SOURCE: Waliszewski, K. “Literary and Artistic Tastes,” and “Catherine and Education.” In The Romance of an Empress: Catherine II of Russia, pp. 330-52; 361-70. New York: D. Appelton and Company, 1894.

[In the excerpts below, Waliszewski discusses Catherine's personal and intellectual relationship with the philosophers of the European Enlightenment, particularly Voltaire, but also Diderot, Rousseau, and others. Waliszewski is dismissive of Catherine, characterizing her writings as merely political tools, and calling into question her discernment, her principles, and her intelligence.]

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES

I

Count Hordt, a Swede, serving in the Prussian army, has left some interesting notes on his visit to St. Petersburg. The first five months of it were spent in prison. This was under the reign of Elizabeth. Peter, on coming to the throne, liberated the prisoner and invited him to dinner.

‘Were you well treated in your captivity?’ asked the Emperor. ‘Don't be afraid to tell me.’

‘Very ill-treated,’ replied the Swede. ‘I had not even any books.’

At that a voice was heard, saying loudly: ‘That was barbarous indeed.’ It was the voice of Catherine.

We shall endeavour to show what were the relations, so often commented upon, but still so little really known, between the Empress and those who were the main instruments of her European fame. Voltaire and his rivals in the honour and adulation of the ‘Semiramis of the North’ demand a separate study. We shall here concern ourselves with Catherine alone.

She loved books, as she has abundantly proved. Her purchase of Diderot's library is well known. Dorat has celebrated this acquisition in an epistle in verse which figures in the edition of his Œuvres Choisis, embellished with a vignette in which are seen little Loves dressed in furs and travelling in sledges. Diderot asked 15,000 francs for his treasure. The Empress offered him 16,000, on condition that the great writer should remain in possession to the time of his death. Diderot thus became, without leaving Paris, librarian of Catherine the Great in his own library. For this he had a pension of 1000 francs a year. It was to commence in 1765. The following year the pension was not paid. This was then the common lot of pensions and pensioners, not only in Russia. On hearing of it from Betzky, Catherine wrote through him to her librarian that she did not wish ‘the negligence of an official to cause any disturbance to her library, and, for this reason, she would send to M. Diderot for fifty years in advance the amount destined to the maintenance and increase of her books, and at the expiration of that period, she would take further measures.’ A bill of exchange for 25,000 francs accompanied the letter.

One can imagine the transports of enthusiasm in the philosophic camp. Later on, the library of Voltaire joined that of Diderot in the Hermitage collection. It was Grimm who, after the death of the patriarch of Ferney, arranged with Madame Denis for this new acquisition. The conditions were, ‘a certain sum’ at the discretion of the Empress, and a statue of Voltaire which she would place in one of the rooms of her palace. Madame Denis relied on the generosity of Catherine, so much belauded by the illustrious dead and by his friends, and Catherine was resolved, as Grimm expresses it, ‘to avenge the ashes of the greatest of philosophers from the insults that he had received in his own country.’ The great man's relatives, his grand-nephews particularly, MM. Mignot and d'Hornoy, protested against the transaction, which, they considered, infringed upon their rights and upon those of France. M. d'Hornoy even attempted to procure an official intervention. But the Empress held to her bargain. Voltaire's books now form part of the Imperial Library, to which they have been removed from the palace of the Hermitage. A special room is assigned to them. In the middle is the statue of Houdon, a replica, from the hand of the master, of the one in the foyer of the Comédie Française at Paris. There are about 7000 volumes, the greater part half-bound in red morocco. Every volume contains annotations in Voltaire's handwriting.

One need not be a Frenchman to feel, on entering this room, the indefinable sensation caused by the sight of things which are not in their proper place. These relics, the monument of one of the greatest glories of France, should assuredly not be here.

These were not, however, the largest part of the additions to the imposing collection of printed books and manuscripts with which Catherine endowed Russia. The king Stanislas Poniatowski was, we know, a cultivated man. On arriving at the throne, he endeavoured to satisfy his tastes and to share them with his fellow-citizens. The capital of Poland profited by this. It had already a considerable library, founded in 1745 by two brothers, who were distinguished savants and good citizens, the Zaluskis. Poniatowski enlarged it. On taking possession of Warsaw, Catherine transported the king to St. Petersburg, and the library along with him. Having no longer any political independence, the Poles were supposed to have no longer any need of books.

Thus Catherine loved books: did she equally love literature? The question may seem strange. It demands an answer, nevertheless. The reign of Catherine corresponds, in the history of literary development in Russia, to a well-marked epoch. The preceding epoch, dominated by the great figure of Lomonossof, stands out clearly. It was, during the lifetime of Elizabeth and for some years after her death, a period of absorption and assimilation of foreign elements en masse. European culture entered into the national life by the door, one might say rather by the breach that Peter the Great had hewed open. A period of reaction and of struggle followed. The national genius, submerged, trampled upon, oppressed, revolted and demanded back its rights. It came finally to treat foreign literature and science as enemies. The poet Dierjavine, and the satirical journalist and thinker Novikof, were the heroes of this campaign of liberation. What part was played in this crisis by Catherine? We know what she did with Novikof: she broke his pen and his life; fifteen years of imprisonment were the last reward that she gave to his labours. She treated Dierjavine worse still: she made him a tchinovnik and an abject courtier.

For all this there is a reason. Catherine's was an intelligence specially, and, so to speak, solely organised for politics and the government of men. She is a little German princess, who, at the age of fourteen, comes to Russia with the idea that she will be one day the absolute mistress of this immense empire, and who has conscientiously applied herself to prepare for the part she will have to play, a part, judging by the examples before her, which has nothing in common with that of a literary Mecaenas. Consequently, all her ideas, all her tastes, are subordinated to this definite conception of her destiny, and of the rights and duties resulting from it. What she appreciates in Voltaire, when the fame and the books of Voltaire reach her, is not the charm of style—does she even know what style is?—but the support that the prose, good or bad, of the author, his poetry, melodious and full of sentiment, or dry and hard to the ear, might afford to the development of the programme of government that she has vaguely mapped out in her mind. She has no sense of harmony, and, beyond her family relations and her love-episodes, she pays little heed to sentiment. At one moment, at the beginning of her reign, influenced a little by her reading and a great deal by her friend of some years' standing, Princess Dachkof, she is wishful to take part in the artistic, scientific, and literary movement which she perceives about her. She flings herself into the mêlée with the ardour she puts into everything. She becomes a writer. She becomes a journalist. But we know already the lamentable shipwreck of her liberal ideas. And what happens to her ideas happens also to her tastes. All the love she may have ever had for letters founders in this disaster, which even the glory of Voltaire does not survive.

But let us first look at her tastes. Voltaire apart, French literature, the only literature with which she is familiar up to a late period of her life, is far from attracting her as a whole. She makes her selection, and what she selects are the works of Le Sage, and those of Molière and Corneille. After studying Voltaire, she has enjoyed Rabelais, and even Scarron. But she has gone back upon her tastes in this direction, only remembering them with a sort of shame that she has ever had them. As for Racine, she simply does not understand him. He is too literary for her. Literature with him is art for art's sake, and art for art's sake, to Catherine, is nonsense. When she applies herself to the task of writing comedies and tragedies, she does not for an instant dream of making a work of art: what she does is criticism, satire, and, above all, politics. She attacks the prejudices and vices that she perceives in the morals of the country, the ideas, and even the men, that offend her. She makes war upon the Martinists, and occasionally upon the King of Sweden. Literature, to her, is merely a branch of her military and repressive powers. Rhetoric, for her, does not exist: she replaces it by logic and her authority as samodierjitsa, ruler of forty millions of men. She, nevertheless, makes a solitary choice in the work of Racine: she likes Mithridate. One sees why.

Still her disputatious instincts and her moralising intentions come in collision with continual obstacles in the surroundings in which she lives. The incident in connection with Sedaine is characteristic in this respect. She had liked Sedaine for his simple gaiety, and the easy flow of his couplets, so pleasantly brought out by the music of Philidor. This pupil of Montesquieu and of Voltaire had a taste for comic opera. In 1779 it occurred to her to utilise, after her own fashion, the talent of the witty and prolific writer. Why should he not compose, on her lines, and for her theatre at the Hermitage, a comedy which might follow up her own satirical pieces? Urged on by Grimm, encouraged by Diderot, Sedaine composes a piece, L'Epreuve Inutile. ‘Tell him,’ writes Catherine immediately to Grimm, ‘that if instead of one, two, or three pieces, he were to do a hundred, I would read them all with the greatest eagerness. You know that, after the Patriarch, there is no one whose writing I like so much as Sedaine's.’ But Betzky, who has read the piece aloud to his august benefactress, is much less enthusiastic. He points out ‘that the piece, if it were played before the court, would give umbrage to the spectators, and that the master plays a very small part in it.’ Catherine at first rebukes these timid objections; she intends to have the piece acted, ‘if it were only to show that she has more credit herself than Raymond.’ Betzky insists; he considers such a tentative [sic] not merely useless, but dangerous; and the Empress finally comes round to his point of view. She tells Sedaine that she thinks his play ‘good, very good’; she sends him 12,000 francs for his trouble, but she informs him that his masterpiece will not be acted, ‘from precaution.’ L'Epreuve Inutile does not even receive the honours of print. We are unaware if it was preserved in manuscript.

Some years later a polemical writer of quite other range appeared on the scene, before a public at first surprised and terrified, but soon in great part won over, and doing all that could be done to atone for its first scandal by the vehemence of its present applause. Catherine ranges herself on the side of those whom the new work still continues to shock of frighten.

‘If I ever write a comedy,’ she says, ‘I shall certainly not take the Mariage de Figaro as a model, for, after Jonathan Wild, I have never found myself in such bad company as at this celebrated marriage. It is apparently with an idea of imitating the ancients that the theatre has recurred to this taste, from which it had seemed to be purified. The expressions of Molière were free, and bubbled up like effervescence from a natural gaiety, but his thought is never vicious, while in this popular play the undertone is constantly unworthy, and it goes on for three hours and a half. Besides that, it is a mere web of intrigues, in which there is a continual effort, and not a scrap of what is natural. I never laughed once all the time I was reading it.’

But Catherine's business is not to play the part of a critic, it is to govern Russia, and what Russia needed at this period was assuredly not to be set in the van of European progress, intellectual and artistic; it was to follow, at a great distance, those who were ahead, to try to come up with them, not by a servile imitation, but doubtless by finding inspiration in them for the development of the original resources of the national genius. What did Catherine do to help on this event, as was her duty and even her ambition in the radiant days when she accepted the title of ‘the Semiramis of the North,’ and Voltaire declared that the sun seemed to have taken to shining on the world from another quarter? We hold with those who think that the best way of protecting literature that can be found by a ruler, is to leave it alone without interfering in its concerns. Such was not the opinion of Catherine. She wished to assert, in this as in all other domains, her personal initiative and her supreme command. She professed in vain to have ‘a republican soul’; the republic of letters was transformed in her eyes into a monarchy governed by her despotic will. Did she, however, bring to light a force, a glory, or did she even aid the outcome of a new period in letters, which could balance the merit and the reputation of the writers of whom the reign of Elizabeth could legitimately boast? We cannot see that she did. No name of the importance of Lomonossof and Soumarokof, whose fame belongs to the former reign, can be found in hers. Catherine confined herself to making the most of this heritage, always for her own personal interests, which were far from being those of art and literature. Lomonossof, now grown old, served as a sort of figure-head; Soumarokof, with his imitations of the French dramatists, was sufficiently good as a set-off. There was perhaps in Dierjavine the making of a great poet; she sees nothing of it in him, and in time he ceases to see it in himself. Felitsa, the poem on which his literary reputation rests, is merely a pamphlet done to order, half panegyric, half satire. The panegyric, we need not say, is for the Empress; the satire for the court nobles, to whom Catherine desires to read a lesson, and to whom she sends copies of the work, with the passages concerning them carefully underlined. At the end of the reign the author of Felitsa is a mere buffoon, wallowing in the antechambers of the favourite, Plato Zoubof. The serious rivals of Lomonossof,—those who try to react against the current of foreign importation, by which Soumarokof is carried along, Kherasskof too, in his Rossiade, and Bogdanovitch, in his Douchenka, made up from the insipidities of the centuries on the subject of the loves of Psyche—Kniajnine, Von-Visine, Loukine, add some interesting plays to the national drama. Kniajnine writes the Fanfaron, a comedy which remains one of the classics of Russian literature, and, in Vadime à Novgorod, attempts the historical drama, drawn from the fresh sources of national tradition. Von-Visine, the Russian Molière, ridicules in his Brigadier the acquirements of Muscovite Trissotins, founded on the reading of French novels; and, in his Dadais, takes off the educators of aristocratic youth, brought at great expense from abroad. But this national drama is not that of Catherine. She never visits it, until in her later years, when the whim takes her, or rather she finds it good policy, to be interested in the dramatisation of scenes taken from the history of the country.

Meanwhile, literature, national or otherwise, feels itself so little under her protection, that the contributors to the Sobiessiednik, founded by the Princess Dachkof, dare not sign their articles, even though they are aware that the Empress herself is one of their number. They are not unwise, if one may recall the fate of Prince Bielossielski, who wrote so charming an ‘Epistle to France,’ won so flattering a reply from Voltaire on ‘the laurels thrown to his compatriots and falling back upon himself,’ and who, then being Minister at Turin, was recalled in disgrace, for no reason but that he was a man of wit, that he showed it in his despatches, and that he turned agreeable verse. Kniajnine, too, knew what it cost to cultivate the national drama. His Vadime à Novgorod was torn up by order of the Empress, and came near being burnt by the public executioner.

An Academy, founded in 1783 on the model of the French Academy, under the inspiration of the Princess Dachkof, is the sole monument that Russian literature owes to a sovereign to whom Russia owes so much in other respects. To this Academy was confided the mission of fixing the rules of orthography, the grammar and prosody, of the Russian language, and of encouraging the study of history. It began, one need hardly say, by undertaking a dictionary, to which Catherine herself contributed.

II

‘Tragedy offends her, comedy bores her, she does not care for music, her cuisine is quite unstudied; in gardens she cares only for roses; she has, in short, no taste for anything but for building and for domineering over her court—for what she has for reigning, and figuring in the world, is a passion.’

It is thus that Durand, the French chargé-d'affaires, summed up, in 1773, the intellectual position of Catherine the Great. His observation was correct, especially from the artistic point of view. Was it lack of knowledge in her, or lack of natural disposition? It was as much the one as the other. She herself was well aware of it. In 1767, when Falconet submitted to her judgment the design for the statue of Peter the Great, she excused herself from passing an opinion; she understood nothing about it, and she recommended the artist to the judgment of his own conscience and of posterity. Falconet was foolish enough to insist—

‘My posterity is your Majesty. The other may come when it will.’

‘Not at all,’ replied Catherine. ‘How can you submit yourself to my opinion? I do not even know how to draw. This is perhaps the first good statue I have ever seen in my life. The merest school-boy knows more about your art than I do.’

We often find in her mouth, and in her writing, this parti pris of incompetence and self-abnegation, so alien from the general tendency of her mind and temperament.

She has an opera for which the best singers are sought all over Europe. She pays heavy incomes to the ‘stars,’ whose demands at that time were without limit. But she acknowledges that all this expense is not in the least for her own pleasure. ‘In music,’ she writes, ‘I am no more advanced than formerly. I can recognise no tones but those of my nine dogs, who in turn share the honour of being in my room, and whose individual voices I can recognise from a distance; the music of Galuppi and Paisiello I hear, and I am astonished at the tones that it combines, but I cannot recognise them at all.’

Nevertheless, certain comic operas of Paisiello succeed in charming her. She has a sense and taste for the grotesque. She is enchanted by the Pulmonia, and even remembers some of the airs, which she hums over when she happens to meet the maestro.

Sometimes, too, even in the domain of art, where she feels so out of place, her despotic instincts claim their rights; and, as if by miracle, she has certain inspirations which are not without a certain savour. Here is a letter, written at the time of her first triumphs over Turkey—

‘Since you speak to me of festivities in honour of the peace, listen to what I am going to say, and do not believe a word of the absurdities of the gazettes. The original project was like that of all festivities: temple of Janus, temple of Bacchus, temple of the Devil and his grandmother, stupid and intolerable allegories, because they were gigantic, and because not to have common sense was supposed to be an effort of genius. Disgusted with all these fine and mighty plans, which I positively would not have, one fine day I summon M. Bajenof, my architect, and I say to him: My friend, three versts from the city there is a meadow; imagine that this meadow is the Black Sea; that there are two roads leading to it from the city; well, one of these roads shall be the Tanaïs, the other the Borysthène: at the mouth of the first you will build a banqueting-hall, that you will name Azof; at the mouth of the other you will build a theatre, that you will name Kinburn; you will trace out with sand the peninsula of the Crimea; you will there enclose Kertch and Iénicalé, as ball-rooms; on the left of the Tanaïs you will place buffets of wine and eatables for the people; opposite to the Crimea you will have illuminations which will represent the joy of the two empires over the re-establishment of peace; on the other side of the Danube you will have the fireworks, and on the land which is supposed to be the Black Sea you will place illuminated ships and boats; you will garnish the banks of the rivers which serve as roads with landscapes, mills, trees, houses, all lit up; and there you will have a fête without anything imaginary in it, but perhaps as good as many others, and much more natural.’

There is something, indeed, very natural and charming in this plan of a fête, but there is also a stroke of policy. There is always this in everything that Catherine thinks and does. All her prepossessions, artistic and literary included, tend in this direction. She accumulates in her Hermitage considerable artistic collections, but she confesses that it is not for love of the things of beauty that are heaped up in the galleries and cabinets that she prepares expressly for them. One cannot delight in what one does not understand, and she does not understand in what consists the merit of a fine picture or of a fine statue. She admits that it is part of the glory of a great sovereign to have these things in his palace. All her famous predecessors, all the monarchs in history whose renown she envies or seeks, Louis XIV. at their head, have had them. But she hits on a word which, coming from any one but herself, would have the air of a cruel epigram, but which characterises the purchases, very extensive during the first part of her reign in particular, to which she submits in order to carry out this part of her programme of imperial magnificence. ‘It is not love of art,’ she says, ‘it is voracity. I am not an amateur, I am a glutton.’ In 1768 she buys for 180,000 roubles the famous Dresden gallery of Count Brühl, ex-Minister of the King of Poland. In 1772 she purchases, at Paris, the Crozat collection. In reference to this Diderot writes to Falconet: ‘Ah, my friend Falconet, how things have changed! We sell our pictures and our statues in time of peace; Catherine buys them in time of war. The sciences, the arts, taste, and wisdom, all make for the North, and barbarism with its attendant train comes down upon the South. I have just carried through an important affair: the acquisition of the collection of Crozat, increased by his descendants, and known to-day under the name of the gallery of the Baron de Thiers. There are Raphaels, Guidos, Poussins, Van Dycks, Schidones, Carlo Lottis, Rembrandts, Wouvermans, Teniers, etc., to the number of about eleven hundred. It has cost her Imperial Majesty 460,000 francs. That is not half its value.’

Her usual good luck accompanied Catherine in these proceedings. Three months later, fifty pictures of not greater worth were sold for 440,000 francs at the sale of the Duc de Choiseul's collection. She herself paid 30,000 francs to Mme. Geoffrin for two pictures of Van Loo, La Conversation Espagnole and La Lecture Espagnole. It is true that this is, perhaps, on her part, a way of establishing friendly relations with the influential matron, who gains on the bargain two-thirds of the amount. She has one misfortune, in 1771, with the Braancamp collection, bought in Holland for 60,000 écus, which goes down on the coast of Finland with the vessel that brings it. But, says Catherine, there is only 60,000 écus lost. She can easily make up for the rest. She buys en bloc the engraved gems of the Duc d'Orléans. Through Grimm and Diderot she sends order after order to French artists: from Chardin and Vernet she demands landscapes; from Houdon a Diana (which has been refused admittance at the Louvre, on the ground that it is too little clothed); from Vien, a ceiling for the grand staircase at Tzarskoïe-Sielo; from the painter on enamel, De Mailly, an artistic inkstand for the room of the Order of St. George, for which he charges 36,000 francs, and which he executes very unwillingly, and only on being forced to do so by an intervention of Government. In 1778 she has copies made at Rome, by Gunterberger and Reiffenstein, of the frescoes of Raphael in the Vatican; and she has a gallery erected at the Hermitage with panels of the same dimension to receive these copies, which, being done on canvas, have been since utilised in the reconstruction of the palace. They can still be seen there. In 1790, in sending to Grimm her portrait, ‘in a fur cap,’ she writes: ‘Here is something for your museum; mine, at the Hermitage, consists of pictures, the panels of Raphael, 38,000 books, four rooms filled with books and prints, 10,000 engraved gems, nearly 10,000 drawings, and a cabinet of natural history contained in two large rooms. All that is accompanied by a charming theatre, admirably adapted for seeing and hearing, and also as to seating accommodation, and with no draughts. My little retreat is so situated that to go there and back from my room is just 3000 paces. There I walk about in the midst of a quantity of things that I love and delight in, and these winter walks are what keep me in health and on foot.’

All that is her own doing. In accomplishing it she has had to fight with serious difficulties, for, though she may make gold at will, her power in this respect is unlimited only within the limits of her empire—outside, the paper money loses too much in change. Thus, from the year 1781 she feels obliged to use moderation. She writes to Grimm: ‘I renew my resolution to buy nothing more, not a picture, nothing; I want nothing more, and consequently I give up the Correggio of “the divine.” That is indeed a ‘glutton's’ vow, as valid as a drunkard's! A veritable conflict commences, from this moment, in the mind of Catherine, between her desires as a collector, now a passion with her, and her forced instincts of economy. It is not the latter that most generally win the day. The letter to Grimm that we have just cited is dated March 29; on the 14th of April we find in the correspondence of the Empress with her art-purveyor this passage: ‘If “the divine” [Reiffenstein] would send her, direct to St. Petersburg, some very very fine old cameos, in one, two, or three colours, in perfect state and keeping, we should be infinitely obliged to those who would procure them for us. That is not to be called a purchase, but what is one to do?’ And on the 23rd she writes: ‘Now, you may say what you like, you may rail at me as you please, but I must have two copies of coloured prints, according to the list I am going to give you … for we are gluttons, and so gluttonous for everything of that kind, that there is no longer a house in St. Petersburg where one can decently live if it does not contain something faintly resembling the panels, the Eternal Father, or the whole string that I have enumerated.’

‘Lord, one would say that the good resolutions of Thine anointed are wavering!’ observes Grimm maliciously in his reply. He has his doubts, too, as to what has provoked this return of ‘gluttony.’ In using the collective pronoun ‘us,’ Catherine does not use the plural instead of the singular by a mere trick of speech. The ‘gluttons’ of whom she speaks are indeed two at present. After the favourite Korssakof, who was a mere boor, has come, since the end of 1780, the handsome Lanskoï, who is a man of education and refined tastes. And the handsome Lanskoï has a real passion for prints and cameos. In July 1781, sending Grimm new orders for purchases, Catherine explains that these are not for her, ‘but for gluttons who have become gluttons through knowing me.’ The money is certainly hers, that is to say, Russia's. In 1784 she renews her resolution of buying nothing more, ‘being poor as church mice.’ But Lanskoï sends 50,000 francs to Grimm ‘for the purchase of a cabinet of pictures,’ and promises a further amount shortly. This new course of things goes on for some time. In 1784, it is true, there is a momentary pause: Catherine will have no more cameos, nor anything of the kind. Lanskoï is dead, and with him is dead also the taste for things which, as she frankly confesses, she does not understand a bit. But in April 1785 it begins again. What has happened? Mamonof has taken the place of Lanskoï, and with the place he seems to have inherited the artistic tastes of the deceased. It is not till 1794 that this intermittent fever comes finally to an end. ‘I shall not buy anything more,’ says Catherine, on January 13. ‘I must pay my debts and save up money; so refuse all the bargains that are offered you.’ It is Plato Zoubof who reigns now, and Zoubof cares for nothing engraved save the gold circles bearing the effigy of his imperial mistress.

Up to now the Empress has not merely been increasing her collections; she has also been building. We should say, she has especially been building. And this time the pleasure has all been her own, as Durand intimated in 1773. We have seen what the Prince de Ligne thought of the sovereign's taste and knowledge in regard to architecture. But in default of judgment and sense of proportion she has at least plenty of spirit. She replaces artistic sense by enthusiasm, and quality by quantity. ‘You know,’ she writes in 1779, ‘that the mania of building is stronger with us than ever, and no earthquake ever demolished so many buildings as we have set up.’ She adds in German these sad reflections: ‘The mania of building is an infernal thing; it runs away with money, and the more one builds, the more one wants to build; it is a disease, like drunkenness.’

At this moment she sends to Rome for two architects—Giacomo Trombara and Geronino Quarenghi. She thus explains her choice: ‘I want Italians because our Frenchmen know too much, and make horrid houses, inside and out, because they know too much.’ Always the same contempt for care, the same penchant for improvisation! She nevertheless frequently consults the learned Clérisseau, who sends her plans of palaces in the Roman style. Perronnet furnishes her with the scheme of a bridge over the Neva; Bourgeois de Chateaublanc, another of a lighthouse for the shores of the Baltic. In 1765 she demands of Vassé a design for an audience-chamber 120 feet long and 62 high.

With all that, does she give good cause to artists, whether architects, painters, or sculptors, to praise her treatment of them? Let us not ask Falconet, on his return from St. Petersburg; his reply would be too bitter. We shall have to speak elsewhere of the visit to the capital of the North of the man to whom the city of Peter the Great and of Catherine owes to this very moment its finest ornament. We shall try also to show what were his relations with the sovereign, beginning, on her part, with more than courtesy, and ending with more than indifference. Let us say here that, not having the least comprehension of artistic things, Catherine could not in any way be likely to understand the soul of an artist. Falconet pleased her at first by his original and somewhat paradoxical turn of mind, still more perhaps by the oddities of his disposition; she soon grew tired, and finally impatient of him. He was too much of an artist for her liking. She had always her own way of interpreting the part to be played in the world by the men of talent whom she wished to employ in improving her capital. She frankly confesses it in one of her letters to Grimm: ‘Si il signor marchese del Grimmo volio mi fare [sic] a pleasure, he will have the goodness to write to the divine Reiffenstein to look me out two good architects, Italians by birth and skilled in their profession, whom he will engage in the service of her Imperial Majesty of Russia for so many years, and whom he will send from Rome to St. Petersburg like a bundle of tools.’ Tools—it is just that; tools that one uses, and then throws away when they are done with, or one finds better and handier ones at hand. It was thus that she did with Falconet. She gives this further piece of advice to Grimm: ‘He will choose honest and reasonable people, not dreamers like Falconet; people who walk on the earth, not in the air.’ She will have nothing aspiring. ‘A Michael Angelo,’ it has been justly said, ‘would never have remained three weeks at the court of Catherine.’ To remain there nearly twelve years, required in Falconet an extraordinary power of resistance, and a veritable passion for the work he had begun, into which he had put all his soul. But when at last he went, he was broken down. Apart from him, Catherine did not keep by her any foreign artists who were not mediocrities: Brompton, an English painter, a pupil of Mengs, and Koenig, a German sculptor. Brompton paints allegories which delight the sovereign, for they are political allegories. ‘He has painted my two grandsons, and it is a charming picture: the elder amuses himself by cutting the Gordian knot, and the other has proudly put the flag of Constantine about his shoulders.’ Koenig does a bust of Patiomkine. Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, arriving at St. Petersburg in 1795 with an achieved reputation, meets with a flattering reception everywhere but at the court—Catherine finds little pleasure in her society, and considers her pictures so bad ‘that one must have a very distorted sense of things to paint like that.’

And the Russian artists—what does she do in this respect? Does she try to discover native talent, to encourage it, and bring it to the front? The list of national glories, contemporaneous with her reign, is easy to establish in this sphere. There is Scorodoumof, an engraver, who had studied art in France, and whom she sent for at Paris in 1782, in order to take him into her service; and whom a traveller, Fortia de Piles, found, a few years later, in an empty studio, engaged in polishing a copper plate for a wretched design done to order: he explained that there was not a workman in St. Petersburg capable of doing this kind of work; was astonished that a stranger took any interest in what he was doing; was quite resigned to the low uses of his profession. There is Choubine, a sculptor, discovered by the same visitor in a narrow room, without models, without pupils, with only one order, a bust, for which an admiral has offered him 100 roubles, the marble itself costing 80 roubles, which he has to take out of the price. There is, lastly, the painter Lossienko. Here is what Falconet says of him: ‘The poor fellow, starving and in the depths of misery, wishing to live anywhere but at St. Petersburg, came and told me all his troubles; then, sinking into drunkenness in his despair, he little knew what he would gain by dying: we read on his tombstone that he was a great man!’

The glory of Catherine wanted one great man the more, and she had him cheaply. The artist once dead, she willingly added his apotheosis to all her grandeurs. She had not taken any pains to keep him alive. All her artistic ideas reduce themselves, in the last resort, to a question of show. And, for this object, the ‘divine’ Reiffenstein, whose name is known all over Europe, is obviously worth more than the poor Lossienko, though he was no more than a good copyist. National art, in short, owes to Catherine some models furnished by her to the study and emulation of Russian artists. Beyond that, she did not give it so much as a morsel of bread.

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CATHERINE AND EDUCATION

I

The institutions founded by Catherine for the furtherance of national education, her educational ideas and writings, hold too large a place in the history of her reign, and in that of the intellectual development of her people, for us to omit some consideration of them in this study, brief as must be the space that we can give them. On arriving at power, Catherine was quick to see what advantage she had derived, in the struggle from which she had come out victorious, from the superiority of her intellectual culture, the relative extent and variety of her knowledge. At the same time, she was able to judge how much it cost in Russia, even on the throne, to arrive at the little knowledge that she possessed. Finally, the handling of power must soon have shown her the enormous difficulties that the best-intentioned rulers have always had to meet with from the ignorance of their subjects. The reform, or rather the establishment, of national education is, from the first, one of the principal ideas brought by the Empress to the government of her empire. In this regard she had everything, or almost everything, to do. The lower classes did not count, the middle class hardly existed; there was therefore nothing to do but to raise the level of studies at the summit of the social ladder. But this level was terribly low. The children of the nobility were brought up by serfs or by foreign tutors. We can guess what they had to learn from the former; as for the latter, we can guess also what sort of people they were—French for the most part—who at that time entered upon the career of private tutor in the far-distant Russia. Méhée de la Touche tells the story of the governess who, being asked by the parents of her future charge if she spoke French, replied: ‘Sacrédié! I should think so; it is my own language.’ She was engaged without further question; only, the name of Mlle. Sacrédié always stuck to her.

As ever, Catherine would do everything, and everything at once. In the second year of her reign, Betzky, the collaborator whom she picked out for this purpose, received the order to set to work on a project, which included a whole new system of education, able to serve as basis for a number of scholastic institutions, to be set on foot subsequently. The result was the publication, in 1764, of General Regulations for the Education of Children of both Sexes. Betzky has admitted that the ideas developed in this document were those of the Empress herself. They must be considered bold, if not original: they are more or less those of Locke and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; those of Jean-Jacques especially, little as Catherine generally professed to think of his genius. It was a project for fabricating men and women not in the least like any that had ever been seen in Russia, taken radically away from the soil which had given them birth, transplanted from their natural surroundings, and developed in an atmosphere artificially prepared for the culture to which they were destined. They were to be taken at the age of five or six, kept strictly shut up, and removed from all outside influence, to the age of twenty or more.

Catherine seriously thought of carrying out this programme. If this was not done, at least within the desired limits and proportions—that is to say, throughout the whole length and breadth of public education—it is because she encountered great difficulties on the way, and that here, too, patience, firmness of resolution, and continuity of effort were once again lacking to her will. Difficulties arose at the outset from the opposition that she met with, not only in her immediate surroundings—but little enlightened itself, as a rule, and consequently indifferent, if not hostile, to the development of any programme whatever, relating to this order of ideas—but also among even the most open-minded and cultivated of those to whom she could appeal, outside the official sphere, for some amount of help in her enterprise. The ideas of Jean-Jacques were by no means those of Novikof, for example, nor those of the circle in which the influence of the publicist was exercised. Now, this was perhaps the most intelligent circle in the Russia of that time. Novikof had pedagogic views of his own, entirely different, giving a large place, in national education, to local feeling, to custom, tradition, to the ways of the country, averse from the introduction of foreign elements. As for the officials at Catherine's disposal, they were inclined to ask whether public education, and schools in general, were of any real value. In 1785, at one of the Empress's evening receptions, as Patiomkine was discussing the necessity of starting a large number of universities throughout Russia, Zavadofski, the director of the recently established normal schools, observed that the University of Moscow had not produced a single distinguished man in science during the whole of its existence. ‘That,’ replied Patiomkine, ‘is because you hindered me from continuing my studies by turning me out.’ This was a fact; the favourite had been sent down, and obliged to enter a regiment, which was the beginning of his fortune. He forgot to say that his idleness and misconduct had quite justified the punishment. Catherine thereupon declared that she herself owed much to the university education: since she had had in her service some men who had carried out their studies at Moscow, she had been able to make out something in the memoranda and other official documents presented for her signature. It was after this conversation that she decided upon founding the Universities of Nijni-Novgorod, and Iekatierinoslaf. But the latter town had itself yet to be founded.

Another difficulty presented itself in the selection of a staff of teachers. In organising the establishment of the corps of cadets, Betzky took for director a former prompter from the French theatre, and for inspector of classes a former valet de chambre of Catherine's mother. One of the professors, Faber, had been a lackey in the service of two other French professors, Pictet and Mallet, whose colleague he now became. Pictet and Mallet having ventured to protest, Betzky contented himself with giving Faber the rank of lieutenant in the Russian army, which, it appeared, put things straight. The master of police in the establishment was a certain Lascaris, a mere adventurer, who afterwards became director, with the title of lieutenant-colonel.

The greatest liberty reigned in this school, if we may believe the testimony of Bobrinski, the natural son of Catherine, who was brought up there: the ideas of Jean-Jacques were liberally applied.

Catherine was thus forced to complicate her programme of scholastic organisation; she had first to think of training the masters for the future pupils that she meant to intrust to them. She sent to Oxford, to the Academy of Turin, to the schools in Germany, young men who were to be prepared for the delicate duties of professorship. But many other things were yet wanting for the founding of national schools, and first, to know how to set about it. She confessed it naïvely to Grimm—

‘Listen a moment, my philosophical friends: you would be charming, adorable, if you would have the charity to map out a plan of study for young people, from A B C to the University. I am told that there should be three kinds of schools, and I who have not studied and have not been at Paris, I have neither knowledge nor insight in the matter, and consequently I know not what should be learnt, nor even what can be learnt, nor where one is to find out unless from you. I am very much concerned about an idea for a university and its management, a gymnasium and its management, a school and its management.’

She intimates, however, the means by which she intends to get over the difficulty for the present—

‘Until you accede or do not accede to my request, I know what I shall do: I shall hunt through the Encyclopédie. Oh, I shall be certain to haul out what I want and what I don't want.’

The philosophers remaining silent, it is the Encyclopédie that has to afford matter for the conceptions to which the universal genius of Catherine betakes itself, in this new order of things.

II

These conceptions were destined to remain sterile, with one exception. Some scholastic establishments date, it is true, from her reign, But these are special schools, that, for instance, of artillery and engineering, founded in 1762, the school of commerce founded in 1772, the academy of mines in 1773, the academy of Beaux Arts in 1774. In 1781 there was even an attempt at popular schools, and in 1783 Jankovitz was summoned for the foundation of normal schools, after the order of those in Austria. Ten were at once founded at St. Petersburg, and the following year they had 1000 pupils. Catherine was full of enthusiasm on the subject, and wrote to Grimm: ‘Do you know that we are really doing fine things, and getting along famously, not in the air (for, from dread of fire, I have expressly forbidden aerostatic globes) but ventre à terre, for the enlightening of the people.’ In reply Grimm conferred upon the sovereign the title of Universal-normalschulmeisterin.

But all that was not the national education according to Locke and Jean-Jacques, of which the Empress dreamed, and which ought, she thought, to regenerate Russia. The dream was unrealised save in the establishment founded in 1764 for the education of girls, in the famous Smolnyi Monastyr, which was one of the favourite achievements of Catherine, the one among all others to which she was most constant; the majestic edifice on the banks of the Neva is even now the admiration of travellers from the West. Demoiselles nobles are still educated there in the most careful manner, and but lately the two daughters of the Prince of Montenegro grew up within these walls, where so often the Empress was to be seen surrounded by her pupils, following their studies with solicitude, and interesting herself in their recreations. Rigorous seclusion, during twelve years, the removal of all outside influences, even family influences, even religious influences: all the details of the plan sketched out in 1764 were to be found in the scheme of this institution. No one was allowed to go out, except to go to the court, whither the Empress frequently summoned the scholars whom she had particularly noticed. There were hardly any holidays. Every six weeks the parents were admitted to see their children, and to witness a public examination which showed what progress they were making. That was all. The lay schoolmistresses never spoke to their pupils of God or the Devil save in general terms, without any attempt at proselytism; the clergy were admitted to this singular monastery, and to some part in the instruction given there, but within prescribed limits. It was a convent having as abbess a philosophising Empress; monastic life with a door of communication opening on the splendours and seductions of the imperial palace; St. Cyr, minus Christianity, and not merely the severe and gloomy Christianity of Madame de Maintenon, but Christianity in general. A long-bearded pope was sometimes seen there; the Christian teaching was absent. The very plan of the establishment was alien to it, for could anything be more absolutely contrary to its spirit than the separation into two divisions of the inmates, kept absolutely apart and distinct, by the very first principles of the undertaking? In this establishment, in which there is room for 500 pupils, there are daughters of the nobility and of the middle classes. They have nothing in common one with another, either in mode of living, of education, or even of costume. The former are indulged with fine clothes, the refinements of the toilette, of the table, and of accommodation, a course of study in which the arts of pleasing hold a large place; the latter have to put up with a coarse kind of clothing, with simple dishes, with lessons in sewing, washing, and cooking. The colour of the clothes is the same, but the ‘corset’ takes the place of the elegant ‘fourreau,’ and is completed by a pinafore, which denotes the humility of their condition. All that is Pagan, utterly Pagan, as is the plan of the teaching itself, into which Diderot would have wished to introduce thorough instruction in anatomy; as are the sallies into the frivolous and corrupt world of the court.

As it has been noted, Catherine is the first Russian sovereign to give attention to the education of women. She gave to her undertaking all the breadth and magnificence that we find in all her creations, and that would seem to be in some sort the natural emanation of herself. But she also put to proof principles which she had not sufficiently gauged. The germs that she thus introduced into the intellectual and moral development of her sex still bear fruit in Russia, not perhaps always for the best.

We have had means of judging, in the Empress's confidences to Grimm, what point she had reached, after fifteen years of sway, in her own studies and notions in regard to this delicate and difficult matter: she obviously went right ahead, picking up principles and ideas for her plans of education as she picked up soldiers for her plans of conquest. In the very numerous writings on educational subjects that she has handed down to posterity, some ideas and ingenious intuitions alternate with the most paradoxical assertions, as, for example, that ‘the study of languages and sciences ought to hold the last place in education,’ or that ‘the health of the body and the inclination of the mind towards what is good make up the whole of education.’ The idea of enlightened despotism, coming out in the blind subjection of pupil to master, accords as best it can with that of the progressive development of the spirit of independence, in which one is to endeavour to fortify the child's mind. As a whole it is almost incoherent. Catherine saw clearly that the way in which the youth of Russia in her time was educated was useless alike to them and to Russia, and she admitted the necessity of a change of system, as an absolute necessity of national progress. It was only on this one point that she had quite made up her mind. At her time, and in the place that she occupied, coming after Ann, Elizabeth, and Peter III., it was something already to have made this discovery and cherished this conviction. But the glory of having been the founder of the national education was not to be hers. The judgment of posterity has given this title to a name more humble than hers, that of a man whom she treated as a foe, to whom she gave a dungeon and a chain as the reward of the labours of which Russia reaps the benefit to-day. It was in the educational establishments founded at St. Petersburg by Novikof that the programme of studies and the plan of scholastic organisation now in force throughout the empire were really mapped out.