“‘Yes, that is true,’ they said; ‘but all the land is ours by right. Your fathers took it away from us seven hundred years ago, and now we are going to nationalize it all.’
“‘Well,’ I answered; ‘I suppose you must do what you like. When are you going to begin?’
“‘Oh, master,’ they said, ‘we are heartily sorry. You are a good master, but we have just condemned you to death, and now we have come to warn you first. Master, we strongly advise you to escape.’
“So the conversation went on. A few days later, they made an attack upon the house in the evening. But I had armed two of my own servants; we fired a gun from a window, and they all went away again. But after that my wife was so frightened that I came into Riga, and now the peasants are sending us firewood and vegetables twice a week by sledge, because they have heard such things are dear in town.”
It is easy to imagine the peculiar confusion that would arise in such kindly and childlike minds when young students and orators, like the almost mythical leader “Maxim,” come out to their isolated farms and preached Karl Marx to them, and the socialisation of wealth, or the glories of a Lettish republic. Social change and the sense of nationality were equal motives in the rising. Excited by wild hopes, inspired by man’s natural longing for equality, by race hatred, and by the oppressions of a stupid and savage Government from abroad, they turned upon the country houses, the church records, the Government offices, and the portraits of the Tsar as the symbols of all that stood between them and happiness.
Certainly the German landowners suffered, and a few were assassinated. It was part of the Russian Government’s scheme that they should suffer, and one of the strangest things in the whole situation of these Baltic Provinces was the unanimity with which, not only every Lett, but every German whether in town or country, rejected the idea of appealing to the German Empire for protection. The suggestion of such a thing made the mildest German mad. It united German and Lett like comrades in arms against a common enemy. The Germans cling to their German language and culture; they will go to any trouble and expense to avoid Russian education; they have the utmost contempt for Russian law and justice; by union with Germany they would gain immensely in government and probably in trade. Yet from Russia they will endure any hardship rather than look to Berlin for help. It is a remarkable instance of the truth that man is governed, not by his interests, but by his tastes. Hearing the protest repeated with vehemence by a beautiful German lady whose home had been burnt down, I asked her the reason, and she said: “We could not endure to be told at every corner not to spit and not to lean out of the window.”
So the landowners suffer, and bear those ills they have. But the man whose suffering to me seemed least deserved was not a landowner, but a country parson. He was so old that I may mention his name without harm, and it is known to the scholars of Europe; for he was Pastor Bielenstein, the greatest authority upon the Lettish language and literature, and authorities are very few. I found him in Mitau, the Courland capital, a quiet German town not far from Riga. There he had taken refuge in a few small rooms, when the peasants chased him from the parsonage, which had been his for sixty years and his father’s before him. In mind and appearance he belonged to an age that Germany has long left behind—the simple age of the Humboldts and the Grimms. He must be one of the very few Germans left who remember the death of Goethe, and to listen to him was like conversing with those gentle followers of learning a century ago, who combined a zeal for knowledge with a childlike trust in “the dear God.” All the sixty years in his parish had been devoted to the cure of souls and the collection of every fragment of Lettish literature—folk-songs, riddles, proverbs, and legends. Volume after volume appeared, and there they all stand as a monument of German industry, though, unhappily, intelligible only to Lettish speakers. Having lost his sight over his work, and growing very old, with his aged wife and grandchildren around him, he determined to write one more book and then depart in peace. The title of the book was “The Happy Life,” and hardly had he published it when the peasants came to his church, ordered him to leave out the Tsar from his prayers, attacked his house, shot his sexton, held eight rifles at his daughter’s heart, burnt his library, smashed his china, trampled on his harpsichord, and made a bonfire of his furniture in the garden, kindling it with his manuscripts. Thus he was driven out, blind, aged, and poor, to begin a new volume of a life which he thought was ending happily.
“But we do not regret the title of my book, do we, dear wife? We have not lost our trust in the dear God,” he said, bending his tall, slim figure to kiss the old lady’s hand.
“No,” she answered. “We have lost our best china, but our guest will kindly excuse it.”
While we were thus conversing, the pastor of a neighbouring parish entered, a little excited over a scene in which he had just taken part. There had been an execution in his village that morning, and it was his duty to conduct the funeral of the young revolutionist who was shot. For some reason the officer in command had ordered a party of horse and foot with two guns to attend the ceremony and prevent any disturbance. “The coffin and I were surrounded by soldiers along the whole route,” said the pastor; “and when we came to the grave, the people were kept three hundred yards away. The result was that they could not hear a word of the sermon which I had prepared with special care for the occasion. As it was in Lettish, the soldiers did not understand it, and all my pains were entirely thrown away.”