THE CORONATION AT MOSCOW.
THE note of Asiatic Immoderateness of which we spoke last week, ran through the Coronation ceremonial at Moscow to the last, and even infected the service in the Cathedral. We
should have thought that difficult, men seldom straining them- selves to be or to look gigantic when bending before an Almighty throne, especially when they are sincere believers ; but even in the religions service the genius of the Russian Court—which, we may remark, is genuine, and not artificial, and represents
truly a characteristic want of limit in the people—remained
true to itself. The desire to separate the Czar from ordinary humanity, to give him, as it were, some separate and higher relation to the Creator, to which ordinary man may not aspire, was perceptible in a hundred details, two at least of which must, we think, be without parallel in Christian worship. That the Czar
should crown himself, just when the course of the symbolical cere- monies seems to demand that the representatives of the Church should crown him, is not out of keeping with Russian history, or with the separate position which, since the time of Peter the Great, the Czars have always assumed in religious affairs, a position which has in it an assumption of an authority above that of the Church itself. It has, too, many precedents. Napo- leon crowned himself, and so always does, we believe, the King of Prussia, each trying, we may suppose, to indicate either that his power is self-derived, or that even in a Church there is nothing between himself and God. That the Czar should crown the Czarina is en rgle, the idea being that she derives everything save her consecration from her husband, and her prostration before him, kneeling as in worship, though outrageous to Western notions, is not inconsistent either with Russian ideas of marriage, or with the Court forms which Moscow has in- herited from Byzantium. The anointing, of course, though most elaborate in Russia, lingers in all European coronations, and is possibly of older origin even than Judaism. But that scene of the whole audience and the entire priesthood suddenly kneeling in the Cathedral to supplicate God for the Czar, while the Czar himself remained standing upright, as if, in the presence of that universal prayer, he had no need to supplicate for himself, as if even before God he could remain erect, must be absolutely unique. It is said to be an etiquette intended to distinguish between the supplicants and the subject of supplication, but no such etiquette would be sanctioned for other than the Czar, and its object must be a separateness still more strangely indicated soon after. The Greek Church, like the Roman Catholic Church, grants to the laity Com- munion only in one kind, reserving the cup most carefully to the priesthood alone. It would be sacrilege to break the
rule under any pressure, but it is broken for the Czar, who, from the moment of his coronation, as a consecrated being, a layman, yet religiously apart from all the lay world, receives the Communion in both kinds, a distinction the more surprising because, though the Church obeys him as Patriarch, and the Patriarchal Chair is never filled, the Greek Church has never recognised, save in this mystical privilege, that the Sovereign is in any way priest. The object clearly is to attribute to the Czar, no doubt after consecration, a sacredness in the strict and even technical sense in which Churches use the word, beyond that of any other of mankind. Even his wife, though she also is consecrated with the holy oil, is re- fused the cup ; and it would not, we conceive, be granted to any other Sovereign who might chance to be received into the Greek Church. It is the unique privilege of the Czars, and must originally have been one of the many efforts visible in this ceremonial to mark the Czar off from mankind in the eyes of his subjects as invested with quasi-supernatural attributes, and above even the religions law which levels all other laymen in an indistinguishable equality. It is as if in England the Sovereign, once consecrated, could by the Anglican theory administer the Communion, or ordain by fiat. There is nothing that we can recall in the least like this in any Christian ceremonial, or indeed, with the possible exception of the reception of the Grand Lama, who is not only priest, but deity incarnate, in any ceremonial whatever. The Khalif is as subject to the Mussulman Holy Law, in theory, as the meanest Moslem, as, indeed, was the Prophet he represents; and the Emperor of China, though as Father of the people be receives " worship " from his subjects, as does also every Chinese father from every Chinese son, is in no way released from the burden of performing all rites, but rather, as the representative man of China before the altar, is more bound to perform them all.
There is something un-Christian, almost unholy, in this deliberate effort to exalt a man above humanity, something which an old Greek would have thought a wilful affront to the Gods ; and one can hardly avoid speculation as to what the Czar thinks of it all himself. How far does he believe what his Church and his people, and even his enemies, conspire to press upon him as true He can hardly believe it all, knowing himself and his own weaknesses ; but how much does he believe r More than other Kings P The records of all Courts, and espe- cially the secret records, seem to show that no Sovereign quite escapes the notion of a separateness residing in himself, of a special relation to God, "in whose hand are the hearts of Kings," of something in him and his personal destiny which is not in other men; and how this must be exaggerated in the -case of the Czar! His will is executive through two continents. He is released from law. He is, by the consent of his Church, in some sense Priest, as well as King, and in reality the most powerful of all priests. He is not only master, but con- secrated to masterdom. The Archbishop of Novogorod comes from his distant diocese to tell him, in the sight of the repre- sentatives of mankind, that " Russia lies before thee," and it is all so true. It is impossible, human vanity and the influence of power and the weight of tradition on the mind being all taken into account, but that the Czar must believe some of it, must think of himself as in some way separate from his kind, and entitled as of right from above to his unrestrained authority. Thousands of priests, in all ages and of all creeds, have believed that of themselves sincerely, and why should not a King also in all sincerity believe it of himself ? If he does, in any degree, however slight, how it must accentuate the natural resentment against rebellion, the natural readiness to believe himself justified in demanding obedience, the natural reluctance to surrender any power, and especially any of that free power unhampered by advice or sanction which seems to all men so much the truest power We can hardly wonder, amidst such a worshipping world, if a CM looks on a demand for a Con- stitution as tainted with something of iniquity, and this even if he should grant it ; as if rebels were declaring against Heaven, and asking God's Vicegerent to obey man also, and more humbly. The sense of the duty of retaining authority felt by all who legally possess it, must rise strong in the heart of a Czar, till it becomes almost as impossible for him to yield it up as for a good man deliberately to do wrong, yet not suffer. And how the loneliness which is the curse of Kings, the sense of pro- found inequality between himself and other men, must be increased in a Czar, till the only true relation of mankind . to him must seem that of service. There is danger
of lunacy in that loneliness, and in the pride it feeds, the lunacy which, as De Quincey thought, beset the early C8381tra- the later men had to struggle for their power—and which has so often, though in milder forms and with more of melancholy, reappeared among the Czars.
For the rest, the festival in Moscow, unique in so many ways among ceremonials, seems to us greatly marred by the privacy which surrounded the central or crowning ceremonial. The chapel, rather than cathedral, in which it was all conducted, in which Princes, and Bishops, and Ambassadors, laden with gold cloth and heavy silks and the insignia of Orders, were packed till motion was impossible and standing-room difficult to maintain ; the services drawn out till strong men grew faint with weariness and standing ; the thin light barely struggling into the building; the overwhelming masses of images, ornaments, paintings, gilding, jewels, all leave on us, watching so far off, an impression of stuffy magnifi- cence, splendour got up to order and overdone, which, in its immoderateness, does not impress. The open air would have been a fitter scene, or that cathedral which Alexander I., after much hesitation, refused to sanction, and which, had it been completed, would have been, of all Russian structures, the one most characteristic of the people and the land. A rocky hill outside Moscow was to have been eviscerated, and turned into a chancel; while a circle of gigantic monoliths, treble the height of those of Stonehenge, closed-in the plain into a vast church, within which a hundred thousand men could stand, with the sky for adequately lofty roof. The Czar, to make the scene complete, should have been seen, as he sat in such a basilica, in his gold robe and diamond crown and sceptre of jewels, by the millions of his subjects, as the gods of India are seen when they are wheeled with slow jerks to the terrace of some pagoda for the adoration of multitudes.
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