Already he hated Karl of Sweden, who had the advantage in education, tradition, and breed; who was controlled, humane, just, and honorable—with none of these things could even the blind devotion of Mentchikoff credit Peter—and who had the added interest of his extreme youth and the justice of his quarrels; a young warrior, stern, outraged, fighting only those who had attacked him, conquering easily, and, with a haughty generosity, claiming no benefits from his victory, but only the restoration of his friend to what was rightfully his—this was a figure on heroic lines and one sure to appeal to the imaginations of men.
And how would the world account Peter by contrast?
A half-savage monarch of an almost wholly Eastern realm, never yet taken seriously into the reckoning in the affairs of Europe, one who had taken eccentric means to learn the means of civilizing his people and who yet was notoriously incapable of controlling his own meanest passions, one who had been guilty of fierce cruelty and bitter revenge and excesses beyond ordinary debauchery—how did such a one show beside the cold, fast, calm, and mighty figure of the young King of Sweden?
Mentchikoff was jealous for his hero, who to him was the greatest man on earth; Peter’s faults were not faults to him; he came of a people long used to cruelty in their rulers, it was in his blood and in his training to submit to tyranny, but he had been the Czar’s companion in his journey through Europe and he had seen, with his strong native shrewdness and perception, the qualities admired and respected by civilized peoples, and he knew exactly where Peter failed to reach the standard of the West—it was one to which he could not attain himself, but that did not prevent him from keenly observing his master’s failure. He still passionately dreamed of seeing the Czar a King after the fashion of the Kings of France and England, and had been one with him in every effort to attain this end; so complete was the devotion and abnegation of Danilovitch Mentchikoff that his life was one with his master’s life, his glory and ambition one with the glory and ambition of Peter Alexievitch. And the Czar’s moods, melancholies, and passions, that went so far to hinder his glorious schemes and tarnish his brilliant qualities, caused the keenest pangs to the fiercely loyal heart of his servant.
And now there was this new hero to reckon with; a man such as Peter was not and never could be.
The long figure at which the Prince gazed with his small brilliant eyes stirred on the rude bed; Peter dropped the arm that shielded his eyes and stared before him.
He also had his thoughts of Karl of Sweden; they were as intense and bitter as those of Danilovitch Mentchikoff.
He was conscious of his own greatness, conscious of his own failings, and overwhelmed by the task which destiny and his own will had laid on his shoulders.
He was the master of a continent, the undisputed lord of millions of human beings, enveloped in a grandeur almost mythical, possessed of a power almost godlike; better for him if he had been content with this, satisfied as his ancestors had been satisfied by an enclosed splendor, instead of being tortured by dreams of making Russia what she had never been, what she perhaps never could be.
All the sciences, the arts, the trades and commerces that had been the result of such slow and painful growth in Europe, he hoped in one generation to implant in the sterile soil of a nation almost wholly savage from the point of view of the West.