THECORONATION OF THE CZAR. THECORONATION OF THE CZAR.
RUSSIANS are much annoyed when told that they are Asiatics, and no doubt the statement, except so far as it is true of all mankind, is untrue of them ; but it is impossible for them to deny the Asiatic tone which pervades the wonderful scene on which all Europe has this week been gazing. We do not mean that the accessories of the Coronation festival are Asiatic, that Asiatic costumes are visible in the streets of Moscow, that Asiatic princes are prominent in the Kremlin, that Asiatic customs are maintained in some of the rites. The Czar is a great Asiatic Sovereign—the greatest, except two, Queen Victoria, and the Empress Regent of China, whose name Europe does not know—and when he calls his subjects together for any grand fanction, much of all that is external must be Asiatic. But this scene in Moscow is Asiatic in more than accessories. If we were asked to state in a word the " note" or central fact which differentiates Asia from Europe, we should answer, " Immoderateness." Nothing in Asia is sufficiently restricted. Empires are too big, populations are too vast, all features of nature are too huge, the arts are too gigantesque, the powers entrusted to men are too awful, calamities are too wide-spread, all things have in them a trace of immoderateness, as if gods and men alike had lost the sense of wise limitation. Forests in Asia cover kingdoms. Mountains occupy the area of large States. Peoples are numbered, like the Chinese and the Indians, by their fractional relation to the whole human race. Mythologies are full of monstrous figures. A cyclone desolates a province. A tidal wave sweeps away halfa-million of men. A famine slaughters out eleven millions. A wall bounds an Empire. One Sovereign is brother of the San, another is God's Vicegerent. a third is incarnate deity. Everything, from the powers of kings and the conceptions of men to the forces of nature and the number of mosquitoes, is gigantic. enorm
ous, fatiguing to the brain, in fact, when measured as all things must be measured by a standard of which man is the unconscious unit, immoderate. This characteristic of immoderateness is the dominant one in the Russian Coronation. The splendours of the scene weary imagination. It is not a country, but two con tinents which are summoned to be present. All nations are in the Kremlin, by their representatives. It is but a ceremonial, but the troops present might invade a first-class State. The procession is one such as Rollin imagined to be following Darius. The festivities are spread over days. The multi tudes to be dined are counted in hundreds of thousands, are to eat whole herds and drink out of reservoirs in which men might drown. Roasted mammoths would not be out of place, and the Tun of Heidelberg would seem small. The expenses, 20,000,000 roubles, are those of a little war. The monarch to be crowned claims freedom from restriction like that of a deity, and actually exercises powers which recall
Simmons's strained effort to express in verse the prerogatives of the Roman Caesar, " earth's awful lord,"— "Whose whispered word
Fills like pervading Nature land and flood; And if but syllabled in wrathful mood, Had the swift lightning's soundless power to pierce, Rending and blasting through the Universe."
A word from the cynosure of that throng, the pale man on the
white horse, who, as his people shout their devotion, and all the world bends in reverence, feels chiefly the necessity of fortitude to await what may meet him at the next turning, would precipitate Russia on the West, or submerge Asia under a million of conquering soldiery ; and he rides on, expecting, though probably not fearing, instant execution. His risks are as immoderate as his powers, his responsibilities, his roll of peoples and of kingdoms. His Opposition speaks with dynamite, argues with the bullet, satirizes with the knife. He has not to fear loss of unpopularity, or untoward events, or even resistance, but immediate and painful death. If any point is unguarded, if his police have misread a warning, if a soldier is faithless, the Czar, riding there behind the representatives of two continents, amid the Royalties of half the world, before a wife seated on a chariot "like a mass of gold," fenced round with the devotion of millions, and armed with illimitable powers, may stumble dead into an open grave. The immoderateness in all around him, in the number of his guards, the costliness of his festa, the preparations for his glorification, is also in the faction
which defies him, and which responds to his claim of all rights by denying all, even the right to keep alive. All that—the exaggerated grandeur and the exaggerated liability, the awful power and the awful powerlessness—is strictly Asiatic, belonging to the continent where everything dwarfs man, and man, as
in revenge, endeavours to overleap restrictions, only to recognise in despair that man is nothing, existence misery, and heaven eternal unconsciousness.
The men of the West, who are accustomed to restriction, and know that there is no buttress to the mind like an imperative law, that even day-dreaming is bewildering unless the dreamer adheres to his self-made conditions, wonder at the vastness of this ceremonial, and think all needful impressiveness would be obtained by one much smaller. Surely, one day, they think, might suffice, and one religions ceremony, a tenth of the expense, and a third of the troops and other adjuncts to the scene, which cannot gratify the Czar, and must in its long protraction greatly increase his danger. The characteristic of immoderateness, they believe, might be cut out, without risk of diminishing the impact to be made on the popular imagination. That is, we suppose, true ; and for ourselves, we can imagine for a Russian Czar no coronation more impressive than the ancient Tartar one, the raising of the Sovereign on a shield in the sight of the whole nation, assembled on some vast plain, each morsel of the shield
being borne up by the representative of a tribe. Tchengis was enthroned so, and the tradition of the scene has lingered for
centuries in men's minds. But ceremonials usually grow of themselves, and it is not difficult to detect the causes which have made this one so separately grandiose. The first idea has been to make it religions, to show the Czar to the people of his faith as the consecrated ruler delegated by the Almighty and by the Orthodox Church to govern them. In nations which do not reject symbolism, great religious functions are always slowly
performed, and always tend to accrete to themselves a more and more elaborate magnificence. No precedent must be departed from, and precedents accumulate like paraphernalia,—like Bishops' robes, for example, or the Russian regalia, which were forwarded to Moscow in a special train. A Pope who was elected in a moment would hardly seem a Pope, and the very notion of harry is inconsistent with the movements of a Church. The Czar is Patriarch, as well as Sovereign; and in his consecration a religious function is performed which, in the eyes of the Russian people, is first of all, and must, as other ceremonials are slow, and costly, and magnificent, be slowest, costliest, most magnificent of any. Otherwise, Czar and Church would alike lack the sense of the becoming. This is indeed the ultima ratio of the Coronation, without which Alexander III. would hardly have encountered its special dangers or sanctioned its enormous expense. Till he is crowned he is not sacred, and as his sacredness is the source of his prerogative, the crowning must be so done as to be past all question, must be known by direct evidence to every person in the Empire. Coronations were arranged before newspapers began, and much of the immoderateness of the ceremonial arises simply from the multitude of witnesses from all the nations beneath the Czar's sceptre whom it was necessary to summon, that on their return they might testify that all had been regularly and solemnly performed. The Kings of the Desert do not oome to Moscow to please themselves, but because they are summoned to see, and do homage, and bear witness on their return. And then the Czar is something more than Patriarch or Sovereign, he is also Cmsar, the " elect " and representative of all who obey him. The origin of the dynasty was elective, and the Romanoffs, hated by the aristocratic chiefs, and without a citizen class to support them, have always made it their policy to proclaim themselves representatives of the dim, common populations. They have probably felt that position also. All Kings feel it more or less ; and to the Czar of Russia, so far removed above his subjects, the " mass " must always seem the most interesting as well as the most formidable object within his dominions. The second main end of the Coronation is to impress them, and in the effort to reach the true people, to become visible across two continents and to a hundred millions, a ceremony naturally becomes grandiose. It is a people which is to see, not a set of spectators, a people which is to be fed, a people which is to recognise that something has occurred so great that each one even of them bears in it some part. When the tenantry count thousands, the kitchen must be big, the roast oxen many, and the beer-vats deep ; and the Czar only increases adequately the preparations of the squire. Add to all the forms necessary to the recognition of a Patriarch, and all the forms essential in the election of a Caesar, all the forms usual in the crowning of a European monarch, who this time is anxious to outdo precedent rather than depart from it, and we have the materials for a ceremonial which would be magnificent anywhere, and which in Moscow, the capital of Northern Asia, as well as of Northern Europe, the city where East and West have embraced each other, becomes a stupendous function, such as could not elsewhere
be performed. In no other city could a coronation be a festa at once religious and democratic, Asiatic and European, modelled upon most ancient precedents, and decorated by all the aid of modern inventiveness and knowledge. Only there could Europeans gaze astonished at a building at once fortress, palace, and basilica—the largest of fortresses, the hugest of palaces, the most stupendous of basilicas—and watch Tartar Princes gazing up thunderstruck under the electric light. And only there, we hope, could the roan who is the centre of all be in more imminent risk of a violent death than a criminal tried, convicted, and expecting sentence.
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