know how to get hold of his real opinion, and even when he has a real opinion, it is impossible to get him to carry it into practice. With him it is the unexpected that always happens. He may be at the same time a Reactionary and a Progressive, a Mystic and an Agnostic, an Imperialist and a Pacifist, a Liberal and an Antisemite.
To wander through the Russian Empire is not only to move through vast distances of space from the ice-bound plain in the North to the vine-clad mills in the South, it is also to wander through æons of time, it is to travel down the ages through every stage of human advance. Visit a Moscow drawing-room, and you will listen to the most progressive thought of the twentieth century, where even the English Radicals are discredited as old-fashioned. You go to the neighbouring provincial town, and you are transported back to the eighteenth century. You move to one of the cities of innumerable shrines and pilgrimages and convents, to Kieff or Kazan, and you seem to be carried back to the Middle Ages. You take a voyage down the Volga, or you ascend the mountain ranges of the Caucasus, and you leave civilization behind.
