_Memoirs of the Empress Catharine II._ Written by herself. With a Preface by A. HERZEN. Translated from the French. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp. 309.
It would seem, that, if any one of the women celebrated in history should, more than all the others, have shrunk from writing her own memoirs, that woman was the petty German princess whom opportunity and her own crafty ambition made absolutest monarch of all the Russias under the name of Catharine II. And of that abandoned and shameless personal career which has made her name a reproach to her sex, and covered her memory with an infamy that the administrative glories of her reign serve only to cast into a blacker shadow, even she has shrunk from committing the details to paper. Indeed, in these Memoirs, she alludes to but one of her amours,--that with Sergius Soltikoff, which was the first, (if we may be sure that she had a first,)--and which seems clearly to have been elevated, if not purified, by a true and deep affection. That it was so appears not by any protestation or even calm assertion of her own, which in an autobiography might be reasonably doubted, but from the unstudied tenderness of her allusions to him; from the fact, which indirectly appears, that he first cooled towards her, and the pang--not of wounded vanity--which this gave her; and yet more unmistakably from the forgiveness which she, imperious and relentless as she was, extended, manifestly, again and again, to her errant lover.
The Memoirs are confined to events which occurred between 1744 and 1760,--the period of Catharine's girlhood and youthful womanhood; but although she brings herself before us, a young creature of fifteen, "with her hair dressed _à la Moise_," (which, in the benightment of our bearded ignorance, we suppose to mean that astounding style in which the excellent Mistress Hannah More is represented in the frontispiece to her Memoirs, with each particular hair standing on end,--a crimped glory of radiating powder,) she appears no less ambitious, crafty, designing, selfish, and self-conscious then than when she drops her pen as she is deepening the traits of the matured woman of thirty. She went to Russia to be betrothed to the Grand Duke, afterwards Peter III., to whom she was at first utterly indifferent, and whom she soon began to despise and regard with personal aversion; and yet when there was a chance that she might be released from this union, she seems not to have known the slightest thrill of joy or felt the least sensation of relief, although she was then not sixteen years old,--so entirely was her mind bent upon the crown of Russia. Partly to attain her end, and partly because it suited her intriguing, managing nature, she set herself immediately to the acquirement of the favor of the Empress on the one hand, and popularity on the other. The first she sought by an absolute submission of her will to that of Elizabeth, giving her self-negation an air of grateful deference; the latter she obtained, as most very popular people obtain their popularity, by adroit flattery,--the subtlest form of which was, in her case, as it ever is, the manifestation of an interest in the affairs of persons utterly indifferent to the flatterer. This moral emollient she applied, as popular people usually do, without discrimination. She remarks that she was liked because she was "the same to everybody"; and it is noteworthy that the same is said almost invariably of very popular persons, and in way of eulogy, by the very people into whose favor they have licked their way; the latter always seeming to be blinded by the titillation of their own cuticles to the fact that the most worthless and disagreeable individuals--those with whom they would scorn to be put upon a level--have received the same coveted evidences of personal regard. When will the world learn that the man, of whom we sometimes hear and read, who is absolutely without an enemy, must either be very unscrupulous or very weak? Catharine's duplicity in this respect seems to have been as constant as it was artful, during the years in which it was necessary for her purpose to make friends; and it was rewarded, as it almost always is, when skilfully practised, with entire success.