My Past and Thoughts

A town which is rather more modern but less historical and ornamental is Turin.

'It simply swamps one with its prosaicness.'

'Yes, but it is easier to live in, just because it is simply a town, a town that exists not only for its own memories but for everyday life, for the present; i ts streets are not archaeological museums, and do not remind us at e\'ery step: memento mori; but look at its working population, at their aspect, keen as the Alpine a ir, and you will see that they are a sturdier stamp of men than the Florentines or the Venetians, and have perhaps even more staying power than the Genoese.'

The Genoese, however, I do not know. It is very difficult to get a proper look at them, for they are always flitting before one's eyes, running, bustling, hurrying, scurrying. The lanes leading to the sea are swarming with people, but those who are standing still are not Genoese; they are sailors from all the seas and oceans, skippers and captains. A bell rings here, a bell rings th('re: Partcn:.a!-Partcn:.a!-and part of thP. ant-heap begins fussing about, some loading, others discharging.

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Z U D E U T S C H

IT HAS BEEN POURING for three days. I cannot go out and I don't feel like working . . . . In the bookshop \vindow the two volumes of Heine's Correspondance� wPre displayed. Here was salvation. I bought them and proceeded to read them till the sky should clear.

Much water has flowed away since Heine was "writing to Moser, Immermann, and Varnhagen.

It is a strange thing: since 1 848 we have kept backing and retreating; we have thrown everything overboard and curled ourselves up like hedgehogs; and yet something has been done and everything has gradually changed. We are nearer to the earth, we stand on a lower, that is a firmer, level ; the plough cuts more deeply, our work is not so showy and it is more like manual labour-perhaps because it really is work. The Don Quixotes of the reaction have ripped open many of our balloons, the smoky gases have evaporated, the airships have come down, and we no longer move like the spirit of God over the waters with reed-pipe and prophetic Psalm singing, but catch at the trees, the roofs, and damp Mother Earth.

\Vhere are those days when 'Young Germany' in its 'beautiful sublime' was theoretically liberating the Fatherland, and in the spheres of Pure Reason and Art was finishing with the world of tradition and prejudiceJ Heine disliked the brightly lit, frosty height upon which Goethe majestically slumbered in his old age, dreaming the clever but not quite coherent dreams of the second part of Faust; but even Heine never let himself sink below the level of the bookshop; it was all still the aula of the university.

the litl:'rary circles, the journalistic parochial gatherings with their tittle-tattle and squabbles, with their bookish Shylocks, with thPir Giittingen high priests of philology and bishops of jurisprudence at Halle or Bonn. Neith<'r Heine nor his circle knew the people, and the people did not know them. Neither the sorrow nor the joy of the lowly fields rose up to those heights; to understand the moan of humanity in the quaking-bogs of to-day they had to transpose it into Latin manners and customs and to

� Correspondance inrditr dr Hrnri Heinr, 2 ,·ols. ( Paris, 1 866-67) , containing the corr<>spondenu• of Heine, not preYiously published, for the years 1 82 1 -42. (A.S.)

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arrive a t their thought through the Gracchi and the proletariat of Rome.

The graduates of a sublimated world, they sometimes emerged into life, beginning like Faust with the beer-shop and always, like him, with a spirit of scholastic denial, which with its reflections prevented them as it did Faust from simply looking and seeing. That is why they immediately hastened back from living sources to the sources of history; there they felt more at horne.

Their pursuits were not only not work but were not science

-

either, but rather erudition-and, above all, literature.

Heine at times revolted against the atmosphere of archives and of analytical enjoyment, for he wanted something different, but his letters are completely German letters of that German period, on the first page of which stands Bettina the child and on the last Rahel the Jewess.3 vVe breathe more freely when we meet in his letters passionate outbursts of Judaism, for then Heine is genuinely carried away; but he quickly lost his warmth and turned cold towards Judaism, and was angry with it for his own by no means disinterested faithlessness.

The revolution of 1 830 and Heine's moving afterwards to Paris did much for his progress. 'Der Pan ist gestorben!' he says with enthusiasm, and hastens to the city to which I once hastened with so morbid a passion-to Paris; he wanted to see the 'great people' and 'grey-headed Lafayette' riding about on his grey horse. But literature soon gets the upper hand ; his letters are filled, inside and on the envelope, with literary gossip and personalities alternating with complaining against fate about his health, his nerves, his low humour, through which there shines an immense, shocking vanity. And then Heine takes on a false note. His coldly inflated, rhetorical Bonapartism becomes as repulsive as the squeamish horror of the well-washed Hamburg Jew before the tribunes of the people when he meets them not in books but in real life. He could not stomach the fact that the workmen's meetings were not staged in the prim setting of the study and salon of Varnhagen, 'the fine-china' Varnhagen von Ense, as he himself called him.

His feeling of his own dignity, however, did not go beyond 3 Bettina von Arnim, the author of a book well known in its time: Gaethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde; Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, the author of Galerie von Bildnissen aus Rahels Umgang und Briefwechsel. Heine was a frequent visitor at the literary salon of Rahel, who took the young poet under her wing. (A.S.) See Hannah Arendt's book, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess ( London, 1 95 7 ) . (D.M. )

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having clean hands and being free from the smell of tobacco. It is hard to blame him for this. This feeling is not a German nor a Jewish one, and unhappily not a Russian one either.

Heine coquettes with the Prussian government, curries favour

\vith it through the ambassador and through Varnhagen, and then abuses it.4 He coquPttPs with the King of Bavaria and showers sarcasms on him ; he more than coquettes with the 'high'

German Diet, and tries to redeem his abject behaviour to it with biting taunts.

Does not all this explain why the scholastic and revolutionary flare-up in Germany so quickly came to grief in 1 848? It, too, was merely a literary effort, and it vanished like a rocket let off in Krollgarden: it had its professor-leaders and its generals from the Faculty of Philology; it had its rank and file in Jack-boots and berets, students who betrayed the revolutionary cause as soon as it passed from metaphysical valour and literary daring into the market-place.

Apart from a fe\v working men who looked in for a moment, or were captivated, the people did not follow these pale Fuhrer, but just held aloof from them.

'HO\v can you put up with all Bismarck's insults?' I asked a year before the war of a dPputy of the Left from Berlin at the very time v1-·hen the count was getting his hand in, in order to knock out the teeth of Grabow and Co. more violently.

'We have done everything we could, inncrhalb the Constitution.'

'Well, then, you should follow the example of the government and try ausscrhalb.'

'How do you mean? Make an appeal to the people? Stop paying taxes? . . . That's a dream . . . . Not a single man would follow us or make a move to support us . . . . And we should provide a fresh triumph for Bismarck by ourselves giving evidence of our weakness.'

'Wf'll, then, I shall say as your president does at each slap in the face: "Shout three times Es lcbc dcr Konig and go home peaceably ! " '

4 Did not the kept genius o� the Prussian King do the same? His twofold hypostasis drew down upon him a caustic remark. After 1 8+8 the K ing of Ha nover, an ultra-Consen·ative and Feudalist. arrived at Potsdam. On the palacP staircase lH' was met hy various courtiers. and among them Humboldt in a l ivery dress-coat. The malicious king stopped and said to him

"·i th a smilP: 'lmmer dPrs,•lbr. immrr Republikaner und immer im Vor::.immer drs Palostrs' (Always the same-always republican and always in the antichamber of the palace).

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L I V I i\" G F L 0 \V E H S-T H E L :\. S T

0 F T H E M 0 H I C :\. N S Q U :\. \Y S

'LET us Go to the Bal de !'Opera; nO\v is just the right time, halfpast one,' I said, getting up from the table in a little room of the Cafe Anglais, to a Russian artist who was always coughing and never quite sober. I wanted some open air and noise ; and besides I was rather afraid of a long tete-a-tJte \vith my Claude Lorrain from the Neva.

'Let us go,' he said, and poured himself out another glass of brandy.

This was at the beginning of 1 849, at the moment of delusive convalescence between two bouts of sickness when one still wanted, or thought that one wanted, to play the fool sometimes and be merry.

We wandered about the opera-hall and stopped before a particularly beautiful quadrille of powdered stevedores and picrrots with chalked faces. All the four girls were very young, about eighteen or nineteen, pretty and graceful, dancing and enjoying themselves with all their hearts, and imperceptibly passing from the quadrille to the cancan. \Ve had not managed to admire them sufficiently when suddenly the quadrille was disturbed

'owing to circumstances in no way depending on the dancers,' as our journalists used to express it in the happy days of the censorship. One of the dancing girls, and alas! the most beautiful, so skilfully, or so unskilfully, lowered her shoulder that her bodice slipped down, displaying half her bosom and part of her back-a little more than is done by Englishwomen, especially elderly ones who have nothing with which they can attract except their shoulders, at the most decorous routs and in the most conspicuous boxes at Covent Garden (in consequence of which in the second tier it is absolutely impossible to listen to Casta Diva or Sul Salice with due modesty ) . I had scarcely had time to say to the becolded artist: 'If only Michelangelo or Titian were here!

Pick up your brush or she will pull it up again,' when a huge black hand, not that of Michelangelo nor Titian, but of a gardien de Paris, seized her by the scruff of the neck, tore her a\vay from the quadrille, and hauled her off. The girl tried not to go and dragged her feet as children do when they arc to be washed in cold water, but order and human justice gained the upper hand and \Verc satisfied. The other girls and their pierrots

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exchanged glances, found a fresh stevedore, and again began kicking above their heads and bouncing back from each other in order to advance with the more fury, paying hardly any attention to the rape of Proserpine.

'Let us go and sec what the policeman does with her,' I said to my companion. 'I noticed the door he led her through.'

\Ve went do\',;n by a side-staircase. Anyone \vho has seen and remembers a certain dog in bronze looking attenti;'ely and with some excitement at a tortoise can easily picture the scene which we came upon. The luckless girl in her light attire was sitting on a stone step in the p iercing wind in floods of tears; facing her stood a lean, tall municipal in full uniform with a predatory and earnestly stupid air, with a comma of hair on his chin and halfgrey moustaches. He was standing in a dignified attitude with folded arms, watching intently to see how these tears would end, and urging:

'Allons, allons!'

To complete the effect the girl was saying through her whining and tears:

' . . . Et . . . et on dit . . . on dit que . . . que . . . nous sommes en Republique . . . et

. on ne peut danser comme

!'on veut! . . .'

All this was so ludicrous, and so really pathetic, that I resolved to go to the rescue of the captive and to the restoration in her eyes of the republican honour of the form of government.

'i\!on brave,' I said with calculated and insinuating courtesy to the policeman, 'what are you going to do with mademoiselle?'

'I shall put her au violon till to-morrow,' he answered grimly.

The wails increased.

'To teach her to take off her bodice,' added the guardian of order and of public morality.

'It was an accident, brigadier, you might let her off.'

·J can't. La consigne . . . .'

'After all, at a fete . . . .'

'But what business is it of yours? Etes-vous son reciproque?'

'It is the first time I have seen her in my life, parole d' horzncur. I don't know her name, ask her yourself. We are foreigners, and arc surprised to sec you in Paris so strict with a weak girl, avec un Ctrc frelc. In our country it's thought that the police here are so kind . . . . Ho\v is it that they are allowed to dance the cancan at all? For if it is allowed, monsieur le brigadier, sometimes without meaning it a foot will be kicked too high or a blouse will slip too low.'

'That may be so,' the municipal observed, impressed by my

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eloquence, but chiefly hooked by my remark that foreigners have such a flattering opinion of the Parisian police.

'Besides,' I said, 'look what you are doing. You are giving her a cold-how can you bring the child, half-naked, out of that stifling dance-hall and sit her down in the piercing wind?'

'It is her own fault: she won't come. But here, I'll tell you what: if you will give me your word of honour that she shan't go back into the dance-hall to-night, I'll let her go.'

'Bravo! Though as a ma tter of fact I expected no less of you, monsieur le brigadier. I thank you with all my heart.'

I had now to enter into negotiations with the liberated victim.

'Excuse me interfering on your behalf without having the pleasure of being personally acquainted with you.'

She held out a hot, moist little hand to me and looked at me with still moister and hotter eyes.

'You heard how it is? I can't vouch for you if you won't give me your word, or better still if you won't come away at once. It is not a great sacrifice really; I expect it is half-past three by now.'

'I'm ready. I'll go and get my cloak.'

'No,' said the implacable guardian of order, 'not a step from here.'

'Where are your cloak and hat? '

'In loge so-and-so, row so-and-so.' The artist was rushing off, but he stopped to ask: 'But will they give them to me?'

'Only tell them what has happened and that you come from

"Little Leontine" . . . . What a ball that was! ' she added with the air with which people say in a graveyard : 'Sleep in peace.'

'Would you like me to bring a fiacre?'

'I am not alone.'

'With whom then?'

'With a friend.'

The artist returned, his cold definitely very bad, with the hat and cloak and a young shop-assistant or commis-voyageur.

'Very much obliged,' he said to me, touching his ha t, and then to her: 'Always making a scandal ! ' He seized her by the arm almost as roughly as the policeman had by the neck, and vanished into the big vestibule of the Opera . . . . Poor girl . . .

she will catch it . . . and what taste . . . she . . . and he!

I felt positively vexed. I suggested to the artist that we should have a drink. He did not refuse.

A month passed. Five of us, Tausenau, the Vienna agitator, General Haug, Miiller-Striibing, and another gentleman and I arranged another time to go to a ball. Neither Haug nor MUller

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had ever been to one. We stood together in a group. Suddenly a masked figure pushed and broke a way through the crowd, came straight up to me, almost threw herself on my neck, and said:

'I had not time to thank you then . . .'

'Ah, Mademoiselle Leontine . . . very, very glad to meet you.

I can just see before me your tear-stained face, your pouting lips-you looked awfully nice ; that does not mean that you don't look nice now.'

The little rogue looked at me with a smile, knowing that this was true.

'Didn't you catch cold then?'

'Not a bit.'

'In memory of your captivity, you ought, if you would be very, very kind . . .'

'Well, what? Soyez bref.'

'You ought to have supper with us.'

'With pleasure, rna parole, only not now.'

'Where shall I look for you then?'

'Don't trouble. I'll come and look for you myself at four o'clock exactly ; but I say, I'm not here by myself . . . .'

'With your friend again . . . ?' and a shiver ran down my back.

She burst out laughing.

'He's not very dangerous,' and she led up to me a blue-eyed girl of seventeen with bright fair hair.

'Here's my friend.'

I invited her too.

At four o'clock Leontine ran up to me and gave me her hand, and we set off to the Cafe Riche. Though that is not far from the Opera, yet Haug had time on the way to fall in love with the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto, that is, with the fair girl. And at the first course-indeed, we had hardly sat down-after long, extravagant phrases about the Tintoretto charm of her hair and eyes, Haug began a sermon on the aesthetic sin of dancing the cancan with the face of a Madonna and the expression of an angel of purity.

'Armes, holdes Kind!' he added, addressing us all.

'Why is it your friend talks such boring fatras?' Leontine said in my ear, 'and why does he go to balls at the Opera at all. He should go to the Madeleine.'

'He is a Germ

'Mais c'cst qu'il est ennuyeu:c, votre ami avec son mal de sermon. Mon petit saint, finiras-tu done bientot?'

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And while waiting for the end of the sermon Leontine, tired out, flung herself on to a sofa. Opposite her was a big lookingglass; she kept looking at herself in it, and at last could not refrain from pointing to herself and saying to me:

'Why, even with my hair so untidy and in this crumpled dress and this position, I really don't look bad.'

When she had said this, she suddenly dropped her eyes and blushed, frankly blushed up to her ears. To cover her confusion she began to sing the well known song which Heine has distorted in his translation, and which is terrible in its artless simplicity:

Et je mourrai dans mon hotel,

Ou a l'H6tel-Dieu.

A strange creature, elusive and full of life; the 'Lacerta'5 of Goethe's Elegies, a child unconsciously overcome by fumes. Like a lizard she really could not sit still for one minute, and she could not keep silent either. When she had nothing to say, she was singing, making faces before the looking-glass, and all with the insouciance of a child and the grace of a woman. Her frivolite was na'ive. Having started whirling by chance, she was still spinning, still hovering . . . . The shock which would have stopped her on the brink or finally thrust her into the abyss had not yet come. She had gone a good bit of the way, but she could still turn back. Her clear intelligence and innate grace were strong enough to save her.

This type, this coterie, this environment exist no more. She was 'la petite femme' of the student-of-old days, the grisette who moved from the Quartier Latin to this side of the Seine, neither faisant the unhappy trottoir nor possessing the secure social position of the camelia. That type has passed away, just as conversations by the fireside, reading aloud at a round table, chatting over tea have gone. Other forms now, other sounds, other people, other words . . . . The present has its own scale, its own crescendo. The mischievous, rather wanton element of the 'thirties

-du leste, de l'espieglerie-passed into chic; there was cayenne pepper in it, but it still retained a careless, exuberant grace, it still retained wit and intelligence. With the increase of business, commerce cast off everything superfluous, and sacrificed everything intellectual to the shop-front, the etalage. The type of Leontine, the lively Parisian gamine, stirring, intelligent, spoilt,

;; Lacertae ( lizards) is what Goethe called the young Venetian wonwn of easy Yirtue in Nos. 67-72 of his Epigrams (Venice, 1 790) . (A.S.)

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sparkling, liberal and, in case of need, proud, is not in demand, and chic has passed into chienne. What the Lovelace of the boulevards needs is the woman-chienne, and, above all, the chienne who has a master of her own. It is more economical and unmercenary-with her he can go hunting at someone else's expense, and pay only the extras. 'Parbleu,' an old man said to me, whose best years coincided with the beginning of the reign of Louis-Philippe, 'je ne me retrouve plus-au est le fion,6 le chic, ou est ['esprit? . . . Tout cela monsieur . . . ne, parle:.

pas, monsieur-c'est bon, c'est beau, well-bred, mais . . . c'est de la charcuterie . . . c'est du Rubens.'

That reminds me hovv in the 'fifties, nice, kind Talandier, with the vexation of a man in love with his France, explained her downfall to me with a musical illustration. 'When,' he said,

\ve were great, in the early days after the revolution of February, nothing sounded but the "Marseillaise"-in the cafes, in the street-processions, always the "l\1arseillaise." Every theatre had its "il1arseillaise," here vvith cannon, there with Rachel. \Vhen things grew duller and quieter, the monotonous sounds of

"lHourir pour la Patrie"7 took its place. That was no harm yet, but \ve sank lower . . . . "Un sous-lieutenant accable de besogne

. . . drin, drin, din. din, din" . . . the \vhole city, the capital of the world, the wholC' of France was singing that trash. That is not the end ; after that, "·e began playing and singing "Partarzt pour le Sn ic'' at the top and "Qu'aimf' done !\/argot . . . i11argot" at the bottom: that is, senselessness and indecency. One can sink no lower.'

One can ! Talandier did not foresee eitlwr 'le suis la femme a barrrbe' or 'The Sapper'; he stopped short at chic and never reached the clzienne stage.

Hasty. carnal debauchery got the upper hand of any embellishments. The body conquered the spirit and, as I said ten years ago, Margot, la fille de marbre, supplanted Beranger's Lisette and all the Leontines in the world. The latter had their humanity, their poetry, their conceptions of honour. They loved noise and spectacles better than wine and supper, and they loved their supper more for the sake of the setting, the candles, the sweets, the flowers. VVithout dancing and balls, without laughter and cha tler they could not exist. In the most luxurious harem they u 'Fion' is a colloq uial word about equivalPnt to 'esprit. ' ( Tr.) 7 B�· HougPt de Lisle und styled during the Revolution of February, 1 8+8,

'the second Marseillaise.' ( R . )

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would have been stifled, would have withered away in a year.

The finest representative was Dejazet�n the great stage of the world and in the little Theatre des Varietes. She was the living embodiment of a song of Beranger, a saying of Voltaire, and was young at forty-Dejazet, who changed her adorers like a guard of honour, capriciously flung away packets of gold, and gave herself to the first-comer to get a friend out of trouble.

Nowadays it is all simplified, curtailed. One gets there sooner, as country gentlemen in the old days used to say who preferred vodka to wine. The woman of fion intrigued and interested, the woman of chic stung and amused, and both, as well as money, took up time. The chienne pounces straight away upon her victim, bites with her beauty, and pulls him by the coat-tail sans phrases; here there is no preface: here the epilogue comes at the beginning. Thanks to a paternal government and the medical faculty, even the two dangers of the past are gone ; police and medicine have made great advances of late years.

And what will come after the chienne? Hugo's pieuvre8 failed completely, perhaps because it is too much like a pleutre. Can we not stop nt the chienne? However, let us leave prophesying. The designs of Providence are inscrutable.

What interests me is something else.

Which of the two prophecies of Cassandra has been fulfilled for Leontine? Is her once graceful little head resting on a lacetrimmed pillow in her own hotel, or has it declined on to a rough hospital-bolster to fall asleep for ever, or wake to poverty and woe? But perhaps neither the one nor the other has happened, and she is busy getting her daughter married or hoarding money to buy a substitute to go into the army in place of her son. She is no longer young now-and probably she is well over thirty.

s In 1 866, after the appearance of Lrs travaillrurs dr Ia mer, by Victor Hugo, in which there is a brilliant and frightening description of an octopus. certain journalists began to compare bl'autiful women of light behaviour with the octopus: pictures appeared which depicted the octopus in the form of a charmer; frocks and hats a Ia piruvrl' bPcame fashionable and the word pieuvrr soon acquired a new meaning-a woman of light behaviour who sucked out the substance of her admirer. (A.S. ) Cf. also A. C. Hilton's "Octopus," a parody of Swinburne's "Dolores": Ah! thy red lips, lascivious and luscious,

\Vith death in their amorous kiss!

Cling round us and clasp us and crush us

With bitings of agonized bliss! (etc.) ( D.M. )

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T H E F L 0 W E R S 0 F :\1 I J\" E R Y A THIS PHALANX is the revolution in person, austere at seventeen .

. . . The fire of her eyes subdued by spectacles that only the light of the mind may shine as it will ; sans-crinolines advancing to replace sans-culottes.

The girl-student and the young-lady-Burschen have nothing in common with the Traviata ladies. The Bacchantes have grown grey or bald, have grown old and retired, and the students have taken their place before they are out of their teens.

The Camelias and the Traviatas of the salons belonged to the time of Nicholas. ThPy were like the shovv-generals of the same time, the strutting dandies whose victories were won over their own soldiers, who knew every detail of military toilette, all the foppishness of the parade, and never soiled their uniforms with the blood of an enemy. The courtesan-generals, jauntily faisant le trottoir on the Nevsky, were cut down at one blow by the Crimean "'ar; and 'the intoxicating glamour of the ball,' the love-making of the boudoir and the noisy orgies of the generals'

ladies, were abruptly replaced by the academic lecture-hall and the dissecting-room, where the cropped student in spectacles studied the mysteries of nature. Then all the camellias and magnolias had to be forgotten, it had to be forgotten that there were two sexes. Before the truths of science, im Reiche der Wahrhcit, distinctions of sex are effaced.

Our Camelias stood for the Gironde, that is why they smack so much of Faublas.9

Our young-lady students are the Jacobins, Saint-Justs in a riding-habit-everything sharp-cut, pure, ruthless.

Our Camelias wore a mask, a loup from \Yarm Venice.

Our students wear a mask too, but it is a mask of ice from the f'\eva. The first may stick on, but the second will certainly melt awav; that, howevl'r, is in the future.

Ti1is is a real, conscious protest, a protest and breaking-point.

Cc n'cst pas WIC cmcute, c'cst unc revolution. Dissipation, luxury, jePring and fine clothes are put aside. Love and pnssion are in the fn r background. Aphrodite with her naked archer sulked and has withdrawn; Pallas Athene has taken her place with her spear and her owl. The Camelias were impelled by 11 The reference is to Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray: Lf's arf'ntures du chevalier de Faublas ( B russels, 1 869) . (R.)

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vague emotion, indignation, insatiably languishing desire and they went on 'til they reached satiety. In this case they are impelled by an idea in which they believe, by the declaration of

'the rights of woman,' and they are fulfilling a duty laid upon them by that belief. Some abandon themselves on principle, others are unfaithful from a sense of duty. Sometimes these students go too far, but they ahvays remain children-disobedient and arrogant, but children. The earnestness of their radicalism shows that it is a matter of the head, of theory, not of the heart. They are passionate in general, but to particular encounters they bring no more 'p::�.thos' (as it was called in old days) than any Leontine. Perhaps less. The Leontines play, they play with fire, and very often, ablaze from head to foot, seek safety from the conflagration in the Seine ; drawn on by life before they have developed any pO\ver of reasoning, it is sometimes hard for them to conquer their hearts. Our students begin with criticism, with analysis ; to them, too, a great deal may happen, but there will be no surprises, no downfalls; they fall with a parachute of theory in their hands. They throw themselves into the stream with a handbook on swimming, and intentionally swim against the current. Whether they will swim long a livre ouvert I do not know, but they will certainly take their place in history, and will deserve to do so.

The most short-sighted people in the world have guessed as much.

Our old gentlemen, senators and m1msters, the fathers and grandfathers of their country, looked with a smile of indulgence and even encouragement at the aristocratic Camelias ( so long as they were not their sons' \Vives) . . . . But they did not like the students . . . so utterly different from the 'pretty rogues' with whom they had at one time liked to warm their old hearts with words.

For a long time the old gentlemen had been angry with the austere Nihilist girls and had sought an opportunity "of overtrumping them.

And then, as though of design, Karakozov fired his pistolshot. 1 0 . . . 'There it is, Your Majesty,' they began to whisper to him, 'that is what not dressing in uniform means . . . all these spectacles and shock-heads.' '\Vhat? not in uniform-dress as approved?' says the Tsar. 'Prescribe it most strictly! ' 'Lenience, IO D. V. Karakozov made an unsuccessf:d attt>mpt on the life of Alex·

ander II on 4th April, 1 866. (A.S.)

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lenience, Your Majesty! We have only been waitmg for your gracious permission to save the sacred person of Your Majesty.'

It was no jesting matter; they set to work unanimously. The Privy Council, the Senate, the Synod, the ministers, the bishops, the military commanders, the town-govemors and the other police took counsel together, thought, talked and decided in the first place to eject students of the female sex from the universities. During this, one of the bi�hops, fearing guile, recalled how once upon a time in the pseudo-Catholic Church a Pope Anna had been elected to the papacy, and would have offered his monks as inspectors . . . since 'there is no bodily shame before the eyes of the dead.' The living did not accept his suggestion: the generals, indeed, for their part supposed that such expert's duties could only be entrusted to an official of the highest rank, placed beyond temptation by his position and his monarch's confidence; there was an idea of offering the post to Adlerberg the Elder from the military department, and to Butkov from among the civilians. But this did not happen-it is said because the Grand Dukes were soliciting for the appointment.

After this the Privy Council, the Synod and the Senate gave orders that within twenty-four hours the girls were to grow their cropped hair, to remove their spectacles and to give a written undertaking to have sound eyes and to wear crinolines.

Although there is nothing said in the Book of Guidancell about

'hooping of skirts' or 'widening of petticoats,' and it positively forbids the plaiting of the hair, the clergy agreed. For the moment the Tsar's life seemed secured till he should reach the Elysian Fields. It was not their fault that in Paris also there were Champs-tlysees, and with a Rond Point,12 too.

These extreme measures were of enormous benefit, and this I say without the slightest irony: but to whom? To our Nihilist girls.

The one thing that they lacked was to cast aside their uniform, their formalism, and to develop in that broad freedom to which they have the fullest claim. It is terribly hard for one who I I A collection of ecclesiastical rules and laws of the State concerning religious observances. It appeared first in the sixth century at Constantinople under the name of Nomokanon; in the ninth century it was translated into Slavonic for the Bulgarian Church and in the eleventh century was accepted by the Russian Orthodox Church. Various amendments were made as time went on; it was last edited in 1 787. (A.S.) 1 2 \'Vhere on 6th June, 1 867, the Polish emigre Anton Berezowski fired unsuccessfully at Alexander II. (A.S.)

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is used to a uniform to cast it off of himself. The garment grows to the wearer. A bishop in a dress-coat would give over blessing and intoning.

Our girl-students and Burschcn would have been a long time taking off their spectacles and their other emblems. They had them taken off at the expense of the government, which added to this good turn the aureole of a toilette martyrdom.

After that their business is to swim au large.

P.S.--Some are already coming back with the brilliant diploma of Doctor of Medicine, and all glory to them! 13

Nice, Summer 1 867

V E .\" E Z I A L A B E L L A 1 4

F E B R U A R Y 1 8 6 7

THERE IS No sucH magnificent absurdity as Venice. To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself; but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius. The water, the sea, their sparkle and glitter, call for a peculiar sumptuousness. Molluscs embellish their cabins with mother-of-pearl and pearls.

A single superficial look at Venice shows one that it is a city of strong will, of vigorous intellect-republ ican, commercial, oligarchica l ; that it is the knot that ties something together across the waters, a warehouse for merchandise under a military flag, a city with a noisy popular assembly and a soundless city of secret councils and measures; in its squares the whole population is jostling from morning 'til night, v1;hile the rivers of its streets flow silently to the sea. While the crowd clamours and shouts in St Mark's ·square, a boat glides by and vanishes unobserved.

13 The first Russian woman doctor, N. P. Suslonl, was dismissed, together with other female students, from the Medico-Surgical Academy in Petersburg in 1 86+. In 1 867 she completed the course at Ziirich University with the degree of Doctor of :\IedicinP. She had connections with revolutionary circles and in 1 86+ she worked for the Contemporarr; when abroad she kept up her intercourse with se\'eral Russian revolutionary emigrants and was ncquaintPd with HPrzen. HPr pxample strengthened the desire of the progressives among the young women for higher education and for work of benefit to society. (A.S. ) H This title may ha\'e been suggPsted either by a song that was wry popular in Venice when Herzen was there, 'La bella Vene.:ia,' or by A. Grigore\''s \'erses, 'Vene.:ia Ia bella.' ( A .S.)

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6 1 0

Who knows what i s under its black awning? Was not this the very place to drown people, within hail of lovers' trysts.

The men who felt at home in the Palazzo Ducale must have been of an eccentric cast. They stuck at nothing. There is no earth, there are no trees, what does it matter? Let us have still more carved stones, more ornaments, gold, mosaics, sculptures, pictures and frescoes. Here an empty corner has been left; into the corner with a thin sea-god with a long, wet beardf Here is an empty recess; put in another lion with wings and a gospel of Saint Mark! There it is bare and empty; put down a carpet of marble and mosaic! and here, lacework of porphyry! Is there a victory over the Turks or over Genoa? does the Pope seek the friendship of the city? then more marble ; cover a whole wall with a curtain of carving, and above all, more pictures. Let Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, Titian fetch their brushes and mount the scaffolding: every step in the triumphal progress of the Beauty of the Sea must be depicted for posterity in paint or sculpturP.. And so full of life was the spirit that dwelt in these stones that new routes and new seaports, Columbus and Vasco da Gama, \vere not enough to crush it. For its destruction the 'One and Indivisible Republic' had to rise up on the ruins of the French throne, and on the ruins of that rppublic the soldier who in Corsican fashion stabbed the lion with a stiletto poisow•d by Austria. 1;; But Venice has digested the poison and proves to be alive once more after half a century.

But is she alive? It is hard to say \vhat has survived except the grand shell, and whether there is another future for Venice . . . .

And, indeed, what future can there be for Italy at all? For Venice, perhaps, it lies in Constantinople, in the free federation of the rising Slav-Hellenic nationalities, which begins to stand out in vague outlines from the mists of the East.

And for ItalyJ . . . Of that later. There is a carnival in Venice now, the first carnival in freedom after seventy years'

captivity.IG The Square has bPen transformed into the hall of the Paris Opera. Old Saint Mark gaily takes his part in the fete with his church paintings and his gilding, with his patriotic flags and his pagan horses. Only the pigeons, ,vho appear in the Square at two o'clock every day to be fed, are be\vildered and flutter from cornice to cornice to convince themselves that this really is their dining-room in such disorder.

1:\ The treaty of Campo Formio, October 1 797. (A.S.) 1�; In 1 866, hy an a�n'<:'ment concluded by Austria and Italy after the Austro-Prussian war, Venice became part of the Kingdom of I taly. ( A.S. )

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The crowd keeps growing, le peuple s'amuse, plays the fool heartily with all its might, with great comic talent in words and in their delivery of pronunciation and gesture, but without the cantharidity of the Parisian pierrots, ,..,·ithout the vulgar jokes of the German, without our native filth. The absence of everything indecent surprises one, though the significance of it is clear. This is the frolic, the recreation, the fun of a whole people, and not a dress-parade of brothels, of their succursales, whose inmates, while they strip off so much else, put on a mask, like Bismarc_k's needle, 17 to intensify their fire and make it irresistible. Here they would be out of place; here the people is having its fun, here sisters, wives and daughters are diverting themselves, and woe to him who insults a mask. For the time of the carnival the mask becomes for the woman what the Stanislaw ribbon in his buttonhole used to be for a station-master. IS

At first the carnival left me in peace, but it kept growing, and with its elemental force it was bound to draw everyone in.

Nothing is too nonsensical to happen when St Vitus's Dance takes hold of a whole population in fancy dress. Hundreds, perhaps m9re, of mauve dominoes were sitting in the big hall of a restaurant; they had sailed across the Square in a gilded ship drawn by oxen (everything that walks on dry land and with four legs is a luxury and rarity in Venice) , and now they were eating and drinking. One of the guests suggested a curiosity to entertain them, and undertook to furnish it; that curiosity was myself.

The gentleman, who scarcely knew me, ran to me at the Albergo Danieli, and begged and besought me to go with him for a minute to the masqueraders. It was stupid to go, and stupid to make a fuss. I went, and I was greeted with 'Evviva!' and full glasses. I bowed in all directions ahd talked nonsense, the

'Evvivas' were more hearty than ever; some shouted: 'Evviva 1 7 H. is thinking of the needle rifle with a firing-pin. invented by J. N.

\"On Dreyes ( 1 787- 1 867 ) , which was breech-loading. Although the needle rifle was adopted as a weapon by the Prussian army in 1 8+ 1 , it was only in Bismarck's time. in the middle of the 1 860s. that it began to be widely used. In the Austro-Prussian war of 1 866 the needle rifle gave the Prussian troops a decisive superiority over the Austrian army. ( A .S.) I S A year ago I saw the carnival at !\:ice. "'hat a fearful differenceto say nothing of the soldiers fully armed and the gendarmes and the commissaires of police with their scarves . . . the conduct of the people themseh·es, not of the tourists, amazed me. Drunken masqueraders were swearing and fightinf; with people standing at their gates. while pierrots were ,·iolently knocked down into the mud.

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

6 1 2

l'amico d i Garibaldi,' others drank t o the poela russo! Afraid that the mauve masks would drink to me as the pittore slavo, scultore e maestro, I withdrew to the Piazza San Marco.

In the Square there was a thick wall of people. I leaned against a pilaster, proud of the title of poet; beside me stood my conductor who had carried out the dominoes' mandat d'amener.

'My God, how lovely she is!' slipped out of my mouth as a very young lady made her way through the crowd. My guide seized me without a single word and at once set me before her. 'This is that Russian,' my Polish count19 began. 'Are you willing to give me your hand after that?' I interrupted. She smiled, held out her hand and said in Russian that she had long wanted to see me, and looked at me so takingly that I pressed her hand once more and follo\",;ed her with my eyes so long as she was in sight.

'A blossom, torn away by the hurricane, washed by the tide of blood from its Lithuanian fields!' I thought, looking after her.

'Your beauty shines for strangers now.'

I left the Square and went to meet Garibaldi. On the water everything was still . . . the noise of the carnival came in discordant snatches. The stern, frov.,'lling masses of the houses pressed closer and closer upon the boat and looked at it with their lanterns; at an entry the rudder splashes, the steel boathook gleams, the gondolier shouts: 'Apri-sia state' . . . and again the water draws m quietly into a by-lane, and suddenly the houses move apart again, and we are in the Grand Canal

. . . 'Feyovia, Signoye,' says the gondolier, mispronouncing his r's, as all the town docs. Garibaldi had stayed at Bologna and had not arrived. The cngine that was going to Florence groaned, awaiting the whistle. 'I had better go too,' I thought; 'to-morrow I shall be bored with the masks. To-morrow I shall not see my Slav beauty . . . .'

The city gave Garibaldi a brilliant rt>ception. The Grand Canal was almost transformed into a continuous bridge; to get into our boat when WE' set out we had to cross dozens of others.

The government and its hangcrs-on did everything possible to show that they were cross "vith Garibaldi . If Prince Amadeo had been ordert>d by his father to show all those petty indelicacies, all that vulgar pique, how was it that the Italian boy's heart did not speak out, that he did not for the moment reconcilt> the city with thc king and the king's son with his conscience? Why, Ga1·ibaldi had madl· them a prescnt of the crowns of the Two Sicilies!

l !l Chotomski . ( ii .S . ) Tlw lady was a Pole, too. ( R . )

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I found Garibaldi neither ill nor any older since our meeting in London in 1 864. But he was depressed, worried and not talkative with the Venetians who were presented to him next day. His real retinue was the masses of the people ; he grew more lively at Chioggia, where the boatmen and fishermen were expecting him.

Mingling with the crowd he said to those poor, simple people:

'How happy and at home I am with you, how deeply I feel that I was born of working folk and have been a working man ; the misfortunes o f our country tore m e away from my peaceful occupations. I too grew up on the sea-coast and know the work. of each one of you. . . .'

A murmur of delight drowned the words of the former boatman and the people rushed upon him.

'Give a name to my new-born child,' cried a \voman.

'Bless mine.'

'And mine,' shouted the others.

B Y Z A N T I U \1

HAVE DOUBTS about the future of the Latin peoples. I doubt their fertility in the future; they like the process of revolutions, but are bored by progress when they have attained it. They like to move headlong towards it without reaching it.

Of course, if the terrestrial globe does not crack, and if a comet does not pass too close and turn our atmosphere red-hot, Italy in the future too will be Italy, the land of blue sky and blue sea, of elegant contours, of a beautiful, attractive race of people, musical and artistic by nature. And of course, all the military and civilian remue-menage, and glory and disgrace, fallen frontiers, and rising Assemblies will all be reflected in her life; she will change (and is changing) from clerical despotism to bourgeois parliamentarianism, from a cheap mode of living to an expensive one, from discomfort to comfort, and so on and so on. But that is not much, and it Joes not take one far. There is another fine country whose shores are washed hy the same blue sea, the home of a fine breed of men, valiant and stern, living beyond the Pyrenees; it has no internal enemy, it has an Assembly, it has an outward unity . . . but for all that, what is Spain'

Nations are of strong vitality; they can lie fallow for ages, and again under favourable circumstances prove once more to be full of sap and vigour. But do they rise up the same as they were?

For how many centuries, I had almost said millennia, was the

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614

Greek people wiped off the face of the earth as a nation, and still it remained alive, and at the very moment when the whole of Europe was suffocating in the fumes of the Restoration, Greece awoke and alarmed the whole world. But were the Greeks of Capodistria2" lik<> the Gn'eks of P<>ricles or the Greeks of Byzantium? All tha t was left of tlwm was the name and a far-fetched memory. Italy, too, may be renewed, but then she will have to begin a new history. Her emancipation is no more than a right to exist.

The example of Greece is very apt; it is so far away from us that it awakens fewer passions. The Greece of Athens, of Macedon, deprived of independence by Rome, appears again politically independent in the Byzantine period. What does she do in it? l'\othing, or worse than nothing: theological controversy, seraglio revolutions par anticipation. The Turks come to the help of stick-in-the-mud nature and add the brilliance of a conflagration to her violent death. Ancient Greece had lived out her life when the Roman Empire covered and preserved her as the lava and ashes of the volcano preserved Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The Byzantine period raised the coffin-lid, and the dead remained dead, controlled by priests and monks as every tomb is, administered by eunuchs who were perfectly in place as representatives of barrenness. "'ho does not kno\'\" the tales of crusaders in ByzantiumJ Incomparably inferior in culture, in refinement of manners, these savage men-at-arms, these rude swash-bucklers, were yet full of strength, daring and impetuosity; the�· were advancing, and the god of history was with them. He likes men, not for their good qualities but for their sturdy vigour and for their coming upon the stage a propos. That is why as we read the tedious chronicles we rejoice \vhen the Varangians sweep down from their northern snows, and the Slavs float down in cockleshells and leave the mark of their targets on the proud walls of Byzantium. As a schoolboy I was overjoyed at the savage in his shirt21 paddling his canoe alone and going with a gold ear-ring in his ear to an interview with the effeminate, luxurious, scholar!�- Emperor,22 John Tsimisces.

Think a little about Byzantium. Until our Slavophils bring

� ° Capodistria. Joannis Antonios. Count of. was President of th e Greek Republic from 1 828 to 1 831, when he was assassinated. ( Tr.) 2 ! Svvatoslm·. Prince of Kie,·. is meant. ( Tr.) 22 John Tsimisces bee ami' EmpC'ror in 969 by marriage with Theophania.

th<' widow of Romanus II. and rPigned till 9i6. HI' \\"as. in fact. victorious oYer the Russians. ( Tr. )

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into the world a new chronicle adorned with old ikon paintings, and until it receives the sanction of the government, Byzantium will explain a great deal of what it is hard to put into words.

Byzantium could live, but there was nothing for her to do; and nations in general only take a place in history while they are on the stage, that is, while they are doing something.

I think I have mentioned the answer Thomas Carlyle gave to me when I spoke to him of the severities of the Parisian censorship.

'But why are you so angry with it?' he said. 'In compelling the French to keep quiet Napoleon has done them the greatest service. They have nothing �o say, but they want to talk . . . .

Napoleon has given them an official justification . . . .'

I do not say how far I agree with Carlyle, but I do ask myself: Will Italy have anything to say and do on the day after the taking of Rome? And sometimes, without finding an anS\'Iier, I begin to wish that Rome may long remain a quickening desideratum.

Until Rome is taken everything will go fairly well ; there will be energy and strength enough, if only there is money enough .

. . .'Til then, Italy will put up with a great deal : taxes, the Piedmontese struggle for precedence, an extortionate administration and a quarrelsome and importunate bureaucracy; while waiting for Rome, everything seems unimportant. In order to have it people will put up with constraints and they must stand together. Rome is the boundary line, the flag; it is there before their eyes, it stops them sleeping, it prevents their attending to business, it keeps up the fever. In Rome everything will be changed, everything will snap . . . . There, they fancy, is the conclusion, the crown ; not at all . . . there is the beginning.

Nations that are trying to redeem their independence never know ( and it is a very good thing too) that independence of itself gives them nothing except the rights of th ir majority, a place among their peers, and the recognition of their· capability as citizens to pass acts, and that is all.

F R A :\ C E , G E I\ M A X Y . . .

A N 0 A :\1 E R I C :\

IN THE MIDST of these reflections I happrned to come across Quinet's pamphlet, France arzd German;-. I was fearfully pleased with it-not that I specially depended upon the judgments of the

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616

celebrated historical thinker, though I have a great respect for him personally, but it was not on my own account that I l·ejoiced.

In old days in Petersburg a friend of mine well known for his humour, finding on my table a book of the Berlin Michelet,2:l On the Immortality of the Soul, left me a note which read as follows: 'Dear friend, when you have read this book, be so good as to tell me briefly whether there is an immortality of the soul or not. It does not matter for me, but I should like to kno\•; in order to set at rest the minds of my relations.' VVell, it is for the sake of my relations that I am glad I have come upon Quinet. In spite of the supercilious attitude many of them have taken up in regard to European authorities, our friends still pay more attention to them than to the likes of us. That is why I have tried when I could to put my O\vn thoughts under the protection of a European nurse. Availing myself of Proudhon, I said that not Catiline but death was at the doors of France; hanging on to the coattails of Stuart Mill, I learnt by heart what he said about the Chineseness of the English ; and I am very glad that I can take Quinet by the hand and say: 'Here my honoured friend Quinet says in 1 867 about Latin Europe what I said about the whole of it in 1 847 and all the following years.'

Quinet sees with horror and grief the degradation of France, the softening of her brain, her increasing shallowness. He does not understand the cause; he seeks it in her deviation from the principles of 1 789 and in her loss of political liberty, and so through his grief there is a hint in his words of a hidden hope of recovery by a return to a genuine parliamentary regime, to the great principles of the Revolution.

Quinet does not observe that the great principlPs of which he speaks, and the political ideas of the Latin world generally, have lost their significance, their musical-box spring has played as much as it could and has almost snapped. Les principes de 1 789

were not mere words, but now they have become mere words, like the liturgy and the words of a prayer. Their service has been enormous: by them., through them, France has accomplished her revolution, she has raised the veil of the future and has sprung back in dismay.

A dilemma has presented itself.

Either free institutions will once more set their hands to the 23 Karl Ludwig Michelet ( 1 801-93) , a professor at the University of Berlin. (A.S. )

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6 1 7

sacred veil, or there will be government tutelage, external order and internal slavery.

If in the life of the peoples of Europe there had been one single a im, one single aspiration, one side or the other would have gained the upper hand long ago. But as the history of vVestern Europe is constituted, it has led to everlasting struggle.

In the fundamental fact of its everyday life, that its culture is twofold, lies the organic obstacle to consistent development. To live in two civilisations, on two levels, in two \\·orlds, at two stages of development, to live not as a whole organism but -as one part of it, \vhile using the other for food and fuel, and to be always talking about liberty and equality, is becoming more and more difficult.

Attempts to reach a more harmonious, better-balanced system have not been successful. But if they have failed in any given place, that rather proves the unsuitability of the place than the falsity of the principle.

The whole gist of the matter lies in that.

The States of North America with their unity of civilisation will easily outstrip Europe; their situation is simpler. The standard of their civilisation is lower than that of \Vestern Europe, but they have one standard and all attain to it: in that is their fearful strength.

Twenty years ago France burst like a Titan into another life, struggling in the dark, meaninglPssly, without plan and \vith no other knowlPdge than of lwr insufferable agony. She was beaten

'by order and civilisation,' but it was the victor who retreated .

ThP bourgeoisie have had to pay for their melancholy victory with all they had gained by ages of effort, of sacrifice, of wars and revolutions, with the best fruits of their culture.

The centres of pmver, the paths of development-all have changed ; the hidden activity and suppressed work of social reconstruction have passed to other lands beyond the borders of France.

As soon as the Germans were con vinced that the French tide had ebbed, that its frightening revolutionary ideas had fallen into decay, that there was no need to fear her, the Prussian helmet appeared behind the walls of the fortresses on the Rhine.

France still fell back, the helmet still moved fonvard. Bismarck has never thought much of his own people, he has kept both ears cocked tmvards France, he has sniffed the air coming from there, and, convinced of the permanent degradation of that country, he understood that Prussia's day was at hand. Having

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

6 1 8

understood this he ordered a plan from Moltke, h e ordered needles from the gun-smiths, and systematically, with unmannerly German churlishness, gathered the ripe German pears and poured them into the apron of the ridiculous Friedrich Wilhelm, assuring him that he was a hero by a special miracle of the Lutheran god.

I do not believe that the destinies of the world will be left for a long time in the hands of the Germans and the Hohenzollerns.

This is impossible, it is contrary to the good sense of humanity, repugnant to the aesthetic of history. I shall say, as Kent said to Lear, only the other way about: 'In thee, oh Prussia, there is nothing that I could call a king.' But nevertheless, Prussia has thrust France into the background and herself taken the front seat. But nevertheless, having painted the motley rags of the German fatherland all one colour, she will lay down the law to Europe so long as her laws are laid down by the bayonet and carried out by grape-shot, for the very simple reason that she has more bayonets and more grape-shot.

Behind the Prussian wave there will arise another that will not trouble itself much whether the old men with their classical principles like it or not.

England craftily preserves the appearance of strength, standing on one side, as though proud of her pretended non-participation . . . . She has fPlt in the depth of ht>r innards the same social ache that she cured so easily in 1 848 with policemen's stavps; but the throes are more violent . . . and she is drawing in her far-reaching tentacles to meet the conflict at home.

France, amazed, embarrassed by her changed condition, threatens to make \Yar not 011 Prussia Lut on Italy if the latter touches the temporal possessions of the eternal father, and she collects money for a monument to Voltaire.

\Viii the Par-splitting Prussian trumpet of the last judgment by ba ttle bring Latin Europe to life? Will the approach of the learned barbarians awaken her?

Chi lo sa?

I arrh·ed at Genoa with some Americans who had only just crossPd the ocean. They werP impressed by Genoa. Everything they had rPad in books about the Old World tlwy now saw with their own eyes, and thPy were never tired of gazing at the precipitous, na rrow, black, mf•diaPval strPets, thP singular hPight of tlw houses, the half-ruined passages, fortifications and so on.

\Ne wpnt into the wstibule of some palace. A cry of delight hrokP from onP of tlw AmPricans: '! Iow these people did live!

Bow tlwv did liw! What dimensions, what elegance' No, you

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6 1 9

will find nothing like it among us.' And h e was ready t o blush for his America. We peeped inside a huge salon. The portraits of former owners, the pictures, the faded walls, the old furniture, the old coats of arms, the unlived-in air, the emptiness, and the old custodian in a black, knitted skull-cap and a threadbare, black frock-coat, with his bunch of keys . . . all said as plainly as words that this was not a house but a curiosity, a sarcophagus, a sumptuous relic of past life.

'Yes,' I said to the Americans as we went out, 'you arc perfectly right, these people did live well.'

March 1 867

The Sztper:Jluozts

ltnd the J£tundicecl l(1 860)

The Onegins and the Pechorins2 were perfectly true to life; they expressed the real sorrow and breakdown of Russian life at that time. The melancholy type of the man who was superfluous, lost merely because he had developed into a man, was to be seen in those days not onlr in poems and novels but in the streets and the villages, in the hotels and the towns . . . . But the dar of the Onegins and the Pechorins is over. There are rzo superfluous men rzow in Russia: on the contrary, now there arc not hands enough to till the vast fields of ours that need ploughing. One who docs not find work now has no one else to blame for it. He must be really a hollow man, a worm-eaten waster or a sluggard.

The Bell, 1 8-J9.

THESE two classes of superfluous men,3 between whom Nature herself raised up a mountain chain of Oblomovs,� and History, 1 First published in The Bell. 1 5th October. 1 860. ( A.S. )

� Pechorin, the hero of Lermontoy's A Hero of Our Time. ( Tr. ) 3 Cf. \Villiam E. Harkins: Dictionary of Russian Literature. ( R . )

� OblomoY, the hero ol I . A. Goncharov's noYel of t h a t name. ( Tr.) His problem was ennui in gPneral and, in particular, getting out of bed in the morning-or at all. "Oblomovism" was an upperclass Russian sucio·

political compla in t of the period. (D.!'d . )

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620

marking out its boundaries, dug a frontier ditch-the very one in which Nicholas is buried-are continually mixed up. And therefore we want, with a partiality like that of Cato for the cause of the vanquished, to champion the older generation.

Superfluous men '"ere in those days as essential as it is essential now that there should be none.

Nothing is more lamentable than, in the midst of the growing activity, as yet unorganised and awkward but full of enterprise and initiative, to meet those gaping, unnerved lads who lose their heads before the toughness of practical work, and expect a gratuitous solution of their difficulties and answers to problems which they have never been able to state clearly.

We will lay aside these volunteers who have appointed themselves superfluous men and, just as the French only recognise as real grenadiers les vieux de la vieille, so we will recognise as honourable and truly superfluous men only those of the reign of Nicholas. vVe ourselves belonged to that unhappy generation and, grasping many years ago that we were superfluous on the banks of the !\:eva, we very practically made off as soon as the rope was untied.

There is no need for us to defend ourselves, but we are sorry for our former comrades and want to protect them from the batch of the sick that followed them after being discharged from Nicholas's infirmary.

One cannot but share the healthy, realistic attitude of one of the best Russian reviews in attacking recently the flimsy moral point of view which in the French style seeks personal responsibility for public events. Historical strata can no more be judged by a criminal court than geological ones. And men who say that one ought not to bring down one's thunders and lightnings on bribe-takers and embezzlers of government funds, but on the environment which makes bribes a zoological characteristic of a whole tribe, of the beardless Russians, for instance, are perfectly right. All we desire is that the superfluous men of Nicholas's reign should have the rights of bribe-takers and enjoy the privileges granted to the embezzlers of public funds. They are the more deserving of this in that thPy are not only superfluous but almost all dead; and the bribe-takers and embezzlers are alive, and not only prosperous but historically justified.

·with whom are we to fight here? \Vhom have we to ridicule?

On the one hand, m!.'n who have fallen from exhaustion ; on the other, men crushed by the machine; to blame them for it is as ungen\'rous as to blamP scrofulous and lymphatic children for the poorness of their parents' blood.

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There can be only one serious question; were these morbid phenomena really due to the conditions of their environment, to their circumstances? . . .

I think it can hardly be doubted.

There is no need to repeat how cramped, how painful, was the development of Russia. We were kept in ignorance by the knout and the Tatars: we were civilised by the axe and by Germans: and in both cases our nostrils were slit and we were branded with irons. Peter I drove civilisation into us with such a wedge that Russia could not stand it and split into two layers. We are hardly beginning now, after a hundred and fifty years, to understand how this split diverged. There was nothing in common between the two parts; on the one side, there was robbery and contempt; on the other, suffering and mistrust; on the one side, the liveried lackey, proud of his social position and haughtily displaying it; on the other, the plundered peasant, hating him and concealing his hatred. Never did Turk, slaughtering men and carrying off women to his harem, oppress so systematically, nor disdain the Frank and the Greek so insolently, as did the Russia of the nobility despise the Russia of the peasant. There is no other instance in history of a caste of the same race getting the upper hand so thoroughly and becoming so completely alien as our class of upper government servants.

A renegade always goes to the extreme, to the absurd and the revolting, to the point at last of clapping a man in prison because, being a writer, he wears Russian dress, refusing to let him enter an eating-house because he is wearing a caftan and is girt with a sash. This is colossal and reminds one of Indian Asia.

On the borders of these savagely opposed worlds strange phenomena developed, whose very distortion points to latent forces, i ll at ease and seeking something different. The Raskolniki and Decembrists stand foremost among them, and they are followed by all the Westerners and Easterners, the One gins and the Lenskys, superfluous and jaundiced men. All of them, like Old Testament prophets, were at once a protest and a hope. By them Russia was exerting itself to escape from the Petrine period, or to digest it to her real body and her healthy flesh.

These pathological formations called forth by the conditions of the life of the period pass away without fail when the conditions are changed, just as now superfluous men have already passed away; but it does not follow that they deserved judgment and condemnation unless from their younger comrades in the Service. And this is on the same principle on which one of the inmates of Bedlam pointed with indignation at a patient who

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called himself the Apostle Paul, while he, who was Christ himself, knew for certain that the other was not the Apostle Paul but simply a shopkeeper from Fleet Street.

Let us recall how superfluous men were evolved.

The executions of 13th July, 1 826, at the Kronverk curtainwall5 could not at once check or change the current of ideas of that time, and as a fact the traditions of the reign of Alexander and the Decembrists persisted through the first half of Nicholas's thirty years' reign, though disappearing from sight and turning inwards. Children caught in the schools dared to hold their heads erect, for they did not yet know that they were the prisoners of education.

They were the same when they left school.

These were far different from the serene, self-confident, enthusiastic lads, open to every impression, that Pushkin and Pushchin6 appear to us to have been when they were leaving the Lycee. They have neither the proud, unbending, overwhelming daring of a Lunin,7 nor the dissolute profligacy of a Polezhayev,8 nor the melancholy serenity of Venevitinov.9 But yet they kept the fai th inherited from their fathers and elder brothers, the faith that 'It will rise-the dawn of enchanting happiness,'10 the faith in Western liberalism in which all then believed-Lafayette, Godefroy Cavaignac, Borne and Heine.

Frightened and disconsolate, they dreamed of escaping from their false and unhappy situation. This was that last hope which every one of us has felt before the death of one we love. Only doctrinaires (red or parti-coloured-it makes no difference) readily accept the most terrible conclusions because properly speaking they accept them in effigie, on paper.

Meanwhile every event, every year, confirmed for them the frightful truth that not only the government was against them, with gallows and spies, with the iron hoop with which the hangman compressed Pestel's head, and with Nicholas putting this hoop on all Russia, but that the people, too, were not with them, 6 At this place in the Peter-Paul Fortress P. I. Peste!, K. F. Ryleyev, S. I. Muravev·Apostol, M. P. Bestuzhev-Ryumin and P. G. Kakhovsky,

'Decembrists,' were hanged on the night of 1 2th-1 3th July, 1 826. (A.S.) 6 Ivan hanovich Pushchin ( 1 798-1859), was a great friend of the poet Pushkin. (Tr.)

7 Mikhail Sergeyevich, one of the Decembrists. (Tr.) s See pp. 1 1 7-20 above. (D.M.)

9 Dmitri Vladimirovich ( 1 805-27 ) , a young poet of the greatest promise who died in 1 827 at the age of twenty-two. (Tr.) 10 From Pushkin's lines 'To Chaadayev.' (A.S.)

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or at least were completely strangers to them. If the people were discontented, the objects of their discontent were different. Together with this crushing recognition they suffered, on the other hand, from growing doubt of the most fundamental, unshakeable principles of Western European opinion. The ground was giving way under their feet; and in this perplexity they were forced actually to enter the Service or to fold their arms and become superfluous, idle. We venture to assert that this is one of the most tragic situations in the world. Now these superfluous men are an anachronism, but of course Royer-Collard or Benjamin Constant would also be an anachronism now. However, one must not cast a stone at them for that.

While men's minds were kept in distress and painful irresolution, not knowing where to find an escape or in what direction to move, Nicholas went his way with dull, elemental obstinacy, trampling down the cornfields and every sign of growth. A master of his craft, he began from the year 1831 to make war on the children; he grasped that he must erode everything human in the years of childhood in order to make faithful subjects in his own image and after his likeness. The upbringing of which he dreamed was organised. A simple word, a simple gesture was reckoned as much an insolence and a crime as an open neck or an unbuttoned collar. And this massacre of the souls of innocents went on for thirty years!

Nicholas-reflected in every inspector, every school director, every tutor and guardian-confronted the boy at school, in the street, i n church, even to some extent in the parental home, stood and gazed at him with pewtery, unloving eyes, and the child's heart ached and grew faint with fear that those eyes might detect some budding of free thought, some human feeling.

And who knows what chemical change in the composition of a child's blood and nervous system is caused by intimidation, by the checking or dissimulation of speech, by the repression of feeling?

The terrified parents helped Nicholas in his task; to save their children by ignorance, they concealed from them their one noble memory. The younger generation grew up without traditions, without a future, except a career in the Service. The government office and the barracks little by little conquered the drawingroom and society, aristocrats turned gendarmes. Kleinmikhels turned aristocrats; the narrow-minded personality of Nicholas was gradually imprinted on everything, vulgarising everything and giving everything an official, governmental aspect.

Of course, in all this unhappiness, not everything perished. No

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one plague, not even the Thirty Years' War, exterminated everyone. Man is a tough creature. The demand for humane progn�ss, the striving for independent initiative, survived, and most of all in the two 1\lacedonian phalanxes of our civilisation, Moscow University and the Tsarskoye Selo Lycee. On their youthful shoulders they carried across the whole kingdom of dead souls the Ark in which lay the Russia of the future; they carried her living thought, her living faith in what was to come.

History will not forget them.

But in this conflict they too lost, for the most part, the youthfulness of their early years: they were over-strained, grew overripe too soon. Old age was on them before their legal coming of age. These were not idle, not superfluous men ; these were exasperated men, sick in body and soul, men wasted by the affronts they had endured, who looked at everything askance, and were unable to rid themselves of the bile and venom accumulated more than five years before. They offer a manifest step forward, but still it is a sickly step; this is no longer a heavy, chronic lethargy, but an acute suffering which must be followed by recovery or the grave.

The superfluous men have left the stage, and the jaundiced, who are more angry with the superfluous than any, will follow them. Indeed, they will be gone very soon. They are too morose, and they get too much on one's nerves, to stand their ground long. The \vorld, in spite of eighteen centuries of Christian contrition, is in a very heathen fashion devoted to epicureanism and a la longue cannot put up with the depressing face of the Daniels of the Neva, who gloomily reproach men for dining without gnashing their teeth, and for enjoying pictures or music without remembering the misfortunes of this world.

Their relief is on its way ; already we see men of quite a different stamp, with untried powers and stalwart muscles, appearing from remote universities, from the sturdy Ukraine, from the sturdy north-east, and perhaps we old folks may yet have the luck to hold out a hand across the sickly generation to the fresh stock, who will briefly bid us farewell and go on their broad road.

We have studied the type of jaundiced men, not on the spot, and not from books; we have studied it in specimens who have crossed the Neman and sometimes even the Rhine since 1 850.

The first thing that struck us in them was the ease with which they despaired of everything, the vindictive pleasure of their renunciation, and their terrible ruthlessness. After the events of 1 848 they were at once set on a height from which they saw the

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defeat of the republic and the revolution, the regression of civilisation, and the insulting of banners-and they could feel no compassion for the unknown fighters. Where the likes of us stopped short, tried to restore animation, and looked to see if there was no spark of life, they went farther through the desert of logical deduction and easily arrived at those final, abrupt conclusions which are alarming in their radical audacity but which, like the spirits of the dead, are but the essence gone out of life, not life itself. In these conclusions the Russian on the whole enjoys a terrific advantage over the European ; he has -in this no tradition, no habit, nothing germane to him to lose. The man who has no property of his own or of others passes most safely along dangerous roads.

This emancipation from everything traditional fell to the lot not of healthy, youthful characters but of men whose heart and soul had been strained in every fibre. After 1 848 there was no living in Petersburg. The autocracy had reached the Hercules'

Pillars of absurdity; they had reached the instructions issued to teachers at the military academics, Buturlin's scheme for closing the universities and the signature of the censor Yelagin on patterns for stencils. Can one wonder that the young men who broke out of this catacomb were crazy and sick?

Then they faded before their summer, knowing no free scope, nothing of frank speech. They bore on their countenances deep traces of a soul roughly handled and wounded. Every one of them had some tic, and apart from that personal tic they all had one in common, a devouring, irritable and distorted vanity. The denial of every personal right, the insults, the humiliations they had endured evolved a secret claim to admiration; these undeveloped prodigies, these unsuccessful geniuses, concealed themselves under a mask of humility and modt>sty. All of them were hypochondriacs and physically ill, did not drink wine, and were afraid of open windows; all looked with studied despair at the present; they reminded one of monks who from love for their neighbour came to hating all humanity and cursed everything in the world from desire to bless something.

One half of them were constantly repenting, the other half constantly chastising.

Yes, deep scars had been left on their souls. The world of Petersburg in which they had lived was reflected in themselves; it was thence they took their restless tone, their languagesaccade, yet suddenly deliquescing into bureaucratic twaddletheir shuffling meekness and haughty fault-finding, their intentional aridity and readiness on any occasion to blackguard one,

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their offensive acceptance of accusations in front of everyone, and the uneasy intolerance of the director of a department.

This knack of administering a reprimand in the style of a director, uttered contemptuously with eyes screwed up, is more repugnant to us than the husky shout of a general, which is like the deep bark of a steady old dog, who growls in deference to his social position rather than from spite.

Tone is not a matter of no importance.

Das was innen--das ist draussen!

Extremely kind at heart and noble in tendency, they-l mean our jaundiced men-might by their tone drive an angel to fighting and a saint to cursing. Moreover, they exaggerate everything in the world with such aplomb-and not to amuse but to mortify-that there is simply no bearing it. Every time anyone mentions a mole-hill they will start talking darkly about mountains.

''-Vh.y do you defend these sluggards' (a jaundiced friend, sehr ausgeziechnet in seine Fache, said to us lately) , 'parasites, drones, white-handed spongers a la Oneghine? . . . They were formed differently, please observe, and the world surrounding them is too dirty for them, not polished enough ; they will dirty their hands, they will dirty their feet. It was much nicer to go on moaning over their unhappy situation and at the same time eat and drink in comfort.'

We put in a word for our classification of the superfluous men into those of the Old Dispensation and those of the New. But our Daniel would not hear of a distinction: he would have nothing to say to the Oblomovs nor to the fact that Nicholas cast in bronze had been gathered to his fathers, and just for that reason had been cast in bronze. On the contrary, he attacked us for our defence and, shrugging his shoulders, said that he looked upon us as on the fine skeleton of a mammoth, as at an interesting bone that had been dug up and belonged to a world with a different sun and different trees.

'Allow me on that ground and in the character of a Homo Benckendorfi testis to defend my fellow-fossils. Surely you do not really think that these men did nothing, or did something absurd, of their own choice?'

'Without any doubt; they were romantics and aristocrats ; they hated work, they would have thought themselves degraded if they had taken up an axe or an awl, and i t is true they would not have known how to use them.'

'In that case I will quote names: for instance, Chaadayev. He did not know how to use an axe but he knew how to write an

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article which jolted the whole of Russia, and was a turning-point in our understanding of ourselves.11 That article was his first step in the literary career. You know what came of it. A German, Wiegel, took offence on behalf of Russia, the Protestant and future Catholic Benckendorf took offence on behalf of Orthodoxy, and by the lie of the Most High, Chaadayev was declared mad and forced to sign an undertaking not to write. Nadezhdin, who published the article in the Telescope, was banished to Ust

Sysolsk; Boldyrev, the old rector, was dismissed: Chaadayev became an idle man. I grant that Ivan Kireyevsky could not make boots, yet he could publish a magazine; he published two numbers and the magazine was forbidden; he contributed an article to the Dennitsa, and the censor, Glinka, was put in custody: Kireyevsky became a superfluous man. N. Polevoy cannot, of course, be charged with idleness; he was a resourceful man, and yet the wings of the Telegraph were clipped, and, I confess my feebleness, when I read how Polevoy told Panayev that he, as a married man, handicapped by a family, was afraid of the police, I did not laugh but almost cried.'

'But Belinsky could write and Granovsky could give lectures; they did not sit idle.'

'If there were men of such energy that they could write or give lectures within sight of the police-troika and the fortress, is it not clear that there were many others of less strength who were paralysed and suffered deeply from it?'

'Why did they not actually take to making boots or splitting logs? It would have been better than nothing.'

'Probably because they had money enough not to be obliged to do such dull work; I have never heard of anyone taking to cobbling for pleasure. Louis XVI is the only example of a king by trade and a locksmith for the love of it. However, you are not the first to observe this lack of practical labour in superfluous men; in order to correct it, our watchful government sent them to hard labour.'

'My fossil friend, I see that you still look down upon work.'

'As on a far from gay necessity.'

'Why should they not have shared in the general necessity?'

'No doubt they should, but in the first place they were born not in North America but in Russia, and unluckily were not brought up to it.'

'Why were they not brought up to it?'

11 For H.'s appraisal of P. Ya. Chaadayev's 'Philosophical Letter,' which appeared in the Telescope, 1 836, No. 1 5, see pp. 29�. (R. )

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'Because they were born not in the tax-paying classes of Russia but in the gentry; perhaps that really is reprehensible, but being at that period in the inexperienced condition of cercaria they cannot, owing to their tender years, be responsible for their conduct. And having once made this mistake in the choice of their parents, they were bound to submit to the education of the time. By the way, what right have you to demand of men that they should do one thing or another? This is some new compulsory organisation of labour; something in the style of socialism transferred to the methods of the Ministry of State Property.'

'I don't compel anyone to work; I simply state the fact that they were idle, futile aristocrats who led an easy and comfortable life, and I see no reason for sympathising ,.,.ith them.'

'Whether they deserve sympathy or not let each person decide for himself. All human suffering, especially if it is inevitable, awakens our sympathy, and there is no sort of suffering to \'lihich one could refuse it. The martyrs of the early centuries of Christendom believed in redemption and in a future life. The Roman Mukhanovs, Timashevs and Luzhins tried to compel the Christians to bow down in the dust before the august image of the Caesar; the Christians would not make this trivial concession and they were hunted down by beasts. They were mad; the Romans were half-witted, and there is no place here for sympathy or surprise . . . . But then farewell, not only to Thermopylae and Golgotha but also to Sophocles and Shakespeare, and incidentally to the whole long, endless epic poem which is continually ending in frenzied tragedies and continually going on again under the title of history.'

Bazaro v 011ce !\!fore (1 868)

L E T T E H. 1 1

INSTEAD oF A LETTER, dear friend,2 I am sending you a dissertation, and an unfinished one too. After our conversa tion I read over again Pisarev's article on Bazarov, which I had quite forgotten, and I am very glad I did-that is, not that I had forgot-I Published in The Pole Star, 1 868. (A.S. ) 2 ;\I, P. Ogarev. (A.S.)

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ten it, but that I read it again. The article confirms my point of view. In its one-sidedness it is more true and more remarkable than its opponents have supposed. Whether Pisarev has correctly grasped the character of Bazarov as Turgenev meant it, does not concern me. What does matter is that he has recognised himself and his comrades in Bazarov, and has added to the portrait what was lacking in the book. The less Pisarev has kept to the stocks into which the exasperated father has tried to thrust the obstinate son, the more freely has he been able to treat him as the expression of his ideal.3

'But what interest can Mr Pisarev's ideal have for us? Pisarev is a smart critic, he has written a great deal, he has written about everything, sometimes about subjects of which he had knowledge, but all that does not give his ideal any claim on the attention of the public.'

The point is that it is not his own personal ideal but the ideal which both before and since the appearance of Turgenev's Bazarov has haunted the younger generation, has been embodied 3 Dmitry hanovich Pisarev ( 1 840-68) was one of those tough-minded young Russian radicals who despised the aging Herzen (the feeling was mutual) as liberal, or "soft," politically, and conservative, or "bourgeois,"

culturally-accusations that were true enough, in their terms. ( Herzen's friend, Turgenev, in Fathers and Sons had given them a name that stuck,

"Nihilists." and a personality type in the anti-hero, Bazarov.) In this essay disguised as a letter to Ogarev-always a personal writer, Herzen felt freer in such informal dress-Pisarev is taken as the type of revolutionary youth who were then modeling themselves on Bazarov with a perversity that must have distressed his inventor: "living persons who have tried to take Bazarovism as the basis of their words and actions."

Herzen's life-imitates-art point would have been stronger a year or so later: like Bazarov, Pisarev died young, at twenty-eight.

The similarities of our "New Left" to the nineteenth-century Russian Nihilists-and, in its more benign aspect, to the later "Narodniki," or

"Back-to-the-People," idealists-have often been remarked on, usually with more heat than light, by elderly (i.e., over thirty) critics of the American radical youth movement in the sixties. As a "critical sup·

porter" of the quondam New Left, who was, like Herzen a century earlier, uneasily divided between hope and skepticism, I wish certain undivided elderly Cassandras, most of them younger than me, had read his last volume before they made their deadly historical parallels ( the other was with Hitler's youth mm·ement) . His cool treatment of the painful subject of the Nihilists (see also "The Superfluous and Jaundiced"

in this volume ) , which was unsparing and yet infused with comradely sympathy, might haYe been useful to them. Nor would his humor have come amiss: it brought his sternest philippics down to human scale. But, as noted in my Preface, Americans don't seem to have read him much.

(D.M.)

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not only in various heroes in novels and stories but in living persons who have tried to take Bazarovism as the basis of their words and actions. What Pisarev says I have seen and heard myself a dozen times; in the simplicity of his heart, he has let out the cherished thought of a whole circle and, focusing the scattered rays on one centre, has shed a light on the typical Bazarov.

To Turgenev, Bazarov is more than alien; to Pisarev, more than a comrade. To study the type, of course, one must take the view which sees in Bazarov the desideratum.

Pisarev's opponents were frightened by his lack of caution; while renouncing Turgenev's Bazarov as a caricature, they repudiated even more violently his transfigured double; they were displeased at Pisarev's having put his foot in it, but it does not follow from this that he was wrong in his interpretation.

Pisarev knows the heart of his Bazarov through and through ; he makes a confession for his hero. 'Perhaps,' he says, 'at the bottom of his heart Bazarov does accept a great deal of what he denies in words, and perhaps it is just what is accepted and concealed that saves him from moral decline and from moral nothingness.'

We regard this indiscreet utterance, which looks so deeply into another's soul, as very important.

Farther on Pisarev describes his hero's character thus:

'Bazarov is extremely proud, but his pride is not noticeable'

[ clearly this is not Turgenev's Bazarov] 'just because it is so great. Nothing would satisfy Bazarov but an eternity of everwidening activity and ever-increasing en;oyment.'4

Bazarov acts everywhere and in everything only as he wishes, or as he thinks advantageous and convenient; he is guided only by his personal desire or personal calculation. He acknowledges no Mentor above him, without himself or within himself. Before him is no lofty aim, in his mind is no lofty notion, and with all this his powers are enormous. If Bazarovism is a malady, it is a malady of our time, and will have to be suffered to the end in spite of any amputations or palliatives.

Bazarov looks down on people, and even rarely gives himself the trouble to conceal his half-contemptuous and half-patronising attitude to those who hate and to those who obey him. He loves no one. He thinks it quite superfluous to put any constraint 4 Youth is fond of expressing itself in all sorts of incomrnensurables and striking the imagination by images of infinite magnitude. The last sentence reminds me vividly of Karl Moor, Ferdinand and Don Carlos.

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on himself whatever. There are two sides to his cynicism, an internal and an external, the cynicism of thought and feeling and the cynicism of manner and expression. The essence of his inner cynicism lies in an ironical attitude to emotion of every sort, to dreaminess, to poetical enthusiasm. The crude expression of this irony, the causeless and aimless roughness of manner, are part of his external cynicism. Bazarov is not merely an empiricist; he is also an unkempt Bursch. Among the admirers of Bazarov there will doubtless be some who will be delighted with his boorish manners, the vestiges left by his rough student life, and will imitate those manners, which are in any case a defect and not a merit.5 Such people are most often evolved in the grey environment of laborious work: rough work coarsens the hands, coarsens the manners, coarsens the feelings; the man is toughened, casts off youthful dreaminess and gets rid of tearful sentimentality; there is no possibility of dreaming at work ; the hard-working man looks upon idealism as a folly peculiar to the idleness and effeminacy of the well-to-do; he reckons moral sufferings as imaginary, moral impulses and exploits as farfetched and absurd. He feels a repulsion for high-flown talk.

Then Pisarev draws the genealogical tree of Bazarov: the Onegins and Pechorins begot the Rudins and the Beltovs,6 the Rudins and the Beltovs begot Bazarov. (Whether the Decembrists are omitted intentionally or unintentionally, I do not know.) The tired and the bored are succeeded by men who strive to act ; life rejects them both as worthless and incomplete. 'It is sometimes their lot to suffer, but they never succeed in getting anything done. Society is deaf and inexorable to them. They are incapable of adapting themselves to its conditions, not one of them has ever risen so high as head-clerk of a government office.

Some are consoled by becoming professors and working for a future generation.' Their negative usefulness is incontestable.

5 The prophecy has now been fulfilled. This mutual interaction of men on books, and books on men, is a curious thing. A book takes its whole stamp from the society in which it is conceived; it generalises, it makes it more vivid and sharp, and afterwards is outdone by reality. The originals caricature their sharply shaded portraits, and actual persons grow into their literary shadows. At the end of the last century all young Germans were a little after the style of \Verther, while all their young ladies resembled Charlotte; at the beginning of the present century the university Werthers had begun to change into 'Robbers,' not real ones but Schilleresque robbers. The young Russians who have come on the scene since 1 862 are almost all derived from Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? with the addition of a few Bazarov features.

6 The hero of Herzen's novel, Who Is at Fault? (Tr.)

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They increase the numbers of men incapable of practical activity, in consequence of which practical activity itself, or more precisely the forms in which it usually finds expression now, slowly but steadily sink lower in public esteem.

'It seemed (after the Crimean War) that Rudinism was over, that the period of fruitless ideals and yearnings was being succeeded by a period of seething and useful activity. But the mirage was dissipated. The Rudins did not become practical workers, and a new generation has come forward from behind them and taken up a reproachful and mocking attitude towards its predecessors. "What are you whining about, what are you seeking, what are you asking from life? You want happiness, I suppose? I daresay you do! Happiness has to be conquered. If you are strong, take it. If you are weak, hold your tongue; we feel sick enough without your whining! " A sombre, concentrated energy was expressed in this unfriendly attitude of the younger generation to their Mentors. In their conceptions of good and evil the young generation and the best men of the preceding one were alike, the sympathies and antipathies of both are the same; they desired the same thing, but the men of the past generation fussed and fretted. The men of to-day are not in a fuss, they are not trying to find anything, they will not submit to any compromise and they hope for nothing. They are as powerless as the Rudins, but they recognise their impotence.

' "I cannot act now," each of these new men thinks, "and I am not going to try. I despise everything that surrounds me, and I shan't trj to conceal my contempt. I shall enter on the battle with evil when I feel myself strong." Having no possibility of acting, men begin to reflect and investigate. Superstitions and authorities are torn to shreds, and the philosophy of life is completely cleared of all sorts of fantastic conceptions. It is nothing to them whether the public is following in their footsteps. They are full of themselves, of their own inner l ife. In short, the Pechorins had will without knowledge, the Rudins knowledge without will, the Bazarovs both knowledge and will.

Thought and action are blended in one firm whole.'

As you see there is everything here (if there is no mistake), both character-drawing and classification. All is brief and clear, the sum is added up, the bill is presented, and perfectly correctly from the point of view from which the author attacked the question.

But we do not accept this bill, and we protest against it from our premature coffins which have not yet arrived. We are not Charles V, and have no desire to be buried alive.

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How strange has been the fate of Fathers and Sons! That Turgenev brought out Bazarov with no idea of patting him on the head is clear; that he meant to do something for the 'Fathers'

is clear too. But when he came to deal with such pitiful and worthless 'Fathers' as the Kirsanovs, Turgenev was carried away by Bazarov in spite of his harshness, and instead of thrashing the sons he chastised the fathers.

And so it has come to pass that some of the younger generation have recognised themselves in Bazarov. But we entirely fail to recognise ourselves in the Kirsanovs, just as we did not recognise ourselves in the Manilovs nor the Sobakeviches, although Manilovs and Sobakeviches existed all over the place in the days of our youth, and exist now.

Whole herds of moral abortions live at the same time in different layers of society and in its different currents ; undoubtedly they represent more or less general types, but they do not represent the most striking and characteristic side of their generation, the side which most fully expresses its force.

Pisarev's Bazarov is, in a one-sided sense, to a certain extent the extreme type of what Turgenev called the 'Sons' ; while the Kirsanovs are the most trite and trivial representatives of the

'Fathers.'

Turgenev was more of an artist in his novel than it is thought, and that is why he turned out of his course, and to my thinking he did well in so doing-he meant to go into one room, and he found himself in another and a better one.

He might just as well have sent his Bazarov to London. That nasty fellow, Pisemsky, was not afraid of the travelling expenses for his sorely tried freaks. We could perhaps have proved to him on the banks of the Thames that, without rising to the post of head-clerk of an office, one might do quite as much good as any head of a department; that society is not always deaf and inexorable when the protest finds a response; that action does sometimes succeed; that the Rudins and the Beltovs sometimes have will and perseverance; and that, seeing the impossibility of carrying on the activity to which they were urged by their inner impulse, they have abandoned many things, gone abroad, and without 'fussing and fretting' have set up a Russian printingpress, and are carrying on Russian propaganda. The influence of the London press from 1 856 to the end of 1863 is not merely a practical fact but a fact of history. It cannot be effaced, it has to be accepted. In London Bazarov would have seen that it was only from a distance that we seemed to be merely brandishing our arms, and that in reality we were keeping our hands at

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work. Perhaps his wrath would have been changed to loving kindness, and he would have given up treating us with 'reproach and mockery.'

I frankly confess this throwing of stones at one's predecessors is very distasteful to me. I repeat what I have said already: 'I should like to save the younger generation from historical ingratitude, and even from historical error. It is time for the fathers not to devour their children like Saturn, but it is time for the children, too, to cease following the example of those natives of Kamchatka who kill off their old people.' Surely it is not right that only in natural science the phases and degrees of development, the declinations and deviations, even the avortements, should be studied, accepted, considered sine ira et studio, but as soon as one approaches history the physiological method is abandoned at once, and in its place methods of the criminal court and the police station are adopted.

The Onegins and Pechorins have passed away.

The Rudins and the Beltovs are passing.

The Bazarovs will pass . . . and very quickly, as a matter of fact. It is a too far-fetched, bookish, over-strained type to persist for long.

A type has already tried to thrust himself forward to replace him, one rotten in the spring of his days, the type of the Orthodox student, the Conservative patriot educated at govemment expense in whom everything loathsome in Imperial Russia vvas regurgitated, though even he felt embarrassed after serenading the Iversky Madonna and singing a thanksgiving service to Katkov.7

All the types that arise will pass, and all, in virtue of the law of the conservation of energy which we have learnt to recognise in the physical world, will persist and will spring up in different forms in the future progress of Russia and in its future organisation.

And so would it not be more interesting, instead of pitting Bazarov against Rudin, to analyse what constitutes the 'red threads' connecting them, and the reasons of their appearing and their transformation? Why have precisely these forms of development been called forth by our life, and \vhy have they passed one into the other in this way? Their dissimilarity is obvious, but in some respects they are alike.

Typical characters readily seize on distinctions, exaggerate the 7 H. is referring to the public thanksgiving for the PSC<�pe of Alt:>xander II from the attempt of D. V. Karakozov to assassinate him in 1 866. (A.S.)

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angles and prominent features for the sake of emphasising them, paint the barriers in vivid colours and tear apart the bonds. The play of colours is lost and unity is left far away, hidden in mist, like the plain that joins the foot of the mountains, whose tops, far apart from each other, are brightly lighted up. Moreover, we load on the shoulders of these types more than they can bear and ascribe to them in life a significance that they have not had, or had only in a limited sense. To take Onegin as the positive type of the intellectual life of the 1 820s, as the integral of all the aspirations and activities of the class then awakening, would be quite mistaken, although he does represent one of the aspects of the life of that time.

The type of that time, one of the most splendid types of modern history, was the Decembrist and not Onegin. He could not be dealt with by Russian literature for all of forty years, but he is not the less for that.

How is it that the younger generation had not the clearness of vision, the judgment or the heart to grasp all the grandeur, all the vigour of those brilliant young men who emerged from the ranks of the Guards, those spoilt darlings of wealth and eminence who left their drawing-rooms and their piles of gold to demand the rights of man, to protest, to make a statement for which-and they knew it-the hangman's rope and penal servitude awaited them? It is a melancholy and puzzling question.

To resent the fact that these men appeared in the one class in which there was some degree of culture, of leisure and of security, is senseless. If these 'princes, boyars, voyevodas,' these Secretaries of State and colonels, had not been the first to wake up from moral hunger but had waited to be aroused by bodily hunger, there would have been no whining and restless Rudins nor Bazarovs resting on their 'unity of will and knowledge': there would have been a regimental doctor who would have done the soldiers to death, robbing them of their rations and medicines, and have sold a certificate of natural death to a Kirsanov's bailiff when he had flogged peasants to death; or there would have been a court clerk taking bribes, for ever drunk, fleecing the peasants of their qunrter-roubles and handing overcoat and galoshes to his Excellency, a Kirsanov and governor of the province; and what is more, serfdom would not have received its death-blow, nor would there have been any of that underground activity beneath the heavy crust of authority, gnawing away the imperial ermine and the quilted dressinggown of the landowners.

It was fortunate that, side by side with men who found their

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gentlemanly pastimes in the kennels and the serfs' quarters, in violating and flogging at home and in cringing servility in Petersburg, there were some whose 'pastime' it was to tear the rod out of their hands and fight for liberty, not for licence in some remote field but for liberty of mind, for human life.

Whether this pastime of theirs was their serious business, their passion, they proved on the gallows and in prison . . . they proved it, too, when they came back after thirty years in Siberia .

If the type of the Decembrist has been reflected at all in literature, it is-faintly but with kindred features-in Chatsky.8

In his exasperated, jaundiced thoughts, his youthful indignation, one can detect a healthy impulse to action ; he feels what it is he is dissatisfied with, he beats his head against the stone wall of social prejudices and tests whether the prison bars are strong.

Chatsky was on the straight road for penal servitude, and if he survived the 14th December he certainly did not turn into a passively suffering or proudly contemptuous person. He would have been more likely to rush into some indignant extreme to become a Catholic, like Chaadayev, a Slav-hater or a Slavophil, but he would not in any case have abandoned his propaganda, which he did not abandon either in the drawing-room of Famusov or in his entrance-hall, and he \vould not have confronted himself with the thought that 'his hour had not yet come.' He had that restless turbulence which cannot endure to be out of harmony with what surrounds it, and must either break it or be broken. This is the ferment which makes stagnation in history impossible and clears away the scum on its flowing but dilatory wave.

If Chatsky had survived the generation that followed the 14th December in fear and trembling and grew up flattened out by terror, humiliated and crushed, he would have stretched across it a warm hand of greeting to us. With us Chatsky would have come back to his own soil. These rimes croisees across the generations arc not uncommon even in zoology. And it is my profound conviction that we shall meet Bazarov's children with sympathy and they us 'without exasperation and mockery.'

Chatsky could not have lived with his arms folded, neither in capricious peevishness nor in haughty self-deification ; he was not old enough to find satisfaction in grumbling sulkiness, nor young enough to enjoy the self-sufficiency of adolescence. The whole essence of the man lies in this restless ferment, this working yeast. But it is just this aspect that displeases Bazarov, it is H The h"ro of Woe from Wit. ( Tr.)

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that that incenses his proud stotctsm. 'Keep quiet in your comer if you have not the strength to do anything; it is sickening enough as it is without your whining,' he says; 'if you are beaten, well, stay beaten . . . . You have enough to eat; as for your weeping, that's only a thing the masters go in for' . . . and so on.

Pisarev was bound to speak in that way for Bazarov; the part he played required it.

It is hard not to play a part so long as it is liked. Take off Bazarov's uniform, make him forget the jargon he uses, let him be free to utter one word simply, without posing (he so hates affectation ! ) , let him for one minute forget the iron hand of duty, his artificially frigid language, his role of castigator, and within an hour we should understand each other in all the rest.

In their conceptions of good and evil the new generation were like the old. Their sympathies and antipathies, says Pisarev, were the same; what they desired is the same thing . . . at the bottom of their hearts the younger generation accept much that they reject in words. It would be quite easy then to come to terms. But until he is stripped of his ceremonial trappings Bazarov consistently demands from men who are crushed under every burden on earth, outraged, tortured, deprived both of sleep and of all possibility of action when awake, that they shall not speak of their pain; there is more than a smack of Arakcheyev about this.

What reason is there to deprive Lermontov, for instance, of his bitter complaint, his upbraidings of his own generation which sent a shock of horror through so many? Would the prison-house of Nicholas have been really any better if the gaolers had been as irritably nervous and carping as B�zarov and had suppressed those voices?

'But what are they for? What is the use of them?'

'Why does a stone make a sound when it is hit with a hammerJ'

'It cannot help it.'

'And why do these gentlemen suppose that men can suffer for whole generations without speech, complaint, indignation, cursing, protest? If complaint is not necessary for others, it is for those who complain; the expression of sorrow eases the pain.

"lhm," says Goethe, "gab ein Gott zu sagen, was er leidet." '

'But what has it to do with us? '

Nothing t o d o with you, perhaps, but perhaps it has something to do with others; but you must not lose sight of the fact that

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every generation lives for itself also. From the point of view of history it is a transition, but in relation to itself it is the goal, and it cannot, it ought not to endure without a murmur the afflictions that befall it, especially when it has not even the consolation which Israel had in the expectation of the Messiah, and has no idea that from the seed of the Onegins and the Rudins will be born a Bazarov. In reality what drives our young people to fury is that in our generation our demand for activity, our protest against the existing order of things was differently expressed from theirs, and that the motive of both was not ahvays and completely dependent on cold and hunger.

Is not this passion for uniformity another example of the same irritable spirit which has made of formality and routine the one thing of consequence and reduced military evolutions to the goose-step? That side of the Russian character is responsible for the development of Arakcheyevism, civil and military. Every personal, individual manifestation or deviation was regarded as disobedience, and excited persecution and incessant bullying.

Bazarov leaves no one in peace; he galls everyone with his haughtiness. Every word of his is a reprimand from a superior to a subordinate. There is no future for that.

'If,' says Pisarev, 'Bazarovism is the malady of our age, it will have to run its course.'

By all means. This malady is in place only until the end of the university course; like teething, it is quite unseemly in the grown-up.

The worst service Turgenev did Bazarov was in putting him to death by typhus because he did not know how to manage him.

That is an ultima ratio which no one can withstand ; had Bazarov escaped from typhus, he would certainly have developed out of Bazarovism, at any rate into a man of science, which in physiology he loved and prized, and which does not change in methods, whether frog or man, embryology or history, is its subject.

Bazarov drove every sort of prejudice out of his head, and even after that he remained an extremely uncultured man. He had heard something about poetry, something about art and, without troubling himself to think, abruptly passed sentence on a subject of which he knew nothing. This conceit is characteristic of us Russians in general ; it has its good points, such as intellectual daring, but in return for that it leads us at times into crude errors.

Science would have saved Bazarov; he 'vould have ceased to look down on people with profound and unconcealed contempt.

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Science even more than the Gospel teaches us humility. She cannot look down on anything, she does not know what superiority means, she despises nothing, never lies for the sake of a pose, and conceals nothing out of coquetry. She stops before the facts as an investigator, sometimes as a physician, never as an executioner, and still less with hostility and irony.

Science-! anyhow am not bound to keep some \vords hidden in the silence of the spirit-science is love, as Spinoza said of thought and cognisance.

L E T T E R 2

WHAT HAS BEEN leaves in history an imprint by means of which science sooner or later restores the past in its basic features. All that is lost is the accidental illumination, from one or another angle, under which it occurred. Apotheoses and calumnies, partialities and envies, all this is weathered and blown away.

The light footstep on the sand vanishes; the imprint which has force and insistence stamps itself on the rock and will be brought to light by the honest labourer.

Connections, degrf'es of kinship, tf'stators and heirs and their mutual rights, will all be revealed by the heraldry of science.

Only goddesses are born without predecessors, like Venus from the foam of the sea. Minerva, more intelligent, sprang from the ready head of Jupiter.

The Decembrists are our great fathers, the Bazarovs our prodigal sons.

The heritage we received from the Decembrists was the awakened feeling of human dignity, the striving for ind!>pendence, the hatred of slavery, the respect for Western Europe and for the Revolution, the faith in the possibility of an upheaval in Russia, the passionate desire to take part in it, our youth and the integrity of our energies.

All that has been recast and moulded into new forms, but the foundations are untouched.

\Vhat has our generation bequeathed to the coming one?

Nihilism.

Let us recall the course of affairs a little.

About the 1 840s our life began to force its way out more violently, like steam from under tightly shut valves. A scarcely perceptible change passed all over Russia, the change by which the doctor discerns, before he can fully account for it, that the malady has taken a turn for tht better, that the patient's

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strength, though very weak, is reviving-there is a different tone. Somewhere within, in the morally microscopic world, there is the breath of a different air, more irritant, but healthier.

Outwardly everything was death-like under the ice of Nicholas's government, but something was stirring in the consciousness and the conscience-a feeling of uneasiness, of dissatisfaction. The horror had lost its edge, and men were sick of the twilight of that dark reign.

I saw that change with my own eyes when I came back from banishment, first in Moscow and afterwards in Petersburg. But I saw it in the literary and learned circles. Another man,9 whose Baltic antipathy for the Russian movement places him beyond the suspicion of partiality, told not so long ago how, returning i n the 'forties t o the Petersburg aristocracy of the barracks after an absence of some years, he was puzzled a t the weakening of discipline. Aides-de-camp of the Tsar and colonels of the Guards were murmuring, were criticising the measures taken by the government, and were dissatisfied with Nicholas himself. He was so stupefied, distressed and alarmed for the future of the autocracy that in perplexity of spirit he felt, when dining with the aide-de-camp B., almost in the presence of Dubelt himself, tha t Nihilism had been born between the cheese and the pears.

He did not recognise the new-born baby, but the new-born baby was there. The machine screwed down by Nicholas had begun to give way; he gave the screw another turn and everyone felt it; some spoke, others kept silent, speech was forbidden ; but everyone understood that things were really going \\Tong, that everyone was distressed, and that this distress \Vould bring no good to anyone.

Laughter intervened in the affair; laughter, which is a bad companion for any religion, and autocracy is a religion. The abomination and desolation of the lower ranks of the officials had reached such a pitch that the government left them to be insulted. Nicholas, roaring with laughter10 in his box at the Mayor and his Derzhimorda, helped the propaganda, not guessing that after the approval of His Majesty the mockery would quickly go higher up the Table of Ranks.

It is difficult to apply Pisare\·'s rubrics to this period in all their sharpness. Everything in life consists of nuances, fluctuations, cross-currents, ebbing and flowing, and not of disconnected 9 H. here refers to a book by D. K. Schedo-Ferrotti (Baron F. I . Firks) : Etudes sur l'avenir de Ia Russie. Nihilisme en Russie ( Berlin and Brus·

sels, 1 86 7 ) , Chapter 2. ( A .S.)

I O Two contemporary diaries record that Nicholas was pleased with the play, Gogol's The Government Inspector. (R.)

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fragments. At what point did the men of will without knowledge cease to be and the men of knowledge without will begin?

Nature resolutely eludes classification, even classification by age. Lermontov was in years a contemporary of Belinsky; he was at the university when we were, but he died in the hopeless pessimism of the Pechorin tendency, against which the Slavophils and ourselves had already risen in opposition.

And by the way I have mentioned the Slavophils. Where are Khomyakov and his 'brethren' to be put) What had they-will without knowledge, or knowledge without will? Yet the position they filled was no trifling one in the modern development of Russia, and their thought left a deep imprint on the current of life of that time. Or in what levy of recruits shall we put Gogol, and by what standard? He had not knowledge ; whether he had will I don't know, but I doubt it; but he had genius, and his influence was colossal.

And so, leaving aside the lapides crescunt, plantae crescunt et vivunt . . . of Pisarev, let us pass on.

There were no secret societies, but the secret agreement of those who understood was very extensive. Circles consisting of men who had, more or less, felt the bear's claw of the government on their own persons kept a vigilant watch on their membership. Any action was impossible, even a word must be masked, but, to make up for this, great was the power of speech, not only of the printed but even more of the spoken word, less easily detected by the police.

Two batteries were quickly moved forward. Journalism became propaganda. At the head of it, in the full flush of his youthful powers, stood Belinsky. University chairs were transformed into pulpits, lectures into the preaching of humanisation; the personality of Granovsky, surrounded by young instructors, became more and more prominent.

Then suddenly another outburst of laughter. Strange laughter, frightening laughter, the laughter of hysteria, in which were mingled shame and pangs of conscience, and perhaps not the tears that follow laughter but the laughter that follows tears.

The absurd, monstrous, narrow world of Dead Souls could not endure it; it subsided and began to withdraw. And the preaching went on gathering strength . . . always the same preaching ; tears and laughter and books and speech and Hegel1 1 and history-all roused men to the consciousness of their condition, to a feeling of horror for serfdom and for their own lack of rights, 11 Hegel's dialectic is a fearful battering-ram in spite of its doublefacedness and its badge of Prussian Protestantism; it vaporised every-

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everything pointed them on to science and culture, to the purging of thought from all the litter of tradition, to the liberty of conscience and reason.

This period saw the first dawn of Nihilism-that most perfect freedom from all ready-made conceptions, from all the inherited obstructions and barriers which hinder the Western European mind from going forward, with the cannon-ball of history chained to its legs.

The silent work of the 'forties was cut short all at once. A time even blacker and more oppressive than the beginning of Nicholas's reign followed upon the Revolution of February.

Belinsky died before the beginning of the persecution. Granovsky envied him and wanted to leave Russia.

A dark, seven-years-long night fell upon Russia, and in it that cast of thought, the manner of reflecting that was called Nihilism, took shape, developed and gained a firm hold on the Russian mind.

Nihilism (I repeat what I said lately in The Bell) is logic without structure, it is science without dogmas, it is the unconditional submission to experience and the resigned acceptance of all consequences, whatever they may be, if they follow from observation, or are required by reason. Nihilism does not transform something into nothing, but shows that a nothing which has been taken for a something is an optical illusion, and that every truth, however it contradicts our fantastic imaginings, is more wholesome than they are, and is in any case what we are in duty bound to accept.

Whether the name is appropriate or not does not matter. We are accustomed to it; it is accepted by friend and foe, it has become a police label, it has become a denunciation, an insult with some, a word of praise with others. Of course, if by Nihilism \Ye are to understand destructive creativeness, that is, the turning of facts and thoughts into nothing, into barren scepticism, into haughty folding of the arms, into the despair which leads to inaction. then true Nihilists are the last people to be included in the definition, and one of the greatest Nihilists will be Turgenev, who flung the first stone at them, and another will be perhaps his favourite philosopher, Schopenhauer. When Belinsky, after listening to one of his friends, who explained at length that the spirit attains self-consciousness in man, answered indignantly: 'So, I am not conscious for my O\Yn sake, but for the thing that Pxistcd and dissipa ted eYerything that was a check on reason.

Moreo,·er, this was the time of Feuerbach, der kritischen Kritik.

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spirit's? . . . Why should I be its fool? I had better not think at all; what do I care for its consciousness? . . .' He was a Nihilist.

When Bakunin convicted the Berlin professors of being afraid of negation, and the Parisian revolutionaries of 1 848 of conservatism, he was a Nihilist in the fullest sense.

All these discriminations and jealous reservations lead as a rule to nothing but violent antagonism.

When the Petrashevsky group were sent to penal servitude for

'trying to overthrow all laws, human and divine, and to destroy the foundations of society,' in the words of their sentence, the terms of which were stolen from the inquisitorial notes of Liprandi, they were Nihilists.

Since then Nihilism has broadened out, has recognised itself more clearly, has to some extent become doctrinaire, has absorbed a great deal from science, and has produced leaders of enormous force and enormous talent. All that is beyond dispute.