Oscar Wilde

“ Czar. It was but the wind and rain; the night is full of storm. (Conspirators murmur outside.)
Vera. It should be so indeed. Oh, where are your guards? where are your guards?
Czar. Where should they be but at home? I shall not live pent round by sword and steel. The love of a people is a king's best body-guard.
Vera. The love of a people!
Czar. Sweet, you are safe here. Nothing can harm you here. O love, I knew you trusted me! You said you would have trust.
Vera. I have had trust. O love, the past seems but some dull grey dream from which our souls have wakened. This is life at last. ”

“ Prince Paul: Oh, we shall have another hunt immediately, for her, Sire! Prince Alexis will assist us, I am sure.
Czarevitch: You never require any assistance to ruin a woman, Prince Paul.
Czar: Vera, the Nihilist, in Moscow! O God, were it not better to die at once the dog's death they plot for me than to live as I live now! Never to sleep, or, if I do, to dream such horrid dreams that hell itself were peace when matched with them. To trust none but those I have bought, to buy none worth trusting! To see a traitor in every smile, poison in every dish, a dagger in every hand! ”

“ To-night! to-night! to-night!
Vera: Peace, you gorged adders! peace!
Michael: What, are we not here to annihilate? Shall we not keep our oath?
Vera: Your oath! your oath! Greedy that you are of gain, every man's hand lusting for his neighbour's pelf, every heart set on pillage and rapine; who, of ye all, if the crown were set on his head, would give an empire up for the mob to scramble for? The people are not yet fit for a republic in Russia.
President: Every nation is fit for a republic.
Michael: The man is a tyrant. ”

“ Michael: Fool, nothing is impossible in Russia but reform.
Vera: Ay, martial law. The last right to which the people clung has been taken from them. Without trial, without appeal, without accuser even, our brothers will be taken from their houses, shot in the streets like dogs, sent away to die in the snow, to starve in the dungeon, to rot in the mine. Do you know what martial law means? It means the strangling of a whole nation. The streets will be filled with soldiers night and day; there will be sentinels at every door. No man dare walk abroad now but the spy or the traitor. ”

“ I will make every frontier a graveyard, every province a lazar-house, and cure the sick by the sword. I shall have peace in Russia, though it be the peace of the dead. Who said I was a coward? Who said I was afraid? See, thus shall I crush this people beneath my feet! (Takes up sword of Czarevitch off table and tramples on it.)
Czarevitch: Father, beware, the sword you tread on may turn and wound you. The people suffer long, but vengeance comes at last, vengeance with red hands and silent feet.
Prince Paul: Bah! the people are bad shots; they always miss one. ”

“ Will crown you with my own hands as Empress in that great cathedral which my fathers built.
Vera (loosens her hands violently from him, and starts up) : I am a Nihilist! I cannot wear a crown!
Czar (falls at her feet) : I am no king now. I am only a boy who has loved you better than his honour, better than his oath. For love of the people I would have been a patriot. For love of you I have been a traitor. Let us go forth together, we will live amongst the common people. I am no king. ”

“ A tyrant! Hath he not dismissed his evil counsellors. That ill-omened raven of his father's life hath had his wings clipped and his claws pared, and comes to us croaking for revenge. Oh, have mercy on him! Give him a week to live!
President: Vera, pleading for a king!
Vera (proudly) : I plead not for a king, but for a brother.
Michael: For a traitor to his oath, a coward who should have flung the purple back to the fools that gave it him. No, Vera, no. The brood of men is not yet dead, nor the dull earth grown sick of childbearing. No crowned man in Russia shall pollute God's air by living. ”

“ What subtle potency lies hidden in this gaudy bauble, the crown, that makes one feel like a god when one wears it? To hold in one's hand this little fiery-coloured world, to reach out one's arm to earth's uttermost limit, to girdle the seas with one's galley; to make the land a highway for one's hosts; this is to wear a crown! to wear a crown! The meanest serf in Russia who is loved is better crowned than I. How love outweighs the balance! How poor appears the widest empire of this golden world when matched with love! ”

“ Vera, it was for you I broke my oath and wear my father's crown. I would lay at your feet this mighty Russia, which you and I have loved so well; would give you this earth as your footstool; set this crown on your head. The people will love us. We will rule them by love, as a father rules his children. There shall be liberty in Russia for every man to think as his heart bids him; liberty for men to speak as they think. ”

“ Czarevitch: I dare all for the people; but you would rob them of common rights of men.
Czar: The people have no rights.
Czarevitch: Then they have great wrongs. Father, they have won your battles for you; from the pine forests of the Baltic to the palms of India they have ridden on victory's mighty wings! Boy as I am in years, I have seen wave after wave of living men sweep up the heights of battle to their death; ay, and snatch perilous conquest from the scales of war when the bloody crescent seemed to shake above our eagles. ”

“ For every hour I have lain awake at night, waiting for the noose or the dagger, they shall pass years in Siberia, centuries in the mines! Ay! I shall have revenge.
Czarevitch: Father! have mercy on the people. Give them what they ask.
Prince Paul: And begin, Sire, with your own head; they have a particular liking for that.
Czar: The people! the people! A tiger which I have let loose on myself; but I will fight with it to the death. I am done with half treasures. I shall crush these Nihilists at a blow. There shall not be a man of them, no, nor a woman either, left alive in Russia. ”

“ But if there is a man of you found in Moscow by to-morrow night your heads will be off your shoulders.
Baron Raff. You remind us wonderfully, Sire, of your Imperial father.
Czar. I banish you all from Russia. Your estates are confiscated to the people. You may carry your titles with you. Reforms in Russia, Baron, always end in a farce. You will have a good opportunity, Prince Petrovitch, of practising self-denial, that excellent virtue! that excellent virtue! So, Baron, you think a Parliament in Russia would be merely a place for brawling. ”

“ Russia is well rid of such men as these. They are the jackals that follow in the lion's track. They have no courage themselves except to pillage and rob. But for these men and for Prince Paul my father would have been a good king, would not have died so horribly as he did die. How strange it is, the most real parts of one's life always seem to be a dream! The council, the fearful law which was to kill the people, the arrest, the cry in the court-yard, the pistol-shot, my father's bloody hands, and then the crown! ”

“ One is never too young to die for one's country!
Vera. Why do you come here night after night?
Alex. Because I love the people.
Vera. But your fellow-students must miss you. Are there no traitors among them? You know what spies there are in the University here. O Alexis, you must go! You see how desperate suffering has made us. There is no room here for a nature like yours. You must not come again.
Alex. Why do you think so poorly of me? Why should I live while my brothers suffer? ”

“ Too many of us have died on block and barricade: it is their turn to be victims now.
Alexis: God knows it, I am with you. But you must not go. The police are watching every train for you. When you are seized they have orders to place you without trial in the lowest dungeon of the palace. I know it—no matter how. Oh, think how without you the sun goes from our life, how the people will lose their leader and liberty her priestess. Vera, you must not go!
Vera: You are right: I will stay. I would live a little longer for freedom, a little longer for Russia. ”

“ I have no mother now but Russia, my life is hers to take or give away; but to-night I am here to see you. They tell me you are leaving for Novgorod to-morrow.
Vera. I must. They are getting faint-hearted there, and I would fan the flame of this revolution into such a blaze that the eyes of all kings in Europe shall be blinded. If martial law is passed they will need me all the more there. There is no limit, it seems, to the tyranny of one man; but there shall be a limit to the suffering of a whole people. ”

“ Delicately nurtured like a king's son, he has dwelt among us.
President: Ay! under a false name. He lied to us at the beginning. He lies to us now at the end.
Vera: I swear he is true. There is not a man here who does not owe him his life a thousand times. When the bloodhounds were on us that night, who saved us from arrest, torture, flogging, death, but he ye seek to kill?—
Michael: To kill all tyrants is our mission!
Vera: He is no tyrant. I know him well! He loves the people.
President: We know him too; he is a traitor.
Vera: A traitor! ”

“ Czar: Say that again! To crush every Nihilist in Russia; to crush this woman, their leader, who makes war upon me in my own city. Prince Paul Maraloffski, I create you Maréchal of the whole Russian Empire to help you to carry out martial law. Give me the proclamation. I will sign it at once.
Prince Paul (points on paper) : Here, Sire.
Czarevitch (starts up and puts his hands on the paper) : Stay! I tell you, stay! The priests have taken heaven from the people, and you would take the earth away too.
Prince Paul (hurriedly) : We have no time, Prince, now. This boy will ruin everything. ”

“ I saw a new day of oppression dawn on Russia; but you never came back. So you pass nights in the palace, do you? You know the password for the guards; you have a key to a secret door. You are a spy—I never trusted you, with your soft white hands, your curled hair, your pretty graces. You have no mark of suffering about you; you cannot be of the people. You are a spy—a spy—traitor!
Omnes: Kill him! Kill him! (Draw their knives.)
Vera (rushing in front of Alexis) : Stand back, I say, Michael! Stand back all! Do not dare lay a hand upon him! He is the noblest heart amongst us. ”

“ Oh, how could Russia bear two hearts like yours and his!
Alex. Vera, the Emperor was not always like this. There was a time when he loved the people. It is that devil, whom God curse, Prince Paul Maraloffski who has brought him to this. To-morrow, I swear it, I shall plead for the people to the Emperor.
Vera. Plead to the Czar! Foolish boy, it is [23] only those who are sentenced to death that ever see our Czar. Besides, what should he care for a voice that pleads for mercy? The cry of a strong nation in its agony has not moved that heart of stone. ”

“ Am I a tyrant? I'm not. I love the people. I'm their father. I'm called so in every official proclamation. Have a care, boy; have a care. You don't seem to be cured yet of your foolish tongue. (Goes over to Prince Paul and puts his hand on his shoulder.) Prince Paul, tell me, were there many people there this morning to see the Nihilists hung?
Prince Paul: Hanging is of course a good deal less of a novelty in Russia now, Sire, than it was three or four years ago; and you know how easily the people get tired even of their best amusements. ”

“ In these modern days to be vulgar, illiterate, common and vicious, seems to give a man a marvellous infinity of rights that his honest fathers never dreamed of. Believe me, Prince, in good democracy every man should be an aristocrat; but these people in Russia who seek to thrust us out are no better than the animals in one's preserves, and made to be shot at, most of them. ”

“ What more does a girl want?
Michael: But Vera, Father Peter——
Peter: Vera, my lad, has got too many ideas; I don't think much of ideas myself; I've got on well enough in life without 'em; why shouldn't my children? There's Dmitri! Could have stayed here and kept the inn; many a young lad would have jumped at the offer in these hard times; but he, scatter-brained featherhead of a boy, must needs go off to Moscow to study the law! What does he want knowing about the law? Let a man do his duty, say I, and no one will trouble him. ”

“ What! is it so small a thing to strangle a nation, to murder a kingdom, to wreck an empire? Who are we who dare lay this ban of terror on a people? Have we less vices than they have, that we bring them to the bar of judgment before us? ”