Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/132

That family life, properly so called, as practised amongst the Muscovites of the sixteenth century, did not admit of the progressive development of certain domestic virtues cannot be affirmed, and this the unfavourable testimony of all contemporary observers notwithstanding. Their observation was limited to the most apparent phenomena, and virtue is a plant which usually flourishes in the shade. One characteristic trait in this respect is the solidarity of feeling so powerful in the numerous class of serving-men and daily guests who surrounded the heads of families of the period. These men, whether slaves or freemen, really constituted a sort of court (dvornia), surrounded by which the boïar loved to play the king, aping the ceremonial and the conferring of places practised in the Grand Ducal household, save that in his bedroom he was apt to replace the spalnik by a postiélnitsa. Badly fed, as a rule, for the turnkey (klioutchnik) did not fail to levy an unconscionable tithe on the food destined for the servants' support; ill-clothed, too, for, as in the Grand Duke's palace, fine liveries and rich clothes were only worn on great occasions, the members of the dvornia frequently sought compensation out of doors. They wandered about the streets, fraternized with vagabonds and beggars, asked charity like them, and helped them, when darkness fell, to strip the passers-by. Reward and punishment alike were bestowed on their master's whim, and their idea of justice was one in which morality had no part. 'The master,' they said, 'will find a fault if he wants to strike.' But they were ready to die for him. When a quarrel arose between two boïars their servants always intervened, and made this intervention a point of honour identical with that observable in the relations between the sloojilyié lioodi and the Sovereign. The boïar, habitually robbed and even betrayed by his servants, just as he often ill-used them, both in their persons and in their dearest interests, felt no scruple as to his own master, whom he deceived and whose property he stole, whenever and however he could, and whom he was quite capable, too, of betraying on occasion, though he would serve him, on some other, with an unchangeable devotion. Ivan the Terrible was to spend his whole life in denouncing and chastising his servants' disloyalty, and yet he always found men to carry out all his undertakings: men with a moral system of their own, in which the sense of right and wrong had no place, and conscience played no part, but in which a single directing instinct asserted itself in prodigies of complete and absolute self-sacrifice—that one principle of 'service.' This imperative absolute, the basis of the social and political organization of the country, triumphantly forced on the docile mind of a robust and patient race, has been the