ENDS AND BEGINNINGS (continued 2)

The period of ‘moulting’ in which we have found Western Europe is the hardest; the new fur is scarcely showing while the old skin has grown stiff, like that of the rhinoceros; here is a crack, there is a crack, but en gros it holds fast. This position between two skins is extremely disagreeable. Everything strong suffers, everything weak that struggles to the surface is ruined; the process of renewal is inextricably connected with the process of decay, and there is no telling which will get the upper hand.

Let me explain my thought further in the next letter. Perhaps I shall succeed in proving to you that this is not a manière de dire, not subjective indignation (indeed, it is difficult to have a personal quarrel with world history), but a few facts noted by eyes free from the myopia of scholastic pedantry and the blindness of mysticism.

Letter 6

We stopped at the reflection that we must not be angry with squirrels for losing their fur, nor at the winter for following the summer every year. To recognise the inevitable is a source of strength. It is only by knowing the currents of the sea and the continually shifting equatorial winds, apart from any desire to correct them, that one can navigate the ocean.

Look how things are done as a rule in Nature. In every species, in the shaping of every form, development goes on the principles by which the germ was determined.

It grows, is defined, and acquires a more or less unalterable character from the mutual interaction of the elements and environment. New factors may arise, new conditions may alter the direction of growth, may arrest what has begun, and change it into something quite different; but if the development does not lose its individuality, if it continues, the form will inevitably progress on the same lines, with its own special characteristic, and will develop its one-sidedness, that is, its individual case. This does not in the least hinder its neighbours, either in space or time, from developing all sorts of variations on the same theme with various complements and differences, with their own one-sidedness in accordance with other conditions and another environment. Only at the beginning of the development of forms there is an undefined and characterless epoch, an epoch of, so to speak, the pre-zoological stage in the egg and the embryo.

Of the transmutation of animal species we know very little. Their whole history has taken place behind man’s back and covers whole periods of time in which there has been no witness. We are confronted now with finished, settled types, so far removed from each other that any interchange between them is impossible. Behind every animal there glimmers a long history—of efforts, of progress, of avortements, and of reaching the equilibrium, in which its forms have come to rest at last, not reaching its vague ideal, but coming to a standstill at the possible, at what will just do.

Needless to say, there are no sharp limits nor irrevocable decisions in any natural phenomena. The creative process that has come to a standstill, that has been reduced to mere repetition, may always be re-awakened; in some cases it has passed from the influence of the stars under the influence of man; by his cultivation he has developed vegetable and animal species which would not have developed of themselves.

All this casts an immense light on the question we are considering.

History presents us with a formation, caught in the very act, not yet settled but settling, and preserving in its memory the leading phases of its development and their ebbs and flows. Some sections of the human race have attained consistent forms and have conquered their history, so to speak; others in the heat of struggle and activity are creating it; while others, like the bottom of a sea that has only recently dried up, are ready for any sort of seeds, any sort of sowings, and give an unexhausted rich soil for everything.

As it is impossible looking at a calm sea to say that it will not within an hour be ruffled into a storm, so we cannot positively assert that China, for instance, or Japan, will for ages and ages maintain their aloof, cramped, stagnant form of existence. How can we tell that some word will not fall like a drop of yeast among those sleepy millions, and rouse them to a new life? But if we have no right to form a final, unconditional conclusion, it does not follow that after careful observation we have not the right to draw some conclusions. The fisherman, looking at a cloudless sky, and noting that there is no wind, will almost certainly be right if he concludes there will not be a storm for an hour.

This is all I ask in my scrutiny of modern history. To me it is evident that Western Europe has developed up to certain limits ... and at the last moment has not the spirit either to cross them, or to be satisfied with what it has gained. The difficulty of the position to-day rests on the fact that at this moment the active minority does not feel itself capable, either of creating forms of existence consistent with modern thought, or renouncing its old ideals, or frankly accepting the petty-bourgeois state that has been built up incidentally, as a form of life suitable for the Germanic Latin people just as the Chinese civilisation is for China.

This agonising state of hesitation and uncertainty makes the life of Europe unendurable. Whether it will come to rest by casting off the prejudices of the past and the hopes of the future, or the restless spirit of the Western European heights and depths will wash away the new dams, I do not know; but in any case I consider the present condition a period of agony and exhaustion. Life is impossible between two ideals.

History provides us with one example in full detail.

The long process of the decline of the ancient world and the rise of the Christian world presents us with every form of historical death, transmigration of souls and rebirth. Whole States stood still, remained outside the movement, did not come into the Christian formation, grew decrepit, and fell into ruins. Savage races, as yet hardly gathered into orderly herds, developed at their side into new and powerful State-organisations.... While Rome, pre-eminently the classical city, was transformed into a city pre-eminently Catholic.

Those who deny the inner inevitability of the death of ancient Rome, and hold that it was slain by violence, forget one thing, that every death is violent. Death does not enter into our conception of the living organism; it is outside it, beyond its limit. Old age and disease protest against death in their sufferings, and do not invoke it, and, if they could find strength in themselves, or means outside themselves, they would conquer death.

The barbarians are all very well, but we must not assume that the whole sickness of the ancient world was due to their onslaughts. From the days of Tacitus, its thought had unmistakably become gloomy and despondent. The depression, the misery, reached the pitch of suicide; such a pitch, in fact, that all the world almost went out of its mind and really became unhinged, believing in the most incredible theodicy and the most unnatural salvation, taking despair for consolation and the religion of death for a new life. Men who could not go out of their minds withdrew from the general saturnalia of death, the funerals in wreaths of roses, with amphoras of wine, the funerals in crowns of thorns, with lamentations over the sins of this world, and withdrew through the two narrow gates of stoicism and scepticism.

Beside the men who disdained death, beside the men who disbelieved in life, beside the fanatics who went forth to destroy the ancient world to the last stone, and the fanatics who expected the old world to rise up again with all the virtues of the days before the Punic Wars, there was a pinchbeck mediocre class, a crowd of those who were neither blind nor seeing, a crowd of the myopic who saw nothing, neither Catiline nor death behind the bustle of their daily cares, the news of war, the affairs of the senate, the gossip of the Court, the puzzles of scholasticism and the endless problems of household management, who shrugged their shoulders, listening to the ravings of the Christian Jacobins, despised the barbarians and laughed at their uncouthness, never guessing that these forest Hottentots, with their long hair and flaxen eyebrows, were coming to take their place in history.

The barbarians, too, have played their part, their duty is over; an immensely rich and ample period was developed by them, but they have reached the limits of their formation; they must reject their fundamental principles or come to a standstill in them.

It is very hard for the modern civilised world to come to terms with the new principles which are harassing it. What could be improved has been improved, what could be overturned has been overturned; it has next to preserve what it has gained, or to move out of the one-sidedness, the individual variation which constitutes its personality. The last word of Catholicism was uttered by the Reformation and the Revolution; they revealed its mystery; the mystic redemption was solved by the political emancipation. The Nicene Creed founded on the remission of sin to the Christian was expressed in the recognition of the rights of every man in the Creed of the last œcumenical council, that is, the Convention of 1792. The morality of the Judean proletarian, Matthew the Evangelist, is the same as that professed by the Geneva proletarian and deist, Jean Jacques Rousseau. It came in as faith, hope, and charity, and goes out as liberty, fraternity, and equality.

The Germanic Latin world reached its climax in the storms and the hurricanes that followed the triumphal year 1789. The upheaval of the French Revolution went on by summits and abysses, the great and the terrible, victories and the Terror, partial landslides and earthquakes, till 1848; then came Amen, Ne plus ultra. The cataclysm that had begun with the Renaissance and the Reformation was over.

The work goes on inwardly: the weaving of the microscopic web, the slow growth of drift from wind and water, the scurrying to and fro of history, the volcanic labours underground, the impenetrable passing of last year’s autumn into this year’s spring. Overhead are terrible apparitions, dead men in old armour and old tiaras, and fantastic figures, incredibly radiant shapes, agonisings, sufferings, frantic hopes, the bitter consciousness of weakness and the impotence of reason. Below is the bottomless pit of elemental passions, of primeval slumber, of childish dreams, of cyclopean mole-like labour. The voice of man does not reach to these depths, as the wind does not reach to the bottom of the sea; only at times the trumpet-blasts and drum-beats of war are heard there, calling to blood, promising slaughter and dealing destruction.

Between the fantastic dreamers at the top and the savages beneath hovers the middle class, having neither the strength proudly to utter its: I am king! nor the self-sacrifice to join the Jesuits or the Socialists.

Hesitating between two moralities, they furnish precisely by this hesitation the material for developing that corruption of which I am speaking.

But how is it between two moralities? What does it mean, ‘between two moralities’? And are there two moralities? Is there not one eternal morality, une et indivisible?

Absolute morality is bound to share the fate of everything absolute; it has no existence at all outside theory, outside abstract thought. There are several moralities, and they are all very relative, that is, historical.

The first Christians stated this very directly, very boldly, without beating about the bush, and, having announced that the new Adam brought a new morality, that the heathen virtues were for the Christian but brilliant vices, they closed Plato, closed Cicero, and proceeded to drag from their pedestals golden-haired Aphrodite, ox-eyed Hera, and the other sinful saints of the old morality.

Pliny looked upon them as fools, Trajan despised them, Lucian laughed at them, but they ushered in a new world and a new morality. Their new morality has grown old in its turn. And that is just what we are talking about.

The Revolution secularised what it could out of the catechism, but the Revolution, like the Reformation, took its stand in the precincts of the Church. Egmont and Alva, Calvin and Guise, Louis XVI. and Robespierre, had the same general convictions; they differed, like Dissenters, in shades only of opinion. Voltaire, who arrived wrapped up in a fur cloak, in a carriage, to see the sunrise, and who fell on his trembling knees with a prayer on his lips, Voltaire, who blessed Franklin’s grandson ‘in the name of God and liberty,’ is as religious as St. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus, only of a different sect. The cold moonlight of Catholicism has passed through all the vicissitudes of revolution, and at its last gasp has unfurled a new standard inscribed Deo et Popolo!

Somewhere on the heights the dawn of a new day is struggling with the moonlight, revealing the glaring incompatibility of faith and knowledge, of church and science, of law and conscience; but of that they know nothing in the plains below—that is for the small band of the elect.

The union of science and religion is impossible, but there is an irregular union, from which one can draw one’s conclusion as to the morality which rests on such a union. The fact is that Reason, fearing a scandal, conceals the truth she knows; Science conceals that she is with child, not by Jehovah but by Pan, and will bear a new redeemer; and both are keeping it quiet, whispering, talking in cypher or simply lying, leaving men in an utter chaos of confused ideas, in which prayers for rain are mixed up with barometers, chemistry with miracles, telegraphs with rosaries. And all this is somehow through routine, through habit; you may believe or not, so long as you maintain certain forms of propriety. Who is deceived? What is it all for? One obligatory rule has remained, strong and accepted. Think what you please, but lie like the rest.

Prophets may guide the people by visions and passionate words, but they cannot guide them if they conceal the gift of prophecy or bow down to Baal.

Is it any wonder that life grows emptier with terrible rapidity, driving men by lack of understanding and by deadly dullness to every kind of frenzy, from gambling on the Exchange to playing at turning tables?

Apparently everything is going in the usual way; respectable people are occupied with their daily cares and business, with practical objects, they hate every sort of Utopia and all far-reaching ideals; but in reality this is not so, and the most respectable people as well as their forefathers have won everything good that they have won by constantly running after the rainbow and accomplishing impossibilities, such as Catholicism, the Reformation, the Revolution. These rainbow visions are no more, or, at any rate, the optical illusion deceives no more.

All the old ideals are dead, every one of them, from the Crucifixion to the Phrygian cap.

Do you remember that awful picture after the style of Jean Paul Richter’s inspired rhapsody, in which he depicts, apropos of what I forget, all the penitent nations on the dread Day of Judgment fleeing terrified to the Cross, praying for salvation and the good offices of the Son of God? Christ answers briefly: ‘I have no father!’

A similar answer is heard now from all the crosses, to which the yearning peoples, worn out with struggle, weary and heavy laden, appeal. From every Golgotha the answer comes more and more loudly: ‘I have no liberty!’ ‘I have no equality!’ ‘I have no fraternity!’ And one hope after another grows dim, casting its last dying light on the melancholy figures of the Don Quixotes, who obstinately refuse to hear the voices from Golgotha ... they beckon to men to follow them more quickly, and one after another vanish in the dark night of winter.

And that is not all; with redoubled horror men have begun to discern that the Revolution not only has no father, but no son.

The terrible fruitless days of June 1848 were the protest of despair; they did not create, they destroyed ... but what they attacked turned out to be the strongest. With the taking of the last barricade, with the deportation of the last batch of untried exiles, came the era of order. The Utopia of the democratic republic proved to be as evanescent as the Utopia of the kingdom of heaven on earth. Emancipation has turned out to be as much a failure as redemption.

But the social ferment has not calmed down sufficiently to allow people to be occupied with their own affairs; they must occupy their minds, and without Utopias, without epidemics of enthusiasm for ideals, they are badly off. It would not be so bad if the masses of the people, disappointed in their expectations, would simply rot and mildew in the Irish manner, like stagnant water; but, as it is, they may rise up in exasperation and test their Samson-like muscles, and see how strong are the pillars of the social edifice in which they are fettered!

Where are we to find ideals that are free from danger?

No need to look far—in the soul of man are many mansions. The classification of man by nationalities becomes more and more the wretched ideal of this world which has buried the revolution.

Political parties have dissolved into national parties: that is not merely a backsliding from the Revolution, it is a backsliding from Christianity. The human ideals of Catholicism and the Revolution have given place to a heathen patriotism; and the honour of the flag is the one honour of the peoples that has remained inviolate.

When I recall how twelve years ago the rake and buffoon Romieu⁠[38] used to preach in the Paris salons to all who would listen that the revolutionary forces that had been roused should be turned from their path to national, maybe dynastic, questions, I cannot help blushing with shame at the memory.

There must be fighting whatever it is for, or a Chinese slumber will fall upon the people in this stagnation, and it will be long before there is an awakening. But is there any need of an awakening? That is just the question.

The last of the Mohicans of the eighteenth century, the Don Quixotes of the Revolution, the Socialists, some of the literary men, the poets, and the eccentric folk of all sorts, are not sleepy, and, as far as they can, they prevent the masses from sleeping.

The taciturn bourgeois is ashamed to confess that he is sleepy and, half-asleep, goes on muttering incoherent phrases about progress and liberty....

He needs war to awaken him. And is there in all the arsenal of the past a standard, a banner, a word, an idea for which men would go out to fight, which they have not seen put to shame and trampled in the mud?... Universal suffrage, perhaps?...

No; no man of our day will go out to fight for a deposed idol with the radiant self-sacrifice with which his forefather went to the stake for the right to sing psalms, with the proud self-confidence with which his father faced the guillotine for the sake of the one and indivisible republic. To be sure, he knows that neither psalms sung in German nor the emancipation of the people à la française will lead to anything.

And no one can die for a god of whom he knows nothing, and who keeps hidden behind a wall. Let him first speak out who he is, let him own himself for a god, and with the impertinence of St. Augustine declare in the face of the old world that ‘its virtues are vices, its truths falsehood and absurdity.’

Well, that will not be to-day nor to-morrow.

The sensible man of our age is like Frederick II., an esprit fort in his study and an esprit accommodant in the market-place. When he entered his study from which his lackeys were dismissed, the king became a philosopher; but when he came out of it, the philosopher became a king....

Here, too, ‘the bulls stand before the mountain.’ And yet it cannot be denied that the light of reason is more and more widely dissipating the darkness of prejudice.... What is most annoying is that people have no time and die early—a man is only beginning to grow sensible when in a trice he is carried to the cemetery. One cannot help recalling the celebrated horse whose master trained it to eat nothing, but death interfered with his plans.

In the Alpine glaciers every summer a crust of ice melts, but its mass is so great that the autumn always catches the work of the sunbeams half-way, and the crust begins to freeze again, though sometimes it does not attain its former thickness. The meteorologists have reckoned many times how many ages and ages the summer will need to beat the winter at its work and melt all the ice. Many doubt whether the sun itself will last long enough to do all the work: possibly a volcanic eruption will help.

A similar calculation has not yet been worked out in history.

October 20, 1862.

Letter 7

Six days for labour and the seventh for rest. Moses and Proudhon were right to defend the Sabbath day. Monotonous work is terribly exhausting. A man must have periodical pauses, in which, after washing his hands and putting on clean clothes, he can go out, not to work but for a walk, have a look at his fellow-creatures and at Nature, possess his soul, breathe freely, be [39]⁠‘resurrected.’⁠[40]⁠

Here I, too, have made of my periodical chatter about ‘Ends and Beginnings’ my Sunday rest, and in it I withdraw from the daily discords, the journalistic rascalities and the workaday wrangles, in which the hours and days of the month change, but opinions and the expression of them remain the same.... I withdraw as into some remote cell from the windows of which many details are unseen, many sounds unheard, though the silent outlines of mountains, far and near, are clearly visible, and the murmur of the sea comes in distinctly.

Perhaps you will think that I am not spending my holiday very gaily; remember that I am in England, where of all the dull days Sunday is the dullest.

Well, there is no help for it. You must be bored once more, while, for my part, I will try to tell you as amusingly as I can about the melancholy matters which we discuss.

But are they really melancholy? And if it really is so, is it not high time we were resigned to them? We really should not talk for ever about things which it is not in our power to change. Would it not be better, like a sensible man, to make up the account-books we have inherited, and, forgetting our inordinate expenses and irreparable losses, accept the total in meekness of spirit as a new starting-point. Grieve as you will, you will not mend things; there are plenty of ways of using inherited capital; there are plenty of dreams men cherish when they receive it. We have had such dreams too.... The symphonia heroica is over, practical life is beginning. The wine has gone flat, let us drink the dry tisane de champagne. It is not so nice, but they say it is more wholesome. Part of the cultured world pines, with the old maid’s yearning for happiness which she has not lost but has never had, and, instead of firmly making up her mind to widowhood without marriage, laments that the ideal of her youth has not carried her off.... Well, what is to be done? It has not, and now it is too late.

People are vexed at not having wings, and so will not trouble to be well shod. The painfulness of European life in its more cultured classes is directly due to their false position between dreams of what is not and contempt for what is.

Side by side with the ideals of seraphic wings which are retreating more and more into the darkness of the past and the ideals of other wings that are vanishing into the future, there is a whole independent world at which the dreamers are incensed, because it has achieved what it could and not what the dreamers expected, that is, not wings. So long as the authority and power of this world is not recognised, so long will the feverish ferment, the perpetual falsity in life, the involuntary faithlessness both to its ideal and to practical life, which is revealed in the continual contradiction of words and deeds, phrases and conduct, continue. That world is not nimble in words and not eloquent, although it has created a great lever, comparable with steam and electricity, the lever of advertisement, of proclamation, of réclame.

With all that, it cannot stand at its full height in all its breadth and say aloud to the people: ‘I am the alpha and omega of your development; come to me and I will comfort you, I will give what can be given; but leave off knocking at all the doors which are not opened to you, some because there is no one to open them, others because they lead nowhere. Remember at last that you have no other god but me, and cease to bow down to all sorts of idols and desire all sorts of wings. Understand that you cannot preach at the same time Christian poverty and political economy, socialist theories and the unlimited right of property. So far my power exists as a fact, but not as the recognised foundation of morality, not even as a flag, and, what is worse, I am denounced, I am insulted in churches, in academies, in aristocratic halls and clubs, in speeches and in sermons, in novels and in newspapers.... I am sick of playing the part of a provincial relation from whom city fops take money and domestic supplies, but about whom they keep quiet or speak with a blush. I want not only to rule, but to wear the purple.’

Yes, my dear friend, it is time to come to recognising with all meekness and humility that bourgeoisie is the final form of Western European civilisation, its coming of age—état adulte; this closes the long series of its visions; with this the epic of its growth, the romance of its youth, everything that has brought so much poetry and calamity into the life of the nations, ends. After all men’s dreams and efforts ... this offers them modest repose and a less troubled life and a comfort within their capacity, not beyond the reach of any one, though insufficient for the majority. By hard work the nations of the West have won their winter quarters. Let others show their mettle. From time to time, of course, men of a different leaven, of heroic times, of other formations—monks, knights, Quakers, Jacobins—will be seen again, but their transient appearance will not be able to affect the prevailing tone.

The mighty elemental hurricanes, that tossed up the whole surface of the European sea, have sunk into a quiet sea-breeze, not perilous for ships, but helping them to sail along the coast. Christianity has grown shallow and quietened down into the calm stony haven of the Reformation; the Revolution, too, has grown shallow and sunk into the calm sandy haven of liberalism. Protestantism, a religion austere in trifles, has found the secret of reconciling the Church which despises earthly goods, with the supremacy of commerce and profit. Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned even more artfully to unite a continual protest against the government with a continual submission to it.

With so indulgent a Church, with so docile a Revolution, Western Europe has begun to settle down, to find its equilibrium: everything that hindered it has been drawn gradually into the solidifying waves, like insects caught in amber. Byron, unable to breathe, let out a scream of anger and fled, one of the first, anywhere ... to Greece.⁠[41] Stoically remaining in Frankfort, Schopenhauer slowly expired, noticing, like Seneca when his veins had been opened, the progress of death and welcoming it as his deliverer.... This did not in the least hinder the tendency of all European life towards stillness and crystallisation; on the contrary, this tendency grew more and more distinct. Individuality was effaced, the racial type concealed everything strikingly original, restless, or eccentric. Men, like goods, were turned into something wholesale, ready-made, cheaper, and commoner, individually, but stronger and more numerous in the mass. Individual characteristics were lost, like the drops of a cataract in the general flood, without even the poor consolation of

Hence their hateful but natural indifference to the life of their neighbours and the fate of individuals; it is the type, the race, the work that matters, not the person. To-day one hundred men are buried in a coal-mine, to-morrow fifty more will be buried; to-day ten men are killed on one railway, and to-morrow five more will be; and every one looks on this as individual misfortune. Society suggests insurance.... What more can it do?... There can be no shortage in the transport of stock because somebody’s son or father has been killed; there can be no shortage in the living apparatus for coal-mining either. A horse is needed, a workman is needed, and whether it is a bay, or whether it is Tom or Harry, is absolutely no matter. In this no matter lies the whole secret of persons being replaced by masses, of individuals being swallowed up by the race.

A storm seemed about to arise, threatening to awaken every one and hinder the bourgeois crystallisation, to bring down belfries and towers and frontiers and customs-houses, but it was turned aside in time by the lightning conductors, and had not a chance. It is easier to picture Europe returning to the Catholicism of the times of Gregory Hildebrandt at the summons of Donoso Cortès and Count Montalembert, than turning into a socialist republic of Fourier’s or Cabet’s pattern. But who speaks seriously of socialism nowadays? The European world may rest easy on that score; the shutters are put up, there are no lightnings on the horizon, the storm is far away ... the bourgeois can quietly tuck himself up in his quilt, tie his kerchief round his head, and put out his candle.

But poor Mother Dorothy, like Gretchen, has a brother a soldier, and like all soldiers he is fond of noise and fighting and will not let her sleep. She would have got rid of him long ago, but she has some valuable belongings, so she must have a guard in case of hungry neighbours. Well, it is not enough for her brother to be her guard; he is ambitious. ‘I am a knight,’ he says, ‘I thirst for heroic deeds and promotion.’

Yes, if the army could be reduced to the defenders of property, the bodyguard of capital, everything would quickly reach its stable final order. But there is nothing perfect in this world, and the hereditary knightly spirit keeps up the ferment and prevents life from settling down. However tempting is plunder and however natural is blood-thirstiness to men in general, the dash of a hussar, the aggressiveness of a Suvorov, are not compatible with maturity, with quiet unruffled culture. The dislike for everything military in China is much more comprehensible in a mature people than the passion of a Nicholas for ‘braid and epaulettes and buttonholes.’

That is just the trouble. What is to be done with the great people which boasts of being a military people, which is all made up of Zouaves, pioupious, and Frenchmen, who are also soldiers?

Peuple de France, peuple de braves!

It is absurd to talk about quiet nights, moonlight walks, free trade, political freedom, or freedom of any sort, while five hundred thousand bayonets, bored and idle, are clamouring for their ‘right to work.’

The Gallic cock sees to it that no turkey, duck, or goose in Europe can sleep in peace.

As a matter of fact, if France would abandon the army and enter the Civil Service (she cannot exist without being an official of some sort) everything would go swimmingly. England would fling the useless guns bought for her riflemen into the sea, my grocer Johnson (and Son) would be the first to exchange his weapon for a fishing-rod, and go fishing in the Thames. Cobden would weaken everything that Palmerston had strengthened, and the Duke of Cambridge would be elected President of the Peace Society.

But France does not dream of leaving military service—and, indeed, how could she? Who would look after Mexico, the Pope, and the almost united Italy? The honour of the flag is involved, there is no help for it!

Peuple de France, peuple de braves!

What is to be done?

Allow me to break off here and to describe another meeting with an old friend: he from his ‘crazy’ standpoint has found a bolder solution of these questions than I have.

Some two years ago I was walking along the Strand, when I saw busily engaged in the doorway of a big shop of travelling requisites a fat, nimble little figure, startlingly out of place in London, and in various ways suggestive of Italy, wearing a light grey hat, and a thin yellow overcoat, and adorned with an immense black beard: I fancied I had seen this figure before somewhere.... I looked more closely ... it was he, it really was he, my vigorous, jolly medical student, with teeth like a wolf’s and the good humour of a good digestion, the demonstrator with whom in old days I had ‘cut up cats and dogs,’ as he expressed it, and not in Italy, but in the anatomical theatre of the Moscow University.

This time I said to my Russian-Italian, ‘You can’t claim to be the first to recognise an old friend.’

‘Eccolo! How charming! Upon my soul!’ and he impetuously kissed me, so intimately had he come to know me during his absence.

‘If you often fling up both hands like that,’ I observed to him, ‘you certainly will have your travelling wallet stolen.’

‘I know, I know. It is the traditional home of thieving.... Do you remember Don Juan, at the end of the poem, when he goes back to London?’

‘I remember. Well, and is your eccentric friend with you?’

‘To be sure. He is expecting me at the hotel; he did put his nose out into the street, but went back at once. He said it was so crowded and stuffy that he was afraid he would be sea-sick. So he sent me to buy a few things for the journey. To-morrow we are setting out for Texas.’

‘Where?’

‘To Texas, you know, in America.’

‘What for?’

‘What we lived in Calabria for. My Telemachus has not changed one bit, only he discourses with more assurance than ever. You remember how he used to explain to you that the terrestrial globe was sick, and that it was high time for men to be cured of civilisation, so now he is convinced that the cure is progressing too slowly in Europe, so he is going off to Texas or somewhere. I am used to him; we spend the whole day, as we always did, in arguing, and it is wonderful what a tie that is. Oh, well, we’ll have a look at America!’

‘And how did you get on in Calabria?’

‘At first he liked it there, though to my thinking the humblest district town in the province of Saratov, say, is superior to the whole of Calabria. You can get billiards there, anyway, and, maybe, some little widow, or at any rate a soldier’s wife in a neighbouring village, but we found none but brigands, shepherds, and priests, and there was no telling which was a brigand, which was a shepherd, and which was a priest. We took a tumbledown ruin of a Radcliffe castle; lizards, the beasts, ran over the floor in broad daylight, while at night the bats flew about the drawing-room, flop, flop, against the wall. But I did go away several times to Naples and to Palermo.... And what do you think of Garibaldi? Now he is a man! you can depend upon him!... But our friend stayed on in his castle; he only once left it to go to Rome. Rome suited him, as though the choir had just left off singing, “May he rest in peace with the Saints.” He is a Hamlet, a grave-digger!’

‘Well, will your Hamlet show himself?’

‘Not a doubt. He has mentioned you several times; you are still astray at times, but are on the right path, he says. Ha, ha, ha!’

‘I am glad to hear it. Let us go to him.’

‘Delighted.’

I found Yevgeny Nikolayevitch greatly aged. His face, much calmer, had gained a shade of a sort of clerical pensiveness: the dry, even pallor of his face gave it a lifeless appearance; the dark rings round his eyes, which were more sunk than ever, gave a sinister look to their old melancholy expression.

‘You are fleeing from us across the ocean, Yevgeny Nikolayevitch,’ I said to him.

‘And I advise you to do the same.’

‘Why so?’

‘It is very wearisome here.’

‘Well, you knew that in the past. You told me so eight years ago.’

‘That is true. But I confess I thought there would be war.’

‘What war?’

‘War!’ and he waved his hand.

‘Have you grown so bloodthirsty in Calabria?’

‘It does not matter to me personally, but it is painful to be the witness of it; I am sorry for the young generation.’

‘But what do you want war for? To help the young generation?’

‘I can’t help it. That is what it has come to.’

‘I frankly confess I do not clearly understand what you mean.’

‘You have hit on a knotty point!’ put in Filipp Danilovitch.

‘That is because you both doubt and believe. That is the trouble. It is clear that tables do not turn, but when the question arises: but what if tables really do turn, then it is not clear. Filipp Danilovitch here is quite a different matter; he is orthodox; he knows that there is progress, and that everything is for the best. But however I look at it, I see that men have kicked over the traces and are plunging deeper and deeper into the morass.’

‘The horse has kicked over the trace, so off with his leg, amputate it at once. Drastic treatment!’ observed Filipp Danilovitch.

‘Find a remedy and amputation will not be necessary. But since there is none, would you leave the invalid alone? The nations of West Europe are tired out, and they have reason to be; they want to rest, to live for their own pleasure; they are sick of perpetually remodelling and reconstructing, and knocking down each other’s houses. They have everything they need—capital and experience and order and moderation ... what hinders them? They had difficult problems, they had cherished dreams: all that is over. Even the problem of the proletariat has subsided. The hungry have become zealous admirers of other men’s property in the hope of obtaining their own; they have become the quiet lazzaroni of industry, whose murmuring and indignation have been stifled, together with all their faculties, and that is undoubtedly one of the greatest debts we owe the factory system.... But still there is no peace, no peace ... armies are kept up, fleets are kept up, all that is gained is wasted on defence—and what can put an end to armaments except war?’

‘That is knocking out one nail with another in the homeopathic way,’ observed Filipp Danilovitch.

‘Is it possible,’ my queer friend continued, ‘to work in one’s own little garden, with a light heart, knowing that there is a gang of bandits, pandours, janissaries, in a cave close by?’

‘Allow me one word,’ Filipp Danilovitch interrupted. ‘I bet you a bottle of Burgundy that you don’t know who these brakes on the wheels of progress and enlightenment, these pandours and janissaries, are!’

‘Austria and Russia, I suppose.’

‘Ha, ha, ha! I knew I should win it. Pay up with a bottle of Chambertin; it is the only wine I care for.’

‘Upon my word,’ Yevgeny Nikolayevitch observed reproachfully, ‘what can Austria do? The country is exerting every effort to keep alive, straining every muscle to hold its parts together. How could she be a menace to any one? She is like a man holding his leg with one hand for fear it should walk off without him, and his head with the other for fear it should drop off his shoulders, and then people talk of her rushing into a quarrel. It is high time after the last campaign to strike Russia, too, off the list of bogeys: far from any one’s being afraid of her, no one even builds any hopes on her now, neither Serbs nor Bulgars, nor any of the Slav patriots who have been trying ever since the fourth century to discover their fatherland and their independence. And a good thing too! Let Russia “look for the life of the world to come,” while in the present she is teaching her officials not to steal and her landowners not to use their fists. In Europe there are systems of oppression better organised which prevent the lungs from breathing and the heart from being at rest.’

‘So it is England and France whom you honour in this way?’

‘Of course, one might put up with England still, though she is stealthily, indirectly, negatively oppressive, on the one hand supporting what is decayed, on the other oppressing what is young, so that it cannot grow: she tells the hungry man when she meets him: “Go your way and God bless you, you are a free man, I won’t keep you.” While France ... oh, well—it is one battalion: all France will follow the drum and fife wherever you like—to Kazan or Ryazan, while she would make a dash at England even without a drum if only to play the master of the house in the docks and in the City, as she does in the Palace of Pekin. Who can hope that these two sworn foes will go on calmly gazing at each other with a hatred which centuries, education, and commercial interests have been unable to overcome, while they move closer and closer together, so that already it is only ten hours’ journey between Paris and London? On the one side of the Channel the légion d’honneur, on the other the Habeas Corpus, and they put up with each other! Do you understand what it means to cherish that passionate hatred, and not to have the spirit to fight? It makes me decide to go to Texas.’

‘It is difficult to understand, that’s true, but it is not altogether a bad thing that it is so. You know, when your war does come and the French cross the Channel to emancipate England, then I shall start for Texas too.’

‘À la bonne heure!’ exclaimed Filipp Danilovitch, delighted.

‘It is drainage; war is a system of drainage for the purification of the soil and the air. How could they remain in London? Moscow is not London, and even the Russians picked up Germans on the way, and invaded Paris.’

‘Have you got a Louis XIX. up your sleeve?’

‘He won’t be wanted.’

‘Yevgeny Nikolayevitch,’ I said, after a pause, ‘and all this is simply in order to reach a Dutch stagnation, and for this mess of pottage to part with the finest dreams, the most sacred aims.’

‘And what is wrong,’ observed Filipp Danilovitch, showing his white teeth again, ‘with eating herrings and pancakes, with a clear conscience and a clean table-napkin in a house which has just been scrubbed, with a wife of Rubens contours, and a ring of little toddlers about you! Schiedam, faro, and curaçao, they are the only things Dutch I know. Ha, ha, ha! What were all your Fouriers and Owens struggling to find?’

‘Not only they: the Catholics and the Protestants, the Encyclopaedists and the Revolutionists ... what were they all struggling for ... and their toil, their faith, their doom, does it all count for nothing? Do you expect the City of God and the Feste Burg and the Phalanstery and the Jacobin Republic all to be realised in fact? I remember ...’ he paused, and then, with some inner emotion, asked me: ‘Have you ever experienced what a man feels when he imparts his outlook to another and sees how it grows up in him?’

‘That is all very well, saving your presence,’ the pupil of Hippocrates interrupted, ‘but what is the use of idle talk, what is the use of bothering?’

‘Ech, Filipp Danilovitch, what is the use of you or me bothering? we have not succeeded in finding a remedy for death, and you know the peace of death is worse than Dutch stagnation. But there, God will forgive you; you are orthodox. But you, now, how can you make such a blunder?’ he added, turning to me, and shaking his head mournfully.

And then suddenly breaking into his nervous, mirthless laugh, he said: ‘I have just remembered a German book in which the laborious existence of the mole is described—it is very funny. The little beast, with big paws and little chinks instead of eyes, tunnels in the dark, underground, in the damp, tunnels day and night, without weariness, without recreation, with passionate persistence. It barely stops to eat some little grains and worms and sets to work again, but the hole is ready for the children, and the mole dies in peace, while the children begin boring holes in all directions for their children. What is the price paid for the lifetime of toil underground? What correspondence is there between effort and attainment? Ha, ha, ha! The funniest thing about it is that after making his splendid corridors and passages which cost him the labour of a lifetime, he cannot see them, poor mole!’

With this moral drawn by my crazy friend, I will conclude the first part of my ‘Ends and Beginnings,’ and the last month of 1862. Within two days we shall have the New Year, and I wish you a happy one; in it we must gather up fresh strength for our mole-like labour; my paws are itching to begin.

December 29, 1862.

Letter 8

Be a man, stop and make answer?

‘Halte-là! Stop!’ was said to me this time, not by a lunatic, but, quite the contrary, by a very sane gentleman who walked into my room with a number of the Bell. in his hand. ‘I have come,’ he said, ‘to have it out with you. Your “Ends and Beginnings” have passed every limit; it is high time to take leave and put an end to them, with regrets for having begun them.’

‘Has it really come to that?’

‘It has. You know I love you, I respect your talent....’

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘it’s a bad look-out; it is clear that he means to abuse me in earnest, or he wouldn’t have attacked me with such a flattering introduction.’

‘Here is my heart,’ I said; ‘strike.’

My resignation, together with the classical allusion, had a happy effect on my irritated friend, and with a more good-natured air he said: ‘Listen to me quietly, laying aside the vanity of the author and the narrow exclusiveness of the exile: with what object are you writing all this?’

‘There are many reasons for it; in the first place, I believe what I write to be the truth, and every man who is not indifferent to the truth has a weakness for spreading it abroad. Secondly ... but I imagine the first reason is sufficient.’

‘No. You ought to know the public whom you are addressing, the stage of development it has reached, and the circumstances in which it is placed. I’ll tell you plainly: you have the most fatal influence on our young people, who are learning from you to despise Europe and her civilisation, and consequently do not care to study it seriously, but are satisfied with a smattering of the newest ideas and think that the breadth of their own nature is enough.’

‘Ough! how elderly you have grown since I saw you last! you abuse the young and want to rear them on falsehoods, like nurses who tell children that the midwife brings the babies, and the difference between the boy and the girl is the cut of their clothes. You had better consider for how many centuries men have been lying shamelessly with a moral object, and morality has been none the better. Why not try speaking the truth? If the truth turns out to be bad, the example would be good. As to my bad influence on the young—I’ve long been resigned to that, remembering how all who have been of any use to the younger generation have invariably been accused of corrupting it, from Socrates to Voltaire, from Voltaire to Shelley and Byelinsky. Besides, I am comforted by the fact that it is very difficult to corrupt our young Russians. Brought up on the estates of slave-owners by Nicholas’ officials and officers, completing their studies in army barracks, government offices, or the houses of the gentry, they are either incapable of being corrupted, or their corruption is already so complete that it would be hard to add to it by any bitter truth about Western Europe.’

‘Truth!... But allow me to ask you whether your truth really is the truth?’

‘I can’t answer for that. You may rely on one thing, that I say conscientiously what I think. If I am mistaken, unaware of it, what can I do? It is more your job to open my eyes.’

‘There’s no convincing you—and you know why; it’s because you are partly right; you are a good dissector, as you say yourself, and a bad accoucheur.’

‘But you know I am not living in a maternity hospital, but in a clinic and an anatomical theatre.’

‘And you are writing for nursery-schools. Children must be taught that they may not snatch each other’s porridge and pull each other’s hair. But you regale them with the subtleties of your pathological anatomy, and keep on telling them besides: Look here, how nasty the entrails of these old Europeans are! What is more, you use two different measures and two different standards. If you do take up the scalpel, you should be fair in your dissection.’

‘What, am I dissecting the living too? How awful! And children too! You do make me out a Herod!’

‘You may joke as you like, you won’t put me off with that. With great insight you diagnose the malady of modern man, but when you have analysed every symptom of chronic disease, you say that it is all due to the patient’s being French or German. And our people at home actually imagine that they have youth and a future. Everything that is precious to us in the traditions, the civilisation, and the history of the Western nations you cut open relentlessly and unsparingly, exposing horrible sores, and in that you are performing your task as a demonstrator. But you are sick of messing about for ever with corpses. And so, abandoning every ideal in the world, you are setting up for yourself a new idol, not a golden calf, but a woolly sheepskin, and you set to bowing down to it and glorifying it as “The Absolute Sheepskin, the Sheepskin of the Future, the Sheepskin of Communism, of Socialism!” You who have made for yourself a duty and a profession of scepticism, expect from a people, which has done nothing so far, a new and original form of society in the future and every other blessing; and, in the excess of your fanatical ecstasy, you stuff up your ears and close your eyes that you may not see that your god is as crude and hideous as any Japanese idol, with its threefold belly and flattened nose and moustaches like the King of Sardinia. Whatever you are told, whatever facts are brought forward, you talk in “ardent ecstasy” of the freshness of spring, of rising crops, of beneficent tempests, of rainbows full of promise! It is no wonder that our young people, after drinking deep of your still fermenting brew of Slavophil socialism, are staggering, drunk and dizzy, till they break their necks or knock their noses against our real reality. Of course, it is as hard to sober them as it is to sober you—history, philology, statistics, incontestable facts, go for nothing with both of you.’

‘But excuse me, I, too, must tell you to call a halt. What are these incontestable facts?’

‘There are masses of them.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as the fact that we Russians belong both by race and language to the European family, genus europaeum, and consequently by the most inevitable laws of physiology we are bound to follow the same line of development. I have never heard of a duck belonging to the genus of ducks breathing with gills....’

‘Only fancy, I haven’t either.’

I pause at this agreeable moment of complete agreement with my opponent to turn to you again and submit to your judgment such attacks on the honour and virtue of my epistles.

My whole sin lies in avoiding dogmatic statement and perhaps relying too much on my readers; this has led many into temptation and given my practical opponents a weapon against me—not always of the same quality and equal purity. I will try to condense into a series of aphorisms the grounds of the theory on the basis of which I thought myself entitled to draw the conclusions, which I have passed on like apples without mentioning the ladder which I had put up to the tree, nor the pruner with which I picked them. But before I proceed to do this, I want to show you by one example that my stern judges cannot be said to be on very firm ground. The learned friend who came to trouble the peace of my retreat takes it as you see for an incontestable fact, for an invariable physiological law, that if the Russians belong to the European family the same line of development awaits them as that followed by the Latin and Germanic peoples. But there is no such paragraph in the laws of physiology. It reminds me of the typically Moscow invention of all sorts of institutions and regulations in which every one believes, which every one repeats, and which have never existed. One friend of mine and of yours used to call them the laws of the English Club.

The general plan of development admits of endless unforeseen deviations, such as the trunk of the elephant and the hump of the camel. There are any number of variations on the same theme: dogs, wolves, foxes, harriers, wolf-hounds, water-spaniels, and pugs.... A common origin by no means implies a similar biography. Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, were brothers, but what different careers they had! It is the same in all spiritual societies or communities. Every form of Christianity has similarities in the organisation of the family, of the Church, and so on, but it cannot be said that the history of the English Protestants has been very similar to that of the Abyssinian Christians, or that the most Catholic Austrian Army has much in common with the extremely orthodox monks of Mount Athos. That the duck does not breathe through gills is true; it is even truer that quartz does not fly like a humming-bird. You certainly know, however, though my learned friend does not, that there was a moment’s hesitation in the duck’s life when its aorta had not taken its downward turn, but branched out with pretensions to gills; but having a physiological tradition, the habit and possibility of development in the duck did not stop short at the inferior form of breathing, but passed on to lungs.

It only comes to this, that the fish has become adapted to the conditions of aquatic life and does not advance beyond gills, while the duck does. But why the fish’s breathing should blow out my theory, I do not understand. It seems to me, on the contrary, to illustrate it. In the genus europaeum there are peoples that have grown old without fully developing a bourgeoisie (the Celts, some parts of Spain, of Southern Italy, and so on), while there are others whom the bourgeois system suits as water suits gills. So why should not there be a nation for whom the bourgeois system will be a transitory and unsatisfactory condition, like gills for a duck?

Why is it a wicked heresy, a desertion of my own principles, and a contradiction of the absolute laws of creation and rules and doctrines, human and divine, that I do not regard the bourgeois system as the final form of Russian society, the organisation towards which Russia is striving and to attain which she will probably pass through a bourgeois period? Possibly the European peoples will themselves pass to another order of life, perhaps Russia will not develop at all; but just as that is possible, there are other possibilities too. Especially as the order in which problems arise, the accidents of time and place and development, the conditions and habits of life and the permanent traits of character, may give endlessly varied direction to development.

The Russian people, covering such wide spaces between Europe and Asia, and standing to the general family of European peoples somewhat in the relationship of a cousin, has taken scarcely any part in the family history of Western Europe. Developing late and with difficulty, it must either show a complete incapacity for progress, or must produce something of its own under the influence of the past and of its neighbours’ examples and its own point of view.

Hitherto Russia has developed nothing of its own, but has preserved something; like a river, she has reflected things truly but superficially. The Byzantine influence has perhaps been the deepest; all the rest has passed like Peter’s innovations: beards have been shaved, heads have been cropped, the skirts of kaftans have been cut off, the people have been silent and given way, while the minority changed their costumes and went into the Service, while the State, after receiving the general European outline, grew and grew.... It is the usual history of childhood. It is over, that no one doubts, neither the Winter Palace nor Young Russia. It is time to stand on our own feet: why must we take to wooden legs because they are of foreign make? Why should we put on a European blouse, when we have our own shirt with the collar buttoning on one side?

We are vexed at the feebleness, at the narrow outlook of the Government, which in its impotence tries to improve our life by putting on the tricolor camisole de force cut on the Parisian pattern, instead of the yellow and black Zwangsjacke, which it wore for a hundred and fifty years. But here we have not the Government, but the mandarins of literature, the senators of journalism, the university professors preaching to us that such is the inevitable law of physiology, that we belong to the genus europaeum, and must therefore cut all the old capers to a new tune, that we must stumble like sheep over the same ditch, fall into the same pit, and afterwards settle down as an everlasting shopkeeper selling greens to other sheep. A plague on their physiological law! And why is it Europe has been luckier, why has no one made her play the part of Greece and Rome over again? There are in life and nature no monopolies, no measures for preventing and suppressing new biological forms, new historical destinies and political systems—they are only limited by practical possibility. The future is a variation improvised on a theme of the past. Not only the phases of development and the forms of life vary, but new nations are created, new nationalities whose destinies are on other lines. Before our eyes, so to speak, a new race has been formed, a variety European by free choice and elemental composition. The manners, morals, and habits of the Americans have developed a peculiar character of their own; the Anglo-Saxon and the Celtic physical types have so changed beyond the Atlantic that you can scarcely ever mistake an American. If a fresh soil is enough to make an individual characteristic nation out of old peoples, why should a nation that has developed in its own way under completely different conditions from those of the West European States, with different elements in its life, live through the European past, and that, too, when it knows perfectly well what that past leads to? Yes, but what are those elements?

I have said what they are many times, and not once have I heard a serious objection, but every time I receive again the same answers, and not from foreigners only, but from Russians.... There is no help for it; we must repeat our arguments again, too.

January 15, 1863.