Little remains to complete the picture, but to say that his tastes were low, as his character was brutish. Passionately fond of theatrical entertainments and the sports of the amphitheatre and circus, it was from the profligate followers of these arts that he chose his favourites, to whom, and to whom alone, he was devotedly attached. The story of his meaning to appoint his horse consul is well known: the brute would have done more credit to the subordinate, than his master to the imperial dignity; but it is apocryphal. But besides a marble stable and an ivory manger, indulgences to which so dignified an animal might reasonably aspire, Caligula assigned to him a house and establishment, that he might entertain company more splendidly. We regret not to know whether the senators or their horses were the objects of this hospitality.
He was wont to say, that of all his qualities, he most valued his firmness of purpose (̓ αδιατρεψία). The judgment was in one sense correct: this was indeed the predominant feature of his character. But it was the firmness not of principle, not even of policy, but of obstinate and entire selfishness, which regarded not the weightiest interests of others when placed in opposition to its caprices; of habitual self–indulgence, which gratified the whim of the moment, alike careless of its folly or of its guilt. At first he would not, in the end he probably could not, control his passions; and this inflexibility is the symptom of that mental disease which we believe to originate in uncontrolled power. This plea furnishes no particle of excuse for him, no more than drunkenness for the excesses of the drunkard: in both the loss of reason is a crime in itself, and in neither probably is it ever so complete as to obliterate the perception of right and wrong. Of genuine madness we find no trace in his life. He appears to have been subject to no delusions upon particular subjects, to no access either of frenzy or melancholy. As a boy he, as well as Cambyses, was subject to epileptic fits, which were supposed to have impaired his mind; and he entertained, it is said, doubts of his own sanity, and had thoughts of submitting to a course of medicine for his recovery. Others thought that a love potion, administered by his wife to fix affection, had produced madness; but the tenor of his life countenances neither supposition. Folly, selfishness, cruelty, and the restlessness of a self–upbraiding spirit cannot be allowed shelter under the plea of insanity; and the mental weakness and incapacity of self–control which arises from the habitual dominion of passion, is no less widely different in its effects than in its origin from that which is dependent upon physical causes.
He perished by domestic conspiracy, in the fourth year of his reign and the twenty–ninth of his age. He oppressed the people and the nobility with impunity: he fell, when his jealous temper rendered him formidable to his servants and favourites.
Paul, emperor of Russia, was the son of Catherine II., who, as is well known, murdered her husband Peter III., and took possession of his throne, which she retained till death. She conceived a strong aversion for her son, who was in consequence brought up in retirement, neglected, and even exposed to want. When arrived at manhood he was still forbidden to reside at court; his children were taken away to be educated under the empress’s care; he was studiously excluded from all knowledge or participation in affairs of state; and even denied permission to gratify his military taste by active service. His mother’s object was at once to render him unfit for empire, and to spread abroad the notion that he was so; with the view of passing him entirely over in favour of his son Alexander, whom in her will she appointed to succeed to the throne. Paul seems to have been naturally affectionate, methodical, a lover of justice, temperate, even amidst the most consummate profligacy ever witnessed in a court; but these good qualities were stifled by the faults of his education. Privation, contumely, and a constant sense of injury, soured his temper, and rendered him distrustful and cruel, at the same time that the enjoyment of a minor despotism made him capricious and ungovernable; for he was the undisputed master of his little court, and could vent upon others the ill–humour inspired by his own crosses, unchecked by the presence of a superior, or the influence of public observation. He lived at the country palaces of Gatschina and Paulowsky, surrounded by his household officers and troops, and shunned by all others; devoted to the minutiæ of military discipline, and employed chiefly in reviewing his guards, for whom he devised a new system of dress and regulations, which it was afterwards his great pride and pleasure to introduce into the army at large. There was a long terrace at Paulowsky, from which he could see all his sentinels, who were stuck about wherever there was room for a sentry–box. Here he used to promenade with an eye–glass, sending orders from time to time to one man to open a button more or less, to another to carry his musket higher or lower, and sometimes trotting a quarter of a league to administer a good caning with his own royal hand to one soldier, or to bestow a rouble on another, as he was pleased or displeased with his bearing.
One or two anecdotes of this part of his life will best illustrate his temper. Travelling through a forest, with marsh on each side of the road, he recollected some reason for going back, and ordered the driver to turn. He did not do so instantly, and Paul repeated the order. “In a moment,” the man replied; “here the road is too narrow.” Paul flew into a passion, jumped out of the carriage, and called to an equerry to stop the driver and chastise him. The equerry endeavoured to allay the storm by assurances that the carriage would turn as soon as possible. “You are a scoundrel as well as he,” was the reply; “he shall turn even though he break my neck: at all hazards he shall do as I bid, the moment I give the order.” Meanwhile the coachman had done so, but too late to save himself from a sound beating.
He ordered a horse that stumbled under him to be starved. On the eighth day word was brought him of the animal’s death; to which he merely answered, “Good.” The same accident happened after his accession in the streets of St. Petersburgh, on which he got off, made his equerries hold a court–martial, and sentenced the offending beast to receive a hundred blows with a stick, which were immediately inflicted in presence of the Czar and the people. Worse anecdotes might be found. His passion for the strict observance of military minutiæ has been mentioned. One day, as he exercised his regiment of cuirassiers, an officer’s horse fell. Paul ran to the spot in a fury: “Get up, you rascal!” “I cannot, Sire—my leg is broken.” Paul spit upon him, and walked away swearing.
Catherine, as before said, appointed Alexander her successor by will. She had intrusted this important document to Zoubow, her last favourite, who hastened immediately upon her death, in the year 1796, to place it in Paul’s hands. It is due to the late emperor to say, that he never took any part in the measures adopted for excluding his father, who succeeded to the vacant throne without opposition. The Czar’s conduct towards his family, on this occasion, does him honour: the more, that under similar circumstances, few of his predecessors would have hesitated to establish their power by the imprisonment or death even of an involuntary rival. Instead of using severity, he gave an affectionate reception to his sons, who had been separated from him since childhood, increased their revenues, and assured them and the empress, to whom he had been a harsh and capricious husband, of his love and protection; and at the same time, with prudence commendable on his son’s account no less than on his own, he provided employment for Alexander which kept the prince near his person till the critical time was over.
The court and city of St. Petersburgh, the whole public of Russia, received with fear their new sovereign, whose caprice and extravagance were well known; but his first measures belied their expectation. He showed a decent respect to his mother’s memory, though he fully returned the hatred which she felt for him, retained her ministers, whom he had no reason to love, and displayed judgment and honesty in his first political measures, until every body thought that a false estimate had been formed of his character. This good sense and moderation did not last long. His first step was to secure his throne by incorporating with the royal guards his own household troops, on whose fidelity he depended. The latter, like the Prætorian bands of the Roman emperors, were a highly privileged and powerful body, captains of which held the rank of colonels of the line. Its officers of course were chiefly of high rank, and many of them, to the amount of some hundred, resigned their commissions, angry at seeing men not of noble birth, perhaps raised from the ranks, placed over their heads, or unwilling to undergo the new and harassing discipline which Paul introduced. The Czar became alarmed at this general desertion, and, by way of conciliation, issued an order that all who had resigned, or should thereafter resign their commissions, should quit St. Petersburgh within twenty–four hours. Many persons transported suddenly without the barriers, and forbidden to re–enter the city, and left on the high road, without shelter or clothing fitted to protect them from the cold, perished miserably for want of money to reach their homes.
Paul came to the throne ambitious of signalizing himself as a reformer, but his mind was far too confined to perform so hard a task successfully. In the civil department, he did little but reverse all that his mother had done; in the military, his attention was confined to insignificant details. His great object was to conform the dress and exercise of the whole army to the model which he had been so long and anxiously forming at Gatschina. The very morning after his accession he commenced this important task by establishing what he called his Wachtparade, to which every morning he devoted three or four hours. However severe the cold, he was still there, dressed in a plain green uniform, with thick boots and a large hat, for he placed his pride in bearing a Russian winter without furs; stamping about to warm himself, with his bald head bare and his snub–nose turned up to the wind, one hand behind his back, and the other beating time with his cane, and crying Raz, dwa—Raz, dwa, one, two—one, two—surrounded by gouty old generals, who dared neither to absent themselves nor to dress warmer than their master. The old Russian uniform was handsome, suited to the climate, and could be put on in an instant: it consisted merely of a jacket and large trousers, which enabled the wearer to protect himself by any quantity of interior clothing, without injury to uniformity of appearance. The hair was worn long, and falling round the neck, so that it defended the ears from cold. Paul introduced the old–fashioned German uniform, which every true Russian hated for its own sake, and despised as holding the Germans in supreme contempt; he encased their legs in long tight gaiters, made them powder and curl their hair, and hung false pigtails from their necks. Marshal Suvarof, on receiving orders to introduce these changes, together with the measure of the men’s curls and pigtails (for everything under Paul was done by measure), observed that “hairpowder was not gunpowder, nor curls cannon, nor pigtails bayonets;” and this witticism is said to have cost him his recall.
Not content with modelling the army after his own notions of elegance, his meddling spirit exerted itself in the most vexatious and tyrannical interferences with the freedom of private life. The dress, the colour of carriages and liveries, the method of harnessing horses, everything was matter of rule, and woe to him who met the Czar with anything about his equipage contrary to etiquette. One day he saw Count Razumoffski’s sledge standing in the street without the driver, and ordered it to be immediately broken in pieces. It was of a blue colour, and the servants wore red liveries: upon which he issued a proclamation forbidding the use of blue sledges and red liveries in any part of the empire. He waged a crusade against round hats, which he thought a mark of jacobinism, the object of his greatest hate and fear. If any person appeared in one, it was taken from his head by the police; if he resisted, he was well beaten. The cocked hats in St. Petersburgh were of course soon exhausted, and then round hats were metamorphosed into three–cornered hats, by pinning up the sides. The emperor himself is said to have stopped persons and pinned up their hats with his royal hands, to show his people how a loyal subject ought to be dressed. An order against wearing boots with coloured tops was no less rigorously enforced. The police officers stopped a gentleman driving through the streets in a pair. He remonstrated, and said he had no others with him, and certainly would not cut off the tops of those; upon which the officers, seizing each a leg as he sat in his droski, pulled them off, and left him to go barefoot home. Coming down a street, the emperor saw a nobleman who had stopped to look at some workmen planting trees by his order. “What are you doing?” said he. “Merely seeing the men work,” replied the nobleman. “Oh! is that your employment? Take off his pelisse and give him a spade. There—now work yourself!” Once, when he met an officer going to the palace wrapped in his cloak, a servant following with his sword, he gave the servant his master’s commission, and reduced the officer to the ranks.