Horrible stories have reached us of a kindly, white-headed old couple being imprisoned for months in a narrow cell of the Fortress, and then being taken out at dawn, and butchered without trial; of a highly cultivated old lady of seventy-six being driven from her bed by the mob, and thrust into the bitter cold of a Petrograd street in January, in her night-dress, and there clubbed to death in the snow. God grant that these stories may be untrue; the evidence, though, is terribly circumstantial, and from Russia comes only an ominous silence.
If I am asked what will be the eventual outcome in Russia, I hazard no prophecies. The strong vein of fatalism in the Russian character must be taken into consideration, also the curious lack of initiative. They are a people who revel in endless futile talk, and love to get drunk on words and phrases. Eighty per cent. of the population are grossly ignorant peasants, living in isolated communities, and I fail to see how they can take any combined action. It must be remembered that, with the exception of Lenin, the men who have grasped the reins of power are not Russians, but Jews, mainly of German or Polish origin. They do not, therefore, share the fatal inertness of the Russian temperament.
I started with the idea of giving some description of a state of things which has, perhaps, vanished for all time from what were five years ago the three great Empires of Eastern Europe.
There is, I think, inherent in all human beings a love of ceremonial. The great influence the Roman and Eastern Churches exercise over their adherents is due, I venture to say, in a great measure to their gorgeous ceremonial. In proof of this, I would instance lands where a severer form of religion prevails, and where this innate love of ceremonial finds its rest in the elaborate ritual of Masonic and kindred bodies, since it is denied it in ecclesiastical matters. The reason that Buddhism, imported from China into Japan in the sixth century, succeeded so largely in ousting Shintoism, the ancient national religion, was that there is neither ritual nor ceremonial in a Shinto temple, and the complicated ceremonies of Buddhism supplied this curious craving in human nature, until eventually Buddhism and Shintoism entered into a sort of ecclesiastical partnership together.
I have far exceeded the limits which I started by assigning to myself and, in extenuation, can only plead that old age is proverbially garrulous. I am also fully conscious that I have at times strayed far from my subject, but in excuse I can urge that but few people have seen, in five different continents, as much of the surface of this globe and of its inhabitants as it has fallen to my lot to do. Half-forgotten incidents, irrelevant it may be to the subject in hand, crowd back to the mind, and tempt one far afield. It is quite possible that these bypaths of reminiscence, though interesting to the writer, may prove wearisome to the reader, so for them I tender my apologies.
I have endeavoured to transfer to others pictures which remain very clear-cut and vivid in my own mind. I cannot tell whether I have succeeded in doing this, and I hazard no opinion as to whether the world is a gainer or a loser by the disappearance of the pomp and circumstance, the glitter and glamour of the three great Courts of Eastern Europe.
The curtain has been rung down, perhaps definitely, on the brave show. The play is played; the scenery set for the great spectacle is either ruined or else wantonly destroyed; the puppets who took part in the brilliant pageant are many of them (God help them!) broken beyond power of repair.—Finita la commedia!