the tenth century the Saracens conquered Nice, and remained in quiet
possession for seventy years, and during their stay introduced much of
the tropical vegetation which we still admire. They were finally driven
away by the insurgent natives in A.D. 975, but they left the impress of
their occupation in many Arabic words which still mark the local
_patois_; and as a number of the fugitives were captured and reduced to
slavery, intermarrying in the course of time with the native population,
the Moorish type is still very noticeable amongst the peasantry. Freed
from the Saracenic yoke, the Niçois lived in peace for nearly two
centuries, being only disturbed from time to time by the unwelcome
visitations of pirates. Later on, toward the middle of the thirteenth
century, like most other Southern and Italian cities, Nice fell a victim
to the constant quarrels of the powerful families allied respectively to
the Ghibelline and Guelphic factions. Thus, the incessant broils between
the Lascaris of Tenda, the Grimaldis of Monaco and the Dorias of
Dolceacqua desolated the surrounding country, and often reduced the city
to a state of siege. The Niçois were compelled to keep up a perpetual
guerilla, which, however inspiriting, was by no means conducive to their
material prosperity. In 1364 an invasion of locusts from Africa led to a
famine, and ultimately a plague which destroyed two-thirds of the
population. The people, attributing their misfortunes to the
intercession of the Jews with the powers below, rose up and massacred
them: only five Israelites out of over two thousand are said to have
escaped their blind fury. When order was at last re-established, and the
Niçois began to settle down again, they perceived their impoverished and
subordinate position to be so alarming that their only chance of safety
was immediately to place themselves under the protection of the dukes of
Savoy, who for a century and a half defended them from the attacks of
their numerous enemies in a most valiant manner. But in 1521, Francis I.
of France wrenched the city and province from the beneficent rule of the
Savoyards and proclaimed himself count of Nice. In 1524 war broke out
between Francis and the emperor Charles V., and the contending armies
alternately devastated and pillaged Nice and its environs. The pest
reappeared, and with it a drought and famine of so fearful a character
that many thousand persons perished, and others in their despair slew
themselves. Pope Paul III. undertook the difficult task of reconciling
the belligerents, and even went so far as to travel to Nice for the
purpose. A marble cross which gives its name to a suburb of the town
("La Croix de Marbre") still marks the spot where the conference took
place in which Francis and Charles swore a peace in the presence of His
Holiness which they took the first opportunity to violate. In 1540 the
war recommenced, and a number of dissolute young men of good family
formed themselves into organized companies of bandits and overran
the country, to the terror of the wretched peasantry and the utter ruin
of many hundreds of honest families. But in 1543 a second Joan of Arc
was raised up by Providence to deliver the Niçois in the person of the
still popular heroine, Catterina Segurana. Francis I. had recently
scandalized Christendom by allying himself with the famous Mohammedan
corsair, Barbarossa of Algiers with a view of reconquering Nice, which
he considered the key of Italy. Accordingly, one fine morning three
hundred vessels belonging to the Algerine pirate entered the neighboring
port of Villefranche, and presently the whole country was filled with a
horde of turbaned freebooters. Cimiez, Montboron, Mont Gros and a
hundred other villages and hamlets were soon alive with French marauders
and Turkish pirates, who presently proceeded to bombard the city itself.
The siege was short, but terrible, and the inhabitants were at the last
gasp when the energetic Catterina Segurana, a washer-woman by trade, and
surnamed _Mao faccia_ ("Ugly face"), on account of the homeliness of her
countenance, seized a hatchet, and, after a vigorous address to her
fellow-citizens, placed herself at their head and led them against the
enemy. The same result attended her efforts as did those of her
immediate prototype, the glorious Maid of Orleans. She so animated the
people, so roused their patriotism, that before the day was over the
French and infidels were conquered, and the bold and generous Catterina.
stood surrounded by her enthusiastic fellow-citizens, waving the
conquered Algerine flag, in token of victory, from the summit of the
castle hill, on the spot where formerly stood her statue.[001]

From the time of the brave Catterina to our own, Nice has sustained at
least a dozen sieges of more or less severity. That of 1706 was perhaps
one of the most shocking on record. The city, by the treaty of Turin of
1696, had once more passed under the protectorate of the dukes of Savoy,
but the French, who have always had a longing eye for the "Department of
the Maritime Alps," as they even then called it, broke the treaty they
had themselves framed, and sent the duc de la Feuillade over the
frontier with twenty thousand men to conquer the country. Nice was then
governed by the marquis de Caraglio, who, although entreated by the
enemy to allow the women and children to leave the city's gates,
positively refused to do so. The consequence was that during the siege,
which lasted six months, more than a third of the inhabitants perished
from starvation. Men are said to have killed their wives for food, and
women their children. Sixty thousand shells fell in various parts of the
town, and the castle, cathedral and many churches were entirely
destroyed.[002]

In 1792, under the First Republic, Nice was again occupied by the
French, and declared a _chef-lieu de département_. By the treaty of 1814
the place was handed over to the Piedmontese, and stayed contentedly
beneath the rule of the Sardinian kings until 1860, when, by the treaty
of March 24, Napoleon III. annexed the county of Nice and the duchy of
Savoy to his imperial possessions, in exchange for the services his army
had rendered Italy at Magenta and Solferino. How long Nice will continue
French is a question somewhat difficult to answer just now. There exists
in the city and province a very strong Italian party, and during the war
of 1870, Nice was declared in a state of siege, owing to the constant
and very serious demonstrations of a certain part of the population. One
of the leading inhabitants, a noted banker, even went so far as
to travel to Florence with the intention of proving to the Italian
government that whilst the French troops were concentrated in the north
those of Victor Emmanuel would find no difficulty in crossing the
frontier and uniting Nice to Italy. To the honor of the Italian
government, this treacherous suggestion was rejected, but in those days
the feeling between France and Italy was more cordial than it has since
been. The Italian party is so active in the city and the department that
the government has difficulty in keeping note of its proceedings.
Thousands of pamphlets are secretly circulated amongst the lower orders,
in which the advantages of the city's return to Italy are vividly
contrasted with the disadvantages it suffers from by remaining French.
The clergy, however, who are both numerous and influential, are French
to a man, and dread the hour which will see them governed by the "jailer
of Pius IX.," and consequently prove a very great assistance to the
authorities in counteracting the intrigues of the Italians. But should
ever, in future years, a war break out between either France and Italy,
or between France and Italy's new ally, Prussia, the _question de Nice_
will be once more on the _tapis_, and victory alone will preserve this
magnificent possession to its present owners.

Nice may well boast herself a rival in point of splendor of natural
position of the most famous cities of the South--of Lisbon, Genoa,
Naples and Constantinople--and she eclipses them in point of climate.
Built at the eastern extremity of a fine gulf--that of Les Anges--and
backed by an amphitheatre of hills and lofty mountains, she is sheltered
from cold winds in winter, and in summer the Alpine breezes temper an
atmosphere which would else be unendurably sultry, owing to the
prevalence of the sirocco, a hot wind which passes directly hither over
the Mediterranean from the burning shores of Africa. One can scarcely
imagine a more glorious panorama than that of this city and its environs
as seen from the sea or from any neighboring elevation. Let us suppose
it a fine morning late in spring, and that we stand upon the deck of a
yacht about a mile and a half distant from the shore. Nice, we see,
surrounds a steep and rugged rock which rises almost perpendicularly
from the Mediterranean to the height of about six hundred feet, and is
crested by the ruins of the ancient castle, and covered with terraced
gardens forming a delicious promenade. Groves of cypresses and sycamores
hang on the declivities of this rock, which in places is rough with
cactuses and aloes and with the Indian fig, whose bright orange flowers,
when the sun's rays fall on them, have a magic splendor of color. A
group of palm trees at the extremest elevation, standing out on a high
crag, add not a little to the picturesque appearance of this singular
urban hill. On one side of this rock the rapid torrent Paillon,
traversed by several handsome bridges, some of them adorned with
statues, separates the "old" from the "new" town. On the other is the
port, filled with steamers and innumerable fishing-craft. Beyond the
port stretches the Boulevard de l'Impératrice, inaugurated a few years
since by the late empress of Russia, with its fine villas, notably the
splendid Venetian Palace, an exact reproduction of the celebrated
Moncenigo Palace at Venice, belonging to Viscount Vigier, whose wife was
once a popular idol of the musical world of Paris and London--Sophie
Cruvelli--and the extraordinary Moresque-looking castle of Mr. Smith,
which is well called the _Folie d'un Anglais_--the "craze of an
Englishman." The latter stands on the end of a promontory, and with its
lofty towers and domes closes in the view. It is perhaps the most
curious residence in the world, being built on a barren rock, and its
apartments literally hewn out of the marble of which it is composed. On
the top of the hill is a long building, with two curious twin towers and
a dome, built of red brick faced with white marble. Here is situated the
chief entrance. You descend from the spacious entry-hall a long well
staircase cut in the rock and lighted from above, until you reach a
superb octagonal chamber of white marble ornamented with
statues and Oriental divans covered with Persian silk. This is the great
saloon, and leading out of it are other fine chambers, all of them lined
with polished marble and furnished with Eastern magnificence.
Externally, there is no trace of these chambers visible. They are, as I
have said, excavated, like Egyptian tombs, in the heart of the mountain.
The proprietor, an eccentric English bachelor, never inhabits this
fantastic mansion, but lives in a second-rate hotel, spending thousands
annually in adding embellishments to his astonishing castle, where,
notwithstanding its magnificent suites of apartments, no human being has
ever slept a night or eaten a meal.

"Smith's Craze," as I have said, closes in the view to our right. To the
left, beyond the torrent Paillon, is situated modern Nice, with its
quays, leviathan hotels, and an almost interminable line of villas
marking the celebrated Promenade des Anglais. The background of the
scene is filled up by a semicircle of well-wooded hills, verdant with
vines, fig, orange, olive and pomegranate trees, and sparkling with
white country-seats, convents, and campanili. Towering over these hills
appears another range, of rocky and bold outlines, and then another, of
lofty mountains whose peaks lose themselves in clouds, and by their
fantastic figures form as delightful an horizon as the eye can behold.
In the centre rises the conical peak of Monte Cao, an extinct volcano,
exactly resembling Vesuvius in conformation, and only wanting a curl of
smoke issuing from its crater to make the illusion perfect. Alongside of
Monte Cao is another extinct volcano, on which are seen the ruins of the
ancient and deserted village of Châteauneuf, while between the two
summits (thirty-five hundred feet high) are distinctly visible the peaks
of some of the ever-snowy Alps. The foreground of the picture is formed
by the deep indigo waters of the Mediterranean, diversified by a hundred
sunny sails, and overhead hangs the cloudless Italian sky.

Let us now put back to port and walk through the city, visiting first
Old Nice, then the modern Pompeii, as Alphonse Karr pleasantly calls
the new town. Old Nice resembles Genoa on a small scale, and has very
narrow streets of lofty (and in some cases really fine) houses, no end
of churches, gloomy-looking convents, and one or two palaces. In the
narrow streets surrounding the cathedral--a large and showy building,
formerly a parish church--is a market supplied with native
fruits--oranges, lemons, grapes, figs, and many varieties of melons and
nuts. The streets, which are in places so narrow that you can almost
stretch your arms across them, are full of bright-looking shops, with
all their varied goods displayed at the open, unglazed windows. Here and
there one comes across remains of ancient times of considerable
interest. Thus, in the Rue Droite is an old house, with a series of
quaint little arches and a curious Gothic gateway, which was formerly
part of the palace inhabited by Joanna II. of Naples. Near the church of
St. Jacques is another old residence, with an odd decoration on its
front in the shape of colossal figures of Adam and Eve, executed in
alto-rilievo, which have their feet on either side of the doorway and
their heads above the fifth story. The tree of knowledge, over-laden
with its dangerous fruit, flourishes between the windows of what was
once the saloon, and is now a manufactory of maccaroni. In the Rue du
Centre is the quondam palace of the Lascaris family, an old Italian
mansion, with marble balconies, wide, majestic staircases adorned with
Corinthian columns, and vast apartments frescoed by Carlone, a reputable
Genoese painter of mythological subjects. Carlone's gods and goddesses
look down no longer on the members of the House of Lascaris, who once
ruled over Tenda, and were the lineal descendants of the imperial
Byzantine house of Del Comneno, but on those of an amiable Niçois
family, who most willingly show the old palace to any stranger who may
choose to knock at their door.

Some years ago a Turinese lawyer, looking over his father's private
papers, discovered that he was the legitimate heir to the Lascaris
titles and estates, which had been left unreclaimed for many
centuries. This gentleman, on proving his claim, assumed the grandiose
title of Prince Lascaris del Comneno, grand duke of Macedonia. His glory
was short-lived. His wife went to Rome and obtained a full recognition
of her rights from the Holy Father and admission into the first circles
of Roman society, but was subsequently expelled from the city for
plotting against the papal government; but she returned with the
Piedmontese occupation in 1870, only, however, to get into a still worse
pickle by exposing herself to the charge of defrauding Flaminio Spada's
bank of a large sum of money. During the trial she _mizzled_, and has
not, I believe, been heard of since. This lady is the famous "Princess
Mopsa" about whose adventures the Roman papers have entertained their
readers considerably during the last year or so.

The churches are usually in the Italian style, having heavy façades,
plain brick sides and queer but rather picturesque bell-towers.
Internally, they are gaudy and tasteless, the altars ornamented on high
days and holidays with innumerable wax candles, festoons of red, white
and blue drapery, and huge pyramids of paper roses with gold foliage.
Ecclesiastical affairs are presided over by Monsignor Pietro Sola, a
charming old bishop, who is the essence of kindliness and charity. He
was formerly one of the spiritual directors of Queen Adelaide of
Austria, the late wife of Victor Emmanuel. The number of priests, monks
and nuns is very considerable. There is a very large Franciscan
monastery up at Cimiez on the hill, and a rambling old Capuchin convent
at St. Bartolomé. The Nice Capuchins are a splendid body of men, and a
goodly sight to see marching in a procession with their
chocolate-colored hooded robes and long, flowing beards. Their present
prior is a marquis Raggi of Genoa, a man of high family and rank, who
some years since abandoned a world he had known only too well, gave all
his fortune to the poor, and turned monk.

There is a street in the old part of Nice which is perfectly unique. It
is nearly a mile and a half long, runs parallel with the sea, and
consists of a double row of low, one-storied houses having a paved
terrace on their roofs, to which you ascend by several handsome
staircases. The terrace forms a very popular promenade of an evening,
and from it are enjoyed lovely views of the bay and mountains. Between
these two rows of houses is the fish-market, where are frequently seen
displayed monsters like Victor Hugo's famous _pieuve_ sprawling out
their dozen glutinous legs fringed with eyes and deadly weapons in
almost supernatural hideousness, to the admiration of a group of English
or American tourists. Hard by the fish-market is the Corso, a shady
promenade round which the gala carriages drive in Carnival time, while
the masked inmates pelt and get pelted in turn with comfits made of
painted clay. The Corso is also the scene of numerous religious
processions, some of which are quaint and picturesque. There are a
number of ancient confraternities established amongst the trades-people
of Nice, who wear costumes of, red, white, black and blue serge,
according to the guild they belong to. This sack-like garment covers
them from head to foot, face and all, there being only two eyeholes slit
in the mask to permit the wearer to see out. These brotherhoods attend
the sick, bury the dead and take care of the widows and orphans, and in
Holy Week make the narrow streets of the old city delightful to the
artistic eye by the bright mass of their vivid-colored raiment, the
flickering of their tapers, and the gigantic crucifixes of gold and
silver they carry in procession from church to church. Every morning
there is a market held on the Corso of fruits, vegetables and flowers.
Such magnificent baskets of camellias, japonicas and roses, such
nosegays of violets and orange-blossoms, can be seen, I fancy, nowhere
but at Nice. Here also the peasant-women sometimes bring immense pots of
Peruvian aloes for sale, whose snowy blossoms are scented like those of
the magnolia, and rise in gigantic pyramids of magnificent cup-shaped
flowers. They are plants to salute respectfully as you pass by
them, such is their size and dignity. In Holy Week women are to be seen
all over the old town selling plaited palm branches of a pale
straw-color, some of which are bedecked with little bows of ribbon or
stars of tinsel, used in the ceremonies of Palm Sunday. The
peasant-girls who come to market at Nice are rather handsome, but as
dark as Nubians, with almond-shaped eyes and long, coarse black hair,
which they wear plaited into tails bound round the head with broad
velvet ribbons, like a coronet. On the top of this headgear they sport a
wide-brimmed straw hat of peculiar shape, ornamented with little black
crosses made of narrow velvet. In Princess Marie Lichtenstein's _Holland
House_ there is a portrait of Lady Augusta Holland wearing one of these
Nice hats.

But it is time for us to cross the bridges and pay our respects to Nice
the "new." When I first visited Nice in 1856 at least two-thirds of this
part of the city were not in existence. There were no splendid
railway-stations then; only one or two, instead of twenty, monster
hotels; the Promenade des Anglais only extended about a mile along the
shore, instead of four; and there were but one quay and two bridges. Now
superb quays line the river on either side, and there are six bridges,
and Heaven only knows how many churches for the accommodation of all the
denominations imaginable and unimaginable, from Père Lavigne's very
beautiful and very orthodox church, in which Monsignor Capel has
preached in Lent, down to Léon Pilate's, where collections are made for
the evangelical missions presided over by Mrs. Gould and W.C. Van Metre.
There is a Greek church of exceeding beauty, the altar-screen of which
was sent from Moscow as a present from the czar; and an Episcopal
church, surrounded by a beautiful cemetery, where sleeps the philosophic
Bussy d'Anglas, with many others whose names are well known. The real
Niçois almost all dwell in Old Nice, leaving the new city to the foreign
colony. Indeed, the natives are rarely if ever seen, except in the
street. They keep to their old quiet way of living, and, beyond letting
their houses and selling their goods, appear to be utterly unconscious
even of the existence of the strangers on the other side of Paillon.
Many of the Nice families are titled and wealthy, but with the exception
of that of the count de Cessoles, it is very rare to meet the Niçois in
society. Mademoiselle Mathilde de Cessoles is the reigning belle, and
deserves the honor. She is a superb-looking woman, with a head and
countenance worthy of a regal diadem. Her features resemble those of the
House of Bourbon, her complexion is admirable, and she has a certain
good-natured, indolent, sultana way of moving which is perfectly
charming. Cupid alone knows how many have sighed for her hand since her
long reign as a queen of society began, but none have as yet been
favored with a kinder glance than that of friendship. Scottish dukes,
Roman princes and American officers have wooed, but never won: la belle
Mathilde still walks the orange groves of her villa, "in virgin
meditation, fancy free."

"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.

This Satanic apotheosis derived no little support from some of the
reformer's idiosyncrasies. He was to his subjects what a rejected
claimant of the Messianic office may have been to the Jews--a stone
of stumbling and a rock of offence to the people whom he came to
bring to a new birth. His civil and ecclesiastical reforms, with the
seeming decapitation of the Church by the abrogation of the
patriarchate, were to the mass of the people an enigma only one
shade less disreputable than the demeanor of himself and his
courtiers. The repudiation of his legitimate wife, Eudoxia, and his
adulterous connection with a foreign concubine, the death
(perhaps by his own hand) of his son Alexis, even the morbid state
of his health and the nervous twitching of his face, and his
astonishing triumphs after equally incredible disasters, contributed
to invest the sombre and gigantic physiognomy of the reformer with a
kind of diabolic halo. The vices of Ivan the Terrible had been as
monstrous, but even in the thick of his crimes he was a true
Russian, as superstitious a devotee as the meanest of his subjects.
But the astonishment and bewilderment inspired by Peter the Great
were only deepened by the reverence felt by the old Russian for the
person of his sovereign. Men could not help doubting whether such a
man, who had cast aside his national and scriptural title for the
foreign and heathen style of emperor, could be the true, the "white"
czar. The story of the usurpers and the false Dmitri had not faded
from the popular memory; and thus there grew up amidst the
unlettered and bewildered Russian people a string of legends in
which were harmonized their belief in the reign of Antichrist and
the popular respect for the czar. In this way the Raskolniks have
created a fantastic history which has been handed down to our own
days, according to one version of which, as has been said, Peter the
Great is the impious bastard of the patriarch Nikon (and from such a
parentage only a devil's offspring could be looked for); while
another asserts that Peter Alexovitch was a pious prince, like his
forefathers, but that he had perished at sea, and in his stead had
been substituted a Jew of the race of Danof, or Satan. On gaining
possession of the throne, continues the legend, the false czar
immured the czarina in a convent, slew the czarovitch, espoused a
German adventuress and filled Russia with foreigners. Such is the
Old Believers' explanation of the portentous phenomenon of a Russian
czar engaged in destroying the institutions of Holy Russia. In the
midst of the nineteenth century the incidents of Peter's career,
whether insignificant or important--his vices not less than his
glory--are used as proofs of his infernal mission. The remarkable
victories with which he recovered from terrible disasters were
miracles wrought by the help of the devil and the Freemasons. The
extension of his power beyond that of all previous Russian monarchs
and of all the ancient _bogatyrs_ was effected by the determination
of Satan that his offspring should receive divine honors. The same
interpretation is applied to the simplest events. Thus, Peter's
celebration with allegorical figures and festivals of the beginning
of the year on the first of January was due to his desire to restore
the worship of false deities and "the old Roman idol Janus." These
silly fables, and this incapacity of understanding how a pagan name
or emblem can be used without falling back into paganism, betray one
of the peculiar features of the Raskol--namely, the realistic
nature, of its symbolism, and its matter-of-fact determination to
fill images, allegories and words with occult meaning.

When once the presence of Antichrist was clearly made out, there was
nothing to hinder the application to Russia of the gloomy
descriptions of the prophets. Their disposition to hunt out
mysterious enigmas in names and numbers made it easy for the
fanatics to find the whole Apocalypse in modern Russia; and the
number of the Beast was sought in the names of Peter and of his
successors. Each letter of the Slavonic alphabet, as of the Greek,
has a numerical value, and the problem is thus to add up the total
of the letters of a name, and so obtain the Apocalyptic number 666
(Rev. xiii. 18). By inserting, reduplicating or omitting certain
letters, and not insisting too strongly on an exact result, the
sectaries have discovered the infernal number in the names of most
of the Russian sovereigns from Peter the Great to Nicholas. Such
alterations are defended on the ground that to throw investigators
off the scent the Beast changes the number which is meant to
designate him, so that he should be recognized under the number 662
or 664 as clearly as under 666. Turning from the particular
sovereign to the imperial title, the Raskolniks have unearthed the
number of the Beast in the letters composing it. Singularly
enough, it happens that all which is needed to obtain the
Apocalyptic number from the word _imperator_ is the omission of the
second letter; whence they say that Antichrist hides his accursed
name behind the letter M. By an equally odd and embarrassing
coincidence the Council of Moscow--which, after deposing Nikon,
definitively excommunicated the schismatics--met in 1666. Here,
plainly enough was the fatal number, and when the reform of the
calendar attracted the attention of the Old Believers to the point,
they considered it a weapon thrust into their hands by their
opponents. The year in question, accordingly, was fixed as the date
of Satan's accession. But not content with turning the line of
monarchs into so many emissaries of hell, some of these champions of
Old Russia have managed, by the help of an anagram, to identify
their native country with the mysterious land which is the object of
so many prophetic curses. In the _Asshur_ of the Bible they find
_Russia_, and apply to it the anathemas launched by the prophets
against Nineveh and Babylon.

The infernal sign, however, was visible to the Raskolniks not only
in the title and the names of their rulers, but in all their
innovations as well, and in all that they imported from abroad.
Since Russia is under the dominion of the "devil, the demon's son,"
the truly faithful are bound to reject all that has been introduced
during "the years of Satan." Encouraged by the notion of Antichrist,
the Raskol's opposition against the modern reform of government
spread until it embraces in its hostility everything brought from
the West. In no other of its developments do we see more distinctly
the characteristic features of the schism, its narrow formalism and
its coarse allegorizing, its blind worship of the past and its
national exclusiveness. It presented the novel spectacle of a group
of popular sects holding in abomination every object of foreign
commerce, everything new--material articles of consumption not less
than the discoveries of science. While the products of the East and
West Indies were pouring into the rest of Europe, the Old Believer
rigorously excluded them. He frowned upon the use of tobacco, of
tea, of coffee and of sugar, and by a curious transfer of his
respect for antiquity to his meat and drink, he stormed against
almost all colonial produce as heretical and diabolical. All that
had come in since Nikon and Peter was put under the ban by the
champions of the ancient liturgy. One Raskolnik forbade traveling on
turnpikes, because they were an invention of Antichrist. More
recently, another showed that the potato was the forbidden fruit
which caused the fall of our first mother. On every side the Old
Believer raised about him a wall of scruples and prejudices,
entrenching himself behind his stagnation and ignorance, and
anathematizing all civilization in a breath. To meet Peter's edicts
enjoining a new costume or alphabet or calendar, the Raskol put
forth a second decalogue: "Thou shalt not shave; Thou shalt not
smoke; Thou shalt use no sugar," etc. In the North, where they are
stricter and more numerous, many Raskolniks still have conscientious
scruples about using tobacco and putting sugar in their tea. The
scriptural arguments urged for this opposition are generally marked
by the coarsest realism. The Old Believer who will not smoke adduces
the passage, "There is nothing from without a man that entering into
him can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are
they that defile the man." The rebuker of the use of sugar urges
that blood is used in its manufacture; whereas Scripture forbids the
eating of the blood of animals--a prohibition, by the way, which
seems to have been maintained longer in Russia than in any other
Christian country. The true ground of the opposition to this or that
article or habit is to be sought not in these theological arguments,
but in its novelty and late introduction. As regards his way of life
and his faith, his table and his devotions, he is minded to tread in
his forefathers' footsteps. A Raskolnik and a member of the orthodox
Church were drinking together, when the latter took a cigar. "Out on
the infernal poison!" cried the Raskolnik.--"What do you, think of brandy?"
asked his companion. "Oh! Wine" (_vino_, the Russian name for
brandy)--"wine was Noah's favorite drink."--"Very good!" said the
other: "now prove to me that Noah was not a smoker." These folk are
still in the patriarchal stage, and an appeal to antiquity is an end
of controversy, "Jeer not at the old," says one of their proverbs,
"for the old man knows old things and teaches justice."

The parties to any political or religious contest need a
standard--some outward sign which appeals to the eye and the
intelligence of all. The most serious of the political questions
that convulse France to-day are symbolized and summed up in the
color of a flag; and thus in the Russian conflict between popular
obstinacy and the modern propagandism the rallying-sign of the Old
Believers, and the emblem of the champions of nationality and
conservatism, was the beard. The national chin was the centre of a
conflict less puerile than might be fancied. Long before Peter the
Great imitators of Western ways had begun to shave, thus setting at
defiance the Oriental custom which everywhere prevailed in Russia.
Under Peter's father one of the Raskol leaders, the protopope
Avvakum, denounced "these bold-faced" men--bold-faced meaning
shaven. The prohibition of Leviticus (xxix. 27; xxi. 5) was first
adduced, in conformity with the love for alleging religious
scruples. Recourse was next had to the ancient missals and the
decrees of the _Stoglaf_, a sort of ecclesiastical code attributed
to a national council. The prohibition of the razor was at first
confined to the clergy, but it spread by little and little to all
the faithful of the orthodox Church. Up to the time of Nikon the
patriarchs had laid hardly less stress on forms and on the exclusion
of foreign ways than their future opponents of the Raskol, and had
condemned shaving as "an heretical practice which disfigures the
image of God, and makes men look like dogs and cats." This is the
main theological argument of the foes of the barber, and their
current interpretation of the verse of Genesis, "God created man in
His own image," "The image of God is the beard," writes a Raskolnik
about 1830, "and His likeness is the moustache." "Look at the old
images of Christ and the saints," urge the Old Believers: "all of
them wear their beards." And so cogent is the argument that the
orthodox theologians are fain to hunt up the scanty list of
beardless saints to be found in Byzantine iconography. Whatever the
force of the arguments drawn from divinity, at bottom the opposition
was only the simple folks' one way of seeing things--the same
clinging to forms, the same compound of symbolism and realism. The
living work of God is to them as sacred as the text of the divine
word. Every word and letter of the sacred office must have its
separate significance; and they cannot admit that the hair with
which the Almighty has covered a man's face is without a meaning. It
is to them the distinctive mark of the male countenance; to remove
it is to change, and therefore to disfigure, the divine handiwork:
it is, in short, hardly less than mutilation.[008]

The beard, like the single repetition of the Hallelujah and the
cross with eight branches, has had its martyrs. No later than last
year (1874), on the Gulf of Finland a peasant who had been drafted
for the navy obstinately refused to be shaved, and rather than
betray his religion underwent a sentence of several years for
insubordination. Scruples of this sort have led the government to
grant permission to wear the beard in the case of certain corps (for
instance, the Cossacks of the Ural) which are mainly composed of Old
Believers. Peter the Great used every means to overcome these
popular prejudices, but the beard was too much for the reformer.
Finding himself unable to shave all the recusants by force, he
bethought him of laying a tax on the wearers of long beards, but in
vain. He was similarly foiled in his attempt to lay a double tax on
the schismatic upholders of the ancient ways. He forbade them to live
in the towns; he deprived them of civil rights; he forced them to
wear a bit of red cloth on the shoulder as a distinctive badge; but
these measures only marked them out as the bravest champions of
national traditions, and increased the respect everywhere rendered
them.

Such an attitude toward civilization leaves no room for mistake as
to the social and political character of the schism. It is a popular
protest against the irruption of foreign customs. It is a reaction
against the reforms of Peter the Great, somewhat as Ultramontanism
is a reaction against the spirit of the French Revolution. The
Staroveres are the champions of ancient customs in the civil sphere
as well as in the religious. The Old Believer is emphatically the
old-fashioned Russian--the Slavophilist of the lower classes--and
hence extreme to the point of absurdity. His revolt against
authority has more resemblance to that of La Vendée than to that of
the Jacobins. Like a conscript obstinately refusing to join his
regiment, he holds back from all part and lot in the changes of
modern Russia; and in this light the schism is the feature which
above all others assimilates Russia to the East.

And just as the East has bound itself fast to externals, so the
Raskolnik praises his fossilism to the skies, and would gladly run
the risk of petrifying society in its inherited shape. With him, as
with the child or the Oriental, wisdom and science belong to the
infancy of civilization, and the maxims of antiquity leave nothing
to be learnt. Under both aspects the Old Believer is reactionary,
opposed to the very principle of progress--the hero of routine and a
martyr to prejudice. His gaze turns naturally to the past, and if
reform ever enters his mind, he dreams of a return to the good old
times of yore. Even his struggle against authority is based on the
old idea of sovereignty: his political motto, as well as that of
most of the people, is, "No emperor, but a czar!" The czar was one
day pointed out to a Raskolnik conscript. "That is no czar," he
said: "he wears a moustache, a uniform and a sword, like all the
rest of the officers. He is nothing but a general." These
worshipers of the past, with their devotion to ceremonial, think of
the czar only as a long-bearded man in a flowing robe, such as they
see in the ancient images. The Old Believers are the exaggerated
representatives of the spirit of stagnation which everywhere
confronts the Russian government. Nothing gives a clearer conception
of the obstacles still in the way of reforms which elsewhere would
be matters of course (as, for instance, the substitution of the
Gregorian for the Julian calendar) than the resistance which other
measures have already encountered.

In principle the Raskol is conservative, not to say reactionary, but
its attitude toward the Church and the State, and the habits
engendered by two centuries of opposition and persecution, give it a
revolutionary, or even an anarchical, character. A secret tie unites
all the branches of public authority, and the rejection of one leads
to the rejection of another. As has been said by an eminent
historian of Russia, the refusal to submit to a single form of
authority brings into activity a disposition to rid one's self of
all social and moral ties. The Hussite revolt against Rome speedily
results in the Taborite revolt against society: Luther calls the
Anabaptists into being. The same phenomenon is repeated in Russia,
in England and in Scotland. Once carried away by the spirit of
revolt, an irresistible tendency sweeps the schism on in the
direction of civil liberty; and both in theory and in practice some
of these sects have reached the most unbridled license. Hence, by
one of those contrasts which are so common in Russia, the Raskol is
judged in two utterly different ways, each of which is partly
correct. The reactionary movement in its inception had the
appearance of an assertion of the rights of individual liberty and
national life, as opposed to the autocratic government; and such it
was, after a fashion--the fashion of refractory conscripts or of
smugglers, not to say of brigands--the fashion, in short, in which
all abuses and prejudices are defended. What it claimed
was liberty, indeed, but liberty as the commonalty understand
it--liberty to retain its customs, its superstitions and its
ignorance--liberty to go and come as it chose. But in all this there
was no notion of political freedom. With all his hatred of foreign
importations, the Old Believer is no enemy to reform in the sense of
national tradition or of furthering the interests of the lower
classes, the artisan and the peasant. Like all popular movements,
the Raskol is essentially democratic, and in some of its sects
socialistic and communistic.

Two things which have especially tended to give the Raskol a
democratic--or even liberal--complexion are serfdom and the
bureaucratic despotism of the country. It was no mere coincidence
which caused the Raskol to break out about half a century after
serfdom was established. Much of its popularity and life was due to
the enslavement of the mass of the people. The slave was proud of
having a different faith from his master; and slavery is always a
propitious soil for the growth of sects. This nation of serfs dimly
felt the Raskol to be an assertion of religious liberty and
self-respect against master, Church and government; and these were
symbolized by the beard and the peculiar sign of the cross. The
Raskol offered to all the oppressed a moral, and often a material,
refuge, an asylum for all enemies of the master and the law, and a
shelter for the fugitive serf, for the deserter, for public debtors
and outlaws of every description. Some sects (as the Wanderers, for
example) are specially organized for such purposes. In these
respects the Raskol was unconsciously one form of the opposition to
serfdom and official despotism; and hence the Old Believers are most
numerous among the most refractory elements of Russia--in the North
among the free peasants (the old colonists of Novgorod), and in the
South among the independent Cossacks of the steppes. Religious and
political opposition have joined hands, and to this combination is
due the strength of the great popular movements of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, such as the Streltsy insurrections at the
time of the revolt of Pougatchef, whose excesses curiously recall
the wars of the Peasants and Anabaptists in the West before the
abolition of serfdom. In the great Russian Jacquerie, and in all the
seditions which held out the hope of emancipation, the first place
was taken by the Old Believers and the Cossacks, most of whom held
the same faith. These two forms of national resistance are naturally
akin. They equally personify the character and the prejudices of the
old Russian. Their main point is their character of protests, so
that an Old Believer may be described as a Cossack in religion,
transporting into that domain the instincts peculiar to the wild
horsemen of the Don. But both Cossack and Starovere have found
themselves forced to give way before the march of civilization, and
the different branches into which the Raskol has split have reached
very divergent conclusions both as to politics and religion.

III.--INTERNAL DIVISIONS.

Nothing is more logical than religious creeds--nothing more rigorously
consequent in its deductions than the theological mind. Religious
thought has an unimpeded course in the twilight of mystery where it
takes its airy flight, and no material facts avail to check it or divert
it from the chosen path. The innate logic of the Russian mind adds force
to the kindred theological quality in its influence upon the Raskol, for
the inhabitant of Greater Russia is distinguished for his logical
consecutiveness and his acceptance of the extremest consequences of a
position. This is partly the cause of the multiplicity and growth of the
strange doctrines prevalent among them; and while this disposition
frequently lands the schism in the most grotesque of absurdities, it
gives a remarkable unity and regularity to even its apparent
divergencies and variations. Irregularity and the play of chance have as
little real place in this spiritual phenomenon as in one belonging to
the region of physics; and a knowledge of the _terminus a quo_
would have suggested its complications as well as the point ultimately
reached. One is now and then tempted to look upon the various sects as
utterly chaotic, but it is not difficult to trace the general course of
their natural evolution.

A less robust faith might easily have been cast down by the obstacle
which confronted the schism at the outset. The revolt aimed at
maintaining the ritual, yet the lack of priests to officiate
necessitated its abandonment. The defenders of the old faith found
themselves, at the first step, deprived of the means of practicing its
rites. A single bishop, Paul of Kolomna, had held out for the ancient
books at the time of Nikon's reform, but he had been imprisoned, and
perhaps put to death: at all events, he died without consecrating a
bishop, and the Raskol was consequently left without an episcopate or a
priesthood. Now, Oriental orthodoxy is not simply doctrinal in its
character, but, as M. A. Réville has remarked of Catholicism, "is, above
all, a method of establishing communication between man and God by the
medium of an organized priesthood, whose successive members transmit
uninterruptedly the divine powers which they hold from Christ;" and the
death of Paul of Kolomna snapped the chain uniting the Old Believers
with Christ, for ever depriving the schism of the powers conferred by
Christ on the apostles and essential to the continuance of the
priesthood and the Church.

The Raskol, so to speak, was stillborn. Unless they retraced their
steps, there were but two paths to take--either to admit priests
consecrated by a Church they had condemned, or to dispense with the
clergy, who alone could celebrate the rites in defence of which they had
revolted. There was little to choose between the two self-contradictory
courses, and each had its partisans. This first check split the schism
into two groups, whose hostility has not been allayed by the lapse of
two centuries. According to some, as Christianity cannot exist without a
priesthood, its complicity with Nikon's heresy has not deprived the
Russian Church of apostolic powers--of the _cheirotonia_, or right
to consecrate bishops and priests by the laying on of hands; and as
their ordination is valid, the schismatics have only to bring back
priests of the official Church to the observance of the ancient ritual.
To this it is answered that by abandoning the ancient books and
anathematizing the ancient traditions the sect of Nikon has lost all
claim to the apostolical succession, so that the established clergy
constitute no longer a Church, but the synagogue of Satan. All communion
with these emissaries of hell is a sin, and ordination by the apostate
bishops a defilement. The Oriental patriarchs have shared the heresy of
the Russian prelates by agreeing to their anathemas against the ancient
rites, and orthodoxy has carried with it in its fall the episcopate,
apostolical succession and the lawful priesthood.

Thus, in the first generation the Raskol fell into two sections--the
_Popovtsy_, who adhere to the priests, and the _Bezpopovtsy_,
who do not. To recruit their clergy the Popovtsy were fain to have
recourse to deserters from the established Church, and were thus
dependent upon it; though we shall see that of late they have succeeded
in getting an independent episcopate along with a complete
ecclesiastical hierarchy. By maintaining a priesthood, however scanty
and ignorant, the Popovtsy preserve the sacraments and the orthodox
Christian system; and, despite the inconsistency of admitting the
priests of a Church that they condemn, they have paused at the first
step of schism and maintain the original position. It is almost
impossible, on the other hand, for the Bezpopovtsy to stop on the slope
down which their logic inexorably drags them. Involved in the
abandonment of the priesthood is that of orthodoxy, or at least of the
orthodox ritual, and the sacrament of orders carries with it the
sacraments which none but the priest can administer. Of the seven
traditional channels of divine grace, baptism alone remains open: the
other six are dried up for ever. Thus, the first step of the Bezpopovtsy
brings them to the destruction of the first principle of Christian
worship. The more rigid of them do not shrink from this most glaring of
contradictions. To save the entire ritual they have sacrificed its most
essential parts. For the double Hallelujah and the sign of the cross
with two fingers instead of three they have foregone the whole Christian
life and the one visible link between man and God, which is to be found
only in the sacraments. The abolition of the sacred ministry and divine
service is their protest against the trifling changes introduced into
their devotional customs by the established Church. In barring the
entrance to Nikon's so-called innovations they have done away with the
priesthood, and so with every dyke against sectarian whimsies or the
very novelties against which they blindly contend.

In the melancholy upshot of the Bezpopovtsy movement there was nothing
to satisfy the fondness for ceremonial and tradition to which the schism
owed its birth; and it was hard to fill the gap left by the loss of
priesthood and sacraments. The old orthodox law had become impossible to
carry out, yet it had not been abrogated. Though perfectly united as to
rejecting the priesthood, they accordingly fell into new fragments,
marked now by hesitations and compromises, and now by grotesque fancies
or by cruel doctrines. For the timid and for those who clung to public
worship it was impossible to believe in Christian life and salvation
without the divinely-appointed means; and in the perplexed effort to
supply the loss of the sacraments their piety resorted to all manner of
ingenious make-believes. Priestly absolution being out of the question,
confession is sometimes made to the "elder" or to a woman, and the
promise of pardon has to do duty for the direct absolution. As the
Eucharist cannot be consecrated, famishing souls resort to types or
memorials of the holy sacrament; and for this _quasi_ communion
rites have been devised which are sometimes pleasing, sometimes bloody
and horrible. One of these is the distribution of raisins by a young
girl; while one sect (which is, however, but indirectly connected with
the Raskol) use the breast of a young maiden instead of the element of
bread. To one of the Bezpopovtsy sects the name of "gapers" is given,
because they are accustomed to keep their mouths open during the
Maundy-Thursday service, that the angels, God's only remaining
ministers, may give them drink from an invisible chalice, since, as they
hold, Christ cannot have wholly deprived the faithful of the flesh and
blood offered upon the cross.

Such are the expedients of the more gentle or enthusiastic to escape
from the religious vacuum into which schism has precipitated them. Quite
different is the course of the more strict and dauntless theologians;
and the ascendency of logic over pious feeling carries with these the
majority of the Bezpopovtsy. No consequence is too revolting for them,
and no hesitating subterfuge worthy of a thought. The priesthood, they
hold, is extinct, leaving only the sacrament of baptism, which the laity
may administer. Make-believes are of no avail. The chain that linked
Heaven with earth is snapped, and can be reunited only by miracle.
Meanwhile, the faithful are like men shipwrecked on a desert island
without a priest among them. Eucharist, penitence, chrism, and, more
than all, marriage, are alike impossible. The priest alone can pronounce
the nuptial benediction; and where there is no priest there can be no
marriage. Such is the ultimate consequence of the schism--the rock on
which the Bezpopovtsy split. With marriage the family goes, society with
the family, and such teachings can never be in harmony with the
feelings, with society or with morality. Marriage is their
stumbling-block and the principal matter on which their discussions and
divisions turn, giving rise to the wildest aberrations and strangest
compromises. The more practical retain marriage as a social
conventionality, while the more logical make celibacy universally
binding, thereby fostering anything but asceticism. Among the Russian
sectaries the familiar combination is repeated of sensuality and
mysticism. Free-love has been both preached and practiced among them;
and among the lower classes the grossest heresies of ancient Gnosticism
have mingled with the wildest and most morbid of modern social theories.
Most of their theological writers, while avoiding such extremes, urge
the most extraordinary maxims in connection with their forbiddance of
marriage, such as that immorality, being but a passing weakness, is less
criminal than marriage, which is interdicted by the faith.... To such a
point as this have the conscientious champions of old ceremonial been
brought. They have carried with them a few shreds of ancient ritual, and
they have not only abandoned Christian and natural morality, but in
their struggle with modern government and civilization deny the
principle which upholds all society.

Even fanatics must stand affrighted before conclusions like these, and
the Bezpopovtsy feel the need of some justification for their subversal
of the _cultus_ and the morality of Christianity. They find but one
solution for the awful enigma presented by Christ's abandonment of the
Church and mankind, by the extinction of appointed sacraments and means
of grace, and by the impious rupture of the tie between man and God. The
downfall of Church and priesthood and the triumph of falsehood and wrong
were foretold by the prophets. This is the time predicted in Holy Writ,
when the very elect shall be wellnigh seduced, and when God shall seem
to give up His own into the hand of the Adversary. The priestless Church
is the Church in the state of widowhood foretold by Daniel in the last
days. Thus, the Raskol was brought by the new path of theology to that
belief in the approaching end of the world and the reign of Antichrist
to which we have already seen it led by its aversion to ecclesiastical
and civil reforms. That the reign of Antichrist is begun is the
fundamental doctrine of the Raskol, and particularly of the
Bezpopovstchin. In the light of this new dogma all the contradictions of
the latter are explained and justified. This is the reason for the
extinction of the priesthood, of marriage and of the family.
Wherefore--many ask--wherefore continue the race when the archangel's
trump is about to proclaim the end of humanity?

The end of the world was announced to be nigh even before Peter the
Great; and they who proclaimed it are not yet weary of awaiting it. Like
Christians in the West in other periods, they are not undeceived by the
delay of the destined time, and are at no loss to explain it. Many
consider the reign of Antichrist to be a period or era which may last
for centuries, as one of the three great epochs in religious history,
and as having, like those of the old and the new dispensations, a law of
its own which abrogates what went before. All of the Raskolniks, or even
of the Bezpopovtsy, however, do not agree as to Antichrist; for while
his reign is generally admitted, it seems to be very differently
understood. Those who retain the priesthood and the more moderate of
their opponents hold his reign to be spiritual and invisible, and
government and established Church to be the unconscious or unwilling
tools of Satan; while the extremists of the Bezpopovstchin maintain that
Antichrist reigns materially and palpably. He it is, as we have seen,
who occupies the throne of the czars since Peter the Great, and his
Sanhedrim that usurps the name of the holy synod. Trivial as the
difference is, theologically speaking, its political consequences are
considerable; for the state may arrive at some understanding with sects
that only regard it as blind and misled, while even a truce is out of
the question with those which look upon it as the incarnate enemy of
souls.

Very singular are the vagaries to which the ignorant peasants are
naturally led by this belief. Since the world is in subjection to
"Satan, the son of Beelzebub," all contact with it was defiling, and
submission to its laws nothing short of a denial of the faith. To escape
the hellish contagion the best means was isolation or rigid withdrawal
into inaccessible retreats or desert places. In their spiritual
confusion and terror some of the sectaries saw no refuge but death, and
murder and suicide were systematically resorted to for the purpose of
shortening the time of probation and hastening their departure from the
accursed world. With some fanatics, called "child-slayers"
(_dietoubütsy_), it was held a duty to expedite the entrance to
heaven of newborn children, and thus to save them infernal anguish.
Others, called "stranglers" or "butchers" (_duchelstchiki,
tiukalstchiki_), think they render a valuable service to their
relatives and friends by anticipating a natural death, in hastening the
end of those who are seriously ill. Taking with a savage literalness the
text, "The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it
by force" (Matt. xi. 12), they hold that none can enter into the kingdom
of heaven but those who die a violent death. One of the most numerous
and powerful bodies in the first century of the Raskol, the
_Philipovtsy_, or "burners," like the Indian fakeers, preached
redemption by suicide, and salvation by the baptism of fire, holding
that the flames alone could purify men from the defilements of a world
which had fallen under the rule of Satan. In Siberia and the
neighborhood of the Ural these sectaries have been known to burn
themselves in hundreds on enormous piles built for the purpose, or by
families in their hovels, to the sound of hymns and chants. Such acts
have been known even during the present century.

One insanity begets another, and belief in the presence of Antichrist
leads to belief in the approaching restoration of the earth, the second
advent of Christ and the millennium, which has infected the more extreme
sects of the Bezpopovstchin, thus connecting it with Gnostic sects of
various origins. Russian literalism, like many early Christian heresies,
interprets the prophets and the Apocalypse in a purely material sense.
The mujik or artisan looks for the establishment of Christ's temporal
kingdom, and anticipates the dominion promised to the saints. Such a
belief opens the door to a trust in prophets, and to all the
extravagances and rascalities that come in its train. In vain does the
Russian statute-book condemn false prophets and lying miracles: from
time to time the country is overrun by _illuminati_ proclaiming the
Second Advent, and occasionally giving themselves out as the expected
Messiah. They are frequently accompanied by a woman, who plays the part
of mystical mother or spouse, and to whom they give the title of the
Mother of God or the Blessed Virgin. Sometimes it is only the simple
folk who are themselves hunting for the Redeemer; and not long since
appeared a body of Siberian sectaries, called "Christ-hunters,"
maintaining that the Saviour was about to appear, and scouring desert
and forest to find him. Peasants have even been known to refuse payment
of their taxes under pretext that Christ was come and had done away with
them. The Messiah of the Russian sectaries is sometimes sought in the
person of a simple peasant, and sometimes in a native or foreign prince.
Some have long beheld the expected liberator in Napoleon, for their
persuasion that the Russian state is the reign of Antichrist easily led
to welcoming as a Saviour any one who seemed destined to destroy it; and
in the great enemy of the empire, the great furtherer of a general
abolition of serfdom, many recognized the conquering Messiah of the
prophets. It is said that at their meetings an image of Napoleon is
worshiped, and busts of him are certainly nowhere met with more commonly
than in Russia. An equal veneration is paid to pictures representing the
first emperor surrounded by his marshals and floating above the clouds
in a kind of apotheosis, which is literally accepted by the
matter-of-fact Russian. The story runs among his worshipers that
Napoleon is not dead, but has escaped from St. Helena and taken shelter
on the shores of Lake Baikal, whence he will one day come forth to
overturn the throne of Satan and found the kingdom of justice and peace.

The main point of these millennial hopes was the abolition of forced
labor and the _obrok_, the emancipation of the serfs, and the
equitable distribution of land and other property. A ready reception was
sure to await such a gospel, with its combination of promises of liberty
and faint dreams of communism; and something of the kind is necessary to
explain the easy success of so many extravagant sects, lying prophets
and feigned Messiahs. Dreams like these in the West incited the
revolutions of the peasants in mediæval times and of the Anabaptists in
the sixteenth century, but they must slowly vanish with the slavery
which gave them birth. The age of freedom anticipated by the mujik, the
kingdom of God of which he caught a glimpse in the promises of the
prophets, is come at last: the Messiah and freer of the people has
appeared, and his reign is begun. The emancipation of the serfs has
given a blow to these millennial dreams, and consequently to the more
advanced sects of the Raskol: its ruin will be completed by education
and material improvement.

The sects whose general evolution we have sketched may appear to us
ridiculous and childish. We are tempted to look with contempt upon a
people capable of such extravagances; but such an estimate would be
erroneous. Absurdity and extravagance have always found a ready welcome
when presented under the garb of religion; and countries boasting of
older and more widespread civilization are not behind Russia in this
regard. The Raskol has its counterpart in the past and the contemporary
sectarianism of England and of the United States. A strong likeness
holds between the Puritans and the Old Believers; and both as to
originality and religious eccentricities the Anglo-Saxon and the
inhabitant of Greater Russia may be compared. The Russians delight in
pointing out the resemblances between their country and the great
republic of the New World; and this is not the least of them. The
Americans have their prophets and prophetesses, just like the old
Russian serfs, and no absurdity or immorality is too gross to find
preachers and converts among them. How shall we account for so striking
an analogy between the two most extensive empires of the two continents?
To characteristics of race and an incomplete blending of different
stocks, or to the nature of the soil, the extremes of heat and cold, and
the strong contrasts of the seasons? to the vastness of their
territories and the scanty diffusion of population and culture over
areas so immense? or still again to the rapid and inharmonious growth of
the two countries--to the lack of popular education in the one, and the
low standard of the higher education in the other? Separately or
combined, these causes fail completely to explain the curious
phenomenon; and still they are the most striking points of resemblance
between the two colossal powers. In some respects, the sectarian spirit
presents itself in a different and almost opposite manner in the
democratic republic and the despotic empire. In the United States the
ranker growths of religious enthusiasm spring from an excess of
individualism and enterprise--from the independent and pushing temper
transported from politics and business into religion. In Russia, on the
contrary, the popular mind has thrown off all restraint in the religious
sphere, simply because this was long the only one in which it could
disport itself unchecked. The religious boldness and extravagance which
in the one country is the direct consequence of the state of society is
in the other rather a reaction against it. Russia's advantage over
America lies in the fact that there the excesses of fancy and zeal
prevail in a more primitive, unsophisticated and childlike race. Some
diseases are best passed through early in life, before the time of full
development. It is no less true of some moral maladies: childhood
suffers from them less than youth or maturity. Russia is still in that
stage of civilization which is naturally subject to attacks of feverish
and mystical religion, but one day it will emerge from it; and the
precocious skepticism of a large portion of its educated classes shows
plainly that no inexorable fate condemns the national character to
credulity and superstition.

The Raskol is more than a morbid symptom or a sign of weakness. If it
does little credit to the sense or cultivation of the people, it does
much to its heart, its conscience and its will. Independence and
individuality are often said to be lacking in it, but the Old Believers
show that firmness and conception of duty which are as needful as
intelligence to a nation's strength. Beneath the dull, monotonous
surface of political society these sects give us a glimpse of the hard
rock which is the groundwork of this seemingly inert race: its
originality and stern individuality are what are dear to it. One day
Russia will display in other spheres the originality and patient, sturdy
energy which these religious struggles have called forth. That a
considerable portion of the people have revolted against the liturgic
reform shows that it is not the stupid, sluggish herd Europe has so long
imagined. On one ground at least its conscience has displayed sufficient
independence, and told despotism that it is not all-powerful. And if
mere ritual alterations have aroused such opposition, what would result
from a change of religion--from the transition to Catholicism or
Protestantism so often dreamed of and advised by Western theologians? So
far from being always docile and void of will and determination, the
Russian people, even in their religious vagaries, have displayed a
singular power of organization and combination.

ELEANOR'S CAREER.

I first met Eleanor Vachy at a boarding-school in the city of R----,
where we soon became intimate friends. Eleanor was the result of a
system. When but a few months old, and an orphan, she had been left to
the care of her aunt, Miss Willmanson, a reformer, a progressionist,
advanced both in life and opinions, who had spared nothing to make her
niece an example to her sex. No pugilist ever believed more fully in
training than did Miss Willmanson: she looked upon institutions of
learning as forcing-houses, where nipping, budding and improving the
natural growth was the constant occupation, and where the various
branches of knowledge were cultivated, like cabbages, at so much a head.
When Eleanor became, so to speak, her property, she seized with avidity
the opportunity of submitting her principles to the test of
experiment--of demonstrating to an incredulous world the power of
education, and the vigor of the female mind and body when formed by
proper discipline. The child was fed in accordance with the most recent
discoveries in chemistry: she was taught to read after the latest
improvement in primers; she was provided with mathematical toys and
gymnastic exercises. Did she take a walk in summer, her attention was
directed to botany; if she picked up a stone to make it skip over a
passing brook, passages from the _Medals of Creation_ or _Thoughts on a
Pebble_ were quoted; and when the stone went skimming over the surface
of the calm pool, the theory of the ricochet was explained and the
wonders of natural philosophy were dilated upon. Every sentence she
spoke was made the text of a lesson, and the names of sages and
philosophers became as familiar to her as those of Jack the Giant-killer
and Blue Beard are to ordinary children.

Especially were the stories of distinguished women repeated by Miss
Willmanson in glowing language, pointed out as precedents, and dwelt
upon as worthy of emulation. "If their genius was great enough," she
would remark, "to extort a recognition in times when only masculine pens
wrote history, what could not the same ability do now?--now, when,
strengthened by waiting, encouraged by ungrudging praise, and sure of
having chroniclers of their own sex who will do them justice, a new era
is dawning. The history of the world needs to be reseen from a woman's
point of view, and rewritten by a woman's hand. Men have had
the monopoly of making public opinion, and have distorted facts. What in
a king they name policy, in a queen is called cruelty; what in a
minister is diplomacy, in a favorite is deceit; what in a man is
justice, in a woman is inhumanity; vigor is coarseness, generosity is
weakness, sincerity becomes shallowness; and faults that are passed over
lightly in the hero are sufficient to doom the heroine for all
posterity."

The peculiar views of Eleanor's aunt did not prevent her from being an
agreeable acquaintance. Although she believed in the intellectual
capacity of woman, she did not look upon herself as a representative of
the class: her admiration of her sex did not degenerate into
self-laudation, and her enthusiasm was not tainted by egotism. Hers was
not a strong-mindedness that showed itself in ungainly coiffures and
tasteless attire. It was content with desiring and claiming for woman
whatever is best, noblest and most lovely in mind and body. She would
have given her life to further this end, but thought it mattered little
if her name were forgotten in the bulletin that announced success to the
cause.

Owing to her extreme reserve in talking of herself, it was very
gradually that I gained this knowledge of Miss Willmanson's character;
but many of her opinions were received at second hand from Eleanor, who
admired her aunt greatly, and never tired of quoting her. It was she who
told me that this talented lady was engaged upon a book the title of
which was _Footsteps of Women in All Ages_. The aunt returned this
admiration in no stinted measure, and her highest ambition seemed
centred in her niece.

Eleanor was a tall, well-formed, unaffected girl, with a clear olive
complexion; a slight rose-colored bloom on cheeks and lips; deep blue
eyes, rather purple than blue, rather amethyst than purple, that looked
every one candidly in the face; and hair reminding you of late
twilight--a shade that, though dark, still bore traces of having once
been light, even sunny.

As to her acquirements, however, what in the older lady was love of
information, in the younger appeared to be what Pepys called a "curious
curiosity." If she had been obliged to investigate a subject by constant
labor, I doubt whether she would have stood the test. At school she was
a parlor-boarder, attended outside lectures on the sciences, went to
concerts and the opera, frequented museums, had small blank-books in
which she took voluminous notes, and was constantly busy with some new
scheme of improvement. In looking at her I often thought that could her
aunt's dreams be realized, could her intellect ever approach the unusual
symmetry and beauty of her face and form, it would indeed be an
achievement. But was it likely that Nature, who is so grudging of her
gifts, after having endowed her so highly physically would do as much
for her mentally? "Aunt Will," as the girl called her, had none of these
misgivings. This beautiful physique she believed to be the effect of her
own foresight and care--of proper food and clothing, of training in the
gymnasium, riding and walking. It was itself an earnest of the success
of her plans, and made her confident for the future. One of the tenets
of her faith was that Eleanor needed only to decide in what direction to
exert herself, and that in any career success was certain. For this
reason she gave her opportunities of every kind, that her choice might
be unlimited.

In this, as in every other opinion, Eleanor agreed with her aunt, not
through vanity, but through respect and habit. What she intended to
become was the theme of long confidences between us when alone together,
for the time which most other girls of her age devote to dreams of love
and lovers was employed by her in speculations about her future
profession. The artlessness of the girl in thus appropriating to herself
the whole field of human wisdom would have been ludicrous had it not
been so frank: it reminded you of a child reaching out its chubby hands
to seize the moon.

In regard to love and marriage, Aunt Will was most resolute in speaking
against them, and by precept and example she endeavored to influence her
niece in the same direction. "It is a state which mentally
unfits a woman for anything"--a dictum which was accepted by Eleanor
without argument. It was understood that her life was to be devoted to
being great, not to being loved. But Aunt Will refused to lend her help
or advice in deciding what the career should be, believing that the
prophetic fire would kindle itself without human help, and fearing that
the least hint of what she desired might fetter a waking genius, though
the girl often plaintively remarked, "I wish aunt would settle it for
me."

The entire faith with which these two women looked forward to the future
roused no little curiosity on my part as to the realization of their
hopes. A year after our acquaintance began the ladies left R---- to
travel abroad. Eleanor assured me solemnly that she should not return
until she had won renown, that vision of so many young hearts on leaving
home. "The great trouble is to decide what to do;" and here she sighed.
"But Aunt Will says our work shapes itself without our knowing. Some
morning we wake and find it ready for our hands, with no more doubt on
the subject. I am waking."

"Meanwhile enjoying yourself."

"Why not?" she answered, smiling: "it is what aunt wishes me to do."

At first I had frequent letters from my friend, but the intervals
between them became longer, as is usual when a new life replaces the
old. In those which I received there was no allusion to the career, and
I felt that inquiries on the subject would be indiscreet. If she were
succeeding, I should hear of it soon enough; and if not, why should I
give her pain? After a separation of about eighteen months, and a
silence of six, one morning, on being sent for to the parlor, what was
my surprise to find myself face to face with Eleanor Vachy, and the
girl, prettier than ever, pressing warm kisses on my cheeks!

We had been talking on every conceivable topic for perhaps an hour, as
only friends can talk, when I chanced to remark, "You intended to make a
much longer stay when you left: I hope nothing disagreeable has
happened to bring you home."

"Nothing _dis_agreeable," she replied, looking slightly
embarrassed. "I would have written about it, but thought I would rather