Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

by Astolphe De Custine

  In general, the men of this country do not appear to me inclined to generosity; they scarcely believe in that quality ; they would deny it if they dared; and if they do not deny it, they despise it, because they have nothing in themselves by which to apprehend its nature. They have more finesse than delicacy, more good temper than sensibility, more pliancy than easy contentedness, more grace than tenderness, more discernment than invention, more wit than imagination, more observation than wit, more of the spirit of selfish calculation than all these qualities together. They never labour to produce results useful to others, but always to obtain some recompense for themselves. Creative genius has been denied them; the enthusiasm which produces the sublime is to them unknown ; sentiments which seek only within themselves for approval and for recompense, they cannot understand. Take from them the moving influences of interest, fear, and vanity, and you deprive them of all action. If they enter the

  68

  CONTEMPT FOR THE

  empire of arts, they are but slaves serving in a palace ; the sacred solitudes of genius are to them inaccessible ; the chaste love of the beautiful cannot satisfy their desires.

  It is with their actions in practical life, as with their creations in the world of thought, — where artifice triumphs, magnanimity passes for imposture.

  Greatness of mind looks to itself for a recompense; but if it asks for nothing from others, it commands much, for it seeks to render men better: here it would render them worse, because it would be considered a mask. Clemency is called a weakness among a people hardened by terror: implacable severity makes them bend the knee, pardon would cause them to lift the head; they can be subdued, but no one knows how to convince them; incapable of pride, they can yet be audacious; they revolt against gentleness, but they obey ferocity, which they take for power.

  This explains to me the system of government adopted by the emperor, without, however, leading me to approve it. That prince knows how to make himself obeyed, and acts in a way to command obedience ; but, in politics, I am no admirer of the compulsory system. Here, discipline is the end; elsewhere, it is the means. Is it pardonable in a prince to resist the good dictates of his heart, because he believes it dangerous to manifest sentiments superior to those of his people ? In my eyes, the worst of all weaknesses is that which renders a man pitiless and unmerciful. To be ashamed of being magnanimous is to confess an unworthiness of possessing supreme power.

  The people are in need of being incessantly re-

  LAW OF KINDNESS.69

  minded of a world better than the present world. How can they be made to believe in God, if they are not to know what is pardon ? Prudence is only virtuous when it does not exclude a higher virtue. If the emperor has not in his heart more clemency than he displays in his policy, I pity Russia; if his sentiments are superior to his acts, I pity the emperor.

  The Russians, when amiable, have a fascination in their manners whose spell we feel in spite of every prejudice ; first, without observing it, and afterwards, without being able to throw it off. To define such an influence would be to explain the power of imagination. The charm forms an imperious, though secret attraction, — a sovereign power vested in the innate grace of the Slavonians, that gift of grace which, in society, can supply the want of all other gifts, and the want of which, nothing can supply.

  Imagine the defunct French politeness again restored to life, and become really all that it appeared —ima2fine the most agreeable and unstudied com-plaisance — an involuntary, not an accµiired, absence of egotism — an ingenuity in good taste — a pleasant carelessness of choice—an aristocratic elegance without hauteur—an easiness without impertinence—the instinct of superiority tempered by the security

  which accompanies rank: but I am wrong in

  attempting to delineate with too finely drawn strokes; these are delicacies in the shading which must be felt. AVe may divine them, but wc must avoid attempting to fix by words their too elusive forms. Let it suffice that all these, and many other graces, are found in the manners and conversation of the really elegant Russians, and more frequently, more com-

  70SEDUCTIVE MANNERS OF

  pletely, among those who have not travelled, but who, remaining in Russia, have nevertheless been in contact with distinguished foreigners.

  These charms, these illusions, give them a sovereign power over hearts: so long as you remain in the presence of the privileged beings, you are under a spell; and the charm is double, for, such is their triumph, that you imagine yourself to be to them what they are to you. Time and the world, engagements and affairs, are forgotten ; the duties of society are abolished; one single interest remains — the interest of the moment; one single person survives— the person present, who is always the person liked. The desire of pleasing, carried to this excess, infallibly succeeds: it is the sublime of good taste ; it is eleganee the most refined, and yet as natural as an instinct. This supreme amiability is not assumed or artificial, it is a gift which needs only to be exercised : to prolong the illusion you have but to prolong your stay. The Russians are the best actors in the world: to produce an effect, they need none of the accompaniments of scenery.

  Every traveller has reproached them with their versatility; the reproach is but too well founded: you feel yourself forgotten in bidding them adieu. I attribute this, not only to levity of character, to inconstancy of heart, but also to the want of solid and extended information. They like you to leave them ; for they fear lest they should be discovered when they allow themselves to be approached for too long a time uninterruptedly. Thence arises the fondness and the indifference which follow each other so rapidly among them. This apparent inconstancy is

  THE RUSSIANS.

  71

  only a precaution of vanity, well understood and sufficiently common among people of the fashionable world in every land. It is not their faults that people conceal with the greatest care, it is their emptiness; they do not blush to be perverse, but they arc humbled at being insignificant. In accordance with this principle, the Russians of the higher classes willingly exhibit every thing in their minds and character likely to please at first sight, and which keeps up conversation for a few hours: but if you endeavour to go behind the decorated scene that thus dazzles you, they stop you as they would a rash intruder, who might take it into his head to 2`0 behind the screen of their bedchambers, of which the elegance is entirely confined to the outer side of the division. They give you a reception dictated by curiosity; they afterwards repel you through prudence.

  This applies to friendship as well as to love, to the society of men as well as to that of women. In giving the portrait of a Russian, we paint the nation, just as a soldier under arms conveys the idea of all his regiment. Nowhere is the influence of unity in the government and in education so sensibly visible as here. Every mind wears its uniform. Alas! how greatly must those suffer, be they even no longer young and sensitive, who bring among this people — cold-hearted and keen-witted both by nature and social education — the simplicity of other lands ! I picture to myself the sensibility of the Germans, the confiding naivete and the careless gaiety of the French, the constancy of the Spaniards, the passion of the English *,

  * La Constance des Espagnols, la passion des Anglais.

  72LIBERTINISM IN MOSCOW.

  the abandon and good nature of the true, the old Italians, all in the toils of the inherent coquetry of the Russians; and I pity the unfortunate foreigners who could believe for a moment they might become actors in the theatre which awaits them here. In matters of the affections, the Russians are the gentlest wild beasts that are to be seen on earth ; and their well-concealed claws unfortunately divest them of none of their charms. I have never felt a fascination to be compared to it, unless in Polish society: a new relation discoverable between the two families ! Civil hate in vain strives to separate these people ; nature re-unites them in spite of themselves. If policy did not compel one to oppress the other, they would recognise and love each other. The Poles
are chivalric and catholic Russians ; with the further difference, that, in Poland, it is the women who form the life of society, or, in other words, who command, and that in Russia, it is the men.

  These same people, so naturally amiable, so well endowed, so extremely agreeable, sometimes go astray in patl)£ which men of the coarsest characters would avoid.

  It is impossible to picture to one's self the life of many of the most distinguished young persons of Moscow. These men, who bear names and belong to families known throughout Europe, are lost in excesses that will not bear to be described. It is inconceivable how they can resist for six months the system they adopt for life, and maintain with a constancy which would be worthy of heaven, if its object were virtuous. Their temperaments seem to be made expressly for the anticipated hell; — for it is

  CONSEQUENCES OF DESPOTISM.73

  thus that I qualify the life of a professed debauchee in Moscow.

  In physical respects, the climate, and in moral respects, the government of this land devour all that is weak in its germ : all that is not robust or stupid dies early, none survive but the debased, and natures strong in good as in evil. Russia is the land of unbridled passions or of passive characters, of rebels or of automata, of conspirators or of machines. There is here nothing intermediate between the tv-rant and the slave, between the madman and the animal: the juste milieu is unknown; nature will not tolerate it; the excess of cold, like that of heat, pushes man to extremes.

  Notwithstanding the contrasts which I here point out, all resemble each other in one respect — all have levity of character. Among these men of the moment, the projects of the evening are constantly lost in the forgetfulness of the morrow. It may be said, that with them the heart is the empire of chance ; nothing can stand against their propensity to embrace and to abandon. They live and die without perceiving the serious side of existence. Neither good nor evil with them possesses any reality: they can cry, but they cannot be unhappy. Palaces, mountains, giants, sylphs, passions, solitude, brilliant crowds, supreme happiness, unbounded grief, —but it is useless to enumerate : a quarter of an hour's conversation with them suffices to bring before your eyes the whole universe. Their prompt and contemptuous glance surveys, without admiring any thing, the monuments raised by human intelligence during centuries. They fancy they can place themselves above every thing, because they de-

  YOL. III.E

  74

  MORAL LICENCE IN LIEU

  spise every thing. Their very praises are insults: they eulogise like people who envy; they prostrate themselves, but always unwillingly, before the objects they believe to be the idols of fashion. But at the first breath of wind the cloud succeeds the picture, and soon the cloud vanishes in turn. Dust, smoke, and chaotic nothingness, are all that can issue from such inconsistent heads.

  No plant takes root in a soil thus profoundly agitated. Every thing is swept away; every thing becomes levelled; all is wrapt in vapour. But from this fluid element nothing is finally expelled. Friendship or love that was imagined lost, will often again rise, evoked by a glance or a single word, and at the very moment when least thought of; though, in truth, it is only thus revived to be almost as quickly again dismissed. Under the ever-waving wand of these magicians, life is one continued phantasmagoria— one long fatiguing game, in which, however, the clumsy alone ruin themselves; for when all the world is cheating, nobody is being cheated : in a word, they are false as water, to use the poetical expression of Shaks-peare, the broad strokes of whose pencil are the revelations of nature.

  This explains to me why hitherto they have appeared to be doomed by Providence to a despotic government: it is in pity as much as through custom that they are tyrannised over.

  If, in addressing myself to the friend to whom I send this chapter, I addressed myself to but one philosopher, here would be the place for inserting details of manners which resemble nothing that he has ever ì·ead of, even in France, where every thing is written and described; but, behind him, I see the public,

  OF POLITICAL FREEDOM.75

  and this consideration stops me. My friend must therefore imagine what I do not relate ; or rather, to speak more correctly, that friend will never be able to imagine it. The excesses of despotism, which can alone give birth to the moral anarchy that here reigns around me, being only known by hearsay, their consequences would appear incredible. `Vhere legitimate liberty is wanted, illegitimate liberty is sure to spring up ; where the use is interdicted, the abuse will certainly creep in : deny the right, and you create the fraud; refuse justice, and you open the door to crime.

  Under the influence of these principles, Moscow is, of all the cities in Europe, the one in which the dissolute man of the fashionable world has the widest field for his career. The government is too well informed not to know that under an absolute rule some kind of revolt must somewhere break out; but it prefers that this revolt should be in manners rather than in politics. Here lies the secret of the licence of the one party and the tolerance of the other. The corruption of manners in Moscow has also other causes. One is, that the greater number of well-born, but, by their conduct, ill-famed persons, retire when disgraced, and here establish themselves.

  After the orgies which our modern literature takes pleasure in depicting, if we are to believe the authors, with a moral intention, we ought to be familiar with all the feaüires of dissolute life. I pass over the question of the pretended utility of their aim; I can tolerate their long though useless sermons: but there is in literature something more dangeroits even than the immoral; it is the ignoble. If, under the pretext of provoking salutary reforms in the lowest classes E 2

  76OBSERVATIONS ON

  of societyj the taste of the superior classes is corrupted, evil is done. To present to women the language of the pot-houses, to make men of rank in love with coarse vulgarities, is to injure the manners of a nation in a way for which no legal reform can compensate. Literature is lost among us, because our most intellectual writers, forgetting all poetical sentiment, all respect for the beautiful, write for the taste of the town ; and, instead of elevating their new readers to the views of delicate and noble minds, they lower themselves to the point of ministering to their coarsest appetites. They have rendered literature an ardent liquor, because, with sensibility, the faculty of tasting and feeling simple things is lost. This is a more serious evil than all the inconsistencies that have been noted in the laws and manners of the former state of society. It is another consecpienee of the modern materialism, which would reduce every thing to the useful, and which can only discern the useful in immediate and positive results. Woe to the land where the men of genius lower themselves to play the part of commissioners of police! When an author feels himself called upon to describe vice he should at least redouble his respect for good taste ; he should propose to himself the ideal truth for type even of his most vulgar characters. But too often, under the professions of our moralist, or rather moralising romance-writers, we discover less love of virtue than cynic indifference to good taste. There is a want of poetry in their works, because there is a want of faith in their hearts. To ennoble the picture of vice, as Kich-ardson has done in his " Lovelace," is not to corrupt the mind, but to avoid soiling the imagination and

  MODERN LITERATURE.77

  lowering the tone of sentiment. Such respect for the delicacy of the reader has, if yon like, a moral object; it is far more essential to civilised society than an exact knowledge of the turpitude of its bandits, and the virtues of its prostitutes. I must ask pardon for this excursion in the fields of conteinporary criticism, and hasten to return to the strict and painful duties of the veracious traveller, duties that are unfortunately too often opposed to these laws of literary composition which a respect for my language and my country has induced me to refer to.

  The writings of our boldest painters of manners are but weak copies of the originals which have been daily presented to my eyes since I have been in Russia.

  Bad faith injures every t
hing, but more especially the affairs of commerce: here it has yet another sphere of action; it incommodes the libertines in the execution of their most secret contracts. The continual alterations of money, favour, in Moscow, every species of subterfuge ; nothing is clear and precise in the mouth of a Russian, nothing is well defined nor well guaranteed ; and the purse always gains something by the slipperiness of the language. This extends even to amorous transactions: each party, knowing the duplicity of the other, requires payment in advance, whence much difficulty arises.

  The female peasants are more cunning than even the women of the town. Sometimes these young and doubly-corrupted savages violate the primary laws of prostitution, and escape with their booty, without paying the dishonourable debt they had contracted. The bandits of other lands observe their oaths, and E 3

  78MONGOLIAN KAPACITY.

  maintain the good faith of comradeship in crime. The dissolute and abandoned in Russia know nothing that is sacred, not even the religion of debauchery, though it be a guarantee essential to the exercise of their profession, — so true is it that the commerce even of shame cannot be carried on without probity.

  Civilisation, which elsewhere elevates the mind, here perverts it. It had been better for the Russians had they remained savages : — to polish slaves is to betray society. It is needful that a man possess a fund of virtue to enable him to bear culture.

  Under the influence of their government the Russian people have become taciturn and deceitful, although naturally gentle, lively, docile and pacific. Assuredly these are rare endowments: and yet, where there is a want of sincerity there is nothing. The Mongolian avidity of this race, and its incurable suspicion and distrust, are revealed by the least as well as the most important circumstances of life. Should you owe twenty roubles to a workman, he would return twenty times a day to ask for them, unless, at least, you were a dreaded nobleman. In Latin lands a promise is a sacred thing—a pledge to the giver as well as the receiver. Among the Greeks, and their disciples the Russians, the word of a man is nothing better than the false key of a robber — it serves to break into the interests of others.