Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

RUSSIAN SENSITIVENESS.Ill

This is the kind of language that is addressed to me, privately, ten times a day. It appears to me as though the Russians would be content to become even yet worse and more barbarous than they are, provided they were thought better and more civilised. I do not admire minds which hold the truth thus cheaply; civilisation is not a fashion, nor an artificial device, it is a power which has its result, — a root which sends forth its stalk, produces its flowers, and bears its fruit.

" At least you will not call us the barbarians of the north, as your countrymen do." This is said to me every time I appear amused by some interesting recital, some national melody, or some noble or poetic sentiment ascribed to a Russian. I reply to these fears by some unimportant compliment, but I think in my own mind that I could better love the barbarians of the north than the apes who are ever imitating the south.

There are remedies for primitive bai`barism, there are none for the mania of appearing what one is not.

A kind of Russian savant, a grammarian, a translator of various German works, and a professor of I know not which college, has made as many advances towards me as he could during this passage. He has been travelling through Europe, and returns to Russia full of zeal, he says, to propagate there all that is valuable in the modern opinions of western Europe. The freedom of his discourse appeared to me suspicious: it was not that luxury of independence observable in

Prince К; it was a studied liberalism, calculated

to draw out the views of others.