But the Russian barbarian conception of wealth and fashion is to have his driver race even when out for a pleasure drive, as if it were a question of life or death. The numberless private turnouts, distinguished by their greater elegance, their splendid horses, harness, liveries, and carriages, have no less speed than the hackney-coachman, but the reverse, at a still greater speed, thanks to the elasticity of their high-stepping Arab trotters. And now imagine twenty-five thousand such vehicles simultaneously in racing motion, with here and there a jingling "troika," its two outer horses galloping madly and the middle horse trotting furiously; imagine, at the same time, the bright colors of the four-cornered plush caps on the heads of the stylish drivers, the gay-colored rugs on the "troikas," the blue and green nets on the galloping horses of the private sleighs, the glitter of the gold and silver harness, the scarlet coats of the court coachmen and lackeys, everything rushing along on a crisp winter day, over the glimmering, freshly fallen snow, between the mighty façades of imposing structures, flanked by an almost unbroken chain of tall policeman and gendarmes, and you have the picture of the heart of St. Petersburg at the time of social activity. Splendor, riches, wildness are all caricatured into magnificence as if calculated to impress and to frighten. Woe to him here who is not of the masters!
St. Petersburg is an act of violence. I have never received in any city such an impression of the forced and the unnatural as in this colossal prison or fortress of the Russia's mighty rule. The Neva, around whose islands the city is clustered, is really not a stream. It comes from nowhere and leads nowhere. It is the efflux of the Heaven-forsaken Ladoga Lake, where no one has occasion to search for anything; and it leads into the Bay of Finland, which is frozen throughout half of the year. No commercial considerations, not even strategical reasons, can justify the establishment of this capital at the mouth of the Neva. The fact that St. Petersburg has none the less become a city of millions of inhabitants is due entirely to the barbaric energy of its founder, Peter the Great, an energy which still works in the plastic medium of Russian national character. On the bank of the Neva stands the equestrian statue of Peter, raised on a mighty block of granite, a notable work of the Frenchman Falconet. The face of the Emperor as he ascends the rock is turned to the northwest, where his most dangerous rival, the Swedish Charles, lived. And just as his whole attitude expresses defiance and self-conscious power, so his city, St. Petersburg, is only a monument of the defiance and the iron will of its founder. The historians relate that Peter intended, by removing his residence to St. Petersburg, to facilitate the access of European civilization to the Russian people. If this be true, Peter utterly failed in his purpose. The old commercial city, Riga, would have answered the purpose much better. To be sure, Riga did not come into Russian possession until eighteen years after the founding of St. Petersburg. Yet what was there to prevent the despot from abandoning the work that he had begun? But no, St. Petersburg was to bid defiance to the contemporary might of Sweden, and so forty thousand men had to work for years in the swamps of the Neva to build the mighty tyrant's castles, the Peter-and-Paul fortress, an immense stone block on the banks of the icy stream. Malarial fevers carried off most of them; but the Russian people supplied more men, for such was the will of the Czar. The drinking-water of St. Petersburg to-day is still a yellow, filthy fluid, consumption of which is sure to bring on typhoid fever; but the will of Peter still works, and St. Petersburg remains the capital.