under the curse of banishment from
HARMONY. The devil has no ear. He cannot
sing second. Counterpoint is a dead-letter
to him. Base as he may be, thorough bass
is a sealed book to him. He is never more
to hear the music of the spheres. Goëthe
has wonderfully implied this in the discordant
jangling of the sound of Mephistophiles'
speeches. After the Spirit of
Negation has spoken one of his devilish
diatribes, the accents of Faust fall upon the
ear like honey. Humanum est errare in the
case of Faust; but the devil cannot err, because
he cannot, in any case, be right. He
who commences nothing, cannot be tardy in
finishing his work. It seems a certain curse
upon the Russian aristocracy that they too
have no ear. They cannot sing in tune: the
only melody they are capable of accomplishing,
is the tune the cow died of. I happened
to mix much, while in Russia, in
musical and operatic circles — of which, specially
I shall have to say something in the
course of this wayward journey. The Russian
ladies insist upon learning the most difficult
morceaux from the most difficult operas.
Where an angel would fear to tread in the
regions of Wapping Old Stairs, the Princess
Piccoliminikoff will rush in with Casta Diva.
They (the ladies) are admirable, nay, scientific,
musicians. They are wonderful pianistes—
but always in a hard, ringy, metallic manner,
without one particle of soul; they are
marvellous executants vocally, and can do as
much perhaps, in the way of roulades and
fioriture, as the almost unapproachable Miss
Catherine Hayes; but sing in time, or tune
(especially), they cannot. "Tout ça chante
faux" ("They all sing false"), a music
master told me at Count Strogonoff's,
pointing to a whole cohort of musical ladies
gathered round a pianoforte. On the other
hand the brutish, enslaved, un-music-mastered
people are essentially melodious. I have
heard, in villages, Russian airs sung to the
strumming of the Balalaïka, or Russian lute,
with a purity of intonation and truth of
expression, that would make many of our
most admired ballad-singers blush.

To the Queen of Sheba is joined a timid
little fluttering fawn of a thing — one Mademoiselle
Nadiejda. Nadiejda what? Well, I
will say Dash. Mademoiselle Dash (the
Christian name is a pretty and tender one, and
signifies, in the English language Hope)
is one, well, not of those raræ aves,
but certainly of those pearls beyond price,
Russian pretty girls. She is not beautiful;
the Russian beauties are either of
Circassian, Georgian, or Mingrelian origin
— dark-eyed, dark skinned, full bee-stung
lipped, and generally Houri-looking; or they
are the rounded German-Frauleins — from
Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland: north German
beauties in fact, and you must have
travelled with me, unavailingly, all this way
Due North, if you do not know, by this time,
what a handsome young German lady is like.
Nadiejda is a pretty girl — a white one. She
was not printed in fast colours, and has been
washed out. Do you know what simply
colourless hair is? — she has it. Do you know
the eye, that although you may be as innocent
as the babe unborn, looks upon you
mournfully, reproachfully, till you begin to
have an uneasy fancy of the possibility of the
metempsychosis, and wonder whether you
ever saw that eye before— thousands of years
since — or did its possessor some grievous
wrong? Nadiejda's lips are not red — the
colour seems all kissed out of them. Her
cheeks are deadly pale, as though she were so
timid that she had blushed, and blushed till
she could blush no more, and so turned to
Parian marble.

Then we have some ladies who certainly
might be a little younger than they look (the
atrocious climate, fatal to every complexion,
being considered), but who are decidedly
much older than they wish to look. Then
we have some old ladies (very few— old
ladies are not plentiful in St. Petersburg;
if you wish to see venerable age you
must go into the provinces), and we have
a few little girls of the bread and butter
eating school-girl genus, who sit silent and
demure in corners, and only speak when
they are spoken to: which is very seldom
indeed.

I have had occasion, speaking of the
"Baba" in the pictures of Russian village
life, to remark upon the general hideousness
of the purely Russian peasant woman. A
girl of " sweet sixteen " is a loutish wench, a
woman of thirty is a horrible harridan. The
only comely exception is to be found in villages
partially femini-colonised by Turkish
women. In the Russo-Turkish campaign of
eighteen hundred and twenty-nine, very large
numbers of Turkish ladies became, on a
truly Sabine or nolens volens willy nilly
principle, the spouses of Russian soldiers;
they were brought to the native villages
of their impromptu husbands, and there
reared progeny, which, in the female line
at least reminds the traveller of the agreeable
fable of Mahomet's Paradise. It is not
very conclusive evidence in favour of the
innate fanaticism of the followers of Islam,
that these Turkish women consented with
scarcely an exception to be baptised, and
received into the Greek church, and subsequently
cheerfully performed all the religious
duties required by that exigent
communion.

Grown-up young ladies with no doughtier
cavaliers than cadets and imperial pages —
beardless, albeit brave, in spiked helmets and
gold lace — would form but an insipid and
juvenile-party sort of gathering round the
social samovar; but the fact is, that the
great majority of the boys in uniform have
brought their big brothers with them, who
now, in all the glories of their hussar, and