But, in justice to him, it should be said that there was one crime he did not commit--a crime, indeed, which he did not DARE commit: he did not violate his oath to maintain the liberties of Finland. THAT was reserved for the second Nicholas, now on the Russian throne.
Whether at the great assemblages of the Winter Palace, or at the reviews, or simply driving in his sledge or walking in the street, he overawed all men by his presence. Whenever I saw him, and never more cogently than during that last drive of his just before his death, there was forced to my lips the thought: ``You are the most majestic being ever created.'' Colossal in stature; with a face such as one finds on a Greek coin, but overcast with a shadow of Muscovite melancholy; with a bearing dignified, but with a manner not unkind, he bore himself like a god. And yet no man could be more simple or affable, whether in his palace or in the street. Those were the days when a Russian Czar could drive or walk alone in every part of every city in his empire. He frequently took exercise in walking along the Neva quay, and enjoyed talking with any friends he met--especially with members of the diplomatic corps. The published letters of an American minister--Mr. Dallas--give accounts of many discussions thus held with him.
There seemed a most characteristic mingling of his better and worse qualities in the two promises which, according to tradition, he exacted on his death-bed from his son --namely, that he would free the serfs, and that he would never give a constitution to Poland.
The accession of this son, Alexander II, brought a change at once: we all felt it. While he had the big Romanoff frame and beauty and dignity, he had less of the majesty and none of the implacable sternness of his father.
At the reception of the diplomatic corps on his accession he showed this abundantly; for, despite the strong declarations in his speech, his tears betrayed him. Reforms began at once--halting, indeed, but all tending in the right direction. How they were developed, and how so largely brought to naught, the world knows by heart. Of all the ghastly miscalculations ever made, of all the crimes which have cost the earth most dear, his murder was the worst.
The murders of William of Orange, of Lincoln, of Garfield, of Carnot, of Humbert I, did not stop the course of a beneficent evolution; but the murder of Alexander IIthrew Russia back into the hands of a reaction worse than any ever before known, which has now lasted nearly a generation, and which bids fair to continue for many more, unless the Russian reverses in the present war force on a better order of things. For me, looking back upon those days, it is hard to imagine even the craziest of nihilists or anarchists wild enough to commit such a crime against so attractive a man fully embarked on so blessed a career. He, too, in the days of my stay, was wont to mingle freely with his people; he even went to their places of public amusement, and he was frequently to be seen walking among them on the quays and elsewhere. In my reminiscences of the Hague Conference, I give from the lips of Prince Munster an account of a conversation under such circumstances: the Czar walking on the quay or resting on a seat by the roadside, while planning to right a wrong done by a petty Russian official to a German student. Therein appears not only a deep sense of justice and humanity, but that melancholy, so truly Russian, which was deepest in him and in his uncle, the first Alexander. There dwell also in my memory certain photographs of him in his last days, shown me not long before his death, during my first official stay at Berlin. His face was beautiful as of old, but the melancholy had deepened, and the eyes made a fearful revelation;for they were the eyes of a man who for years had known himself to be hunted. As I looked at them there came back to me the remembrance of the great, beautiful frightened eyes of a deer, hunted down and finally at my mercy, in the midst of a lake in the Adirondacks--eyes which haunted me long afterward. And there comes back the scene at the funeral ceremony in his honor at Berlin, coincident with that at St. Petersburg--his uncle, the Emperor William I, and all about him, in tears, and a depth of real feeling shown such as no monarch of a coarser fiber could have inspired. When one reflects that he had given his countrymen, among a great mass of minor reforms, trial by jury; the emancipation of twenty millions of serfs, with provision for homesteads; and had at that moment--as his adviser, Loris Melikoff, confessed when dying--a constitution ready for his people, one feels inclined to curse those who take the methods of revolution rather than those of evolution.
My departure from Russia embraces one or two incidents which may throw some light upon the Russian civilization of that period. On account of the blockade, Iwas obliged to take the post from St. Petersburg to Warsaw, giving to the journey seven days and seven nights of steady travel; and, as the pressure for places on the post was very great, I was obliged to secure mine several weeks beforehand, and then thought myself especially lucky in obtaining a sort of sentry-box on the roof of the second coach usually occupied by the guard. This good luck was due to the fact that, there being on that day two coaches, one guard served for both; and the place on the second was thus left vacant for me.
