The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 61, November, 1862. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
with no feeble shame, but trusting her power to save him,
Through the circle she passed, and straight to the side of her lover,—
Took his hand in her own, and mutely implored him an instant,
Answering, giving, forgiving, confessing, beseeching him all things,—
Drew him then with her, and passed once more through the circle
Unto her place, and knelt with him there by the side of her father,
Trembling as women tremble who greatly venture and triumph,—
But in her innocent breast was the saint's sublime exultation.
So was Louis converted; and though the lips of the scorner
Spared not in after-years the subtle taunt and derision,
(What time, meeker grown, his heart held his hand from its answer,)
Not the less lofty and pure her love and her faith that had saved him,
Not the less now discerned was her inspiration from heaven
By the people, that rose, and embracing, and weeping together,
Poured forth their jubilant songs of victory and of thanksgiving,
Till from the embers leaped the dying flame to behold them,
And the hills of the river were filled with reverberant echoes,—
Echoes that out of the years and the distance stole to me hither,
While I moved unwilled in the mellow warmth of the weather,—
Echoes that mingled and fainted and fell with the fluttering murmurs
In the hearts of the hushing bells, as from island to island
Swooned the sound on the wide lagoons into palpitant silence.
THE DEVELOPMENT AND OVERTHROW OF THE RUSSIAN SERF-SYSTEM
Close upon the end of the fifteenth century, the Muscovite ideas of Right were subjected to the strong mind of Ivan the Great, and compressed into a code.
Therein were embodied the best processes known to his land and time: for discovering crime, torture and trial by battle; for punishing crime, the knout and death.
But hidden in this tough mass was one law of greater import than all others. Thereby were all peasants forbidden to leave the lands they were then tilling, except during the eight days before and after Saint George's day. This provision sprang from Ivan's highest views of justice and broadest views of political economy; the nobles received it with plaudits, which have found echoes even in these days;2 the peasants received it with no murmurs which History has found any trouble in drowning.
Just one hundred years later, there sat upon the Muscovite throne, as nominal Tzar, the weakling Feodor I.; but behind the throne stood, as real Tzar, hard, strong Boris Godounoff.
Looking forward to Feodor's death, Boris makes ready to mount the throne; and he sees—what all other "Mayors of the Palace," climbing into the places of fainéant kings, have seen—that he must link to his fortunes the fortunes of some strong body in the nation; he breaks, however, from the general rule among usurpers,—bribing the Church,—and determines to bribe the nobility.
The greatest grief of the Muscovite nobles seemed to be that the peasants could escape from their oppression by the emigration allowed at Saint George's day.
Boris saw his opportunity: he cut off the privilege of Saint George's day; the peasant was fixed to the soil forever. No Russian law ever directly enslaved the peasantry,3] but, through this decree of Boris, the lord who owned the soil came to own the peasants upon it, just as he owned its immovable boulders and ledges.
To this the peasants submitted, but over this wrong History has not been able to drown their sighs; their proverbs and ballads make Saint George's day representative of all ill-luck and disappointment.
A few years later, Boris made another bid for oligarchic favor. He issued a rigorous fugitive-serf law, and even wrenched liberty from certain free peasants who had entered service for wages before his edicts. This completed the work, and Russia, which never had the benefits of feudalism, had now fastened upon her feudalism's worst curse,—a serf-caste bound to the glebe.
The great waves of wrong which bore serfage into Russia seem to have moved with a kind of tidal regularity, and the distance between their crests in those earlier times appears to have been just a hundred years,—for, again, at the end of the next century, surge over the nation the ideas of Peter the Great.
The great good things done by Peter the world knows by heart. The world knows well how he tore his way out of the fetichism of his time,—how, despite ignorance and unreason, he dragged his nation after him,—how he dowered the nation with things and thoughts which transformed it from a petty Asiatic horde to a great European power.
And the praise due to this work can never be diminished. Time shall but increase it; for the world has yet to learn most of the wonderful details of his activity. We were present a few years since, when one of those lesser triumphs of his genius was first unfolded.
It was in that room at the Hermitage—adjoining the Winter Palace—set apart for the relics of Peter. Our companions were two men noted as leaders in American industry,—one famed as an inventor, the other famed as a champion of inventors' rights.
Suddenly from the inventor,4 pulling over some old dust-covered machines in a corner, came loud cries of surprise. The cries were natural indeed. In that heap of rubbish he had found a lathe for turning irregular forms, and a screw-cutting engine once used by Peter himself: specimens of his unfinished work were still in them. They had lain there unheeded a hundred and fifty years; their principle had died with Peter and his workmen; and not many years since, they were reinvented in America, and gave their inventors fame and fortune. At the late Paris Universal Exposition crowds flocked about an American lathe for copying statuary; and that lathe was, in principle, identical with this old, forgotten machine of Peter's.
Yet, though Peter fought so well, and thought so well, he made some mistakes which hang to this day over his country as bitter curses. For in all his plan and work to advance the mass of men was one supreme lack,—lack of any account of the worth and right of the individual man.
Lesser examples of this are seen in his grim jest at Westminster Hall,—"What use of so many lawyers? I have but two lawyers in Russia, and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;"—or when, at Berlin, having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his servants to be hanged in order to test it;—or, in his reviews and parade-fights, when he ordered his men to use ball, and to take the buttons off their bayonets.
Greater examples are seen in his Battle of Narva, when he threw away an army to learn his opponent's game,—in his building of St. Petersburg, where, in draining marshes, he sacrificed a hundred thousand men the first year.
But the greatest proof of this great lack was shown in his dealings with the serf-system.
Serfage was already recognized in Peter's time as an evil. Peter himself once stormed forth in protestations and invectives against what he stigmatized as "selling men like beasts,—separating parents from children, husbands from wives,—which takes place nowhere else in the world, and which causes many tears to flow." He declared that a law should be made against it. Yet it was by his misguided hand that serfage was compacted into its final black mass of foulness.
For Peter saw other nations spinning and weaving, and he determined that Russia should at once spin and weave; he saw other nations forging iron, and he determined that Russia should at once forge iron. He never stopped to consider that what might cost little in other lands, as a natural growth, might cost far too much in Russia, as a forced growth.
In lack, then, of quick brain and sturdy spine and strong arm of paid workmen, he forced into his manufactories the flaccid muscle of serfs.
See Gerebtzoff,
Haxthausen.
The late Samuel Colt.