Part 4 — Appendix (To Chapter 29)

I N. H. Ketscher (1842-1847)

I must speak of Ketscher again, and this time in far more detail. On my return from exile I found him as before in Moscow—though, indeed, he had become so rooted in Moscow and so much a part of the life there that I cannot imagine Moscow without him, or him in any other city. He did try moving to Petersburg, he could not stand six months of it, threw up his position and reappeared on the banks of the Neglinny in Bazhanov’s café to preach free-thought to officers as they played billiards, to teach actors dramatic art, to translate Shakespeare, and to love and worry his old friends. It is true that he had now a new circle, i.e., the circle of Byelinsky and Bakunin; but though he lectured them day and night, he was still heart and soul with us.

He was then going on for forty, but he remained absolutely an old student. How did that happen? It is just that that we must investigate.

Ketscher is a perfect example of the class of strange personalities that were developed in the stagnant swamp of the Russia of the Petersburg period, especially after 1812, who were the consequence of it, the victims of it, and indirectly the stepping-stones from it to other things. These people broke away from the wearisome and ignoble common track and never found one of their own, spent their lives in seeking it and got no farther than the search. The characteristics of these victims are very varied; they are not all like Onyegin or Petchorin they are not all idle and superfluous people; there are people who work hard and yet accomplish nothing, people who are failures: I have been tempted a thousand times to describe a whole series of original figures, to draw striking portraits taken from life, but I have stopped short, overwhelmed by my material. There is nothing of the herd, of the rank and file about them; they are of all shapes and figures, but one common feature or rather one common misfortune connects them all. Looking into the dark grey background, they see soldiers under the stick, serfs under the lash, faces that betray a stifled moan, carts on their way to Siberia, prisoners trudging in the same direction, shaven heads, branded faces, helmets, epaulettes, plumes ... in short, the Russia of Petersburg. It is that that torments them; they have neither the strength to accept it nor to tear themselves away nor to alter things. They try to escape from that background and cannot—they have no ground under their feet; they try to cry out against it—they have no voice, nor are there ears to hear them.

It is no wonder that with this loss of balance there are among them more original and eccentric than practically useful and perseveringly industrious people, that there is as much that is inharmonious and senseless in their lives as there is good and humane.

Ketscher’s father was a scientific instrument-maker. He was famed for his surgical instruments and extreme honesty. He died early, leaving his widow a large family to bring up and business affairs in confusion. Consequently there could be in Ketscher’s case no question of real contact, that is, of direct contact with the simple people such as is, even in a wealthy household, absorbed with one’s foster-mother’s milk, with one’s earliest games. The foreign manufacturers and traders, craftsmen and their employers, make up a narrow circle, cut off by habits, interests, and everything else both from the lower and the upper classes of Russia. Often in those circles the family life is pure and moral in comparison with the savage tyranny and hidden vice of our merchants, with the sad and dreary drunkenness of our workmen, and with the narrow, filthy life of our government clerks which rests entirely on thieving. It is, nevertheless, entirely alien to the world surrounding it, it is foreign, and from the very first gives a different pli and different fundamental principles.

Ketscher’s mother was a Russian, and I imagine that it was owing to that fact that Ketscher did not grow up a foreigner. I do not think she took any part in the children’s education, but what was of the greatest consequence was that they were baptized into the Orthodox Church, which meant that they had no religion whatever. Had they been Lutherans or Catholics they would have been drawn in the German direction. They would have gone to one or other Kirche, and would insensibly have passed into its Gemeinde, with its alienating and isolating influence, with its rival coteries and its parochial interests. No one sent Ketscher to the Russian Church, of course; besides, even if he had been in the habit of going to it sometimes as a child, it has not the spider-like character of its sister churches, especially with foreigners.

It must be remembered that the period of which I am speaking knew nothing of hysterical orthodoxy. The Church, like the State, did not fly to any weapon for its defence and was not jealous of its rights, perhaps because no one was attacking them. Every one knew what these two beasts were like and no one put a finger in the jaws of either. They, for their part, did not snatch at the strangers within their gates, being doubtful of their orthodoxy or of their loyalty. When the Chair of Theology was founded in the Moscow University, old Professor Heym, famous for his lexicons, said with horror in the university hall: ‘Es ist ein Ende mit der grossen Hochschule Ruthenias.’ Even Magnitsky’s and Runitch’s savage epidemic of bigotry, senseless, flagrant as it was, and (as always with us) carried out by spies and policemen, passed over like a malignant storm-cloud, broke over the people who happened to be on the road, and vanished in the shape of diverse Fotys and countesses.⁠[131] In the high schools and boarding-schools the catechism was taught as a form and for the examinations, which always began with ‘Scripture.’

In due time Ketscher entered the Academy of Medicine and Surgery. That was also a purely foreign institution and also not particularly orthodox. One of the lecturers there was Just Christian Loder, the friend of Goethe and the teacher of Humboldt, one of the pleiades of free and vigorous thinkers who have raised Germany to a height of which she never dreamed. For these men science was still a religion and propaganda a warfare; freedom from the fetters of theology was new for them; they still remembered the struggle for it, they had faith in their conquest of it and were proud of it. Loder would never have consented to teach anatomy according to the catechism of Filaret. Beside him stood Fischer of Waldheim and the surgeon Hildebrandt, of whom I have spoken in another place. There was never one word of Russian nor one Russian face in the Academy, but there were various other German laboratory assistants, demonstrators, and chemists: everything Russian was thrust into the background. There is only one exception that we remember, i.e., Detkovsky. Ketscher cherished his memory, and he probably had a good influence on the students. The medical students, however, made up of two species, Germans and seminarists, did not even in later days take part in the common life of the universities, but confined themselves to their own affairs.

Those affairs seemed of little account to Ketscher, which is the best proof of his not being a genuine German and not putting his profession before everything.

His own family circle could have no special attraction for him, and from early years he had preferred to live apart. The rest of his surroundings could only repel and jar upon him. He set to reading and re-reading Schiller.

In later years Ketscher translated the whole of Shakespeare, but Schiller left indelible traces upon him.

Schiller was exactly the right author for our students. Posa and Max, Karl Moor and Ferdinand were students, robber-students: it is all the protest of the first dawn, of the first revolt. More swayed by his heart than his intellect, Ketscher understood and absorbed the poetical theorising of Schiller, the revolutionary philosophy in his dialogue, and there he stopped. He was satisfied: criticism and scepticism were utterly alien to him.

A few years after his first reading of Schiller he came upon another gospel and his moral life was determined for ever. Everything else interested him little and passed without leaving a trace. The revolution of the ’nineties, that vast, colossal tragedy in the style of Schiller, with its bloodshed and its side issues, with its gloomy virtues and its bright ideals, with the same character of dawn and protest, absorbed him entirely. In this, too, Ketscher did not attempt to analyse. He accepted the French Revolution as though it were a biblical legend, he believed in it, he loved its leading figures, he had his personal preferences and dislikes among them; nothing drew him behind the scenes.

Such he was when I met him at Passek’s in 1831, and such he was when I parted from him in 1847 on the high road at Tchorny Gryaz.

This—not romantic, but so to speak ethico-political—dreamer could hardly have found the surroundings he was seeking in the Academy of Medicine and Surgery of those days. A worm was gnawing at his heart and medical science could not stifle it. Withdrawing from the persons surrounding him, he took to living more and more in one of the characters with which his imagination was filled. Continually coming into contact with very different interests and petty people, he began to shun society, got into the way of scowling, telling bitter truths that were uncalled for, and truths that every one knew, and tried to live like La Fontaine’s ‘Sonderling,’ or ‘Robinson Crusoe’ in Sokolniky. In the little garden of their house there was an arbour, and here ‘the apothecary Ketscher took refuge to translate the apothecary Schiller’ as N. A. Polevoy used to jest in those days. The door of the arbour had no lock and there was hardly room to turn round in it, but that was just right for him. In the morning he used to dig in the garden, plant and transplant flowers and shrubs, treat the poor of his district gratis, correct the proofs of ‘The Robbers’ and of ‘Fiesco,’ and instead of evening prayers would recite speeches of Marat and of Robespierre. In fact, if he had worked less with books and more with his spade, he would have been just what Rousseau wished every man to be.

Ketscher made our acquaintance through Vadim in 1831. In our circle, which consisted in those days of Sazonov, the elder Passeks, and two or three other students, besides Ogaryov and me, he saw the first promise of the accomplishment of his cherished dreams, the first signs of new growth on the fields that had been mown so thoroughly in 1826, and so he attached himself to us. Being older than we, he soon acquired ‘the rights of censorship’ and would not let us take a step without comments and sometimes reproofs. He believed that he was a practical man and more experienced than we; moreover, we liked him, liked him very much in fact. If any one fell ill, Ketscher was like a sister of mercy, and never left the invalid till he recovered. When Kolreif, Antonovitch and the others were arrested, Ketscher was the first to get into the barracks to see them, did his best to entertain them, lectured them, and went so far that Lissovsky, the general of the gendarmes, sent for him and impressed upon him that he must be more careful and must remember his position (he was an army doctor). When Nadyezhdin, who was theoretically in love, wanted to be secretly married to a young lady whose parents forbade her to think of him, Ketscher undertook to assist him and arrange a romantic elopement, and, wrapped in his celebrated black cloak lined with red, sat on a seat in the Rozhdestvensky Boulevard with Nadyezhdin waiting for a secret signal. For a long time they waited in vain; Nadyezhdin grew weary and disheartened. Ketscher stoically consoled him; despair and his consolations had a singular effect on Nadyezhdin, he fell asleep. Ketscher scowled and strode gloomily up and down the boulevard. ‘She isn’t coming,’ said Nadyezhdin, half asleep, ‘let us go home to bed.’ Ketscher scowled more than ever, shook his head gloomily, and led the sleepy Nadyezhdin home. When they had gone, the girl came out into the porch of her house and the signal agreed upon was repeated not once but a dozen times, and she waited an hour or two; all was quiet and she more quietly still returned to her room, probably shedding tears but completely cured of her love for Nadyezhdin. It was a long time before Ketscher could forgive Nadyezhdin his sleepiness; he would shake his head, while his lower lip quivered, and say: ‘He did not love her.’

The sympathy Ketscher showed at the time of our imprisonment and at the time of my marriage has been described already. For the five years from 1834 to 1840, in which he was almost the only one of our circle left in Moscow, he represented it with pride and glory, preserving our tradition, and not changing it in a single detail. So we found him, some of us in 1840 and some of us in 1842. In us exile, contact with a different world, reading, and work had made many changes. Ketscher, our irremovable representative, remained the same as ever. Only instead of Schiller he was translating Shakespeare.

One of the first things which Ketscher, who was extremely delighted at having his old friends gathered together again in Moscow, did was to renew his censorship morum—and this was the occasion of the first signs of friction, which for a long time he failed to notice. His scolding sometimes angered us, which had never happened in old days, and sometimes bored us. In the past we had lived at such high pressure and so much in common that no one had paid attention to little stumbling-blocks in the pathway. Time, as I have said, had made many changes; character had developed in different directions—and the part of a kind but fault-finding uncle was often worse than absurd. Every one tried to turn it into a jest, to cloak his superfluous candour and critical love under his friendliness and good intentions, and they made a great mistake. Yes, what was amiss was that it was necessary to cloak, to explain away, to practise restraint. If he had been checked from the very first, those unhappy misunderstandings with which our Moscow life ended at the beginning of 1847 would never have arisen.

Our new friends, however, were not quite so indulgent as we were, and even Byelinsky, as intolerant of injustice as Ketscher himself, would sometimes lose all patience and, though he was very fond of him, would give him severe lessons, refusing to argue with him for months together. Cold or indifferent Ketscher never was. He was invariably either violently aggressive or ardently affectionate, passing rapidly from being the warmest of friends into being the sternest of judges; this, of course, made coldness and silence harder for him to bear than anything.

Immediately after a quarrel or a series of violent attacks Ketscher’s attention was distracted, his anger passed without leaving a trace, probably he was inwardly dissatisfied with himself, but he never admitted it; on the contrary, he tried to turn everything into a joke and again overstepped the limit beyond which a joke ceases to be amusing. It was the everlasting repetition of the famous ‘gander’ in the reconciliation of Ivan Ivanovitch with Ivan Nikiforovitch.⁠[132] Every one must have seen children who once they have yielded to temptation are nervously unable to stop short of any naughtiness, the conviction that they will be punished seems to intensify the temptation. Feeling that he had again succeeded in irritating some one into cold and biting replies, he returned to an utterly gloomy frame of mind, raised his eyebrows, strode about the room, became a tragic figure from some play of Schiller’s, a juryman from the court of Fouquier-Tinville,⁠[133] in a ferocious voice brought out a series of accusations against all of us, accusations for which there was not the slightest foundation, convinced himself in the end of their truth, and, overwhelmed with grief that his friends were such scoundrels, went morosely home, leaving us dumbfoundered and furious, until wrath gave way to mercy and we laughed like lunatics.

Early next morning, Ketscher, mild and mournful, was pacing up and down his room, savagely smoking his pipe, waiting for one of us to come to scold him and be reconciled. He would make it up, always, of course, preserving his dignity as of an old, though exacting, uncle. If no one appeared, Ketscher, concealing a mortal dread in his heart, would go mournfully to a café in Neglinny Street, or to the bright, peaceful haven in which he was always met by a good-natured laugh and a friendly greeting, i.e., to M. S. Shtchepkin’s, and there stay till the storm he had raised abated. He complained of us, of course, to Schtchepkin. The kind-hearted old man gave him a good scolding, told him that he talked nonsense, that we were not such miscreants as he made out, and offered to take him at once to see us. We knew that Ketscher was miserable after his outbursts, and understood, or rather forgave, the feeling which prevented him from saying simply and directly that he was wrong and so effacing at the first word all traces of discord. The ladies, who almost always took his part, were foremost in making approaches to him. They liked his open simplicity, which went as far as rudeness (he never spared them), and regarded it as eccentricity. Their support convinced Ketscher that that was the way to behave, that it was charming and was, moreover, his duty.

Our quarrels and disputes at Pokrovskoe were sometimes full of absurdity, and at the same time whole days were overshadowed by them.

‘Why is the coffee not nice?’ I asked Matvey.

‘It has not been properly made,’ answered Ketscher, and suggested that his method should be tried. The coffee so made was just the same.

‘Bring the spirit-lamp and coffee here. I will make it myself,’ said Ketscher, and set to work. The coffee was no better, as I observed to Ketscher. He tried it and, fixing his eyes upon me from under his spectacles, asked in a voice already a little bit excited: ‘So in your opinion this coffee is no better?’

‘No.’

‘Well, it is really amazing that even in such a trifle you refuse to change your opinion.’

‘It is not I, but the coffee.’

‘Really it is beyond anything, this miserable vanity.’

‘Upon my word, I didn’t make the coffee and I didn’t make the coffee-pot....’

‘I know you, anything to prove your point; what pettiness over the beastly coffee—it’s hellish vanity!’ He could say no more; heartbroken at my despotism and vanity in matters of taste, he thrust his cap down on his head, snatched up a bark basket and went off into the woods. He came back towards evening, having walked fifteen miles; a successful search for edible fungi had dispelled his gloomy mood. I, of course, made no reference to coffee, but paid various civilities to the fungi.

Next morning he tried to raise the coffee question again, but I declined to take up the challenge.

One of the chief subjects of our disputes was the education of my son. Education shares the fate of medicine and philosophy: on those subjects every one in the world has positive and sharply defined opinions, except the few who have devoted a long and serious study to them. Ask about the building of a bridge or draining of a swamp, and a man will tell you frankly that he is not an engineer or an agricultural expert. Begin talking about dropsy or consumption, he will suggest a remedy, one that he remembers, has heard spoken of, or that has benefited his uncle. But in questions of education he goes farther still. ‘That is my principle’ he tells you, ‘and I never depart from it; I don’t like trifling in matters of education, it is a subject I feel too keenly about.’

What ideas Ketscher was bound to have about education may be gathered to the minutest detail in the sketch we have given of his character. In this he was consistent, which is more than can be said of people who discourse on education as a rule. Ketscher’s ideas were those of Rousseau’s ‘Émile,’ and he firmly believed that the negation of everything which is done with children now would of itself be excellent education. He wanted to wrest the child from artificial life and consciously restore him to a savage condition, to that primitive independence in which equality is carried so far as to wipe out the distinction between man and the monkey.

We were ourselves not so very far removed from this view, but in him, like everything that he had once assimilated, it was a fanatical creed which admitted neither of doubt nor argument. A very real and genuine need is felt for something very different from the old-fashioned theological, scholastic, aristocratic education in which dogmatism, formalism, strained pedantic classicism, and external discipline are considered of more importance than moral development. Unluckily, in education as in everything else, the violent and revolutionary method, while breaking down the old, has given us nothing to replace it. The wild assumption of the ‘normal man,’ which the followers of Jean Jacques adopted, cut the child off from his historical surroundings, made him a foreigner in them, as though education were not the development of the life of the race in the individual.

The arguments about education were rarely confined to the theoretical field, the application was too near at hand. My son, at that time seven or eight years old, was a delicate child, very liable to attacks of fever and dysentery. This weakness lasted until our visit to Naples, or rather till we met at Sorrento a doctor of whom we knew nothing, who altered the whole system of diet and treatment. Ketscher wanted to harden him all at once like tempered steel. I would not allow it, and he was furious: ‘You are a conservative,’ he shouted angrily, ‘you are ruining the unfortunate child, you are turning him into an effeminate little gentleman and at the same time a slave.’

The child was naughty and shouted when his mother was ill. I checked him: apart from the plain necessity of doing so, it seemed to me perfectly right to make him restrain himself for the sake of somebody else, for the sake of his mother who loved him beyond measure; but Ketscher said to me gloomily:

‘What right have you to check his shouting? He ought to shout, it is no life at all. The accursed authority of parents!’

These discussions, however lightly I took them, made our relations difficult and threatened a serious estrangement between Ketscher and his friends. If this had come about, he would have been more severely punished than any one, both because he was very much devoted to us all and because he did not know how to live alone. His character was eminently expansive and not at all self-centred. Some one was necessary to him. His very work was a continual conversation with some one else, that some one else was Shakespeare. After working the whole morning he felt dull. In the summer he could walk in the country or work in his garden; but in winter there was nothing left for him but to put on his famous cloak or his rough, camel-coloured overcoat and go from near Sokolniky to us, to Arbat, or to Nikitsky Street.

His captious intolerance was due to the fact that he never had the intellectual exercise of verifying, analysing, and making problems clear: for him there were no problems; all was settled and he went straight forward without looking back. Perhaps if he had been engaged in practical work this might have been a good thing, but he had none. Active participation in active affairs was impossible, only the three uppermost grades in the service take part in them in Russia. And he transferred his thirst for activity to the private life of his friends. We were spared by theoretical work from the emptiness which gnawed at his heart. Ketscher settled all questions summarily, straight off, in one way or another—which did not matter; having once settled them, he went on without hesitating at anything, remaining obstinately faithful to his conviction.

For all that there was no serious estrangement between us till 1846. Natalie was very fond of Ketscher, he was inseparably connected with the memory of the 9th of May 1838. She knew that a tender affection lay hid under his hedgehog-like prickles and was unwilling to see that the prickles were growing and sending their roots farther and farther down.

A quarrel with Ketscher seemed to her something sinister; she fancied that if time could file away, and with such a tiny file, one of the links that had held so firmly throughout our youth, it would next attack another, and the whole chain would be broken. In the midst of sullen words and harsh answers I used to see her turn pale and entreat me with her eyes to stop, she would shake off her momentary vexation and hold out her hand. Sometimes this touched Ketscher, but he made tremendous efforts to show that he did not really care, that he was ready to make it up, but that he would perhaps go on quarrelling.

The dreadful fluctuating relation of bullying affection and yielding affection might have been prolonged at this stage for years. But new circumstances which complicated Ketscher’s life brought things to a head.

He had a love affair, as queer as everything else in his life, which made him settle down quickly in rather clammy domesticity. Ketscher’s life, which was based on the utmost simplicity, on the elementary requirements of a student’s Bohemian existence among his comrades, was suddenly transformed. A woman appeared in his home, or to be more correct a home appeared because in it there was a woman. Till then no one had conceived of Ketscher as a domestic character, for in his chez soi he liked to be irregular in everything, to walk about as he lunched, to smoke between the soup and the beef, to sleep in any bed but his own, so that Konstantin Aksakov observed jestingly ‘that Ketscher was distinguished from the human species by the fact that men dine while Ketscher feeds.’ All at once he had a dwelling, a domestic hearth, a roof of his own!

This was how it happened.

A few years before, Ketscher, as he walked every day between Sokolniky and Basmanny Street, used to meet a poor, almost destitute little girl. She used to return that way, tired out and depressed, from some workshop. She was plain, shy, scared, and pathetic. No one noticed her existence, no one pitied her. Without parents or relations she had been taken for the sake of Christian charity into some dissenting community, there grew up, and left it to go to hard work with no defence or support, alone in the world. Ketscher got into conversation with her and taught her not to be afraid of him, questioning her about her sorrowful childhood and wretched existence. He was the first person in whom she found sympathy and warmth, and she attached herself to him body and soul. His life was lonely and cheerless; behind all the noise of suppers with his friends, of first nights at the Moscow theatres, and of the Bozhanovsky coffee-house, there was an emptiness in his heart which he would, of course, not have admitted to himself, but which made itself felt. The poor, colourless flower fell of itself on his bosom—and he accepted it, not thinking much about the consequence and probably not attaching special importance to the incident.

In the best and most progressive men there still exists something akin to the property qualification for the franchise in their attitude to women, and there are classes below it which are regarded as naturally destined to be victims. We have all treated them as of no account, so there is hardly any one who can dare to throw a stone.

The orphan was passionately devoted to Ketscher. Being brought up in a dissenting community had left its traces on her: she had gained from it a capacity for blind faith, for idol-worship, a capacity for persistent, concentrated fanaticism and boundless devotion. Everything that she had loved and worshipped, everything she had feared, everything she had obeyed, Christ and the Mother of God, the holy saints and the wonder-working ikon—all that she found now in Ketscher, the man who was the first to pity her, the first to be kind to her. And all this was half-hidden, half-buried, dared not express itself.

She had a child; she was very ill, the baby died.... The bond which should have strengthened the tie between them broke it. Ketscher grew colder to S——, went to see her less often, and then abandoned her altogether. That this child of nature would not ‘cease to love him easily’ might have been confidently predicted. What had she left in all the wide world but her love? There was nothing else but to throw herself in the river Moskva. The poor girl used to go out when her day’s work was done, scantily clothed in her poor garments, regardless of rain or cold, along the road leading to Basmanny Street, and would wait for hours together to meet him, to watch him pass, and then to weep, to weep the whole night through; as a rule she hid herself, but sometimes she bowed and spoke. If he answered kindly, S—— was happy and ran home in good spirits. Of her ‘misfortune,’ of her love she dared not speak, she was ashamed. Two years or more passed like this. In silence, without repining, she endured her fate. In 1845 Ketscher moved to Petersburg. This was too much for her. Not to see him even in the street, not to observe him from a distance and watch him pass, to know that he was hundreds of miles away among strangers and not to know whether he was well or whether any trouble had befallen him—this she could not bear. Entirely without means and without assistance, S—— began saving up her kopecks, devoted all her efforts to this one object, worked for months, then vanished and made her way somehow or other to Petersburg. There, tired, thin, and hungry, she went to Ketscher, imploring him not to spurn her but to take her, telling him that she wanted nothing, that she would find a corner for herself, would find work and live on bread and water, if only she could stay in the city where he was and might sometimes see him. Only then Ketscher fully understood what a heart beat in her bosom. He was shattered, overwhelmed. Pity, remorse, the consciousness of being so loved changed his attitude: now she should remain there with him, this should be her home, he would be her husband, her friend, her protector. Her dreams had come true; forgotten were the cold autumn nights, forgotten the terrible journey and the tears of jealousy and bitter sobs: she was with him and would certainly never be parted from him living. Before Ketscher came back to Moscow no one knew all this story except Mihail Semyonovitch Shtchepkin, now it was neither possible nor necessary to conceal it; we two and all our circle received with open arms this child of nature who had performed so heroic a feat. And this girl, full of love for him as she was, did Ketscher an infinite amount of harm with her absolute devotion and submission. On her lay all the blessing and all the curse that lies upon the proletariat, especially upon ours.

We in our turn did her almost as much harm as she did Ketscher.

And in both cases it was done in complete ignorance and with the purest intentions. She completely ruined Ketscher’s life as a child may ruin a fine engraving with his paint-brush, supposing that he is adorning it. Between Ketscher and S——, between S—— and our circle, lay a vast, terrible chasm, steep and precipitous, and with no bridge, no pass to cross it. We and she belonged to different ages of mankind, to different geological formations, to different volumes in the history of the world. We were the children of New Russia fresh from the university and the academy, we were fascinated by the political splendour of the West and religiously cherished our infidelity, openly denying the Church, while she had been brought up in a dissenting community, in a Russia of the days before Peter, in all the bigotry of sectarianism, with all the superstitions of a hidden religion, with all the legendary marvels of old-world Russian life.

Having by an extraordinary effort of will fastened the severed ties again, she kept tight hold of the knot. Ketscher could not escape now. But indeed he did not wish to. Blaming himself for the past, he strove sincerely to efface it; S——’s stupendous effort had won him. Yielding before it, he knew that he too was making a sacrifice, but, being an extremely pure and generous nature, he was glad to make it as an atonement. But he knew only the material side of the sacrifice: the practical restriction of his freedom. The incongruity of an old student with Schilleresque dreams living with a woman for whom not merely the world of Schiller but even the world of reading and writing, of all secular education, did not exist, never entered his head.

People may say what they like, but the saying inter pares amicitia is perfectly true and every mésalliance is foredoomed to unhappiness. A great deal that is stupid, supercilious, and bourgeois is implied in the saying, but in essence it is true. In the worst of all forms of inequality, the inequality of culture, there is one salvation: the education of one person by the other; but for that two rare gifts are needed: one must know how to educate and the other must know how to be educated; one must be able to lead, the other to follow.

Far more often the companionship of an undeveloped personality, confined to the pettiness of personal life with no other interests to engross the heart, weighs the other down, induces foolishness and fatigue; imperceptibly he grows petty and narrow, and though he feels ill at ease, yet, entangled in nets and meshes, he reconciles himself to it. Sometimes it happens that neither of them yields, and then the marriage turns into a permanent war, an everlasting duel in which they grow set and remain for ever in fruitless efforts on the one side to lift up, on the other to drag down: that is, both trying to defend their several positions. When their strength is equal, this conflict swallows up their whole life and the strongest natures are exhausted and sink helpless by the way. The more cultured nature is the first to succumb, the aesthetic feelings are deeply wounded by the difference of level. The best moments, which should be bright and musical, are poisoned by it: expansive natures passionately desire that all who are near and dear to them should be near to their thoughts, to their religion; this is taken for intolerance. For them the proselytism of the home is the continuation of their apostolic work, their propaganda; their happiness is limited where they are not understood ... and most often there is no wish to understand them.

To educate a mature woman is a very difficult task; it is especially difficult in those marriages which are the consequence and not the commencement of intimate relations. Ties that have been lightly, frivolously begun rarely rise above the level of the bedroom and the kitchen. The common roof comes too late for education under it to be possible; only now and then some misfortune will rouse a soul that sleeps but is capable of awakening. For the most part la petite femme never becomes a full-sized one, never becomes wife and sister together; she either remains mistress and courtesan, or becomes cook and mistress.

Living under the same roof is in itself a terrible thing over which half the marriages come to ruin. Living cramped up together, people come too close to each other, see each other too minutely, too much in deshabille, and gradually petal by petal tear away all the flowers of the wreath that crowned each with grace and poetry. But similarity of culture goes a long way to smooth things over. If it is absent and there is idle leisure, one cannot be for ever babbling nonsense, talking of housekeeping or paying compliments; and what is to be done with a woman when she is something between an odalisque and a servant, a creature bodily near and intellectually remote. She is not wanted by day and she is for ever on the spot; a man cannot share his interests with her and she cannot share her gossip with him.

Every uneducated woman living with an educated husband reminds me of Delilah and Samson, she cuts off his strength and there is no guarding oneself from her. Between dinner, even if it is late, and bed, even if one goes to it at ten o’clock, there is an endless period in which one does not want to go on working and yet is not ready for sleep, when the linen has been counted and expenses reckoned up. It is in those hours that the wife drags the husband down into the narrow circle of her trivialities, into the world of irritable resentments, tittle-tattle, and spiteful insinuations. This is bound to leave its traces. Relations of cohabitation between a man and a woman without equality of culture are sometimes enduring when they rest on convenience, on common housekeeping, I had almost said on hygiene. Sometimes these working associations are a mutual help combined with mutual satisfaction; for the most part a wife is taken as a nurse, as a good housewife pour avoir un bon pot-au-feu as Proudhon said to me. The formula of the old jurisprudence is very clever, a mensa et toro; destroy the common bed and common board and they will separate with untroubled conscience.

These business-like marriages are scarcely better. The husband is continually at his work, professional or commercial, at his office, his counting-house, or his shop. His wife is continually busy with the linen and the stores. The husband returns tired; everything is ready for him, and everything goes with the same little even trot, to the gates of the cemetery to which their parents have preceded them. This is a purely town phenomenon and it is more often met with in England than anywhere; this is the petty-bourgeois happiness preached by the moralists of the French stage and dreamt of by the Germans⁠[134]⁠; different stages of culture can live together more easily within a year after the man leaves the university; there is a division of work and precedence given to the man. The husband, particularly if he has money, becomes what the popular sense calls him, mon bourgeois of his wife. By this path and, thanks to the laws of inheritance, it is a path that never gets overgrown with grass, every woman remains perpetually a kept woman, her husband’s if not some other man’s. She knows this.

But these marriages have a moral unity of their own, they have a similarity of outlook, a similarity of object. Ketscher himself had no object and was incapable of being either the ‘bourgeois’ or the tutor. He could not even struggle with S——, she always gave way. He frightened her with his loud voice and his grumbling temper. Though her heart was developed she had a heavy, stubborn intelligence, that stagnancy of brain which we often meet with in those who are quite unaccustomed to abstract thought, and which is one of the distinguishing traits of the period before Peter the Great. United to the man she loved so intensely, so devotedly, she desired nothing and feared nothing. And indeed what had she to fear? Poverty? but had she not been poor all her life, had she not suffered destitution, that humiliating poverty. Work? but she had toiled from morning till night in a workroom for a few coppers. Quarrelling, separation? Yes, that last had terrors, and great terrors too; but she so utterly abandoned all personal will that it was really difficult to quarrel with her, and ill-humour she would put up with, maybe she would have put up with blows even, so long as she were satisfied that he loved her a little and did not want to part with her. And that he did not want, and there was a fresh reason for not wanting it on the top of everything else. With the instinct of love S—— understood it very well. Dimly aware that she could not fully satisfy Ketscher, she took to making up for what she lacked by continual waiting upon him and solicitude for him.

Ketscher was over forty. He had not been spoilt in regard to domestic comfort. He had spent all his life at home as the Kirghiz in his cart, with no property and no desire to possess it, with no conveniences of any sort and no craving for them. By degrees everything was changed; he was surrounded by a network of attention and services, he saw a childish delight when he was pleased with anything, alarm and tears when he raised his eyebrows, and this went on every day from morning till night. Ketscher took to staying at home more often; he was sorry to leave her continually alone. Besides, it was hard for him not to be struck by the difference of her absolute submission and our growing opposition. S—— endured his most unjust outbursts with the gentleness of a daughter who, concealing her tears, smiles to her father and waits sans rancune till the storm is over. S——, submissive, slavishly meek, trembling, ready to weep and kiss his hand, had an immense influence on Ketscher. Intolerance is fostered by giving way to it.

Did not Rousseau’s Thérèse, poor, stupid Thérèse, turn the prophet of equality into a petty vulgarian, perpetually absorbed in preserving his own dignity?

S——’s influence on Ketscher showed itself in the way Diderot describes when he complains of Thérèse. Rousseau was suspicious; Thérèse developed his suspiciousness into a petty readiness to take offence, and with no intention of doing so estranged him from his best friends. Remember that Thérèse could not read properly and could never be taught to read the time on the clock—which did not prevent her from fostering Rousseau’s hypochondria till it passed into gloomy madness. In the morning Rousseau would go to see Baron d’Holbach. A servant would bring in lunch and set places for three—Holbach, his wife, and Grimm; engaged in conversation, no one would notice it but Jean Jacques. He would pick up his hat. ‘But you must stay to lunch,’ Madame d’Holbach would say and order another place to be laid; but by then it was too late to set things right. Rousseau, livid with vexation and gloomily cursing the whole human race, would run home to Thérèse and tell her that no plate was set for him as a hint for him to go. Such tales were just to her taste, she could take warm interest in them, they put her on a level with him and indeed a little above him, and she herself began talking scandal, sometimes against Madame d’Houdetot, sometimes against David Hume, sometimes against Diderot. Rousseau would rudely break off all relations, would write senseless and insulting letters, sometimes calling forth terrible replies (for instance, from Hume), and withdrew to Montmorency abandoned by every one, and for lack of human beings cursing the sparrows and the swallows to whom he threw grain.

Once more:—without equality there can be no real marriage. The wife who is excluded from all the interests that occupy her husband, who is apart from them and does not share them, may be a concubine, a housekeeper, a nurse, but not a wife in the full, honourable sense of the word. Heine said of his ‘Thérèse’ that she ‘does not know and never will find out what he wrote about.’ This was thought charming, amusing, and it never occurred to any one to ask: ‘Why, then, was she his wife?’ Molière, who read his comedies aloud to his cook, was a hundred times more humane, but Madame Heine quite unintentionally paid her husband back. During the last years of his martyred existence she surrounded him with her own friends, faded dames aux camellias of a past season, grown moral as they grew wrinkled, and their washed-out, grey-headed adorers.

I do not mean to say that a wife must necessarily do and like what her husband does and likes. The wife may prefer music and the husband painting, that does not disturb their equality. I have always thought that the official trailing of husband and wife about together was dreadful, absurd, and senseless, and the higher placed they are the more ludicrous it is. Why should the Empress Eugénie appear at cavalry drill, and why should Victoria draw her husband to the opening of parliament with which he had nothing to do? Heine did well not to take his better-half to the receptions at the Court functions of Weimar. The prose of their marriage did not lie in that, but in the absence of any common ground, any common interest to unite them apart from sexual attraction.

I will pass to the harm which we did to poor S——. The mistake we made was again the mistake of all Utopias and idealisms. When one side of a question is correctly grasped, no attention is commonly paid to that to which that side adheres and whether it can be separated from it, no attention to the vast network of veins connecting the raw flesh with the whole organism. We still think like Christians that we have but to say to the lame man: ‘Take up thy bed and walk.’

At one stroke we flung the solitary and half-savage S——, who had seen no one, from her loneliness into our circle. We liked her originality, we wanted to preserve it, and we destroyed the last chance of her developing by removing all desire for improvement, assuring her that she was all right as she was. But she did not herself care to remain simply as she was. What was the result? We—revolutionaries, socialists, champions of the emancipation of women—turned a naïve, devoted, simple-hearted creature into a Moscow petty-bourgeoise!

Did not the Convention, the Jacobins, and the Commune itself turn France into a petty-bourgeoise, turn Paris into an épicier?

The first house that was opened with love and warm-heartedness to S—— was ours. Natalie went to see her and forcibly brought her to us. For a year S—— behaved quietly and was shy of strangers; timid and reserved as before, she was full of the poetical charm of the peasant in a way. There was not the faintest desire to attract attention by her strangeness; on the contrary there was the desire to be unnoticed. Like a child or a weak little wild animal she took refuge under Natalie’s wing; her devotion in those days knew no bounds. She loved playing with Sasha for hours together and used to tell him and us details of her childhood, her life among the raskolniks, her suffering as an apprentice, i.e., in the workroom.

She became the plaything of our circle; that, of course, she liked; she saw that her position, that she herself was original, and from that time she was lost; no one could have saved her. Natalie alone thought seriously of her education. S—— did not belong to the common herd; she had escaped a number of mean defects; she was not fond of fine clothes, did not care for luxury, for expensive things, nor for money—so long as Ketscher was satisfied and found nothing wanting she did not mind about anything else. At first S—— loved to have long, long talks with Natalie and trusted her, meekly listened to her advice, and tried to follow it.... But after she had looked about her and was at home in our circle, perhaps worked up by others who were amused at her oddities, she began to display a sort of injured antagonism and would answer any criticism very far from naïvely: ‘Oh, I am such a poor creature, how could I change or improve? It seems I must go down to my grave just as silly and foolish.’ In these words there was a note of wounded vanity, conscious or not conscious. She ceased to feel free with us and came less and less often to see us. ‘Natalya Alexandrovna, God bless her,’ she would say, ‘no longer likes poor me.’ It was not natural to Natalie to be hail-fellow-well-met with everybody or to be effusive like a schoolgirl; an element of deep serenity and great aesthetic feeling was always predominant in her. S—— did not understand the value of the difference between Natalie’s attitude to her and that of others, and forgot who had been the first to hold out a hand to her and warmly welcome her; with her Ketscher too drew away from us and grew more and more morose and irritable.

His suspiciousness greatly increased. In every careless word he saw an intention, a spiteful motive, a desire to wound, and not to wound him only but also S——. She for her part wept, complained of her lot, resented slights to Ketscher, and by the law of moral reverberation his own suspicions returned to him multiplied tenfold. His scolding affection began to change into a desire to find us in fault, into a supervision, a continual espionage, and the petty faults of his friends came more and more to eclipse all their other qualities in his eyes. Our pure, lofty, mature circle began to be invaded by the tittle-tattle of servant girls and the bickerings of provincial government clerks.

Ketscher’s irritability became infectious; continual accusations, explanations, reconciliations, poisoned our gatherings. This corrosive dust settled in every crevice and by degrees dissolved the cement that united so firmly our relations with our friends. We all succumbed to the influence of gossip. Even Granovsky grew ill-humoured and irritable, took Ketscher’s part unfairly, and lost his temper. Ketscher used to go to Granovsky with his accusations against Ogaryov and me. Granovsky did not believe them, but pitying Ketscher, ‘who is ill, wounded and yet so fond of you,’ took his side emphatically and was angry with me for want of tolerance. ‘Why, you know what he is like; it’s an illness. The influence of S——, who is good-natured but uneducated and tiresome, is driving him farther and farther in that unfortunate direction.’

To end this melancholy tale I will quote two instances.... They show vividly how far we had got from the theory of making coffee at Pokrovskoe.

One evening in the spring of 1846 we had five intimate friends with us, and among them Mihail Semyonovitch Shtchepkin. ‘Have you taken the house at Sokolovo this year?’ he asked. ‘Not yet,’ I answered, ‘I haven’t the money and one has to pay the rent in advance.’ ‘Surely you are not going to stay all the summer in Moscow?’ ‘I shall wait a little, then we shall see.’ That was all. No one took any notice of this conversation, and other subjects followed peacefully a second afterwards. We were intending to go next day after dinner to Kuntsovo, which we had loved from childhood. Ketscher, Korsh, and Granovsky went with us. The excursion took place, and everything went well except that Ketscher raised his eyebrows more gloomily than ever. But in the end we all came in for a storm.

It was a spring evening, warm but not scorchingly hot; the trees had only just come out into leaf. We sat in the garden jesting and talking. All at once Ketscher, who had been silent for half an hour, got up and stood facing me. With the face of a prosecutor of the Vehme,⁠[135] and with his lips quivering with indignation, he said: ‘I must say that you were clever in the way you reminded Mihail Semyonovitch yesterday that he hadn’t paid you the nine hundred roubles he borrowed from you.’

I really did not understand; especially as I certainly had not thought of Shtchepkin’s debt for the last four months.

‘It was delicate I must say: the old man has no money now and he is just going to the Crimea with his immense family, and here you tell him in the presence of five persons: “I haven’t the money to take a summer villa.” Ough, how disgusting!’

Ogaryov took my part. Ketscher flew at him and there was no end to the absurd accusations he brought against him; Granovsky tried to soothe him but could not and went away together with Korsh before the rest of us. I felt incensed and humiliated and answered very harshly. Ketscher looked at me from under his brows and without saying a word went back to Moscow on foot. We were left alone and in a state of something like pitiful irritability drove home. I wanted this time to give Ketscher a good lesson and to drop relations with him for a time, if I did not break them off altogether. He was penitent and shed tears: Granovsky insisted on our making peace, talked to Natalie, and was deeply distressed. I made it up, but not light-heartedly, and said to Granovsky: ‘You see, it will last for three days.’

That was one pleasure excursion, here is another.

Two months later we were at Sokolovo. Ketscher and S—— were going back to Moscow in the evening. Ogaryov rode part of the way with them on his Circassian horse, Kortik. There was no shadow of misunderstanding or ill-humour.

Ogaryov came back two or three hours later; we laughed together at the day having passed off so peacefully, and separated for the night.

Next day Granovsky, who had been in Moscow overnight, met me in our park; he was thoughtful and more melancholy than usual, and at last he told me he had something on his mind and wanted to talk to me. We went by the long avenue and sat down on the seat, the view of which is familiar to every one who has been at Sokolovo.

‘Herzen,’ Granovsky said to me, ‘if only you knew how difficult, how painful it is to me ... how I love you all in spite of everything, and I see with horror that everything is dropping to pieces. And now, as though in mockery, these petty mistakes, damnable carelessness, lack of delicacy....’

‘But tell me please what has happened,’ I asked, genuinely alarmed.

‘Why, Ketscher is furious with Ogaryov, and indeed, to tell the truth, it would be hard not to be; I try, I do what I can, but I haven’t the strength, particularly when people don’t care to do anything themselves.’

‘But what is the matter?’

‘Why, this: yesterday Ogaryov rode part of the way with Ketscher and S——.’

‘It was arranged in my presence, and indeed I saw Ogaryov in the evening afterwards and he did not say a word.’

‘On the bridge Kortik shied and began rearing, and Ogaryov pulling him up was so vexed that he swore before S—— and she heard and Ketscher heard too. I dare say he didn’t think, but Ketscher asks why he never happens to be so careless in the presence of your wife and mine. What is one to say to that?... And besides, for all her simplicity S—— is very sentimental, which is quite natural in her position.’

I said nothing. This was beyond all bounds.

‘What’s to be done?’

‘It’s very simple,’ I said. ‘We must break off all acquaintance with scoundrels who are capable of intentionally forgetting themselves before a woman. To be the intimate friend of such people is contemptible....’

‘But he doesn’t say that Ogaryov did it intentionally.’

‘Then what’s the talk about? And you, Granovsky, Ogaryov’s friend, repeat the ravings of a madman who ought to be put in an asylum. For shame!’

Granovsky was disconcerted.

‘My God!’ he said, ‘is it possible that our little group of friends—the one place where I found hope, repose, and love, where I took refuge from our oppressive environment—will break up in hatred and anger?’

He covered his eyes with his hand. I took the other hand; my heart was very heavy.

‘Granovsky,’ I said to him, ‘Ketscher is right: we have all come too close to each other, we are too cramped and we have stepped over each other’s traces.... Gemach! my friend, gemach! We need airing, refreshing. Ogaryov is going to the country in the autumn. I am soon going abroad—we will part without hatred and anger; what was true in our friendship will be set right, will be purified by absence.’

Granovsky wept. With Ketscher I had no explanation on that subject. Ogaryov did, as a fact, go to the country in the autumn, and afterwards we too went away.

News of our Moscow friends reached us more and more rarely. Frightened by the terror that followed 1848, they waited for a safe opportunity to send letters. These opportunities were rare, passports were hardly ever given. From Ketscher we had not a word for years together; he was never fond of writing, however.

The first living news was brought me in 1855 after I had moved to London. Ketscher, I heard, was in his element, conspicuous at banquets in honour of the heroes of Sebastopol, embracing Pogodin and Kokorev, embracing the sailors from the Black Sea, making an uproar, scolding, admonishing. Ogaryov, who had come straight from the graveside of Granovsky, told me little; what he did tell was gloomy.

Another year and a half passed. During that time I had finished this chapter, and to whom first of outsiders was it read?

Yes—habeant sua fata libelli.

In the autumn of 1857, Tchitcherin came to London; we were expecting him with impatience: once one of Granovsky’s favourite pupils and a friend of Korsh and Ketscher, he seemed to us one of our intimate circle. We had heard of his rudeness, his conservative leanings, his boundless vanity, and his doctrinaire attitude, but he was still young ... many angles are rubbed down by the passage of time.

‘I have long hesitated whether I should come and see you or not; so many Russians visit you now that one needs more courage not to come than to come; I, as you know, though fully respecting you, do not agree with you in everything.’

That was how Tchitcherin began.

He made his approach not simply, not in the spirit of youth; he had stones hidden in his bosom, the light in his eyes was cold, there was a challenge and a dreadful, repellent conceit in the tones of his voice. From the first words I saw that this was not an opponent but an enemy; but I stifled the instinctive warning and we got into conversation.

Our talk soon passed to reminiscences and to questions from me. He described the last months of the life of Granovsky, and when he went away I felt better pleased with him than at first.

After dinner next day conversation turned on Ketscher. Tchitcherin spoke of him as a man whom he liked, laughing without malice at his sallies; from the details he told me I learned that his affection for his friends was still as denunciatory, that S——’s influence had reached such a point that many of his friends were up in arms against her, avoided their society, and so on. Carried away by the stories he told me and my own recollections, I offered to read Tchitcherin my unpublished chapter about Ketscher and read aloud the whole of it. I have many times repented doing this, not because he made a bad use of what I read, but because I was vexed and pained that at forty-five I was capable of exposing our past before a coarse man who afterwards jeered with such merciless impudence at what he called my ‘temperament.’

The wide differences that separated our views and our temperaments were soon made plain.

From the first days an argument sprang up from which it was clear that we differed in everything. He was a disciple of the French democratic order and had a dislike for English freedom, not reduced to any logical order. He saw in the empire the education of the people, and advocated a powerful state and the abasement of the individual before it. It will be readily understood what these ideas became when applied to Russia. He was a governmentalist, looked upon the government as far superior to society and its movements, and took the Empress Catherine II. for almost the ideal of what Russia needed. All this theory came from a regular edifice of dogma from which he could always and at once deduce his theosophy of bureaucracy.

‘Why do you want to be a professor,’ I asked him, ‘and try to get a lecturer’s chair? You ought to be a Minister and try to get a portfolio.’

Arguing with him, we saw him off at the railway station and parted agreeing about nothing but our mutual respect.

A fortnight later he wrote to me from France with enthusiasm about the working classes, about the institutions. ‘You have found what you were looking for,’ I answered, ‘and very quickly; that comes of going there with ready-made views.’ Then I suggested that we should begin a correspondence in print and wrote the beginning of a long letter.

He did not care to do so and said that he had no time and that such an argument would do harm....

A remark made in the Bell concerning doctrinaires in general he took as aimed at himself; his amour-propre was stung, and he sent me his ‘denunciation,’ which made a great talk at the time.

Tchitcherin got the worst of the campaign, of that I have no doubt. The outburst of indignation invoked by his letter printed in the Bell was universal in the younger generation and in literary circles. I received dozens of articles and letters, one of which was published. We were still mounting an uphill path in those days, and had no need of Katkov’s⁠[136] drags to hold us back. The coldly offensive, insolently smooth tone, more perhaps than was actually said, incensed the public and me alike; it was something new in those days. On the other hand, those who took Tchitcherin’s side were: Elena Pavlovna, the Iphigenia of the Winter Palace; Timashov, the head of the Third Section; and N. H. Ketscher.

Ketscher remained true to the reaction, not because he ‘preferred Grandison to Lovelace’ but because carried without a guiding compass à la remorque of a circle he remained true to it without noticing that it was sailing in the opposite direction. The man of a coterie, for him questions followed the banner of personalities and not the other way about.

Never having worked through to a single clear understanding or to a single clear conviction, he advanced with noble aspirations and bandaged eyes, and was continually beating his enemies, not noticing that the positions were changed and that in their game of blind-man’s buff he beat us, beat others, is even now beating some one, even now imagining that he is accomplishing something.

I append the letter I wrote to Tchitcherin as the beginning of a friendly discussion which was prevented by his attacking me like a prosecutor:

‘My Learned Friend,—It is impossible for me to argue with you; you know so much, you know it so well, everything in your brain is fresh and new, and what matters most is that you are convinced you do know it, and so, untroubled, you resolutely await the rational development of events in accordance with the programme revealed by science. You cannot be in disharmony with the present; you know if the past was this and that, the present is bound to be this and that, and is bound to lead to this and that in the future; you are able to reconcile yourself to it through your ideas and your interpretation of it. Yours is the happy lot of a priest, comforting the sorrowful with the eternal truths of your theory and with your faith in them. All these advantages you derive from your dogmatic belief, because dogma excludes doubt. Doubt means that a question is open; dogma, that the question is closed, settled. And so every dogma is exclusive and uncompromising, while doubt can never attain so sharp a finality; it is the very essence of doubt to be ready to agree with the speaker or conscientiously to seek significance in his words, even to the extent of losing precious time needed for finding objections. Dogma sees truth from a definite angle, accepted as the sole stronghold of salvation, while doubt strives to escape from all angles, looks all round, returns on its tracks, and often paralyses all action by its humility before truth. You, my learned friend, know definitely in what direction to go, how to lead; I do not know. And so I feel that it is for us to observe and study, and for you to teach others. It is true that we can say what ought not to be done, we can unite men to act, rouse thought, set it free from chains, dispel the phantoms of church and police-station, of academy and criminal court—that is all; but you can say what ought to be done.

‘The attitude of dogma to its object is the religious attitude, that is the attitude from the point of view of eternity; the temporary, the transitory, persons, events, generations scarcely enter into the Campo Santo of philosophy, or, if they enter, it is only when purified from real life in the form of an herbarium of logical shadows. Dogma as a whole lives really in all times, and lives in its own period as though it were the past, not spoiling its theoretical attitude by too passionate an interest in it. Knowing the necessity of suffering, dogma keeps itself as a Simeon Stylites on a pedestal, sacrificing everything temporary to the eternal, the living particulars to general ideas. In short, the dogmatists are first of all historians, while we, together with the crowd, are your substratum; you stand for history für sich, we—for history an sich. You explain to us where our disease lies, but are we diseased? You bury us, reward us, or punish us after our death, you are our doctors and priests; but are we sick or dying?

‘This antagonism is nothing new and it is of great value for progress, for development. If all mankind could believe you, it might be rational, but would die of universal boredom. The late Filiminov put as an inscription on his “fool’s cap”: Si la raison dominait le monde, il ne s’y passerait rien.

‘The geometrical dryness of dogma, the algebraic impersonality of it, gives it the widest power of generalisation; it must shun sensations and, like Augustus, command Cleopatra to be veiled. But for active intervention passion is more essential than dogma, and man has no algebraic passions. The general he can understand, but it is the particular that he loves or hates. Spinoza with all the outspoken vigour of his genius maintained the necessity of reckoning as essential only the incorruptible, the eternal, the unchanging substance, and not resting one’s hopes on the fortuitous, the relative, the personal. Every one understands this in theory, but man attaches himself only to the particular, the personal, to the accomplished fact; in the reconciling of these extremes, in their harmonious combination, lies the highest wisdom of life.

‘If from this general definition of our opposite points of view we pass to particular examples we shall find that though our goal is the same, there is no less antagonism between us; even in those instances in which we start from agreement. An example will make this clear. We are completely agreed in our attitude to religion; but this only goes so far as the denial of supernatural religion, but as soon as we come into contact with sublunary religion the distance between us is immense. You have moved from the dark, incense-laden walls of a cathedral to a well-lighted government office, from Guelph you have turned Ghibelline, you have replaced the hierarchies of heaven by grades in the service, the absorption of the individual soul in God by its absorption in the State, God is replaced by centralisation, the priest by the police-inspector.

‘You see in this change an advance, a triumph, we see new chains. We want to be neither Guelphs nor Ghibellines. Your secular, civic, and legal religion is the more terrible for being deprived of all that is poetical, fantastic, of all that is childlike in character; in place of which you have the red-tape of officialdom, the idol of the State with the Tsar at the top and the hangman at the bottom. You want man set free from the church to hang about for a couple of centuries in the hall of a government office, while the caste of high-priest officials and monks of dogma decide in what way and to what degree he is to be free, like our committees for the emancipation of the peasants. And all that repels us; we can accept a great deal, make concessions, sacrifice something to circumstance; but for you it is not a sacrifice. Of course in that too you are happier than we. Losing your religious faith you are not left without any support; and finding that faith in the State may take the place of Christianity for mankind, you have accepted it, and you have done very well for your moral hygiene, for your peace of mind. But this remedy sticks in our throat and we hate your government offices, your centralisation, quite as much as the Inquisition, the Consistory, the Book of Precepts.

‘Do you grasp the difference? You, as a teacher, want to teach, to direct, to herd your flock. We, like a flock that is becoming conscious, do not want to be herded, but want to have our own village courts, our own representatives, our own delegates, to whom we can entrust the management of our affairs. That is why the authority of the government is an insult to us at every step, while you applaud it as your predecessors the priests applauded the temporal power. You may even differ from it as the clergy has sometimes differed from it or like people quarrelling on board ship: however great the distance between you may be, you are still in the same boat, and for us, laymen, you are still on the side of the government.

‘Civic religion—the apotheosis of the State—is a purely Roman idea and in the modern world, principally French. It is consistent with a strong state, but is incompatible with a free people; through it you may get splendid soldiers, but you cannot have independent citizens. The United States, on the contrary, have, so far as it is possible, abolished the religious character of the police and the administration.’

Epilogue

On re-reading the chapter about Ketscher I cannot help reflecting on the original, eccentric characters who live or have lived in Russia. What whimsical personalities occur again and again in the history of our culture! In what countries, under what degrees of latitude and longitude could a figure be found as angular, as rugged, as captious and erratic, as good-natured and ill-natured, as noisy and unmanageable as Ketscher’s except in Moscow?

And how many of these original figures have I watched ‘in all their varied kinds,’ from my father to Turgenev’s ‘Children.’ ‘This is how the Russian oven turns them out,’ Pogodin said to me. And indeed, what marvels it does turn out, especially when the head is made on the German pattern ... from Russian buns and bread-rings to Orthodox loaves flavoured with Hegel, and French rolls à la quatre-vingt-treize! It would be a pity if all these original products should be lost and leave no trace. We usually dwell only upon the leading figures.

But in them the effect of the Russian oven is less obvious; in them its peculiarities are corrected and redeemed; they are examples of the Russian type of intelligence rather than of the influence of their environment. These are followed by all sorts of unattached individuals who have lost their way; the eccentric figures among them are beyond all reckoning. The tiny connecting links that make up the chain of historical movements, the particles of yeast which are lost in the dough, they have raised it, not for their own benefit. Men who awoke early in the dark night and groped feeling their way to work, stumbling against everything in their road, they awakened others to quite different labours.

... I will try some day to save two or three more profiles from complete oblivion. They are almost lost already in the grey fog from which only the mountain tops and high crags stand out.

II Basil and Armance (An episode of the year 1844.)

A very characteristic episode is connected with our second villeggiatura; it would really be a pity not to put it in, although Natalie and I had very little to do with it. This episode might be called: ‘Armance and Basil, or the philosopher from civility, the Christian from courtesy, and George Sand’s “Jacques” turned into the Jacques of Destiny.’ It began at a French fancy dress ball.

In the winter of 1843 I went to a fancy dress ball. There were a mass of people there, five thousand if I remember right, and scarcely any one I knew. Basil was whirling round with a masked lady, he had no thoughts to spare for me. He was slightly shaking his head and screwing up his eyelashes, as connoisseurs do when they find the wine excellent and the grouse marvellous.

The ball took place in the hall of a reputable society. I walked about and sat down a little, looking at Russian aristocrats dressed up as pierrots of all sorts, zealously doing their best to look like Parisian shopmen and desperate dancers of the cancan, and went upstairs to supper; there Basil sought me out. He was in an utterly abnormal state, and in the first glow of the acute period of love; it was more acute as Basil was about that time forty and his hair was beginning to be thin on his lofty brow. He talked to me incoherently of some French ‘Mignon,’ with all the simplicity of a Klärchen and all the playful charm of a Parisian grisette.

At first I imagined that this was one of those romances in one chapter in which there is a conquest on the first page and a bill to pay on the last. But I became convinced that this was not the case. Basil saw his Parisian girl a second or third time and followed circumvolutionary tactics without making a direct attack. He introduced me to her. Armance really was a lively, charming child of Paris, who took after her parent. From her language to her manners and the special shade of independence and boldness—everything about her was characteristic of the respectable working-class of the great city, she was still a work-girl not a petty-bourgeoise. This type has never existed among us. The careless gaiety, the easy manners, freedom, mischief, were all combined with the instinct of self-preservation, the instinctive feeling of danger and honour. Flung as children sometimes from ten years old into the battle of poverty and temptation, defenceless, surrounded by the pestilential infection of Paris and snares of all sorts, they become their own providence and protection. Such girls may readily give themselves, but it is hard to take them by surprise, unawares. Those of them who might be bought never get into this class of working girls; they are bought before they reach that stage, are whirled off and engulfed in another type, sometimes for ever, sometimes to reappear six or seven years later in their carriage in Longchamps or in the box at the opera—mit Perlen und Diamanten.

Basil was over head and ears in love. A theorist in music and a philosopher in painting, he was one of the most complete representatives of the ultra-Hegelians. He spent his whole life soaring in an aesthetic heavens among philosophical and critical niceties. He looked upon life as he did upon Shakespeare, reducing everything in life to its philosophical significance, making everything lively boring and everything fresh stale; in fact, leaving no emotion of the heart in its directness and simplicity. This attitude, however, was characteristic in varying degrees of almost every circle of that period; some broke loose from it by talent, others from liveliness, but traces of it persisted for a long time with all—some kept the jargon, others the philosophy itself.

‘Let us go’ Bakunin said to T—— in Berlin at the beginning of the ’forties, ‘and plunge into the gulf of real life, let us fling ourselves into the waves’; and they went to ask Varnhagen von Ense to dip them like a dexterous bathing man into the gulf of practical life and to present them to a pretty actress. It will be readily understood that with such preparations there is no reaching a plunge into the passions that ‘devour the secret sources of our spirit,’ nor indeed to any action whatever. The Germans too do not get to action; but then Germans do not seek action, but simply tranquillity. Our temperament on the other hand cannot endure this attitude—des theoretischen Schweigens—gets entangled, stumbles, and trips up more funnily than seriously. And so our philosopher in love at forty began, screwing up his eyes, to collate all the speculative theories on the demonic power of love which drew Hercules and the frail youth alike to the feet of Omphale, began to explain to himself and others the moral idea of the family, the foundations of marriage (Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Chapter Sittlichkeit). There was no impediment on the side of Hegel. But the phenomenal world of fortuity and appearances—the world of the spirit not yet freed from tradition—was not so accommodating. Basil had a father, Pyotr Konytch, a wealthy man who had himself been married three times in succession and had had three children by each marriage. On learning that his son, and the eldest one too, wanted to marry a Catholic, a poor girl, and a French one, coming moreover from Kuznetsky Bridge, he resolutely refused his blessing. Basil, who had adopted the chic and manners of scepticism, might have perhaps dispensed with the parental blessing; but the old man associated with the blessing not only consequences jenseits (in the other world), but also diesseits (in this world), to wit, his inheritance.

The old man’s opposition hurried things on, as is always the case, and Basil began to think of hastening the dénouement. The only thing left to do was to get married without wasting words, and later on to make the old man accept un fait accompli, or to conceal the marriage from him in the expectation that before long he would neither bless nor curse nor dispose of his fortune.

But the unenlightened world of tradition had to be reckoned with even then. To be married on the quiet in Moscow was not easy and was extremely expensive, and the wedding would have reached his father’s ears at once through deacons, sacristans, church servitors, match-makers, clerks, shopboys, and gossips of all sorts. It was proposed to sound our Father Ioann in the village of Pokrovskoe, known to my readers from the scandal of his stealing when inebriated a silver watch and box from the sacristan.

Father Ioann, on learning that the disobedient son was about forty, that the bride was not Russian and that her parents were not here, that, besides me, a university professor would sign as a witness, began thanking me for this kind service, probably supposing that I was trying to marry Basil in order to secure him a two-hundred rouble note. He was so touched that he shouted to the next room: ‘Wife, wife, bring out two or three eggs,’ and a bottle wrapt in paper out of the cupboard, in order to regale me.

Everything went well.

The day of the wedding and other details were not fixed: Armance was to come to Pokrovskoe to stay with us. Basil who meant to accompany her was to return to Moscow and, after making the final arrangements, to come from his father’s curse to receive the drunken blessing of Father Ioann.

In expectation of i promessi sposi we ordered supper to be got ready and sat down to wait for them. We waited and waited: it struck twelve o’clock at night. No one came.... One o’clock—still no one. The ladies went to bed. A—— and Ketscher and I set to upon the supper. Le ore suonan al quadriano, e una e due e tre ... but ... still no sign of them.

At last the tinkle of a bell came nearer and nearer, there was the rumble of wheels over the bridge. We rushed into the porch. A coach drawn by three horses drove rapidly into the yard and stopped, Basil came out. I went up to give my hand to Armance; she seized my hand at once, but with such force that I almost cried out—and then flung herself on my neck repeating with a giggle, ‘Monsieur Herstin’ ... it was no other than Vissarion Grigoryevitch Byelinsky in propria persona.

There was no one in the coach but Byelinsky who was laughing till he coughed and Basil who was crying till he had a cold in his nose. We looked at one another in amazement. I must observe that, to add to the effect, there had been no trace of Byelinsky in Moscow till two days before. ‘Give me something to eat,’ Byelinsky said at last, ‘I’ll tell you then what marvels have been happening among us; I must defend poor Basil, who is more afraid of you than of Armance.’

This is what had happened. Seeing that things were moving rapidly to a climax Basil took fright; he began to reflect and was utterly overwhelmed as he pondered on the mercilessly fatal character of marriage, its indissolubility according to the code of Russian law and the code of Hegel; he locked himself up, a victim to the spirit of agonising investigation and ruthless analysis. His terror grew from hour to hour, the more so as the way of retreat was not easy either, and to decide to take it needed almost as much character as the marriage itself. This terror grew till Byelinsky, who on arriving from Petersburg went straight to see him, knocked at his door. Basil described to him all the horror with which he was going to meet his happiness, and all the aversion with which he was entering upon marriage with love—and asked his advice and help.

Byelinsky answered that he must be mad after this—consciously and knowing beforehand what it would be—to take such fetters upon himself. ‘Herzen now,’ he said, ‘got married and eloped with his wife, and came from exile to get her; but ask him: he never once reflected whether he ought to do so or not and what the consequence would be. I am sure it seemed to him that he could do nothing else. Well! But you want to do the same, analysing and reflecting.’

This was all Basil wanted; he wrote to Armance that very night, a dissertation upon marriage, upon his luckless theorisings, upon the impossibility of simple happiness, from an analytic spirit, he laid before her all the disadvantages and dangers of their union and asked her advice—what they should do now.

He brought her answer with him.

In Byelinsky’s account and in Armance’s letter their two natures, hers and Basil’s, came out vividly. A marriage between persons of such opposite temperaments would certainly have been strange. Armance wrote sorrowfully: she was surprised, wounded, did not understand his reflections, and saw in them a pretext and a sign of cooling love. She said that, since it was so, there must be no talk of marriage, gave him back his promise, and concluded by saying that after what had happened they had better not meet. ‘I shall remember you with gratitude,’ she wrote, ‘and do not blame you in the least. I know that you are exceedingly good, but even more exceedingly weak! Good-bye, and may you be happy.’

Such a letter could not have been altogether agreeable to receive. In every word there was strength, vigour, and haughtiness. The child of splendid plebeian stock, Armance was worthy of her origin. Had she been an Englishwoman, what a tight hold she would have kept of Basil’s letter, how by the lips of her virtuous solicitor she would have described with indignation and shamefaced modesty his first pressure of her hand, his first kiss, and how her lawyer with tears in his eyes and chalk on his wig would have exhorted the jury to compensate injured innocence with a couple of thousand pounds.

The French woman, the poor sewing girl never thought of that.

The two or three days they spent at Pokrovskoe were depressing for the ex-bridegroom. He was like a school-boy who has disgraced himself in class, and is afraid both of the teacher and his comrades. He wrote me a letter which showed confusion and dissatisfaction with himself and asked me to come and say good-bye. At the beginning of August I went from Pokrovskoe to Moscow; while I was away Natalie received at Pokrovskoe a new dissertation from him. I went to Basil’s and came straight in upon a farewell banquet. They were drinking champagne, and in the toasts and good wishes there were strange hints. ‘Of course you don’t know,’ Basil murmured into my ear: ‘You see I ... er ...’ and he added in a whisper: ‘you see Armance is going with me. What a girl; only now I have learned to know her,’ and he shook his head.

This was as great a surprise as Byelinsky’s unexpected appearance.

In the letter to Natalie he explained to her at great length that thought and reflection upon marriage had brought him to hesitation and despair; he doubted both of his love for Armance and his suitability for family life; that in that way he had come to the agonising feeling that he ought to break off everything and flee to Paris, that in that state of mind he had come, pitiful and ridiculous, to Pokrovskoe. After he had reached this decision he had read the letter of Armance over again and made a fresh discovery, to wit, that he loved Armance very much, and he had therefore asked her to see him and had again offered her his hand. He had thought again of the priest at Pokrovskoe, but the proximity of Mamonov’s factory frightened him. He was intending to be married in Petersburg and at once to set off for France. ‘Armance is as happy as a child!’

In Petersburg Basil thought fit to be married in the Kazan cathedral. That philosophy and learning might not be forgotten, he asked the chief priest Sidonsky, the learned author of the Introduction to the Study of Philosophy, to perform the ceremony. Sidonsky had long known Basil from his learned articles as a free and worldly thinker and a disciple of the German philosophy. After all the strange things that had happened to Armance, she had the honour rarely vouchsafed to any of serving as the occasion for one of the most comic meetings of two sworn foes, learning and religion.

To show off his worldly culture Sidonsky began before the wedding talking of the latest philosophic brochures, and when everything was ready and the sacristan held up the epitrahil which, stooping, he began to put on, he said to Basil, dropping his eyes: ‘Pardon me, it is a ceremony; I know very well that the Christian ritual has outlived its time, that....’

‘Oh, no, no,’ Basil interrupted in a voice full of sympathy and compassion: ‘Christianity is eternal; its essence, its substance, cannot pass away.’

Sidonsky, with a chaste glance, thanked his ‘chivalrous’ antagonist, turned to the choir and chanted: ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord, now and for ever and ever!’ ‘Amen,’ boomed the choir, and the ceremony went on in due order, and Sidonsky led Basil in a crown and Armance in a crown round the lectern ... making Isaiah rejoice.

From the cathedral Basil took Armance home and leaving her there spent a literary soirée at Krayevsky’s. Ten days later Byelinsky saw the happy pair into the steamer. At this point it will be supposed that the story is certainly ended.

Not a bit of it.

Things went very well as far as the Cattegat; but at that point George Sand’s accursed novel Jacques turned up.

‘What do you think of Jacques?’ Basil asked Armance as she was finishing the novel.

Armance told him her opinion of it, Basil informed her that it was quite mistaken, that her criticism wounded his spirit on its deepest side, and that his philosophy of life had nothing in common with hers.

The sanguine Armance was unwilling to change her philosophy of life, so they both crossed the Belt.

When they came out into the German Ocean Basil felt more at home, and made another attempt to persuade Armance to take a different view of Jacques and to change her philosophy of life.

Almost dying of sea-sickness, Armance with a last effort declared that she would not change her opinion of Jacques.

‘What have we in common after that?’ observed Basil, flying into a rage.

‘Nothing,’ answered Armance, ‘and si vous me cherchez, querelle, then let us simply part as soon as we touch land.’

‘You have decided,’ said Basil, very high and mighty; ‘you prefer....’

‘Anything in the world to living with you; you are an insufferable man, weak and tyrannical.’

‘Madame!’

‘Monsieur!’

She went to the cabin, he remained on deck. Armance kept her word. From Havre she went to her father, and a year later returned to Russia and indeed went on to Siberia.

This time I believe the story of this intermittent marriage is ended.

Though indeed Barère⁠[137] has said:

Written 1857, Laurel House, Putney.