Author's Apology

Exception has been taken to the title of this seeming tomfoolery
on the ground that the Catherine it represents is not Great
Catherine, but the Catherine whose gallantries provide some of
the lightest pages of modern history. Great Catherine, it is
said, was the Catherine whose diplomacy, whose campaigns and
conquests, whose plans of Liberal reform, whose correspondence
with Grimm and Voltaire enabled her to cut such a magnificent
figure in the eighteenth century. In reply, I can only confess
that Catherine's diplomacy and her conquests do not interest me.
It is clear to me that neither she nor the statesmen with whom
she played this mischievous kind of political chess had any
notion of the real history of their own times, or of the real
forces that were moulding Europe. The French Revolution, which
made such short work of Catherine's Voltairean principles,
surprised and scandalized her as much as it surprised and
scandalized any provincial governess in the French chateaux.

The main difference between her and our modern Liberal
Governments was that whereas she talked and wrote quite
intelligently about Liberal principles before she was frightened
into making such talking and writing a flogging matter, our
Liberal ministers take the name of Liberalism in vain without
knowing or caring enough about its meaning even to talk and
scribble about it, and pass their flogging Bills, and institute
their prosecutions for sedition and blasphemy and so forth,
without the faintest suspicion that such proceedings need any
apology from the Liberal point of view.

It was quite easy for Patiomkin to humbug Catherine as to the
condition of Russia by conducting her through sham cities run up
for the occasion by scenic artists; but in the little world of
European court intrigue and dynastic diplomacy which was the only
world she knew she was more than a match for him and for all the
rest of her contemporaries. In such intrigue and diplomacy,
however, there was no romance, no scientific political interest,
nothing that a sane mind can now retain even if it can be
persuaded to waste time in reading it up. But Catherine as a
woman with plenty of character and (as we should say) no morals,
still fascinates and amuses us as she fascinated and amused her
contemporaries. They were great sentimental comedians, these
Peters, Elizabeths, and Catherines who played their Tsarships as
eccentric character parts, and produced scene after scene of
furious harlequinade with the monarch as clown, and of tragic
relief in the torture chamber with the monarch as pantomime demon
committing real atrocities, not forgetting the indispensable love
interest on an enormous and utterly indecorous scale. Catherine
kept this