Russia as it is.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 11573, 2 October 1900, Page 1

Russia as it is.

To me, when I was in Russia (Arthur Symons writes in the Saturday Review), in the summer of 1897, Russia seemed the country of freedom. I was a foreigner, I did not concern myself in questions either of politics or religion; I went at the time of the Medical Congress, and with a friend who was a member of that Congress, so that. I had certain advantages in my favour. Wherever I went, in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, I found, so far as I was concerned, a delightful absence of officialism; I could go where I liked, do as I pleased, was not expected at every moment to conform to some unknown regulation, as one is expected in Germany, for instance. The same freedom seemed to exist even among the natives. Peasants would clamber up against the windows of a royal palace, the coachman would turn to the prince whom he was driving, and light his cigarette from, the cigarette of his master. And I think I never saw people so friendly with one another, except perhaps in Spain. And this friendliness in Russia goes somewhat further, becomes a more definitely helpful thing, than it does in Spain. It has become an earnest helpfulness, which has stamped itself upon tho very faces of the people. And, after all one has heard of Russian brutality, it is interesting to note for oneself the signs of gentleness which are to be found not only in these grave, bearded, patient, faces, but in many little, 'unexpected ways. One hardly thinks of Russia without thinking of the knout. Well, the Russian cabmen drive without whips, using only tho ends of their reins, and the raps finish in a mere bunch of ribbons.

When the Russian is cruel, ho is cruel just as tho barbarian always is, because he is indifferent to pain, his own or another's. Ho does not spare, because he would not complain. And he has the Mohammedan's readiness to sacrifice everything for a cause, which to him is that spiritual aud temporal power which is his religion, and which has taken far deeper root in him than any mere sentiment, essentially a modern one, of tolerance or of sympathy with suffering. In the Roumiantsof Museum of Moscow there is the cage in which Emilian Pougatchef was imprisoned: it is a cago only very slightly higher and wider than the height and size of an average man; it has chains for fastoning hand and foot together, so that the man can only stand upright, without even moving, inside the iron bars of his portable prison. But Pougatchef was a rfeligious rovolter, and to spare one who had taken up arms against religion would have been to spare a dangerous enemy of God. The word which I should use to represent tho main impression made on mo by the average Russian, the soldier, tho railway porter, tho labourer, is uprightness. The Russian has a genius for solf-sacrifico; self sacrifice has made him a martyr and a conspirator; it has given him strength and weakness. Ho can resign himself to anything, and resignation can just as easily bo heroism or mere apathy. [ In Russia everything is large and everything is loud. Moscow is like an immense" village, and everything in it is built broad, not high, because there is so much space to cover. The public squares, unpaved and surrounded by a little rhn'of cobbles,aroasbigas meadows. The arcades and passages, with their cellars below, thfeir shops above, llicir glass roofs, are so enormous that they could hold the Passage des Panoramas, and the Burlington Arcade, ami the gallaries at Milan, without filling more than a corner of them. Colours shriok and flame; the

I Muscovite eye sees only by empliasis and by contrast; red is completed either by another red or a bright blue. There are no shades, no reticences, no modulations. The restaurants are filled with the din of vast mechanical organs, with drums aud cymbals: a great bell clashes against a chain on all the trams, to clear the road; the music which one hears is a ferocity of brass. The masons who build the houses build in top boots, red shirts, and pink trousers; the houses are painted red or green or blue; the churches are like the temples of savage idols, tortured into every unnatural snaps -and coloured every glaring colour. Bare feet, osiersandals, and legs swathed in rags pass to and fro among the top-boots of the middle classes, the patent-leather boots of the upper classes, like 'the inner savagery of a race still so near barbarism, made evident in that survivial of the foot-gear of primitive races. But if we would see what is really at the root of the national character, the actual_ nature of the peasant, it is not even in Moscow that it must be sought, but in such a place as Sergievo, and on such an occasion as the annual pilgrimage to the Troitsa Monastery, on the day of the Assumption. The monastery, bulbous and angular, with its red walls and gold and _green domes and spires, is set on the triangular point of a small hill ; all about it are bright coloured sheds and and shops and booths, and little village houses of painted wood ; a village fair was going on, in honour of the pilgrimage, and a stream of men and women in bright clothes wandered up and down all the roads incessantly, and gathered in groups about the 'tea-shops and the booths of the fair. Inside the monastery walls, in the churches, and along the paths, the immense, quiet, ugly crowd wandered on, or waited patiently at gateways. It was made up for the most part of women, and these women were all old, or looked old, and they were all ugly, and all shapeless, dressed iv a patchwork of bright colours, their skirts looped up about their red and wrinkled legs, bare to the knee, or above their osier shoes bound about with cords. They were shapeless and uncouth, with bodies that seemed as if they had never known even the animals joys af life ; but there was none of the dirt, disease, and violence of a French or Italian prilgrimage, of Lourdes or Casalbordino.' They were clean and sturdy, and they passed slowly, leaning on their staves, or waiting two and two in long lines, to enter the church and kiss the relics, with a dogged patience, without noise, or talking, or laughter; with a fixed sense of the duty to be done, than of the need of rest, and then of the long journey home. They went in order by the large room by tke refectory, took their bread and salt, which they ate in the refectory, and then sat down, like great grown-up school children, at long wooden tables in the open air, where the monks served them with bread and soup. Then they flung themselves down on the ground wherever they happened to find a little free space, and slept heavily. They lay there with their heads on their bundles, themselves like big bundles of rags; some of them lay in the graveyard, upon the graves and the turf, like a dead army, waiting to be buried. And in all this this there was no fervour, no excitement, a perfectly contained emotion, a dogged doing of something which they had set out to do. They had come from all parts of Russia, walking all the way, and they had come simply to kiss the relics, and then to go home again, because it was their duty. They were all good-humoured, cheerful, contented; they accepted discomfort as they accepted poverty, labour, their bodies which had never known happiaess or beauty; Contentment in -them was strength, but it had in it also something lamentable. Here, in the placid and vigorous herd of animals, were women who had never discovered that woman could v be beautiful, human beings who had never discovered that life could be a desirable thing in itself.