and in the same way, the Russian gentry think themselves the gayest people in the world, in their life of social precariousness, and of restriction on personal action. No doubt they suffer under the increased panic and helplessness of this terrible year; but it cannot be to them by any means so intolerable as it would be to us who have never known what it was to fear our government, or our neighbours, or our own households.
Let us see what we know of the character of ordinary Russian life, and of that of to-day. Such a survey, however brief, may help us to sympathise now, and prepare us for whatever we may next witness.
We cannot too carefully remember that, however we may talk about Russian society, we know nothing of the life of any part of it but the aristocracy. There is nothing else that we can know; for there is nothing there equivalent to our middle class. English residents and travellers in Russia describe to us the dress and appearance of everybody who appears in the streets and passes along the roads; they tell us what the shops and markets are like, and how people work in the fields, and the mines, and the factories, and the great charity-schools, and asylums; but there is nobody to report what is thought, and said, and felt by nine-tenths of the people. Remembering, then, how narrow our range of observation is, this is what we may be said to know.
The Russians consider themselves the most light-hearted people in the world,—the very gayest,—those who have the easiest life of it: and the common run of foreign observers fall into the belief that it is so. The citizens have no onerous cares, no arduous enterprises, no political duties, no social responsibilities. Government undertakes everything for them, and only begs them not to trouble themselves about anything. This gives them leisure to gratify their likings, and pursue their amusements, without any danger of reproach from any quarter; and they claim that Russia is the same sort of paradise for men that Belgravia and Washington are for women. An Englishman’s comment on this is that such a life would not satisfy him; and I need not dwell on that plain fact: but I must point out that the bright gaiety of aristocratic life in Russia is only one side of it. The Czars and their counsellors have steadily desired that life should be essentially monotonous to the citizens, while the irksomeness was duly relieved by superficial excitements. A perpetual round of entertainments was to preclude all dulness, while no absorbing interests were to find entrance. But it is not for Czars and councils to decree what men shall do with their lives, and at the same time save them from the consequences of any abuse of life. As it has turned out, nowhere are there so many catastrophes as in Russian life, where nothing remarkable is to be allowed to happen: nowhere are there so many thunderclaps as in that gay realm where everybody is to be always dancing in the sunshine. The element of uncertainty is most striking,—whether we study native or foreign pictures of Russian society. Throughout the vast mountain pile of Russian life, there are not only deep hidden caverns where misery groans, and gloomy ravines where men’s hearts fail them for fear, but also chasms in the flowery uplands, into which somebody or other is for ever falling, to the horror of the bystanders. The Government is vexed that it should be so,—declares that it is the fault of the sufferers,—complains of men’s perverseness, that they will think and desire, and aspire, and do anything but amuse themselves, and go deftly through their easy work in the public offices: but not the less is the thing for ever happening; and this perpetual experience of shocks must have done something towards either deadening men’s feelings, or inuring their minds to such a state of things as the present.
As for the ladies,—their life is easily understood and imagined. They are all hospitable,—it being the habit of their order to keep open house in the country, and something very like it in town. They read in several modern languages, they cultivate music and drawing, they dress themselves and their houses prettily, they amuse themselves and other people, all their lives long. In a state of society in which due scope is not allowed to the best human energies, there is sure to be a prevalence of two tendencies,—of scepticism and of sentimentality; and the women are sure to have their full share of the one or the other. Among Russian ladies, there is, accordingly, a knowing turn and a sentimental turn; and if we would find a ripe wisdom, the fruit of knowledge, sensibility, thought, and experience, we must look for it among those who are far from being gay and light-hearted.
But I must be more rapid in my survey. What is the life of the men of Russia, as it was before the opening of the present crisis?
There was the Czar; a man as far from happy as any one in his dominions. He believed—from Peter the Great to the second Alexander—that conspiracy was always dogging his steps, and boring mines under his throne. He was a god to the nation; but he had the work of a Providence to do in a polity which charged him with every man’s business and every man’s fate; and thus, between his dignity and his task, his pride and his mortal limitations, his brain was in danger, and a sound and serene life was out of the question. As for any possible aid in his work,—an autocrat can have no friend, in the best sense; and the late Czar only said what every Czar thinks when he declared that his officials would steal his very breeches if they could. Then come the officials. They are the worst class in society, unless it be the Jew dram-sellers, who are the locusts of the country districts as the political functionaries are of their own department. They are nominally underpaid, and therefore provide for themselves by corruption and oppression. We all know so much of this, and the Russian bureaucracy is so established as the type of a curse in high places, that I need say no more of it. But the military part of the public service is no longer to be described, as it once was, in the same terms with the civil. Since the last war, if the soldiery are not more miserable than before, their misery has become better known. The case has been taken to heart by the Imperial family; thieves and oppressors in high places have been punished: frauds have been stopped; and, above all, the conscrip-
