It cannot be said that he succumbed easily; he struggled desperately for full ten years. He came into exile still hoping to confound his enemies and vindicate himself; he came, in a word, still ready for conflict, bringing plans and projects. But he soon discerned that all was over.
Perhaps he could have dealt even with this discovery, but he had at his side a wife and children and ahead of him years of exile, poverty, and privation; and Vitberg was turning grey, growing old, growing old not by the day but by the hour. When I left him in Vyatka at the end of two years he was ten years older.
Here is the story of this long martyrdom.
The Emperor Alexander did not believe it \'\'as his victory over Napoleon: he was oppressed by the fame of it and genuinely gave the glory to God. Always disposed to mysticism and melancholy, in which many people saw the fretting of conscience, he gave way to it particularly after the series of victories over Napoleon.
When 'the last soldiers of the enemy had crossed the frontier,'
Alexander issued a proclamation in which he vowed to raise in Moscow a huge temple to the Saviour.
Plans were invited from all sides, and a great competition was instituted.
Vitberg \vas at that time a young artist who had just completed his studies and won a gold medal for painting. A Swede by origin, he was born in Russia and at first was educated in the Engineers' Cadet Corps. The artist was enthusiastic, eccentric, and given to mysticism: he read the proclamation, read the appeal for plans, and flung aside all other pursuits. For days and nights he wandered about the streets of Petersburg, tormented by a persistent idea ; it was stronger than he was: he locked himsE-lf up in his room, took a pencil and set to work.
To no one in the world did he confide his design. After some months of work he went to Moscow to study the city and the surrounding country and set to work once more, shutting himself up for months together and keeping his design a secret.
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The date of the competition arrived. The plans were numerous: there were designs from Italy and from Germany and our Academicians sent in theirs. And the unknown young man sent in his among the rest. Weeks passed before the Emperor examined the plans. These were the forty days in the wilderness, days of temptation, doubt, and agonising suspense.
Vitberg's colossal design, filled with religious poetry, impressed Alexander. He came to a stop before it, and it was the first of which he inquired the authorship. They broke open the sealed envelope and found the unknown name of an Academy pupil.
Alexander desired to see Vitberg. He had a long talk with the artist. His bold and fervent language, his genuine inspiration and the mystical tinge of his convictions impressed the Emperor.
'You speak in stones,' he observed, examining Vitberg's design again.
That very day his design was accepted and Vitberg was chosen to be the architect and the director of the building committee.
Alexander did not know that with the laurel wreath he was putting a crown of thorns on the artist's head.
There is no art more akin to mysticism than architecture ; abstract, geometrical, mutely musical, passionless, it lives in symbol, in emblem, in suggestion. S imple l ines, their harmonious combination, rhythm, numerical relationships, make up something mysterious and at the same time incomplete. The building, the temple, is not its own object, as is a statue or a picture, a poem, or a symphony; a building requires an inmate; it is a place mapped and cleared for habitation, an environment, the cuirass of the tortoise, the shell of the mollusc; and the whole point of it is that the receptacl(' should correspond with its spirit, its object, its inmate, as the cuirass does with the tortoise.
The walls of the temple, its vaults and columns, its portal and fa<;ade, i ts foundation and its cupola must bear the imprint of the divinity that dwells within it, just as the convolutions of the brain are imprinted on the hone of the skull.
The Egyptian temples were their holy books. The obelisks were. sermons on the high-road.
Solomon's temple was the Bible turned into architecture; just as St Peter's in Rome is the architectural symbol of the escape from Catholicism, of the beginning of the lay world, of the beginning of the secularisation of mankind.
The very building of temples was so invariably accompanied by mystic rites, symbolical utterances, mysterious consecrations that the mediaeval builders looked upon themselves as some-
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thing apart, a kind of priesthood, the heirs of the builders of Solomon's temple, and made up secret guilds of stonemasons, which afterwards passed into Freemasonry.
From the time of the Renaissance architecture loses i ts properly mystical character. The Christian faith is struggling with philosophic doubt, the Gothic arch with the Greek pediment, spiritual holiness with "·ordly beauty. "'hat gives St Peter's its lofty significance is that in its colossal dimension Christianity struggles towards life, the church becomes pagan and on the walls of the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo paints Jesus Christ as a broad-shouldered athlete, a Hercules in the flower of his age and strength.
After St Peter's basilica, church architecture deteriorated completely and was reduced at last to simple repetition, on a larger or smaller scale, of the ancient Greek peripteries or of St Peter's.
One Parthenon is called St Madeleine's church in Paris; the other, the Stock Exchange in !'\"''" York.
'Vithout faith and without special circumstances, it was hard to create anything living: there is an air of artificiality, of hypocris�·, of anachronism, a bout all new churches, such as the five-domed cruet-stands with onions instead of corks in the Indo
Byzantine manner, which Nicholas builds, with Ton for architect, or the angular, Gothic churches, so offensive to the artistic eye, with which the English decorate their towns.
But the circumstances under which Vitberg created his design, his personality, and the state of mind of the Emperor were all exceptional.
The war of 1 8 1 2 had caused a violent upheaval in men's minds in Russia ; it was long after the deliverance of l\1oscow before the ferment of thought and nervous irritation could subside. Events outside Russia, the taking of Paris, the story of the Hundred Days, the suspense, the rumours, "'aterloo, Napoleon sailing owr the ocean, the mourning for fallen kinsmen, apprehension for tlw living, the returning troops, the soldiers going home, all had a violent effect on even the coarsest natures. Imagine a youthful artist, a mystic, gifted with creative power and at the same time a fanatic, under the influence of all that was happening, under the influence of the Tsar's challenge and his own genius.
Ncar :Moscow, between the Mozhaysk and Kaluga roads, there is a slight eminence which dominates the whole city. These are the Sparrow Hills of which I have spoken in the first reminiscences of my youth. The city lies stretched at their foot, and one of the most picturesque views of Moscow is from the top of them.