CHAPTER XXIVST. PETERSBURG.

WE were in Russia, at Warsaw. At that point in the journey we were put through a searching process, and the result having satisfied the officials that we were not of the dangerous classes, and had no designs upon the life of the Emperor, or the emancipation of Poland, we had been allowed to enter. And now that we had come to St. Petersburg, there was no need of overhauling us again, for we had been certified to already. We were as free on arriving at the capital as if we had come to New York.

At the station-house we were reminded at once that we were in a strange land, by the peculiar costume of the porters and drivers, who were as numerous and noisy as at home. They wore low-crown hats, with bevelled rims; long coats reaching to the feet, and a belt about their loins. They were as clamorous for hire as in more civilized countries, but they pulled and hauled less. It was easy to see that the hand of government was upon this most ungovernable class of men. We found the same kind of omnibuses that run in our own streets, and on the one inscribed with the name of the hotel to which we were bound we took our seats, and were soon riding over the roughest paved streets that ever disgraced a city. For a long series of years St. Petersburg was unpaved. At length an imperial decree was issued that every vehicle coming into the city should bring a certain number of stones to be left for paving. If each carriage had dumped its load, without regard to sizeor order, just where it happened, the result would have been about the same as we found and felt the state of the streets to be, as we were bounced and tumbled on our way to the Hôtel de France.

SCENE AT RAILWAY STATION.

The manager of the hotel bade us welcome in good English. We were grimed with the dust of thirty hours’ steady railroad travel, and the luxury of a bath was more enjoyable than bed or board. The Russian is a very different bath from the Turkish, where to the preliminaries of warm air to set the system into a perspiration is added the thorough and plentiful scrubbing with hot water, poured on mercilessly. The Russian is the vapor bath only, and its effect is to open all the pores of the skin, to empty them completely as the streams of perspiration gush from every little mouth, and to incite a pleasurable languor, when all sense of weariness, soreness, or stiffness is gradually steamed away. The Russian dinner that followed was of the best: soup, fish, cutlet, roast beef, partridges, vegetables, and varied dessert. Wines or not, as you choose to order.

To see a city whose language is not one of your accomplishments, you must have a guide, acommissionaire, avalet de place. Now we knew precious little of the Russ. We had picked up a little Polish—mark, I do not say polish—at Warsaw, and had startled the natives by sudden outbreaks in what we supposed to be perfectly proper language, but which only served to awaken their pity or make them laugh; but the Russian is another thing, and not expecting to spend a winter here, nor to study the literature of the country, we had given no time to the language. We must have some one to be our mouth to the people, somebody who could answer a thousand questions out of his own stores of information, or serve as our interpreter when we attempted to get it out of others.

In the city of St. Petersburg resides an old Englishman whose name is Russel. He has an understanding with thehotel men that whenever a guide is wanted by travellers, he is to be sent for, and at our intimation he made his appearance, and very respectfully offered his services to make us familiar with the lions of the town. Mr. Russel is a venerable man in years, having completed his threescore and ten some time since. Half a century of these years he has dwelt in this capital of the Russian empire, and toiled in this interesting service of expounding its wonders to the visitors from other countries. Mr. Russel has become so familiar with the objects of interest in his adopted city, that he imagines his strangers to be equally familiar with them, and in no need of being enlightened. He is so far gone in the loss of his faculties, if he ever had any great quantity to lose, that a question must be proposed to him often and in many forms, before he comprehends it, and when he answers, you are not sure that he understood you, or that he knows any thing about the matter. He never speaks except when he is spoken to, unless to tell you something you knew before, or that was not worth knowing. He would pass the most important and interesting buildings or monuments or historic places in the city, and not mention them, unless you asked him,—“What’s that?” Yet he was very English. He dropped the H invariably. He exaspirated his vowels most unmercifully. Pointing to the tombs of the kings and royal family, he said: “That’s thehareto the throne; that’s hishaunt, and there’s hishuncle.” In a picture-gallery we came to Danae, and he was kind enough to say, “That’s a woman, I believe,” and there was not much room for doubt on the subject; and in a group of mythological sculpture he remarked for our information, “That’s Jupiter,—these is all gods.”

This was the intelligent man who was to make us acquainted with the city of St. Petersburg. If you are to be told only what he could tell me, it would not be worthwhile to read any further. But we have eyes and ears of our own, and already the barbaric splendor of this northern capital is breaking upon us. You shall have our first impressions and our last, for we have made two visits here, and have become familiar with the city, if not in love with it. It is not a city to go into raptures over. Perhaps it will become beautiful one day. But nothing in it is finished. Streets with palaces on them are still disfigured with insignificant and miserable dwellings. Palaces are not completed. Wealth has been lavished, but nothing is done. It resembles our own capital in this, that its public buildings are far apart, and the city is not half built up.

In the year 1703, Peter the Great began to build a city, to be called after his own name. He selected a miserable site on the banks of the Neva, and here he gathered a host of Russians, Tartars, Kalmucks, and Fins, and set them at this stupendous work. We expect to grow as the people want houses to live in. Peter built a city, and then looked for people to come and find it. The little cottage that he built for himself on the shore is still standing where he placed it, and the tools with which he worked, with his own industrious and skilful hands. For several successive years, 40,000 men were annually raised by draft, as for an army, to come from distant parts of the empire and build. The nobility of Russia came and caused residences to be reared for them, when they saw that Moscow was no longer to be the capital. Peter died, and Catharine I. did not push on the work with energy. Her successor, Peter II., loved Moscow more, and died there. Anne, the empress, adopted Petersburg as her residence, and it flourished under her reign. Catharine strove hard to defend it from the inroads of the river, but it lies so low that no art can avert inundations. It lies in the midst of waters, a vast morass. Canals easily traverse its bosom. Bridges and islands and quays are part of thestreets and squares of the city. The houses are too many for the inhabitants. The thoroughfares are never thronged. You may walk long streets and scarcely meet a person. Half a million is the number of its inhabitants, but there is room for many more.

The contrasts are more sudden and striking than in other capitals. The rich are very rich; the poor are very poor. Society is rigid in its laws. The nobles have no sympathies with the serf, though a serf no longer. Caste is stronger in Russia than in England.

But I am impatient to be out in the town, sight-seeing. It is a very hot day, and I asked Russel if they often had such hot weather in June. “Well,” he said, “sometimes it is ’ot as this, and sometimes not so ’ot: it depends very much on the weather;” and with this profound observation he led the way into the city.

It was but a step from our lodgings, under the arch that divides and connects the state apartments into the grand square in front of the Winter Palace, the residence of the Emperor of Russia.

But before us rises a red granite column, the grandeur and beauty of which instantly fix the eye. A single stone, eighty-four feet high and fifty feet in circumference,—the loftiest single shaft of modern times, only less in height than Pompey’s Pillar,—stands in the midst of the square, surmounted by an angel and the cross. The pedestal bears a brief inscription, but it tells the whole story,—“Grateful Russia to Alexander I.” Originally this stone was cut out of the mountain, 104 feet long, and the order was to make the loftiest monolith in the world; but from fear that it was too long to stand firmly on its base, which was fourteen feet in diameter, it was shortened to its present length. With incredible labor it was erected upon a pedestal twenty-five feet high, and there, polished, it stands, perhaps the most splendid shaft that now pressesupon the earth. It seemed to grow as I gazed upon it. And daily as I caught sight of it from other parts of the city, or as I drove into the magnificent area of which it is the central figure, its simple majesty and exceeding beauty impressed me more and more. What vast labor it cost to bring this block from the mountains of Finland, and plant it perpendicularly on the banks of the Neva, in the heart of the city!

In the Admiralty Square is a more famous statue, and one of which we have heard from childhood; pictures of it had made it so familiar that it seemed an old acquaintance,—Peter the Great, the founder of the city, its inventor and builder, is on horseback, riding up a rock, to the verge of which he has come, when he reins in his steed and sits looking upon the river and the city he has raised upon its banks. The horse is rearing, and the immense weight rests upon his hinder legs and the tail, which touches a huge serpent, coiled at the horse’s feet. This is deservedly reckoned one of the finest equestrian statues, and it honors the most extraordinary man of his age.

Two boys were together crowned as Czars of Russia, at Moscow, by the Greek patriarch, on the 15th of June, 1682. They were brothers, and one of them soon yielded to the superior energy of the other, and resigning his share of the government, leftPeterthe sole sovereign of an empire but little above the range of barbarism. This Peter, who becamePeter the Great, was then but seventeen years old. He was far in advance of every one, and his reign marks the era of Russia’s rise to greatness among the nations. Yet this man never rose to the conception of what must be a nation’s true glory. His ideas all ran in the line of material grandeur, and not in the direction of moral and mental progress. He was a born mechanic, and he built a nation. He thought to build a people just as he built the city that bears his name. His superstitiousnobles considered it wicked for him to go abroad, but he had heard of the arts of civilization, that made France and Holland and England glorious in the world, and he determined to see for himself what it was that made them so. He laid aside his imperial purple (if he ever had any), and travelled into distant lands. Sometimes he concealed his royal person in the garb of a common workman, and wrought in the shops with his own hands. I have seen many specimens of his handicraft that would do credit to any artisan who earned his bread by his industry and skill. He was a capital ship carpenter. Russia was in want of a navy. Peter learned how to build ships, and made a navy for Russia. In foreign countries he studied every thing, but learned nothing truly great in the art of government. Going into the courts of Westminster with a friend one day, in London, and seeing many men with wigs, he asked who they were.

“They are lawyers,” said his friend.

“Lawyers!” he exclaimed; “why, I have only two lawyers in my dominions, and I mean to hang one as soon as I return.”

In all that he saw in England and Holland, where he spent most of his time abroad, he never learned thatmindmakes nations great; that intelligence is the security of national progress and prosperity, and that the people, even under despotic governments, have the power to help themselves if their rulers will give them a chance. But he came back with the idea of making his empire greater by making it broader, and he took the sword as the instrument of success. He was partially successful. After a reign of half a century, he died and left his empire on the highway to civilization and glory. It is wonderful that Russia has made so little progress since his death in 1725. Yet no monarch ever reigned who descended to such minute details in legislating for his people. Inured to hardships himself,and possessed with the idea that nothing was invincible which his will was set to overcome, he undertook to force his subjects into sudden and astounding reforms, from which they revolted. He could not make them see with his eyes, nor work with his hands. He made his clergy shave their faces, and the enemies of his innovations called him the antichrist. No man ever lived who impressed himself more indelibly upon a people than Peter the Great. His name is held in honor second only to the Divine. The relics of his handiwork are preserved with religious care. Every museum has some specimen of his genius and industry, and the lapse of a hundred and fifty years since these things were made by imperial fingers invests them with interest approaching reverential awe.

But the greatest of all his works, and one that is the most characteristic of the man, is the city of St. Petersburg itself. Why he selected such a site for it, it is impossible to say, unless its very unfitness and apparent impracticability developed that faculty for which he was so remarkable, and impelled him to undertake what to others was an impossibility. From the summit of a monument, or the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the city seems to float in the waters. And this would not be a fatal objection to the site if it stood in such relations to the rest of the empire or the world as to make it important to fix it here. But it does not. Winter shuts it out from communication with the sea about half the time.

As we were walking on the most thronged of the thoroughfares in St. Petersburg, the Nevski Perspective, a well-dressed gentleman paused, and, turning toward a church which he was passing, took off his hat and offered a silent prayer. What at first appeared the eccentricity of a single individual, or excessive devotion, I soon perceived was the practice of many, and indeed a custom of the country. In passing a church, of course one passes an altar;and it may be, and indeed is, out of sight, but the devout believer recognizes the fact by a token of reverence, slight perhaps, but nevertheless sincere. Women hurrying by with baskets of market stuff were often willing to put down their burdens before the cross and pass a moment in thoughts of their Saviour.

I went into the church, the Kazan Cathedral, with a colonnade in feeble imitation of St. Peter’s at Rome. The Greek religion is as nearly like the Romish as this church is like St. Peter’s: it is a copyafter it, and a good ways after it, but still so near that it amounts to the same thing. They do not make unto themselves graven images, because that is forbidden by the second commandment; but they do make the likeness of things in heaven and earth, although that is forbidden, and they do bow down and worship these likenesses, or pay apparently the same honors to a picture of the Virgin that the Romanist does to a statue. The distinction is without a difference. But when I entered the cathedral, I saw a sight that never met my eye in Rome or any Roman Catholic city. In the middle of the day, and on a week-day too, respectably appearing, well-dressed gentlemen were standing or kneeling before the altar offering their devotions. Women were there numerously, and the poor, whose garb denoted their poverty; and these classes are largely represented in Romish churches everywhere; but the Greek religion had such hold upon the people of another set, as to excite remark. The same lavish expenditure upon the churches is to be seen here as in Italy and Spain, though the architecture is far from being so effective as that which prevails in Spain and Italy. This church was built sixty years ago, at an expense of three millions of dollars then. A colonnade inside in four rows extends from the centre pillars supporting the dome, which is 230 feet above the floor, and from the three great doors. These columns are fifty-six in number, each one a singlestone, thirty-five feet high, with bronze Corinthian capitals. In the midst of the main door the name of God is recorded with precious stones, and a miraculous painting of the Virgin blazes with gold and jewels of untold value. And in the midst of this temple of religion, sacred to the worship of the Prince of Peace, hung trophies of victories over France, Turkey, and Persia.

But this church is not the wonder of the city. You must go with us to the Isaac Cathedral, whose gilded dome has attracted our eye from every part of the city, and whose glittering cross above the crescent we have studied with an opera-glass, again and again, at a distance. Peter the Great built a church of wood just here, and Catharine another when the first was destroyed, but that gave way to this glorious pile, which was forty years in building, and was completed in 1858. It is far more imposing in its external appearance than St. Peter’s. Its proportions are perfect and stupendous. Like all other Greek churches, it is four square and in the form of the Greek cross. A grand entrance on each side is approached by a broad flight of red granite steps, vast blocks of stone from the quarries of Finland. Each flight of steps is surmounted by a peristyle, each pillar of which is sixty feet high, one solid, polished, red granite column! Above them, thirty pillars support the central cupola, and on the crown of this vast hovering cupola is a miniature of the temple below, a beautiful finish to the whole, on the summit of which stands the shining cross.

Within, the splendor is amazing. Think of columns of solid malachite fifty feet high! A bit of this stone is a gem to be set in gold for an ornament on a lady’s dress. But here it is in lofty pillars, and steps for altars, with lesser pillars of lapis lazuli standing near. The worship is in the form and manner of the Greek Church, and is strikingly Oriental, more so than that we see in the Church of Rome.Men and women not merely bow and kneel and cross themselves, touching their fingers to their foreheads and breasts, but they prostrate themselves with their faces on the cold stone floor, and lie there as if dead. Women thus lying in a heap looked more like a bundle of rags or old clothes, than human beings worshipping the Almighty. Others brought candles and lighted them, to be burned before the images, that is, the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Child. Some of the people lighted the candles themselves, repeating a prayer; the verger lighted them for others, and presented them to the Virgin as he proceeded with the service.

One woman brought a napkin or some cloth embroidered, and gave it to the verger, who opened a golden door into the Virgin’s panel, and placing the offering in it, locked it again. This was as truly idolatrous as any worship you would see in Romish churches, and wherein it differs from offerings to idols in pagan temples I do not see.

A collection was now taken up, by assistants going around with bags, and gathering from the multitude standing before the altar. Every one seemed to put in something, and their alms and prayers went together.

Three priests were officiating. One went about swinging a censer with burning incense. A choir of men-singers stood near the altar and made the responses with great power and singular sweetness of tone. The sacristan came to us and offered to show us the sacred things in the temple, and when we objected that the service was in progress, and we did not wish to be sight-seeing at such a time, he assured us it was all right, and we need not stand upon ceremony. He led us to the holy places, and pointed out the sacred relics, which were useful to him in extracting a fee from the stranger, and that is the only miracle they are able to work. If they do this every day, and often enough every day, they will be held in honor as long as the temple stands.

In the course of our wanderings under the lead of the sacristan, we found ourselves behind the veil, or the hanging curtain which was opened for the priests to go out and in during the service. Fearful of intrusion, we were about to retire, when one of the priests came from his place, and invited us into the apartment where he was standing, and responding as his associate read the service. The inmost shrine, perhaps it may be called the Holy of Holies, is in a round temple, whose dome is held by eight pillars of solid malachite, and the walls and floors are of polished marbles of various colors. The steps by which we ascend to it are of polished porphyry.

The freedom with which a stranger was admitted “behind the scenes” in the midst of the service was surprising to me, and I had an opportunity not expected, of coming into contact with the priests and ministers of the Greek religion, while in their service. The priests are a very inferior order of men; very unlearned, of low extraction, and in their appearance and manners what you would expect after such a statement. They are obliged to be married once, and if the wife die, they are not allowed to marry a second time, but the widower continues to serve at the altar as before. It is said that the priests are very watchful of the health of their wives, on the principle that a good thing which cannot be replaced must be preserved with the greatest care. This is better than the celibacy of Romish priests, which is offensive to nature and good morals, a curse to the church and the world. You cannot be long in any country where the Romish priests abound without hearing of their bad morals, but the reputation of the priests in the Russo-Greek Church is better. In their religious services, the most effective part is the singing, and indeed the praying is intoning, which is a drawling kind of singing, now coming into use in the ritualistic churches, which are only feeble imitations of the Romish and Greek. Boys are employedin the choirs, and for some parts of the service, the solos particularly, they get the deepest bass voices that can be hired, and sometimes they render the sublime passages with great effect. I have said the men, as well as the women, appear to be religious in Russia. And it struck me as very strange to see a fine-looking, full-grown man coming in at noonday into a church, bringing a little wax candle, walking up to a shrine over which is a picture of the Virgin, kneeling before it, bowing his head to the floor, crossing himself again and again, lighting his candle and sticking it into a hole prepared for the purpose, and once more prostrating himself to kiss the pavement, and then retire! This lighting of candles is an emblem of life, and is designed to keep the spiritual nature of man continually in view. The Russians have no religious ceremonies without this symbol of the Spirit. It is fast finding its way into the churches of England and America that copy after these Oriental customs, without apprehending their meaning.

Nothing in the mode of worship distinguishes the Greek from the Roman Catholic. I would not speak with confidence, but it appeared to me that the people were moredeeplyreligious than they are in Roman Catholic countries. It is not, as with the people in Italy and Spain, and more especially in France, merely a matter of form to be gone through with, and that the end of it. In the Romish cathedrals, it was rare that I could get into sympathy with the worshippers so as to feel devotional in a service foreign from that with which I was familiar. For anywhere on earth where men are worshipping God in their way and we are present, from curiosity, or any other motive, I would desire also to be a worshipper, and offer among strangers the incense of a loving heart, touched with a sense of sin, and longing for divine favor. There is no danger of becoming an idolater by worshippingthe only living and true God in the midst of idolaters. The soul goes out to him who heareth prayer for those who are bowing down to stocks and stones. And he whom they ignorantly worship I would find in their temples, for the way to him is through the open door in the side of his crucified Son. But the Roman Catholics do not get so near to God as these Greek Christians do, for the former seem to be so much engrossed with saints and the mother of Jesus, that they lose the joy and blessedness of coming right to Christ, who is in the Father, and by whom they are saved.

The Russians keep Lent very rigidly, and are also careful to fast every Wednesday and Friday. They have four great fasts in the year: Lent, Peter’s fast, Conception fast, and St. Philip’s fast. The children are taught the catechism of the Greek Church. The Sabbath is not observed with any more regard to rest and worship than it is in France or Italy. They make long pilgrimages to monasteries and holy places. There are no pews or seats in the churches; all stand, the rich and poor, the emperor and empress, high and low alike on a level in the presence of God. When the Emperor was assailed in the park by an assassin, a few years ago, and escaped the blow aimed at his life, he rode directly to this Isaac Cathedral, and here in the midst of the thronging multitude, gave thanks for his deliverance from sudden death. The language of the church service is the Slavonic, and it is quite as unintelligible to the masses as theora pro nobisand the rest of the Latin to the Roman Catholics in our country. The whole service is quite as imposing as the Romish, with processions and banners and sonorous responses. Religious services are often celebrated in private houses to cast out evil spirits; and always the fortieth day after a person’s death is observed in memory and improvement of the event. Inone corner of every room that you enter from the street is the image of the Virgin, and you are expected always to remove your hat on coming in; at first, it seems to be required as a token of respect to the persons in the house, but it is solely to honor the Virgin in the corner. The Russians are a very superstitious people, and they believe in houses haunted with good and evil spirits, especially the evil, and the constant presence of a pictured Mary is a protection; at least they think so.

A RAINY DAY IN A RUSSIAN CITY.

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