It was but a step from our lodgings, under the arch that divides and connects the state apartments into the grand square in front of the Winter Palace, the residence of the Emperor of Russia.
But before us rises a red granite column, the grandeur and beauty of which instantly fix the eye. A single stone, eighty-four feet high and fifty feet in circumference,—the loftiest single shaft of modern times, only less in height than Pompey’s Pillar,—stands in the midst of the square, surmounted by an angel and the cross. The pedestal bears a brief inscription, but it tells the whole story,—“Grateful Russia to Alexander I.” Originally this stone was cut out of the mountain, 104 feet long, and the order was to make the loftiest monolith in the world; but from fear that it was too long to stand firmly on its base, which was fourteen feet in diameter, it was shortened to its present length. With incredible labor it was erected upon a pedestal twenty-five feet high, and there, polished, it stands, perhaps the most splendid shaft that now presses upon the earth. It seemed to grow as I gazed upon it. And daily as I caught sight of it from other parts of the city, or as I drove into the magnificent area of which it is the central figure, its simple majesty and exceeding beauty impressed me more and more. What vast labor it cost to bring this block from the mountains of Finland, and plant it perpendicularly on the banks of the Neva, in the heart of the city!
In the Admiralty Square is a more famous statue, and one of which we have heard from childhood; pictures of it had made it so familiar that it seemed an old acquaintance,—Peter the Great, the founder of the city, its inventor and builder, is on horseback, riding up a rock, to the verge of which he has come, when he reins in his steed and sits looking upon the river and the city he has raised upon its banks. The horse is rearing, and the immense weight rests upon his hinder legs and the tail, which touches a huge serpent, coiled at the horse’s feet. This is deservedly reckoned one of the finest equestrian statues, and it honors the most extraordinary man of his age.
Two boys were together crowned as Czars of Russia, at Moscow, by the Greek patriarch, on the 15th of June, 1682. They were brothers, and one of them soon yielded to the superior energy of the other, and resigning his share of the government, left Peter the sole sovereign of an empire but little above the range of barbarism. This Peter, who became Peter the Great, was then but seventeen years old. He was far in advance of every one, and his reign marks the era of Russia’s rise to greatness among the nations. Yet this man never rose to the conception of what must be a nation’s true glory. His ideas all ran in the line of material grandeur, and not in the direction of moral and mental progress. He was a born mechanic, and he built a nation. He thought to build a people just as he built the city that bears his name. His superstitious nobles considered it wicked for him to go abroad, but he had heard of the arts of civilization, that made France and Holland and England glorious in the world, and he determined to see for himself what it was that made them so. He laid aside his imperial purple (if he ever had any), and travelled into distant lands. Sometimes he concealed his royal person in the garb of a common workman, and wrought in the shops with his own hands. I have seen many specimens of his handicraft that would do credit to any artisan who earned his bread by his industry and skill. He was a capital ship carpenter. Russia was in want of a navy. Peter learned how to build ships, and made a navy for Russia. In foreign countries he studied every thing, but learned nothing truly great in the art of government. Going into the courts of Westminster with a friend one day, in London, and seeing many men with wigs, he asked who they were.
“They are lawyers,” said his friend.
“Lawyers!” he exclaimed; “why, I have only two lawyers in my dominions, and I mean to hang one as soon as I return.”
In all that he saw in England and Holland, where he spent most of his time abroad, he never learned that mind makes nations great; that intelligence is the security of national progress and prosperity, and that the people, even under despotic governments, have the power to help themselves if their rulers will give them a chance. But he came back with the idea of making his empire greater by making it broader, and he took the sword as the instrument of success. He was partially successful. After a reign of half a century, he died and left his empire on the highway to civilization and glory. It is wonderful that Russia has made so little progress since his death in 1725. Yet no monarch ever reigned who descended to such minute details in legislating for his people. Inured to hardships himself, and possessed with the idea that nothing was invincible which his will was set to overcome, he undertook to force his subjects into sudden and astounding reforms, from which they revolted. He could not make them see with his eyes, nor work with his hands. He made his clergy shave their faces, and the enemies of his innovations called him the antichrist. No man ever lived who impressed himself more indelibly upon a people than Peter the Great. His name is held in honor second only to the Divine. The relics of his handiwork are preserved with religious care. Every museum has some specimen of his genius and industry, and the lapse of a hundred and fifty years since these things were made by imperial fingers invests them with interest approaching reverential awe.
But the greatest of all his works, and one that is the most characteristic of the man, is the city of St. Petersburg itself. Why he selected such a site for it, it is impossible to say, unless its very unfitness and apparent impracticability developed that faculty for which he was so remarkable, and impelled him to undertake what to others was an impossibility. From the summit of a monument, or the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the city seems to float in the waters. And this would not be a fatal objection to the site if it stood in such relations to the rest of the empire or the world as to make it important to fix it here. But it does not. Winter shuts it out from communication with the sea about half the time.
As we were walking on the most thronged of the thoroughfares in St. Petersburg, the Nevski Perspective, a well-dressed gentleman paused, and, turning toward a church which he was passing, took off his hat and offered a silent prayer. What at first appeared the eccentricity of a single individual, or excessive devotion, I soon perceived was the practice of many, and indeed a custom of the country. In passing a church, of course one passes an altar; and it may be, and indeed is, out of sight, but the devout believer recognizes the fact by a token of reverence, slight perhaps, but nevertheless sincere. Women hurrying by with baskets of market stuff were often willing to put down their burdens before the cross and pass a moment in thoughts of their Saviour.
I went into the church, the Kazan Cathedral, with a colonnade in feeble imitation of St. Peter’s at Rome. The Greek religion is as nearly like the Romish as this church is like St. Peter’s: it is a copy after it, and a good ways after it, but still so near that it amounts to the same thing. They do not make unto themselves graven images, because that is forbidden by the second commandment; but they do make the likeness of things in heaven and earth, although that is forbidden, and they do bow down and worship these likenesses, or pay apparently the same honors to a picture of the Virgin that the Romanist does to a statue. The distinction is without a difference. But when I entered the cathedral, I saw a sight that never met my eye in Rome or any Roman Catholic city. In the middle of the day, and on a week-day too, respectably appearing, well-dressed gentlemen were standing or kneeling before the altar offering their devotions. Women were there numerously, and the poor, whose garb denoted their poverty; and these classes are largely represented in Romish churches everywhere; but the Greek religion had such hold upon the people of another set, as to excite remark. The same lavish expenditure upon the churches is to be seen here as in Italy and Spain, though the architecture is far from being so effective as that which prevails in Spain and Italy. This church was built sixty years ago, at an expense of three millions of dollars then. A colonnade inside in four rows extends from the centre pillars supporting the dome, which is 230 feet above the floor, and from the three great doors. These columns are fifty-six in number, each one a single stone, thirty-five feet high, with bronze Corinthian capitals. In the midst of the main door the name of God is recorded with precious stones, and a miraculous painting of the Virgin blazes with gold and jewels of untold value. And in the midst of this temple of religion, sacred to the worship of the Prince of Peace, hung trophies of victories over France, Turkey, and Persia.