Chapter XXXII: The Exile's Return (2)

"But it waxes late--'tis near three o'clock:" let us hasten past the casinos, cafes, reading-rooms, Turkish baths and American drinking-bars which flourish on the quays, and make our way to the Promenade des Anglais, by this time alive with fashionables. The "Promenade," as I have said, is nearly four miles long, and faces the sea. It is very broad, and has on one side a row of villas and hotels--on the other a walk shaded by oleanders and palm trees, through the openings of which are obtained magnificent views of the Mediterranean. Some of these villas are remarkably beautiful, especially that of the Princes Stirby, the former sovereigns of Wallachia, which is surrounded with exquisite gardens abounding with noble camellia trees, some of which produce as many as fifteen hundred flowers. The Villa de Dempierre is very pretty, and is the property of the countess of that name, who is a most noteworthy person. Madame de Dempierre belongs to one of the most ancient and wealthy families of France. She was once a great beauty, and is still a brilliant wit and charming artist. Some years ago she visited the empress of Russia, then residing at Nice, where she died. Her Imperial Majesty, who was noted for her habit of making personal remarks, said bluntly, "Madame la comtesse, how beautiful you must have been!" "Majesty," answered the _spirituelle_ Madame de Dempierre, "you were complaining of the nearness of your sight: since you can distinguish my beauty through the vista of so many years, I think you enjoy long-sightedness in a remarkable degree." The empress wrinkled her nose, and presently observed: "I think, countess, I remember to have seen your husband, General de Dempierre, in Russia." "Doubtless Your Majesty did so: he was the first Frenchman that entered the Kremlin." The czarina was silent: the fall of Moscow was not a pleasant subject of conversation to the wife of Nicholas. The Villa de Diesbach comes next, the winter residence of the historical family of that name, into which married a few years since a tall, gazelle-eyed American belle, Miss Meta McCall. Then follows the pretty Villa Bouxhoevden, the property of a Corlandese count of a very noble house, whose wife hails from New Jersey. The countess is much the fashion, and her hospitable house is a rendezvous of the elite of the foreign and American colony. She is a tall, graceful woman, with a pale and interesting countenance, shadowed with clusters of light-brown curls, which reminds one of Vandyke's portraits of Queen Henrietta Maria--a likeness somewhat increased by costumes admirably suited to her style--long flowing robes of rich silk trimmed with ermine and costly lace. Then there is Mrs. Williams's garden, with Indian creepers and gaudy Eastern plants, sent to her by her gallant son, the Crimean hero, from the slopes of the Himalayas. Here on a Sunday gathers a pleasant circle to drink five-o'clock tea and listen to the bright remarks of Madame de la Caume, the daughter of the hostess, who knows more about French politics than many a deputy at Versailles. But whilst we have been looking in at villa-gardens the Promenade has filled up rapidly. A continuous stream of carriages occupies the centre of the road, a throng of gay folks animate with their showiest toilets the oleander walk and the Jardin Publique, where a tolerable band plays for two or three hours thrice a week. The marble stairs of the Casino are crowded with loungers, and the windows and balconies of every villa are filled with well-dressed men and women. Nowhere, perhaps, excepting in Rotten Row or the Bois de Boulogne, can so many celebrated and beautiful women and handsome or famous men be seen parading up and down together as on the Promenade des Anglais of a fine afternoon in the season. Here gathers the _crême de la crême_ of two worlds, the Old and the New, Europe and America. In the winter of 1870 the town was crowded to excess. Never before were there so many notabilities assembled at Nice--never was there so much gossip, so much _cancan_ and small talk. It was amusing to sit in the shade of a palm tree on the promenade and review the _personæ_ of this Vanity Fair. Frederick Charles of Prussia and his princess in a landau, with two Nubians on the box; the crown-princess Victoria of England and her sister of Hesse-Darmstadt, on a trip from Cannes, where they were then visiting; Her Grace of Newcastle; De Villemessant of the _Figaro_, in an invalid's chair, the most accomplished of _causeurs_; Count Montalivet, the former minister of Louis Philippe, and by him, for a few days at the full of the season, a little old gentleman with a squeaky voice, M. Adolphe Thiers. Next comes a group of ladies, the three daughters of the Hispano-Mexican duchess De Fernan-Nuñez; all three looking exactly alike, tall and dark; all three of a height; all three invariably dressed in black, with lofty Tyrolese hats and cocks' feathers; all three unmarried; all three marriageable, and worth Croesus only knows how many millions; all three invariably alone--a fact which made old Madame Colaredo scream out of her window one day, "_Tiens! voilà les trois cent (sans) gardes_!" Then follow Lord Rokeby, the most affable of lordships; Lord Portarlington; General Sir William Williams of Kars; Princess Kantacuzène, the last descendant of the imperial Byzantine house of that name; the ideally lovely Miss Amy Shaw of Boston; the three pretty Miss Warrens of New York; Madame Gavini de Campile, the wife of the prefect, a fine-looking dame gloriously arrayed in showy robes, whom half the society adored and the rest cordially hated; the duke de Mouchy, who married Anna Murat; the duke de Périgord-Talleyrand, who married an American; the duke de la Conquista, who derives his title from the conquest of Peru; the lovely countess Del Borgo; and the famous Italian beauty, Madame Bellotti, a Milanese lady, whose maiden name was Visconti, of that semi-royal house. Theresa Bellotti's beauty is of a grand style seen nowhere out of Italy. Picture her to yourself as I once saw her at a masquerade at the préfecture. Round her superb figure swept an ample robe of crimson velvet looped up with bands of gold. Her bare arms, models worthy of the chisel of Canova, gleamed from the rich sables which lined the hanging sleeves of her dress. Her hair, dark as night, was gathered up in the high fashion Sir Joshua Reynolds loved to depict. A half-moon of enormous diamonds fastened a plume over her left temple, and her neck and fingers flashed back the colors of the rainbow from a thousand gems. As to her face, it was radiant. Rich color flushed her cheeks, her eyes sparkled with animation when she spoke; but at times, when her features resumed a calm after conversation, she resembled the portraits of some of the famous Italian women of the Renaissance--her own ancestress, for instance, Bianca Visconti, duchess of Milan, or Veronica Cibò, or Lucrezia Petroni, whose daughter was the ill-fated Beatrice Cenci. And now come by the fascinating Mrs. Lloyd, whom all the world knows and likes; grand-looking Mrs. Senator Grymes of Louisiana, a witty, brilliant old lady, whose salon is one of the most elegant in Nice; Baron Haussmann, and with him his colossal daughter, Madame de Perneti, the handsomest of giantesses, who was once asked to join in private theatricals, but when the stage was built up in her friend's drawing-room, being about five feet from the level of the rest of the chamber, it was discovered that _la belle Caryatide_, as her friends call her, could not act on it, for the simple reason that she was a full head taller than the scenery; clever Madame de Skariatine, the daughter of the famous Count Schouvalof (the "Shoveloff" of our times), who, after being Russian ambassador half over Europe, turned Barnabite monk at Rome; Lady Dalling and Bulwer, the great duke of Wellington's niece, and now the widow of one of England's most illustrious statesmen; hospitable Marquise de St. Agnan, and her pretty daughter, Mademoiselle Henriette; and Princess Souvarow, _ci-devant_ widow Apraxine, _ci-devant_ widow Kisselof, the most fascinating of Russian princesses, and one of the greatest of female gamblers, who one night broke the bank at Monte Carlo for two hundred and fifty thousand francs, and lost them the next. On the opposite side of the way, screening herself from observation, demurely clad in sober-colored attire, Madame Volnis passes along from some mission of charity. This lady was once one of the most popular actresses on the French stage, and with Mademoiselle Mars and Rose Chéri was the idol of Paris--Léontine Fay. She was, if possible, a still greater favorite in St. Petersburg, where, on her retirement from the stage, she became French reader to the late czarina. Since the death of the empress she has always resided at Nice, where she is distinguished for her exalted piety and extreme charity. Even when on the stage this lady devoted her leisure to charitable works. She was always remarked for her modesty of manner: her dress was simplicity itself. At the theatre she wore costumes rich and elegant, suited to the parts she enacted, but in society she invariably appeared in plain white muslin or dark silk. It would be impossible to exaggerate her goodness. Her whole life has been passed amongst the poor, in the minute fulfillment of her duties, and on her knees in church. After acting one part of the evening, she would hasten, on the fall of the curtain, to pass the rest of it watching by the bedside of some poor wretch stricken low perhaps by some infectious disease. During the war of 1870, Madame Volnis's conduct was angelical. If there was some awful operation to be performed upon any of the wounded soldiers sent to Nice from the field of battle, it was she who was present, who held the sufferer's hand, and who consoled and cheered with the tenderness of a Sister of Charity--of a mother.

As the austere figure of Léontine Fay passes away, hidden in a cloud of sunny dust raised by the wheels of a hundred carriages, another form comes upon the stage, radiant amongst the most brilliant, the observed of all observers--Madame Rattazzi, _née_ Princess Bonaparte Wyse. What a wonderful toilette is hers! One fine afternoon she appeared upon the Promenade clad in a purple velvet robe, edged and flounced with canary-colored satin, looped up voluminously _en panier_, and adorned with big bows of yellow ribbon. Her hat was a broad-brimmed Leghorn straw trimmed with large bunches of pansies. No one but Madame Rattazzi could have worn such an attire in the public streets without the risk of being hooted, but such are the grace and beauty of this celebrated woman that her costume seemed in perfect keeping. She was in Nice one winter for at least five months, and every day saw her out in a fresh dress. When she travels she has more boxes than Madame Ristori. She dwelt on the Promenade, over the dowager of Colaredo, who had a special spite against her; in consequence of which she invariably illuminated her windows, when she had company, with the Italian colors, red, white and green, to the supreme disgust of the old Ultramontane countess. Her apartment was elegantly furnished, and adorned with beautiful vases of mignonette and plants of moss-roses. When she received of an evening the chambers were agreeably lighted up with many pale and subdued lamps. Her tables were always covered with new books, magazines and several copies of her own poems and novels, including an exceedingly clever story, _Louise Keller_, which she had just finished. On the walls hung pictures in oil and water-colors of her own execution; on the piano were scattered, together with much classical music, some hymns, polkas and ballads of her composition. One night she acted in a comedy of her own writing, and her rendering of the part of the heroine, a witty and intriguing widow, was inimitable. Many severe critics have declared that Madame Rattazzi is, as an actress, a worthy rival of Fargeuil or Madeleine Brohan. Her manners are very fascinating--a little bit too natural to be quite French, and a little too ceremonious to be quite Italian. She would have proved an invaluable acquisition at the downfall of the tower of Babel, for she is mistress of I dare not say how many languages. As a rule, women hate her, and men do just the contrary. This is not to be wondered at, for she is very beautiful even now. Her face has the chiseled cameo features of her uncle, Napoleon I.; her eyes are deep violet, fringed with long sweeping lashes; her mouth is perfectly exquisite, and on either side of it two pretty dimples appear whenever she smiles. So many enemies has she amongst her own sex that to avenge herself for the affronts they constantly offer her she published a magazine in Florence called the _Matinées Italiennes_, for the purpose of showing up her female antagonists. Here is a sample: "At Nice a grand ball; Madame la Viscomtesse de B---- _en grande toilette_, looking for all the world like a big Nuremberg doll, with her black hair dyed an impossible straw-color, and appearing at least five years younger than she did when I first saw her make her _début_ in society five-and-twenty years ago; and she was then a gushing maiden of twenty-one." By and by comes the hour of vengeance. Madame Rattazzi gives a ball, and not a woman will go to it. In 1870 she gave one at the Grand Hotel, to which half the town was invited. There arrived at the festal scene about five hundred men and just thirty-two women. It was funny enough. The thirty-two women besported themselves with thirty-two partners in the centre of the hall to the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and all kinds of musical instruments, whilst the rest of the men stood round the hall five deep, like a deep dark fringe on a Turkish carpet. Madame Rattazzi, however, achieved a great triumph against all odds. By dint of grace, charm of manners and tact she put all her guests in the best humor. The "thirty-two" had a fine time of it, and danced to their hearts' content. The five hundred men were introduced and grouped and wined and punched until every man there swore that earth did not hold a fairer or more genial hostess. Madame Rattazzi was "supported," as the phrase goes, on this memorable occasion by Madame la Princesse, her mother, a rather formidable-looking dowager, a daughter of Lucian Bonaparte, and widow of Sir Thomas Wyse, once British consul at Athens. Her Imperial Highness Princess Letitia must have been a wonderful beauty in her youth--a stately grand being who one could easily imagine might have resembled the Roman Agrippina or empress Livia. Once the barrier of her stately manners overcome, she proved to be a talkative, affable woman of the world, with a huge experience thereof. I can see her now, dressed in a scarlet satin robe and glittering with jewels. She wore a headdress of diamonds with two long ostrich feathers in it, one of which, a white one, got out of its place and stood bolt upright, as if it was frightened, until some charitable hand laid it down. This was, I fancy, the last ball Princess Letitia ever graced, for she died a very little while afterward. Poor Rattazzi was there too. He was not a striking-looking man, but agreeable and excessively polite. He rarely talked politics--I rather suspect from the fear of compromising himself--but his conversation was was pleasant and varied. After his death Madame Rattazzi removed to Monaco, where she busied herself with editing his letters and memoirs--a task which, it appears, the Italian government would be delighted that she should spare herself, as his papers are said to be very full of compromising matter relative to the Mentana expedition. A large sum of money was offered her to relinquish her hold on these documents, but she answered by a letter published in the Italian papers that they were left to her as a sacred trust, and that she felt herself in duty bound to make their contents public, in order to justify her husband's memory. As a curious proof of her political sagacity--unless it is to be considered a mere coincidence--I may mention that in January, 1870, she came to a masked ball at the Casino dressed as Mars, in a short skirt of red satin, a cuirass of gold, on her head a helmet, in one hand a spear, and in the other a shield, and on it was written "Roma." Did Madame Rattazzi foresee that by September of the same year there would be a war, and that as one of its results Rome would so soon become the capital of that Italy which her husband had helped to build up?[003]

From this somewhat rambling sketch the reader will readily understand that Nice is one of the great centres of society in Europe, and indeed in late years it is rather, as a place of gay reunion that it is frequented than as a resort for invalids. Since the foundation of quieter colonies at Mentone and San Remo, Nice has somewhat lost its reputation as a sanitarium, for it is rather difficult, especially for young people, to resist the temptation of its innumerable balls and round of gayeties; and these are not considered conducive to the preservation of health even amongst the healthiest. The medical men, therefore, recommend places along the neighboring coast which enjoy the same or even greater advantages of climate. That of Nice, after all that has been written about it, still seems to me one of the finest in the world. The air is exquisitely pure and clear, and has proved beneficial in many hundreds of cases of incipient consumption. But the fatal error is often made of sending hither patients in whom the disease has made considerable progress. In such cases the irritating air hastens death. I have known people brought here in the second and last stages of consumption, who have been carried off in a fortnight after their arrival, and who might have lingered on for years elsewhere. The patient who finds himself benefited should remain at Nice for at least three or four years, only varying the air in summer by a visit to some of the many pleasant places in the neighboring mountains, where the atmosphere is pure, cool and wholesome. Perhaps, it is owing in part to the brightness of the sunshine and the beauty of the scenery that soon after his arrival the health of the invalid often revives as if by enchantment. Alphonse Karr, a resident of many years, who knows every nook and corner of the place, and who has cultivated a garden in its environs as celebrated throughout the world as his own sparkling pen, says well: "Who is there so downhearted as to resist the glorious heat of the sun, the beauty of that deepest of blue seas, the loveliness of the varied trees, the tropical vegetation, the scent of the orange-flowers, the music of the brooks, the sight of the ever-changing hues of the mountains of _Nizza la bella_?"

R. DAVEY.

THE RASKOL, AND SECTS IN RUSSIA.

FROM THE FRENCH OF ANATOLE LEROY-BEAULIEU.

I.--ORIGIN OF THE RASKOL.

For more than two centuries Russian orthodoxy has been undermined by obscure sects, unknown to foreigners, and little known to Russians themselves. Beneath the imposing pile of the official Church have been hollowed out vast underground burrows and a labyrinth of gloomy crypts, which form a retreat for the popular beliefs and superstitions. We propose to descend into these catacombs of ignorance and fanaticism. We shall attempt to map them out, to explore their remotest nooks, and to lay hold in this, their hiding-place, of the character and aspirations of the people. Nothing could yield better means of acquaintance with the genius of the nation and the groundwork of Russian society. The _Raskol_, with its thousand sects, is perhaps the most original feature of Russia, and what most sharply distinguishes it from Western Europe.

Like rivers colored by the soil through which they flow, religions often change their characteristics according to the nations who practice them. The Raskol is Byzantine Christianity issuing from the Russian lower classes. In the thick and muddy waters of Muscovite sectarianism we can distinguish foreign admixtures, sometimes Protestant, sometimes Jewish, or even Mohammedan, more frequently Gnostic or pagan. The Raskol, nevertheless, remains wholly different, in principle and in tendency, from all the religions and religious movements of the world: it is original and national from the foundation up. So thoroughly Russian is it that outside of its native country it has never made a proselyte, and even within the empire has hardly any adherents excepting among the people of "Greater Russia," the most thoroughly national of all. So spontaneous has been its growth that in all its phases it is its own best interpreter, and if confined to an isolated continent, its development would have been the same. The Raskol is the most national of all the religious movements to which Christianity has given birth, and at the same time the most exclusively popular. It took its rise, not in the schools, nor in the monasteries, but in the mujik's hovel and in the shop; and it has never spread beyond its birthplace. Hence, the student of politics and the philosopher take a keener interest in ignorant heresies than is to be found in their doctrines alone. These sects of lately-liberated peasants claim an attention by no means due to their meagre theology, from their being the symptom of a mental condition and a social state for even a distant approach to which all Western Europe would be scoured in vain.

The Raskol (schism) is neither a sect nor a group of sects. It is, rather, an aggregate of doctrines and heresies, which are often divergent or even contradictory, with no other tie than a common starting-point and a common hostility to the official orthodox Church. In this respect the Raskol is more nearly analogous to Protestantism than to anything else. It is inferior to Protestantism in the numbers and education of its adherents, but it almost equals it as regards the variety and originality of its developments. Further the likeness cannot be fairly said to go. In the midst of their unfilial revolt, German Protestantism and the Russian Raskol preserve alike the signs of their origin, the stamp (so to speak) of the Church whence they have issued, as well as of the widely-differing states of society which gave them birth. In Western Europe love of speculation and a critical spirit gave rise to the larger part of modern sects, while in Russia they are the offspring of reverence and unenlightened obstinacy. In the West, the predominance of feeling over the value attached to the externals of religion has been the cause of religious divisions, whereas the same result has been produced in Russia by an extraordinary reverence for external forms for ritual and ceremonial. The two movements thus seem to be in absolutely opposite directions, but they have nevertheless terminated at the same point. In other words, the Raskol, when once freed from the authority which maintained the unity of the faith, was as powerless as Protestantism to establish any authority within itself. It has in consequence become a prey to the same license of opinion, to the same individualism, and, finally, to the same anarchy.

Few religious revolutions have involved results so, complex as the Raskol, yet few have been simpler in their inception. The countless sects which for two centuries have had their being among the Russian people took their rise, in general, from the revision of the liturgy. One stock produced them nearly all: only a few sects (though these, by the way, are by no means the least curious) date from an earlier time or have another origin than this liturgic reform. The Middle Ages in Russia, as elsewhere, were marked by the rise of heresies. Of these the oldest may have arisen before the Mongol conquest, from contact with Greeks or Slaves, particularly with the Bulgarian Bogomiles, the ancestors or Oriental brethren of the Albigenses. Other heresies sprang up later in the North, in the Novgorod region, from intercourse with Jewish or other Western traders. Of most of these the name alone remains: such are the _Martinovtsy_, the _Strigolniki_, the Judaizers, and so on. All these sects were dying away when the Raskol broke out; and it absorbed all the vague, embryonic beliefs floating in the popular mind. Some of these antique heresies--the Strigolniki, for instance--after having disappeared from history, seem to have come to light again in the shape of certain sects of our own days; and one might fancy that they had been for centuries running on in an underground channel.

In the dim disputes of mediæval times, however, one may make out with some clearness the fundamental principle of the Raskol: it is a scrupulous veneration for the letter--formalism, in a word. "In such a year," says a Novgorod chronicler of the fifteenth century, "certain philosophers began to chant, '_O_ Lord, have mercy upon us!' while others said, '_Lord_, have mercy upon us!'"[004] In this remark the whole Raskol stands revealed. Controversies like these begat the schism which has rent the Russian Church asunder. Religious invocations have for this people the nature of magical formulæ, the slightest change in which destroys their efficacy. The Russian clings to the heathen feeling, though he hides it under a Christian veil. He believes in the power of particular words and gestures. He still seems to regard his priest as a kind of _chaman_, religious ceremonies as enchantments, and religion in general as witchcraft. A fondness for rites (_obriad_) is indeed one of the characteristics of the inhabitant of Greater Russia. The way in which Russia was converted to Christianity has much to do with this. The mass of the people became Christians at the bidding of others, and with no sufficient preparatory instruction, without even having passed through all the stages of that polytheistic evolution from which other nations of Europe had emerged before their adoption of Christianity. The religion of the gospel was, in its highest statement, too far advanced for the mental and social condition of the people; and so it was corrupted, or rather reduced to external forms. Russia adopted merely the outside of Christianity; and there, even more strictly than in the West, it is true that the peasant was still a heathen. Other nations have adopted the outside of a religion, and have afterward absorbed its spirit: from its geographical and historical remoteness such an absorption was hard for Russia to achieve. It was separated from the centres of the Christian world by distance and by Mongol rule: its religion, like everything else, was debased by poverty and ignorance. Theology, properly speaking, utterly vanished, and its place was taken by ceremonial, which thus became the whole of religion. Amidst the general degradation a knowledge of the words and rites of public worship was all that could be exacted of a clergy which did not always know how to read.

The changes which had taken place in the traditional texts and ritual have little solid ground for the popular devotion entertained for them. The liturgy was corrupted by the superstitious veneration paid it by the ignorant. False readings had crept into the books which contained the various local "uses," to borrow a term from the Anglican terminology. Liturgical unity had imperceptibly disappeared amidst various readings and discordant ceremonies. In course of transcription absurdities had slipped into the missals, along with grotesque additions and arbitrary intercalations, while the new readings were received with the respect due to antiquity, and these sometimes unintelligible passages acquired a sanctity in direct proportion to their obscurity. The devout mind found in them mysteries and occult meanings. On such perverted texts were erected theories and systems which pious fraud from time to time expanded into treatises attributed to the Fathers of the Church. So wild was the confusion, and so palpable the alterations, that early in the sixteenth century Vassili IV., a Russian prince, summoned a Greek monk for the purpose of revising the liturgical books. But the blind veneration of the clergy and people rendered this attempt abortive. The reviser, Maximus, was condemned by a council, and confined on a charge of heresy in a distant monastery. The crisis was superinduced by the introduction of the press. Here, as elsewhere, the new discovery brought with it a taste for the study and revision of texts, and ultimately violent theological contests. The missals which issued from the Russian presses of the sixteenth century at first only aggravated the evils for which they should have afforded a remedy. The errors of the manuscripts from which they were printed received from these missals the authority and circulation of type. The copyists had introduced countless variations, but these acquired a fresh unity and unanimity from the very fact of their publication in such a form.

The Slavonic liturgy of Russia seemed in a state of hopeless corruption when, toward the middle of the seventeenth century, the patriarch Nikon determined upon a measure of reform. In addition to a degree of cultivation unusual in his age and country, and an enterprising and determined character, he possessed what was specially required for such a step: he had learning, firmness and power, for through his influence over Alexis, the czar, he ruled the State almost as thoroughly as he ruled the Church. In Russia, as it was before Peter the Great, a task so completely dependent on learning was indeed a bold undertaking. By order of the patriarch ancient Greek and Slavonic manuscripts were gathered from all quarters, and monks were summoned from Byzantium and from the learned community of Athos to collate the Slavic versions with their Greek originals. The interpolations due to the ignorance or whims of copyists were remorselessly stricken out, and into the ritual, thus purified, was introduced the pomp customary at the court of Byzantium. The new missals were printed and adopted by a council (through the patriarch's influence), and finally imposed, with all the authority of the state government, on every Russian province. "A sore trembling laid hold upon me," says a copyist of the sixteenth century, "and I was affrighted when the reverend Maximus the Greek bade me blot out certain lines from one of our Church books." Not less was the scandal under Peter the Great. The man who laid hands on the sacred books was everywhere held guilty of sacrilege. Whether from a knowledge of the propriety of the measure, or from the spirit of ecclesiastical fidelity, the higher clergy upheld the patriarch, but their inferiors and the common people made a determined fight. And even now, after the lapse of more than two centuries, a large body adhere immovably to the ancient books and the ancient ritual, which are made sacred to them by the approbation of national councils and the blessing of generations of patriarchs. Such was the inception of the schism, the Raskol, which still divides the Russian Church. Tracing the matter back to its source, the contest is seen to turn upon the knotty question of the transmission and the translation of the sacred texts, which has more than once divided the churches of the West. In Russia no one was competent to form a proper judgment of the essence of the dispute, and it was thus rendered only more lasting and bitter. Monks, deacons, plain sextons, denounced the innovations as novelties borrowed from Rome or from the Protestants, and as being tantamount to the bringing in of a new religion. When the Church brought to bear upon these recusants the pains and penalties everywhere employed against heretics, the only result was to give the schism martyrs, and with martyrs a fresh impetus. Ten years after the promulgation of the revised liturgy its rash author fell a victim to the jealousy of the boyards and to his own arrogance, and was solemnly deposed by a council. To the Raskol his deposition appeared in the light of a justification of their own course. The condemnation of the reformer seemed necessarily to involve the condemnation of the reform. Great, then, was the popular bewilderment when the council turned from deposing the author of the liturgic revision to hurl its anathemas against those who opposed that revision. The share taken in this excommunication by the Oriental patriarchs rather lessened than added to its weight, since the dissenters denied to Greek and Syrian bishops, who knew not a letter of the Slavonic alphabet, the right of passing judgment on Slavonic books.

The theological world is no stranger to subtleties, but never perhaps did causes so trifling breed such interminable quarrels. The sign and the form of the cross, the heading of processions westward or eastward, the reading of a particular article of the Creed, the spelling of the name of Jesus, the inscription to be placed over the crucifix, the single or double repetition of the Hallelujah, the number of eucharistic wafers to be consecrated,--such are the leading points in the controversy which ever since has rent the Russian Church. The orthodox make the sign of the cross with three fingers, while the dissenters follow the Armenian practice of only two. The former permit the cross with four arms, like our own: the latter cannot away with any but that with eight arms, with a crosspiece for the Saviour's head and another for his feet. Since the reform the Church chants the Hallelujah thrice, the Raskolniks only twice. The dissenters defend their persistence by symbolical interpretations, and delight to make a profession of faith out of the simplest rite. For instance, they insist that after their fashion of making the sign of the cross the three closed fingers render homage to the Trinity, while the two others testify to the double nature of Christ, so that, without uttering a word, the sign of the cross is an act of adherence to the three fundamental dogmas of Christianity--the Trinity, the incarnation and the atonement. In like manner they interpret the double Hallelujah following the three Glorias, and cast it in the teeth of their opponents that they ignore in their ritual one or another of the great Christian doctrines. Such interpretations, based on corrupted texts or feigned visions, show the grotesque blending of coarseness and subtlety which makes up the Raskol.

If we may judge from the origin of the schism, its essence lies in the worship of the letter, the servile respect for forms. To the anti-reforming Russian, ceremonies form the whole of Christianity, and liturgy is one with orthodoxy. The same confusion between faith and the outward forms of worship is revealed by the chosen name in which the dissenters delight. Not content with the title of _Starovbriadtsy_ (old ritualists), they adopt that of _Starovery_ (maintainers of the old faith), which amounts to styling themselves _true_ believers, the genuine orthodox, since in religious matters, unlike those of human science, authority is on the side of antiquity, and even innovations must come forward invoking the past. Here, as often happens, there is little ground for the Starovery's boast, for if they preserve the ancient Russian books, their opponents have gone back to the old Byzantine liturgy; and the party which most loudly vaunts its claim to antiquity does so with least reason.

The principle of the Raskol, which sometimes runs out into the wildest dreams of mysticism, is essentially realistic. Under this materialistic _cultus_, however, there lurks a sort of idealism, of coarse spiritualism. Religious vagaries, with all their absurdities, always have a lofty, sometimes even a sublime, side. It would be wrong to fancy that there is nothing but ignorant superstition in the Starovere's scrupulous attachment to his ancestral worship. The vulgar heresy is, in fact, only an overdone ritualism, whose logic lands it in absurdity. The Old Believer's reverence for the letter comes from his belief that letter and spirit are indissolubly united, and that the forms of religion are as needful as its essence. Religion is to him, both as regards forms and dogmas, a whole, all whose parts hang together; and no human hand can touch this masterpiece of Providence without blemishing it. There is an occult sense in every word and in every rite. He cannot believe that any ceremony or formula of the Church is void of meaning or of efficacy. Divine service has nothing in it merely accessory, indifferent or unmeaning. Holy things are holy throughout: in the worship of the Lord everything is deep and full of mystery; and it is blasphemy to change anything or to withhold from it its proper veneration. The Starovere, of course, cannot formulate his doctrine, but if he could, religion would appear, according to his view, a sort of completed and adequate representation of the supernatural world. His simple logic exacts from all public worship an absolute perfection which it is impossible to realize. Looked at in this light, the Old Believer who marched to the stake for the sign of the cross, and sacrificed his tongue rather than chant another Hallelujah, grows highly respectable. From this standing-point the Russian schism is essentially religious: its mistake, so to speak, is the excess of religion. Symbolism is the principle of its formalism, or rather the Raskol is symbolism run into a heresy. This gives it originality and value in sectarian history. To these extravagant ritualists ceremonies are not simply the garb of religion: they are its flesh and blood, in whose absence dogma is but a lifeless skeleton. Thus, the Raskol is the direct opposite of ordinary Protestantism, which by its very nature sets small store by outward ceremonies, regarding them as needless ornament or a dangerous superfluity. Ritual to the Starovere is as much an integral part of traditional Christianity as doctrine: it, is equally the legacy of Christ and the apostles; and the sole mission of the Church and the clergy is to preserve both intact. This leaning to symbolism saves his scrupulous fidelity to outward forms from degenerating into a slavish superstition. On the other hand, the allegorizing tendency which clings fast to the letter sometimes takes odd liberties with the spirit of ceremonies and texts. It is the peculiarity of the symbolizing temper scrupulously to respect the form while arbitrarily dealing with the spirit. Thus, the ritual and the sacred books become a kind of heavenly charade, whose answer must be found by the imagination. And so, in their hunt after the hidden sense of narratives and words, some of the Raskolniks have allegorized the histories of the Old and New Testaments, and changed the gospel records into parables. Some have gone so far as to see in the greatest of the gospel miracles nothing but types.[005] Such a system of exegesis easily leads to a kind of mystic rationalism: the forms of religion tend to gain more consistency than the essence, and public worship to be placed above doctrine. Some of the extreme sects of the Raskol have actually reached this point. A perfect carnival of wild interpretation prevailed among this ignorant rabble, and crazy doctrines and grotesque tenets were not slow in following in its train.

The Old Believer loves his peculiar rites, not only for the meaning he puts into them, but also for the sake of the authority on which he holds them: the moral and social _rationale_ of the schism is a deep respect for traditional customs and for the habits handed down from his forefathers. But even in his slavish devotion to ancestral ritual and prayers the Starovere simply exaggerates a feeling which, if not properly religious, commonly links itself with religion and adds to its influence. All men and all nations set great store by the maintenance of their hereditary faith, and even the common rhetorical abuse of such phrases demonstrates its power. When thus intertwined with the associations of family and country, religion assumes the guise of an inheritance solemnly committed to our trust by the departed. This feeling is singularly powerful in Russia from linking itself with a superstitious veneration for antiquity. You can often get no other reason from many of these sectaries for the faith that is in them. Quite recently a judge tried to bring to reason a group of peasants who were under prosecution for celebrating clandestine religious rites, but he could extract no other answer than this: "Our fathers practiced these customs. Take us anywhere you please, but leave us free to worship as our fathers did." A like reply is said to have been made by the Old Believers of Moscow to the late czarovitch on occasion of a visit to their burying-ground at Rogojski.

The liturgic reform of the seventeenth century was a revolution in the simplest elements of worship: it called upon the son to unlearn the sign of the cross that his mother had taught him. Such a change would have been hazardous anywhere, but it caused a peculiarly serious disturbance in Russia, where all prayer is connected with a kind of ceremonial of repeated bowings and crossings, which more closely resemble the devotional customs of the Mohammedans than those of other Christian countries. The people violently rejected the new sign of the cross and the entire reformed liturgy. It mattered little that the new ritual was more ancient than their own. The ignorant Russian knows no antiquity older than his fathers and grandfathers, and his attachment to the outer forms of orthodoxy was only intensified by remembering the recent attempts of popes and Jesuits to gain a foothold in the country. If he suffered the least change in his cherished customs, he might risk being Romanized, and, like the United Greeks of Poland, one day wake up and find himself part and parcel of the spiritual dominion of the papacy. With such dim fears the Old Believer opposed to the orthodox hierarchy a blind fidelity to orthodoxy. Their dread of seeing the Church corrupted inspired people and clergy with suspicion of all foreigners, even of their brethren in the faith whom the czars or the patriarchs had invited from Byzantium and from Kief. The Russian alone, of all the orthodox nations, had maintained his independence against infidel and pope, and he held himself the people of God, chosen to preserve the true faith. Everything European was indiscriminately rejected by this long-isolated nation. Their detestation of the West, its churches and its civilization, leads some of the Old Believers to anathematize even the language of theology and learning. Not longer ago than the close of the last century one of their writers waxed hot against the orthodox priests of Lesser Russia, many of whom, he said, "study the thrice-accursed Latin tongue." He reviled them for their readiness to commit the mortal sin of calling God _Deus_, and God the Father _Pater_, as though the Deity could have no other than the Slavic name of _Bog_, or the change of appellation involved a change of God. A like spirit is evident in the resistance offered by the Staroveres to the correct spelling of the name of Jesus, whom they persist in calling Issous, rejecting as diabolical the more accurate form Iissous. Such peculiarities show a nation shut up in its own vastness and isolated by its position and its history. It is a kind of Christianized China, knowing, and desiring to know, nothing beyond itself.

The revolt against the innovating patriarch was, in reality, a revolt against foreign, particularly against Western, influences. Instead of the accusation that he leaned to Romanism or Lutheranism, it would have been a better representation of the real grievance to charge him and the czar with borrowing from the West, not its theology, but its spirit and civilization, and even this, perhaps, unwittingly. The outbreak of the Raskol synchronizes with the introduction of foreign influence; and the coincidence is not accidental. The schism was but the reaction against the reforms which the Romanoffs carried out in so European a spirit. The patriarch's enterprise has been sometimes attributed to his vanity or his thirst for literary fame, but it was really the first indication of the approaching revolution, and of a growing sympathy with the West, where (as in England, for instance) at about the same period analogous[006] reforms gave birth to similar disturbances. If the former hermit of the White Sea invited criticism and learning to review the ritual of his Church, it was only in obedience to the same _Zeitgeist_ which under Peter the Great's elder brother, who succeeded Alexis, was to found at Moscow a kind of ecclesiastical university modeled on that of Kief. The Church, not less than the State, felt the Western breeze that was rising on the Russian steppes. And, as the Western spirit first attempted to introduce itself in the sphere of religion, so religion confronted it with its most formidable barrier. From the historian's point of view, the Raskol is that same popular resistance to the introduction of Western novelties which under Peter the Great passed from its original aspect of an ecclesiastical and religious revolt into the further stage of a social and civil insurrection.

II.--OPPOSITION TO MODERN CIVILIZATION.

In spite of himself, Peter the Great both inherited and aggravated the schism. At the present day it is hard to picture the impression produced upon his subjects by Peter I. He not merely astonished and bewildered them: he scandalized them. An open, systematic and sometimes brutal attack was made upon the customs, traditions and prejudices of the people. The reformer did not confine himself to the civil institutions: he laid violent hands upon the Church, and forced his way into the family, regulating, as the whim seized him, both public affairs and the private life of the citizen. The old-fashioned Russian was a stranger in Peter's new empire. His eyes were shocked by the spectacle of an unaccustomed garb, and novel administrative titles fell strangely on his ear. Names and things, the almanac and the laws, the alphabet and the fashions of dress,--everything was transformed. The very elements of civilization were hardly recognizable. The year began on the first of January, instead of the first of September. Men were no longer to date from the creation, but must adopt the Latin era. The old Slavonic characters, hallowed by immemorial ecclesiastical use, were partly cast aside, and what were retained took a new shape. The masculine attire was altered and the chin was shorn of its beard, while the veil no longer might protect the modesty of the women. The impression made by such a succession of shocks upon a nation so bigotedly attached to its ancestral ways was comparable only to an earthquake rocking Old Russia to its foundations.

Many of these innovations, as being borrowed from the Romanists or the Lutherans of the West, had a religious significance for the people. The change introduced by Peter the Great in the ancient calendar, in the Slavonic alphabet and in the national costume seemed but a carrying out of those which Nikon had initiated. So natural was the parallel that the Old Believers held the one to be but the continuation of the other; and the notion took shape in a seditious legend, according to which Peter was the adulterous offspring of the patriarch. The popular aversion felt for the reforms of the latter was augmented by that aroused by the emperor's innovations: the social revolt took the disguise of religion, since it had been provoked by a Church measure, and still more because Russia had not yet emerged from that stage of civilization in which every great popular movement assumes a religious aspect. A national prestige was thus communicated to the Raskol, which in its turn lent to the popular resistance the energy of religion. By giving the social revolt the semblance of a struggle for the rights of conscience the schism imparted to it a vigor and persistency which the lapse of two centuries has not succeeded in crushing.

But the Raskol rebelled not only against innovations and the introduction of foreign elements, but still more obstinately against the principle of the reforms and the modern method of state administration. The Russian, like the Mohammedan East of to-day and all other primitive societies, was most keenly sensitive to the burdens and vexations made necessary by this imitation of the European governmental system. From this point of view the Raskol was the opposition of a half-patriarchal society to the regular, scientific, omnipresent, impersonal system of European administration. It kicks instinctively against centralization and bureaucracy--against the state's encroachments upon private life, the family and the community. It struggles to tear itself loose from the pitiless machinery of government, hemming every life within its iron pale. The Cossack took refuge in the wild freedom of nomadic life, and the Old Believer was equally averse to giving in to the complicated mechanism of government. He would have nothing to do with the census, with passports or stamped paper. He strove to elude the new systems of taxation and conscription, and to this day some of the Raskolniks are in a state of systematic revolt against the simplest of governmental methods. Religious grounds, of course, are found for this insubordination, and they have theological arguments to urge against the census, as well as against the registration of births and deaths. In the opinion of a strict Old Believer the right of numbering the people belongs to God alone, as is shown by the biblical record of David's punishment. Sometimes the official designations strengthen the scruples of these simple folk, with their tendency to attach a great importance to phrases and names; and hence, partly at least, the popular antipathy to the poll-tax under its Russian form, "soul-tax." The revolt against such phrases is the fashion in which this nation of serfs, whose body was chained to the soil, asserted its possession of a soul.[007]

The struggle against the supervision and interference of the state has gone with some sects to the length of refusing submission to obligations imposed by every civilized country. The _Stranniki_ (wanderers) in particular boast of keeping up a ceaseless struggle with the civil authority, and make rebellion a moral principle and a religious duty. From condemning the state as the protector and helper of the Church, they have come to cursing it for its own tendencies and claims. Thus, the singular spectacle is presented of the more extreme schismatics looking upon their native government with the same feelings as were entertained by some of the Christians of the first three centuries toward the pagan empire of Rome. To these fanatics the government of the orthodox czars came to be the reign of Satan and the dominion of Antichrist. Nor was this an empty metaphor: it was a clear, determined conviction, and it still exerts a strong religious and political influence upon the schism. The Raskolniks could see but one interpretation of the overturning of public and private order under Peter the Great, and for what they regarded as the triumph of darkness: to them it was the coming end of the world and the advent of Antichrist. The old customs, it seemed, must carry with them in their fall the Church, society and all mankind. For centuries the extremity of agony or of wonder has wrung this cry from Christendom. After political revolutions and disastrous wars, in the most enlightened countries of Europe, in France and elsewhere, religious persons, in the panic of calamity, have been seen to take refuge in this last solution for the woes of Church or of State, and proclaim with the Raskolniks that the time was at hand. But what must have been the state of mind in Old Russia when the stunning blows of Peter the Great seemed to be dashing everything to pieces? Even at the period of the liturgic reform the fanatics had cried that the patriarch's fall was the harbinger of the world's end. The days of man, they said, are numbered; the Apocalyptic woes are at hand; Antichrist draws nigh. With the accession of Peter the Great, while he was reducing everything to confusion before their bewildered eyes, and trampling under foot the old customs, along with morality itself at times, the Raskolniks were at no loss to recognize in him the coming Antichrist. Nations are not always clear-sighted: the creator of modern Russia was regarded by a considerable portion of his subjects as an envoy or representative of hell; and his empire has never ceased to hold the unexampled position of a government cursed by a part of its own people as the dominion of Antichrist.