Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/130

 106 in his own house, and by force, without incurring any serious reproach.

Amongst the lower orders, laxity of morals as to this matter was extreme, and the neglect of all reserve and decency almost general. Women would issue stark naked from the public bath-houses, and brush against the passers-by in the open street. In the following century, Oléarius recounts a scene he himself witnessed at Novgorod. A great crowd had gathered for some religious ceremony. A woman came out of a tavern where she had got drunk, and, dazed by the open air, fell down in an indecent posture. A drunken peasant saw her, threw himself like a wild beast on the naked form, while the crowd, men, women, and children, gathered, shouting with laughter, round the horrid sight. …

Even when the wife became a mother her miserable fate was hardly bettered. Maternity, for her, was reduced to the material cares and duties of the child's earliest years, and the essential element—affection—was always to be lacking. Respect for parents was, indeed, believed to insure a long and happy life. It was said of a man who spoke evil of the authors of his being, 'The ravens will tear him with their beaks, the eagles will devour him. …' 'A father's curse dries up,' runs another proverb; 'a mother's curse roots up.' But the family law, while it ascribed a much greater authority to the father, 'Look on thy father as on God, and on thy mother as on thyself,' seems to have had its roots in fear. The father thus commended, not to the love, but to the respect of his children, was the august bearer (groznyï) of the whip. It was a law of slavery still, devoid of all moral strength, the fitting counterpart of the political system which it completed, which it partly inspired, and which it made acceptable. And here again, as quoted by Karamzine ('History of Russia,' ix. 156), is the testimony of a Russian moralist who has much to say and conceals nothing as to those family relations, the sad truths concerning which no historian of the epoch can overlook or hide. They have lain like a curse on ten centuries of the past history of a people which thereby, more than by any other cause, has been prevented from entering into earlier and fuller dealings and community of thought with other civilized nations. 'Better it is to have an unsheathed dagger at one's side than an unmarried son in one's house. … Better it is to have a goat in the house than a girl who has grown up; the goat runs about the meadow and will bring home milk, the girl runs about the village'—here there is an untranslatable play on words—'she will bring home her father's shame.'

Under the domestic roof, which so often sheltered a very