Russian military autocracy, and the Swiss Jacobin Frédéric César de La Harpe, who inspired him with a youthful enthusiasm for the doctrines of Rousseau and the principles of the French Revolution and, incidentally, introduced him to the Abbé de Saint Pierre's Projet de traité pour rendre la paix perpétuelle.

For years these contradictory influences struggled for the mastery over Alexander's mind. At first that of La Harpe prevailed, inspiring the tentative motions towards constitutional reforms in Russia, the granting of a constitution to Finland, the attempt to realise his youthful dream of a regenerated Poland and, after 1815, the loud championship of Liberal principles which kept Metternich in a flutter of apprehension. Adam Czartoryski, who had reason enough to distrust the professions of his Imperial friend, recorded his belief that Alexander's intentions were always "of the purest gold." Yet the gold of his idealism was mixed throughout with an alloy from the other vein. It was, in part, the influence of La Harpe which led him to reverse his father's policy and turn against Napoleon, whom he accused of betraying the principles of the revolution. The vision of himself as the world's peace-maker was already before his eyes when, during the negotiations which led up to the third Coalition, he proposed to Pitt, in the event of victory, to reform the geography of Europe on national lines, to establish the governments everywhere on the sacred rights of humanity," and to bind them together in a league of which the stipulation would form a new code of the law of nations," the observance of which would be guaranteed by “ the forces of the new union." Here, too, spoke the pupil of La Harpe. Yet three years later, at Tilsit, it was the tradition of the Russian autocracy that prevailed, and the dream of a confederated Europe was exchanged for the more flattering vision of sharing with Napoleon the empire of the world. "What is Europe?" he said to Savary, the French ambassador; "where is it, if it is not you and we?" And so the conflict of tendencies in Alexander's mind continued. Years later he would speak of La Harpe as the teacher to whom he owed everything: "It was he who made me a man." But in the end there remained of this teaching only the phrases.

Shortly after Tilsit there was introduced into the complex of Alexander's mind yet another element-emotional religion. His spirit, tormented by remorse for the part he had taken in the plot

against his father Paul, sought comfort in the mystic interpretation of the Bible, especially of the apocalyptic books. The result was inevitable in view of the character of the man and the temper of the times. The horrors of war then, as always, had raised up a numerous company of prophets and prophetesses, who proclaimed aloud that Armageddon was being fought, that Napoleon was Antichrist and the Beast, and that the latter days were about to be accomplished."* Clearly, Alexander was "the man from the North" called by God to overthrow the Beast and establish the millennium upon earth. The tremendous events of 1812 seemed to confirm the call. The burning of Moscow, he told the evangelical Bishop Eylert, had shed light into his soul; and when he crossed the frontiers of Russia, on the track of the broken remnants of Napoleon's grand army, it was to proclaim as his divine mission the restoration of the reign of " independence and peace."

It was not, however, till later that the full sense of his mission came to him. The pride of the victor was uppermost in him when he entered Paris at the head of the cavalry of his Guard; and while he was there, La Harpe being at his elbow, his pronouncements, to the consternation of his allies, were apt to contain references to the rights of man rather than to the precepts of the Gospel. Nor was the atmosphere of the Congress of Vienna, which followed, favourable to religious moods. Alexander's impressionable nature responded to the new environment; he joined feverishly in the ceaseless round of gaieties by which the diplomatic proceedings were enlivened, and his morals shocked even that not very straitlaced society. Indeed, he was made responsible for the consequent waste of time and money, and he is reported to have resented, as directed against himself, the famous mot of the Prince de Ligne le Congrès danse mais ne marche pas. It was only when the news of Napoleon's return from Elba had scattered the Congress, and he was once more leading his armies towards France, that his mood veered round again to religious mysticism. He was brooding alone over an open Bible, at Heilbronn, on the night of June 4, 1815, when that exuberant evangelist the Baroness de Krüdener at last succeded in gaining access to him and, after

*A fascinating and scholarly account of the religious movements of the period will be found in E. Muhlenbeck, "Étude sur les origines de la Sainte Alliance" (1887).

two hours of impassioned exhortation, attained the summit of her ambition by adding him, sobbing like a child, to the company of her converts.

The offspring of the spiritual liaison thus formed was the Act of the Holy Alliance. To all appearance this was innocent enough. It merely proclaimed, with somewhat exaggerated unction, the intention of the sovereigns who signed it to be guided henceforth, both in their relations with each other and in their conduct towards their subjects, by the principles of the Gospel of Christ. Metternich called it " a loud-sounding nothing"; to Castlereagh, at the outset, it seemed only "a sublime piece of mysticism and nonsense." None the less, there was an uneasy suspicion that something lay behind it; that Alexander-to quote the Austrian diplomatist Baron Vincent-was "disguising under the language of evangelical abnegation schemes of far-reaching ambition." After all, his political ethics, as exhibited at Vienna, had not been such as to inspire confidence in the purity of his motives; for he had all but plunged Europe again into war by insisting on keeping his grip on Poland, in violation of recently signed treaties. Especially ominous seemed the necessary exclusion of the Sultan from the evangelical pact; for the Eastern question had been raised at Vienna only to be shelved, relations between Russia and the Ottoman Empire continued to be strained, owing to the nonfulfilment of the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest, and large Russian forces were concentrated in Bessarabia on the Turkish frontier.

To allay these suspicions, Alexander (in 1816) published the text of the Act, and instructed his ambassador in Constantinople to reassure the Sultan as to its meaning. But the malaise continued, and was increased by the growing incoherency of Alexander's language and policy. In this year, indeed, he seemed to adopt incoherency as a deliberate expedient; for he appointed two foreign secretaries who accurately represented the contradictory tendencies in his own mind and will. The one, Count Nesselrode, was a stiff, unimaginative German conservative; the other, Count Capo d'Istria, was a patron of the Greek Hetaira, Philike, and was hated by Metternich as "the coryphæus of Liberalism"; and these ministers, working separately, used flatly contradictory language with the impartial approval of their Imperial master. The result, until the dismissal of Capo d'Istria

on the eve of the Congress of Verona, was complete mystification. If at Madrid the Russian ambassador, Tatishchev, was hand-inglove with the reactionary camarilla, while in Paris Pozzo di Borgo championed Liberalism; if in Germany the Russian agent Kotzebue was murdered " for espousing the cause of unrestrained monarchy and absolutism," while in Italy M. de La Harpe, “ not to mention the Russian ministers at the various Italian courts," was hobnobbing with the Carbonari and “holding a language of the purest democracy"; what could this mean but that Alexander was deliberately troubling the waters to favour his own fishing?

Metternich thought so, and covered reams of paper with the elaboration of his alarms. Robert Gordon, the British minister in Florence, came nearer the truth. He poured scorn on Metternich's exaggerated fears." Magnanimity," he said, " is a Russian thesis, and on his travels each Russian composes a theme of his own upon it. For the exercise of this genius he naturally attracts to his person the unfortunate and discontented . . . who who may build groundless hopes upon high-sounding words." The Emperor Alexander himself, he added, " preached a magnanimous doctrine" and so set the fashion.* Gordon was right in thinking that it did not follow necessarily that the doctrine would be applied in practice; for, as Czartoryski pointed out in his memoirs, Alexander loved phrases for their own sake. Those he used were mainly the revolutionary platitudes he had learned from La Harpe, and he continued to use them when they had ceased to have any relation whatever to his practical policies.

The magnanimous doctrine preached in the Act of the Holy Alliance seemed too transcendental to threaten any mundane consequences, though the exalted mood which dictated it had helped the cause of peace by ranging Alexander on the side of Great Britain in resistance to the dismemberment of France. But the Act seemed to acquire an ominously practical significance when, at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, Alexander claimed that it was the nucleus of a universal union, and that its signatories were committed to the principle of the mutual guarantee of territories and of thrones. This principle, which involved the right of collective intervention wherever danger threatened the established order, seemed the more dangerous

*W. Alison Phillips, "Confederation of Europe," 2nd ed., p. 188.

since Alexander proposed himself to be its main executor, excusing his failure to "set a salutary example" in the matter of disarmament on the plea that his huge armies were maintained in the interests of Europe.

A principle so perilous to national liberties could never be accepted by Great Britain, which firmly maintained the principle of non-intervention and, moreover, objected to being committed to definite action in circumstances which could not be foreseen. The situation thus created was a delicate one. British ministers, while objecting to the idea of a universal union, rightly believed the maintenance of the Quadruple Alliance, with its strictly limited commitments, to be necessary for the peace of Europe; there had always been some fear that Alexander might break away from this and follow an erratic course of his own, and this fear might now be realised were his proposals to be too brusquely rejected. The peril was overpassed by the diplomatic tact of Castlereagh, who years before had pointed out that Alexander must be "grouped." In order now to keep him grouped, Castlereagh appealed at once to his vanity and his idealism, and "by presenting something in the tone of his own ideas" and by deft allusions to his "beneficent principles," succeeded in making him" descend from his abstractions "on to the solid ground of the treaties. The process enraged the Opposition in Parliament, which scented a betrayal of liberty; but it saved the Alliance, to which France was now added as a fifth member. The declaration which was issued at the close of the Conference, though its language here and there recalls that of the Holy Alliance, committed the signatory Powers to no more than the pursuit of peace and a friendly collaboration whenever peace should be threatened.

Alexander however clung to his ideal, and influences were at work which soon gave to this ideal a new colour. In 1819 there were signs that the revolutionary hydra was again raising its many heads agitation in Germany, culminating in the murder of Kotzebue, and in France conspicuous Liberal victories at the polls. The year 1820 brought worse things: in January, the overthrow of absolutism in Spain as the result of a military pronunciamiento; in February, the murder of the Duc de Berri, heir presumptive to the throne of France, and later the military revolutions in Naples and Piedmont. Alexander's " Jacobinism wilted under these fiery blasts, and he was a changed man when,