillo, 188.

Müller, Max, 27-8, 48, 51 _et sq._, 60 _et sq._, 66, 68-9, 72, 75-6.

Murray, Mr., 197.

Napier, Francis, Lord, 296-7, 304, 306.

Napoleon, 13, 152, 251, 254 _et sq._

Napoleon III., 179, 271-2, 287, 291, 307-8.

National Gallery, xvii.

Nesselrode, Count, 275.

Newton, Sir Isaac, 53.

Ney, Marshal, 267.

Nicholas, Emperor of Russia, 167, 247, 262 _et sq._

Nietzsche, xiii., 213 _et sq._

North, Christopher, 215.

Northcote, James, 184.

Northcote, Sir Stafford, 157.

Norns, The, 115-16.

Orloff, Alexis, 289.

Oubrie, M. d’, 254.

Ovid, 116 _et sq._

Paesiello, 151.

Pahlen, Count Nicholas, 251, 286 _et sq._

Pahlen, Count Peter, 250-1.

Palmerston, Henry Temple, Viscount, 293-4, 301, 305.

Paris, the Commune, 78 _et sq._

Parkes, Sir Harry, xvii.

Parsees, The, 65-6.

Paskiewitch, Prince, 267, 282-3.

Paul I., Emperor of Russia, 248 _et sq._, 258, 262, 272, 299.

Pechler, xv.

Peel, Right Hon. Sir Robert, 269.

Peirce, President, 293.

Penka, 60.

Pepys, Samuel, 243 _et sq._

Persigny, Madame de, 93.

Peter III., Emperor of Russia, 249, 250.

Phillips, Sir Claude, 176, 201-2.

Phillips, March, 107, 109, 110, 113.

Pichler, Frau, 130-1, 134, 136-7, 142, 150, 152.

Pigalle, 180.

Plant life, 221 _et sq._

Poesche, 60.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 234.

Pourtalès, Comtesse de, 93-4.

Poynter, Sir Edward, 199, 200.

Prain, Sir David, 245.

Prajapati Gautama, 18, 30.

Pushkin, Alexandre, 205 _et sq._

Queensberry, William Douglas, Duke of, 164, 167-8, 173.

Raglan, Fitzroy Somerset, Lord, 265.

Rahula (son of the Buddha), 22, 32.

Rasumowski, Countess, 251-2.

Redcliffe, Lord Stratford de, 276 _et sq._

Rembrandt, 152, 182-3, 188.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 101, 172, 176, 186 _et sq._

Rhode, Erwin, xiii., 213.

Ribeaupierre, Count, 252.

Richmond, 104-5.

Robinson, William, 114-15.

Rockhill, William Woodville, 23, 44.

Rogers, Rev. William, 124.

Roscoe, Edward Stanley, 170, 173-4.

Rosebery, Lord, 93-4, 201-2.

Royal Society of Literature, xxii.

Royal Horticultural Society, 97.

Romney, George, 176.

Rostopchin, Fedor, 257 _et sq._, 272.

Rothschild, Alfred de, 200-1.

Rubens, 186.

Russell, Lord John, 295 _et sq._, 304, 307.

Ruysdael, 184.

Russia, 246 _et sq._

Sabatier, Louis, 54, 58.

Sagan, Princesse de, 93-4.

St. Aldwyn, Rt. Hon. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, 1st Viscount, 201.

St. Hilaire Barthélemy, 11, 23, 40.

Sanguszko, Prince, 267.

Satow, Sir Ernest, xvii.

Savile, John Lumley, Lord, 296.

Scheffer, Ary, 188.

Schlegel, August von, 60.

Schopenhauer, 214, 216.

Schrader, Eberhard, 60.

Schumann, 218.

Schwendener, 226 _et sq._

Scott, Sir John, 156, 159, 177, 190, 194, 197-8, 201-2.

Seaford, Charles Ellis, Lord, 167.

Sedley, Sir Charles, 244-5.

Selwyn, George, 164-5, 167 _et sq._

Selwyn, Bishop John, 210.

Sévigné, Madame de, 46, 171.

Seymour, Sir Hamilton, 195, 273.

Seymour, Lord Henry, 160, 173-4, 177.

Seymour, Lord Henry (son of 1st Marquis of Hertford), 174.

Shakespeare, 206-7, 238 _et sq._

Sharp, Granville, 298.

Siddartha, Prince. _See_ THE BUDDHA.

Smith, Assheton, 45.

Smith, J. R., 186.

Spiegel, 60.

Staël, Madame de, 152.

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 58.

Stockmar, Baron, 142.

Stowe, 182, 188.

Subasio, Mount, 56.

Subhadra, 42, 44.

Suddhōdana, King of Kapilavastu (father of the Buddha), 14 _et sq._, 24 _et sq._, 32 _et sq._

Sudras, The, 49, 51-2.

Sujata, 31.

Suprabuddha, King, 15, 23.

Sutherland, George Leveson-Gower, 3rd Duke of, 79, 156.

Suvoroff, Prince, 297.

Swift, Dean, 229.

Swinbrook, Glos., xxii.

Talbot, Henry, 241.

“Tales of Old Japan,” Lord Redesdale’s, iv., 127.

Talleyrand, Prince, 254.

Terry, Mrs., 171.

Thackeray, W. M., 173.

Thalberg, Sigismund, 152.

Thynne, Lady Edward, 84.

_Times_, 4, 203.

Titian, 176.

Tolstoy, Count, 205, 289 _et sq._

Tomini, 255-6.

Tragedy in Stone, A, x.

Troubetzkoi, Prince, 263.

Turgeniev, Ivan, 205-6, 299.

Underhill, William, 239.

Vaisiyas, The, 49.

Valouieff, M., 299 _et sq._

Vandyck, 176.

Veda, Religion of the, 59, 66 _et sq._

Velasquez, 184-5, 187-8.

Vernon, Hon. W. W., xix.

Veronese, Paul, 184.

Victoria, German Empress (Princess Royal), 144, 150.

Victoria, Queen, 129 _et sq._, 135, 138 _et sq._, 150, 153-4, 269, 277.

Vihara, 12, 34, 36.

Vinoy, General, 91.

Virgil, 206.

Visakha, 36.

Voltaire, 206.

Wagner, Richard, 214 _et sq._

Wagner, Frau Cosima, 215-16, 220.

Wallace, Agnes (Jackson), 159, 192.

Wallace, Sir Richard, 155 _et sq._, 173, 175 _et sq._, 181-2, 188, 190 _et sq._

Wallace, Lady, 194 _et sq._

Wallace Collection, xvii., 155 _et sq._

Walmesley, Mrs., 241.

Warner, Dr., 170.

Watteau, Antoine, 112-113, 188.

Watts, George Frederick, 144.

Weber, Carl von, 152.

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 265.

Whately, Archbishop, 13.

Wilberforce, William, 298.

Wilhelm II., Kaiser, xxiii.

Wilkinson, Sir Gardner, 126.

Winterhalter, Friedrich, 144.

Worth, M., 94.

Yasōdhara (wife of the Buddha), 18, 22, 32, 35-6.

Yule, Sir Henry, 49.

York, Cardinal, 193.

Yriarte, 177-8.

Zarathustra, 66-7.