looking back over my travels, few visits stand out with more pleasant recollections than those i have paid to petrograd.
in the present tsar, nicholas ii., one finds a type of sovereign not only different from either king edward or the kaiser, but, in my experience, unique. sovereigns may have moments of an affectionate emotion; they rarely have consistent tenderness. in their most intimate relations of family life they are apt to resume suddenly the frigid tones of royalty; and i have seen a king, talking even with his mother, get himself unexpectedly into his royal manner and speak as stiffly as if he were giving his mind to some lower breed of human being. many a person, chatting tête-à-tête with a sovereign alone, has been charmed by the simple naturalness of his manner, and meeting him an hour later, before others, has wondered if it could be the same man. not so the tsar. he has more human tenderness than i ever{158} saw in any other man. he enters a crowded audience-room with the same charming kindliness and unconsciousness of self that he has in the privacy of family life. his eyes have always the one clear gaze of a clean soul.
he is not at first impressive, simply because he is incapable of playing a part, even a royal one. but the more you see of him the more he grows on you. he has no love of display, of uniforms, of the parade of royal power. he is wise with the wisdom of sympathy, and eager to help his people, and benevolent in his thought of them to a degree for which i know no parallel. i think it must be due to the unmistakable irradiations of this kindliness of heart that no attempts have been made upon his life, even during the bitterest frenzies of revolutionary hate.
in the menace with which the existence of royalty is surrounded, one would expect to find the imperial family living amid all the oppressions of constant fear. on the contrary, i thought them the happiest royal family i have seen. they were so naturally affectionate and happy that it was even possible to forget that they were royal. they had apparently accepted the dangers of their life as soldiers do{159}—as we all accept the lesser dangers of our ordinary day—and were unaffected by them.
what they thought of the problems of their rule i do not know; and i do not know enough of their people to understand what those problems really are. but surely no power could be more beneficently exercised than this man’s must be; and if his spirit could only animate the instruments of his authority and the innumerable officials who are necessary to administer it, the mad asperities of recrimination in russia would be as impossible to the administration and its opponents as they are to the tsar himself.
he is a dane, through his mother, and his qualities are those that make the royal families of denmark and sweden so charming. but these are the constitutional monarchies of a kindly and contented people, who have no cause to rebel against a government that is their own creation, and who show no awe of a ruling family as unassuming as themselves. i think, if one must be born royal, it would be wise to be born to a scandinavian crown.
i have rarely felt happier than i did when i heard that nicholas ii. had called on his subjects to take a share in the government of the vast russian em{160}pire. the publication of the imperial manifesto of october, 1905, in which the emperor announced the creation of the imperial duma, was an event of first-class importance, and i admired the spirit of the nation which had shown its determination to limit the power of the crown and the wisdom of the emperor in yielding to the desires of his subjects.
“this is the first step,” i said, “on the path which must ultimately lead to the substitution of democratic for autocratic government in russia.”
my affection for the emperor and empress, my enthusiasm for the advancement of democratic ideas, my recollections of a long visit to russia, all combined to intensify my interest in the dawn of freedom in a land which i felt, when i visited it, was part of asia included in europe by some strange mistake of the geographers.
it was mid-winter when i arrived for the first time in petersburg, magical beneath its snow mantle, and i came as a simple tourist to see the country and to study the conditions of russian life. i established myself in a hotel as a spanish countess, feeling delighted that nobody knew who i actually was, and revelling in the freedom of strict incognito.{161} but i had not been in the hotel five hours before a grand master of ceremonies arrived and betrayed my secret. from that minute everybody knew that the countess was an infanta of spain, and my liberty was gone. it is my usual experience. i arrive somewhere, believing that not a soul knows where i am, and, almost before i have taken possession of my rooms, there is a whirr of the telephone bell and somebody at the other end saying: “eulalia, how did you get here? you must come and see us at once.”
the grand master of ceremonies brought me a message from the emperor and empress, telling me how delighted they were to know that they were going to see me soon, and suggesting that i should come to the winter palace the next morning for the twelfth day ceremony of the blessing of the waters.
“but i have nothing to wear!” i cried.
it was absolutely true. i had never expected to figure at a court ceremony, and it had not occurred to me to bring a manteau de cour. etiquette, however, is less severe in russia than in spain or in prussia, as i soon discovered, and the next morning i{162} put on my smartest frock and drove to the winter palace, a gigantic building, painted dull red, with rows of gods and goddesses standing on the cornice of its stupendous fa?ade, looking cold and unhappy in the nipping air.
i had not seen the empress since we were girls, staying with queen victoria at windsor or in the beautiful isle of wight. and what a charming girl she was! a simple english girl in appearance, in a skirt and blouse, utterly unaffected, warm-hearted, and fresh as a rosebud touched with dew. i was thinking of the happy, careless days when we were in england together, as i drove to the palace, forgetting the change that the passage of the years makes in the friends of one’s youth, and when i went into the room where the empress was waiting to watch the blessing of the waters from the window, i felt startled to find, instead of the girl i used to know, a surpassingly beautiful and stately woman. the petals of the rosebud had unfolded. she was the centre of a brilliant group of grand duchesses and ladies, all wearing the strange but beautiful dress of the russian court, with long hanging sleeves. on her head was a kokoshnik, a crescent-shaped diadem,{163} flaming with diamonds, from which fell a long white veil, and her stateliness and beauty distinguished her from all the other sumptuous figures surrounding her. a stranger who had never seen her before would have been certain that it was she, and not one of the others, who was empress.
“how good to see you again, eulalia, after all these years,” she said, coming towards me; and she put her arms round me and kissed me.
and in that greeting i realised that the tsaritsa had not changed. she was still the affectionate and unaffected friend i had known years before. we had a hundred questions to ask each other, but almost before we had had time to begin, we had to stop talking to attend to the imposing ceremony which was beginning on the frozen neva.
from the window i saw that a pavilion, like an exceedingly decorative bandstand, had been erected on the ice, just in front of the palace, and i watched a procession of ecclesiastics in stiff byzantine robes and glittering mitres move slowly across the road separating it from the palace, followed by the grand dukes and the emperor. the singing of the choir floated to us through the frosty air and the{164} empress crossed herself devoutly. she is a sincerely religious woman.
i watched the emperor standing motionless beneath the fretted and gilded canopy of the pavilion, and the thought suddenly flashed into my mind that the russian emperors alone claim the right to govern the souls as well as the bodies of their subjects. the autocrat is a great ecclesiastical personage as well as a secular ruler, and the russian church depends upon him and can do nothing without his consent. i remembered that banishment to siberia was the punishment for those who deserted the orthodox church and refused to believe as the tsar believes and to pray as the tsar prays. the kings of spain and the emperors of austria are sons, not rulers, of the church, and i had been taught that the pope was king of kings. it seemed to me that no worse form of despotism could be conceived than the concentration in the hands of an autocratic ruler of the spiritual and temporal power and, as these thoughts crowded into my mind, there seemed to me something sinister and terrible in the ceremony i was watching, and i realised, as i had never done before, the immensity and the awfulness of the power
[image unavailble.]
courtesy of collier’s
nicholas ii and the heir of russia
{165}
wielded by the motionless figure beneath the gay pavilion. nobody rejoiced more than i did when the emperor published the manifesto of april, 1905, granting his subjects religious liberty, and i realised that the stupendous claim which had made me shudder when i thought of it, as i watched the sumptuous twelfth day ceremony from the windows of the winter palace, had been renounced for ever. in point of fact, nicholas ii. had no desire to maintain it, and he renounced it as soon as an appropriate occasion arose.
after the picturesque ceremony which had stirred these thoughts had ended and the archbishop had dipped a golden cross in the water running below the ice of the river, the holy water was brought into the palace to the empress, and the emperor joined us. he gave me a characteristically russian welcome. his manner was engagingly simple and unaffected. the contrast between him and the german emperor was extraordinary. the kaiser, a constitutional monarch, whose power is strictly limited, shows by his bearing and his manner, as i have indicated in another chapter, that he holds the divine right of kings to be a cardinal article of faith.{166} when one is with the tsar it requires a certain effort of the imagination to remember that he possesses autocratic power over the lives of 160,000,000 human beings. the russians are the most hospitable people in the world, and the emperor and empress are not excelled by any of their subjects in kindness and generosity to guests. they both insisted that, so long as i remained in petersburg, i must be with them as much as possible, and, in point of fact, although i slept at the hotel, i was constantly at the winter palace, and had my part in the intimate family life of the imperial family.
when a man likes nothing better than to remain at home with his wife, it is a sure sign that he is very much in love with her. judged by that test, there is no happier couple in europe than the emperor and empress of russia. they are never more contented than when together, and it was obvious to me that the tsar simply adores his wife. it would be strange if he did not, for there is not a gentler or sweeter woman in the world than the beautiful tsaritsa. and both of them are devoted to their children. they used to make me come with them sometimes to the nursery, where the little{167} grand duchesses used to welcome us with shrieks of delight. what games there were! people who think of the tsar as a frowning despot would have been astonished to see a vigorous pillow-fight going on between him and his children. and away from the formalities of the court, closeted with her children, the tsaritsa was always radiant and happy. under the spell of their prattle and of their caresses she was transformed. the smiling mother seemed a different woman to the beautiful but grave lady seen by the public in the ceremonies of the court.
“do try and get the empress to smile, eulalia,” said one of the grand duchesses to me at some court function.
but that was sooner said than done. there is not a trace of artificiality in the empress’s character. she seemed unable to pretend she was enjoying herself, when, in point of fact, she was fatigued and bored. moving as the central figure of a splendid pageant, i think she was always wishing the ceremony to be at an end and to find herself free to be with her children again.
the tastes of the emperor are as simple as those of the empress and in curious contrast to those of{168} most of the imperial family. neither of them likes the late supper-parties in which the majority of their relations indulge. early to bed and early to rise is my motto, and supper-parties, hardly finished at two o’clock in the morning, bored me unutterably. when i went to the opera with the emperor and empress, we used to take time by the forelock and sup in the second entr’acte, in order to be able to go straight to bed when we got home. the ballets given at the marinsky theatre were exceedingly beautiful, and the empress followed the movements of the dancers with evident enjoyment from the stage-box. behind the box is a charming room, and there it was that supper used to be served.
“here is your high tea, eulalia,” the empress would say merrily, and then we sat down to a square meal of cold meat and countless cups of tea, to which i used to do ample justice, as i did not dine before going to the theatre.
his love of simplicity does not, however, prevent the emperor from enjoying society. like most russians, he is fond of it, and his animation and vivacity at court balls were delightful and, moreover, genuine. i liked to watch him dance the ma{169}zurka, that rushing, almost violent, dance that they say only a slav can dance to perfection. it was so obvious that he enjoyed it. when supper was served we went to a long table on a dais, set at one end of a great hall, and i discovered that the russian court has a very charming custom which does not obtain elsewhere. the emperor and empress took their places, facing the general company, with their royal guests and other members of the imperial family to right and to left of them; but we had hardly been a minute at table before the emperor rose and went to one of the tables below the dais, where he sat down and chatted with the people supping at it. after talking for five minutes, he went to another table to greet other guests, and then passed from group to group, sitting down at each table for a few minutes. and, with the russian instinct of hospitality, the emperor played the part of host so well that the conversation became more animated at each table he visited. the presence of some sovereigns, too careful of preserving the distance between themselves and persons who are not of the blood royal, sometimes casts a gloom on their guests.{170}
perhaps the emperor’s obvious enjoyment of a ball was due to the fact that it is but seldom he can allow himself relaxation. there is not a busier man in the world. i once remarked to him that i find it impossible to get through the work of the day unless i follow a definite rule, and i asked him how he divided up his time.
“i get up early,” he answered, “and after a light breakfast i work until eleven. then i take a walk and come back for luncheon at half-past twelve. after that comes the task of giving audiences to ministers and others, and, when work allows it, i take a drive before tea in order to get some fresh air. immediately after tea i am busy again with my secretaries, and work with them lasts until dinner-time.”
“a strenuous day,” i said.
“but that is not the end of it,” he answered, smiling. “i am very often obliged to go back to work straight from the dinner-table, and sometimes it is not finished until far on into the night.”
the emperor’s devotion to duty is in striking contrast to the almost traditional love of pleasure displayed by the grand dukes. a foreigner might{171} easily be led to suppose that the house of romanoff is at heart in sympathy with democratic ideas. the lack of formality at court, the marriages between grand dukes and commoners, the presence of unlettered peasants at certain of the ceremonies of the winter palace, the share taken by some of the members of the imperial family in amusements accessible to anybody who has money in his pocket, their supper parties in restaurants and their enjoyment of the café concerts of the capital—all these things might deceive the stranger. to know the grand dukes and grand duchesses is to realise that they neither understand the aspirations of the democracy nor sympathise with them, for, reflecting the glory of autocracy they are more firmly convinced than any other royal persons in europe that a gulf divides them from the rest of mankind. and this conviction is so deep that they appear to believe that the most ordinary actions are ennobled by the mere fact that they are performed by persons in whose veins flows the imperial blood.
the life led by most of them would be unbearable to me. a perpetual round of amusements becomes in the end as wearisome as the treadmill.{172} how people who are not in the first flush of youth can day after day sit up until two o’clock in the morning, as too many of them do, eating unnecessary suppers and drinking champagne, i can not understand. high tea with the emperor and empress pleased me better than late suppers with the grand dukes and grand duchesses. indeed, when i yielded to persuasion and went out with them for an evening’s amusement my sleepiness used to divert them immensely.
“eulalia, you’re yawning,” they would say.
“it is two hours past my bedtime,” i would answer.
and then we laughed, and it was probably the grand duke alexis who would suggest that we should all drive out to the islands and have another supper at a café concert. then i would strike and go home, scolding myself for sitting up so late and marvelling at the extraordinary vitality of the rest of the company, starting merrily on the long sledge drive to the islands, where they would sit by the hour in a private room overlooking the little stage on which the unsuccessful artists of paris danced and sang.{173}
perhaps it is because i am spanish and not russian that i failed to see the pleasure to be derived from spending the night in frivolity; for, in point of fact, there is nothing characteristically grand-ducal in this curious craze; it is simply russian, and moscow merchants will spend thousands of roubles in extravagant amusements between midnight and sunrise. the grand dukes are typical russians. they have the virtues and the failings of the typical russian, and—i am not sure whether it is a virtue or a failing—they are, like all the russians i have ever met, exceedingly susceptible to feminine charms. to the russian, love is everything, and in russia women have more power to change men’s lives than in any other land.
to please the woman he loves a russian will exile himself to a foreign country, will alter his habits, and change his manner of life completely. it is not, therefore, surprising that members of the house of romanoff have deliberately incurred the anger of the emperor and voluntarily left russia to live abroad for the sake of the women they love. they make their homes in paris or in the english countryside, and become the humble slaves of the wives{174} they have chosen; while these ladies, although perhaps of humble origin, find themselves treated by society, always anxious to gain the approval of princes, with hardly less reverence than princesses of the blood royal.
but if the majority of the members of the imperial family love extravagant amusement, there is one notable exception to the rule. the grand duchess elizabeth, widow of the grand duke serge, who was assassinated by revolutionists, shares the simple tastes of her sister, the empress, and detests the empty formality of courts as much as i do. when we were girls we saw a great deal of each other at windsor and in the isle of wight, and it was a great delight to me to talk over the old days when i visited her in her palace within the fantastic battlements of the kremlin.
she was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful women in europe, and her husband was extraordinarily handsome; indeed, their beauty and their bearing made them the most distinguished couple at the great gathering of royal personages i met at buckingham palace when the jubilee of queen victoria was celebrated. after the terrible death of her hus{175}band, the grand duchess devoted herself to the education of the grand duke paul’s motherless children, the grand duke dmitri and the grand duchess maria pavlovna, and, that task accomplished, she became a sister of charity. she has founded a convent in moscow, where she follows a severe rule and devotes herself to hospital work and the care of the poor, realising that even a princess has no excuse to shirk the responsibilities of life and to lead a useless existence.
how is it that there is such a marked difference between the tastes of the emperor and those of his uncles and cousins? the answer is not difficult to find. the emperor’s love of simplicity comes from his mother, the empress marie, who, now that she can indulge her own tastes, lives the greater part of the year with queen alexandra in a small villa on the danish coast. when i visited them there i found that they were living as simply as private persons who know nothing of the life of courts.
but, while recognising the influence of his mother in the formation of the emperor’s character, i like to think that something of the spirit of peter the great has been conserved in the imperial family,{176} and that the love of work, the courage, and the simplicity displaced by nicholas ii. are in some measure gifts from his great ancestor. one afternoon i drove out to the islands in a troika, a sledge that might have come from fairyland, covered with glistening trappings and luxurious furs and drawn by three horses abreast, and, on my way, i stopped to visit the little house in which peter the great lived when he was building his new capital. it is a tiny cottage, a mere hut, with two rooms. nothing could be simpler or more unlike the vast winter palace. yet i felt, as i left this humble abode, that the spirit of the man who was content to live in it still reigns in the splendid home of his descendant, the present emperor.
i have alluded to the courage of nicholas ii., and it may surprise those who only know him by repute that i should emphasise this trait of his character. i myself had often heard that he was timorous and dreaded assassination. it was therefore a great surprise to me to find that he often walked from the palace to my hotel, with only a single aide-de-camp in attendance. although his grandfather had been assassinated by revolutionists, he himself appeared{177} to be absolutely fearless and to disregard the risk he ran by walking about petersburg. if precautions are taken to protect him now, he permits them solely because he is convinced that his life is of value to his people. russia is his one thought. during recent months he has proved this, too, by the way he has identified himself personally with the campaign in which his soldiers are engaged.
those who do not know him often speak or write of him as cruel, tyrannical, caring for nothing but the conservation of the imperial power and wealth. that is an absolutely false estimate of his character. one has only to look into his beautiful blue eyes to realise that he is neither harsh nor cruel and to understand his great tenderness. indeed, it is his tenderness that distinguishes him from most of the sovereigns i know. his affection for his mother, his devotion to his wife and children, are the outcome of this quality, and its exercise is not confined to his domestic life. i have heard him speak on more than one occasion with the utmost feeling of persons who had been condemned to exile in siberia. it was perfectly clear to me from the way in which he spoke of them that, had he followed the dictates{178} of his own heart, he would have cancelled the sentences and pardoned the offenders. i could see that the thought of their sufferings made him suffer himself, and that it was only a stern sense of duty that made him acquiesce in penalties he regretted.
the bulk of the tsar’s subjects are peasants, and he very often spoke of their life and their customs. indeed, he displayed the keenest interest in plans to better their condition and to raise their standard of culture. sovereigns, i have noticed, carefully eschew any reference to questions which they and their ministers are unable to solve, and it is to me significant that neither the tsar nor the kaiser has ever spoken to me of the polish question. the tsar was, however, aware that the bourbons and the great polish family of zamoyski are now connected—my cousin, princess caroline of bourbon, married a zamoyski—and he very delicately appointed a gentleman of that family to be in attendance on me during my stay in petersburg. from intercourse with this gentleman and with other poles i met in russia i discovered that there is a profound difference between the russian and the polish character. there always remains something of the asiatic in{179} the russian, but the pole belongs to the west. he has the slav charm and the latin culture. i know of nothing sadder than the tragedy of poland. that splendid nation, which once saved europe from the turks, has been parcelled out between three empires, but neither the iron will of the german emperor nor the autocratic power of nicholas ii. has succeeded in killing the polish spirit. small wonder that both at berlin and petersburg the subject was not broached at court. since then the war has come. will the end of it witness the resurrection of poland as a nation?
the emperor is perfectly well aware that my sympathies are with the democracy. but naturally i never attempted to force my ideas upon him. i am able to understand that a sovereign who wields absolute power and to whom the most powerful of his ministers is obliged to yield may be necessary for russia at the present day. i am convinced that the world will be happier—princes and people alike—when democracy has triumphed, but i realise that in a country like russia, the bulk of whose population is unlettered, it would be foolish, as well as dangerous, to introduce suddenly and without prepara{180}tion methods which are successful in the west. education, and education alone, can establish the victory of democracy.
from my home in the capital of a great people, in whose motto is enshrined a profound belief in the brotherhood of mankind and the essential equality of prince and peasant, i look out over europe and see the decay of old institutions and the movements which are slowly but certainly reducing those monarchs who still retain power to the position of decorative figureheads. in norway the process is already finished, and, although i confess that i was first surprised, i was immensely pleased to find, during a recent visit to king haakon and queen maud, that they were simply the first among equals. i am firmly convinced that this will be the ultimate form of monarchy throughout europe, but long years must pass before the russian people have the culture and political knowledge which make a simple norwegian the equal of his sovereign. meanwhile, it is satisfactory to know that the man guiding the destinies of the russian people possesses the fine qualities which distinguish nicholas ii.
