ENDS AND BEGINNINGS

A year ago, when I was writing ‘Ends and Beginnings,’ I did not expect to conclude them so abruptly. I wanted in two or three following letters to define the ‘Beginnings’ more closely; the ‘Ends’ seemed to me sufficiently clear of themselves. This I could not do. My outlook changed: events gave me neither peace nor leisure—they made their own commentaries and their own deductions. The tragedy is still developing before our eyes, and is more and more passing from an individual conflict into the prelude to a world struggle. Its prologue is complete; the plot is well constructed; all is in a tangle; neither men nor parties can be recognised. One cannot help recalling the image of Dante’s wrestlers, in which the combatants’ limbs were not only intertwined, but by some metamorphosis subsequently transformed into each other.

Everything youthful and enthusiastic, from the prayer before the Crucifix to the feat of reckless daring, from the woman dressed in black to the secret preserved by the whole people—everything that had faded away in the old world, from the mitre and the sword of chivalry to the Phrygian cap—has appeared once more in all its poetic brilliance in rebellious Poland, as though to deck with the flowers of youth the elders of civilisation, as they slowly move into the conflict that they dread.

On the other hand, the ‘Beginnings’ glimmer faintly through the smoke of burnt cities and villages.... What is happening here is the exact opposite.... All the surviving relics of the old world have risen up in defence of the rule of Petersburg, and are defending its ill-gotten gains with all the weapons bequeathed by the barbarous ages of military violence and the corrupt period of diplomatic intrigue. These range from the torture and murder of prisoners to false amnesties and sham declarations, from the barbaric exile of whole sections of the population to newspaper articles and the filigree rhetoric of Gortchakov’s notes.

The storms of recent days have ruffled the still waters of our pool. Much that has lain buried in silence under the coffin-lid of past oppression has come to the surface and revealed its utter putrefaction. Only now we can measure the depth of the corruption which the Imperial Government has developed in the cause of Germanising us for a century and a half. The German lymph has matured in the coarse Russian blood, the healthy organism has given it fresh strength, and, while infected by it, has lost nothing of its own vice. The inhuman narrow ugliness of the German officer and the petty vulgarity of the German official has long ago blended in Russia with the features of the Mongol, the savage and unrelenting cruelty of the oriental slave and of the Byzantine eunuch. But we have not been used to seeing this composite personality outside the army barracks and the government offices; it has never appeared so strikingly outside the Service: scantily educated, it not only wrote little but even read little. Now our Minotaurs come to the surface not only in the palaces and torture-chambers, but in society, in the universities, in literature.

We thought that our literature was so lofty, that our professors were such apostles; we were mistaken in them, and how painful it is! we are revolted by it as by every display of moral degradation. We cannot but protest against the dreadful things that are being said and done; we cannot but be repelled by the frenzy of violence, the inhuman butchery and still more inhuman applause. Perhaps it may be our lot to fold our hands and die in our retreat before this delirium of ‘cultured’ Russia is over.... But this storm will not uproot the seed that lies hidden in the soil; it will not hurt it, and maybe it will strengthen it. A new vital force is strengthened by everything—ill deeds and good alike. It alone can pass through blood, unstained, and say to the savage combatants: ‘I know you not; you have worked for me, but it was not for my sake you worked.’

Look at the savage satrap in Lithuania: he strangles the Polish element, but the Russian autocracy will bear the marks of the struggle; he hunts down the Polish nobles, but it will be the Russian nobles who will flee.

Like house-porters, they know not for whom they are sweeping, for whom they are clearing a path, as little as the Roman she-wolf knew whom she was suckling, whom she was rearing. Not Romulus, but Remus, wronged in the past, will tread the bloodstained path: it is for him that Tsar and satraps are clearing a road.

But before he comes much blood yet will flow, and there will be a fearful collision of two worlds. Why must it flow? Why, indeed? There is no help for it, if men gain no more sense. Events move rapidly and the brain develops slowly. Under the influence of dark forces, of fantastic images, the peoples move as though sleep-walking through a succession of insoluble problems; after fighting together, and seeing nothing clearly, during all the fifteen hundred years from the fearful collapse of the Roman world, they reach the nineteenth century, which is no more civilised than the times of Germanicus and Alaric.

August 1, 1863.

Letter 1

And so, dear friend,⁠[26] you will positively go no further, you want to rest amidst the rich autumn harvest, in shady parks, languidly ruffling their leaves after the long, hot summer. You are not alarmed at the days growing shorter, at the mountain-tops turning white, and the cold, sinister wind that blows at times; you are more afraid of our spring floods, of the knee-deep mud, of the wild overflow of the rivers, of the bare earth showing under the snow, and, in fact, of our dreams of a future harvest from which we are separated by storms and hail, by drought and deluge, and all the hard work we have not yet accomplished.... Well, in God’s name, let us part in love and concord like good fellow-travellers.

You have only a little way further to go, you have arrived, here is the brightly lighted house, the sparkling river and the garden, and leisure and books at hand, while I, like an old post hack, always in harness, shift from one task to another till I drop dead between two stations.

Believe me that I fully understand your dislike and dread of a life with no order nor beaten paths, and your affection for established civic and political forms, and, moreover, such as may become ‘better,’ but are so far the ‘best’ existing.

We men of European town civilisation can, as a rule, only exist under the established conventions. Town life accustoms us from early childhood to the fact that discordant forces are balanced and kept in check behind the scenes. When we are by chance thrown off the beaten track on which, from the day of our birth, it guides and carefully moves us, we are as completely at a loss as the theoretical savant, accustomed to museums and herbariums and to wild beasts in glass cases, is at a loss when confronted with the traces of a geological cataclysm, or with the dense population of the Mediterranean Sea.

I have chanced to see two or three desperate haters of Europe who have returned from beyond the ocean. They had gone thither, so revolted by the Reaction after 1848, so exasperated against everything European, that they had hastened on to Kansas or California, hardly willing to stop at New York. Three or four years later they reappeared in the familiar cafés and beer-shops of old Europe, ready to make any concession to avoid seeing the virginal forests of America and her untilled soil, to avoid being tête-à-tête with Nature and meeting wild animals, rattlesnakes, and men with revolvers. You must not imagine, however, that they were simply terrified by danger, material privations, or the necessity of work; here, too, men die of hunger if they do not work, and here, too, they work sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, while the police and the spies in the old continent are more dangerous than wild beasts and revolvers. They were, above all, terrified and depressed by Nature untouched by man, by the absence of that well-ordered organisation, that peace secured by the administration, that artistic and epicurean comfort which depend on permanent habitation, are protected by a strong wall of police, rest upon the ignorance of the masses, and are defended by the Church, the Law, and the Army. For the sake of this mess of pottage, well served, we sacrifice our share of human dignity, our share of sympathy for our neighbour, and give our negative support to the régime which is in reality hateful to us.

In France we have seen another example: the literary men who lived in rhetoric, the artists who lived in art for art’s sake and for money’s sake, were beside themselves at the disturbance caused by the Revolution of February. We have an acquaintance, a teacher of singing, who, to escape 1848, moved from Paris to London, to the home of sore throats, bronchitis, asthma, and speaking through the teeth—only to avoid hearing the alarm bell and the masses singing in chorus.

In the Russia of to-day the causes which led men to flee from Paris and from Arkansas are combined. In America what was most alarming was naked Nature, wild Nature with the dew of creation not yet dry upon its leaves, the Nature we love so ardently in pictures and poems. (The man with the revolver naïvely killing his neighbour is as much in place in the Pampas as the naïve tiger with teeth an inch long.) In France Nature is not to be feared, it is swept and garnished, tigers do not walk about, and the vine flourishes; but, on the other hand, in 1848, passions broke loose again, and again the foundations of good order tottered. Among us in Russia, while Nature is untouched, men and institutions, culture and barbarism, the past that died an age ago, and the future which will be born in ages to come—all are in ferment and dissolution, being pulled down and built up, everywhere there are clouds of dust, posts and rafters. Indeed, if one adds to our primitive means of travel the highly developed means of making money in the Service, to the natural mud of our roads the filth of the life of our landowners, to our winter tempests the Winter Palace, together with the generals, the Cabinet Ministers, the refreshment bars, and the Filarets, ‘the gendarme vanguard of civilisation’ made in Germany, and the rearguard with axes in their belt, primeval in their force and their simplicity, one must have a great passion or a mighty madness to plunge of free will into that whirlpool, which redeems its chaos by the rainbow-lights of prophecy and the grand visions, for ever glimmering behind the fog and for ever unable to disperse it.

Passion and madness are talents of a sort, and do not come at will. One is irresistibly drawn into the whirlpool, another is repelled by its froth and uproar. The point is that to one man sleep is dearer than father and mother, and to another his dream. Which is better? I do not know: and, indeed, both may lead to the same delirium.

But we will not give way to these philosophic reflections; they commonly by one path or another conduct us to the unpleasant conclusion that whether you batten in a feather-bed or fret yourself in a squirrel’s wheel, you will do no good one way or the other, except perhaps to enrich the soil when you are dead. Every life, as the students’ song has it, begins with Juvenes dum sumus, and ends with Nos habebit humus!

We must not dwell on this mournful reduction of everything in the world to nullity, or you will call me a nihilist, and that is now the term of abuse which has replaced Hegelian, Byronist, and suchlike.

A living man thinks of what is living. The question between us is not whether a man has the right to withdraw into a peaceful retreat, to turn aside like an ancient philosopher from the Nazarene madness and the influx of barbarians. Of that, there can be no question. I only want to make clear to myself whether the ancient sanctuaries, built so solidly and overgrown with the moss of mediaeval Europe, are so peaceful and convenient, above all, so secure as they were; and, on the other hand, whether there is not a magic spell in the visions we see in the snowstorm and the ringing of the sledge-bells, and whether there is not some real force in that magic.

There was a time when you defended the ideas of Western Europe, and you did well; the only pity is that it was entirely unnecessary. The ideas of Western Europe, that is, scientific ideas, have long ago been recognised by all as the inalienable property of humanity. Science is entirely without latitude or longitude; it is like Goethe’s ‘Divan,’ Western and Oriental.

Now you want to maintain that the actual forms of Western European life are also the heritage of mankind, and you believe that the manner of life of the European upper classes, as evolved in the historic past, is alone in harmony with the aesthetic needs of human development, that it alone furnishes the conditions essential for literary and artistic life; that in Western Europe art was born and grew up, and to Western Europe it belongs; and finally, that there is no other art at all. Let us pause first at this point.

Pray do not imagine that I shall from the point of view of civic austerity and Puritanism protest against the place which you give to art in life. I am in agreement with you on that point. Art—c’est autant de pris; together with the summer lightnings of personal happiness, it is our one indubitable blessing. In all the rest, we are either toiling or drawing water in a sieve for humanity, for our country, for fame, for our children, for money, and at the same time are solving an endless problem. In art we find enjoyment, in it the goal is attained; it, too, is an ‘End’ in itself.

And so, giving to Diana of Ephesus what is due to Diana, I ask you of what exactly you are speaking, of the present or the past? Of the fact that art has developed in Western Europe, that Dante and Michael Angelo, Shakespeare and Rembrandt, Mozart and Goethe, were by birth and opinion ‘Westerners’? But no one disputes it. Or do you mean that a long historical life has prepared both a better stage for art and a finer framework for it, that museums are more sumptuous in Europe than anywhere else, galleries and schools richer, students more numerous, teachers more gifted, theatres better decorated, and so on? And that, too, is true. Or nearly so, for ever since the great opera has returned to its primitive state of performers strolling from town to town, only grand opera is überall und nirgends. In the whole of America there is no such Campo Santo as in Pisa, but still Campo Santo is a graveyard. It is quite natural, indeed, that where there have been most corals there you find most coral-reefs.... But in all this where is the new living creative art, where is the artistic element in life itself? To be continually calling up the dead, to be repeating Beethoven, to be playing Phèdre and Athalie, is all very well, but it says nothing for creativeness. In the dullest periods of Byzantium, Homer was read and Sophocles recited at the literary evenings; in Rome, the statues of Pheidias were preserved, and the best sculpture collected on the eve of the Genserics and the Alarics. Where is the new art, where is the artistic initiative? Is it to be found in Wagner’s ‘music of the future’?

Art is not fastidious; it can depict anything, setting upon all the indelible imprint of the spirit of beauty, and impartially raising to the level of the madonnas and demigods every casual incident of life, every sound and every form, the slumbering pool under the tree, the fluttering bird, the horse at the drinking-trough, the sunburnt beggar-boy. From the sinister, savage fantasy of hell and the Day of Judgment to the Flemish tavern with the back view of a peasant, from Faust to Faublas, from the Requiem to the Kamarinsky, all lie within the domain of art.... But even art has its limit. There is a stumbling-block which neither the violinist’s bow nor the painter’s brush nor the sculptor’s chisel can deal with; art to conceal its impotence mocks at it and turns it into caricature. That stumbling-block is petty-bourgeois vulgarity. The artist who excellently portrays a man completely naked, covered with rags, or so completely dressed that nothing is to be seen but armour or a monk’s cassock, is reduced to despair before the bourgeois in a swallow-tail. Hence the necessity of flinging a Roman toga upon Robert Peel; hence a banker is stripped of his coat and his cravat, and his shirt is unbuttoned, so that if he could see his own bust after death he would be covered with blushes before his own wife.... Robert Macaire and Prudhomme are great caricatures. Sometimes caricatures are works of genius; in Dickens they are tragically true to life, but still they are caricatures. Beyond Hogarth that style cannot go. The Vandyke and Rembrandt of petty bourgeoisie are Punch and Charivari, they are its portrait gallery and pillory; they are the family records and the whipping-post.

The fact is that the whole petty-bourgeois character, both in its good qualities and its bad qualities, is opposed to art and cramping to it; art withers in it like a green leaf in chlorine, and only the passions common to all humanity can at times, by breaking into bourgeois life, or, even better, breaking out of its decorum, raise it to artistic significance.

Decorum, that is the real word. The petty bourgeois, like Moltchalin,⁠[27] has two talents, and he has the same ones, Prudence and Punctuality. The life of the middle class is full of petty defects and petty virtues; it is self-restrained, often niggardly, and shuns what is extreme, what is superfluous. The park is transformed into the kitchen garden, the thatched cottage into the little town house with an escutcheon painted on the shutters, but every day they drink tea in it, and every day they eat meat. It is an immense step in advance, but not at all artistic. Art is more at home with poverty and luxury than with crude prosperity, with comfort when it is an end in itself; if it comes to that, it is more at home with the harlot selling herself than with the respectable woman selling at three times the cost the work of the starving seamstress. Art is not at ease in the stiff, over-neat, careful house of the petty bourgeois, and his house is bound to be such; art feels instinctively that in that life it is reduced to the level of external decoration such as wallpaper and furniture, to the level of a hurdy-gurdy; if the hurdy-gurdy man is in the way he is kicked out, if they want to listen they give him a halfpenny and with that have done with him.... Art which is pre-eminently elegance of proportion cannot endure the yard-measure; a life self-satisfied with its narrow mediocrity is defiled for art by the worst of blots—vulgarity.

But that does not in the least prevent the whole cultured world from passing into petty bourgeoisie, and the vanguard has arrived there already. Petty bourgeoisie is the ideal to which Europe is everywhere striving and ascending. It is the ‘hen in the soup,’ of which Henry the Fourth dreamt. A little house, with little windows looking into the street, a school for the boy, a dress for the girl, a servant for the hard work—all that makes up indeed a haven of refuge—Havre de Grace! The man turned off the soil which he had tilled for ages for his master, the descendant of the villager, crushed in the struggle, the homeless workman, doomed to everlasting toil and hunger, the day-labourer, born a beggar and dying a beggar, can only wipe the sweat from their brows and look without horror at their children by becoming property owners, masters, bourgeois; their sons will not be kept in lifelong bondage for a crust of bread, their daughters will not be condemned to the factory or the brothel. How should they not strive to be bourgeois? The bright image of the shopkeeper—who has replaced the knight and the priest for the middle classes—hovers as the ideal before the eyes of the casual labourer, until his tired and horny hands drop on his sunken chest, or until he looks at life with that Irish tranquillity of despair which precludes every hope, every expectation, except the hope of a whole bottle of whisky next Sunday.

Bourgeoisie, the last word of civilisation, founded on the absolute despotism of property, is the ‘democratisation’ of aristocracy, the ‘aristocratisation’ of democracy. In this order Almaviva is the equal of Figaro—everything below is straining up into bourgeoisie, everything above sinking down into it through the impossibility of maintaining itself. The United States present the spectacle of one class—the middle class—with nothing below it and nothing above it, and the petty bourgeois manners and morals are retained. The German peasant is the petty bourgeois of agriculture; the workman of every country is the petty bourgeois of the future. Italy, the most poetical land in Europe, was not able to hold out, but at once forsook her fanatical lover, Mazzini, and betrayed her husband, the Hercules Garibaldi, as soon as Cavour, the petty bourgeois of genius, the little fat man in spectacles, offered to keep her as his mistress.

With the coming of bourgeoisie, individual characters are effaced, but these effaced persons are better fed; clothes are made by the dozen, not to measure or to order, but there are more people who wear them. With the coming of bourgeoisie, the beauty of the race is effaced, but its prosperity increases, the statuesque beggar from Transteverino is employed for rough work by the puny shopkeeper of the Via del Corso. The crowds of holiday-makers in the Champs-Élysées or Kensington Gardens, or the audiences in churches or theatres, depress one with their vulgar faces, their dull expressions; but the holiday-makers in the Champs-Élysées, the audiences listening to the sermons of Lacordaire or the songs of Levasseur,⁠[28] are not concerned at that, they do not notice it. But what is very important to them and very striking is that their fathers and elder brothers were not in a position to go holiday-making or to the theatre as they are; that their elders sometimes drove on the box of carriages, but they drive about in cabs, and very often too.

It is for this reason that bourgeoisie is triumphing and is bound to triumph. It is useless to tell a hungry man, ‘It suits you much better to be hungry; don’t look for food.’ The sway of bourgeoisie is the answer to emancipation without land, to the freeing of men from bondage while the soil is left in bondage to a few of the elect. The masses that have earned their halfpence have come to the top and are enjoying themselves in their own way and possessing the world. They have no need of strongly marked characters, of original minds. Science cannot help stumbling upon the discoveries that lie closest at hand. Photography—that barrel-organ version of painting—replaces the artist; if a creative artist does appear he is welcome, but there is no desperate need of him. Beauty, talent, are altogether out of the normal; they are the exceptions, the luxury of Nature, its highest limit or the result of great effort, of whole generations. The voice of Mario, the points of the winner of the Derby, are rarities. But a good lodging and a dinner are necessities. There is a great deal that is bourgeois in Nature herself, one may say; she very often stops short in the middle, half-way, and evidently has not the spirit to go further. Who has told you that Europe will have it?

Europe has been through a bad quarter of an hour. The bourgeois were all but losing the fruits of a long lifetime, of prolonged efforts, of hard work. A vague but terrible protest has arisen in the conscience of humanity. The petty bourgeois have been reminded of their wars for their rights, their heroic age and biblical traditions. Abel, Remus, Thomas of Münster have been slain once more, and long will the grass grow upon their tombs as a warning how the all-powerful bourgeoisie punishes its enemies. Since then all has returned to its normal routine, which seems secure, which is based on reason, which is strong and growing, but has no artistic plan, no aesthetic chord: it does not seek to have them; it is too practical; it agrees with Catherine II. that it is not becoming for a serious man to play the piano well; the Empress, too, regarded men from the practical point of view. The gardens are too heavily manured for flowers to grow; flowers are too unprofitable for the petty bourgeois’ garden; if he does sometimes grow them, it is for sale.

In the spring of 1850 I was looking for lodgings in Paris. By that time I had lived so long in Europe that I had grown to hate the crowding and crush of civilisation, which at first we Russians like so much. I looked with horror mixed with disgust at the continually moving, swarming crowd, foreseeing how it would rob me of half my seat at the theatre and in the diligence, how it would dash like a wild beast into the railway carriages, how it would heat and pervade the air—and for that reason I was looking for a flat, not in a crowded place, and to some extent free from the vulgarity and deadly sameness of the lodgings à trois chambres à coucher de maître.⁠[29]⁠

Some one suggested to me the lodge of a big old house on the further side of the Seine in the Faubourg St. Germain, or close by. I went there. The old wife of the concierge took the keys and led me by the yard. The house and the lodge stood behind a fence; within the courtyard behind the house, there were green trees. The lodge was neglected and deserted-looking, probably no one had been living there for many years. The somewhat old-fashioned furniture was of the period of the First Empire, with Roman straight lines and blackened gilt. The lodge was by no means large or sumptuous, but the furniture and the arrangement of the rooms all pointed to a different idea of the conveniences of life. Near the little drawing-room to one side, next the bedroom, was a tiny study with cupboards for books and a big writing-table. I walked through the rooms, and it seemed to me that after long wanderings I had come again upon a dwelling for a man, un chez soi, not a hotel room nor a human stall.

Everything—the theatre, holiday-making, books, pictures, clothes—everything has gone down in quality and gone up terribly in numbers. The crowd of which I was speaking is the best proof of success, of strength, of growth; it is bursting through all the dams, overflowing and flooding everything; it is content with anything, and can never have enough. London is crowded, Paris is cramped. A hundred railway carriages linked on are insufficient; there are forty theatres and not a seat free; a play has to be running for three months for the London public to be able to see it.

‘Why are your cigars so inferior?’ I asked one of the leading London tobacconists.

‘It is hard to get them, and, indeed, it is not worth the trouble; there are few connoisseurs and still fewer well-to-do ones.’

‘Not worth while? You charge eightpence each for them.’

‘That brings us hardly any profit. While you and a dozen like you will buy them, is there much gain in that? In one day I sell more twopenny and threepenny cigars than I do of these in a year. I am not going to order any more of them.’

Here was a man who had grasped the spirit of the age. All trade, especially in England, is based now on quantity and cheapness, and not at all on quality, as old-fashioned Russians imagine when they reverently buy Tula penknives with an English trademark on them. Everything has a wholesale, ready-made, conventional character, everything is within the reach of almost every one, but does not allow of aesthetic distinction or personal taste. Everywhere the hundred-thousand-headed hydra lies in wait close at hand round a corner, ready to listen to everything, to look at everything indiscriminately, to be dressed in anything, to be fed on anything—this is the all-powerful crowd of ‘conglomerated mediocrity’ (to use Stuart Mill’s expression) which purchases everything, and so dominates everything. The crowd is without ignorance, but also without culture. To please it art screams, gesticulates, falsifies, and exaggerates, or in despair turns away from men and paints animal portraits and pictures of cattle, like Landseer and Rosa Bonheur.

Have you seen in the last fifteen years in Europe an actor, a single actor, who is not a clown, a buffoon of sentimentality, or a buffoon of burlesque? Name him!

Many blessings have been vouchsafed to the epoch of which the last expression is to be found in the notes of Verdi, but the artistic vocation was certainly not among them. Its own creation—the café chantant—an amphibious product, half-way between the beer-cellar and the boulevard theatre, is precisely on its level. I have nothing against cafés chantants, but I cannot give them serious artistic value; they satisfy the ‘average customer,’ as the English say, the average purchaser, the average bidder, the hundred-headed hydra of the middle class, and there is nothing more to be said.

The way out from this position is far off. Behind the multitude now ruling stands an even greater multitude of candidates eager to enter it, to whom the manners, ideas, and habits of life of the middle class appear as the one goal to strive for. There are enough to multiply their numbers ten times over. A world without land, a world predominated by town life, with the rights of property carried to the extreme point, has no other way of salvation, and it will all pass through petty bourgeoisie, which in our eyes has not reached a high level, but in the eyes of the agricultural population and the proletariat stands for culture and progress. Those who are in advance live in tiny cliques like secular monasteries, taking no interest in what is being done by the world outside their walls.

The same thing has happened before, but on a smaller scale and less consciously; moreover, in the past there were ideals, convictions, words which set both the simple heart of the poor citizen and the heart of the haughty knight beating; they had holy things in common, to which all men did homage as before the sacrament. Where is there a hymn nowadays which could be sung with faith and conviction in every storey of the house from the cellar to the garret? Where is our ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’ or our ‘Marseillaise’?

When Ivanov was in London he used to say with despair that he was looking for a new religious type, and could find it nowhere in the world about him. A pure artist, dreading falsehood in his painting like blasphemy, understanding rather by imagination than by analysis, he asked us to show him where were the picturesque features in which a new Atonement would shine forth. We could not show them. ‘Perhaps Mazzini will,’ he thought.

Mazzini would have pointed him to the unity of Italy, perhaps to Garibaldi in 1861, to that last of the great men as to a forerunner.

Ivanov died knocking in vain, the door was not opened to him.

Isle of Wight.

June 10, 1862.

Letter 2

Apropos of Mazzini. A few months ago the first volume of his collected works appeared. Instead of a preface or notes, Mazzini connected the articles written by him at various times, by means of a series of amplifications; there is a mass of the most living interest in these explanatory pages. The poem of his monastic life dedicated to one god and one service is unintentionally revealed in these disconnected jottings, possibly more fully than he meant.

An enthusiast, a fanatic with Ligurian blood in his veins, Mazzini was from youth up irrevocably devoted to the great cause of the freedom of Italy, and to that cause he remains faithful for ever—ora e sempre, as his motto says: he finds his youth, love, family, faith, duty, all in that. Espoused to one wife, he has not betrayed her, and grey-headed, emaciated, sick, he holds off death, he refuses to die before Rome is the capital of United Italy and the lion of Saint Mark tears to tatters the black-and-yellow rag which flies above him.

The testimony of such a man, one, too, who attacked scepticism, socialism, and materialism, a man who lived in every heart-throb of European life for forty years, is extremely important.

After the first schoolboy enthusiasm of every revolutionary career, after the romance of conspiracies, mysterious passwords, meetings at night, vows over bloodless daggers, the young man reconsiders things.

In spite of the fascination for a youthful Latin soul of the setting and ritual, the earnest and ascetic Mazzini soon discerned that there was in Carbonarism far more ceremony and empty form than action, far more meeting and preparing than doing. We, too, perceived long ago that the political liturgy of the priests of conspiracy, like the church liturgy, is only a dramatic performance; however much feeling and sincerity the priests sometimes bring to the service, still the Lamb is slain in bread and bleeds in wine. Mazzini noticed that thirty-five years ago.

Having reached that point, it was hard for the young Carbonaro to stop. Watching recent events in the crumbling Empire, an eye-witness of monarchical restorations, revolutions, constitutional attempts and republican failures, Mazzini reached the conclusion that contemporary European life had, as he expressed it, ‘no initiative of any sort,’ that the conservative idea and the revolutionary idea have only negative significance: one destroys, not knowing to what end, the other preserves, not knowing to what end; that in everything that was going on (and the revolution of 1830 was going on at that time) there was nothing inaugurating a new order of things.

In these words of the future rival of the Pope there are echoes of the funeral knell struck by the Pope’s friend, Maistre.

The void of which Mazzini was sensible may well be understood.

The flood-tide of the revolutionary sea rose triumphantly in 1789 and, untroubled by any doubts, drowned the old world. But when everything was covered by its waves, and when mitres, plumed hats, and heads without bodies (among them one wearing a crown) had bobbed up for a moment and sunk again to the bottom, then for the first time a fearful freedom and emptiness was felt. The forces set free attacked one another, then stopped, exhausted; they had nothing to do, they waited for the events of the day as casual labourers wait for work. Those standing armies of the Revolution boiled with martial energy, but there was no war to fight; above all, there was no clear aim to fight for. And when there is no aim, anything may become the aim. Napoleon assured them that he was the aim, that war was the aim, and set blood flowing faster than the revolutionary tide had flooded the world with ideas.

Mazzini saw that, and, before uttering his final verdict, he looked beyond the political walls. There he was met by the colossal egotism of Goethe, his serene callousness, his interest as of a naturalist in human affairs; there he was met by the self-consuming colossal egotism of Byron; the poetry of scorn beside the poetry of contemplation; lamentation, laughter, proud flight, and revulsion from the modern world beside the haughty satisfaction in it. The heroes of Byron impress Mazzini; he tries to discover the origin of these strange hermits with no religion and no monastery, these egoists, concentrated on themselves, useless, unhappy, without work, without fatherland, without interests, these ascetics, ready for sacrifices which they know not how to make, ready to despise themselves as human beings. And again Mazzini stumbles upon the same cause. Byron’s heroes are lacking in faith, in an objective ideal; the poet’s vision, turning aside from his barren, repellent surroundings, was reduced to the lyrical expression of states of feeling, to the impulses of activity turned inwards, to morbid nerves, to the spiritual abysses where madness and sense, vice and virtue, lose their limits and turn to phantoms, to gnawing remorse and, at the same time, morbid ecstasy.

Mazzini’s active spirit could not stop at this analysis of the malady. At all costs he longed to find motive for action, the word of a new faith,—and he found them.

Now the lever is in his hands. He will turn the world upside-down, he will re-create Europe, he will exchange the coffin for the cradle, will turn the demolishers into architects, will solve the problem of society and the individual, of freedom and authority, will give faith to the heart without robbing the mind of reason.... What, you may wonder, is this magnum ignotum? The unity and freedom of Italy with ancient Rome for its centre.

In all this, of course, there is no place for analysis nor for criticism. Was it not because Mazzini had found a new revelation, a new redemption of the world, and an Italian resorgimiento, that he failed to foresee one thing—Cavour? He must have hated Cavour more than Antonelli. Cavour was the prose translation of his poem, he fulfilled the prosaic part of Mazzini’s programme, à la longue Rome and Venice will follow suit. Cavour is the Italian Martha, thwarting the all-absorbing dream of the Italian Mary with household trivialities; and while Mary, with tender ecstasy, saw the redemption of the world in liberated Italy, Martha was cutting out a Belgian dress for Italy, and the country, pleased that the new garment did not pinch her, went along the beaten European track, the great trade route, though there is no reaching a regeneration of the world without risking a more perilous path.

The fanatic Mazzini was mistaken; the immensity of his error made Cavour and United Italy possible. But for us it matters little how Mazzini solved the question; what is of interest to us is that as soon as a Western European stands on his own feet and shakes off ready-made formulas, as soon as he begins to look at the state of contemporary Europe, he is conscious of something amiss, he feels that things are not going the right way, that progress has taken the wrong turning. Revolutionaries and conservatives can easily cheat this feeling by replacing what they lack with the principle of nationalism, especially if, luckily for them, their native country is under foreign rule. But what comes next? What are they to do when they have established the independence of their people? Or what are they to do if it is already independent?

Mazzini, conscious of the emptiness of the democratic idea, points to the emancipation of Italy from the ‘Tedeschi.’ Stuart Mill sees that everything around him is growing vulgar and petty; he looks with despair at the overwhelming myriads of petty bourgeois massed together like pressed caviare, with no initiative, no understanding, but in England they have no Austrian yoke, no Pope, no Neapolitan Bourbon. What is to be done there?

I foresee the wrath of our bond-slaves of the factories of learning and the foundries of scholasticism; I can see how malignantly in the light of day they will look at me with their night-owls’ eyes and say: ‘What nonsense is he talking? As though historical development could turn aside, as though it did not move according to its laws, like the planets which never turn aside, and never break away from their orbits.’

To this last contention it may be said that anything may happen, and that there is no reason why a planet should not sometimes break away from its orbit. Saturn’s ring has been preserved and revolves with it, while Jupiter’s necklace has broken into separate beads, and the earth has one moon like a cataract in the eye. But one has but to glance into a hospital instead of an observatory to see how the living go off the track, develop in their abnormality and carry it to comparative perfection, distorting and sometimes destroying the whole organism. The delicate equilibrium of every living creature is uncertain and to some extent adapts itself to abnormalities: but one step too far in that direction, and the overstrained knot is broken and the elements released form into new combinations.

The general laws, of course, remain the same, but they may vary in their particular applications, till they appear absolutely opposite in their manifestations. Fluff flies and lead falls in obedience to the same law.

In the absence of a set plan and fixed date, of a yard-measure and a clock, development in nature and in history, far from not being able to turn aside, is bound to be continually turning aside, in accordance with every influence and by virtue of its irresponsible passivity and lack of definite aim. In the individual organism the deviation reveals itself by pain, and the warning of pain often comes too late. Complex, composite organisms fly off at a tangent and are carried downhill, unconscious of the road or the danger, owing to the constant change of generations. There is very little possibility of stopping the deviation, arresting the downward flight or overtaking it, and there is little desire to do so; such a desire would in every case presuppose consciousness and aim.

Consciousness is a very different thing from practical application. Pain does not cure, but calls for treatment. The diagnosis may be correct, but the treatment may be bad; one may have no knowledge of medicine, yet clearly perceive the disease. To demand a cure from a man who points out some evil is exceedingly rash. The Christians who wept over the sins of this world, the socialists who exposed the sores of the social order, and we, dissatisfied, ungrateful children of civilisation, we are not the physicians, we are the pain; what will come of our moaning and groaning we do not know; but the pain is recorded.

We are confronted with a civilisation which has developed consistently on the basis of a landless proletariat and the unlimited right of the owner over his property. What Sieyès prophesied has come to pass: the middle class has become all-important because it possesses property. Whether we know how to emerge from petty-bourgeois rule to the rule of the people or not, we have the right to regard bourgeois rule as a one-sided development, a monstrosity.

By the word monstrosity, disease, we commonly understand something unnatural, exceptional, not reflecting that abnormality and disease are more natural than the normal, which is merely the algebraical formula of the organism, an abstraction, a generalisation, an ideal formed from different particulars by the exclusion of what is accidental. The deviation and the abnormality follow the same law as the organisms; if they were not subjected to it, the organism would die. But, in addition to that, they rest on their peculiar rights, they have their private laws, the consequences of which we have again the right to deduce, apart from any ability to correct them. Seeing that the forepart of the giraffe has acquired a one-sided development, we could surmise that this development was at the expense of the hind part, and that in consequence there would infallibly be a series of defects in his organism corresponding with his one-sided development, but for him natural and comparatively normal.

Bourgeoisie makes up the forepart of the European camelopard; that might be disputed, if the fact were not so obvious; but, once that is accepted, we cannot overlook all the consequences of this supremacy of the shop and trade. It is clear that the man at the helm of this world will be the tradesman, and that he will set his trademark on all its manifestations. The ineptitude of an aristocracy by birth and the misery of a proletariat by birth are equally helpless against him. The government must die of hunger or become his menial; its comrades in unproductivity, the guardians of the human race in its immaturity, the lawyers, notaries, judges and such, are equally under his yoke. Together with his supremacy, the whole of moral life is degraded, and Stuart Mill, for instance, did not exaggerate when he talked of the narrowing of men’s minds and energies, the filing down of individuality, life continually becoming more shallow, and wide human interests being continually more excluded from it by its being confined to the interests of the counting-house and bourgeois prosperity. Mill says plainly that, going by that road, England will become a second China; to which we would add, and not England alone.

Perhaps some crisis will save us from the Chinese decay. But whence and how will it come, and will the aged body survive it? That I cannot tell, nor can Stuart Mill. Experience has taught us; more cautious than Mazzini, we humbly adhere to the point of view of the dissector. We know of no remedies and have little faith in surgery.

I have been particularly fortunate, I have lived next door to the hospital and have had a first-rate seat in the anatomical theatre; I had not to look in the atlas, nor to attend lectures on parliamentary therapeutics, nor theoretical pathology; disease, death, and dissolution were taking place before my eyes.

The death agony of the July monarchy, the fever of the Papacy, the premature birth of the Republic and her death, the June days following on the February twilight, all Europe in a fit of somnambulism falling from the roof of the Pantheon into the muddy pond of the police! And then ten years in the spacious museum of pathological anatomy, the London Exhibition of specimens of all the progressive parties in Europe, side by side with the indigenous specimens of every form of conservatism from the times of the Judean high priests to the Puritans of Scotland.

Ten years!

I had leisure to look deeply into that life, into what was going on around me; but my opinion has not changed since in 1848 I ventured, not without horror, to decipher on the brow of those men the Vixerunt of Cicero!

With every year I struggle more and more against the lack of comprehension of men here, their indifference to every interest, to every truth, the trivial frivolity of their senile intellects, the impossibility of persuading them that routine is not the infallible criterion, and that habit proves nothing. Sometimes I stop short, I fancy that the worst time is over, I try to be inconsistent: I fancy, for instance, that suppressed speech in France is growing into thought.... I expect, I hope.... Exceptions do happen sometimes.... Something seems to be dawning.... No, nothing!

And no one feels this.... People look at you with a sort of pity as at one deranged.... But I have happened to meet with old, old men who shake their heads very mournfully. Evidently these old men are ill at ease with the strangers of their household, that is, with their sons and grandsons....

Yes, caro mio, there is still in the life of to-day a great type for a poet, a type altogether untouched.... The artist who would look intently at the grandfathers and grandsons, at the fathers and children, and fearlessly, mercilessly embody them in a gloomy, terrible poem, would be the laureate at the graveside of this world.

That type—the type of the Don Quixote of the Revolution, the old man of 1789, living out his old age on the bread of his grandsons, French petty bourgeois grown rich—has more than once moved me to horror and depression. Think of him a little and your hair will stand on end.

Isle of Wight, Cowes.

July 20, 1862.

Letter 3

... Phew, what a disgusting summer! Cold, darkness, sleet, continual winds, constant irritation of the nerves and also of the membrane of the nose; and all that has been going on for three months, and there were seven months before that on this side of the Sign of the Ram.

At last the sun has come out in a cloudless sky. The sea is smooth and sparkling. I am sitting at my window in a tiny farm; I cannot take my eyes off it; it is so long since I saw the sun and the distance. To-day it is actually warm. I am simply delighted, seeing that Nature is not played out yet. The rejoicing is endless: bees and birds are flying, buzzing, singing, droning; in the little yard of the farm the cock, dry at last, is crowing his loudest; and the old dog, oblivious of his age and social position, lies on his back like a puppy, with his legs in the air, rolling from side to side with an unconscious epicurean growl. There are no people to be seen from my window, but fields, trees, and gardens without end; in spite of the sea on one side, this view reminds one of our great Russian landscapes, and there is the scent of grass and trees, too.

It was more than time for the weather to improve, for I had really begun to be afraid not of a social, but of a geological catastrophe; I had begun to expect that after ten months of bad weather Europe would crack, and by volcanic means cut the Gordian knot of contemporary problems and impasses, bidding those who will to begin, not from their ABC, but from a second Adam.

You, as a poet and idealist, probably don’t believe in such nonsense, but Lamé,⁠[30] as one of the greatest mathematicians of our age, is not of that opinion. He fancies that the equilibrium of the crowded continents is very insecure, and that, taking also into account their rapid movement in one direction, and certain facts of the shifting of contours in Iceland, the earthly globe may crack in Europe at any moment. He has even drawn up a series of formulas and made a series of calculations.... But there is no need to frighten you; the crack won’t reach as far as the province of Orel.

We had better, taking advantage of the phenomenally fine weather, return to our discussion of ‘Ends and Beginnings,’ and if the earthquake comes it will settle things.

The Don Quixote of the Revolution sticks in my head. That austere, tragic type is vanishing, vanishing like the aurochs of the White Russian forest, like the Red Indian, and there is no artist to record his old clear-cut features, marked with the traces of every sorrow, every grief that comes from general principles and faith in humanity and reason. Soon these features will perish, still unyielding, still wearing an expression of proud and reproachful disdain, then their image will be effaced and the memory of man will lose one of its noblest and loftiest types.

These are the peaks in which the mountain range of the eighteenth century ends; with them it reaches the limit; with them a series of ascending efforts breaks off. There is no reaching a higher level through volcanic action.

Titans, left after the struggle, after defeat, representatives of unsatisfied ambitions, for all their Titanic effort turn from great men into melancholy Don Quixotes. History rises and falls between the prophets and the Knights of the Grievous Countenance. Roman patricians, republicans, stoics of the early ages, hermits fleeing into the wilderness from a Christianity vulgarised into the official religion, Puritans who passed a whole century gnashing their teeth over failure to attain their tedious ideal—all these, left by the retreating tide, obstinately struggling forward and sticking in the mud, unsupported by the wave, all are Don Quixotes, but Don Quixotes who have found their Cervantes. For the champions of the early church, there are volumes of legends, there are ikons and paintings, there are mosaics and sculpture. The type of Puritanism is firmly fixed in English literature and in Dutch painting, but the type of the Don Quixote of the Revolution is fading before our eyes, growing rarer and rarer, and no one thinks of even photographing it.

Fanatics of earthly religion, dreamers not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the Kingdom of Man, they are left the last sentinels of the ideal, long ago deserted by the army; in gloomy solitude they stand for half a century, incapable of changing, still expecting the coming of the republic on earth. The ground sinks lower and lower; they refuse to see it. I still come upon some of these apostles of the ’nineties; their clear-cut, melancholy, striking figures, standing out above two generations, seem to me like austere, immovable Memnons, falling into ruins stone by stone in the Egyptian desert.... While at their feet tiny men and little camels swarm, bustle, drag their goods, hardly visible through the whirling sand.

Death gives more and more warning of his approach; the aged, lustreless eye is sterner, grows weary with the effort of seeking a successor, looking for one to whom to yield place and honour. Son?—the old man frowns. Grandson?—he waves his hand in despair. Poor King Lear in democracy, whenever he turns his dimming eyes upon those of his own household, everywhere he is met by lack of understanding, lack of sympathy, disapproval, half-concealed reproach, petty considerations and petty interests. They are afraid, before strangers, of his Jacobin words; they beg pardon for him, pointing to his scanty grey hair. His daughter-in-law worries him to be reconciled with the Church, and a Jesuit abbé flits in at times, like a passing crow, to see what strength and consciousness is left, so as to catch him for God in his deathbed delirium. Well it is for Citoyen Lear if there is somewhere in his neighbourhood a Citoyen Kent who finds that ‘he is every inch’ a hero of 1794, some obscure comrade of Santerre,⁠[31] a soldier of the army of Marceau and Hoche, Citoyen Spartacus Brutus junior, childishly faithful to his tradition, and proudly keeping shop with the hand which held a lance crowned with the Phrygian cap. Lear will visit him sometimes to relieve his heart, to shake his head, and to recall old days, with their immense hopes, with their great events, to abuse Tallien⁠[32] ... and Barras⁠[32] ... the Restoration, with its cafards, the shopkeeper king, and ce traître de Lamartine. Both know that the hour of revolution will strike, that the people will awaken like a lion and again hoist the Phrygian cap, and one of them will fall asleep in these dreams.

Scowling Lear will follow the coffin of Spartacus Brutus junior, or Spartacus Brutus junior, not concealing his profound loathing of all the kindred of the deceased, will follow the coffin of Lear, and of the two majestic figures one only will be left, and that one absolutely superfluous.

‘He, too, is no more; he, too, has not lived to see it,’ thinks the old man who is left, as he comes back from the funeral. Can superstition and monarchy, the party of Pitt and of Coburg, have triumphed for good and all? Can all our long lifetime, our efforts, our sacrifices?... No, that cannot be; the truth is on our side, and the victory will be with us.... Reason and justice will triumph, in France first of all, of course, and then in all humanity, and ‘Vive la République Une et Indivisible’! The old man at eighty prays with his aged lips, just as another old man, giving up his soul in peace to his Maker, murmurs ‘Thy Kingdom come,’ and both tranquilly close their eyes and do not see that neither the Kingdom of Heaven on earth nor the sole and indivisible Republic in France is coming at all, and do not see it, because not the Lord but their decaying body has received their soul in peace.

Holy Don Quixotes, the earth rest lightly upon you!

This fanatical conviction of the possibility of bringing about harmonious order and the common weal, of the possibility of realising the truth because it is the truth, this renunciation of everything private and personal, this devotion which survives every ordeal, every blow, is the topmost peak.... The mountain ends there; higher, beyond, is icy air, darkness, nothing. We must go down again. Why cannot we go on? Why does not Mont Blanc stand on Chimborazo and one of the Himalayas continue them? That would be a mountain!

But no—every geological cataclysm has its romance, its mountain poem, its individual peaks of granite and of basalt, whose mass towers above the lower slopes. Monuments of the revolutions of the planets, they have long ago been overgrown with forest and moss, bearing witness to thousands of years of immobility. Our pioneers of the Revolution have left their Alps in history; the traces of their titanic efforts have not passed away, and it will be long before they pass. What more would you have?

Yes, that is enough for history. It has its own wholesale, ruthless valuation; in it, as in the description of battles, we have the movement of companies, the action of artillery, the attack of the left flank, the retreat of the right; it has its leading figures, the ‘30th Light Cavalry and afterwards the 45th.’ The bulletin goes no further; it is satisfied with the sum total of the dead, but the ‘fifth act’ of every soldier goes further, and it has a purely civilian interest.

What was not endured by these men of the latest flood-tide, left stranded in the slime and mud by its ebb! What did not these fathers endure—more solitary in their own families than monks in their cells! What terrible conflicts every hour, every day!... What moments of weariness and despair?

Is it not strange that in the long series of ‘Misérables’ brought before us by Victor Hugo there are old men ... but the miserable old man par excellence is thrust into the background, neglected? Hugo scarcely noticed that side by side with the agonising sense of guilt there is another anguish, the agonising sense of one’s useless rectitude, the recognition of one’s fruitless superiority over the feebleness of every young creature near that has survived.... The great rhetorician and poet, while dealing with the sorrowful lives in modern France, scarcely touches upon the greatest sorrow in the world—that of the old man, young in soul, surrounded by a generation growing more and more shallow.

Beside them what are the poignant but useless and purely subjective sufferings of Jean Valjean described with such wearisome minuteness in Hugo’s omnibus of a novel? Of course, one may feel compassion for every form of unhappiness, but one cannot feel deep sympathy for all. The pain of a broken leg and the pain of a broken life stir a different kind of sympathy.

We are not sufficiently Frenchmen to understand such ideals as Jean Valjean, and to sympathise with such heroes of the police as Javert. To us Javert is simply loathsome. Probably Hugo had no idea, when he drew this typically national figure of the jackal of Law and Order, how he was branding his ‘charming France.’ In Jean Valjean all we can understand is his external struggle of the good-luckless wild beast, baited by a whole pack of hunting dogs. His inner conflict does not touch us; this man, so strong in will and muscles, is in reality a singularly weak man. A saintly convict, an Ilya Muromets⁠[33] from the galleys of Toulon, an acrobat at fifty, and a lovesick boy at almost sixty, he is a mass of superstition. He believes in the brand on his shoulder, he believes in his sentence, he believes that he is an outcast, because thirty years ago he stole a loaf, and that not for himself. His virtue is morbid remorse, his love is senile jealousy. His strained existence is raised to truly tragic significance only at the end of the book by the heartless narrow-mindedness of Cosette’s husband and the boundless ingratitude of herself. And here Jean Valjean really has something in common with our old men—the remorse of the one and the rectitude of the others blend in burning suffering. The mercury frozen in the thermometer scalds like the molten lead of the bullet. The consciousness of rectitude, consuming half the heart, half the existence, is as painful as the gnawings of conscience, and worse indeed. In the latter case there is the relief of confession, the prospect of reward; in the former there is nothing. Between the old man of the ’nineties—fanatic, dreamer, idealist—and the son, older than he in prudence, good sense, and disillusionment, the son so extremely well satisfied with things on a lower plane, and the grandson who, swaggering in his uniform of Guide Impérial, dreams of how to get a berth as a sous-préfet pour exploiter sa position, the natural relation is violated, the balance is destroyed, and the normal succession of generations is distorted.

Jean Valjean in his aged virginity, in his lyrical personal concentration, did not himself know what he wanted from the younger generation. What did he really want from Cosette? Could she have been a friend to him? In the inexperienced innocence of his heart, he went beyond the love of a father.... He wanted to love her exclusively for his own sake, and a father’s love is not like that. Moreover, though he has mentally been draping himself all his life in the jacket of a convict, he is crushed under the burden of repulsion evinced for him by the very narrow-minded young man—the typical representative of a generation sinking into vulgarity.

I don’t know what Hugo meant to make of his Marius, but to me he is as much a type of his generation as Javert is of his. In the instincts of the young man there is still a glimmer of the virtues of another period—warm and generous impulses, with no reflection, no roots, almost no significance, springing from tradition and example. There is in him no trace of the leaven of the eighteenth century, that restless itch for analysis and criticism, that menacing summons of everything in the world to the test of the intellect; he has no intellect, but he is still a good comrade; he goes to the barricades, not knowing what is to come afterwards; he lives by routine, and, knowing à code ouvert what is good and what is evil, troubles his head as little about it as a man who knows for certain that it is sinful to eat meat in Lent. With this generation, the revolutionary epoch comes finally to a standstill and begins its descent; another generation, and there will be no more generous impulses; everything will fall into its commonplace routine, personality will be effaced, and the succession of individual specimens will be scarcely perceptible in the daily routine of life.

I imagine that there must have been something of the sort in the development of animals. The species in course of formation stirring towards what is above its strength, while failing to make the most of its powers, has gradually gained equilibrium and proportion, and lost its anatomical eccentricities and physiological excesses while gaining fertility, and beginning from generation to generation, from age to age, to repeat its distinct form and its individuality in the image and semblance of the first forefather who adopted steady habits.

When the species is evolved development almost stops; at any rate, it is slower and on a humbler scale, as it is with our planet. Having reached a certain stage of cooling, it changes its crust very slowly; there are floods, but there are no world-wide deluges; there are earthquakes here and there, there is no universal cataclysm. Species become stationary, and are consolidated in various forms more or less one-sided in one direction or another, and are satisfied with them; they are scarcely able to escape from them, and if they did, or if they do, the result would be just as one-sided. The mollusc does not try to become a crab, the crab a trout, or Holland Sweden.... If we could presuppose ideals in animals, the ideal of a crab would still be a crab, but with a more perfect equipment. The nearer a country is to its final condition, the more it regards itself as the centre of all civilisation and of every perfection, like China, which stands unrivalled; like England and France, which in their antagonism, in their rivalry, in their mutual hatred, never doubt each that she is the foremost country in the world. Some species are at rest in the position they have attained; development continues in the unfinished species, beside the finished which have completed their cycles.

Everywhere where human swarms and ant-heaps have attained comparative prosperity and equilibrium, progress becomes slower and slower, imagination and ideals are dimmed. The satisfaction of the rich and the strong suppresses the efforts of the poor and the weak. Religion appears as the comforter of all the heavy laden. Everything that gnaws at the heart, that makes men suffer, every craving left unsatisfied on earth, all are set right and satisfied in the eternal realm of Ormuzd, loftier than the Himalayas at the foot of Jehovah’s throne. And the more unrepiningly men endure the temporary sorrows of earthly life, the fuller the heavenly consolation, and that for no brief period, but for ever and ever. It is a pity that we know little of the inner story of the Asiatic peoples who have dropped out of history, know little of those uneventful periods which preceded the violent inroads of savage races who devastated everything, or the predatory civilisation which uprooted or reconstructed everything. It would show us in simple and elementary form, in those plastic biblical images which only the East creates, the transition of the people from historical upheavals into a peaceful status quo of life, persisting in the accepted, untroubled sequence of generations, like winter into spring, spring into summer....

With slow, untroubled steps England is advancing to that repose, to that unruffled stagnation of forms, ideas, convictions. The other day The Times congratulated her on the lack of interest in parliamentary debates, on the unrepining submission with which workmen starve to death, ‘while so lately their fathers, the contemporaries of O’Connor,’ agitated the country with their menacing murmurs. As firmly as an aged oak stands the English Church, its roots deep in the soil, graciously tolerating all forms of Dissent, and convinced that they will not move far away.

Swaggering and resisting, as is her wont, France is shoved backwards while making a show of progress. Behind these giants will come in two columns others, once prophetically united under one sceptre ... on the one hand, the thin, austere, ascetic type of the Spaniard, brooding without thought, enthusiastic without an object, anxious without cause, taking everything to heart, unable to improve anything, in short, a type of a true Don Quixote de la Mancha; on the other, the sturdy Dutchman, content when he has had a good meal, reminiscent of Sancho Panza.

Is not the reason that the children of to-day are older than their fathers, older than their grandfathers, and able à la Dumas junior to talk of their ‘prodigal fathers,’ that senility is the leading characteristic of the present age? At any rate, wherever I look I see grey hairs, wrinkles, bent backs, last wills and testaments, balanced accounts, funerals, ends, and I am always seeking and seeking beginnings. They are only to be found in theories and abstractions.

August 10, 1862.

Letter 4

Last summer a friend, a Saratov landowner, and a great Fourierist, came to see me in Devonshire.

Please don’t be angry with me (it was not the landowner who said that to me, but I who say it to you) for so continually wandering from the point. Parentheses are my joy and my misfortune. A French literary man of the days of the Restoration, a classic and a purist, more than once said to me, taking a pinch of snuff in the prolonged academic fashion which will soon have passed away altogether: ‘Notre ami abuse de la parenthèse avec intempérance!’ It is for the sake of digressions and parentheses that I prefer writing in the form of letters, especially letters to friends; one can write without check whatever comes into one’s head.

Well, so my Saratov Fourierist came to Devonshire and said to me: ‘Do you know what is odd? I have just been for the first time in Paris. Well—of course ... it is all very fine, but, seriously speaking, Paris is a dull place—really dull!’

‘What next?’ I said to him.

‘Upon my soul, it is.’

‘But why did you expect it to be amusing?’

‘Upon my word, after the wilds of Saratov!’

‘Perhaps it is just owing to that. But were not you bored in Paris because it’s so excessively gay there?’

‘You are just as silly as you always were.’

‘Not at all. London, looking like a permanent autumn, is more to our taste; though the boredom here, too, is awful.’

‘Where is it better, then? It seems the old proverb is right. It is where we are not!’

‘I don’t know: but it must be supposed that it is not very nice there either.’

This conversation, though it is apparently not very long, nor particularly important, stirred in me a whole series of old notions concerning the absence of a sort of fish-glue in the brain of the modern man; that is why his mind is cloudy and thick with sediment—new theories, old habits, new habits, old theories.

And what logic! I say it is dull in Paris and London, and he answers, ‘Where is it better, then?’ Not noticing that this was the line of argument employed by our house-serfs of the old style: in reply to the observation, ‘I fancy you are drunk, my boy,’ they answered, ‘Well, did you stand treat?’ What grounds are there for the idea that men are happy anywhere? that they can or ought to be happy? And what men? And happy in what? Let us assume that men do have a better life in one place than another. Why are Paris and London the pinnacles of this better life?

Is it from Reichardt’s guidebook?

Paris and London are closing a volume of world-history—a volume in which few pages remain uncut. People, trying with all their might to turn them as quickly as possible, are surprised that as they approach the end there is more in the past than in the present, and are vexed that the two fullest representatives of Western Europe are setting together with it. The audacity and recklessness in general conversations which float, as once the Spirit of God, over the waters, are terrific, but as soon as it comes to action, or even to a critical appreciation of events, all is forgotten, and the old weights and measures are hauled out of the grandmother’s storeroom. Worn-out forms can only be restored by a complete rebirth: Western Europe must rise up like the Phoenix in a baptism of fire.

‘Oh, well, in God’s name, into the flames with it.’

What if it does not rise up again, but singes its beautiful feathers, or maybe is burnt to ashes?

In that case continue to baptize it with water, and don’t be bored in Paris. Take my father, for example: he spent eight years in Paris and was never bored there. Thirty years afterwards he was fond of describing the fêtes given by the maréchals and by Napoleon himself, the suppers at the Palais Royal in company with actresses and opera dancers, decked in diamonds that had been wrenched out of conquered royal crowns, of the Yussupovs, the Tyufyakins and other princes russes who lost there more souls of peasants than were laid low at Borodino. With various changes and un peu plus canaille the same thing exists even now. The generals of finance give banquets as good as those of the generals of the army. The suppers have moved from the Rue St. Honoré to the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne. But you are a serious person; you prefer to look behind the scenes of world-history rather than behind the scenes of the Opera.... Here you have a parliament, even two. What more do you want?... With what envy and heartache I used to listen to people who had come home from Europe in the ’thirties, as though they had robbed me of everything they had seen and I had not seen. They, too, had not been bored, but had great hopes, some of Odilon Barrot, some of Cobden. You, too, must learn not to be bored; and in any case be a little consistent; and if you still feel dull, try to find the cause. You may find that your demands are fantastic, then you must try to get over it; that it is the boredom of idleness, of emptiness, of not knowing how to adapt yourself. And perhaps you will find something else: that you are bored because Paris and London have no answer to make to the yearnings that are growing stronger and stronger in the heart of the man of to-day—which does not prevent their standing for the highest culture and most brilliant result of the past, and being rich endings of a rich period.

I have said this a dozen times. But it is impossible to avoid repetitions. Persons of experience are well aware of it. I spoke to Proudhon of the fact that articles which are almost identical, with only slight variations, often appeared in his journal.

‘And do you imagine,’ Proudhon answered, ‘that once a thing has been said, it is enough? That a new idea will be accepted straight off? You are mistaken. It has to be repeated, it has to be dinned into people, repeated over and over again, so that the mind is no longer surprised by it, so that it is not merely understood, but is assimilated, and obtains real rights of citizenship in the brain.’

Proudhon was perfectly right. There are two or three ideas which are particularly precious to me; I have been repeating them for about fifteen years; fact upon fact confirms them with unnecessary abundance. Part of what I anticipated has come to pass, the other part is coming to pass before our eyes, yet these ideas seem as wild, as unaccepted, as they were.

And what is most mortifying, people seem to understand you; they agree, but your ideas remain like aliens in their heads, always irrelevant, never passing into that integral part of consciousness and the moral being, which as a rule forms the undisputed foundation of our acts and opinions.

It is owing to this inconsistency that people apparently highly cultured are continually being startled by the unexpected, caught unawares, indignant with the inevitable, struggle with the insurmountable, pass by what is springing into life, and apply all sorts of remedies to those who are at their last gasp. They know that their watch was properly set, but, like the late ‘unlamented’ Kleinmihel, cannot grasp that the meridian is not the same.

Pedantry and scholasticism prevent men from grasping things with simple lively understanding more than do superstition and ignorance. With the latter the instincts are left, hardly conscious, but trustworthy; moreover, ignorance does not exclude passionate enthusiasm, and superstition does not exclude inconsistency, while pedantry is always true to itself.

At the time of the Italian war a simple-hearted, worthy professor lectured on the great triumphs of ‘international law,’ describing how the principles of Hugo Grotius had developed and entered into the conscience of nations and governments, how questions which had in old times been decided by rivers of blood and the miseries of entire provinces, of whole generations, were now settled, like civil disputes between private persons, on the principles of national right.

Who, apart from some old professional condottiere, would not agree with the professor that this is one of the greatest victories of humanity and culture over brute violence? The trouble is not that the lecturer’s judgment is wrong, but that humanity is very far from having gained this victory.

While the professor in eloquent words was inspiring his young audience to the contemplation of these triumphs of peace, very different commentaries on international law were taking place on the fields of Magenta and Solferino. It would not have been easy for any international court to avert the Italian war, since there was no international cause for it, for there was no subject in dispute. Napoleon waged this war as a remedial measure to pacify the French by the gymnastics of liberation and the galvanic shocks of victory. What Grotius or Vattel⁠[34] could have solved such a problem? How was it possible to avert a war which was essential for domestic interests? If it had not been Austria the French would have had to beat somebody else. One can only rejoice that the Austrians presented themselves.

Then, India, Pekin—war waged by democrats to maintain the slavery of the blacks, war waged by republicans to obtain the slavery of political unity. And the professor goes on lecturing; his audience are touched; they fancy that they have heard the last creak of the gates of the temple of Janus, that the warriors have laid down their weapons, put on crowns of myrtle and taken up the distaff, that the demobilised armies are tilling the fields.... And all this at the very moment when England is covered with volunteers, when at every step you meet a uniform, when every shopkeeper has a gun, when the French and Austrian armies stand with lighted matches, and even a prince—I think it was of Hesse Cassel—put on a military footing and armed with revolvers the two hussars who had from the time of the Congress of Vienna ridden peacefully without weapons behind his carriage.

If war breaks out again—and that depends on thousands of chances, on one casual shot—in Rome or on the borders of Lombardy, a sea of blood would flow from Warsaw to London. The professor would be surprised, the professor would be pained. But one would have thought he should not be surprised nor pained. The trend of history is plain for all to see! The misfortune of the doctrinaires is that they, like our Diderot, shut their eyes when arguing, that they may not see that their opponent wants to retort; and their opponent is nature itself, history itself.

To complete the absurdity we ought not to lose sight of the fact that in abstract logic the professor is right, and that if not a hundred but a hundred million men had grasped the principles of Grotius and Vattel, they would not slaughter each other either for the sake of exercise or for the sake of a bit of land. But the misfortune is that under the present political régime only a hundred and not a hundred million men can understand the principles of Grotius and Vattel.

That is why neither lectures nor sermons have any effect, that is why neither the learned fathers nor the spiritual fathers can bring us any relief; the monks of knowledge, like the monks of ignorance, know nothing outside the walls of their monasteries, do not test their theories by facts, their deductions by events, and, while men are perishing from the eruption of the volcano, they are blissfully beating time, listening to the music of the heavenly spheres and marvelling at its harmony.

Lord Bacon long ago divided the learned into the spiders and the bees. There are periods in which the spiders are distinctly in the ascendancy, and then masses of spiders’ webs are spun, but little honey is gathered. There are conditions of life which are particularly favourable to spiders. Lime trees, thickets, and flowering meadows, above all, wings and a social conception of life, are necessary for the production of honey. A quiet corner, untroubled leisure, plenty of dust, and lack of interest in anything outside the inner process, is all that is needed for producing spiders’ webs.

At ordinary times it is even possible to saunter along the dusty, smooth highroad without breaking the spiders’ webs, but as soon as it comes to crossing rough ground and hillocks there is trouble.

There was a really good, quiet period of European history beginning with Waterloo and lasting till the year 1848. There was no war then, but plenty of international law and standing armies.

The governments openly encouraged ‘true enlightenment’ and quietly suppressed the false; there was not much freedom, but there was not much slavery; even the despotic rulers were all good-natured in the style of the patriarchal Francis II., the pious Friedrich Wilhelm, and Alexander the friend of Araktcheyev. The King of Naples and Nicholas came by way of dessert. Manufactures flourished, trade flourished even more, factories worked, masses of books were written; it was the golden age for all the spiders; in academic retreats and in the libraries of the learned endless spiders’ webs were spun!...

History, criminal and civil law, international law, and religion itself, were all brought into the region of pure science and thence dropped in lacy fringes of spider’s web. The spiders swung at their own sweet will in their meshes, never touching the earth. Which was very fortunate, however, since the earth was covered with other crawling insects, who stood for the idea of the state armed for self-defence, and clapped over-bold spiders into Spandau and other fortresses. The doctrinaires understood everything most perfectly à vol d’araignée. The progress of humanity was as certain in those days as the route mapped out for the Most High when he travelled incognito—from stage to stage with horses ready at the stations. And then came—February the 24th, June the 24th, the 25th, the 26th, and December the 2nd.

These flies were too big for a spider’s web.

Even the comparatively slight shock of the July revolution gave the final death-blow to such giants as Niebuhr and Hegel. But its triumph was still to the advantage of the doctrinaires; the journalists, the Collège de France, the political economists sat on the top steps of the throne beside the Orleans dynasty, those who remained alive recovered and adapted themselves somehow to 1830; they would have probably got on all right even with the republic of the troubadour, Lamartine.

But how could they compromise with the days of June?

How could they live with the 2nd of December?

Of course, Gervinus teaches us that an epoch of centralisation and despotism necessarily follows a democratic revolution, but yet something seemed amiss. Some began asking whether we should not go back to the Middle Ages, others simply urged a return to Catholicism. The fakirs of the Revolution pointed out with undeviating finger along the whole railway line of time to the year 1793; the doctrinaires went on lecturing regardless of facts, in the expectation that mankind will have had its fling and return to Solomon’s temple of wisdom.

Ten years have passed.

Nothing of all that has come off. England has not become Catholic, as Donoso-Cortès desired; the nineteenth century has not become the thirteenth, as some of the Germans desired; the peoples resolutely refuse French fraternity (or death!), international law after the pattern of the Peace Society, honourable poverty after Proudhon, and a Kirghiz diet of milk and honey.

While the Catholics....

The mediaevalists....

The fakirs of 1793....

And all the doctrinaires go on preaching....

Where is humanity going since it despises such authorities?

Perhaps it does not know.

But we ought to know for it.

Apparently not where we expected it to go. And, indeed, it is hard to tell where one will get to, travelling on a globe which a few months ago only just missed a comet, and may any day crack, as I informed you in my last letter.

September 1, 1862.

Letter 5

In the early days of my youth I was struck by a French novel which I have not met since; it was called Arminius. Possibly it has no great merits, but at the time it had a great influence on me, and I remember the chief incidents to this day.

We all know something of the meeting and conflict between two different worlds; the one, the classical world of culture, corrupt and effete; the other, savage as a wild beast of the forest, but full of slumbering forces and chaotic impulses. But we only, for the most part, know the official public side of this contact, not that side concerned with details and the privacy of home life. We know the events in the rough, but not individual fortunes; not the dramas in which lives were silently broken and perished in personal struggle, in which blood was replaced by bitter tears, and devastated towns by ruined families and forgotten graves.

The author of Arminius tried to reproduce these two worlds—the one moving from the jungle to history, the other from history into the grave—as they met at the domestic hearth. In this, world history is reduced to personal gossip, is brought nearer to us, more within our grasp and comprehension.⁠[35]⁠

It never entered my head then that I should find myself in a similar conflict, that a similar conflict would come into my own life with all its ruinous force, and that my hearth would be devastated and shattered at the meeting of two historic worlds.

In our attitude to the Europeans, in spite of all the points of difference, which I understand quite well, there are points of resemblance to the attitude of the Germans to the Romans. In spite of our exterior, we are still barbarians. Our civilisation is skin-deep, our corruption is crude, our coarse hair bristles through the powder on our heads, and our sunburn shows through the powder on our cheeks. We have plenty of the cunning of savages and the evasiveness of slaves. We are ready to give blows indiscriminately and to fall at a man’s feet, when we are guiltless, but I obstinately repeat we are very far behind the corrosive hereditary subtleties of West European corruption.

Among us, intellectual development serves as a purification and a guarantee—at least it has done so hitherto;⁠[36] exceptions are exceedingly rare, culture among us is a barrier which much that is infamous never crosses; and it is owing to this that all through the reign of Nicholas the government could not succeed in establishing a secret police nor a literature in the pay of the police, like the French.

In Western Europe this is not so, and that is how it is that Russian dreamers who have made their way into freedom readily surrender to any man who touches with sympathy on their holy things, who understands their cherished thoughts, forgetting that for him these holy things have long ago passed into a commonplace, into a convention, that, for the most part, they repeat them possibly even sincerely, but in the way in which a priest, thinking of something else, blesses any one he meets. We forget how many other elements are tangled in the complex, exhausted, morbidly struggling soul of the Western European, how utterly he is exhausted, worn out with envy, penury, vanity and amour-propre, and into what a terrible epicureanism of the higher morbidly nervous kind the humiliation, poverty, and struggle of competition have developed.

We find out all this when the blow has fallen; it stuns us. We feel ourselves made fools of, and want to revenge ourselves. Looking at this I sometimes think that much blood will flow from the ‘conflict of these two different forms of culture....’ These lines were written some years ago.

I am still of the same opinion despite the fact that in Europe Russians enjoy the reputation of a most depraved people. This is due to the lack of polish in our conduct and the rustic habits of our landowners. We have convinced the whole world of our viciousness, just as the English have convinced it of their domestic virtue. As a matter of fact, neither the vice nor the virtue goes very deep. Russians abroad not only lead a disorderly life, but boast of their savage and dissolute habits. Unfortunately, being brought into contact as soon as they pass the frontier with the clumsy and servile country of kellners and hofraths, the Russians, like half-educated people in general, cease to stand on ceremony, and let themselves go further and further, and in this reckless mood arrive in Paris and London. It has happened to me many times to observe how conspicuous Russians make themselves by absolute trifles, and they keep up the first impression by the sort of defiant nargue with which they refuse to obey the received conventions (though they are models of submissiveness and correctness at home!). A man is recognised as a Russian in the big hotels, because he shouts in the public room, guffaws loudly, and invariably protests at smoking being forbidden in the dining-room. All this aggressiveness of an upper servant outside his master’s house shows far more immaturity and unfamiliarity with freedom than deep depravity; bragging always goes with this moral ‘unripeness.’ Like boys of fourteen, we not only want to drink too much, but to show off to all the world: ‘Look how I have been going it!’ But all the world judges differently. Looking at what the Russians lay bare, it thinks, shaking its head, ‘What must they have concealed?’ And all the while there is nothing there, just as there is nothing in the soldier’s haversack on parade, though it looks as though it were stuffed.

Ages of civilisation, passing from generation to generation, acquire a special bouquet which one does not catch at once; in this the fate of man is similar to the fate of Rhine wine. There is nothing particularly attractive about the propriety that is gained, though it is pleasanter to go by its rules, as it is to go along a well-swept path. We, it must be admitted, are badly swept, and there are a good many hard stones and plenty of mud on our path.

Our breaking-in to culture is fresh in our memory: it was accomplished by rough-and-ready means, just as a peasant taken into the master’s house is shaved like a German and turned into a servant. Renouncing at the command of the Most High the whole structure of the national life, the nobility have obstinately retained all its bad qualities; flinging overboard together with its prejudices the severe decorum and propriety of the national manners, they have retained all the coarse habits of the master and the Tatar lack of respect for self and for others. The oppressive traditional morality of old days has been replaced neither by the aristocratic conception of honour nor the citizen’s conception of public duty and independence; it has been replaced much more simply by German barrack discipline in the army, mean servility and cringing dependence in the public service, and nothing at all outside it.

Outside the government service, the nobleman was transformed from the servant who is beaten to a Peter the Great who is beating; in the country he had full scope: there he became at once corporal, emperor, grand gentleman, and father of his domain. This life of both wolf and enlightener produced colossal monstrosities, from torturers like Bühren and Potyomkin on the grand scale to the hangmen and Potyomkins on a microscopic scale; from Izmailov flogging police captains to Nozdryov with one whisker torn off; from the ‘Araktcheyev of all the Russias’ to the minor Araktcheyevs of battalions and companies who flogged the soldier into his grave; from the bribe-takers of the first three grades to the hungry swarms of clerks who scribbled the poor peasants into their graves; with endless variations of drunken officers, bullies, cardsharpers, heroes of fairs, dog-fanciers, brawlers, devotees of flogging, and seraglio-keepers. Here and there among them is a landowner who has turned a foreigner in order to remain a human being, or a ‘noble soul,’ a Manilov,⁠[37] a turtle-dove of a nobleman, cooing in his mansion beside the stable where chastisement was administered.

One might wonder what good thing could arise, grow, and flourish in this soil between the Araktcheyevs and the Manilovs? What could be reared by these mothers who sent men for soldiers, cut off women’s hair, and beat their servants, by these fathers who fawned on all above them and were savage tyrants to all below them? Yet it was among them that the men of the 14th of December arose, a phalanx of heroes, suckled like Romulus and Remus on the milk of a wild beast.... Finely they throve on it! They were heroes, wrought out of pure steel from head to foot, martyr warriors who went forth consciously to inevitable ruin to awaken the younger generation to new life and to purify the children, born in the midst of brutality and slavishness. But who cleansed their souls with the fire of purification, what virgin force renounced in them its filth and its corruption, and made them the martyrs of the future?

It was in them; that is enough for me for the present. I make a note of it and return to what I was saying: there is a sort of unstable, unbalanced ferment and frenzy in the pothouse debauchery of our vice; it is the delirium of intoxication which has taken hold of an entire class, that has strayed off the path with no serious plan and aim. But it has not that deeply penetrating, deeply rooted, subtle, nervous, intelligent, fatal depravity from which the educated classes of Western Europe are suffering, dying, and decaying.

But how has it come to pass, what moral simoom has blown on the civilised world?... There has always been progress and more progress, there are free institutions, railways, reforms, and telegraphs.

Much that is good is being accomplished, much that is good is being accumulated, but the simoom still blows and blows like a memento mori, continually increasing, and sweeping everything in the world before it. To be wroth at this is as useless as to be wroth with the squirrels for losing their fur, at the sea because after full tide, as though to mock us at its very best moment, it begins to ebb. It is high time that we accepted this fluctuation, this rhythm of all creation, this alternation of night and day.