Chapter 4

1 POLISH REFUGEES Aloysius Bernacki—Stanislaw Worcell—The Polish Agitators between 1854 and 1856—The Death of Worcell

Other misfortunes, other sufferers await us. We live on yesterday’s battlefield: all around are the hospitals, the wounded, the prisoners, the dying. The army of Polish emigrants is the oldest of all and the most worn out by suffering, but it has remained obstinately alive. In migrating abroad the Poles, in spite of Danton’s dictum, took their fatherland with them, and with heads erect they have proudly and sternly carried it about the world. Europe has stood aside with respect before the solemn procession of valiant warriors. The peoples have come forward to do them homage; the kings have turned away and averted their eyes to let them pass unnoticed. Europe was awakened for one instant by their footsteps, brought tears and sympathy for them, found money and the spirit to give it.⁠[60] The melancholy image of the Polish refugee, the knight-errant of national independence, has survived in the popular memory. Twenty years in exile have not weakened his faith, and at every momentous crisis, in every hour of conflict and struggle for freedom, the Poles have been the first to answer the roll-call, just as Worcell and the elder Darasz were the first to rally to the Provisional Government of 1848.

But the government of which Lamartine was one had no need of them and did not think of them at all. The most convinced republicans thought of Poland in order to make use of her by the insincere summons to war and revolt of the 15th of May 1848. They saw the deception, but the French bourgeois (with whom Poland was a fad, just as Italy was with the English) have been sulky with Poland ever since. People no longer talked in Paris with the same rhetoric of Varsovie échevelée, and the common people only kept, together with many Napoleonic memories, the legend of ‘Poniatowski’ supported by a rough woodcut in which Poniatowski is drowning on horseback in his chapska.

The year 1849 marks the beginning of the most depressing time for the Polish exiles. It dragged on wearily up to the Crimean War and the death of Nicholas. Not one real hope, not one drop of living water. The apocalyptic time, foretold by Krasinski, seemed to have come. Cut off from their fatherland, the refugees were cast away on other shores, and, like trees without fresh sap, were withering and fading away; they were becoming aliens to their own people without ceasing to be aliens to the foreigners among whom they lived. The latter to some extent sympathised with them, but their misfortunes lasted too long, and there is no good feeling in man that can stand too long a strain. Moreover, the Polish question was pre-eminently a national question, and only accidentally a revolutionary one, in so far as it was a revolt against a foreign yoke.

The refugees looked backward as much as they looked forward, they were striving to re-establish—as though there were anything worth re-establishing in the past except independence—and independence alone implies nothing: it is a negative conception. Could any country be more independent than Russia? To the complex, laboriously worked-out formula of future social organisation, Poland contributed no new idea, nothing but her historical claim and her readiness to help others in the legitimate hope of reciprocity. The struggle for independence always calls forth warm sympathy, but foreigners can never make it their cause. Only those interests are common to all which by their very essence transcend nationality—such, for instance, as the interests of Catholicism and Protestantism, revolution and reaction, economics and Socialism.

In 1847 I made the acquaintance of the Polish democratic Central Committee. At that time it was held in Versailles, and the most active member was, so I fancied, Wysocki. No real intimacy was possible. The refugees did not want to hear from me what I knew; all they wanted to hear was the confirmation of their hopes and assumptions. They wanted to learn about the conspiracy that was undermining the whole political fabric of Russia, asked whether Yermolov was taking part in it ... and I could tell them of nothing but the radical tendencies among the young people, of Granovsky’s propaganda, of the immense influence of Byelinsky, of the shades of opinion in the two parties struggling at that time in literature and society—the Westerners and the Slavophils. That seemed to them of little consequence.

They had a rich past, we had a great hope; their breast was covered with scars, while we were toughening our muscles to receive them. Beside them we were like recruits beside veterans. The Poles are mystics, we are realists. They are attracted by the mysterious twilight in which outlines are blurred and phantoms hover, in which one can imagine infinite distance, infinite height, because nothing can be seen distinctly. They can live in this half-dreaming state, without analysis, without cold investigation, without gnawing doubts. In the depths of their souls there is an element of mediaevalism alien to us, and a crucifix before which they can pray at moments of grief and fatigue. In Krasinski’s poetry the Stabat Mater drowns the national hymns, and draws us not to the triumph of life, but to the triumph of death, to the Day of Judgment.... We are either more stupid in our faith or more intelligent in our doubt.

This mystical tendency developed to the furthest limit after the time of Napoleon. Mickiewicz, Towianski and even the mathematician Wronski all helped to create the Messianic idea. In old days there were Catholics and Encyclopaedists, but there were no mystics. The old men who had been educated in the eighteenth century were free from theosophic fantasies. The tempering given by the classical tradition of the grand siècle was permanent, like that of Damascus steel. It was my luck to meet two or three specimens of such old Polish Encyclopaedists.

In Paris, and in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, moreover, there lived from 1831 onwards a nuncio of the Polish Diet, Count Aloysius Bernacki, who was minister of finance at the time of the revolution, and marshal of the nobility of some province; he presented his fellow-nobles to Alexander I., who was playing the Liberal in Poland in 1814.

Completely ruined by the confiscations, he settled in 1831 in Paris, in a small lodging in the Chaussée d’Antin, as I have mentioned already, whence he issued every morning in a dark brown coat to take a walk and read the newspapers, and, at a later hour, came out again in a dark blue coat with gilt buttons to spend the evening with some one; in 1847 I made his acquaintance. The house he lived in was dilapidated, the lady who owned the house wanted to have it repaired. Bernacki wrote a letter to her, which so touched the Frenchwoman (not at all an easy thing to do when it is a question of money) that she entered into negotiations with him and only asked him to leave the house for a time. When she had the house done up, she let Bernacki have his rooms again at the same rent. He saw with grief the new and handsome staircase, the new wallpaper, window-frames, and furniture, but submitted to his fate.

Temperate in all things, absolutely sincere and honourable, the old man was an admirer of Washington and a friend of O’Connell. A true Encyclopaedist, he advocated egoism bien entendu and spent a whole life in self-sacrifice, and had sacrificed everything, from wealth and family to social position and native land, without ever showing any special regret or deigning to complain.

The French police left him in peace and even respected him, knowing that he had been a minister and a nuncio; the prefecture seriously imagined that a nuncio of the Polish Diet was something of the nature of a papal nuncio. This was known among the exiles, and so his comrades and fellow-countrymen were constantly sending him to interview the police on their behalf. Bernacki went without a murmur and wearied the officials with correctly turned complimentary speeches, until they often made concessions to get rid of him. After the complete suppression of the February revolution, the tone changed; no smiles nor tears nor compliments nor grey hairs were of any avail, and just then, as ill luck would have it, the widow of a Polish general who had fought in the Hungarian War arrived in Paris, entirely destitute. Bernacki asked the prefecture to assist her; in spite of the high-sounding title, ‘Son Excellence Monsieur le Nonce,’ the prefecture refused flatly. The old man appealed to Carlier; to get rid of him and at the same time to humiliate him, Carlier replied that assistance was given only to the refugees of 1831. ‘If you feel such sympathy for this lady,’ he added, ‘send in an application for yourself for assistance on the ground of poverty; we will assign you twenty francs a month, and you can make what use you like of them.’

Carlier was caught. Bernacki received the prefect’s suggestion in the most simple-hearted way and at once accepted it, thanking him effusively. From that time forward, the old man went every month to the prefecture, waited for an hour or two in the anteroom, received twenty francs and took the money to the widow.

Bernacki was a good deal over seventy, but he was wonderfully well-preserved; he liked dining with his friends, sitting up with them till two o’clock in the morning and sometimes drinking a glass or two of wine. One night we were going home with him about three o’clock in the morning; we had to pass through the Rue Lepelletier. The Opera House was glowing with lights; pierrots and débardeurs, wrapped in shawls, dragoons and police-officers were thronging in the entry. In jest, feeling confident that he would refuse, I said to Bernacki:

‘Quelle chance! Shall we go in?’

‘With the greatest pleasure,’ he answered. ‘I haven’t seen a masked ball for fifteen years.’

‘Bernacki,’ I said to him jestingly, as we went into the hall, ‘when are you going to begin to grow old?’

‘Un homme comme il faut,’ he answered laughing, ‘acquiert des années, mais ne vieillit jamais.’

He kept up his character to the end, and, like a well-bred man, took his leave from life quietly and on good terms with it; he felt unwell in the morning and died in the evening.

At the time of Bernacki’s death I was in London. There soon after my arrival I made friends with a man whose memory is still precious to me and whose coffin I helped to carry to the Highgate Cemetery—I am speaking of Worcell. Of all the Poles I got to know then, he was the one I liked best, and the one who was least antagonistic to Russians. It was not that he was fond of Russians, but he looked at things humanely and so was incapable of wholesale condemnation and narrow-minded hatred. He was the first man with whom I discussed the founding of the Russian printing-press. After listening to me the sick man grew animated, took pencil and paper, began making calculations, reckoning how much type we should require and so on. He made out the chief orders, he introduced me to Czernecki, with whom I worked so much later on.

‘My God, my God,’ he said, as he held the first page of proof in his hand, ‘a free Russian press in London ... how many evil memories are effaced from my mind by that sheet of paper smeared with printer’s ink!’

‘We ought to go hand in hand,’ he often repeated afterwards; ‘our path is one, our cause is one ...’ and he laid his wasted hand on my shoulder.

At the Polish anniversary of the 29th of November 1853, I made a speech at the Hanover Rooms with Worcell in the chair. When I had finished amidst loud applause, Worcell embraced me and kissed me with tears in his eyes.

‘Worcell and you on the platform made a great impression upon me just now,’ one of the Italians (Count Nani) said to me as we went out. ‘It seems to me that that noble, grey-headed, frail-looking old man and your healthy, stalwart figure were the typical representatives of Poland and Russia.’

‘Only add,’ I said, ‘that Worcell in giving me his hand and embracing me forgave Russia in the name of Poland.’

Indeed we might have gone hand in hand—but it was not to be.

Worcell was not alone.... But first let me speak of him alone.

When Worcell was born, his father, one of the wealthy Polish aristocrats in Lithuania, a kinsman of Eszterhazy, of Potocki, and I do not know of whom else, sent for the village-elders and young women from five of his estates, that they might be present at the christening of the little count, Stanislaw, and might remember all their lives the banquet given by their lord on the occasion. This took place in 1800. The Count gave his son the most brilliant, the most many-sided education; Worcell was a mathematician, a linguist, and familiar with the literatures of five or six countries; in his early youth he had acquired an immense amount of knowledge and at the same time he was a man of the world, belonging to the most aristocratic Polish society at one of the most brilliant periods of its decline, between 1815 and 1830; Worcell married young and was only just entering upon ‘practical’ life, when the rebellion of 1831 broke out. He gave up everything and threw himself heart and soul into the movement. The rebellion was suppressed, Warsaw was taken. Count Stanislaw crossed the frontier like the rest, leaving family and fortune behind.

Instead of following him, his wife cut off all relations with him. As a reward for doing so, part of the property was restored to her. They had two children, a son and a daughter; how they were brought up, we shall see later; to begin with, their mother trained them to forget their father.

Meanwhile Worcell made his way through Austria to Paris and at once found himself in perpetual exile and entirely without means. He was not in the least daunted. Like Bernacki, he adopted a life of monastic self-denial and zealously entered upon his mission, which only ceased twenty-five years afterwards, when he drew his last breath in a little damp basement room, in a wretched lodging-house in gloomy Hunter Street.

To reorganise the Polish party of progress, to extend the propaganda of its principles, to concentrate the refugees’ forces, to prepare for a new rebellion and to advocate this from morning till night, to devote his whole time to it—such was the plan of Worcell’s whole life, from which he never deviated and to which he subordinated everything. With this object he got into touch with all the revolutionists of France, from Godefroi Cavaignac to Ledru-Rollin; with this object he became a freemason, and kept in close relations with the followers of Mazzini, and later on with Mazzini himself. Worcell firmly upheld the banner of the revolutionary party of Poland in opposition to the party of the Czartoryzskis. He was convinced that the aristocracy had been the ruin of the revolution, he looked upon the old nobles as the enemies of his cause, and sought support from the new, the purely democratic Poland.

Worcell was right.

The Polish aristocracy, sincerely devoted as they were to their cause, were in many ways opposed to the tendencies of our times; the image of the Poland of the past was for ever hovering before their eyes, not a new Poland, but the old Poland restored; their ideal was based as much on memories as on hopes. The fetters of Catholicism were quite enough to hold Poland back—the armour of feudal chivalry would have paralysed her completely. In joining hands with Mazzini, Worcell wished to unite the Polish cause with the general European movement for republicanism and democracy. It is clear that he was bound to seek support among the humbler gentry, among townspeople and workmen. It was only in those classes that insurrection could begin. The aristocracy would join the movement, the peasants might be drawn into it, though they never would have taken the initiative.

Worcell may be reproached with stepping into the rut in which the European revolution was already sunk and foundering, for seeing in that path the only way of salvation; but, having once taken it, he was consistent. Circumstances vindicated him completely. Where, indeed, could revolutionary forces be found in Poland, if not in the social layer to which Worcell always turned, and which was forming, growing up and gaining strength between 1831 and 1860?

However different our views may be of revolution and the methods of bringing it about, we cannot deny that everything gained by revolution has been gained by the middle classes and the workers of the towns. And the Polish question was a purely patriotic one; national independence was more precious than social revolution, even to the heart of Worcell himself.

A sort of shudder of awakening ran over slumbering Europe some eighteen months before the revolution of February. The Cracow affair, the trial of Miroslawski, even the war of the Sonderbund and the Italian risorgimento were signs of it. Austria replied with an outbreak of imperial terrorism, Nicholas presented her with Cracow, which did not belong to him—but tranquillity was not restored. Louis-Philippe fell in February 1848, it was a Pole who carried his throne to be burned. Worcell at the head of the Polish democracy came forward to remind the Provisional Government of Poland. Lamartine met him with cold rhetoric. The Republic was more peaceable than the Empire.

There was a moment when it was possible to hope; that moment was missed by Poland, missed by all Western Europe, and Paskevitch announced to Nicholas that Hungary lay at his feet.

After the fall of Hungary, there was nothing more to expect, and Worcell, forced to leave Paris, moved to London.

In London at the end of 1852 I found him a member of the European Committee.⁠[61] He knocked at every door, wrote letters, newspaper articles, worked and hoped, persuaded and entreated—and as, with all that, he had to eat, took to giving lessons in mathematics, in geometrical drawing, and even in French; coughing and breathless from asthma, he walked from one end of London to the other to earn two shillings or at the most half a crown. And then part of what he earned he gave to his comrades.

His spirit never flagged, but his body could not keep pace with it. The London atmosphere, damp, soot-laden, never warmed by the sun, was bad for his weak chest. Worcell was wasting away, but still he persevered. So he lived on to the Crimean War; he could not, I had almost said he should not, have survived that.

‘If Poland does nothing now, all is lost, for many years, if not for ever, and I had better close my eyes,’ Worcell said to me, as he set off with Kossuth for a tour round England.

They held meetings in all the principal towns. Worcell and Kossuth were received with loud applause, small sums of money were subscribed for the cause—and that was all. The Government and the Parliament are very good at knowing when public opinion is simply stirred, and when it is insistent. A strong Government after bringing forward a Conspiracy Bill fell in anticipation of a mass-meeting of protest in Hyde Park. There was in the meetings held by Kossuth and Worcell nothing definite, nothing forcible enough to induce the Government and Parliament to acknowledge the rights of Poland and to express sympathy with the Polish cause. The terrible reply of the Conservatives was unanswerable: ‘All is quiet in Poland.’ The English Government would have had, not to recognise an accomplished fact, but to bring it about, to take the initiative in revolution, to rouse Poland. Public opinion in England does not go so far as that. Moreover, in petto, every one was longing for the end of the war which had only just begun, was costly and, in reality, quite useless.

At intervals between the meetings Worcell returned to London. He was too intelligent not to realise their failure, he was visibly ageing, he was gloomy and irritable, and, with the feverish energy with which dying men fly to all manner of remedies, he went back to Birmingham or Liverpool, with sinister apprehensions, and obstinate hopes in his heart, to raise his lament for Poland from the platform. I looked at him with great distress. But how could he imagine that England would rouse Poland, that the France of Napoleon III. would stir up revolution? How could he build hopes on the Europe which had let Russia invade Hungary and the French invade Rome? Did not the very presence of Mazzini and Kossuth in London loudly proclaim the degradation of Europe?

... About the same time the long-rankling dissatisfaction of the younger refugees with the Central Committee became articulate. Worcell was petrified—he had not expected this blow, and yet it came quite naturally.

The small group of people immediately surrounding Worcell were far from being on his level. He understood this, but having grown accustomed to his chorus had fallen under its influence. He imagined that he was their leader, while the chorus that followed him directed his course as they wished. Worcell alone rose to the heights on which he could breathe freely, where it was natural for him to be—the chorus, like plebeian relations, dragged him down to the low level of personal squabbles and petty calculations. The leader, old before his time, gasped in this atmosphere from spiritual breathlessness as much as from physical.

These people did not understand the importance of the alliance which I proposed.

They looked upon it as a means of giving a different colour to the cause; their everlasting repetition of commonplaces, their patriotic phrases, their stock memories—had all grown insipid and boring. Association with the Russians would introduce a novel element. Moreover, they hoped to improve their almost bankrupt position at the expense of the Russian propaganda.

From the very beginning, there was no real understanding between the members of the Central Committee and me. Suspicious of everything Russian, they wanted me to write and publish something like a profession de foi. I wrote The Poles Forgive Us. They asked me to alter certain expressions. I did so, though I was very far from agreeing with them. In reply to my article L. Z. wrote an appeal to the Russians and sent it to me in manuscript. There was not a trace of a new idea in it; there were the same phrases, the same allusions to the past, and outbursts of Catholicism as well. Before translating it into Russian, I pointed out to Worcell the absurdities of the original. Worcell agreed and asked me to explain the matter in the evening to the members of the Central Committee. Then followed the eternal scene between Trissotin and Vadius:⁠[62] the very passages which I criticised were, it appeared, essential to save Poland from ruin. As for the Catholic phrases, they said that whatever their personal convictions might be, they wished to keep with their people; and the people were devoted to their oppressed mother, the Latin Church.

Worcell supported me. But as soon as he began to speak, his comrades made an uproar. Worcell was coughing from the tobacco smoke and could not make himself heard. He promised me to talk to them afterwards and to insist upon the chief corrections. A week later the Polish Democrat came out. Not one word was altered in the appeal; I refused to translate it. Worcell told me that he too was amazed at this proceeding. ‘It is not enough for you to be amazed; why did you not stop it?’ I said to him.

It was evident to me that sooner or later Worcell would be faced with the question, whether to break off from the existing members of the Central Committee and remain in close relations with me, or to break off his association with me and remain on the same terms with his half-baked revolutionists ... Worcell chose the latter course; I was grieved by this, but neither complained of it nor resented it.

At this point I must go into melancholy details. When I set up the printing-press, it was decided that all the expenses of publishing (paper, type, rent, labour, etc.) should fall upon me. The Central Committee undertook the dispatch of the Russian papers and pamphlets at their own expense and through the same channels as the Polish pamphlets. All that they took to send off I gave them free of charge. It would seem that mine was the lion’s share, but apparently it was not enough.

For their own purposes and principally in order to collect funds, the Central Committee arranged to send a delegate to Poland. They even wanted him to go to Kiev and, if possible, to Moscow for propaganda among the Russians, and asked me to give him letters. I refused, afraid of getting people into trouble. Three days before the delegate set off I met Z. in the street in the evening, and he asked me at once: ‘How much are you giving for the expenses of the delegate?’

It struck me as a strange question, but knowing what straits they were in, I said that I would give ten pounds (250 francs), if they liked.

‘What do you mean? You must be joking,’ said Z. frowning. ‘He will need at least sixty pounds and we need forty pounds to make that up. We cannot leave it like that, I will talk to the comrades and come to you.’

He did, in fact, come next day accompanied by Worcell and two other members of the Central Committee. On this occasion Z. simply accused me of refusing to give enough money for the expenses of the delegate, though I had agreed to give him Russian papers to take.

‘Upon my soul,’ I said, ‘you decided to send the delegate, you think it necessary; so the cost of it falls on you. Worcell is present, let him remind you of our agreement.’

‘What’s the use of discussing trifles: as though you didn’t know that we haven’t a farthing!’

This tone sickened me at last.

‘I think you haven’t read Dead Souls,’ I said, ‘or I would have reminded you of how Nozdryov, showing the boundary of his estate to Tchitchikov, told the latter that the land on both sides of the boundary was his. That is very much like our position: we have divided our work and our burdens by arranging that both parts should fall on my back.’

The little bilious Lithuanian began to lose his temper and make an outcry about honour, and wound up his absurd and discourteous speech by the question, ‘What do you want, then?’

‘That you should not take me for a bailleur de fonds nor a democratic banker, as one German called me in a pamphlet. You think too much of my fortune and, I fancy, too little of me; you are mistaken....’

‘Excuse me, excuse me ...’ cried the Lithuanian, pale with fury.

‘I cannot permit this conversation to go further,’ Worcell, who had been sitting gloomily in the corner, observed, rising to his feet, ‘or you must continue it without me. Cher Herzen, you are right, but think of our position: it is essential to send the delegate and we have not the means.’

I stopped him. ‘In that case you might have asked me whether I could do anything, but you could not demand it; and to demand it in this coarse way is simply disgusting. I will give the money; I do so entirely for your sake, and I give you my word of honour, gentlemen, this is for the last time.’

I handed Worcell the money and they all gloomily withdrew.

The delegate went and returned, having done nothing. The war drew near, began. The émigrés were dissatisfied; the younger section blamed Worcell’s comrades for incapacity, laziness and seeking their own interests instead of those of Poland. Their discontent reached the point of open protests, they talked of demanding accounts from the members of the Central Committee, of making an open declaration of lack of confidence. The one thing that restrained them and made them hesitate was their love and respect for Worcell. I did all I could through Czernecki to strengthen their scruples, but blunder after blunder committed by the Central Committee was enough to drive any one out of patience.

In November 1854 there was another Polish meeting, but its spirit was different from that of the previous year. An M.P., Joshua Wolmsley, was asked to take the chair. The Poles put their cause under English patronage. To prevent the speeches from being too red, Worcell wrote notes to some of us, on the same pattern as the one I received from him:

‘You know that we have a meeting on the 20th; we cannot as on the previous occasion ask you to say a few sympathetic words for us; the war and the necessity for securing English support compel us to give a somewhat different tone to the meeting. Herzen, Ledru-Rollin and Pianciani will not speak for us. The speakers will be principally English; of our comrades, only Kossuth will make a speech in order to give an account of our position, etc.’

I answered that ‘I received his invitation not to speak at the meeting, and accepted it the more readily as it was so easy to comply with.’

Support from the English was not forthcoming; concessions were made in vain; even the subscriptions did not amount to much. Wolmsley said that he was ready to give money, but did not wish to put his name down as a subscriber, that as a Member of Parliament he could not take part officially in raising funds for an object not sanctioned by the Government.

All this, and among other things my exclusion from the platform, intensified the irritation of the younger comrades; a statement of the charges against the Central Committee was already being passed from hand to hand. As luck would have it, I was obliged to find fresh quarters for the Russian press. Z., who rented the house in which the Russian as well as the Polish press was installed, was heavily in debt; the bailiffs had been in twice already; they might be expected any day to seize our press together with the furniture. I commissioned Czernecki to move it; Z. made difficulties, was unwilling to let the type and other belongings go; I wrote him a cold letter. In answer to it Worcell, ill and agitated, came to Richmond next day to see me.

‘You are giving us the coup de grâce; at the very moment when there is such strife raging among us you are moving the press.’

‘I assure you that I am not doing so for any political reason, any quarrel, or as a protest, but simply I am afraid that everything will be distrained at Z.’s. Can you assure me that that will not happen? I will rely on your word of honour and not move the press.’

‘He certainly is in very great straits.’

‘How can you, then, wish me to risk the loss of my only weapon? Even if I should be able to recover it later on, think of the loss of time. You know how these things are done here.’

Worcell did not speak.

‘I’ll tell you what I can do for you: I will write a letter, saying that for business reasons I am compelled to move the press, but so far from meaning that I am breaking off from you, it will come to our having two presses instead of one. You can publish this letter if you like or show it to any one you please.’

I did in fact write this letter, addressing it to a humble member of the Central Committee, who was in charge of the office.

‘No doubt you have heard,’ asked Worcell, ‘that they are drawing up an act of indictment against us?’

‘I have.’

‘This is how I am rewarded in my old age ... this is what I have been brought to ...’ and he shook his grey head mournfully.

‘I doubt whether you are right, Worcell. They are so accustomed to love and respect you, that it was only through fear of wounding you that things have not come to a head before. You know that it is not with you they have a quarrel, let your comrades go their own way.’

‘Never, never; we have done everything together, we share the responsibility.’

‘You won’t save them.’

‘And what did you say half an hour ago about Russell’s betraying his comrades?’

It was in the evening. I was standing at a little distance from the fireplace, Worcell was sitting at the window with his face towards the fire. His face, worn by illness, with the red glow of the fire quivering over it, struck me as more wasted and suffering than ever—a tear, the bitter tear of age, rolled down his hollow cheek ... several minutes of unbearably painful silence followed ... he got up, I went with him to his bedroom, the great trees were rustling in the garden. Worcell opened the window and said: ‘I should last twice as long here with my poor chest.’

I gripped him with both hands: ‘Worcell,’ I said, ‘stay with me; I will give you a second room, no one shall interfere with you, do as you like, breakfast alone, dine alone if you like; you will rest here for two or three months.... You will not be continually worried, you will be refreshed. I entreat you as a friend, as though I were your younger brother.’

‘I thank you. I thank you with all my heart. I would accept your invitation at once, but under present circumstances it is simply out of the question ... on the one hand, there is the war; on the other, our fellows will take it as meaning that I have deserted them. No, every man must bear his own cross to the end.’

‘Well, sleep well to-night at least,’ I said to him, trying to smile. There was no means of saving him!

In the autumn of 1856 Worcell was advised to go to Nice and to stay a little while first on the warm shores of the Lake of Geneva. When I heard of it I offered him the money necessary. He accepted it, and that brought us together again; we began seeing each other more frequently. But he was a long time preparing to go; the damp London winter with its smoky stifling fog, its everlasting humidity and terrible north-east winds, was beginning. I tried to hurry him off, but already he began to betray a sort of instinctive dread of change, of movement. He was afraid of solitude. I suggested that he should take some one with him to Geneva; there I should have handed him over to Karl Vogt.

He accepted everything, agreed to everything, but did nothing. He lived in an underground basement; it was scarcely ever light in his room, there he was fading away, ill with asthma, without air, breathing coal smoke.

Peter Taylor told Worcell’s landlady to send him every week her bill for his lodging, board and washing; he paid this bill, but gave not a single pound into the old refugee’s hands.

It was definitely too late for him to travel; I offered to take a good room for him in the Brompton Consumption Hospital.

‘Yes, that would be very nice, but it is impossible. Only think what a dreadful distance it is from here.’

‘Well, what of it?’

‘Szabicki lives here and all our affairs are here; he would have to come every morning to bring me a daily report.’

At this point self-sacrifice bordered upon madness.

... The war was ending, Nicholas was dead, a new Russia was arising, we lived to see the Paris Peace, and to see the Polar Star and everything we published bought up to the last copy. We began publishing the Bell and it went well.... Worcell and I rarely saw each other; he rejoiced at our success with that inner suppressed but burning pain with which a mother who has lost her son watches the development of another’s boy.... The time of the fatal alternative set by Worcell in his oggi o mai had come, and he was fading out of life....

Three days before his end Czernecki sent for me. Worcell had asked for me—he was very ill, they were expecting the end. When I came in he was in a state of semi-consciousness not unlike a trance; he lay on the sofa, pale and waxen ... his cheeks were terribly sunken, and these fits of unconsciousness had been frequent with him during the last few days, he was slowly growing used to death. A quarter of an hour later Worcell began to come to himself, spoke in a faint voice; he recognised me, sat up and lay half reclining.

‘Have you read the papers?’ he asked me.

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me how the Neufchâtel question is going. I can read nothing.’ I told him, he listened and understood everything.

‘Ah, how I want to sleep! Leave me now, I shall not sleep with you here, and I shall be easier if I sleep.’

Next day he was a little better. He wanted to say something to me ... twice he began and stopped ... and only when he was left alone with me the dying man called me to his side and, feebly taking my hand, said: ‘How right you were ... you don’t know how right you were! ... it has been on my mind to tell you so.’

‘Don’t let us talk any more about them.’

‘Go your own way ...’—he raised his dying but bright and radiant eyes upon me. He could talk no more. I kissed him on the lips, and it was well I did, for our parting was a long one. In the evening he got up, sipped a little warm gin and water with the landlady—an excellent simple-hearted woman, who had a religious reverence for Worcell as a being of a higher order—went back to his own room, and fell asleep. Next morning Szabicki and the landlady asked whether he wanted anything more. He asked them to make a fire and let him sleep again; they did so. Worcell never woke again.

When I came he was gone. His thin, thin face and body were covered by a white sheet. I looked at him, said a last good-bye, and went to fetch a sculptor’s workman to take a mask of him. His last interview, his great agony I have described in another place; I will add one terrible touch to it.

Worcell never spoke of his family. Once he was looking for some letter to give me; rummaging in the table he opened a drawer. There lay a photograph of a well-fed-looking young man with the moustache of an officer. ‘A Pole and a patriot, no doubt,’ I said, more in jest than by way of inquiry.

‘That,’ said Worcell, looking away and hurriedly taking the portrait out of my hand, ‘is my son.’ I learned later that he was in the Russian service in Warsaw.

His daughter had married a count and was living in wealthy style. She did not know her father.

Two days before his death he was dictating his will to Mazzini ... his last message to Poland, his farewell to her and greetings to friends.... ‘That is all,’ said the dying man. Mazzini did not put down the pen. ‘Think a little,’ he said; ‘is there nothing else you want at this moment? Are there no others to whom you should have something to say?’ Worcell understood, his face clouded over and he answered: ‘There is nothing for me to say to them.’

I know no curse which would sound more terrible and lie more heavily upon one than those simple words.

With the death of Worcell the democratic party of the Polish emigrants in London grew pettier. It had rested upon him, upon his beautiful, his revered personality. The radical party fell apart into little cliques, almost hostile to each other. The yearly meetings split up, became poor in numbers and interest. There was still the everlasting requiem, the rehearsal of losses, new and old, and, as always in requiems, the visionary hope of the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting, the faith in the second coming of Buonaparte and the resurrection of Poland.

Two or three worthy old men remained like grand and mournful monuments; like the grey-headed, long-bearded Israelites weeping at the walls of Jerusalem. They pointed, not like leaders, to the path ahead, but like monks, to the grave; they bring us to a standstill with their Sta viator!

The best of the best among them had kept a youthful heart in his decrepit body, and a gentle, childishly pure youthful light in his blue eyes. He was already on the brink of the grave, he would soon pass away, and soon, too, his opponent Czartoryzski.

Is not that really finis Poloniae?

Before we part for ever from the touching and sympathetic personality of Worcell in the cold Highgate cemetery, I should like to give a few more trifling details about him. So men coming from a funeral check their mourning to tell stories of the dead man.

Worcell was very absent-minded in little daily affairs; he always left behind him his spectacles, spectacle-case, handkerchief, snuff-box; on the other hand, if a handkerchief not his own lay beside him he would put it in his pocket; he came to see me sometimes with three gloves, sometimes with one.

Before he moved to Hunter Street, he lived close by in a semicircle of small houses at 43 Burton Crescent, not far from the New Road. After the English fashion all the houses in the Crescent were single dwellings. The house in which Worcell lived was the fifth from the end and, knowing his absent-mindedness, he always counted the doors. Returning one day from the opposite side of the Crescent, Worcell knocked and, when the door was opened, walked into his room. A girl, probably the daughter of the house, came out of it. Some one coughed twice behind him: a complete stranger was sitting in the armchair. ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Worcell, ‘I am afraid you have been waiting for me.’ ‘Allow me,’ observed the Englishman, ‘before answering, to know with whom I have the honour of speaking.’

‘I am Worcell, and I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance; what can I do for you?’

Here Worcell was suddenly struck by the idea that he had come to the wrong place; looking about him he saw that the furniture and everything else was not his. He told the Englishman of his plight, and apologising went off to the fifth house from the other side. Fortunately the Englishman was a very polite person, which is not a very common find in London.

Three months later the same thing happened again. This time when he knocked, the maid who opened the door, seeing a venerable old man, asked him to walk into the parlour, where the Englishman was having supper with his wife. Seeing Worcell walk in, he held out his hand good-humouredly and said: ‘It’s not here, you live at No. 43.’

In spite of this absent-mindedness, Worcell preserved to the end of his life an extraordinary memory; I used to refer to him as to a lexicon or encyclopaedia. He had read everything in the world and studied everything, mechanics and astronomy, the natural sciences and history. Though he had no Catholic prejudices, from the old pli of the Polish mind he believed in a spiritual world, unnecessary and impossible, but apart from the material world. It was not the religion of Moses, Abraham and Isaac, but the religion of Jean Jacques, of George Sand, of Pierre Leroux, of Mazzini and the rest. But Worcell had less right to it than any of them.

When his asthma was not worrying him very much and he was not very gloomy, Worcell was very charming in company. He told stories superbly, and especially reminiscences of the old life of the Polish nobility. I used to listen attentively to his tales. The world of Pan Tadewsz, the world of Murdelio ... passed before one’s eyes; a world the end of which one could not regret; on the contrary, one rejoices that it is no more, though one cannot refuse to acknowledge a sort of brilliant, unbridled poetry in it entirely lacking in the life of the Russian nobility. West European aristocracy is indeed so completely alien to us that all accounts of our grandees may be reduced to stories of savage luxury, of banquets in which a whole town takes part, of multitudes of house-serfs, of tyrannising over the peasants and poor neighbours, together with slavish cringing before the emperor and the court. The Sheremetyevs and the Golitsyns with all their palaces and great estates were in no way distinguished from their peasants, except by wearing a German coat, reading and writing French, and enjoying wealth and the Tsar’s favour. They were all continually justifying Paul’s dictum, that he had no one about him but servants in high positions; it was to such that he was speaking when he said it. All that is very good, but one ought to recognise it. What can be more pitiful et moins aristocratique than the last representative of Russian nobility and high rank whom I have seen, Prince Sergey Mihailovitch Golitsyn, and what can be more loathsome than an Izmailov?

The manners of the Polish Pans were bad, barbarous, almost unintelligible now; but they were on another plane, due to a different mould of character, and there was not a shade of churlishness in them.

‘Do you know,’ Worcell asked me once, ‘why the Passage Radziwill in the Palais Royal is so called?’

‘No.’

‘You remember the celebrated Radziwill, the friend of the Regent, who drove with his own horses from Warsaw to Paris and bought a house for every night he had to sleep on the journey; the quantity of wine drunk by Radziwill was too much for his less vigorous host; the Duke became so much attached to him, that though he saw him every day, he used to send him notes in the morning. One day Radziwill wanted to tell the Regent something; he sent a lad with a letter to him. The fellow looked and looked, but could not find the place, and came back to confess his failure. “You fool,” the Pan said to him, “come here, look out of window, do you see that big house?” (the Palais Royal).—“Yes, I see it.”—“Well, that is where the greatest Pan here lives. Any one will show it you.” The lad went off and looked and looked, but could not find the place. The fact is that the palace is screened by houses, and one has to make a détour by the Rue Honoré. “Phew, what a bore!” said the Pan; “tell my steward to buy the houses between my house and the Palais Royal, and to make a street, so that this fool won’t lose his way next time I send him to the Regent.”’

I will give another example of how financial operations are conducted as a rule in our world.

After my arrival in London in 1852, while speaking of the low state of the Italian party funds with Mazzini, I told him that in Genoa I had proposed to his friends that they should put a tax on their incomes and pay, those with no families 10 per cent., those with a family less.

‘They will all agree,’ observed Mazzini, ‘but very few will pay it.’

‘That would be shameful; they will pay,’ I said. ‘I have long wished to contribute my mite to the Italian cause, it is as dear to me as my own; I will give 10 per cent. of my income at the same time. That will be about £200. Here is £140, but £60 I will keep for the present.’

In 1853 Mazzini vanished. Soon after his departure two refugees called upon me, one wearing a fur collar because he had ten years previously been in Petersburg; the other with no collar, but with a grey moustache and a little military beard. They came with a message from Ledru-Rollin; he wanted to know whether I was not intending to send a sum of money to the European Committee. I confessed that I had no such intention.

Some days later the same question was put to me by Worcell, ‘Where can Ledru-Rollin have picked up that idea?’

‘Why, you did give some to Mazzini.’

‘That is rather a reason for not giving to any one else.’

‘I believe you still have £60 to give.’

‘Promised to Mazzini.’

‘That is all the same.’

‘I don’t think so.’

A week passed; I had a letter from Mazzoletti, in which he informed me that it had come to his knowledge that I did not know to whom to send £60 still in my hands; for which reason he begged me to send the money to him as the representative of Mazzini in London.

This Mazzoletti really was Mazzini’s secretary. An official and a bureaucrat by nature, he amused us by his official dignity and bureaucratic manner.

When a telegram appeared in the newspapers announcing the rising in Milan of the 3rd of February 1853, I went to Mazzoletti to find out whether he had any news. Mazzoletti asked me to wait; then came out to me with an anxious but valiant air, carrying some papers and accompanied by Bratiano, with whom he was in earnest conversation.

‘I have come to you to find out if you have any news.’

‘No, I only heard myself from The Times; I am awaiting a dispatch from hour to hour.’

Two or three others arrived. Mazzoletti was pleased, and so groaned and complained that he had no time to spare. In course of conversation he began to drop hints of news and explanations.

‘How do you know that?’ I asked him.

‘That ... these, of course, are my own deductions,’ Mazzoletti observed, somewhat disconcerted.

‘I will come to you to-morrow morning....’

‘If any news comes to-day I will let you know.’

‘You will oblige me; from seven till nine o’clock this evening I shall be at Verrey’s.’

Mazzoletti did not forget. At seven o’clock I was dining at Verrey’s: an Italian whom I had seen twice walked in, he came up to me, looked about him, waited till the waiter had gone to fetch something, and saying that Mazzoletti had charged him to tell me that there was no telegram, went away.

On receiving the letter from the state secretary of revolution, I answered him jokingly, that he was wrong in picturing me as standing helpless in the midst of London, not knowing to whom to give £60; that without a letter from Mazzini I had no intention of giving the money to any one whatever.

Mazzoletti wrote me a long and somewhat wrathful note, which was intended, without lowering the dignity of the writer or exceeding the limits of parliamentary courtesy, to be sarcastic at the expense of the recipient.

Not a week had passed after these overtures when early one morning Amelia G., one of the women most devoted to Mazzini and an intimate friend of his, called upon me. She told me that the rising in Lombardy had failed, that Mazzini was still in hiding there and asking them to send him money at once, and they had no money.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘is the famous £60; only, don’t forget to tell your privy councillor Mazzoletti, and Ledru-Rollin too if occasion arises, that I did not do so badly in refusing to fling these 1500 francs into the bottomless pit of the European Committee.’

In anticipation of our Russian national inference from my story, I ought to say that no one ever profited by the money so collected.⁠[63] In Russia some one would have stolen it: here it vanished exactly as though someone had burnt the banknotes in a candle without taking the numbers.

2 Pater V. Petcherin

‘Yesterday I saw Petcherin.’

I started at the name.

‘What,’ I asked, ‘the Petcherin, is he here?’

‘Who, the Reverend Petcherin? Yes, he is here.’

‘Where is he?’

‘In the Jesuit monastery, Saint Mary’s Chapel, at Clapham.’

The Reverend Father Petcherin!... That sin too lies at the doors of Nicholas. I had not known Petcherin personally, but I had heard a very great deal about him from Ryedkin, Kryukov and Granovsky. He had returned, a young professor, from abroad, to take the Chair of Greek in the Moscow University; it was at one of the very darkest periods of the persecution by Nicholas between 1835 and 1840. We were in exile, the later young professors had not yet arrived, the Telegraph had been forbidden, the European had been forbidden, the Telescope had been forbidden. Tchaadayev had been declared insane.

It was not till after 1848 that the Terror in Russia went to even further extremes.

But the frenzied tyranny of the last years of Nicholas’ reign was unmistakably the fifth act. By then it was already becoming apparent that something was not only breaking and ruining, but was itself being broken and dropping into ruins. There was the sound as though the floor were cracking under a collapsing roof.

In the ’thirties, on the contrary, the frenzy of power went its accustomed routine with its regular step; all around was silence and desolation, everything was dumb submission with no hope, no human dignity, and at the same time dull, stupid and petty. Any one who looked for sympathy met a flunkey’s menace or panic, all turned from him or insulted him. Petcherin was gasping for air in this Neapolitan cave of slavery, he was overtaken by horror, misery, he had at all costs to escape from this accursed land. To get away he needed money. Petcherin began to give lessons, reduced his expenditure to the barest necessaries, missed the gatherings of his comrades, went out little, and after saving a small sum went away.

Soon afterwards he wrote a letter to Count Strogonov; he informed him that he should not return. Thanking him and bidding him farewell, Petcherin spoke of the unbearably suffocating atmosphere from which he was escaping, and besought him to protect the luckless young professors doomed by their culture to the same agonies, to shield them from the blows of brute force.

Strogonov showed this letter to many of the professors.

There was silence about him for some time in Moscow, then suddenly we heard with an infinitely bitter feeling that Petcherin had become a Jesuit, that he was serving his novitiate in a monastery. Poverty, friendlessness, solitude had broken his spirit. I looked through his Triumph of Death, and asked myself: ‘Can this man possibly be a Catholic, a Jesuit? Why, he has already gone from the rule of the Tsars, where history is made under the stick of the policeman, and under guard of the gendarme. Why then did he so soon feel the need of other control, other authority?’

The Russian felt isolated, forlorn in the closely classified West, up to its neck in business; he was too conscious of being without kith or kin. When the cord by which he was bound was broken and his life, suddenly set free from every external guidance, was left in his own hands, he did not know what to do, could not deal with it, and thrown out of his natural orbit with no goal before him, no boundaries to restrain him, he sank into a Jesuit monastery!

At two o’clock on the day after I heard his name, I went to Saint Mary’s Chapel. The heavy oak door was closed—I knocked three times with a knocker in the shape of a ring, the door opened and a thin young man of about eighteen appeared, wearing a monk’s cassock; in his hand was a breviary.

‘Whom do you wish to see?’ the brother who acted as porter asked.

‘The Reverend Father Petcherin.’

‘Kindly give me your name.’

‘Here is my card and a letter.’ In the letter I had put an announcement of the Russian printing press.

‘Come in,’ said the young man, closing the door behind me. ‘Will you wait here?’ and he indicated two or three large chairs with antique carving on them in the spacious vestibule.

Five minutes later he returned, and told me in French, with a slight accent, that le père Petcherin sera enchanté de me recevoir dans un instant.

After that he led me across the refectory into a small, lofty room, dimly lighted, and again asked me to sit down. On the wall there was a crucifix carved out of stone, and, if I am not mistaken, on the other side there was also a Madonna. About the heavy, massive table there were large wooden armchairs and ordinary chairs. A door on the opposite side led by a porch into a spacious garden; its worldly greenness and the rustle of the leaves seemed somehow out of keeping.

The brother doorkeeper showed me a notice on the wall, in which was the statement that the reverend fathers saw those that had need of them between four and six. It was not yet four.

‘I think you are not an Englishman and not a Frenchman?’ I asked him, listening to his accent.

‘No.’

‘Sind Sie ein Deutscher?’

‘Oh, nein, mein Herr. Ich bin beinahe ihre Landsmann, ich bin ein Pole.’

Well—the brother doorkeeper was not a bad choice, he spoke in four languages. I sat down; he went away; I felt strange at seeing myself in these surroundings. Black figures kept walking by in the garden; two men in semi-monastic dress passed close by me; they gravely but courteously bowed, looking at the ground; on each occasion I rose and as gravely bowed in return. At last a little very elderly priest came in wearing a biretta and the regular garb in which priests are dressed in monasteries. He came straight up to me, his robes rustling, and asked me with the purest French accent: ‘You wish to see Petcherin?’ I answered by giving my name.

‘I am greatly delighted at your visit,’ he said, holding out his hand; ‘please sit down.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, somewhat taken aback at not having recognised him. It had not entered my head that I should meet him in such a costume. ‘Your dress....’

He gave a slight smile and at once went on: ‘It is a long while since I have had any news of my own country, of our friends, of the university. You probably knew Ryedkin and Kryukov.’

I looked at him; his face was old, older than his years, one could see that behind those wrinkles much had passed, and passed away, tout de bon, that is, had died, leaving only its funereal traces on his features. The artificial clerical composure with which monks destroy as with corrosive sublimate whole sides of their heart and their mind had reached even his speech and all his movements. A Catholic priest has always something of the widow, he too is always in mourning and in solitude, he too is faithful to something which is not, and quenches his real passions by stimulating his imagination.

When I told him about our common acquaintances and about the death of Kryukov, at which I had been present, and how his students had borne him to the cemetery across the whole length of the town, and then about Granovsky’s triumphs, about his public lectures, we both sank into thought. What was passing in the skull under the biretta I do not know, but Petcherin took it off as though it weighed heavily on him at that moment, and laid it on the table. Conversation did not run easily. ‘Sortons un peu au jardin,’ said Petcherin, ‘le temps est si beau, et c’est si rare à Londres.’

‘Avec le plus grand plaisir, but tell me, please, why are we talking in French?’

‘Yes, indeed! Let us speak Russian. I believe I have quite forgotten it.’

We went out into the garden. The conversation again passed to our university days in Moscow.

‘Oh,’ said Petcherin, ‘what a terrible time it was when I left Russia! I cannot think of it without shuddering!’

‘Only imagine what is being done there now; our Saul has gone completely mad since 1848,’ and I told him of several atrocious incidents.

‘Unhappy country, especially for the minority who have received the unlucky gift of culture. And yet what a good people! I often think of our peasants when I am in Ireland. They are very much alike; the Celtic peasant is just such a child as ours. You should go to Ireland, and you will be convinced of it yourself.’

So the conversation was prolonged for half an hour; at last when I prepared to leave him I said to him: ‘I have a favour to ask of you.’

‘Please tell me what it is.’

‘Several of your poems came into my hands in Petersburg: among them is a trilogy—“Polikrat Samossky,” “The Triumph of Death” and something else: haven’t you got them, or can you not let me have them?’

‘How can you recall such nonsense! They were the crude, childish productions of a certain period and a certain mood.’

‘Perhaps,’ I observed smiling, ‘that is why I like them; but have you got them or not?’

‘No, indeed!’

‘And you could not dictate them?’

‘No, no, certainly not.’

‘But if I can find them somewhere in Russia will you permit me to publish them?’

‘I really look upon those trivial productions as though some one else had written them; they mean no more to me than a sick man’s ravings after his recovery.’

‘Since they mean nothing to you, then I can publish them—without your name, of course?’

‘Do you like those verses still?’

‘That’s my business. You only tell me whether you will allow me to publish them or not.’

Even then he would not give me a direct answer. I did not insist further.

‘Why,’ observed Petcherin, as I was saying good-bye, ‘you have brought me none of your publications. I remember some three years ago there was talk in the newspapers of a book published by you, I believe in German.’

‘Your cloth,’ I answered, ‘will tell you on what grounds I could not bring it; accept my not doing so as a sign of respect and delicacy.’

‘You little know our tolerance and our love; we may grieve over error, pray for its correction, earnestly desire it, and in any case love the man.’

We parted. He forgot neither the book nor my answer, and three days later wrote me the following letter in French:—

J.M.J.A., St. Mary’s, Clapham, April 11, 1853.

I cannot disguise from you the sympathy that is awakened in my heart by the word freedom—freedom for my unhappy country! Do not for one instant doubt the sincerity of my desire for the resurrection of Russia. For all that, I am far from agreeing with your programme in all respects. But that is of no importance, the love of the Catholic priest embraces all opinions and all parties. When your most precious hopes deceive you, when the powers of this world rise up against you, you will still have left an unfailing refuge in the heart of the Catholic priest: in him you will find affection without insincerity, precious tears and the peace which this world cannot give you. Come to me, dear fellow-countryman. I should be very pleased to see you once more before I go away to Guernsey. Do not forget to bring your brochure for me.

V. Petcherin.

I took him the books, and four days afterwards received the following letter:—

St. Pierre, Island of Guernsey, J.M.J.A., Chapelle Catholique, April 15, 1853.

I have read both your books with great attention. One thing has particularly impressed me: it seems to me that you and your friends rest your hopes exclusively on philosophy and on belles lettres. Can you imagine that it is their vocation to reform society as it is? Pardon me, but the evidence of history is entirely against you. There is no instance of a society being founded or recreated by philosophy and literature. I say plainly (tranchons le mot), only religion has ever served as the foundation of a state; philosophy and literature, alas! are but the latest flower of the social tree. When philosophy and literature attain their apogee, when philosophers, orators and poets are the ruling power and settle all public questions, then comes the end, the downfall, then comes the death of society. That is shown by Greece and Rome, that is shown by the so-called Alexandrian period; never was philosophy more encouraged, never was literature more flourishing, yet it was a period of deep social degradation; whenever philosophy has undertaken the re-creation of the social order, it has invariably passed into a social despotism, for instance in the case of Frederick II., Catherine II., Joseph II., and in all the revolutions that have failed. You have let fall a phrase felicitous or infelicitous as you like: you say that the phalanstery is nothing but the barracks in another form, and that Communism can but be the autocracy of Nicholas transformed into another aspect. In fact, I see a shadow of melancholy resting on you and your Moscow friends. Indeed, you seem yourselves conscious that you are all Onyegins, i.e. that you and your friends are all in negation, in doubt, in despair. Is it possible to rebuild society on such foundations?

Perhaps what I have said is a commonplace, and you know it better than I do. I write this not for the sake of argument, not to begin a controversy, but I thought myself bound to make this criticism, because sometimes the noblest minds and best hearts are mistaken in their fundamental principle, without themselves being aware of it. So I write this to you to show how attentively I have read your book, and to give you a fresh proof of the respect and love which, etc.

V. Petcherin.

To this I answered him in Russian:

25 Euston Square, April 21, 1853.

Honoured Fellow-countryman,—I thank you most sincerely for your letter, and ask your leave to say a few words à la hâte, on the principal points of it.

I entirely agree with you that literature like the flowers of autumn appears in all its brilliance before the downfall of states. Ancient Rome could not be saved by the witty phrases of Cicero, nor by his thin morality, nor by the Voltairianism of Lucian, nor the German philosophy of Proclus; but note that it could not be saved by the Eleusinian mysteries either, nor by Apollonius of Tyana, nor all the efforts to prolong and revive paganism.

It was not only impossible but useless. There was no need to save the ancient world, it had outlived its age, and a new world had risen up to take its place. Europe is precisely in the same position; literature and philosophy are not preserving its decrepit forms, but thrusting them into the tomb, breaking them up, setting us free from them.

The new world is approaching exactly as it was then. Do not think that I have been inconsistent in calling the phalanstery a barracks; no, all doctrines and schools of socialists that have appeared hitherto, from Saint-Simon to Proudhon, who stands for nothing but negation, are poor, they are the first murmur, the first spelling out word by word, they are the Therapeutes and the Essenes of the ancient East. But who has not a foreboding, a glimpse of the vast issues that are dimly apparent through those one-sided efforts, and who would punish children because their teeth are cut with difficulty or come through irregularly?

The despondency of modern life is the despondency of the twilight, of transition, of forebodings. Animals are uneasy before an earthquake.

Nothing has got beyond that point. Some try to force open the door to the future, others forcibly prevent the past from going; some look to prophecies, others to memories, their work consists in hindering each other, and both alike are stuck in the bog.

Beside it is another world—Russia. Its foundation is a communistic peasantry still slumbering, with a surface scum of cultivated people reduced to the condition of Onyegin, to despair, to exile, to your fate and to mine. It is a bitter lot for us. We are victims of the fact that we are born out of our right time. For our cause that makes no difference; at any rate, it has not the same importance.

Speaking of the revolutionary movement in new Russia, I have said that from Peter the Great Russian history is the history of the nobility and of the Government. The revolutionary ferment is found in the nobility; though in Russia it has had no outlet—open, active, in the market-place—no outlet except the literary career; there too I have tracked it.

I have had the boldness to say in my letter to Michelet that cultured Russians are the most emancipated of men; we have gone incomparably further in negation than, for instance, the French. In negation of what? Of the old world, of course.

Together with his idle despair Onyegin now is arriving at positive hopes. You have perhaps not noticed them. Abjuring Europe in its effete form, abjuring Petersburg, which is Europe again but adapted to our manners, weak and cut off from the people, we have perished. But little by little something new, grotesque in Gogol, exaggerated in the Panslavists, has been developing. This new element is the element of faith in the strength of the people, a faith full of love. With it we have begun to understand the peasantry. But we are far away from them. I am not saying that it will be our lot to re-create Russia; we must be thankful to have welcomed the common people, and to have divined that the new world belongs to them.

One word more. I am not confounding science with literary and philosophical culture. Science, if it does not re-create a state, does not really decline with it. It is a means, it is the memory of the human race, it is its conquest over Nature, its emancipation. Ignorance, ignorance alone is the cause of pauperism and slavery. The masses have been left by their educators in the condition of cattle. Science, nothing but science, can correct that now and give them bread and shelter. Not through propaganda but through chemistry, mechanics, technology, railways, it may restore the brain which has been cramped morally and physically for ages.

I shall be truly delighted, et cetera.

A fortnight later, I received the following letter from Father Petcherin:

J.M.J.A., St. Mary’s, Clapham, May 3, 1853.

I answer you in French for reasons of which you are aware. I could not write to you before, I was burdened with duties in Guernsey: one has little time for philosophical theory when one lives in the midst of a reality pulsating with life; one has no leisure to settle speculative problems of the future destiny of mankind when mankind in flesh and blood comes to pour out its sorrows on one’s bosom, and to beg for advice and help.

I must frankly confess that your last letter filled me with horror, and a very egoistic horror I must admit.

What will happen to us when your culture (votre civilisation à vous) gains the day? For your science is everything, alpha and omega. Not that broad science which embraces all the faculties of man, everything visible and invisible, science as it has been understood by the world hitherto, but a limited, narrow science which analyses and dissects matter, and knows of nothing else. Chemistry, mechanics, technology, steam, electricity—the great science of eating and drinking, the worship of the individual (le culte de la personne) as Michel Chevalier would have said! Woe to us if that science triumphs! In the days of their persecution by the Roman Emperors Christians had at least the possibility of flight into the wilderness of Egypt, the sword of the tyrants was checked at that boundary which they could not pass. But whither can one flee from the tyranny of your material civilisation? It levels mountains, excavates canals, lays down railways, sends steamers; its newspapers penetrate to the burning wastes of Africa, to the pathless forests of America. As once Christians were dragged into the amphitheatres to be exposed to the jeers of the crowd greedy for spectacles, so now they will drag us men of prayer and silence into the public market-place, and there ask: ‘Why do you flee from our society? You ought to take part in our materialistic life, in our trade, in our marvellous industry. Go, make speeches in the market-place, go and preach political economy, deliberate on the fall and rise of the exchange. Go and preside at our feasts, paradise is here on earth—let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!’ That is what moves me to horror, for where are we to find a refuge from the tyranny of matter, which is gaining more and more mastery of all?

Forgive me if I have somewhat exaggerated the gloomy colours of my picture; it seems to me that I have only carried the foundations laid by you to their legitimate conclusion. I should not have left Russia for an intellectual caprice (caprice de spiritualité). Russia has indeed begun with science as you understand it, and she is continuing with it. She holds in her hands the gigantic lever of material power. She calls all talents to serve her and to celebrate her material prosperity. She will become the most cultured country in the world. Providence has allotted to her the material world; she will make a paradise of it for her elect. She understands civilisation just as you understand it, the science of the material has always been her strength. But we who have faith in an immortal soul and a future life, what have we to do with this civilisation of the present minute? Russia will never have me for its subject.

I have propounded my views with simplicity, to make our position clear to each other. Forgive me if I put too much heat into my words. As I am going back to Ireland on Friday morning it will be impossible for me to come to you, but I shall be very glad if it will suit you to visit me on Wednesday or on Thursday after dinner.—Receive, etc.

V. Petcherin.

I answered him next day.

25 Euston Square, May 4, 1853.

Honoured Fellow-countryman,—I went to see you to press the hand of a Russian whose name was familiar to me and whose position was so like my own.... Although life and convictions have put you among the triumphant ranks of the conquerors and me in the melancholy camps of the vanquished, I had no thought of touching upon the difference of our opinions. My wish was to see a Russian, my wish was to bring you living news of your native land. From a sense of delicacy I did not offer you my pamphlets, it was your own wish to see them. Hence your letter, my answer, and your second letter of the 3rd of May; you attack me, my opinions (exaggerated and not fully held by me), I cannot but defend myself. I only wrote to you that I reckon the sum total of our conquests over Nature and of all our culture, of course, entirely outside the domain of belles lettres and abstract philosophy.

But this is a lengthy subject, and I have no desire without special provocation to repeat everything that has so many times been said about it. Allow me rather to reassure you in regard to your anxiety about the future of men who love the contemplative life. Science is not a special school or doctrine, and so it can become neither a government, an arbitrary law, nor a persecution. You probably meant to speak of social ideas, of freedom. In that case, take the most ‘materialistic’ and ‘most free’ country, England. Men of the contemplative life as well as the advocates of a Utopia find in it a nook for tranquil reflection and a platform for preaching their doctrines. And yet England, a Protestant monarchy, is very far from complete tolerance.

And what is there to fear? The rumble of the wheels bringing bread to the hungry, half-clad crowd? We do not forbid men to thrash corn for fear they should disturb our poetic tranquillity.

There will always and everywhere be contemplative natures; there will be more freedom for them both as to thought and stillness; let them find themselves a quiet spot; no one will disturb and no one will summon them, no one will persecute them, no one will either oppress them or support them. I imagine it is wrong to be afraid of improving the life of the masses because the process of improving it may grate upon the ears of men who do not want to hear anything external. No one asks even for self-denial, for kindness, for sacrifice in this case. If it is noisy in the market-place you should not carry your wares there but go away from it. But the newspapers follow us everywhere—what contemplative nature is dependent for happiness on the first edition in Paris or the first edition in London?

But, you see, if instead of freedom the anti-materialistic and monarchial principles triumph, then it will be hard for us to find a place, not where we may rest undisturbed, but where we may escape the hangings, burnings, and torturings which are still to be found to some extent in Rome and Milan, in France and Russia.

Which then need feel afraid? Of course, death is of no consequence sub specie aeternitatis, but from that point of view, you know, everything else is of no consequence either.

Forgive me, honoured fellow-countryman, for my frank opposition to what you say, and consider that I could make no other answer.

My warmest good wishes that you may have a good journey to Ireland.

With that our correspondence ended.

Two years passed. The grey fog on the European horizon was lighted up by the glare of the Crimean War which made its darkness blacker than ever, and all at once, among the bloody news of campaigns and sieges, I read in the newspapers that somewhere in Ireland the Reverend Father Vladimir Petcherin had been brought up for trial for publicly burning a Protestant Bible in the market-place. The haughty British judge, taking into consideration the senselessness of the action and the fact that the prisoner was a Russian, confined himself to a paternal exhortation to a greater propriety of behaviour in the streets for the future....

Can those chains weigh lightly upon him ... or does he often take off his biretta and lay it wearily on the table?

3 THREE TRIALS

I The Duel

In 1853 the celebrated communist Willich introduced me to a Parisian workman called Emanuel Barthélemy. I knew his name before from the June trial, from his sentence, and finally from his escape from Belle-Île.

He was a young man, short, but of a muscularly powerful build; his pitch-black curly hair gave him a Southern look; his face, slightly marked with smallpox, was clear-cut and handsome. Continual conflict had aroused in him an inflexible will and the power of directing it. Barthélemy was one of the most single-minded natures which it has been my lot to meet. Of bookish school education he had none except in his own line: he was an excellent mechanic. We may note in passing that it was from the ranks of the mechanics, machinists, engineers, and railway workers that the most resolute fighters on the June barricades came.

The thought of his life, the passion of his whole existence was an unflagging thirst like that of Spartacus for the revolt of the working people against the middle classes. This idea was in him inseparable from a savage desire to massacre the bourgeois.

What a commentary that man furnished me on the horrors of 1793 and 1794, on the days of September, on the hatred with which the parties nearest of kin destroyed each other! In him I saw face to face how a man can combine a thirst for blood with humanity in other relations, even with tenderness, and how a man may be at peace with his own conscience while like Saint-Just sending dozens of men to the guillotine.

‘That the revolution may not be for the tenth time stolen out of our hands,’ Barthélemy would say, ‘we must crush our worst foe at home, in our own family. At the counter, in the office, we always find him—it’s in our own camp we ought to destroy him!’ On his proscription lists were the names of almost all the refugees: Victor Hugo, Mazzini, Victor Schœlcher,⁠[64] and Kossuth. He made very few exceptions; among them, I remember, was Louis Blanc. The peculiar object of his most genuine hatred was Ledru-Rollin. The keen, passionate but extremely composed face of Barthélemy would twitch convulsively when he spoke of ‘the dictator of the bourgeoisie.’

He talked in a masterly fashion, a talent that is growing more and more rare. Public speakers in Paris, and still more in England, are endless in number. Priests, lawyers, members of parliament, men selling pills or cheap pencils, hired orators—secular and spiritual—in the parks, they all have a wonderful faculty for preaching, but very few can talk for the benefit of a room.

Barthélemy’s one-sided logic, continually turned in one direction, acted like the flame of a blowpipe. He spoke smoothly without raising his voice or gesticulating; his choice of words, his sentences were correct, pure, and completely free from the three curses of modern French, revolutionary jargon, legal expressions and the easy familiarity of shop-boys.

Where had this workman, brought up in the stifling foundries where iron was forged and wrought for machines, in stifling Parisian alleys, between the pot-house and the forge, in prison and in penal servitude—where had he gained his true conception of beauty and proportion, of tact and grace—a conception lost by bourgeois France? How had he managed to preserve the unaffected naturalness of his language among the frigid rhetoricians, the Gascons of revolutionary babble?

It is indeed a puzzle.

It seems as though the atmosphere must be fresher about the workshops. Here is his life, however.

He was not yet twenty when he was mixed up in some émeute in the time of Louis-Philippe. A gendarme stopped him, and as he began to say something the gendarme gave him a punch in the face with his fist. Barthélemy, who was being held by a municipal, tore himself away, but could do nothing. This blow awakened the tiger in him. Barthélemy—an eager, good-humoured young working lad—got up the next day transformed.

It must be observed that though Barthélemy was arrested the police released him, finding him not guilty. As for the outrage done him, no one cared to discuss it. ‘What do you want to run about the streets for when there is an émeute going on? Besides, how could we find the gendarme now?’

So there it was. Barthélemy bought a pistol, loaded it and took to sauntering about that part of the town; he hung about for a day or two, when all at once he saw the gendarme standing at the corner. Barthélemy turned away and cocked his pistol. ‘Do you recognise me?’ he asked the police officer. ‘I should think I do.’ ‘Then you remember how you...?’ ‘Come, go along, go on your way,’ said the gendarme. ‘Bon voyage to you too,’ said Barthélemy, and pulled the trigger. The gendarme fell, and Barthélemy walked away. The gendarme was mortally wounded, but did not die on the spot.

Barthélemy was tried for simple murder. No one took into consideration the greatness of the insult—especially according to French ideas—the impossibility of a workman sending a challenge, the impossibility of taking legal proceedings. Barthélemy was condemned to penal servitude. This was the third school in which he was trained after the forge and the prison. When Crémieux, the Minister of Justice after the February revolution, revised sentences, Barthélemy was released.

The days of June came. Barthélemy, one of the most ardent followers of Louis Blanc, showed himself then in his full strength.

He was seized while heroically defending a barricade and carried off to the forts. Some of the victims were shot on the spot, others were crowded into the cellars of the Tuileries, while others were sent to the forts and were there sometimes shot casually, more to make room than for any other reason.

Barthélemy survived; at his trial he did not dream of defending himself, but turned the prisoner’s dock into a platform from which to attack the National Guard. To him we are indebted for many details of the exploits that the guardians of order performed in secret, privately as it were. Several times the president commanded him to be silent, and at last cut short his speech with a sentence of penal servitude for fifteen or twenty years if I remember right (I have not the record of the proceedings before my eyes).

Barthélemy was sent with others to Belle-Île.

Two years later he escaped and turned up in London with a plan for going back there and arranging the escape of six of the prisoners. The small sum of money which he asked for (six or seven thousand francs) was promised, and disguised as an abbé, with a breviary in his hand, he went to Paris and to Belle-Île, arranged everything, and came back to London for the money. I am told that the plan was not carried out on account of a dispute whether Blanqui was to be released or not. The partisans of Barbès and others chose rather to leave several friends in prison than to release one enemy.

Barthélemy went away to Switzerland. He disagreed with all the parties and cut himself off from them; to the followers of Ledru-Rollin he was a sworn foe, but he was not friendly with his own side; he was too curt and angular, his extreme opinions were unpleasant to the ‘leaders’ and scared the weak. In Switzerland he devoted himself to the manufacture of arms. He invented a special make of gun, which was loaded as it was fired and in that way enabled a succession of bullets to be shot off at the same target one after another. With this weapon he dreamed of killing Napoleon III., but Barthélemy’s wild passions on two occasions saved Buonaparte from the man whose determination was no less than Orsini’s.

In Ledru-Rollin’s party there was a desperate character—a duellist, rake and scapegrace called Cournet.

Cournet was one of that special class who are often met with among Polish Pans and Russian officers, particularly among retired cornets living in the country; to it belonged Denis Davydov and his boon companion Burtsov, Gagarin—‘the skull and cross bones’—and Lensky’s second, Zaryetsky. In a vulgar form they are met with among the Prussian Junkers and in the Austrian barracks. In England they do not exist at all; in France such a man is at home, he is like a fish in water, but a fish with polished, varnished scales. These men are brave, reckless to the point of insolence and senselessness, and very dull-witted. They live all their lives on the memory of two or three incidents in which they have passed through fire and water, have sliced off somebody’s ears, have stood under a shower of bullets. It sometimes happens that they have first bragged of some daring action and have then really performed it to prove their words. They are dimly conscious that their recklessness is their strength; the only point of interest of which they can boast, and they have a mortal passion for boasting. With all that, they are often good comrades, especially in good-humoured talk, and will stand up manfully for their own side till the first tiff with the latter; altogether they have more military daring than civic courage.

Idlers, reckless gamblers at cards and in life, Lanzknechts of every desperate enterprise, particularly if it is possible to put on a uniform with the gold lace of a general, and to get money and decorations—and afterwards to settle down again for some years in a billiard-room or a café. And whether it is in helping Napoleon in Strasbourg, or the Duchess of Berry in Blois, or the red republic in the Faubourg St. Antoine, they do not care.... For them and for all France bravery and success cover everything.

Cournet had begun his career in the fleet during the quarrel between France and Portugal. With a handful of comrades he crept on to a Portuguese frigate, overpowered the crew and took the frigate. This incident determined and concluded Cournet’s future life. All France was talking of this young midshipman; he went no further, and ended his career with the exploit with which he began it, as completely as though he had been killed in it. Later on he was expelled from the fleet. Profound peace reigned in Europe. Cournet was bored to death and began fighting on his own account. He used to say that he had fought twenty duels; we may suppose that he had fought ten, and that is quite enough to show that he could not be considered a rational man.

How he came to be a red republican I cannot tell. He played no particular part among the French refugees. Various anecdotes were told about him, such as that he had belaboured a police officer who had tried to arrest him in Belgium and got away, and other pranks of the same kind.

He considered himself one of the foremost swordsmen in France.

The gloomy courage of Barthélemy, who was full of an unbridled amour-propre of his own sort, in contact with the arrogant valour of Cournet, was bound to lead to disaster. They were jealous of each other. But belonging to different circles, to hostile parties, they might all their lives have avoided a meeting. Kind friends with brotherly zeal helped to bring it about.

Barthélemy had a grudge against Cournet on account of letters sent to him through Cournet from France which had never reached him. It is very probable that Cournet was not to blame in this matter; gossip was soon added to this grievance. Barthélemy had in Switzerland become acquainted with an actress, an Italian girl, and was living with her. ‘What a pity,’ Cournet said, ‘that this most socialist of socialists should have let an actress keep him!’ Barthélemy’s friends promptly wrote to him of this saying. On getting the letter, Barthélemy threw up his work on the gun, and his actress, and galloped off to London.

I have already mentioned that he was acquainted with Willich. The latter was a pure-hearted and very good-natured man, a Prussian artillery officer; he had gone over to the side of the revolution and become a communist. He had fought at Baden for the people, being in control of the artillery during Hecker’s insurrection, and when everything was crushed he went to England. He arrived in England without a halfpenny, and tried to give lessons in mathematics and German, but he had no luck. He gave up his school-books, and regardless of his previous rank as an officer heroically became a workman. With some comrades he set up a workshop for making brooms and brushes. They did not meet with support. Willich did not lose hope either of the resurrection of Germany or of the improvement in his own fortunes; the latter, however, did not improve, and he carried his hopes of a Teutonic republic with him to New York, where he obtained a post as a government surveyor.

Willich perceived that the business with Cournet was taking a very unfortunate turn, and offered his services as a mediator. Barthélemy had the fullest confidence in Willich, and put his case in his hands. Willich went to see Cournet. The Prussian’s firm, quiet tone had an effect on the ‘première épée’; he explained the matter of the letters; then in answer to Willich’s question, whether he believed that Barthélemy was being kept by an actress, Cournet said that he had repeated a rumour, and that he regretted it.

‘That,’ said Willich, ‘is quite enough. Write what you have said on paper, give it me, and I shall go home truly delighted.’

‘If you like,’ said Cournet, and took up the pen.

‘So you are going to apologise to a fellow like Barthélemy,’ observed another refugee, who had come in at the end of the conversation.

‘Apologise? Why, do you take this for an apology?’

‘For the act of an honest man,’ said Willich, ‘who having repeated a slander regrets it.’

‘No,’ said Cournet, flinging down the pen, ‘that I cannot do.’

‘Didn’t you say so just now?’

‘No, no, pardon me, but I cannot. Tell Barthélemy that “I said that because I chose to say it.”’

‘Bravissimo!’ cried the other refugee.

‘On you, monsieur, rests the responsibility for the misfortunes that will follow,’ Willich said to him, and went away.

This happened in the evening; he came to me before he had yet seen Barthélemy; he walked mournfully up and down the room, saying: ‘Now a duel is inevitable. What a misfortune that that refugee was present!’

‘There is no helping things now,’ I thought. ‘Reason is silent before the wild flare of passions, and when one adds to that French blood, the hatred of coteries and of different members of the chorus in the amphitheatre...!’

Two days later I was walking along Pall Mall in the morning; Willich was striding rapidly along. I stopped him; pale and agitated he turned to me.

‘What is it?’

‘Killed outright.’

‘Who?’

‘Cournet. I am running to Louis Blanc for advice what to do.’

‘Where is Barthélemy?’

‘He and his second and Cournet’s seconds are in prison. Only one of the seconds was not arrested; by the English law Barthélemy may be hanged.’

Willich got on to an omnibus and was carried off. I was left in the street. I stood pondering, then turned and went home again.

Two days later Willich came to me. Louis Blanc had of course taken an active interest in the matter and had tried to consult some well-known lawyers. It had been thought best to put the matter so that it should not be known who fired and who was a witness. To do this it was necessary that both sides should say the same thing. All were persuaded that the English judge would not care to set police traps in the case of a duel.