stern Europe and the
pedantic officialism of St. Petersburg, are of a more modern and less
academic type. Their philippics are directed not against Peter the Great
and his reforms, but rather against recent Ministers of Foreign Affairs
who are thought to have shown themselves too subservient to foreign
Powers, and against M. Witte, the late Minister of Finance, who is
accused of favouring the introduction of foreign capital and enterprise,
and of sacrificing to unhealthy industrial development the interests of
the agricultural classes. These laments and diatribes are allowed free
expression in private conversation and in the Press, but they do not
influence very deeply the policy of the Government or the natural course
of events; for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs continues to cultivate
friendly relations with the Cabinets of the West, and Moscow is rapidly
becoming, by the force of economic conditions, the great industrial and
commercial centre of the Empire.

The administrative and bureaucratic centre--if anything on the frontier
of a country can be called its centre--has long been, and is likely to
remain, Peter's stately city at the mouth of the Neva, to which I now
invite the reader to accompany me.

CHAPTER XXVI

ST. PETERSBURG AND EUROPEAN INFLUENCE

St. Petersburg and Berlin--Big Houses--The "Lions"--Peter the Great--His
Aims and Policy--The German Regime--Nationalist Reaction--French
Influence--Consequent Intellectual Sterility--Influence of the
Sentimental School--Hostility to Foreign Influences--A New Period of
Literary Importation--Secret Societies--The Catastrophe--The Age of
Nicholas--A Terrible War on Parnassus--Decline of Romanticism and
Transcendentalism--Gogol--The Revolutionary Agitation of 1848--New
Reaction--Conclusion.

From whatever side the traveller approaches St. Petersburg, unless he
goes thither by sea, he must traverse several hundred miles of forest
and morass, presenting few traces of human habitation or agriculture.
This fact adds powerfully to the first impression which the city makes
on his mind. In the midst of a waste howling wilderness, he suddenly
comes on a magnificent artificial oasis.

Of all the great European cities, the one that most resembles the
capital of the Tsars is Berlin. Both are built on perfectly level
ground; both have wide, regularly arranged streets; in both there is
a general look of stiffness and symmetry which suggests military
discipline and G