GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA'S JOURNEY DUE NORTH * THIS volume contains an
account of the results of a visit to St. Petersburg and Moscow, with a call at a country-house in the vicinity or en route. The title of the " journey " is therefore something of a misnomer. St. Petersburg is four degrees of lati- tude north of Edinburgh, and Moscow about forty degrees of lon- gitude east ; so that in reality the course is rather east than north, or at least east by north. This may seem a small matter; but as a straw shows which way the wind sets, so trivial traits will indicate character. We fear that this sacrifice of fact to words— of truth to smartness and a notion of " effect "—is significant of Mr. Sala as a litterateur. If it were possible to deal with pro- ductions—we were going to say of the intellect, but—of the pen, as chemists deal with solid-seeming substances' driving off by heat all that was vapoury or wishy-washy till the residuum is reached, the substantial result would be very little in Due North. The new information would be about nothing ; the information of any kind not much, and what there is appearing in a form by no means very trustworthy. Words are the first staple of Mr. Sala's book ; the next feature is what are called " sketches" ; and when he aims at depicting Russian life, or more properly the conclu- sions the author draws as to the social condition of Russia, his ideas are embodied for purposes of effect in stories or anecdotes which may be verities, but look exceedingly like invention. So far as criticism can judge, they are extreme if true. But though we cannot decompose books into their elements, we can reach a sort of descriptive analysis. The Journey Due North then contains rather more than three hundred pages, seventy of which are occupied with the tourist's journey out, delays by frost, the steam-voyage on the Baltic, and passing the custom-house. "My first walk" in St. Petersburg, and the Drosehky with its driver, enable the reader to reach one-third of the book. The Czar's Highway gives an account of Russian roads : of which the world has had pictures by men who had travelled very much further than Mr. Sala. The Great Bazaar, Merchants and Money- changers, and three chapters on Russian country life, including a semi-dramatic view of serfs, get us well on through two-thirds of the work. Three other chapters devoted to the tourist's German hotel at St. Petersburg, and how he got there, nearly reach four- fifths of the whole ; a sort of illustrated-by-story-telling de- scription of the police—" the Great Russian Boguey " almost filling up what the Americans call the balance. This balance is made out by three or four chapters of which the most marked are "Music and the Drama "—chiefly relating to stories of ballet- dancers and miscellaneous matters ; and the "Black People," that is the serfs; but which deals in reminiscences of Nieholas quelling the cholera-infuriated mob ; or the murder of Paul, or this story of Alexander's life and death, which baseless in itself, and contradicted as regards the death-bed by unimpeachable evi- dence, is not a bad type of the anther and his book—" ars-fish that comes to net." "They say that Alexander the First never recovered from the first fit of (I hope not guilty) horror into which he was thrown by the deed he prafited so largely by ; that the triumphs of the Borodino and the Bergsina, the splendours of Erfurt and Tilsit, the witticisms of Madame de Steel, the pa-, tronage of the first gentleman (and we hope the last gentleman of that pattern) in Einope, including as that patronage did a Guildhall banquet, the pencil of Sir Thomas Lawrence, the Temple of Concord on the &raw" tine, and Sir William Congreve's fireworks—nay, not these nor the lima-.
tions of Madame Krudener could ever efface from his mind the memog thja that night of abominations. They say that on his doubtful bed of dea,
Taganrog he writhed with more than pain and continually moaned : M e - ese epouvantable ! dee epouvantabk !' :Ind than, after a lapse, 'Pimps- reur ! ' The gentlewoman was not by as in the tragedy, but the physician was ; and he knew his patient was suffering from ills that physic could not • A Journey due North : being Notes of a -Residence in Russia in the Summer of 1856. By George Augustus Sala. Published by:Bentley. sare The lord of sixty. million .souls was haunted by the remembrance of ,s,,,,s.,ilaht He saw in imagination the bedroom ; the conspirators ree g ,„`"7",--he in his shirt, hiding behind a screen; the incoherent torrent of ."'adlur—atioCnaarsan d menaces in French and Russ; and then the dreadful knock- ing at the outer door; the fear of rescue, (though, indeed, it was but another hand of conspirators arriving) ; the overturn of the lamp, and the end of that monarch." We have met ere now a good many specimens of literary ego- tism, obtrusive self-opinion, and magazine word-mongery, but no- thing that ever surpassed Due North. At the same time Mr. Sala is a master in his way, and if clever writing, without re- ference to the matter or the professed object of the author, were the sole thing to be considered, the book would be a good book, deprived of its verbiage. With the faults of his class, Mr. Sala has also their trenchant manner, and some of that independence of conclusion which partly originates from not knowing how diffi- cult it is to get at truth. Persons who know much more about Russia than Mr. Sala, say that the Russian is deeply attached to his home. Mr. Sala denies the assertion, and perhaps correctly, though he has only reasons to adduce.
"Home is not as a home held by in any class in Russia. It very rarely happens that moujiks who from serfs have become merchants of the second guild, and amassed large fortunes, ever think in their declining days of retiring to the village which has given them birth, or even of making be- quests beneficial to their native place at their death. Soldiers too when discharged after their time of service has expired, scarcely ever return to their village. They prefer becoming servants and Dvorniks in the large towns. 'Rh! and what would you have them to do ' ? a vivacious Rus- sian gentleman, with whom I had been conversing on the subject, asked me. They are no longer serfs, and are of no use to their seigneur. They are no longer young, and are no longer wanted for the conscription. What would you have them do in this village of Tours? What indeed? Government- ally-inclined philosophers say that the Russians are so patriotic that home is home to them, be it ever so homely,' throughout the whole extent of the empire, and that they are as much at home in the steppes of the Uk- raine, as in the morasses of Lake Ladoga. l am of opinion myself that the homely feeling does not exist at all among the Russian people. Russian military officers have told me that an epidemic melancholia sometimes breaks out among young recruits which is broadly qualified as a Mal du Pays; but I think it might be far better described us a Mal dc Position. The position of a recruit tor the first six months of his apprenticeship is per- haps the most intolerable and infernal noviciate which a human being can well suffer—a combination of the situation of the young bear with all his troubles to come, the monkey upon that well-known allowance of many kicks and few half-pence, the hedgehog with his prickles inwards instead of outwards, and the anti-slavery preacher whose suit of tar and feathers is just beginning to peel off. When, however, the recruit has swallowed suf- ficient stick, he very soon gets over his Mal du Pays. Rationally envisa- ging the question of home-loving in nationalities, the Great Britons, (Eng- lish, Irish, and Scotch,) though the greatest travellers and longest residents abroad, are the people most remarkable for a steadfast love for their home, and a steadfast determination to return to it at some time or another. After them must be ranked the French, who always preserve an affectionate reverence for their pays; but for all the sentimental Vaterland and Suce- Heimweg songs of the Germans, the hundreds of German tailors, boot- makers, and watchmakers, one finds in every European capital, seem to get on very well—at least up to threescore and ten or thereabouts—without looking forward to a return home. Your Dane or Swede, so long as he re- mains in his own land, is very fond of it ; but, once persuaded to quit it he thoroughly naturalizes himself in the country which he has adopted, and forgets all about Denmark and Sweden. As to the Americans, they never have any homes. They locate ; and as gladly locate at Spitsbergen as at Hartford, Connecticut.'
The best picture of the externals of St. Petersburg ever pub- lished was Kohl's, which formed a series of perfect photographs. The artificial "made-to-order" character of the capital, its streets without traffic, quays without commerce, and palatial custom- house with little to pass, was, we think, best impressed by Mr. Ritchie, in an illustrated Annual published many years ago. Mr. Sala strikingly hits off the contrast between the surface civiliza- tion of the few, not extending to cleanliness by the by, and the ge- neral barbarism below it ; though this is done in an offhand way, and might have been done without going to Russia. He also im- presses the morass nature of the foundation on which St Peters- burg rests, by his experience of the pavement.
"The huge open places, or Ploschads, like stony seas, into which the gaunt streets empty themselves, are uniformly paved with granitous stones, of which the shores of the Gulf of Finland furnish an inexhaustible supply. This pavement, if arranged with some slight regularity, would be in the early stage of progress towards tolerable walking space • but the founda- tions being utterly rotten, treacherous, and quicksanily, the unhappy paving-stones tumble about in a stodge of mud and sand ; and the Floe- &ads are, consequently, almost incessantly under repair. This is espe- cially the case in the month of April, at the time of the general thaw. Part of the pavement sinks down, and part is thrown up—the soothe of small mud volcanoes. Thousands of moujiks are immediately set to work, -but to very little purpose. The ground does not begin to settle before May ; and when I arrived in St. Petersburg, many of the streets were, for Pedestrians, absolutely impassable. The immense parallel series of streets at Wassili-Ostrov—Linies, as they are called—and which are numbered from one to sixteen, as in America, were simply bogs, where you might drive, or wade or stride through on stilts, but in which pedestrianism was a matter of hos:ideas impossibility. The government, or the municipality, or the police, or the Czar, had caused to be constructed along the centre of these Linies, gigantic causeways of wooden planking, each above a mile U' length Perham raised some two feet above the level of the mud, and along which the dreary processions of Petersburg pedestrians were enabled Pass. This was exceedingly commodious, as long as you merely wanted to walk for walking sake ; but of course, wherever a perspective inter- sected the Linie there was a break in the causeway, and then you saw be- fore you, Without the slightest compromise in the way of step, a yawning abyss of multi-coloured mud. Into this you are entitled either to leap, and disappear, like Edgar of Ravenswood, or to wallow in it ella ptg, or to endeavour to clear it by a hop, step, and a jump. The best mode of pro- f;fNing, en the whole, is to hail a droschky or a moujik, and, like Lord offer him, not a silver pound, but sundry copper copecks, to carry You across the tuuddy ferry; and this tionin may be obviated by your char- tering an ischvostehik's vehicle in the first instance, and leaving the cause- WaY to those who like leaping before they look.
"The ground having become a little more solid, the pavement might naturally be expected to improve. So it does, on the Nevskoi ; but, in the suburbs, the occupant of each house is expected to see to the proper state of repair of the pavement immediately before his dwelling. As the Russian householder is not precisely so much enamoured of his city and government as to make of his allotted space of street a sort of Tom Tidler's ground, with silver roubles and gold imperials, or to pave it with porphyry, Cairrara marble, or even plain freestone, he ordinarily employs the cheapest and handiest materials that his economy or his convenience suggests. The re- sult is a most astonishing paving-salad, in which flints, shards and pebbles, shingles; potsherds, brickbats, mortar, plaster, broken bottles, and pure dirt are all amalgamated. The mosaic is original but trying to the temper—de- structive to the boots and agonizing to the corns."
Essentially speaking Due North is not a book of travel or of information to be given as the result of foreign observation ; but a series of " sketches " in which an eye for personal or salient characteristics, and a skill to depict them are the chief requisites. These Mr. Sala possesses, and his depiction of persons is the best part of the volume ; though quite as interesting before he gets to Russia as afterwards. To be as North as we can go we will take our specimen in this way from his tavern companions at Heyde's, St. Petersburg. "There are portly German merchants from Leipsie and Stettin, come to buy or see ; there are keen, dressy, dandified Hamburgers—no thumb- ringed, slow-going, sauer-kraut. eating Germans these—but men who com- bine business with pleasure, and speculating feverishly in corn and hides and tallow all day, drink and smoke and dance and play dominoes and bil- liards, and otherwise dissipate themselves, all night. What lives ! Wondrous travellers are these Hamburg men. They know all the best hotels and best tables d'hôte all over the continent. They talk familiarly of Glasgow and Dublin, Wolverhampton and Cheltenham. Their Paris they know by heart ; and there is another country they are strangely acquainted with—ltaly ; not artistic Italy, musical Italy, religious Italy, but commercial Italy. One Hamburger tells me about Venice. He touches not on St. Mark's Square, the Bridge of Sighs, or the Bucentaur. He confines his travelling reminiscences to the custom-house regulations, and the naviga- tion dues exacted by the Lombardo-Venetian government. He has had ventures to Leghorn, and has done a pretty stroke of business at Naples, and has an agent at Palermo. I would call him a Goth, but that it is much better to call him a Hamburger. Then there arc German ship-brokers, German sharebrokers, and a few of the wealthier German tradesmen of St. Petersburg, who come here to quaff their nightly bumpers, and play their nightly games at dominoes. The Russian element consists of students from the University of St. Petersburg, and pupils from the Ecole de Droit (equi- valent to our English law students) ; and these alunini wear cocked hats and swords. Some of these days I am certain the Russian government in its rage for making everything military will insist upon the clergy wearing cocked hats and swords ; we shall have the Archbishop of Novgorod in a shako, and the patriarch Nikon in a cocked hat. Finally, there are a few Russian officers, but not guardsmen. Heyde's is not aristocratic enough for them; and the Russian officers of the line, though all noble ex officio, are as poor as Job." The papers originally appeared in Household Words, and to this mode of publication the word-spinning of the book and some other defects may probably be attributed. The minute descriptions perhaps originated in a wish to imitate his editor, as well as that pouring forth of what may be called reflections but which are only opinions.
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