THE FUNERAL OF THE CZAR.
11T is not difficult to perceive why the burial of the Czar with its ceremonial protracted from Odessa to St. Petersburg has been so magnificent a pageant—one, indeed, that may linger in Russian tradition for two or even three centuries. It has suffered from no drawback except tedious- ness, which was inevitable and has probably attended every pageant witnessed throughout the ages, even the one which was the most real of all, a Roman triumph just before the Empire. The conditions of success were all present in profusion. It is essential to a grand pageant that it should have a central object ; that expense should be scarcely thought of ; that those whom the world holds great, should be present in numbers ; that the variety of costume should be infinite; that troops with their ordered splendour should be on the ground in numbers sufficient to excite awe ; that the influence of religion should be visible in countless symbols, or in the demeanour of all concerned ; and that vast multitudes should be present, and should be moved either by some com- mon emotion or some common interest in the pageant itself. Every one of these requisites was present both in Moscow and in St. Petersburg during the obsequies of Alexander III. During the whole of the vast ceremonial, which lasted in reality for ten days, the actual interment being onlyits final act, the dead Czar was the one centre of Russian interest, the golden catafalque around his corpse the one object of absorbed atten- tion, so reverenced that, as the peasantry of Moscow caught glimpses of it through the long lines of soldiers, the "thud" of their heads on the roadway, as they fell prostrate in excite- ment or adoration, struck an English reporter as the strangest and most notable sound in the whole ceremonial. Of expense there was no heed, Court vieing with Court, city with city, grandee with grandee, till even the Cathedral of St. Petersburg could scarcely contain the masses of silver piled up in the shape of wreaths, and it is proposed to melt them down to plate a mighty monument to the deceased Emperor. The ceremonial has cost first and last nearly half a million, and if more money would have produced a greater effect, more would have been assigned to it by the Romanoffs or subscribed freely by their devoted people. Lavishness is a Russian foible; and when the lavish- ness produces at once splendour and honour for the Czar, lavishness is never blamed. The attendance round the corpse included the representatives of almost all the Kings in Europe or in Asia, all the mighty of the Russian Empire, its foremost soldiers, its greatest statesmen, all in blazing yet mournful uniforms ; while the troops were more numerous than at most reviews, and the firing of the artillery lasted hours, and was repeated from station to station from the Baltic to the Yellow Sea. The multitude of ecclesiastics was endless, Archbishops and Bishops and Abbots standing as thick as clergymen at a Bishop's reception ; the ritual of the Orthodox Church, the stateliest in the world, went on through the whole ceremonial; while the people acknowledged in hymns, prayers, dirges, and genuflec- tions that they at least believed the symbols to mean something more than mere provooatives to devotion. The lower Russian believes his faith if he does not obey it, and on any great occasion, however vast the multitude, he strives with his whole heart to make its belief visible to the world. The priesthood perform their ceremonies not as ceremonies, but as essential acts, careless what time they occupy, not only incapable of weariness, but un- aware of it, insisting that men like the Czar, the Prince of Wales, or Prince Henry of Prussia should stand for hours, like any other worshippers, bearing lighted candles in their hands. They did not shrink even from the strange ceremonial which an early Abbot would seem to have borrowed from Egypt, and bound in the hand of the dead Monarch a written formula with which, as he crossed the threshold of the eternal Kingdom, all evil spirits might be terrified into instant flight. This custom is so strange, so utterly foreign to the central ideas of all Christian Churches, that we quote the very words of the narrator, the correspondent of the Telegraph, who is, we believe, specially favoured by Russians high in place :—" Prayer of Absolu- tion. It begins with the words, ' Our Lord Jesus Christ, by virtue of His Divine grace, gift, and power given to His Holy Disciples and Apostles to bind and loose the sins of men,' and going on to cite the text in question, prays Christ to forgive all the sins, including excommunication and others of the gravest categories, by his love for man and by the prayers of the Virgin Mary, mother of God, of the holy apostles, and of all saints. This prayer is not merely read, it is likewise printed on a scroll of paper, which the officiating priest places in the hands of the corpse as a document enabling him, when wandering about in the spirit world during the first few days after death, to pass on his solitary way unmolested by evil spirits. The custom) suggestive of religious usages prevalent in ancient Egypt, began in Russia in the days of St. Theo- dosius, Abbot of Petshersky Monastery, who was besought by Prince Simon to bless him both in life and in death. St. Theo- dosius, moved by his tearful request, wrote out the prayers and requested his monks to place them in his hands when dead." A wondrous folly it seems to most Englishmen ; and yet could a great Church assert more strikingly the equality of all men before the spiritual powers,—an equality which in the prayer put not in the mouth of the priest but in that of the corpse, the Monarch himself is compelled, as it were, with a later breath than that of the body, publicly to acknow- ledge :—" Brethren, Friends, Kinsmen, and Acquaintances,— View me here lying speechless, breathless, and lament. But yesterday we conversed together : the awful hour of death hath now overtaken me. Come near all who are bound to me by affection, and with a last embrace pronounce the last farewell. No longer shall I sojourn among you; no longer bear a part in your discourse. To the Judge I go who is no respecter of persons ; the master and the slave, the Sovereign and the subject, the rich and the poor, are all alike before Him, and according to their deeds shall they be put to shame or rewarded. Therefore let me entreat and beseech you all, pray earnestly unto Christ our God that I may not be tor- mented with the wicked according to my sins, but be received into the light of life." And finally all this went on in a cathedral crammed to the roof, and aware of the presence of surrounding multitudes so vast—they are said to have reached a million—that it took bodies of troops, many fire-engines, and a shameful use of the whips of the Cossack cavalry to drive them back, lest in their involuntary swayings and rushings, they should unwillingly crush the procession down. Colours of the brightest, noise of the loudest, movement of the most irresistible kind, it was amidst all these addenda, as well as amidst the blaze of silver and gold, and military uniforms and ecclesiastical robes, that the long-drawn pageant was got through at last, and the corpse finally deposited in its last home, the inside of the great cathedral fane.
The funeral was, from Odessa to St. Petersburg, a mag. nificent spectacle, and we do not know that, from the Russian point of view, there was anything to criticise in it. The Russians think their Church honoured by such a scene as well as their Monarchy, and to deepen their reverence for both is part of their persistent policy. Probably, too, the maintenance of such visible state in both does deepen it among the masses, though it is difficult to forget that there is also a frightful recoil, and that every Russian Nihilist has been exposed to these influences all his life, and has emerged from them a man who denies God, and makes it the aim of his life to extinguish Monarch and Monarchy in blood. The masses, however, are still reverent, and their imaginations may be permanently excited by the gigantesque symbolism which brings home to them for a day the grandeur of their Church and of their Czar. Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny that although Western Europeans read of such scenes with deep interest, and sometimes even with emotion, though they frankly accord to them the epithet "grand," and though they are conscious that their life in its inability to produce such pageants has lost something, yet they regard it all with something of dissatisfaction, if not disdain. It is not only that the exaggeration, which is the note of everything Russian, from the Czar's prerogative to Tolstoi's contempt for the world, displeases them, like a day- dream without limitations, but that they are offended, or rather shall we say made reluctant to appreciate, by some- thing barbaric in the whole scene. The disparity between the corpse and the almost awful ceremonial which an- nounces only that life has fled, strikes them as the con- viction would that the Great Pyramid had been built only as a tomb, or that a nation had been sacrificed to the manes of a chief. They are alarmed, weighed down, dispirited by all this grandeur, inclined to believe it all unreal, and pro- duced, like a scene in a theatre, by lavish expenditure, and the fiat of a clever manager. Themselves longing to rest in some quiet churchyard, with only trees above them, and perhaps a flower or two from those who cannot forget, they can hardly recognise sorrow amidst such pomp, or connect the undying religious sentiment with such magnificence, such ponderous etiquettes, such tedious formulas, such thunders either from the cannon or the crowd. There is no peace in such a scene, and the cultivated Western mind—remembering Ire- land, we will not answer for the Western masses—has learned to link death and peace in an inseparable bond of feeling. A burial, it conceives, should be religious only, and it is impatient of vast preparation, huge masses of ornament, multitudes who can take no personal part. It is doubtful, too, of the vast expenditure, and thinks with a sort of shame which is not definite, and yet still exists, of all that this wasted mass of treasure might have secured to the living who suffer and are wretched for the want of such aid. The grand condition of a successful pageant—that none engaged in it shall distrust themselves or doubt for a moment that it must be acceptable to the higher powers —is wanting to the West, almost as wanting as the feeling once so universal among mankind that the sacrifice of animal life must be the highest symbol of human submission to that which is above humanity. Probably no Englishman could now witness a sacrifice without an instinctive recoil, and there is the same recoil before a pageant so mighty as that of Sunday week at Moscow or Monday last at St.' Petersburg. " Let us at least be not tumultuous in the presence of death," is the rooted Western feeling, and there is tumult even in the orderliness of so vast a multitude as that which accompanied "the Peace Preserver" to his last home. Horror of the grandiose as an accompaniment of death has not however been born in the Slavic mind any more than it has in the Asiatic, and we are bound to suppose—indeed,' all attainable evidence proves—that the avalanche of honours poured upon the hearse of Alexander IIL met the true sentiment, not only of his son and his servants, but of the mighty people, who, all over the Empire, as the cannon told that the interment had been completed, rushed to the churches to pray for the departed " Father." That action at least was sincere and religious, as Russians understand religion; and while we sympathise with the undemonstrative West, and its love of quiet funerals and belief that sorrow is mainly silent, we are not sure that such sympathy is not evidence that something in us has been lost. At all events, it has been lost for ever, and with it the power of quite admiring, quite sym- pathising with such a pageant as that with which, for at least ten days, our newspapers were filled. To us all there was in it a note of artificialness, which probably did not exist, and which most certainly no Russian below the sceptical class either detected or disliked.
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