ALEXANDER III.
IT is a curious fact, considering the great interest taken in crowned heads, that of all the leading statesmen in Europe, the Kings are the least accurately known. Even Queen Victoria is scarcely understood by her own people ; and we shall probably find, when the memoirs of her reign come to be published, that "the best of con- stitutional Sovereigns " had many qualities, and marked qualities, besides her devotion to duty, and the truth- fulness, quite unusual in its degree, to which Minister after Minister has borne testimony. That the Emperor of Austria is a great diplomatist, that he is devoted to the interests of the House of Hapsburg, and that he can patiently tolerate Constitutional forms, has long been widely known ; but of the remainder of his character, no one outside a most limited circle has the least idea. There are men who should know, who say be is an ordinary Hapsburg, rather wanting in the usual knowledge of highly cultivated men, but with a certain instinct for governing ; and there are others equally qualified who believe him to be a kind of Ulysses hiding acute penetration, and something not far removed from cunning, under a mask of magnificent manners. That he is dutiful, no one doubts ; but the object to which he considers that duty should be paid is not so clear, nor will it be unless Destiny should unexpectedly divide the interests of his Empire and of his House, hitherto, through- out his reign, inseparable. The King of Italy is generally regarded as an able officer, with much knowledge of foreign politics and some firmness ; but that description does not constitute a character, and of his remaining qualities, except that he is a good manager of finance, and has in him, somewhere, the Savoyard tendency to plot, nothing seems to be clearly discerned. Even of the Emperor of Germany, with his fondness for being visible, for rushing about, and for making speeches, little is known. or, rather, much is known, but the knowledge produces nothing but perplexity. Every competent German you interrogate has an opinion about his Emperor ; but then he has also a second one, which is equally strongly held, and which is irreconcilable with the first. Is William II. energetic or only fussy ? far-sighted or only viewy a. good judge of men or only a man of decided predilections ? We fancy the Ambassadors of Europe, if forced to speak ingenuously— which is, of course, an unthinkable hypothesis—would reply that all those questions insinuated partial truth ; but that none of them implied what was quite true. Yet all these personages, except Queen Victoria, seem to be as visible as most statesmen ; and the German Emperor is decidedly more so. The fact is, we suppose, that the Kings are never betrayed, that their notes are never shown, and that the few who really know them, speak of them with a reserve seldom completely broken until the next heir also has passed away. No living King is so clear a person, so visible a human being, as the King who has been dead some fifty years. Of all Kings, however, except the Emperor of China, who must have a remarkable personality, yet is to Euro- peans only a magnificent piece of porcelain, the one of whom Europe knows least with any certainty is the Emperor of Russia. Judged by external actions alone, he is a tyrant almost of the ancient type, who will not abolish the horrors of Siberia, though he knows all about them ; who dooms Nihilists by the dozen to cruel imprisonment ; who drives five millions of Jews to despair by persistent persecution ; who treats all dissenters and Catholics among his own subjects much as the Papacy once treated heretics ; and who, by shifting his great army westward, has heavily increased the military burdens now weighing upon all Europe. It seems so impossible, however, that a modern Sovereign should be a man like this, that even in England, where religious persecution is held to be detestable, the Czar is exonerated from the charge of cruelty, and all the tyrannical acts of his reign are set down to his Ministers, who, it is thought, are exempted by his unfor- tunate seclusion in Gatschina from any but spasmodic control. Personally, Alexander III. is regarded as an embodiment of Trollope's hero, Lord Chiltern, a dull, fierce man who meant well, but had imperfect self-control, and could not help, whenever he was strongly moved, rushing at his object like a bull. He is supposed to tolerate certain cruelties as essentials to his government, but individually to be like other men, patient until crossed, and always full of a sense of responsibility strongly evidenced by his re- luctance to embark on the war which his soldiery desire, and to which his subjects are not altogether disinclined. It is interesting to find this more merciful, and there- fore more credible, account, in the main confirmed by M. Lanin, the Russian who draws in the Contemporary Review such horrible pictures of his own country and its people. This writer, though he evidently dis- likes the Czar, describes him exactly as a. Lord Chiltern —which also is the popular Russian conception of him, his nickname being The Bull—but ascribes to him what he calls religious mania, but what might easily be described as a lofty though singular conception of duty. It is pro- bable that almost every Sovereign who ever reigned over a great people has believed himself to be in some special degree an object of Providential notice, even if he fancied, like our own William Rufus, that there was a sort of struggle going on between him and his Creator. The position almost forces the first thought into the minds of Kings, and as a matter of historic fact, it has rarely been totally absent from them. It is not an unreasonable idea either, at least to those who believe that God governs, and especially to those who are convinced that He delegates to a caste certain supernatural powers. The Czar, says M. Lanin, not only believes in the usual idea of Kings, but holds its natural corollary, that as he is chosen of Heaven to reign, he is, CZ necessitate, endowed with the required qualities for reigning. Naturally humble about himself, with no belief in his own qualifications for the throne, without much education, and with no grace of nature, Alexander III. accepted the divine fiat which slew his brother and made himself the heir as an event which called on himself for a painful submission, but assured him in return of the divine help in reigning. He therefore, though fully conscious of many deficiencies, governs for him- self, choosing no great Minister, and rather suspicious of counsel, satisfied that the course of conduct which occurs to himself as wise or right, is the course intended by Heaven, and going on as in a groove. " It's awfully hard lines," he said, soon after his coronation, "that I of all others should become Emperor of Russia ; " but having so become, he has taken up his burden with deadly resolve to carry it, and has steadily done his work as well as he could ; part of the work being that Ramification of the Empire, and making of all its people Orthodox Christians, which have been the occasion of almost all the recent cruelties. Personally, though a violent man, with a habit of rude- ness to those he dislikes, the Emperor has no liking for cruelty :—" Those who accuse the Emperor of cruelty wrong the man and misconstrue his acts. It would be as reasonable to prosecute for assault and battery the good- natured American who, having belaboured a supposed burglar for a quarter of an hour in the dark, was painfully shocked to discover, when the light was brought in, that he had grievously disfigured a friendly neighbour who had courageously stolen into the premises to save him from an imaginary assault. The Russian Tsar has not yet had the search-light turned upon his actions, or perhaps his visual nerve needs purging with euphrasy and rue to render it sensitive to the rays ; but his intentions have never been called in question by those who are competent to sit in judgment upon his conduct. He has granted their lives to many men who risked them in dastardly attempts to take his ; and, incredible though it may seem, it was owing to his personal interference that Madame Tsebrikova was not deported to the mines of Siberia. There are depths of tenderness in his soul which even most of his Ministers do not suspect, and, if his people are none the better for them, the fault cannot be entirely laid upon his shoulders." Even calamity does not shake, although it tries, his faith. He receives all news, of course, except the little he reads in newspapers, through official Reports, upon which it is his custom to make marginal notes :—" The account of a fire, of a failure of the crops, of a, famine, or of some other calamity, is almost invariably commented upon in the one stereotyped word `discouraging' (neyooteshitelno), and so frequently has this brief commentary been written on the most important Reports, that a Minister once remarked that if the fingers of fate were to write on the wall of the Anitshkoff Palace what they are reported to have written on that of Belshazzar, the Russian Monarch could not withstand the temptation of scrib- bling under it the customary gloss : neyooteshitelno." Is not that an interesting figure, and one, too, that, strange as it is, is yet possible ? A similar attitude of mind can -be traced in the Emperor Charles V., and must have existed in every Pope who fully believed, as a majority 'have done, in his own mission and prerogatives. General • Gordon held much the same idea, and so did even Napoleon, though with the latter the Sovereign who conferred the mission was not God but Destiny. If this account is true, and on one point of it—the Czar's belief that he is an instrument in the hand of Providence.— we have had frequent confirmation of its truth, the per- sonality of the Czar is not one which it is pleasant for Europe to contemplate. It is almost inevitable that any one who thinks himself thus divinely commissioned, unless he believes also in some stringent limitation of the com- mission, as the Popes do, should believe, also, that any strong mental breeze blowing through him is divinely sent, and should act on it, be the consequences what they may. The Emperor is peaceful by nature, dreading, it is said, not war itself, but the immense responsibility for details which must fall on him in a campaign— responsibility which he could only shoulder, as he has shouldered the Empire, in a spirit of fierce resig- nation; but the war-breeze might blow some day through his head, and then there would be no question of prudence or turning or anything else, except to follow the wind, whithersoever it might lead. It is fortunate that, with such a belief, no dreamer has seized on him, as Madame Krudener did on Alexander I., and no soldier, and, indeed, no statesman, or the world might be startled by the result of strong impulse urging such a rushing force on some mission not Russian but world-wide. Happily, however, the fanaticism of sovereignty, like other fanaticisms, is usually fatal to the reception of advice, the only counsel that is trusted being that which arises unsought from within. Still, the man thus strangely moved by what must be half piety, half pride of position, commands two millions of trained men, and is obeyed without a question from the frontier of Germany to the sea that washes the North Coast of China. It is an awful power to be placed in the hands of one who considers himself released by Heaven, so long as he pursues what he conceives to be duty, from the consequences of his acts.
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