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vol. title: Vol Four of The Theosophical Society of The Arya Samaj of Arya-wart vol. period: Sept 1878 – Sept 1879 pages in vol.: 350 |
A Russian Roamer
A very interesting lady is stopping at the Palace Hotel, one who has a passion for travel, hereditary, perhaps, since she is of Tartar descent, and has, therefore, an inalienable right to be a nomad. This is Madame Lydie Pashkoff, Russian by birth, Parisian by residence, tourist by instinct, scholar and linguist by pure love of knowledge, member of the French Geographical Society, correspondent of the Paris Figaro, with other journals, French and Russian, and collaborateur of the Tour du Monde. She has traveled far and seen much; has crossed the Volga into Siberia; been through Syria as far as Palmyra; voyaged up the Nile; visited Brazil, and having come across the continent of America will, in a few days, be on the ocean plowing her way to Japan. She might easily say with the poet:
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed
Greatly, and suffered greatly, both with those
Who love me and alone.
* * * * *
I am become a name,
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men,
And nations, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honored of them all.
And now she is on the way to the “western isles” and the “baths of all the stars,” not to see the “great Achilles,” but simply on a mission of moral propagandism, for she belongs to a philosophical society whose design is to convert the world.
A Chronicle reporter called to see her yesterday and learned some interesting points of her history. Her age must remain unrevealed, though she is past thirty. She was born in Moscow, her father’s family claiming in its line of glorious ancestry a Tartar prince, father of Saint Alexis. Her mother was an actress who wed a boyar, owner of seven thousand serfs. A vigorous and masculine education was given by her father, including horsemanship, gymnastic exercises and the use of weapons. She dressed like a boy during most of her girlhood. She became an orphan at an early age, and married unhappily. Having been divorced, her extraordinary individuality at once showed itself, and she became a brilliant power in social and political circles. She married again, and her new husband, a proprietor of copper mines, took her into remote districts, where she lived a long time with nature. Her husband received the appointment of Egyptian agent, and she resided a while in Cairo, whence she diverged to various quarters of the Orient. Two or three years ago she went to Paris and began to write her travels, and also a series of fictions illustrating Russian character. Among them were “La Princesse Vera Glinsky,” “A Divorce in Russia,” and “La Niania Maroha,” which were praised by the Paris press not only for their dramatic power, but for the purity of their French, which Madame Pashkoff speaks and writes like a cultivated native.
The reporter found the energetic tourist at a table writing a letter to the Figaro. Her greeting was voluble, cordial and ladylike, with something of an oriental demonstrativeness. “Do you speak German?” “Do you speak French?” she asked in quick succession, following the interrogatories with the explanation, “I speak leetle English.” Though, as Carlyle said of Longfellow, she is “weel skealed in the tongues,” her English vocabulary did prove to be limited. She uses all the modern languages of Europe as fluently, and sometimes with a polyglot mixture of verbs and substantives that is alarming to the untaught listener.
Is calculated to attract attention anywhere, whether at the table d’hote, where she wears the brightest of jewelry and the showiest of robes, on the street with her more manlike costumes, or in her morning robe in her private apartments. She dawned on the reporter in a loose Arabian robe of blue over snowy muslin underskirts trimmed with Valenciennes lace; her small feet were encased in pink slippers, with the heels under the instep; her dark and abundant hair was kept in place by a bandeau of gold. Her eyes are dark and luminous, her features regular, and suggesting that, like the Arab ladies among whom she has traveled, she deems it wise to render her complexion fairer and her face more expressive by the use of artificial colors. Her fingers were encircled by a profusion of rings, and from an Oriental brooch, “round as the shield of my fathers,” there hung a massive Red Sea pearl, brilliant in color and irregular in size, the gift of some illustrious Egyptian.
Was curiously changed from the sober red, blue and drab Palace Hotel apartment. It was ablaze with life and color. The furniture was scarcely visible, so literally was it covered with the accumulated riches of the tourist and savante. A table covered with beads, brushes, articles of vertu and toilet …ing into the central court. Books were scattered here and there, in which were recounted the lady’s adventures, handsomely illustrated with engravings. Conspicuous among these pictures were portraits of the lady in Turkish or Egyptian costumes, that reminded one of Lady Hester Stanhope and her adventures. Two revolvers of English make, at which Madame Pashkoff looked and fondly smiled when they were alluded to, reposed upon the center-table, among things more peaceable and less familiar. A scrap-book containing autograph letters from French, Russian, Persian and Turkish dignitaries lay on the table.
Upon her wrist was a bracelet made entirely of beetles. “This,” said she, in her mixed English and French, unclasping and exhibiting it, “is made of scarabees taken from mummies in the pyramids. They are 4000 years old. Look at the hieroglyphs.” She reversed the bracelet, and on the undersides of each beetle were minute and curious characters. “This sapphire,” she went on, showing a beautiful gem handsomely set, “was given me by an Arab Sheik; and this (indicating a lovely ruby on a neighboring finger) was the gift of a lady in the harem of the Khedive of Egypt.”
Then from the treasures of her wardrobe she drew a priceless Indian shawl and dropped it lovingly over her person. Next she draped herself picturesquely in an Oriental robe of silver and gold, made, she said, in Bagdad. Then she showed portraits of herself in various costumes; one on porcelain in a robe worn in Constantinople; another, a photograph in a dress such as is worn by the ladies of the harem.
“You have met many sovereigns in your travels, have you not?” asked the visitor.
“Oh, yes!” was the reply; “the Sultan, the Khedive of Egypt, the Emperor of Brazil.”
“And the Czar?”
“Yes, the Czar; but I did not go to see him; he used to come to see me. My husband is an officer in the Imperial Guard.”
“What do you think will be the result of a war, if there is one?”
“I cannot tell. England has not many soldat and plenty of money; Russia has plenty of soldat and no money, and, I fear, little food. I hear the peasants are starving on the Volga; and, indeed, all over there is great misery.”
“But the Russians can take Constantinople?”
“But they cannot hold it. In and about Constantinople are 6,000,000 people, and they cannot hold them in subjection. It is useless to try.”
“What is the object of your visit to Japan?”
“I go there in the interests of a philosophical society as a propagandist.”
“Are you connected with the popular societies in Russia?”
“I am not connected with the Communist societies. I am not a Communist—a Nihilist. The Nihilist does not believe in anything.”
“What are the doctrines of your society?”
In answer to this question the tourist and propagandist exhibited the following circular printed in English.
Its creed and plans are given in the fifth and sixth sections as follows:
* Follow Rules of the Theosophical Society.[2]
1878.[3]
Lassalle’s Sad Romance *
Ferdinand Lassalle, the apostle of German Socialism, was killed in a duel, Aug. 28, 1864, by the Baron Janko von Racowitz. The quarrel was concerning a young lady of gentle birth, of whom the two men were desperately enamored, and whom the Baron von Racowitz afterward married. That lady, born Hélène de Doenniges of Bavaria, is now a resident of New York, and from her lips The Sun has obtained the details of one of the most remarkable romances of modern history—the story of her relations with one of the most remarkable men of modern times.
The ideas of Ferdinand Lassalle were represented in the last general election in Germany by over 800,000 votes. The progress of those ideas in the city of Berlin is measured by the difference between 65 Socialist votes polled in 1867, and 56,336 votes cast in 1878. In 1874, the decennial of his death at Geneva, the Socialists of Germany celebrated that event with solemn ceremonies. German Socialists, said a recent writer, regard Ferdinand Lassalle with “passionate veneration.” In his notable speech before the German Reichstag, delivered a few weeks since, Bismarck said of him: “From the moment that I first saw and spoke with Lassalle I did not regret it. * * * There was something about the man that attracted me to him in an extraordinary degree. He was one of the most intellectual and lovable men I have ever come in contact with; a man who was ambitious in a lofty style—not at all a Republican in spirit. * * * These petty fellows who place themselves on a level with him, he would have scornfully refused to acknowledge; nor would he have given them the opportunity to make use of his name. * * * Our conversations lasted for hours, and I was always sorry when they came to an end. * * * I regret that the difference between his political attitude and mine did not permit me to associate with him more than I did, and I would rejoice to find to-day a man possessed of a nature so gifted and so intellectual.”
To the man so eulogized by the master spirit of Europe, recent political and biographical literature has devoted the most earnest attention. There was printed in The Sun of last summer a comparatively brief sketch of Lassalle, the materials for which were selected from a monograph then just published by Herr Bamberger in the Deutsche Rundshau, a biography published in Copenhagen, and from elaborate reviews of his life and character that had recently appeared in the London Times and the Revue des Deux Mondes. He was born at Breslau, in Silesia, of Jewish parents. His father was a wealthy merchant, and gave him an excellent education, opportunities which he seized to make a brilliant impression in the gymnasiums of Breslau and Leipsic and in the University. At 20 he went to Paris, to collect there the material for a History of the Ancient School of Ionian Philosophy. There he met Heine, and the two German Jews “were drawn together,” says the reviewer, “not only by a community of origin, but by a singular conformity in the turn and temper of their minds.” Heine thus introduced Lassalle to Varnhagen von Ense: “The bearer is a young man endowed with the most remarkable intellectual gifts. To the profoundest learning, the widest culture, and the quickest penetration that I have ever encountered, he joins an astonishing force of will and dexterity in action. But he is a veritable son of the new time, who knows nothing of the self-denial and self-depreciation you and I professed with more or less hypocrisy. He belongs to a generation which means to enjoy and to command.”
From Paris the young German, “already ranking himself with those who were spoken of as revolutionists,” went to Berlin and settled there as a private-docent, or unsalaried professor. The great Humboldt referred to him as Das Wunderkind—the wonderful boy. He engaged himself, with prodigious energy, in the study of the law and in gathering materials for the forthcoming works that have made his name famous. But with his political and literary career this article can deal but in the briefest fashion; it is only necessary to tell here of the events that led to the sudden close of his brilliant career.
In 1845, to quote again from the reviewer, “he met in Berlin a person who was to exert a decisive influence upon his life. The Countess Sophie de Hatzfeldt, by birth a princess of Hatzfeldt, was engaged in a lawsuit against her husband to obtain a pension suitable to her rank and her inherited fortune. The lady had a great deal of wit and sentiment, and a strikingly independent character, and entered with lively interest into the social and political discussions of the day, and was not shocked by bold ideas. Lassalle, who resembled the Countess in many respects, was attracted to her at first sight, and vowed to make good her rights. In connection with this lawsuit occurred an incident which Lassalle’s enemies pronounced a crime. The Baroness Meyendorff, it seems, had stopped at Cologne on her return from a visit to Count Hatzfeldt. She had in her possession a casket, which, as the Countess Hatzfeldt believed, contained papers, the property of the latter, and of the utmost importance to her suit. Accordingly, two of Lassalle’s friends introduced themselves into Mme. Meyendorff’s room at the hotel and carried off the casket, which turned out, however, to hold nothing but jewels. In the prosecution which followed, one of his friends was found guilty and one acquitted, and Lassalle being tried as an accomplice, defended himself in a speech of such admirable eloquence that he was discharged by the Court, notwithstanding an adverse verdict of the jury. This occurred in 1848, when Lassalle was 23 years of age. Having been admitted to the bar at Dusseldorf he continued to push the Hatzfeldt suit, which he finally terminated in 1854 with a compromise extremely favorable to the Countess. During the intervening period he had thrown himself with fervor into the political movement of that troubled epoch. At the same time he was writing for the Socialist newspaper edited by Karl Marx, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Nor were these literary labors enough for him, his ardent temperament disposing him to energetic action. At the date of the conflict between the Prussian Chamber and the Manteuffel Ministry he undertook to organize armed resistance on the part of the artisans and tradesmen against the Conservative coup d’état. In November, 1848, when Dusseldorf was declared in a state of siege, he was arrested and tried for treason on the charge of inciting to civil war. Again Lassalle defended himself with an assurance and an eloquence which made a profound impression on the jury. He invoked boldly the principles of the French revolution, riddled with the shafts of his keen irony the advocates of passive resistance, re-<... continues on page 8-52 >
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