Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/137

 Rh were completely free in this respect, thanks to the innumerable taverns, the existence of which the fiscal authority favoured in its own interests. In this matter, as in so many others, secular interests were at variance with the principles of a vexatious system of morals, and the result was a series of compromises which have led observers astray.

The Church, as may be imagined, warred against the kabaks; but from a general point of view, if the Church's own witness is to be believed, her commands and anathemas did very little good. The conciliable of the year 1551 has left us a picture of contemporary morals which reveals a condition, in the popular classes, at all events, of extreme profligacy. In the course of certain nocturnal gatherings, which combined the commemoration of a Christian festival with the worship of a heathen tradition—the feast of St. John and the festival of Iarilo, the Slav Priapus—drunkenness favoured every other form of debauchery. Men and women, girls and boys, spent the night in some out of the way spot, dancing, singing, indulging in every kind of excess; and, so we read in the report of this illustrious assembly, 'when dawn came, they ran shouting like mad folk down to the river, where they all bathed together, and when the bell rang for matins they went back to their houses, and there fell down, like dead people, of sheer exhaustion.' The stress laid by the members of this council, and by all Church writers of that time, on the sin of sodomy, is equally significant.

But the Church, as we know, exacted much—too much. She confounded and condemned every form of sociability with a quite excessive severity. Secular art, like pleasure, fell under her interdict. She waged war, too, against the skomorokhy. According to a popular legend, which had a religious basis, the devil took on the form of these wandering jugglers and musicians, so that he might lead honest folk to their perdition. Without this special action on the devil's part, the skomorokhy frequently played the part of burglars—nay, even of highway robbers. Considered outlaws, and treated as such, they moved about, to insure their own safety, in bands numbering from thirty to sixty persons, and sometimes they grew dangerous. They were artists in their way, and the forerunners of the entertainers who form an integral part of every civilized life. They supplied the comic note, and the national theatre is the outcome of their coarse and burlesque performances. They had rivals, too, pursued, like them, by the thunders of the Church—other comedians, these, bear-leaders.

The bear held an important position in the Muscovite life of this epoch. He, too, was an artist after a fashion; and not