But her attention soon became diverted. She was not, as Gunning thought, insincere, only fickle; she wanted patience and continuity of aim.
Continuing Reign of Catherine the Great,
our selection from W. Knox Johnson. The selection is presented in six easy 5 minute installments.
Previously in Reign of Catherine the Great.
Reform of the ex cathedra sort was just then in the air. From the Tagus to the Dnieper, and from Copenhagen to the Vatican, Europe was crowded with paternal monarchs and earnest ministers, who were willing to do almost everything for the people and nothing by them. The world had not seen statesmen so sincere, enlightened, and plausible. A generation later, on the meeting of the National Assembly, the despotic reformation of Montesquieu and Voltaire will still seem about to be translated into action. Men read their Rousseau: soon they will understand him; they will also understand that Non de nobis sine nobis, which was the haughty motto of the Hungarian magnates.
But her attention soon became diverted. She was not, as Gunning thought, insincere, only fickle; she wanted patience and continuity of aim. The “States-General” had produced an excellent effect in the world, and, in fact, had afforded her information afterward turned to account. Her eye is on the Turk: as with the second Pitt, had it not been for this cursed war we should have seen greater things. “Beginnings — only beginnings!” exclaims an eye-witness, “there are plenty of sketches to be seen, but where is the finished picture?” Other reports that shoals of academies and secondary schools bear witness to Catherine’s enthusiasm for education, but that some exist only on paper, while others seem to have everything except scholars. Things are done hastily, and without just measure or proportion; the imitative talent of the Russian does not seem to carry him quite far enough. At her death, says a historian who wrote eight years after it, most of her foundations were already in ruins; everything seemed to have been abandoned before completion. Yet we must not forget that liberal ideas were in themselves a revelation to the Russia of her days, and that after a succession of contemptible sovereigns she appeared as the first worthy successor of Peter. It was already something for a woman there to be governed by large social conceptions; has it not been said even elsewhere that the politics of women are proper names? You may say what you will: she saved the European tradition of Peter the Great and was in a sense the creator of modern Russia.
But to her philosophic friends at Paris it mattered little whether her designs were in the parchment or any other stage. Since Voltaire had hailed her as the “Northern Semiramis,” no adulation was enough to translate their enthusiasm: the “charms of Cleopatra,” for example, were united in her to “the soul of Brutus.” On her side she “distributed compliments in abundance, gold medals also (but more often in bronze?), and from time to time even a little money.” La Harpe, Marmontel, Volney, Galiani, and many others fallen silent in these days were sharers in her bounty. She would buy the books of some specially favored and instal them at home again as “her librarians.” Only one or two, D’Alembert, Raynal, stood aloof, with the mistrustful Jean Jacques, who refused the demesne of Gatschina. Diderot came to St. Petersburg in those days, declaiming for two, three, five hours with unmatched copiousness of discourse, astounding Catherine with his large argument and fiery eloquence, and entertaining her hugely by his oblivion of everything once fairly launched on his foaming torrent. The philosopher who, borne on spiritual hurricanes, would leap from his chair at Princess Dashkoff’s, striding to and fro as he spat upon the floor in his excitement, forgot himself equally in the presence of “Semiramis.” “In the heat of exposition he brought his hands down on the imperial knees with such force and iteration” that Catherine complained they had turned black and blue. But for all that she would egg on this strange wild-fowl. “Allons,” she would exclaim, a table once set safely between them, “entre hommes tout est permis!”
As for Voltaire, his proudest title was that of “lay preacher of the religion of ‘St.’ Catherine.” Her correspondence with him, which begins the year after her accession and continues until his death, is in truth a kind of journalism, written partly by herself, partly by others. Its object is to keep the friend of princes and dictator of literary opinion au courant with her ideas, measures, and general policy. She is not content now, however, with the applause of her generation; she aims at commanding the sources of history itself. Here she motions posterity to take its stand behind contemporaries in the church of Voltaire’s foundation, while the archpriest of Ferney prostrates himself with iterated formula, “Te Cathariniam laudamus, te Dominam confitemur.” For St. Catherine was an interested reader of that correspondence of Diderot’s with her sculptor Falconet, whose theme is the solidity of posthumous fame. Rulihière had already written an account of the events of 1762, of which he had been an eye-witness; she had tried first to buy him, and then to have him thrown into the Bastille. She will search Venice for a pliable historian; and her own letter on the coup-d’état, together with her memoirs, shows how strong in her was that “besoin de parolier” analyzed by the great Pascal a century before. Catherine, be quite certain of it, is no earnest seeker after truth; rather “the plain man,” with something of the acuteness as well as the insensibility of common-sense. The Philosophes were the interest of the cultivated “as scholars had been in one century, painters in another, theologians in a third.” They had the ear of Europe, who rest now in Mr. Morley’s bosom. But Catherine confessed years after: “Your learned men in ‘ist‘ bored me to extinction. There was only my good protector Voltaire. Do you know it was he who made me the mode?”
With what a quaint inconsequence her truer self appeared at the Revolution! She, who will foresee Napoleon, was rudely shocked by the fall of the Bastille. The Revolution touched her in her tenderest point. With every year, in spite of her sentiments and cosmopolitan culture, this Princess of Zerbst became more and more fervently autocratic and Russian. She had jestingly asked her doctor to bleed away the last drop of her German blood. No one ever had a more fanatical hero-worship for the Russian himself, or a deeper enthusiasm for the greatness in his history. It was in the political sphere that her convictions play, and she had a vague but passionate belief in what she and Russia might do together.
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