AS WE APPROACHED Kronstadt—an underwater fortress of which the Russians are justly proud—the Gulf of Finland suddenly assumed an animated appearance. The Imperial fleet was in motion and surrounded us on all sides. It remains in port, ice-locked for more than six months of the year; but during the three months of summer the marine cadets are exercised in nautical maneuvers between St. Petersburg and the Baltic. After passing the fleet, we again sailed on an almost desert sea; now and then only enlivened by the distant apparition of some merchant vessel, or the yet more infrequent smoke of a pyroscaph, as steamboats are learnedly called in the nautical language of some parts of Europe.
The Baltic Sea, by the dull hues of its unfrequented waters, proclaims the vicinity of a continent depopulated under the rigors of the climate. The barren shores harmonize with the cold aspect of the sky and water, and chill the heart of the traveler.
No sooner does he arrive on this unattractive coast, than he longs to leave it; he calls to mind, with a sigh, the remark of one of Catherine’s favorites, who, when the Empress complained of the effects of the climate of Petersburg upon her health, observed, “It is not God who should be blamed, madame, because men have persisted in building the capital of a great empire in a territory destined by nature to be the patrimony of wolves and bears.”
My traveling companions have been explaining to me, with much self-satisfaction, the recent progress of the Russian marine. I admire the prodigy without magnifying it as they do. It is a creation, or rather a re-creation of the present emperor’s. This prince amuses himself by endeavoring to realize the favorite object of Peter I; but however powerful a man may be, he is forced, sooner or later, to acknowledge that nature is more powerful still. So long as Russia shall keep within her natural limits, the Russian navy will continue the hobby of the emperors and nothing more.
During the season of naval exercises, I am informed that the younger pupils remain performing their evolutions in the neighborhood of Kronstadt, while the more advanced extend their voyages of discovery as far as Riga, and sometimes even to Copenhagen.
As soon as I found that the sole object of all this display of naval power, which passed before my eyes, was the instruction of pupils, a secret feeling of ennui extinguished my curiosity.
All this unnecessary preparation, which is neither the result of commerce nor of war, appears to me a mere parade. Now, God knows, and the Russians know, whether there is any pleasure in a parade! The taste for reviews in Russia is carried beyond all bounds, and here, before even landing in this empire of military evolutions, I must be present at a review on the water. But I must not laugh at this. Puerility on a grand scale is a monstrous thing, impossible except under a tyranny, of which it is, perhaps, the most terrible result! Everywhere, except under an absolute despotism, men, when they make great efforts, have in view great ends; it is only among a blindly abject people that the monarch may command immense sacrifices for the sake of trifling results.
The view of the naval power of Russia, gathered together for the amusement of the czar, at the gate of his capital, has thus caused me only a painful impression. The vessels which will be inevitably lost in a few winters, without having rendered any service, suggest to my mind images—not of the power of a great country, but of the useless toils to which the poor, unfortunate seamen are condemned. The ice is a more terrible enemy to this navy than foreign war. Every autumn, after the three months’ exercise, the pupil returns to his prison, the plaything to its box, and the frost begins to wage its more serious war upon the Imperial finances. Lord Durham once remarked to the emperor himself, with a freedom of speech which wounded him in the most sensitive part, that the Russian ships of war were but the toys of the Russian sovereign.
As regards myself, this childish colossus by no means predisposes me to admire what I may expect to see in the interior of the empire. To admire Russia in approaching it by water, it is necessary to forget the approach to England by the Thames. The former is the image of death, the latter of life.
On dropping anchor before Kronstadt, we learned that one of the noble vessels we had seen maneuvering around us had just been lost on a sandbank. This shipwreck was dangerous only to the captain, who expected to be cashiered, and, perhaps, punished yet more severely. Prince K—— said to me privately, that he would have done better to have perished with his vessel. Our fellow-traveler, the Princess L——, had a son attached to the unlucky ship. She was placed in a situation of painful suspense, until news of his safety was brought to her by the governor of Kronstadt.
The Russians are incessantly repeating to me that it is requisite to spend at least two years in their country before passing a judgment upon it; so difficult is it to understand.
But though patience and prudence may be necessary virtues in those learned travelers who aspire to the glory of producing erudite volumes, I, who have been hitherto writing only for my friend and myself, have no intention of making my journal a work of labor. I have some fear of the Russian customhouse, but they assure me that my écritoire will be respected.
Nothing can be more melancholy than the aspect of nature in the approach to St. Petersburg. As you advance up the gulf, the flat marshes of Ingria terminate in a little wavering line drawn between the sky and the sea; this line is Russia. It presents the appearance of a wet lowland, with here and there a few birch trees thinly scattered. The landscape is void of objects and colors, has no bounds, and yet no sublimity. It has just light enough to be visible; the gray mossy earth well accords with the pale sun which illumines it, not from overhead, but from near the horizon, or almost indeed from below,—so acute is the angle which the oblique rays form with the surface of this unfavored soil. In Russia, the finest days have a bluish dimness. If the nights are marked by a clearness which surprises, the days are clothed with an obscurity which saddens.
Kronstadt, with its forest of masts, its substructures, and its ramparts of granite, finely breaks the monotonous reverie of the pilgrim, who is, like me, seeking for imagery in this dreary land. I have never seen, in the approaches to any other great city, a landscape so melancholy as the banks of the Neva. The campagna of Rome is a desert, but what picturesque objects, what past associations, what light, what fire, what poetry, if I might be allowed the expression, I would say, what passion animates that religious land! To reach St. Petersburg, you must pass a desert of water framed in a desert of peat earth; sea, shore, and sky, are all blended into one mirror, but so dull, so tarnished, that it reflects nothing.
The thought of the noble vessels of the Russian navy, destined to perish without having ever been in action, pursues me like a dream.
The English, in their idiom, which is so poetical when it relates to maritime objects, call a vessel of the royal navy, a man of war. Never will the Russians be thus able to denominate their ships of parade. These men of court, or wooden courtiers, are nothing more than the hospital of the Imperial service. If the sight of so useless a marine inspired me with any fear, it was not the fear of war but of tyranny. It recalled to my mind the inhumanities of Peter I, that type of all Russian monarchs, ancient and modern.
Some miserable boats, manned by fishermen as dirty as Eskimos, a few vessels employed in towing timber for the construction of the Imperial navy, and a few steamboats, mostly of foreign build, were the only objects that enlivened the scene. Such is the approach to St. Petersburg: all that could have influenced against the choice of this site, so contrary to the views of nature or to the real wants of a great people, must have passed before the mind of Peter the Great without moving him. The sea, at any cost, was the monarch’s sentiment. How strange an idea in a Russian to found the capital of the empire of the Slavs in the midst of the Finns, and in the vicinity of the Swedes! Peter the Great might say that his only object was to give a port to Russia; but if he had the genius which is ascribed to him, he must have foreseen the scope of his work; and in my opinion he did foresee it. Policy, and, I fear, the revenge of Imperial self-love, wounded by the independence of the old Muscovites, have created the destinies of modern Russia.
Russia is like a vigorous person suffocating for want of external air. Peter I promised it an outlet, but without perceiving that a sea necessarily closed during eight months in the year is not like other seas. Names, however, are everything in Russia. The efforts of Peter, his subjects, and successors, extraordinary as they are, have only served to create a city which it is difficult to inhabit; with which the Neva disputes the soil whenever the wind blows from the gulf, and from which the people think of flying altogether at each step that this war of elements compels them to take towards the south. For a bivouac, quays of granite are superfluous.
The Finns, among whom the Russians fixed their new capital, are of Scythian origin; they are still almost Pagans— suitable inhabitants of the soil of Petersburg. It was only in 1836 that an ukase appeared, commanding their priests to add a family name to the saint’s name given to the children in baptism.
This race is almost without physiognomy. The middle of the face is flattened to a degree that renders it deformed. The men, though ugly and dirty, are said to be strong, which, however, does not prevent their being small, sickly, and poor. Although the natives of the territory, they are seldom seen in Petersburg except upon market days. They inhabit the swamps, and slightly elevated granite hills of the environs.
Kronstadt is a very flat island in the middle of the Gulf of Finland: this aquatic fortress is raised above the sea only just sufficiently to defend the navigation to St. Petersburg. Its foundations and many of its works are under water. Its guns are disposed, according to the Russians, with great skill, and by virtue of the shower of ball that an order of the emperor’s could here pour upon an enemy, the place passes for impregnable. I am not aware whether these guns command both the passages of the gulf; the Russians who could have informed me, would not. My experience, although of recent date, has already taught me to distrust the rodomontades and exaggerations in which the subjects of the czar, inspired by an excess of zeal in the service of their master, indulge. National pride appears to me to be tolerable only among a free people.
We arrived at Kronstadt around midnight, at the dawning of one of those days without real beginning or end, which I am tired of describing though not of admiring.
After casting anchor before the silent fortress, we had to wait a long time for the arrival of a host of official personages, who boarded us one after the other; commissaries of police, directors and sub-directors of the customs, and finally the comptroller himself. This important personage considered himself obliged to pay us a visit on account of the illustrious Russian passengers on board. He conversed for a long time with the returned princes and princesses. They talked in Russian, probably because the politics of the West were the subject of their discourse; but when the conversation fell on the troubles of landing and the necessity of leaving our carriages at Kronstadt, French was freely spoken.
The Travemünde packet draws too much water to ascend the Neva; the passengers, therefore, have to proceed by a smaller steamer, which is dirty and ill constructed. We are allowed to carry with us our lighter baggage, after it has been examined by the officers. When this formality is concluded, we leave for Petersburg, with the hope that our carriages, left in the charge of these people, may arrive safely on the morrow.
The Russian princes were obliged, like myself, to submit to the laws of the customhouse, but on arriving at Petersburg I had the mortification of seeing them released in three minutes, whilst I had to struggle with every species of trickery for the space of three hours.
A multitude of little superfluous precautions engender here a population of deputies and sub-officials, each of whom acquits himself with an air of importance and a rigorous precision, which seems to say, though everything is done with much silence, “Make way, I am one of the members of the grand machine of state.”
Such members, acting under an influence which is not in themselves, in a manner resembling the wheelwork of a clock, are called men in Russia! The sight of these voluntary automata inspires me with a kind of fear: there is something supernatural in an individual reduced to the state of a mere machine. If, in lands where the mechanical arts flourish, wood and metal seem endowed with human powers, under despotisms, human beings seem to become as instruments of wood. We ask ourselves, what can become of their superfluity of thought? and we feel ill at ease at the idea of the influence that must have been exerted on intelligent creatures before they could have been reduced to mere things. In Russia I pity the human beings, as in England I feared the machines: in the latter country, the creations of man lack nothing but the gift of speech; here, the gift of speech is a thing superfluous to the creatures of the state.
These machines, clogged with the inconvenience of a soul, are, however, marvelously polite; it is easy to see they have been trained to civility, as to the management of arms, from their cradle. But of what value are the forms of urbanity when their origin savors of compulsion? The free will of man is the consecration that can alone impart a worth or a meaning to human actions; the power of choosing a master can alone give a value to fidelity; and since, in Russia, an inferior chooses nothing, all that he says and does is worthless and unmeaning.
The numerous questions I had to meet, and the precautionary forms that it was necessary to pass through, warned me that I was entering the empire of Fear, and depressed my spirits. Fear is as catching as sadness. Thus, I was afraid and I was sad . . . out of politeness . . . to be like everybody else.
I was obliged to appear before an Areopagus of deputies who had assembled to interrogate the passengers. The members of this formidable rather than imposing tribunal were seated before a large table; some of them were turning over the leaves of the register with an attention which had a sinister appearance, for their ostensible employ was not sufficient to account for so much gravity.
Some, with pen in hand, listened to the replies of the passengers, or rather the accused, for every stranger is treated as a culprit on arriving at the Russian frontier. All the answers translated from French to German and finally to Russian were carefully written down, probably arbitrarily, and the passports minutely examined and detained, under the promise that they would be returned at Petersburg.
These formalities being satisfied, we proceeded on board the new steamboat. Hour after hour elapsed, and still there was no talk of starting. Every moment black, doleful boats proceeded from the city, and rowed towards us. Although we were moored close to the walls, the silence was profound. No voice issued from this tomb. The shadows that were gliding in their boats around were equally silent. They were clad in coarse capotes of gray wool, their faces lacked expression, their eyes possessed no fire, their complexion was of a green or yellow hue. Observing these unfortunate creatures, I wondered what man had done to God that he should condemn sixty million fellow-beings to live in Russia. I was told that they were sailors attached to the garrison, but they more resembled soldiers. Sometimes the boats passed round us in silence, sometimes six or a dozen ragged boatmen, half covered with sheepskins, the wool turned within and the filthy skin appearing without, brought us some new police agent, or tardy customhouse officer. These arrivals and departures, though they did not accelerate our matters, at least gave me leisure to reflect on the species of filthiness peculiar to the people of the North. Those of the South pass their life in the open air, half naked, or in the water; those of the North, for the most part shut up within doors, have a greasy dirtiness, which appears to me far more offensive than the neglect of a people destined to live beneath the open heaven, and born to bask in the sun.
The tedium to which these Russian formalities condemned us, gave me also an opportunity of remarking that the great lords of the country were little inclined to bear patiently the inconveniences of public regulations, when those regulations proved inconvenient to themselves.
“Russia is the land of useless formalities,” they murmured to each other—but in French, that they might not be overheard by the subaltern employees. I have retained the remark, with the justice of which my own experience has only too deeply impressed me. As far as I have been hitherto able to observe, a work that should be entitled The Russians Judged by Themselves, would be severe. The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear, they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible.
The cause of all our delay was at length revealed. The chief of chiefs, the director of the directors of the custom-house again presented himself: it was this visit we had been awaiting so long, without knowing it. At first it appeared as if the only business of the great functionary was to play the part of the man of fashion among the Russian ladies. He reminded the Princess D—— of their encounter in a house where the princess had never been; he spoke to her of court balls she had never seen: but while continuing to dispense these courtly airs, our drawing-room officer of the customs would now and then gracefully confiscate a parasol, stop a portmanteau, or recommence, with an imperturbable sangfroid, the researches already conscientiously made by his subordinates.
In Russian administration, minuteness does not exclude disorder. Much trouble is taken to attain unimportant ends, and those employed believe they can never do enough to show their zeal. The result of this emulation among clerks and commissioners is, that the having passed through one formality does not secure the stranger from another. It is like a pillage, in which the unfortunate creature, after escaping from the first troop, may yet fall into the hands of a second and a third.
The chief turnkey of the empire proceeded slowly to examine the vessel. At length this perfumed Cerberus, for he scented of musk at the distance of a league, released us from the ceremonies attending an entrée into Russia, and we were soon under weigh, to the great joy of the princes and princesses, who were going to rejoin their families. Their pleasure belied the observation of my host in Lübeck; as for me, I could not partake in it: on the contrary, I regretted leaving their delightful society to go and lose myself in a city whose vicinity was so uninviting. But the charm of that society was already broken; as we drew towards the end of our journey the ties which had united us became severed—fragile ties, formed only by the passing requirements of the voyage.
The women of the North know wonderfully well how to make us believe that they would have desired to meet with that which destiny has brought in their way. This is not falsehood, it is refined coquetry, a species of complaisance towards fate, and a supreme grace. Grace is always natural, though that does not prevent its being often used to hide a lie. The rude shocks and uncomfortably constraining influences of life disappear among graceful women and poetical men; they are the most deceptive beings in creation; distrust and doubt cannot stand before them; they create what they imagine; if they do not lie to others, they do to their own hearts; for illusion is their element, fiction their vocation, and pleasures in appearance their happiness. Beware of grace in woman, and poetry in man—weapons the more dangerous because the least dreaded!
Such were my thoughts on leaving the walls of Kronstadt: we were still all together, but we were no longer united. That circle, animated, but the previous evening, by a secret harmony which rarely exists in society, now lacked its vital principle. Few things had ever appeared to me more melancholy than this sudden change. I acknowledged it as the condition attached to the pleasures of the world, I had foreseen it, I had submitted a hundred times to the same experience; but never before did it enlighten me in so abrupt a manner. Besides, what annoyances are more painful than those of which we cannot complain? I saw each individual about to re-enter his own path; the free interchange of feeling which unites those traveling together to the same goal no longer existed among them; they were returning into real life, whilst I was left alone to wander from place to place. To be ever wandering is scarcely to live. I felt myself abandoned, and I compared the cheerlessness of my isolation to their domestic pleasures. Isolation may be voluntary, but is it on this account the more sweet? At the moment, everything appeared to me preferable to my independence, and I regretted even the cares of domestic life. I could read in the eyes of the women the thoughts of husband, children, milliners, hairdressers, the ball, and the court; and I could equally read there, that, notwithstanding the protestations of yesterday, I was no longer an object of concern to them. The people of the North have changeable hearts; their affections, like the faint rays of their sun, are always dying. Remaining fixedly attached neither to persons nor to things—willingly leaving the land of their birth—born for invasions—these people seem as though merely destined to sweep down from the pole, at the times and epochs appointed by God, in order to temper and refresh the races of the South, scorched by the fires of heaven and of their passions.
On arriving at Petersburg, my friends, favored by their rank, were speedily liberated from their floating prison, in which they left me, bound by the irons of the police and the customhouse, without so much as bidding me adieu. Where would have been the use of adieus? I was as dead to them. What are travelers to mothers of families? Not one cordial word, not one look, not one thought was bestowed on me. It was the white curtain of the magic lantern, after the shadows have passed. I repeat that I had expected this denouement, but I had not expected the pain which it caused me; so true it is that within ourselves exists the source of all our unforeseen emotions.
Only three days before landing, two of our fair and amiable travelers had made me promise to visit them in Petersburg, where the court is now assembled. I shall wait.