CONVERSATIONS WITH THE CZAR.—IF CROMWELL WAS THE GREATEST MAN (CAESAR EXCEPTED) WHO EVER ROSE TO THE SUPREME POWER, PETER WAS THE GREATEST MAN EVER BORN TO IT.
IT was singular enough that my introduction to the notice of Peter the Great and Philip le Debonnaire should have taken place under circumstances so far similar that both those illustrious personages were playing the part rather of subjects than of princes. I cannot, however, conceive a greater mark of the contrast between their characters than the different motives and manners of the incognitos severally assumed.
Philip, in a scene of low riot and debauch, hiding the Jupiter under the Silenus,—wearing the mask only for the licentiousness it veiled, and foregoing the prerogative of power, solely for indulgence in the grossest immunities of vice.
Peter, on the contrary, parting with the selfishness of state in order to watch the more keenly over the interests of his people, only omitting to preside in order to examine, and affecting the subject only to learn the better the duties of the prince. Had I leisure, I might here pause to point out a notable contrast, not between the Czar and the Regent, but between Peter the Great and Louis le Grand: both creators of a new era,—both associated with a vast change in the condition of two mighty empires. There ceases the likeness and begins the contrast: the blunt simplicity of Peter, the gorgeous magnificence of Louis; the sternness of a legislator for barbarians, the clemency of an idol of courtiers. One the victorious defender of his country,—a victory solid, durable, and just; the other the conquering devastator of a neighbouring people,—a victory, glittering, evanescent, and dishonourable. The one, in peace, rejecting parade, pomp, individual honours, and transforming a wilderness into an empire: the other involved in ceremony, and throned on pomp; and exhausting the produce of millions to pamper the bloated vanity of an individual. The one a fire that burns, without enlightening beyond a most narrow circle, and whose lustre is tracked by what it ruins, and fed by what it consumes; the other a luminary, whose light, not so dazzling in its rays, spreads over a world, and is noted, not for what it destroys, but for what it vivifies and creates.
I cannot say that it was much to my credit that, while I thought the Regent’s condescension towards me natural enough, I was a little surprised by the favour shown me by the Czar. At Paris, I had seemed to be the man of pleasure: that alone was enough to charm Philip of Orleans. But in Russia, what could I seem in any way calculated to charm the Czar? I could neither make ships nor could sail them when they were made; I neither knew, nor, what was worse, cared to know, the stern from the rudder. Mechanics were a mystery to me; road-making was an incomprehensible science. Brandy I could not endure; a blunt bearing and familiar manner I could not assume. What was it, then, that made the Czar call upon me, at least twice a week in private, shut himself up with me by the hour together, and endeavour to make me drunk with Tokay, in order (as he very incautiously let out one night), “to learn the secrets of my heart”? I thought, at first, that the nature of my mission was enough to solve the riddle: but we talked so little about it that, with all my diplomatic vanities fresh about me, I could not help feeling I owed the honour I received less to my qualities as a minister than to those as an individual.
At last, however, I found that the secret attraction was what the Czar termed the philosophical channel into which our conferences flowed. I never saw a man so partial to moral problems and metaphysical inquiries, especially to those connected with what ought to be the beginning or the end of all moral sciences,—politics. Sometimes we would wander out in disguise, and select some object from the customs or things around us, as the theme of reflection and discussion; nor in these moments would the Czar ever allow me to yield to his rank what I might not feel disposed to concede to his arguments. One day, I remember that he arrested me in the streets, and made me accompany him to look upon two men undergoing the fearful punishment of the battaog;* one was a German, the other a Russian: the former shrieked violently, struggled in the hands of his punishers, and, with the utmost difficulty, was subjected to his penalty; the latter bore it patiently and in silence; he only spoke once, and it was to say, “God bless the Czar!”
* A terrible kind of flogging, but less severe than the knout.
“Can your Majesty hear the man,” said I, warmly, when the Czar interpreted these words to me, “and not pardon him?” Peter frowned, but I was not silenced. “You don’t know the Russians!” said he, sharply, and turned aside. The punishment was now over. “Ask the German,” said the Czar to an officer, “what was his offence?” The German, who was writhing and howling horribly, uttered some violent words against the disgrace of the punishment, and the pettiness of his fault; what the fault was I forget.
“Now ask the Russian,” said Peter. “My punishment was just!” said the Russian, coolly, putting on his clothes as if nothing had happened; “God and the Czar were angry with me!”
“Come away, Count,” said the Czar; “and now solve me a problem. I know both those men, and the German, in a battle, would be the braver of the two. How comes it that he weeps and writhes like a girl, while the Russian bears the same pain without a murmur?”
“Will your Majesty forgive me,” said I, “but I cannot help wishing that the Russian had complained more bitterly; insensibility to punishment is the sign of a brute, not a hero. Do you not see that the German felt the indignity, the Russian did not? and do you not see that that very pride which betrays agony under the disgrace of the battaog is exactly the very feeling that would have produced courage in the glory of the battle? A sense of honour makes better soldiers and better men than indifference to pain.”
“But had I ordered the Russian to death, he would have gone with the same apathy and the same speech, ‘It is just! I have offended God and the Czar!’”
“Dare I observe, Sire, that that fact would be a strong proof of the dangerous falsity of the old maxims which extol indifference to death as a virtue? In some individuals it may be a sign of virtue, I allow; but, as a national trait, it is the strongest sign of national misery. Look round the great globe. What countries are those where the inhabitants bear death with cheerfulness, or, at least, with apathy? Are they the most civilized, the most free, the most prosperous? Pardon me; no! They are the half-starved, half-clothed, half-human sons of the forest and the waste; or, when gathered in states, they are slaves without enjoyment or sense beyond the hour; and the reason that they do not recoil from the pangs of death is because they have never known the real pleasures or the true objects of life.”
“Yet,” said the Czar, musingly, “the contempt of death was the great characteristic of the Spartans.”
“And, therefore,” said I, “the great token that the Spartans were a miserable horde. Your Majesty admires England and the English; you have, beyond doubt, witnessed an execution in that country; you have noted, even where the criminal is consoled by religion, how he trembles, and shrinks,—how dejected, how prostrate of heart he is before the doom is completed. Take now the vilest slave, either of the Emperor of Morocco or the great Czar of Russia. He changes neither tint nor muscle; he requires no consolation; he shrinks from no torture. What is the inference? That slaves dread death less than the free. And it should be so. The end of legislation is not to make death, but life, a blessing.”
“You have put the matter in a new light,” said the Czar; “but you allow that, in individuals, contempt of death is sometimes a virtue.”
“Yes, when it springs from mental reasonings, not physical indifference. But your Majesty has already put in action one vast spring of a system which will ultimately open to your subjects so many paths of existence that they will preserve contempt for its proper objects, and not lavish it solely, as they do now, on the degradation which sullies life and the axe that ends it. You have already begun the conquest of another and a most vital error in the philosophy of the ancients,—that philosophy taught that man should have few wants, and made it a crime to increase and a virtue to reduce them. A legislator should teach, on the contrary, that man should have many wants: for wants are not only the sources of enjoyment,—they are the sources of improvement; and that nation will be the most enlightened among whose populace they are found the most numerous. You, Sire, by circulating the arts, the graces, create a vast herd of moral wants hitherto unknown, and in those wants will hereafter be found the prosperity of your people, the fountain of your resources, and the strength of your empire.”
In conversation on these topics we often passed hours together, and from such conferences the Czar passed only to those on other topics more immediately useful to him. No man, perhaps, had a larger share of the mere human frailties than Peter the Great; yet I do confess that when I saw the nobleness of mind with which he flung aside his rank as a robe, and repaired from man to man, the humblest or the highest, the artisan or the prince,—the prosperity of his subjects his only object, and the acquisition of knowledge his only means to obtain it,—I do confess that my mental sight refused even to perceive his frailties, and that I could almost have bent the knee in worship to a being whose benevolence was so pervading a spirit, and whose power was so glorious a minister to utility.
Towards the end of January, I completed my mission, and took my leave of the court of Russia.
“Tell the Regent,” said Peter, “that I shall visit him in France soon, and shall expect to see his drawings if I show him my models.”
In effect, the next month (February 16), the Czar commenced his second course of travels. He was pleased to testify some regard for me on my departure. “If ever you quit the service of the French court, and your own does not require you, I implore you to come to me; I will give you carte blanche as to the nature and appointments of your office.”
I need not say that I expressed my gratitude for the royal condescension; nor that, in leaving Russia, I brought, from the example of its sovereign, a greater desire to be useful to mankind than I had known before. Pattern and Teacher of kings, if each country in each century had produced one such ruler as you, either all mankind would now be contented with despotism or all mankind would be free! Oh! when kings have only to be good, to be kept forever in our hearts and souls as the gods and benefactors of the earth, by what monstrous fatality have they been so blind to their fame? When we remember the millions, the generations, they can degrade, destroy, elevate, or save, we might almost think (even if the other riddles of the present existence did not require a future existence to solve them), we might almost think a hereafter necessary, were it but for the sole purpose of requiting the virtues of princes,—or their SINS!*
* Upon his death-bed Peter is reported to have said, “God, I dare trust, will look mercifully upon my faults in consideration of the good I have done my country.” These are worthy to be the last words of a king! Rarely has there been a monarch who more required the forgiveness of the Creator; yet seldom perhaps has there been a human being who more deserved it.—ED.
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