Mystery Enshrouds Czar and Sultan.
With the foregoing sovereigns we find evidence as to their habits and disposition in the same direction. Of the Czar, however, as of Abdul Hamid of Turkey—who is described by one set of biographers as a high-minded and scholarly recluse, and by others as a sodden and fear-shaken sensualist—we have two pictures at variance with each other in almost every particular. It may prove interesting, therefore, under existing conditions, to compare some recorded impressions of Nicholas II, as made by him upon various persons who have been brought into contact with him.
In the World of To-Day, for January, William T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, of London, one of the ablest and best-known journalists of his time, and who recently had a personal interview with the Czar, writes of him thus:
The question as to his intelligent grasp of the facts of the situation with which he has to deal is one upon which those who are admitted to the intimacy of his councils can speak with authority. It is one, however, upon which those who have never heard him speak are often the most confident.
I can speak with some assurance on this matter, although it is one on which it ought not to be necessary to speak at all. But I have seen many men, crowned and uncrowned, in the course of a tolerably long and varied journalistic career. I have had four opportunities of talking with Nicholas II. Altogether I have spent many hours alone with him. Our conversation never flagged. It did not turn upon the weather, but upon serious topics both at home and abroad, in which I was intimately concerned and intensely interested.
Hence I have at least had ample materials for forming judgment, and few people have had more of the experience of contemporaries necessary to compare my impressions. I have no hesitation in saying that I have seldom in the course of thirty years met any man so quick in the uptake, so bright in his mental perception, so sympathetic in his understanding, or one possessing a wider range of intellectual interest.
Neither have I ever met any one man or woman who impressed me more with the crystalline sincerity of his soul. Of his personal charm, of his quick sense of humor, of the genial sense of good-fellowship by which he puts you at once at your ease, I do not need to speak.