My Past and Thoughts

History bears witness that societies are constantly attaining a rational autonomy, but testifies likewise that they remain in moral bondage. Whether these problems are soluble or not is hard to say; they are not to be solved in a plain, blunt manner, especially not by mere love for men, or by other noble, warm emotions.

In all spheres of life we strike against insoluble antinomies, against those asymptotes which are always striving towards their hyperbolas and never coinciding with them. These are the extreme limits between which life fluctuates, advances and ebbs, touching now one shore, now the other.

The emergence of people protesting against social bondage and the bondage of conscience is no new thing; they have appeared as accusers and prophets in all civilisations that have been at all mature, especially when these were growing old. This i s the upper limit, the arresting personality, an exceptional and rare phenomenon, like genius, beauty or an extraordinary voice.

Experience does not show that their Utopias were realised.

There is a frightening example before our eyes. Within the 21 The Dialogues of Lucian: 'Zeus tragikos.' (A.S.) 22 'Old shop' (in English in the original) is H.'s version of 'the Old Firm,'

i.e., the Anglican Church. (R.)

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memory of man there has never been encountered such a confluence of fortunate conditions for the rational, free development of a State as in North America. Every impediment was absent which existed on the exhausted soil of history, or on soil which was quite untilled. The teaching of the great thinkers and revolutionaries of the eighteenth century without the militarism of France, English common law23 without its caste system, lay at the foundation of the life of their state. And what else? Everything that old Europe dreamt of: a republic, a democracy, a federation, autonomy for each patch of land, the whole lightly tied together by a common governmental girdle with an insecure knot in the middle.

Nov•;, what came of this?

Society, the majority, seized the powers of a dictator and of the police; the people themselves fulfilled the function of a Nicholas Pavlovich, of the Third Division and of the executioner; the people, who eighty years ago proclaimed the 'rights of man,' is disintegrating because of the 'right to flog.' Persecution and victimisation in the Southern States (which have set the word Slavery in their flag, as Nicholas once set the word Autocracy in his) in the form of their thought and speech are not inferior in vileness to what was done by the King of Naples and the Emperor at Vienna.

In the Northern States 'slavery' has not been elevated into a religious dogma ; but what can be the standard of education and of freedom of conscience in a country which throws aside its account-book only to devote itself to tables that turn and spirits that knock-a country which has kept in being all the intolerance of the Puritans and Quakers!

In milder forms we come across the same thing in England and Sweden. The freer a country is from government interference, the more fully recognised its right to speak, to independence of conscience, the more intolerant grows the mob: public opinion becomes a torture-chamber; your neighbour, your butcher, your tailor, family, club, parish, keep you under supervision and perform the duties of a policeman. Can only a people which is incapable of inner freedom achieve liberal institutions?

Or does not all this mean, after all, that a State continually develops its requirements and ideals, which the better minds fulfil by their activity, but the realisation of which is incompatible with life in a State?

We do not know the solution of this problem, but we have no 23 'Common law' is in English in the original. (R.)

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right to consider it solved. Until now history has resolved 1t m one way, and certain thinkers-Robert Owen among them-in another. Owen believes, with the indestructible belief of the thinkers of the eighteenth ct-ntury (called the age of unbelief), that humanity is on the eve of its solemn investiture with the toga virilis. We think, however, that all guardians and pastors, all pedagogues and wet-nurses may calmly eat and sleep at the expense of the backward child. Whatever rubbish peoples demand, in our century they will not demand the rights of a grown-up. For a long time to come humanity will still be wearing turn-down collars a /'enfant.

There is a mass of reasons for this. For a man to come to his senses and see reason he must be a giant; and after all not even colossal powers will help him to break through if the way of life of a society is so well and firmly established as it is in Japan or China. From the moment when the baby opens its eyes with a smile on its mother's breast until the time when, at peace with his conscience and his God, he shuts his eyes just as calmly, convinced that while he has a short nap he will be carried to an abode where there is neither weeping nor sighing, everything has been arranged in order that he shall not evolve a single simple conception, shall not run up against one simple, lucid thought. With his mother's milk he sucks in stramonium; no emotion is left undistorted, undiverted from its natural course.

His education at school continues what has been done at home: it crystallises the optical illusion, consolidates it with book learning, theoretically legitimises the traditional trash and trains the children to know without understanding and to accept denominations for definitions.

Astray in his conceptions, entangled in words, man loses the flair for truth, the taste for nature. What a powerful intellect must you possess, to be suspicious of this moral carbon monoxide and, with your head swimming already, to hurl yourself out of it into the fresh air, with which, into the bargain, everyone round is trying to scare you! Owen's answer to this would have been that this was just why he was beginning his regeneration of society not with a Fourierist phalanstery, not with an lcaria,24

but at school, at a school into which he would take children of two and less.

Owen was right and, what is more, he demonstrated in prac-24 The Journal to Icaria, by Etienne Cabet, a Utopian novel, depicts an imaginary country run on communist lines. (A.S.)

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tice that he was: faced with New Lanark Owen's opponents were silent. That cursed New Lanark stuck in the throats of people who perpetually accused socialism of Utopianism and of inability to achieve anything in practice. '"What was done by Considerant and Brisbane, by the abbey of Citeaux, by the tailors of Clichy and by Proudhon's Banque du Peuple?'25 But against the brilliant success of New Lanark there was nothing to be said.

Savants and ambassadors, ministers and dukes, merchants and lords, they all came out of the school with wonder and veneration. The Duke of Kent's doctor, a sceptic, spoke of New Lanark with a smile. The Duke, a friend of Owen's, advised him to visit New Lanark himself. In the evening the doctor wrote to the Duke: 'I am leaving a report until to-morrow. I am so much excited and touched by what I have seen that I can write no more; several times my eyes filled with tears.' I expect my old gentleman to make this solemn admission. So he demonstrated his conception in practice-he was right. Let us go farther.

New Lanark was at the height of its prosperity. The indefatigable Owen, in spite of his trips to London, the meetings he attended and the constant visits from all the celebrities of Europe-even, as we have seen, from Nicholas Pavlovich-applied himself with the same loving energy to his school-cumfactory and the well-being of his workers, among whom he was developing a communal life. And the whole thing blew up.

"What do you think, then? That he went bankrupt? The instructors quarrelled, the children were spoilt, the parents took to drink? Forgive me: the factory prospered, the profits increased, the workers grew rich, the school flourished. But one fine morning there came into that school two buffoons in black wearing low-crowned hats and coats that were purposely badly cut: it was two Quakers,26 who were just as much proprietors in

�5 Considerant, who emigrated to America in 1 842, two years later organised, with the participation of Al bert Brisbane," the coloy of 'Reunion' in Texas. In the monastery at Citeaux, after the revolution of 1 848, there was founded one of the workers' productive associations. At Clichy, a small place not far from Paris, a great co-operative productive comradeship of tailors was organised in March 1 8·1-8, to a plan of Louis Blanc's and with the support of the Luxemburg Committee. The 'People Bank,' founded by Proudhon in 1 849, the object of which was the furnishing of workers with 'free credit.' All these undertakings proved to be failures. ( A .S.)

26 Quakers visited the school at New Lanark three times between 1 8 1 4

and 1 822 ( Podrnore, op. cit., I , 1 5 8 ) . (R.)

• ( 1 809-90) , father of the journalist Arthur Brisbane, who becarne "William Randolph Hearst's columnist and adviser. (D.M_)

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New Lanark as Owen himself was. They scowled at the sight of the merry children who were not grieving in the least over the Fall; they were horrified that the little boys wore no trousers,27

and demanded that some catechism of theirs should be taught.

Owen answered to start with by a stroke of genius: he gave them the figure of the rise in profits. Their jealousy for the Lord was quieted for a time; the sinful figure was so great.28 But the conscience of the Quakers woke up again, and they began to demand even more insistently that the children should not be taught dancing nor worldly singing, but-peremptorily-their own schismatic catechism.

Owen, with whom choral singing, correct movements and dances played an important part in education, did not agree.

There were long arguments; the Quakers decided this time to consolidate their places in paradise, and demanded the introduction of psalms, and of some sort of short trousers for the children who were going about a /'ecossaise. Owen realised that the Quakers' crusade would not stop there. 'In that case,' he told them, 'run the place yourselves: I decline to do it.' He could not have acted otherwise.29

'The Quakers,' says a biographer of Owen, 'when they entered on the management of New Lanark, began by lowering pay and increasing the hours of work.'

New Lanark collapsed.

It must not be forgotten that Owen's success discloses one more great historical novelty, namely, that it is only at first that the poor, oppressed workman, denied an education, trained from childhood in drunkenness, deceit and war with society, opposes innovations, and this out of mistrust; but as soon as he is convinced that the change is not to his detriment, that in the course of it he, too, is not forgotten, he follows with submission, and then with confidence and love.

27 They wore kilts. (R.)

28 New Lanark produced £1 60,000 pure profit in the first five years, and after that the average yearly profit came to £ 1 5,000. ( A .S. ) 29 The demands of the Quaker-companions were presented to Owen in January 1 824; he put his signature to their conditions and agreed to continue temporarily with the conduct of the undertaking until a new manager could be found. Owen's break with his co-proprietors and his forced departure from New Lanark happened later in 1 829. (A.S.) Podmore says (op. cit., I, 1 58) that the schools at New Lanark continued to flourish . . . until the institutic'1 of Board Schools in Scotland in 1 872. ( R. )

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The environment, which acted as a brake, is not here.

Gentz, the literary sycophant of Metternich, said to Robert Owen at a dinner in Frankfort:30

'Suppose you had been successful, what would have been the outcome of it?'

'It's very simple,' Owen answered. 'The outcome would have been that every man would have had enough to eat, would have been properly clothed and would have been given a sensible education.'

'But that's just what we don't want,' observed the Cicero of the Congress of Vienna. Gentz was frank, if nothing else.

From the moment that the shopkeepers realised, as the priests had, that those companies of 'play-workers' and teachers were something very much in earnest, the destruction of New Lanark was inevitable.

And it is for this reason that the failure of a small Scottish hamlet with its factory and school has the significance of a historical misfortune. The mins of Owen's New Lanark inspire in us no less mournful thoughts than were once inspired in Marius by other mins, with the difference that the Roman exile was sitting on the coffin of an old man and pondering the vanity of vanities, and we ponder the same thing, sitting at the fresh grave of a baby, a very promising one, killed by being badly looked after and through fear that it would demand its inheritance!

I I I

So, JUDGED BY REASON, Owen was right; his deductions were logical and, what is more, were justified in practice. All that they lacked was understanding in his hearers.

'It's a matter of time ; people will understand one day.'

'I don't know.'

'One can't think, though, that people will never arrive at an understanding of their own interests.'

Yet it has been so till now; this lack of understanding has been made up by the Church and the State, that is, by the two chief obstacles to further development. This is a circular argument., from which it is very hard to get away. Owen imagined that it sufficed to point out to people their obsolete absurdities for 30 A banquet arranged by Simon Moritz Bethmann, a banker, in 1818

i n connection with a congress o f the Holy Alliance then meeting a t Aachen. (A.S.)

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them to free themselves-and he was mistaken. Their absurdities, especially those of the Church, are obvious; but this does not hamper them in the least. Their indestructible solidity i s based not o n reason but o n the lack of it, and therefore they are as little amenable to criticism as are hills, woods and cliffs.

History has developed by means of absurdities; people have constantly set their hearts on chimeras, and have achieved very real results. In waking dreams they have gone after the rainbow, sought now paradise in heaven, now heaven on earth, and on the way have sung their everlasting songs, have decorated temples with their everlasting sculptures, have built Rome and Athens, Paris and London. One dream yields to another; the sleep sometimes becomes lighter, but is never quite gone. People will accept anything, believe in anything, submit to anything and are ready to sacrifice much; but they recoil in horror when through the gaping chink between two religions, which lets in the light of day, there blows upon them the cool wind of reason and criticism. If, for example, Owen had wished to reform the Church of England, he would have been just as successful as the Unitarians, the Quakers and I do not know who else. To reorganise the Church, to set up the altar behind a screen, or without one, to remove the images, or bring in more of themall this is possible, and thousands would follow the reformer; but Owen wanted to lead people out of the Church, and here was the sta, viator, here was his Rubicon. It is easy to walk up to the frontier: the most difficult thing in every country is to cross it, especially when the people itself is on the side of the passport official.

In all the thousand and one nights of history, as soon as a little education has been amassed, there have been the same endeavours: a few men have woken up and protested against the sleepers, have announced that they themselves were awake, but have been unable to rouse those others. Their appearance demonstrates, without the slightest doubt, man's capacity to evolve a rational understanding. But this does not solve our problem: can this exceptional development become general? The guidance which the past gives us does not favour an affirmative verdict. Perhaps the future will go differently, will bring to bear different forces, other elements, unknown to us, which will change for the better or for the worse the destiny of humanity, or of a considerable part of it. The discovery of America is tantamount to a geological upheaval ; railways and the electric telegraph have transformed all human relationships. What we do not know we have no right to introduce into our calculation;

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but even if we have the best of luck we still cannot foresee that it \viii be soon that men will feel the need for common sense.

The development of the brain needs and takes its time. There is no haste in nature: she could lie for thousands and thousands of years in a trance of stone, and for other thousands could twitter with the birds, scour the forests with the beasts or swim in the sea as a fish. The delirium of history will last her for a long time, and it will prolong magnificently the plasticity of nature, which in other spheres is exhausted.

People who have realised that this is a dream imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary satisfactions.

Take at haphazard, without making a choice, any newspaper: cast your eye upon any family. 'What Robert Owen could help there? For absurdities people suffer with self-abnegation; for absurdities they go to their death; for absurdities they kill other men. Everlasting care and trouble, want, alarms, the sweat of his brow, toil without rest or end-man does not even enjoy them. If he has any leisure from his work he hastens to twist together the net of a family, he twines it quite casually, finds himself caught in it, pulls others in and, if he is not to escape from death by starvation by the never-ending toil of a galley slave, he starts upon a violent persecution of his wife, his children, his relations, or himself is pe1·st>cuted by them. So people oppress each other in the name of family love, in the name of jealousy, in the name of marriage, and make hateful the most holy ties. When will man come to his senses? 'Will it be on the other side of the family, beyond its grave, when a man has lost everything--energy, freshness of intellect-and seeks only tranquillity?

Look at the troubles and cares of a whole ant-hill, or of a single ant: enter into its quests and purposes, its joys and sorrows, its conception of good and evil, of honour and disgrace, into everything that it does in the course of its whole life, from morning to night; see to what it devotes its last days and to what it sacrifices the best moments of its life-you will find yourself in a nursery, with its little horses on wheels, with gold foil and spangles, with dolls stood in one corner and the birch stood in another. In a baby's prattle a flash of sense can from time to time be perceived, but it is lost in childish distraction. You cannot stop and consider-you will confuse matters, fall behind, get stuck; everything has been too much compromised, and things move too quickly for it to be possible to stop, especially before a

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handful of people with no cannons, money or power, protesting in the name of reason, and not even warranting with miracles the truth of what they say.

A Rothschild or a Montefiore must be in his office in the morning, to begin the capitalisation of his hundredth million ; in Brazil there is plague, and war in Italy, America is falling to pieces-everything is going splendidly: and, if someone talks to him then of man's exemption from responsibility and of a different distribution of wealth, of course he does not listen. Mac

Mahon spent days and nights considering how most surely, i n the shortest time, t o get the greatest number o f people dressed in white uniforms destroyed by people in red trousers;31 he destroyed more of them than he had thought he would; everyone congratulated him, even the Irish who, as papists, had been beaten by him-and then he is told that war is not only a repulsive absurdity but a crime too. Of course, instead of listening he sets himself to admiring the sword presented to him by Ireland.

To these people busy with military or civil service, stockbroking, family quarrels, cards, decorations, horses, Robert Owen advocated a different employment of their powers and pointed out the absurdity of their lives. Convince them he could not, but he exasperated them and drew down upon himself all the intolerance of incomprehension. Reason alone is long-suffering and merciful because it understands.

Owen's biographer judged very truly when he said that he destroyed his own influence when he repudiated religion. Really, when he bumped against the Church's fence, he should have stopped ; but he climbed over to the other side and remained there all on his own, with the curses of the devout for company.

But it seems to me that sooner or later he would have remained in just the same way with the wrong end of the shell-alone and an outlaw.32

The only reason why the mob did not flare up against him from the very outset was that the State and the lawcourt are not so popular as the Church and the altar. But the right to punish would a la longue have been upheld by people a trifle better grounded than God-crazed Quakers and newspaper hypocrites.

31 Herzen is referring to the military expedition of 1830 for the seizure of Algeria. (A.S.)

32 'Outlaw' is in English. The reference is to ostracism in ancient Athens. ( R.) For "shell," Americans would say "stick." ( D.M. )

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About the doctrine of the Church and the truths of the catechism no one argues \vho has any self-respect, for he knows beforehand that they will not hold water at all. It is impossible to be in earnest about proving the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, or about affirming that the geological researches of Moses conform to those of Murchison. The secular Churches of civil and criminal law and the dogmas of the juridical catechism stand much more firmly and enjoy, pending scrutinisation, the rights of proven truths and unshakeable axioms.

Men who overturned altars dared not touch the mirror of justice. Anarcharsis Clootz, the Hebertists, who called God by the name of Reason, were just as certain of every salus populi and other civic commandments as \\'ere mediaeval priests of the canon law and the need to burn sorcerers.

It is not long since that one of the most powerful, daring thinkers of our time,33 in order to deal the Church a final blow, secularised it, made of it a tribunal and, snatching from the hands of the priests an Isaac who had been made ready to be sacrificed to God, brought him before a court, that is, as a sacrifi ce to justice.

The eternal controversy, the controversy thousands of years old, about free-will and predestination, is not over. It was not only Owen in our time who doubted man's responsibility for his actions. We shall find traces of this doubt in Bentham and Fourier, in Kant and Schopenhauer, in the natural scientists and physicians and, more important than all, in everyone who interests himself in the statistics of crime. The controversy is not decided, in any case, but that it is ;ust to punish a criminal, and this according to the degree of the crime, on that there is not even any controversy: that's something everyone knows for himself!

On which side, then, is the lunatic asylum?

'Punishment is the inalienable right of the criminal,' said Plato himself.

It is a pity that he himself uttered this quibble, but we at all events are not obliged to keep repeating, with Addison's Cato,

'Plato, thou reasonest well,' even when he says that 'our soul dieth not.'

If to be disembowelled or hanged constitutes the criminal's right, let him bring a complaint himself if it has been violated.

There is no need to force people's rights upon them.

33 P.-J. Proudhon. (A.S.)

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Bentham calls the criminal a miscalculator, and of course, if someone has made a mistake in his reckoning, he must take the consequences of his mistake; but this is not his right, you know.

No one says that, if you have bumped your forehead, you have a right to a bruise, and there is no special official who would send a surgeon's mate to raise a bruise if there is not one. Spinoza speaks still more simply of the possible necessity of killing a man, who prevents others from living, 'as a mad dog is killed.'

That is comprehensible. But lawyers either are so disingenuoJ.Is, or have so dammed up their intelligence, that they utterly refuse to recognise execution as a safeguard or as vengeance, and take it for some kind of moral recompense, 'a restoration of the equilibrium.' In war matters are more direct: the soldier does not speculate about the guilt of the enemy he kills; he does not even say that killing him is just: it is kill who kill can.

'But with these notions all the lawcourts will have to be shut.'

'\Nhy? Basilicas were once made into parish churches; should we not try now to turn them into parish schools?'

'With these notions of impunity not a single government will be able to hold on.'

'Owen might have answered, like the first brother in history,34

"Have I been bidden to strengthen governments?" '

'With governments he was very tractable, and could come to terms with crowned heads, Tory Ministers and the President of the American Republic.'

'But did he get on badly with Catholics or Protestants?'

'What? You think Owen was a republican?'

'I think that Robert Owen preferred that form of government which agreed best with the Church accepted by him.'

'What are you saying? He had no Church.'

'Y au see, then.'

'All the same, one cannot be without a government.'

'No doubt . . . however rotten it is, yet it's necessary. Hegel tells a story of a good old woman who said, "Well, what if it is bad weather? It's better than no weather at all." '

'All right: laugh ; but the State will perish, you know, without a government.'

'And what business is that of mine?'

3 4 Jesus Christ. (A.S.) Cain. (R.) Socrates. (D.M.)

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I V

AT THE TIME of the Revolution the experiment was made of radically altering civic life while preserving the powerful authority of the government.35

Decrees of the government provided for have survived, with their heading:

:f:GALITJ�;

LIBERTE

BoNHEUR CoMMUN,

to which was sometimes added, by way of elucidation: 'Ou la mort!'

The decrees, as indeed one ought to have expected, begin with the police decree.

§ 1 . Persons who do nothing for the fatherland have no political rights: these are foreigners to whom the republic grants hospitality.

§ 2. Nothing is done for the fatherland by those who do "not serve it with useful labour.

§ 3. The law considers useful labour:

Agriculture, stock-breeding, fishing, seafaring.

Mechanical and manual work.

Retail trade.

Carriers' and coachmen's work.

The military profession.

The sciences and instruction.

§ 4. However, the sciences and instruction will not be considered useful if the persons engaged in them do not present, within a given period, evidence of good citizenship (civisme) written in the statutory form.

§ 6. Foreigners are forbidden entry to public meetings.

§ 7. Foreigners arc under the direct surveillance of the supreme administration, to which is reserved the right to eject them from their domicile and send them to places of correction.

In the decree 'of work' everything is assessed and assigned: at what time to do what; how many hours to work. Foremen give 3" In 1 796 Bnbeuf hended the revolutionary-communistic 'Agreement in the name of equality.' (A.S. )

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'an example of zeal and activity,' others report to the authorities on everything done in the workshop. Workmen are sent from one place to another (as with us peasants are driven to work on the roads) according to the need for hands and labour.

§ 1 1 . The supreme administration sends to forced labour (trauaux forces) , under supervision of communes designated by it, persons of both sexes whose bad citizenship ( incivisme) , idleness, luxurious living and bad behaviour set a bad example to society. Their property will be confiscated. ·

§ 1 4. Special officials will care for the maintPnance and increase of cattle, for the clothing, removals and amenities of working citizens.

Decree of the distribution of property:

§ 1 . No one member of a commune may make use of anything except that which is assigned to him by law and given through the instrumentality of an official (magistral) invested with the power.

§ 2. A people's commune from the very beginning gives to its members quarters, clothes, laundry, light, heat, a sufficient quantity of bread, meat, poultry, fish, eggs, butter, wine and other beverages.

§ 3. In each commune, at fixed times, there will be communal meals, at which the members of the commune are obliged to be present.

§ 5. Every member taking payment for work, or keeping money by him, is punished.

Trade decree:

§ 1. Foreign trade is forbidden to private persons. The wares will be confiscated, the criminal punished.

Trade will be carried on by officials. Subsequently money is abolished. It is forbidden to introduce gold and silver. The republic does not issue money; domestic private debts are cancelled, foreign ones discharged; and if anyone deceives or defrauds he is punished with perpetual slavery (esclavage perpetuel) .

At the bottom of this you would expect to find: 'Peter. Tsarskoye Selo,' or 'Count Arakcheyev. Georgia'; but it is signed not by Peter I but by the first French socialist, Gracchus Babeuf!36

36 "Being an opponent of the centralized state, Herzen tries to present Babeuf's designs in an unfavorable light," note the savants of the

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I t would be hard t o complain that i n this project there i s not enough government. There is solicitude for everything, supervision of everything, custodianship of everything; everything is organised and set in order. Even the reproduction of animals is not left to their own weaknesses and coquetry but is regulated by superior authority.

And what, do you think, is the purpose of all this? For what are these serfs of well-being, these prisoners adscripti to equality, fed on 'poultry and fish, washed, clothed and amused'J Not simply for their own sakes: indeed, the decree says that all this shall be done mediocrement. 'The republic alone must be rich, splendid and omnipotent.'

This reminds one forcefully of our Iverskaya Mother of God: sie hat Per/en und Diamanten, a carriage and horses, regular priests to serve her, coachmen with unfreezable heads-in a word, she has everything-only she does not exist: she owns all this wealth in effigie.

The contrast between Robert Owen and Gracchus Babeuf is very remarkable. In a hundred years' time, when everything on this terrestrial globe will have changed, it will be possible by means of these two molar teeth to reconstruct the fossil skeletons of England and France down to the last little bone. The more these two mastodons of socialism belong in essence to one family, and proceed towards one goal and from the same stimuli, the clearer is the difference between them.

The one saw that, in spite of the execution of the King, of the proclamation of the Republic, the annihilation of the Federalists, and the democratic Terror, the people remained of no account; the other, that in spite of the huge development of industry, of capital, of machinery and of increased productivity, 'merry England' was more and more becoming 'sorry England,' and greedy England -nore and more hungry England. This led both of them to the necessity for change in the basic conditions of Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. Tries and, I'd say, succeeds. Their accusation that Herzen presents Babeuf's decrees-which must have had a most familiar ring to their ears-"in a form which is somewhat simplified and exaggerated" would be more impressive had they given examples. How they must have suffered, though, during their scholarly labors' Usually, to their credit, in silence. But Herzen's savage treatment of Babeuf's prematurely Leninist program was too much. Their protest that Herzen was prejudiced against Babeuf's left-totalitarian u topia because he was "an opponent of the central ized state," as indeed he was-this is a real cri de coeur from these ambivalent victims-cumhighpriests of Soviet ideology. ( D.M. )

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political and economic life. Why they (and many others) happened upon this way of thinking almost at the very same time is easily understood. The contradictions in the life of society had not become more numerous or worse than before, but by the end of the eighteenth century they stood out more sharply. Elements of social life, developing separately, destroyed the harmony which had formerly existed among them in less favourable circumstances.

Having been so close to each other at the point of departure, they both went off in opposite directions.

Owen sees, in the fact that social evil was being recognised, the last achievement, the last victory in the hard, complex, historic campaign; he greets the dawn of a new day, which had never existed or been able to exist in the past, and tries to persuade the children to cast away their swaddling-clothes and leading-strings as soon as possible and stand on their own feet.

He has taken a look through the doors of the future and, like a traveller who has reached his destination, he no longer rages at the road or curses the posting-station masters or the broken-down horses.

But the constitution of 1 793 thought differently, and Gracchus Babeuf,37 too, thought differently along with it. It decreed the restoration of the natural rights of man which had been forgotten and lost. The way in which life was lived in a State was the criminal fruit of usurpation, the consequence of the wicked conspiracy of tyrants and their accomplices, the priests and aristocrats. They must be punished as enemies of their country, their property must be returned to its legal sovereign, who now had nothing and for that reason was called a sansculotte. The time had come to restore his ancient, inalienable rights. . . .

Where were they? Why is the proletarian the sovereign? Why is it to him that all the property plundered by others belongs? Ah!

you doubt-you are a suspect fellow: the nearest sovereign takes you off to the citizen judge, and he sends you to the citizen executioner, and you will not be doubting any more!

The practice of the surgeon Babeuf could not interfere with the practice of Owen, the man-midwife.

Babeuf wished by force, that is, by authority, to smash what had been created by force, to destroy what had been wrongfully acquired.

37 The followers of Babeuf relied on the constitution accepted by the Convention of 24th June, 1 793, which they considered a genuine expression of the will of the people. (A.S.)

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With this purpose he laid a plot: i f he had succeeded in making himself master of Paris, the insurrectionary committee would have enjoined his new system upon France, just as the victorious Osmanlis enjoined theirs upon Byzantium ; he would have forced on the French his slavery of general prosperity and, of course, with such violence as would have provoked the most fearful reaction, in the struggle with which Babeuf and his committee would have perished, leaving to the world a great thought in an absurd form, a thought which even now glows under the ashes, and troubles the complacency of the complacent.

Owen, seeing that people of the educated countries \'\'ere growing up towards a transition to a new epoch, had no thought of violence and simply wished to help this development. Just as consistently from his side as Babeuf from his, he set about the study of the embryo, the development of the cell. He began, like all natural scientists, with a particular instance: his microscope, his laboratory, was New Lanark; his study grew and came to puberty along with the cell

For Owen a plot was unnecessary and a rebellion could only do him harm. He could get on not only with the best government in the \">'orld, the English government, but with any other.

In a government he saw a superannuated, historical fact supported by people who \Wrf' backv.,·ard and undeveloped, and not a gang of bandits which must be caught unawares. While not seeking to overturn the government he also did not in the least seek to amend it. If the saintly shopkeepers had not put a spoke in his wheel, there would be in England and America now hundreds of New Lanarks and New Harrnonies;38 into them would have flowed the fresh vigour of the working population, and little by little they would have drawn off the best vital juices from the State's antiqu

Babeuf ·was guillotined. At the time of his trial he grew into 3A By Owen's magic touch co-oprrativr u•orkrrs' associations began to be established in England; there are as many as 2.00 of them. The Rochdale society, which began modestly and in indigence fifteen years ago with a capital of 2.8 livrrs, is now building with the society's money a factory with two engines. each of 60 h. p., and each costing £30,000. The cooperative societies print a magazine, The Co-operator, which is published exclusively by working men.

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one of those great personalities, those martyred and slaughtered prophets, before whom a man is compelled to bow. He was extinguished, and on his grave there grew and grew the alldevouring monster of Centralisation. Before this monster individuality withered and was effaced, personality paled and vanished. Never on European soil, from the time of the Thirty Tyrants at Athens to the Thirty Years War, and from that until the decline of the French Revolution, has man been so caught up in the spider's web of government, so enmeshed in the toils of administration, as in the most recent times in France.

v

AuouT THE TIME that the heads of Babeuf and Dorthes fell into the fatal sack at Vendome,39 Owen was living in the same lodgings as another unrecognised genius and pauper, Fulton, and giving him his last shillings in order that he might make models of machines with which he would enrich and benefit the human race. It happened that a certain young officer was displaying his battery to some ladies. In order to show the proper attention he fired off-without the slightest necessity-a few cannon-balls ( he tells this himself) ; the enemy replied: a few men fell dead and others were wounded. The ladies were left thoroughly content with the shock to their nerves. The officer felt some pangs of conscit>nce: 'Those people,' he says, 'perished absolutely unnecessarily' . . . but they were at vvar and this feeling soon passed.

Cela promettait, and subsequently the young man shed more blood than the whole of the Revolution, and demanded in one levy more soldiers than Owen would have needed pupils in order to transform the whole world.

Napoleon had no system, and for others he neither wished wealth nor promised it: wealth he desired only for himself, and by wealth he understood power. Now see how feeble Babeuf and Owen are compared with him! Thirty years after his death his name was enough to get his nephew recognised as Emperor.

What was his secret?

Babeuf wished to enjoin prosperity and a communist republic on people.

Owen wished to educate them to a different economic way of living, incomparably more profitable for them.

Napoleon wanted neither the one nor the other; he understood 39 27th May, 1 797. (A.S.)

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that Frenchmen did not i n fact desire to feed on Spartan broth and to return to the morality of Bn�tus the Elder, that they were not very well satisfied that on feast-days 'citizens will assemble to discuss the laws and instn�ct their children in the civic virtues.' But-and this is a different thing-fighting and boasting of their own bravery they do l ike.

Instead of preventing them, or irritating them by preaching perpetual peace, Lacedaemonian fare, Roman virtues and crowns of myrtle :1\'apoleon, seeing how passionately fond they were of bloody glory, began to egg them on against other peoples and himself to go hunting with them. There is no reason to blame him: the French would have been the same even without him; but this identity of tastes entirely explains his people's love for him: he was not a reproach to the mob, for he did not offend it by either his purity or his virtues nor did he offer it a lofty, transfigured ideal. He \Vas neither a chastising prophet nor a sermonising genius. He belonged himself to the mob and he showed it its very self (with its deficiencies and sympathies, its passions and inclinations) elevated into a genius and covered with rags of glory. That is the answer to the enigma of his power and influence ; that is \vhy the mob wept for him, lovingly brought his coffin over and hung his portrait everywhere.

If he did fall, it was not at all because the mob abandoned him, because it discerned the emptiness of his designs, because it grew weary of surrendering its last son and of shedding human blood without reason. He provoked the other peoples to a ferocious resistance, and they began to fight desperately for their slavery and for their masters. Christian morality was satisfied: it would have been impossible to defend one's own enemies with a greater fury!

For this once, a military despotism was vanquished by a feudal one.

I cannot pass with indifference the engraving which shows the meeting of 'Wellington and BlUcher at the moment of victory at Waterloo; I stand gazing at it every time, and every time my heart is chilled and frightened. That calm, British figure, which promises nothing brilliant, and that grey, roughly good-natured, German condottiere. The Irishman in the English service, a man without a fatherland, and the Pn�ssian whose fatherland is in the barracks, greet each other gladly; and how should they not be glad? They have just turned history off the high road and up to the hubs in mud-mud out of which it will not be hauled in fifty years. It was dawn . . . Europe was still asleep in those days and did not know that her destinies had been altered-and

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how? Bliicher hurried and Grouchy was too late! How many misfortunes, how many tears did that victory cost the nations!

And how many misfortunes, how much blood would a victory of the opposing side have cost them?

Both nature and history are going nowhere, and therefore they are ready to go anywhere to which they are directed, if this is possible, that is, if nothing obstructs them. They are composed au fur et a mesure of an immense multitude of particles acting upon and meeting with each other, checking and attracting each other; but man is by no means lost because of this, like a grain of sand in a mountain ; is not more subject to the elements nor more tightly bound down by necessity: he grows up, by reason of having understood his plight, into a helmsman who proudly ploughs the waves with his boat, making the bottomless abyss serve him as a path of communication.

Having neither programme, set theme nor unavoidable denouement, the dishevelled improvisation of history is ready to walk with anyone; anyone can insert into it his line of verse and, if it is sonorous, it will remain his line until the poem i s torn up, s o long a s the past ferments in its blood and memory. A multitude of possibilities, episodes, discoveries, in history and in nature, lies slumbering at every step. The rock had only to be touched with science and water flowed out of it-and what is water? Think what has been done by compressed steam, or by electricity, since man, not Jupiter, took them into his hands.

Man's share in this is a great one and full of poetry: it is a kind of creation. The elements, matter, are indifferent: they can slumber for a thousand years and never wake up; but man sends them out to work for him, and they go. The sun had long been travelling across the sky: suddenly man intercepted its ray; he retained the trace of it, and the sun began to make portraits for him.

Nature never fights against man; this is a base, religious calumny. She is not intelligent enough to fight: she is indifferent. 'In proportion as a man knows her, so can he govern her,'

said Bacon, and he was perfectly right. Nature cannot thwart man unless man thwarts her laws; she, as she goes on with her work, will unconsciously do his work for him. Men know this, and it is on this basis that they are masters of the seas and lands.

But man has not the same respect for the objectivity of the historical world: here he is at home and does not stand on ceremony. In history it is easier for him to be carried passively along by the current of events, or to burst into it with a knife

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and a shout: 'General prosperity or death ! ' than to observe the flooding and ebbing of the waves on which he floats, to study the rhythm of their fluctuations, and by that same means to discover for himself unending fairways.

Of course, the position of man in history is more complicated: here he is at one time boat, wave and pilot.

'If only there were a chart! '

'But i f Columbus had had a chart someone else would have discovered America.'

'Why?'

'Because it would have had to have been discovered to get on to the chart.'

It is only by depriving history of every predestined course that man and history become something earnest, effective and filled with profound interest. If events are stacked in advance, if the whole of history is the unfolding of some anti-historic plot, if the result of it all is one performance, one mise en scene, then at least let us too take up wooden swords and tin shields. Are we to shed real blood and real tears for the performance of a charade by providence? If there is a pre-ordained plan, history is reduced to an insertion of figures in an algebraical formula, and the future is mortgaged before its birth.

People who speak with horror of Owen's depriving man of freewill and moral splendour are reconciling predestination not only with freedom but also with the hangman!-except on the authority of the text that 'the son of man must be betrayed, but woe unto him who shall betray him.'40

Is it to be wondered at that with such elucidation the simplest everyday subjects become, thanks to scholastic interpretation, utterly incomprehensible? Can there be, for instance, a fact more 40 Theologians, in general, are more courageous than doctrinaires; they say plainly that without the will of God a hair will not fall from the head, and the responsibility for every act, even for the intention, they leave with man. Scientific fatalism asserts that they do not even speak of persons, of accidental carriers of an idea . . . (that is, there is no mention of us, the ordinary man, and as for such persons as Alexander of Macedon or Peter l-our ears have been stunned with their universal, historical vocation) . The doctrinaires; you see, are like great proprietors: they deal with the economy of history en gros, wholesale . . . but where is the boundary betwPen individuals and the herd? At what point do a few grains, as my dear Athenian sophists used to ask, become a heap?

It goes without saying that we have never confused predestination with the theory of probabilities ; we have the right to make deductions from the past to the future. \Vhen we perform an induction, we know what we

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patent to everyone than the observation that the longer a man lives the more chance he has of making his fortune; the longer he looks at one object the better he sees it if nothing disturbs him and he does not go blind ? And out of this fact they have contrived the idol of progress, a kind of golden calf, growing incessantly and promising to grow to infinity.

Is it not simpler to grasp that man lives not for the fulfilment of his destiny, not for the incarnation of an idea, not for progress, but solely because he was born; and he was born for (however bad a word that is) . . . for the present, which does not at all prevent his either receiving a heritage from the past or leaving something in his will. To idealists this seems humiliating and coarse: they will take absolutely no account of the fact that the great significance of us men, with all our unimportance, with the hardly discernible flicker of the life of each person, consists in just this: that while we are alive, until the knot held together by us has been resolved into its elements, we are for all that ourselves, and not dolls destined to suffer progress or embody some homeless idea. We must be proud of not being needles and thread in the hands of fate as it sews the motley stuff of history .

. . . We know that this stuff is not sewn without us, but that is not the object of us, not our commission, not the lesson set us to learn, but the consequence of the complex reciprocal bond that links all existing things by their ends and beginnings, causes and effects.

And that is not all: we can change the pattern of the carpet.

There is no master craftsman, no design, only a foundation, and we are quite, quite alone, too. The earlier weavers of fate, all those Vulcans and Neptunes, have taken leave of this world.

Their executors conceal their testament from us-but the deceased bequeathed us their power.

'But if on the one hand you give a man's fate to him to do as he likes with, and on the other you deprive him of responsibility, then, if he accepts your teaching, he will fold his arms and do absolutely nothing at all.'

Then will people not stop eating and drinking, loving and are doing, basing ourselves on the permanence of certain laws and phenomena, but admitting the possibility of their infringement. \Ye see a man of thirty, and we have ewry right to suppose that a fter another thirty years he will be grey-haired or bald, somewhn t stoop<'d. and so on.

This does not mean that it is ordained that he shall go grey or bald. or stoop-that this is his destiny. If he dies at thirty-nine, he will not go grey, but will turn 'to clay,' as Hamlet says, or into a salad .

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producing children, delighting in music and the beauty of women, when they find out that they eat and listen, love and enjoy, for themselves alone, not for the fulfilment of higher designs, and not for the soonest possible attainment of an endless progress towards perfection?

If religion with its crushing fatalism, and doctrinairism with its chilly cheerlessness, have not made people fold their arms, then there is no reason to fear that this may be done. by a view which rids them of these slabs of stone. A mere sniff of life and of its inconsistency was enough to rescue the Hebrew people from religious pranks like asceticism and quietism, which had constantly existed only in \•.:ord and not in deed: is it possible that reason and consciousness will turn out to be feebler?

Moreover, a realistic view has a secret of its own; he who folds his arms in the face of it will not apprehend or embrace it; he belongs still to a different age of brain ; he still needs spurs: the devil with his black tail on one side and on the other the angel with a white lily.

Men's aspiration towards a more harmonious way of living is perfectly natural; it cannot be stopped by anything, as hunger and thirst cannot be stopped. That is why we are not in the least afraid that people will fold their arms as a result of any teaching whatever. ·whether, if better conditions of life are discovered, man will be successful in them, or will in one place go astray and in another commit follies, that is a different question. In saying that man will never get rid of hunger we are not saying whether there will always be victuals for everybody, and wholesome ones, too.

There are men who are content with little, who have meagre needs, narrow views and limited desires. There are also peoples with a small horizon and strange notions, who are content to be indigent, false and sometimes even vulgar. The Chinese and Japanese are \vithout doubt two peoples who have found the most suitable social form for their way of living. That is why they remain so unalterably the same.

Europe, it seems to us, is also close to 'sa turation' and aspires, tired as she is, to settle, to crystallise out, finding her stable social position in a petty, mean mode of life. She is prevented from composing herself at her ease by monarchico-feudal relics and the principle of conquest. A petit bourgeois system offers enormous improvement in comparison with the oligarchicomilitary-there is no doubt of that-but for Europe, and specially for Anglo-Germanic Europe, it offers improvement not only enormous but also sufficient. Holland is ahead: she was the

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first to become quiescent, before the interruption of history. The interruption of growth is the beginning of maturity. The life of a student is more full of incidents and proceeds much more stormily than the sober, workman-like life of the father of a family. If England were not weighed down by the leaden shield of feudal landlordship, if she did not, like Ugolino, constantly tread on her children who are dying of hunger, if, like Holland, she could achieve for everyone the prosperity of small shopkeepers and of patrons of moderate means, she would settle down quietly in her pettiness. And along with that the level of intelligence, breadth of view and aesthetic taste would fall still lower, and a life without incidents, sometimes diverted by external impulses, would be reduced to a uniform rotation, to a faintly varying semper idem. Parliament would assemble, the budget would be presented, capable speeches delivered, forms improved

. . . and the next year it would be the same, and the same ten years later; it would be the comfortable rut of a grown-up man, his routine business days. Even in natural phenomena we see how eccentric the beginnings are, and the settled continuation goes noiselessly on; not like a tempestuous comet, its tresses dishevelled, describing its unknown path, but like a tranquil planet with its satellites like lamps, gliding along its beaten track ; small divagations attest even more the general order .

. . . The spring is somewhat \Vetter or somewhat drier, but after every spring comes summer; but before every spring comes winter.

'For goodness' sake! This means that the whole of humanity will get as far as a system of pettiness and there get stuck?'

Not the whole of it, I think, but certain parts of it for sure.

The word 'humanity' is most repugnant; it expresses nothing definite and only adds to the confusion of all the remaining concepts a sort of piebald demi-god. What sort of unit is understood by the word 'humanity'J Is it what we understand by any other collective denomination, like caviare, and so on? Who in the world would dare say that there is any form of order that would satisfy in an identical manner Iroquois and Irish, Arab and Magyar, Kaffir and Slav? We may say only that to certain peoples a petty order is repellent, and others are as much at home in it as fish in water. The Spaniards and Poles, and in part the Italians and Russians, contain very few petty elements; the social order in which they would be well off is higher than that which pettiness can give them. But it in no way follows from this that they will attain this higher state or that they will not turn aside on to the bourgeois road. Aspiration alone ensures

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nothing; \Ye are fearfully emphatic about the difference between the possible and the inevitable. It is not enough to know that such and such an order is repellent to us: we must know what order we want and whether its realisation is possible. There are many possibilities ahead: the bourgeois peoples may fly a quite different pitch ; the most poetic peoples may turn shopkeepers.

Every man is supported by a huge genealogical tree whose roots go back almost to the paradise of Adam; at our backs, as behind the wave on the shore, is felt the pressure of the whole ocean-of the history of all the world; the thought of all the centuries is in our brain at this minute; there is no thought except in the brain, and with that thought we can be a power.

There is nothing e:rtreme in anrone, but each person can be an irreplaceable realitr; before every man the door is open. If a man has something to sar, let him speak: he will be listened to; if he is tormented by a conviction, let him preach a sermon.

People are not as submissive as the elements, but we are always dealing with the masses of our own time: they are not peculiar to themselves, nor are we independent of the common background of the picture, of identical antecedent influences; there is a common tie.

Now do you understand on whom the future of man, of peoples, depends?

'On whom?'

'\Vhat do you mean, on whom? Why, on You and ME, for instance. How can we fold our arms after this?'

T H E F R E E

R U S S I A N

P R E S S A N D

THE B E L L

( 1 8 5 8 - 1 8 6 2 )

Apogee and Perifj·ee

ABOUT TEN o'cLOCK one morning I heard from downstairs a thick, discontented voice:

'May dee comsa-colonel rioos ver vwar.'

'Monsieur ne refoit jamais le matin et.

'Zhe par deman.'

'Et votre nom, monsieur?'

'May voo diray colonel rioos'-and the colonel raised his voice.

Jules was in a very difficult situation. I went to the top of the stairs, and asked:

'Qu'est-ce qu'il r a?'

'Say voo?' asked the colonel.

'Oui, c'est moi.'

'Give orders for me to be admitted, my dear sir. Your manservant won't let me in.'

'Be good enough to come up.'

The colonel's somewhat testy face became visible and, as he stepped with me into my study, he suddenly assumed an air of some dignity and said:

'I am Colonel So-and-so: I am passing through London and thought it my duty to call.'

I at once felt myself to be a general: I pointed to a chair and added:

'Sit down.'

The colonel sat down.

'Are you here for long?'

'Till to-morrow, sir.'

'Have you been here for a long time?'

'Three days, sir.'

'Why a re you staying for such a short time?'

'You see, without speaking the language it's strange here, like being in a forest. I sincerely wanted to see you in person, to thank you for myself and many of my comrades. Your publications are very useful; there's a lot of truth in them, and sometimes they make us split our sides.'

'I'm extremely grateful to you ; this is the only acknowledgment we've received abroad. Are many of our issues received at home with you?'

'A great many, sir. And think how many people read each page: they read and re-read them till they're in holes, in rags; 5Z9

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there are devotees who even make copies of them. We meet sometimes to read them, and criticise: you know? I hope you will permit the frankness of a military man who has a sincere respect for you?'

'By all means. It hardly becomes us to oppose freedom of speech.'

'We often speak so among ourselves: there's much profit in your disclosures. You know yourself how much one can say over there about Sukhozanet, for instance: keep your tongue between your teeth, eh? ; or about Adlerberg, let's say? But, you see, you left Russia a long time ago: you've forgotten too much about it, and we keep thinking you harp too much on the peasant question . . . it's not ripe yet . . .'

'Isn't it?'

'Yes, indeed, sir . . . I agree with you entirely; good gracious: the same soul, form, image of God . . . and all that, believe me, is seen by many people nowadays, but there mustn't be any hurry prematurely.'

'You think not?'

'I'm sure, sir. Our peasant is a fearful slacker, you know. He's a good chap, perhaps, but a drunkard and a slacker. Emancipate him at once, and he'll stop working, won't sow the fields and will simply die of hunger.'

'But why should you worry about that? Nobody has entrusted the feeding of the Russian people to you, Colonel, have they? . . .'

Of all possible and impossible rejoinders, this was the one that the colonel expected least.

'Of course, sir, on the one hand . . . .'

'Well, don't you be afraid about on the other hand; he won't really die of hunger, will he, because he will have sown wheat not for his master but for himself?'

'Excuse me: I thought it was my duty to say . . . . Besides, it seems to me I'm taking up too much of your valuable time.

Allow me to take my leave.'

'I thank you most humbly for calling.'

'Pray don't trouble . . . . Oo ay mon kab? You live a good way out, sir.'

'It's not close.'

I wanted, with this splendid scene, to begin the description of the period of our bloom and prosperity. Such scenes and similar ones were continually repeated. Neither the fearful distance at which I lived from the West End-at Putney or Fulham-nor

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the door that was permanently shut in the mornings-nothing helped. We were the fashion.1

Whom indeed did we not see at that time? How many people would now pay dearly to wipe out their visit from the memory, if not of themselves, then of humanity? But then, I repeat, we were the fashion, and in a tourist's guide-book I was mentioned as one of the curiosities of Putney.

So it was from 1 85 7 to 1 863, but it had not been so before. I n proportion a s reaction extended and strengthened itself i n Europe after 1 848, and Nicholas grew more savage not by the d�y but by the hour, Russians began to be rather frightened and to avoid me. Besides, it became known in 1 85 1 that I had officially refused to go to Russia. At that time there were very few travellers. At long intervals one of my old acquaintances would appear, recount frightful, inconceivable things, speak with dread of his return and disappear, looking round to makC' sure there was no fellow-Russian there. \Vhen I was visited at Nice by A. I.

Saburov, in a carriage with a body-servant, I looked on i t as a feat of heroism. \Vhen I passed secretly through France in 1 852 I met some of the Russians in Paris: these were the last. In London there was nobody. \Veeks, months went by . . . .

'No Russian sound, nor Russian face.'2

No one wrote mC' any letters. :VI. S. Shchepkin was the first who was anything like a friend from home that I saw in London.

I have told the story of our meeting in another place. His arrival for me "·as like an All Souls' Day. He and I held a general commemoration of the Muscovite dead, and our verv mood was somehow sepulchral. The real dove from the ark with the olive leaf in its mouth was not Shchepkin but Dr Vensky.

He was the first Russian who came to see us, after the death of Nicholas, at Cholmondely Lodge, Richmond, and was perpetually amazed that it should be so spelt, but pronounced Chumly Lodge.3 The news that Shchepkin brought was gloomy; he was in a mournful state of mind himself. Vensky used to laugh from morning till night, showing his 'vhite teeth ; his news was full of the hope, the sanguineness, as the English say, that possessed 1 The 'apogee' of The Bell was from 1 857 to 1862. (R.) 2 From A. S. Griboyedov: Woe from Wit, Act Ill, scene 22. (A.S.) 3 Dear Vensky was always getting wonderfully stuck in the English language. 'Judging by the map.' he said to my son, 'Keff is not far away.'

'I haven't heard of such a place.' 'Oh, come: there's an enormous botanical garden there and the best orangery in Europe.' 'Let's ask the gardener.' They asked, ami he did not know. Vensky unrolled the map.

'There it is, quite close to Richmond '' It was Kew.

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Russia after the death of Nicholas and made a luminous band against the sullen background of Petersburg imperialism. True, he did bring a bad account of the health of Granovsky and Ogarev, but even this disappeared in the glovving picture of an awakening society, of which he himself was a specimen.

How avidly I listened to his stories, cross-questioned him and ferreted out details. I do not know whether he knew then or appreciated afterwards the immeasurable good he did me.

Three years of life in London had fatigued me. It is a laborious business to \VOrk without seeing the fmit from close at hand; and as well as this I was too much cut off from any circle of my kin. Printing sheet after sheet with Chernetsky and piling up heaps of printed pamphlets in Triibner's cellars, I had hardly any opportunity to send anything across the frontier of Russia.4 I could not give up: the Russian printing-press was my life's work, the plank from the paternal home that the ancient Germans used to take with them when they moved; with it I lived in the atmosphere of Russia ; with it I was prepared and armed. But with all that, it wore one out that one's work was never heard of: one's hands sank to one's sides. Faith dwindled by the minute and sought after a sign, and not only was there no sign: there was not one single word of sympathy from home.

\Yith the Crimean \\'ar, \vith the death of Nicholas, n new time came on; out of the continuous gloom there emerged new masses, new horizons; some movement could be sensed: it was hard to see well from a distance--there had to be an eye-witness.

One appeared in the person of Vensky, who confirmed that these horizons were no mirage but reality, that the boat had moved and was under way. One had only to look at his glowing face to believe him. There had been no such faces at all in recent times in Russia.

Overwhelmed by a feeling so unusual for a Russian, I called to mind Kant taking off his velvet cap at the news of the proclamation of the republic in 1 792 and repeating, 'Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart.' Yes, it is good to fall asleep at dawn after a long night of bad weather, fully believing that a marvellous day is coming!

I ndeed, the morning was drawing near of the day for which I had been yearning since I was thirteen-a boy in a camlet jacket 4 For how literature that was illP�al in Russia was smuggled in from abroad. sec ;\lichacl Futrell : Northern Underground . . . 1865-1917

( Faber, 1 963 ) . (R.)

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sitting with just such another 'malefactor' (only a year younger) in a little room in the 'old house'; in the lecture-room at the university, surrounded by an eager, lively brotherhood ; in prison and exile; in a foreign land, making my way through the havoc of revolution and reaction; at the summit of domestic happiness, and shattered, lost on the shores of England with my printed monologue. The sun which had set, lighting up Moscow below the Sparrow Hills and carrying with it a boyish vow . . . was rising after a twenty-year-long night.

What was the use now of rest and sleep? . . . To work! Arid to work I set myself with redoubled energy. The work no longer went for nothing, no longer vanished in a dark expanse: loud applause and burning sympathy were borne to us from Russia .

The Pole Star was bought u p like hot cakes. The Russian ear, unused to free speech, became reconciled to it, and looked eagerly for its masculine solidity, its fearless frankness.

Ogarev arrived in the spring of 1 856 and a year later ( 1 st July, 1857) the first sheet of the Kolokol (Bell) came out. Without a fairly close periodicity there is no real bond between a publication and its readership. A book remains, a magazine disappears; but the book remains in the library and the magazine disappears in the reader's brain and is so appropriated by him through repetition that it seems his very own thought; and, if the reader begins to forget this thought, a new issue of the magazine, never fearing to be repetitious, will prompt and revive it.

In fact, for one year the influence of The Bell far outgrew The Pole Star. The Bell was accepted in Russia as an answer to the demand for a magazine not mutilated by the censorship. We were fervently greeted by the young generation; there were letters at which tears started to one's eyes . . . But it was not only the young gf'neration that supported us . . .

'The Bell is an authority,' I was told in London in 1 859 by, horribile dictu, Katkov, and he added that it lay on the table at Rostovtsev's to be referred to about the peasant question . . . .

And before him · the same thing had been repeated by Turgenev, Aksakov, Samarin and Kavelin, by generals who were liberals, liberals who were counsellors of state, ladies of the court with a thirst for progress and aides-de-camp of literature; V. P. Botkin himself, constant as a sunflower in his inclination towards any manifestation of power, looked with tenderness on The Bell as though it had been stuffed with truffles. All that was wanting for a complete triumph was a sincere enemy. We were before the

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Vchmgericht,5 and we had not long to wait for him. The year 1858 \vas not yet over when there appeared the accusatory lttter of Chicherin. With the haughty frigidity of an unbending doctrinaire, with the roideur of an incorruptible judge he summoned me to a reply and, like Biron, poured a bucket of cold water on my head in the month of December.6 The behaviour of this Saint-Just of bureaucracy astonished me; but now, after seven years, Chicherin's letter seems to me the flower of politeness after the strong language and strong pa triotism of the Jl.1ikha_rlovsky time.' Yes, and the temper of society was different in those days; Chicherin's 'indictment' provoked an explosion of indignation and we had to try to calm down our exasperated friends. \Ve received letters, articles, protests by dozens. To the accuser himself his former friends Vl:rote letters singly and collectively, full of reproaches, one of them being signed by common friends of ours (three-quarters of them now are more friendly with Chicherin than with me) ; with the chivalry of bygone times he sent on thi s letter himself to be kept in our arsenal.

At the palace The Bell had received its rights of citizenship even earlier. Its articles led the Emperor to give orders for a review of the affair of 'Kochubey8 the marksman' who winged his steward. The Empress wept over a letter to her about the upbringing of her children ; and it is said that Butkov, the bold Secretary of State, repeated in a fit of arrogant self-sufficiency that he \vas afraid of nothing, 'Complain to the Tsar, do what you like, \vrite to The Bell, if you must, it's all the same to me.'

An officer passed over for promotion seriously asked us to print the fact, with a particular hint to the Emperor. The story of 5 The Vehmgerichte were mediaeval German tribunals which tried capital charges and were dreaded for their severity. ( Tr.) 6 1n the novel of I . I. Lazhechnikov ( 1 792-1 860 ) . The House of Ice, i t is described how Biron's sen-ants, by pouring buckets of water over a disobedient Ukrainian, turned him into a statue of ice. (A.S. ) i The era of the orgy of reaction. when part of liberal society turned to nationalism, chauvinism and a state of mind reminiscent of the Black Hundro:>ds, is called by HPrzPn after two m<'n who personified reaction-1\Iikhail Katkov and M ikhail l\1uravev. (A.S.) 8 In 1 853 Prince L. V. Kochubey shot at his steward, I. Saltzmann, and wounded him : yet not only did he remain unpunished but, by bribing the judges, he managed to get Sal tzmann put in prison. H. devoted a series of notices in The Bell in 1 858 and 1 859 to the exposure of these abuses, with the result that the case was reviewed and Saltzmann was set free. (A.S.)

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Shchepkin and Gedeonov I have told in another place-I could tell dozens of such stories .

. . . Gorchakov pointed with amazement to the account printed in The Bell of the secret session of the Council of State9

to consider the peasant business. 'Now who,' he said 'can have told him the details so accurately, except one of those present?'

The Council was disquieted and there was a secret conversation once between 'Butkov and the Tsar' about how to muzzle The Bell. The unmercenary Muravev advised that I should be bought off; Panin, the giraffe with the ribbon of St Andrew, preferred that I should be inveigled into the Civil Service.

Gorchakov, who played between these two 'dead souls' the part of Mizhuyev,10 had doubts about my venality and asked Panin:

'What position shall you offer him?'

'Assistant Secretary of State.'

'Well, he won't accept an assistant secretaryship of state,'

answered Gorchakov, and the fate of The Bell was left to the will of God.

But the will of God evinced itself plainly in the flood of letters and correspondence from all parts of Russia. Each one wrote whatever came into his head: one to blow off steam, another to convince himself that he was a dangerous fellow . . . but there were letters written in a burst of indignation, passionate cries that revealed the everyday abominations. Letters like this compensated for dozens of 'exercises,' just as one visit made up for any number of colonels rioos.

Altogether the bulk of the letters could be divided into letters with no facts in them but with an abundance of heart and eloquence, letters with magisterial approval or magisterial rebukes, and finally letters with important communications from the provinces.

1 8 6 2

Again it was striking ten o'clock in the morning, and again I heard the voice of a stranger, not a military voice this time, 9 The session was held on 28th January, 1 86 1 , and was reported in The Bell on 1 st March. (A.S.)

10 See N. V. Gogo!: Dead Souls, Part I, chapter 4.

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thick and stern, but a woman's, irritable, upset and sounding like tears:

'I must, I absolutely must see him . . . . I shan't go away till I have.'

And after that there came in a young Russian girl, or young lady, whom I had seen twice before.

She stopped in front of me and looked me steadily in the eyes: her features "vere sad, her cheeks on fire ; she hastily excused herself, and then:

'I have only just come back from Russia, from Moscow; friends of yours, people who are fond of you, have commissioned me to tell you . . . to ask you .

' Her voice failed her and she

stopped.

I understood none of this.

'Can it be true that you-you that we were so passionately fond of-you . . . ? '

'But what is the matter?'

'Tell me, for God's sake, yes or no--did you have anything to do with the Petersburg fire?'ll

'I?'

'Yes, yes, yes! They're accusing you . . . at any rate, they're saying you knew about the wicked scheme.'

'What madness! Can you take it seriously, this accusation?'

'Everyone's saying it!'

'Who's "everyone"? Some Nikolay Filippovich Pavlov?' (My imagination did not go any farther at that time ! )

'No: people you know well, people who love you dearly; you must clear yourself for their sakes; they're suffering, they're waiting . . .'

'And do you believe it yourself?'

'I don't know. That's why I came, because I don't know: I expect you to explain. . . .'

' Let's begin by you calming yourself, and sitting down and listening to me. If I had secretly participated in this incendiarism, what makes you think that I should tell you so-like that, the first time I'm asked? You've no reason, no basis for believing me. You'd do better to say where in all that I've writ-11 Great fires broke out in Petersbur� on 28th May, 1862, and burned for several days. The Tsarist government took a

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ten there's anything, one single word, that could justify such a n absurd accusation. W e are not madmen, you know, t o try to commend ourselves to the people of Russia by setting fire to the Rag Market.'

'Why do you keep silent? Why don't you clear yourself publicly?' she asked, and in her eyes there was irresolution and doubt. 'Brand these wicked men in print, say you're horrified by them, that you're not with them, or . . . .'

'Or what? Now, that's enough,' I said to her with a smile, 'of playing Charlotte Corday; you've no dagger and I'm not sitting in my bath. It's shameful of you, and twice as shameful of my friends, to believe such rot; but it would be shameful for us to try to clear ourselves of it, all the more if we tried to U.o so by way of trampling on and doing great harm to people quite unknown to us \vho now are in the hands of the secret police and who very likely had as much to do with the fires as you and I.'

'So you're determined not to clear yourself?'

'No, I won't.'

'Then what shall I write to them?'

'Write what you and I have been saying.'

She took the latest issue of The Bell out of her pocket and read out: ' "Vv"hat fiery cup of suffering is passing us by? Is it the fire of senseless destruction, or punishmPnt that purifies by flame?

What has driven people to this, and what are these people?

What painful moments are they for the absent one when gazing where all his love lies, all that a man lives by, he sees only the dull glow of a conflagration." '

'Dark, frightening lines, that say nothing against you and nothing for rou. Believe me: clear yourself-or remew er iT''"

words: Your friends and supporters will abandon rou.'

Just as the colonel rioos had been the drum-major of our success, so the unmurderous Charlotte Corday was the prophetess of our collapse in public opinion-on both sides, too. At the same time as the reactionaries lifted their heads and called us monsters and incendiaries, some of the young people bade us farewell, as though we had fallen by the wayside. The former we despised, the latter we pitied, and we waited sadly for the rough waves of life to destroy those who had made too far out to sea, for we knew that only some of them would get back and make fast to the shore.

The slander grew and was quickl-,.- caught up by the press and spread over the whole of Russia. It was only then that the denunciatory era of our journalism began. I remember vividly the amazement of people who were �imple and honourab!e, not

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in the least revolutionaries, before the printed denunciations--it was something quite new to them. The l iterature of disclosures quickly shifted its weapon and was twisted a t once into a literature of police perquisitions and calumniation by informers.

There was a revolution in society itself. Some were sobered by the emancipation of the peasants; others were simply tired by political agitation; they wished for the former repose ; they were satiated before a meal which had cost them so much trouble.

It cannot be denied: our breath is short and our endurance is long!

Seven years of liberalism had exhausted the whole reserve of radical aspirations. All that had been amassed and compressed i n the mind since 1 825 was expended in raptures of joy, in the foretaste of the good things to come. After the truncated emancipation of the peasants people with weak nerves thought that Russia had gone too far, was going too quickly.

At the same time the radical party, young, and for that very reason full of theories, began to announce its intentions more and more impulsively, frightening a society that was already frightened even before this. It set forth as its ostensible aim such extreme outcomes, that liberals and the champions of gradual progress crossed themselves and spat, and ran away stopping their ears, to hide under the old, filthy but familiar blanket of the police. The headlong haste of the students and the landowners' want of practice in listening to other people could not help bringing them to blows.

The force of public opinion, hardly called to life, manifested itself as a savage conservatism. It declared its participation in public affairs by elbowing the government into the debauchery of terror and persecution.

Our position became more and more difficult. We could not stand up for the filth of reaction, but our locus standi outside it was lost. Like the knights-errant in the stories who have lost their way, we were hesitating at a cross-roads. Go to the right, and you will lose your horse, but you will be safe yourself; go to the left, and your horse will be safe but you will perish ; go forward, and everyone will abandon you ; go back-that was impossible: for us the road in that direction was overgrown with grass. If only a sorcerer or hermit would appear and relieve us of the burden of irresolution . . . .

Our acquaintances, and the Russian ones especially, used to meet at our house on Sunday evenings. In 1 862 the number of the latter greatly increased: merchants and tourists, journalists and officials of all the departments, and of the Third Division

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[ the Secret Police] in particular, were arriving for the Exhibition. It was impossible to make a strict selection ; we \varned our more intimate friends to come or a different day. The pious boredom of a London Sunday \vas· too much for their discretion, and these Sundays did to some extent lead to disaster. But before I tell the story of that I must describe two or three specimens of our native fauna vvho made their appearance in the modest drawing-room of Orsett House.12 Our gallery of living curiosities from Russia was, beyond all doubt, more remarkable and more interesting than the Russian Section at the Great Exhibition.

In 1 860 I received from a hotel in the Haymarket a Russian letter in which some unknown persons informed me that they were Russians and were in the service of Prince Yury Nikolayevich Golitsyn, who had secretly left Russia : 'The prince himself has gone to Constantinople, but has sent us by another route.

The prince bade us wait for him and gave us money enough for a few days. More than a fortnight has passed ; there is no news of the prince; our money is spent, the hotel-keeper is angry. \Ve do not know what to do. Not one of us speaks English.' Finding themselves in this helpless situation, they asked me to rescue them.

I went to them and arranged things. The hotel-keeper knew me, and consented to wait another \veek.

Five days later a sumptuous carriage with a pair of dapplegrey horses drove up to my front door. However much I explained to my servants that no one was to be admitted in the morning-even though he should arrive in a coach and six and call himself a duke-! could never overcome their respect for an aristocratic turn-out and title. On this occasion both these temptations to transgression were present, and so a moment later a huge man, stout and with the handsome face of an Assyrian bullgod, was embracing me and thanking me for my visit to his servants.

This was Prince Yury Nikolayevich Golitsyn. It was a long time since I had seen so solid and characteristic a fragment of All Russia, so choice a specimen from our fatherland.

He at once began telling me some incredible story, which all turned out to be true, of how he had given a pensioner's son an article from The Bell to copy, and how he had parted from his 1 2 The house in London where Herzen liYed from NoYember 1 860 'til June 1 863. (A.S.)

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wife; how the pensioner's son had informed against him, and how his wife did not send him money; how the Tsar had �ent him into perpetual banishment at Kozlov, in consequence of which he had made up his mind to escape abroad, and therefore had brought off with him over the Moldavian frontier some young lady, a governess, a steward, a precentor and a maidservant.

At Galatz he had picked up also a valet who spoke five languages after a fashion, and had proved to be a spy. Then he explained to me that he was passionately fond of music and was going to giYe concerts in London; and that therefore he wanted to make the acquaintance of Ogarev.

'They d-do make you p-pay here in England at the C-Customs,'

he said with a slight stammer, as he completed his course of universal history.

'For commercial goods, perhaps, they do,' I observed, 'but the Custom-house is very lenient to travellers.'

'I should not say so. I paid fifteen shillings for a c-crocodile.'

'\Vhy, what do you meanJ'

'What do I meanJ Why, simply a c-crocodile.'

I opened my eyes wide and asked him:

'But what is the meaning of this, Prince? Do you take a crocodile about with you instead of a passport, in order to frighten the police on the frontier?'

'It happened like this. I was taking a walk in Alexandria, and I saw a little Arab offering a crocodile for sale. I liked it, so I bought it.'

'Oh, did you buy the little Arab too?'

'Ha-ha !-no.'

A week later the prince was already installed in Porchester Terrace, that is, in a large house in a very expensive part of the town. He began by ordering his gates to be for ever wide open, which is not the English custom, and a pair of dapple-grey horses to be for ever waiting in readiness at the door. He set up living in London as though he had been at Kozlov or Tambov.

He had no money of course, that is, he had a few thousand francs, enough to pay for the adwrtisement and title-page of a life in London; they were spent at once; but he threw dust in pPople's eyPs, and succeedPd for a few months in living free from care, thanks to the stupid trustfulness of the English, of which foreignPrs have not been able to break them to this day.

But the prince went ahead at full steam. The concerts began.

London was imprPSSPd by the prince's title on the placards, and at the second concert the room (St James's Hall, Piccadilly) was

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full. The concert was magnificent. How Golitsyn had succeeded in training the chorus and the orchestra is his own secret, but the concert was absolutely first-rate. Russian songs and prayers, the Kamarinskaya and the Mass, fragments from an opera of Glinka's and from the Gospel ( Our Father)-it all went splendidly.

The ladies could not sufficiently admire the colossal fleshy contours of the handsome Assyrian god, so majestically and gracefully wielding his ivory sceptre ; the old ladies recalled the athletic figure of the Emperor Nicholas,13 who had conquered the London ladies most of all by the tight elk col/ants, white as the Russian snows, of his Horse Guards' uniform.

Golitsyn found the means of making a loss out of this success.

Intoxicated by the applause he sent at the end of the first half of the concert for a basket of bouquets (remember the London prices), and before the beginning of the second part of the programme he appeared on the stage ; two liveried servants carried the basket, and the prince, thanking the singers and choms, presented each with a bouquet. The audience received this act of gallantry on the part of the aristocratic conductor with a storm of applause. My prince, towering to his full height and beaming all over, invited all the musicians to supper at the end of the concert.

At thi s point not only London prices but also London habits must be considered. Unless previous notice is given in the morning, there is no place where one can find supper for fifty persons at eleven o'clock at night.

The Assyrian chief walked valiantly along Regent Street at the head of his musical army, knocking at the doors of various restaurants ; and at last he knocked successfully. A restaurantkeeper, grasping the situation, rose to the occasion with cold meats and mulled wines.

After this there began a series of concerts of his with every possible trick, even with political tendencies. At each of them the orchestra stmck up a Herzen waltz, an Ogarcv quadrille, and then the Emancipation Symphony . . . . compositions with which the prince is very likely even now enchanting Moscow audiences, and which have probably lost nothing in the transfer from Albion, except their names; they could easily be altered to a Potapov waltz, a Mina waltz and Komissarov's Partitur.

With all this noise there was no money; he had nothing to pay 13 The Tsar Nicholas I visited England in i344. (A.S.)

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with. His contractors began to murmur. And at horne there began, little by little, Spartacus' revolt of the slaves.

One morning the prince's factotum carne to me, that is, his steward vvho now styled himself his secretary, together with the precentor, a fair-haired, curly-headed Russian lad of two-andtwenty who directed the singers.

'\Ye have come to see you, Alexander Ivanovich, sir.'

'\Yhat has happened?;

'Why, Yury �ikolayevich is treating us very badly. We want to go back to Russia, and we ask him to settle our account-do not betray your own gracious good nature: stand up for us.'

I felt myself surrounded by the atmosphere of 'Horne,' which seemed to rise up like steam in a bath-house.

'\Vhy do you come to me with this request? If you have serious grounds for compla ining of the prince, there is a court of justice here for everyone, a court which will not behave crookedly in favour of any prince or any count.'

'vYe have heard of that indeed, but why go to law? Much better if you will sort it out.'

'What good will it be to you if I do? The prince ""·ill tell me to mind my own business; I shall look like a fool. If you do not want to go to law, go to the ambassador; the Russians in London arc in his care, not in mine . . . .'

'But where should we be then? Once Russian gentlemen are sitting together, what chance can there be of settling with the prince? But you see, you are on the side of the people; so that is why we have come to you. Do be gracious, and take up our cause.'

'\\'hat fellows you are! But the prince won't accept my decision; what will you gain by it? '

'Allow me to report to you, sir,'14 the secretary retorted eagerly, 'he \vill not venture on that, sir, since he has a very great respect for you ; besides, he would be afraid. He would not be pleased to get into The Bell-he has his pride, sir.'

'Well, listen, to waste no more time; here is my decision. If the prince \vill consent to accept my mediation, I will undertake the matter; if not, you must go to law; and since you know neither the language nor the mode of proceeding here, if the prince really is treating you unfairly I shall send you a man who knows English and English ways and speaks Russian.'

'Allow me,' the secretary was beginning.

'No, I won't allow you, my dear fellow. Good-bye.'

H The formula used by soldiers when addressing an officer. (R.)

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While they are on their way to the prince I shall say a word or two about them.

The precentor was in no way distinguished except by his musical abilities; he was a well-fed, soft, stupidly handsome, rosy servant-boy; his manner of speaking with a slight burr and his rather sleepy eyes called up before me a whole series, one reflection behind another in the looking-glass, when you are telling fortunes, of Sashkas, Senkas, Aleshkas and Miroshkas.

The secretary, too, was a purely Russian product, but a more striking specimen of his type. He was a man over forty, with an unshaven chin and hollow cheeks, in a greasy coat, unclean himself and soiled inwardly and outwardly, with small, crafty eyes and that peculiar smell of Russian drunkards, made up of the ever-persistent bouquet of corn-spirit fumes mixed with a flavour of onion and cloves to mask it. Every feature of his face encouraged and gave currency to every evil suggestion, which would doubtless have found response and appreciation in his heart, and would if profitable have received assistance from him.

He was the prototype of the Russian petty official, the Russian extortioner, the pettifogging Russian clerk. When I asked him whether he was pleased at the approaching emancipation of the peasants, he answered:

'To be sure, sir-most certainly,' and added with a sigh: 'Good Lord, the lawsuits and examinations in the courts that there will be! And the prince has brought me here as though to make fun of me just at this time.'

Before Golitsyn arrived, this man had said to me with a show of genuine feeling:

'Don't you believe what people will tell you about the prince oppressing the peasants, or how he meant to set them free for a big redemption sum without any land. All that is a story spread by his enemies. It is true he is violent and extravagant, but to make up for that he has a good heart and has been a father to his peasants.'

As soon as he had quarrelled \vith the prince he had complained of him, cursed his own lot and lamented that he had trusted such a rogue. 'Why, he has done nothing all his life but debauch himself and ruin his peasants; you know he is just keeping up a pretence before you now-but he is really a beast, a plunderer . . . .'

'When were you telling lies: now, or when you praised him?' I asked him, smiling.

The secretary was overcome with confusion. I turned on my heel and went away. Had this man not been born in the ser-

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vants' hall of the Prince Golitsyn, had he not been the son of some village clerk, he would long ago, with his abilities, have been a minister of state.

An hour later the precentor and his mentor appeared with a note from Golitsyn. He asked me, with apologies, whether I could go and see him to put an end to these petty squabbles. The prince promised beforehand to accept my decision without disputing it.

There was no getting out of it: I went.

Everything in the house indicated an unusual excitement; the French servant Picot hastily opened the door to me and, with the solemn fussiness with which a doctor is conducted to a consultation at the bedside of a dying man, showed me into the drawingroom. There I found Golitsyn's second wife, flustered and irritated. Golitsyn himself, with no cravat, his heroic chest bare, was pacing up and down the room with huge strides. He was furious, and so stammered twice as much as usual ; his whole face betrayed his suffering from the blows, kicks and punches that were surging inwardly but could have no outlet into the actual world, though they would have been his answer to insurgents in the province of Tambov.

'For G-G-God's sake, forgive me for t-t-troubling you about these b-b-blackguards.'

'What is the matter?'

'P-p-please ask them yourself; I shall only listen.'

He summoned the precentor, and the following conversation took place between us:

'Are you dissatisfied in some way?'

'Yes, very much dissatisfied ; that is just why I want to go back to Russia without fail.'

The prince, who had a voice as strong as Lablache's, emitted a leonine groan: another five blows in the face had to be stifled within him.

'The prince cannot keep you back ; so tell us what it is you are dissatisfied with.'

'Everything, Alexander Ivanovich, sir.'

'Well, do speak more definitely.'

'What can I say? Ever since I came away from Russia I have been run off my legs with work, and had only two pounds of pay, and what the prince gave me the third time, in the evening, was more by way of a present.'

'And how much ought you to have received?'

'That I can't say, sir . . . .'

'Well, have you a definite salary?'

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'No indeed, sir. The prince, when he was graciously pleased to escape abroad [ this was said without the slightest malicious intention ] , said to me: "If you like to come with me, I'll make your future," says he, "and if I have luck, I'll give you a good salary; but if not, then you must be satisfied with a little" ; so I took and came.'

He had come from Tambov to London on such terms. Oh, Russia !

'Well, and what do you think? has the prince been lucky or not?'

'Lucky? no, indeed ! Though, to be sure, he might . . . .'

'That is a different question. If he has not been lucky, then you ought to be satisfied with a small salary.'

'But the prince himself told me that for my duties and my abilities, according to the rate of pay here, I ought not to get less than four pounds a month.'

'Prince, are you willing to pay him four pounds a month?'

'I shall be d-d-delighted.'

'That is capital; what more?'

'The prince promised that if I wanted to go back he would pay my return fare to Petersburg.'

The prince nodded and added: 'Yes, but only if I were satisfied with him ! '

'What a re you dissatisfied with him for? '

Now the dam burst; the prince leapt up. I n a tragic bass, which gained weight from the quiver on some vowels and the little pauses between some of the consonants, he delivered the following speech :

'Could I be satisfied with that m-milksop, that p-p-pup? What enrages me is the foul ingratitude of the bandit. I took him into my service from the very poorest family of peasants, barefooted, devoured by lice; I trained the rascal. I have made a m-m-man of him, a m-musician, a precentor; I have trained the scoundrel's voice so that he could get a hundred roubles a month in Russia in the season.'

'All that is so, Yury Nikolayevich, but I can't share your view of it. Neither he nor his family asked you to make a Ronconi of him; so you can't expect any special gratitude on his part. You have trained him as one trains nightingales, and you have done a good thing, but that is the end of it. Besides, this is not the point.'

'You are right; but I meant to say, how can I put up with this? You know, I'll give the rascal.

'So you agree to pay his fare?'

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'The devil take him. For your sake, only for your sake, I'll give it.'

'Well, the matter is settled, then: and do you know what the fare is?'

'I am told it is twenty pounds.'

'No, that is too much. A hundred silver roubles from here to Petersburg is more than enough. Will you give that? '

'Yes.'

I worked out the sum on paper and handed it to Golitsyn; he looked at the total . . . it amounted, I think, to just over £30.

He handed me the money on the spot.

'You can read and write, of course? ' I asked the precentor.

'Of course, sir.'

I wrote out a receipt for him in some such form as this: I have received from Prince Yury Nikolayevich Golitsyn £30 odd [ so much in Russian money] being salary owing to me and my fare from London to Petersburg. With that I am satisfied, and have no other claims against him.

'Read it for yourself, and sign it.'

The young man read it, but made no movement to sign it.

'What is the matter?'

'I can't, sir.'

'Why can't you?'

'I am not satisfied.'

A restrained leonine roar-and, indeed, even I was on the point of raising my voice.

'What the devil is the matter? You said yourself what you claimed. The prince has paid you everything to the last farthing.

What are you dissatisfied with?'

'Why, upon my word, sir, and the privations I've suffered since I've been here.'

It was clear that the ease with which he had obtained the money had whetted his appetite.

'For instance, sir, I ought to have something more for copying music.'

'You liar!' Golitsyn boomed, as even Lablache can never have boomed; the piano responded with a timid echo; Picot's pale face appeared at the crack of the door and vanished with the speed of a frightened lizard.

'Wasn't copying music a part of your definite duty? Why, what else would you have done all the time when there were no concerts?'

The prince was right, though he need not have frightened Picot with his corztre-bombardon voice.

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The precentor, being accustomed to sounds of all sorts, did not give way but dropped the music-copying and turned to me with the following absurdity:

'And then, too, there is something for clothes. I am quite threadbare.'

'But do you mean to tell me that Yury Nikolayevich undertook to clothe you, as well as to give you about £50 a year salary?'

'No, sir; but in old days the prince always did sometimes give me things, but now, I am ashamed to say it, I have come to going about without socks.'

'I am going about without s-s-socks myself,' roared the prince, and folding his arms across his chest he looked haughtily and contemptuously at the precentor. This outburst I had not expected, and I looked into his face with surprise; but, seeing that he did not intend to continue, and that the precentor certainly did, I said very gravely to the predatory singer:

'You came to me this morning to ask for my mediation: so you trusted me?'

'We know you very well, we have no doubt of you at all, you will not let us be wronged.'

'Excellent. ·well, this is how I settle the matter: sign the receipt at once or give me back the money, and I shall give it back to the prince and at the same time decline to meddle any further.'

The precentor had no inclination to hand the money to the prince; he signed the receipt and thanked me.

I shall leave out of my tale how he converted his reckoning into roubles. I could not din into him that the rouble was not worth the same on the exchange as it had been when he left Russia.

'If you think that I ,...-ant to cheat you of 30 shillings, this is what you had better do: go to our priest and ask him to reckon it for you.' He agreed to do so.

It seemed as though all was over, and Golitsyn's breast no longer heaved with such stormy menace; but as fate would have it the finale recalled our fatherland as the beginning had.

The precentor hesitated and hesitated, and suddenly, a s though nothing had happened between them, turned t o Golitsyn with the words:

'Your Excellency, since the steamer does not go from Hull for five days, be so gracious as to allow me to remain with you meanwhile.'

My Lablache will give it him, I thought, self-sacrificingly preparing myself for the shock of the sound.

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