Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 63, No. 388, February 1848

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BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCLXXXVIII. FEBRUARY, 1848. VOL. LXIII.

EDINBURGH: WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET; AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

CONTENTS.

The Russian Empire 129 Autobiography of a German Headsman 148 Edinburgh after Flodden 165 Subjects for Pictures 176 Jerusalem 192 My English Acquaintance 194 Our West Indian Colonies 219 Now and Then 239

THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE.

(Secret History of the Court and Government of Russia, under the Emperors Alexander and Nicholas. By H. SCHNITZLER. Two vols. Bentley: London.)

Russia is the most extraordinary country on the globe, in the four most important particulars of empire,—its history, its extent, its population, and its power.

It has for Europe another interest,—the interest of alarm, the evidence of an ambition which has existed for a hundred and fifty years, and has never paused; an increase of territory which has never suffered the slightest casualty of fortune; the most complete security against the retaliation of European war; and a government at once despotic and popular; exhibiting the most boundless authority in the sovereign, and the most boundless submission in the people; a mixture of habitual obedience, and divine homage: the reverence to a monarch, with almost the prostration to a divinity.

Its history has another superb anomaly: Russia gives the most memorable instance in human annals, of the powers which lie within the mind of individual man. Peter the Great was not the restorer, or the reformer of Russia; he was its moral creator. He found it, not as Augustus found Rome, according to the famous adage, “brick, and left it marble:” he found it a living swamp, and left it covered with the fertility of laws, energy, and knowledge: he found it Asiatic, and left it European: he removed it as far from Scythia, as if he had placed the diameter of the globe between: he found it not brick, but mire, and he transformed a region of huts into the magnificence of empire.

Russia first appears in European history in the middle of the ninth century. Its climate and its soil had till then retained it in primitive barbarism. The sullenness of its winter had prevented invasion by civilised nations, and the nature of its soil, one immense plain, had given full scope to the roving habits of its half famished tribes. The great invasions which broke down the Roman empire, had drained away the population from the north, and left nothing but remnants of clans behind. Russia had no Sea, by which she might send her bold savages to plunder or to trade with Southern and Western Europe. And, while the man of Scandinavia was subduing kingdoms, or carrying back spoil to his northern crags and lakes, the Russian remained, like the bears of his forest, in his cavern during the long winter of his country; and even when the summer came, was still but a melancholy savage, living like the bear upon the roots and fruits of his ungenial soil.

It was to one of those Normans, who, instead of steering his bark towards the opulence of the south, turned his dreary adventure to the north, that Russia owed her first connexion with intelligent mankind. The people of Novgorod, a people of traders, finding themselves overpowered by their barbarian neighbours, solicited the aid of Ruric, a Baltic chieftain, and, of course, a pirate and a robber. The name of the Norman had earned old renown in the north. Ruric came, rescued the city, but paid himself by the seizure of the surrounding territory, and founded a kingdom, which he transmitted to his descendants, and which lasted until the middle of the sixteenth century.

In the subsequent reign we see the effect of the northern pupillage; and an expedition, in the style of the Baltic exploits, was sent to plunder Constantinople. This expedition consisted of two thousand canoes, with eighty thousand men on board. The expedition was defeated, for the Greeks had not yet sunk into the degeneracy of later times. They fought stoutly for their capital, and roasted the pirates in their own canoes, by showers of the famous “Greek fire.”

Those invasions, however, were tempting to the idleness and poverty, or to the avarice and ambition of the Russians; and Constantinople continued to be the great object of cupidity and assault, for three hundred years. But the city of Constantine was destined to fall to a mightier conqueror.

Still, the northern barbarian had now learned the road to Greece, and the intercourse was mutually beneficial. Greece found daring allies in her old plunderers, and in the eleventh century she gave the Grand-duke Vladimir a wife, in the person of Anna, sister of the emperor Basil II; a gift made more important by its being accompanied by his conversion to Christianity.

A settled succession is the great secret of royal peace: but among those bold riders of the desert, nothing was ever settled, save by the sword; and the first act of all the sons, on the decease of their father, was, to slaughter each other; until the contest was settled in their graves, and the last survivor quietly ascended the throne.

But war, on a mightier scale than the Russian Steppes had ever witnessed, was now rolling over Central Asia. The cavalry of Genghiz Khan, which came, not in squadrons, but in nations, and charged, not like troops, but like thunderclouds, began to pour down upon the valley of the Wolga. Yet the conquest of Russia was not to be added to the triumphs of the great Tartar chieftain; a mightier conqueror stopped him on his way, and the Tartar died.

His son Toushi, lit the beginning of the thirteenth century, burst over the frontier at the head of half a million of horsemen. The Russian princes, hastily making up their quarrels, advanced to meet the invader; but their army was instantly trampled down, and, before the middle of the century, all the provinces, and all the cities of Russia, were the prey of the men of the wilderness. Novgorod alone escaped.

The history of this great city would be highly interesting, if it were possible now to recover its details. It was the chief depot of the northern Asiatic commerce with Europe; it had a government, laws, and privileges of its own, with which it suffered not even the Khan or the Tartars to interfere. Its population amounted to four hundred thousand—then nearly equal to the population of a kingdom. In the thirteenth century it connected itself still more effectively with European commerce, by becoming a member of the Hanseatic League; and the wonder and pride of the Russians were expressed in the well-known half-profane proverb, “Who can resist GOD, and the great Novgorod?”

There is always something almost approaching to picturesque grandeur in the triumphs of barbarism. The Turk, until he was fool enough to throw away the turban, was the most showy personage in the world. The Arabs, under Mahomet, were the most stately of warriors, and the Spanish Moors threw all the pomp, and even all the romance, of Europe into the shade. Even the chiefs of the “Golden Horde” seemed to have had as picturesque a conception of supremacy as the Saracen. Their only city was a vast camp, in the plains between the Caspian and the Wolga; and while they left the provinces in the hands of the native princes, and enjoyed themselves in the manlier sports of hunting through the plains and mountains, they commanded that every vassal prince should attend at the imperial tent to receive permission to reign, or perhaps to live; and that, even when they sent their Tartar collectors to receive the tribute, the Russian princes should lead the Tartar’s horse by the bridle, and give him a feed of oats out of their cap of state!

But another of those sweeping devastators, one of those gigantic executioners, who seem to have been sent from time to time to punish the horrible profligacies of Asia, now rose upon the north. Timour Khan, the Tamerlane of European story, the Invincible, the Lord of the Tartar World, rushed with his countless troops upon the sovereignties of Western Asia. This universal conqueror crushed the Tartar dynasty of Russia, and then burst away, like an inundation, to overwhelm other lands. But the native Russians again made head against their Tartar masters, and a century and a half of sanguinary warfare followed, with various fortunes, and without any other result than blood.

Without touching on topics exclusively religious, it becomes a matter of high interest to mark the vengeances, furies, and massacres, of heathenism, in every age of the world. Yet while we believe, and have such resistless reason to believe, in the Providential government, what grounds can be discovered for this sufferance of perpetual horrors? For this we have one solution, and but one: stern as the inflictions are, may they not be in mercy? may not the struggles of barbarian life be permitted, simply to retard the headlong course of barbarian corruption? may there not be excesses of wickedness, extremes of national vice, an accumulation of offences against the laws of moral nature, (which are the original laws of Heaven,) actually incompatible with the Divine mercy? Nothing can be clearer to the understanding, than that there are limits which the Divine Being has prescribed to his endurance of the guilt of man, and prescribed doubtless for the highest objects of general mercy; as there are offences which, by human laws, are incompatible with the existence of society.

The crimes of the world before the flood were evidently of an intense iniquity, which precluded the possibility of purification; and thus it became necessary to extinguish a race, whose continued existence could only have corrupted every future generation of mankind.

War, savage feuds, famines, and pestilences, may have been only Divine expedients to save the world from another accumulation of intolerable iniquity, by depriving nations of the power of utter self-destruction, by thinning their numbers, by compelling them to feel the miseries of mutual aggression, and even by reducing them to that degree of poverty which supplied the most effective antidote to their total corruption.

Still, those sufferings were punishments, but punishments fully earned by their fierce passions, savage propensities, remorseless cruelties, and general disobedience of that natural law of virtue, which, earlier even than Judaism or Christianity, the Eternal had implanted in the heart of his creatures.

In the fifteenth century Russia began to assume a form. Ivan III. broke off the vassalage of Russia to the “Golden Horde.” He had married Sophia, the niece of the Greek emperor, to which we may attribute his civilisation; and he received the embassies of Germany, Venice, and Rome, at Moscow. His son, Ivan IV., took Novgorod, which he ruined, and continued to fight the Poles and Tartars until he died. His son Ivan, in the middle of the sixteenth century, was crowned by the title of Czar, formed the first standing army of Russia, named the Strelitzes, and established a code of laws. In 1598, by the death of the Czar Feodor without children, the male line of Ruric, which had held the throne for seven hundred and thirty-six years, and under fifty-six sovereigns, became extinct.