I should be sorry to have it thought that all my stay in the Russian capital was given up to official routine and social futilities. Fortunately for me, the social demands were not very heavy. The war in the Crimea, steadily going against Russia, threw a cloud over the court and city and reduced the number of entertainments to a minimum. This secured me, during the long winter evenings, much time for reading, and in addition to all the valuable treatises I could find on Russia, I went with care through an extensive course in modern history.
As to Russian matters, it was my good fortune to become intimately acquainted with Atkinson, the British traveler in Siberia. He had brought back many portfolios of sketches, and his charming wife had treasured up a great fund of anecdotes of people and adventure, so that I seemed for a time to know Siberia as if I had lived there.
Then it was that I learned of the beauties and capabilities of its southern provinces. The Atkinsons had also brought back their only child, a son born on the Siberian steppe, a wonderfully bright youngster, whom they destined for the British navy. He bore a name which I fear may at times have proved a burden to him, for his father and mother were so delighted with the place in which he was born that they called him, after it, ``Alatow-Tam Chiboulak.''[10]
[10] Since writing the above, I have had the pleasure of receiving a letter from this gentleman, who has for some time held the responsible and interesting position of superintendent of public instruction in the Hawaiian Islands, his son, a graduate of the University of Michigan, having been Secretary of the Territory.
The general Russian life, as I thus saw it, while intensely interesting in many respects, was certainly not cheerful.
Despite the frivolity dominant among the upper class and the fetishism controlling the lower classes, there was, especially in that period of calamity, a deep undertone of melancholy. Melancholy, indeed, is a marked characteristic of Russia, and, above all, of the peasantry. They seem sad even in their sports; their songs, almost without exception, are in the minor key; the whole atmosphere is apparently charged with vague dread of some calamity.
Despite the suppression of most of the foreign journals, and the blotting out of page after page of the newspapers allowed to enter the empire, despite all that the secret police could do in repressing unfavorable comment, it became generally known that all was going wrong in the Crimea. News came of reverse after reverse: of the defeats of the Alma and Inkerman, and, as a climax, the loss of Sebastopol and the destruction of the Russian fleet. In the midst of it all, as is ever the case in Russian wars, came utter collapse in the commissariat department;everywhere one heard hints and finally detailed stories of scoundrelism in high places: of money which ought to have been appropriated to army supplies, but which had been expended at the gambling-tables of Homburg or in the Breda quarter at Paris.
Then it was that there was borne in upon me the conviction that Russia, powerful as she seems when viewed from the outside, is anything but strong when viewed from the inside. To say nothing of the thousand evident weaknesses resulting from autocracy,--the theory that one man, and he, generally, not one of the most highly endowed, can do the thinking for a hundred millions of people,--there was nowhere the slightest sign of any uprising of a great nation, as, for instance, of the French against Europe in 1792, of the Germans against France in 1813 and in 1870, of Italy against Austria in 1859 and afterward, and of the Americans in the Civil War of 1861. There were certainly many noble characters in Russia, and these must have felt deeply the condition of things; but there being no great middle class, and the lower class having been long kept in besotted ignorance, there seemed to be no force on which patriotism could take hold.
CHAPTER XXVII
AS ATTACH AND BEARER OF DESPATCHES
IN WAR-TIME--1855
The spring of 1855 was made interesting by the arrival of the blockading fleet before the mouth of the Neva, and shortly afterward I went down to look at it.
It was a most imposing sight: long lines of mighty three-deckers of the old pattern, British and French,--one hundred in all,--stretched across the Gulf of Finland in front of the fortresses of Cronstadt. Behind the fortresses lay the Russian fleet, helpless and abject; and yet, as events showed during our own Civil War half a dozen years later, a very slight degree of inventive ability would have enabled the Russians to annihilate the hostile fleet, and to gain the most prodigious naval victory of modern times.
Had they simply taken one or two of their own great ships to the Baird iron-works hard by, and plated them with railway iron, of which there was plenty, they could have paralleled the destruction of our old wooden frigates at Norfolk by the Merrimac, but on a vastly greater scale. Yet this simple expedient occurred to no one; and the allied fleet, under Sir Richard Dundas, bade defiance to the Russian power during the whole summer.
The Russians looked more philosophically upon the blockade than upon their reverses in the Crimea, but they acted much like the small boy who takes revenge on the big boy by making faces at him. Some of their caricatures on their enemies were very clever. Fortunately for such artistic efforts, the British had given them a fine opportunity during the previous year, when Sir Charles Napier, the commander of the Baltic fleet, having made a boastful speech at a public dinner in London, and invited his hearers to dine with him at St. Petersburg, had returned to England, after a summer before Cronstadt, without even a glimpse of the Russian capital.
