My Past and Thoughts

With the means at the disposal of the new magazine, which was to be called La Tribune des Peuples, it might have been made the international Moniteur of movement and progress. Its success was the more certain because there is no international periodical at all; there are sometimes excellent articles in The Times and the Journal des Debats on special subjects, but they are occasional and disconnected. The A ugsburg Gazette would really be the most international organ if its black-and-yellow proclivities were not so glaringly conspicuous.

But it seems that all the good projects of the year 1 848 were doomed to be born in their seventh month and to die before

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cutting their first tooth. The magazine turned out poor and feeble-and died at the slaughter of the innocent papers after the 1 4th of June, 1 849.

"When everything was ready and standing by, a house was taken and fitted up with big tables covered with cloth and little sloping desks; a lean French litterateur was engaged to watch over international mistakes in spelling; a committee to edit it was set up of former Polish nuncios and senators, and Mickiewicz was appointed head to this with Chojecki as his assistant;all that was left to arrange was a triumphal opening ceremony, and what date could be more suitable for that than the anniversary of February the 24th, and what form could it more decently take than a supper?

The supper \Yas to take place at Chojecki's. When I arrived I found a good many guests already there, and among them scarcely a single Frenchman ; to make up for this other nationalities, from the Sicilians to the Croats, were well represented. I was really interested in one person only-Adam Mickiewicz; I had never seen him before. He was standing by the fireplace with his elbow on the marble mantelpiece. Anyone who had seen his portrait in the French edition of his works, taken, I believe, from the medallion executed by David d'Angers, could have recognised him at once in spite of the great change wrought by the years. Many thoughts and sufferings had passed over his face, which was rather Lithuanian than Polish. The whole impression made by his figure, by his head, his luxuriant grey hair and weary eyes, was suggestive of unhappiness endured, of acquaintance with spiritual pain, and of the exaltation of sorrow-he was the moulded likeness of the fate of Poland. The same impression was made on me later by the face of Worcell, though the features of the latter, while even !llore expressive of suffering, were more animated and gracious than those of Mickiewicz. It seemed as though Mickiewicz were held back, preoccupied, distracted by something: that 'something' was the strange mysticism into which he retreated further and further.

I went up to him and he began questioning me about Russia: his information was fragmentary ; he knew little of the literary movement after Pushkin, having stopped short at the time when he left Russia.1 In spite of his basic idea of a fraternal league of all the Slavonic peoples-a conception he was one of the first to I A. :\1ickiewicz had been in Russia in 1 824 and 1 825 to participate in the work of the secret patriotic society of the Philarets. He met and made friends with Pushkin, Ryleyev, Baryatynsky, Vyazemsky, Zhukovsky, Krylov, Griboedov and others. (A.S.)

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develop-he retained some hostility to Russia. And indeed it could hardly he otherwise after all the atrocities perpetrated by the Tsar and his satraps; besides, we were speaking at a time when the terrorism of Nicholas was at i ts very worst.

The first thing that surprised me disagreeably was the attitude to him of the Poles, his followers: they approached him as monks approach an abbot, with self-abasement and reverent awe; some of them kissed him on the shoulder. He must have been accustomed to these expressions of submissive affection, for he accepted them with great laisser aller. To be recognised by people of the same way of thinking, to have influence on them, to see their affection, is desired by everyone who is devoted, body and soul, to his convictions and lives by them ; but external signs of sympathy and respect I should not like to accept-they destroy equality and consequently freedom. Moreover, in that respect we can never catch up with bishops, heads of departments, and colonels of regiments.

Chojecki told me that at the supper he was going to propose a toast 'to the memory of the 24th of February, 1 848,' that Mickiewicz would respond with a speech in which he would expound his views and the spirit of the new magazine; he wished me as a Russian to reply to Mickiewicz. Not being accustomed to public speaking, especially without preparation, I declined his invitation, but promised to propose the heal th of Mickiewicz and to add a few words describing how I had first drunk his health in Moscow at a public dinner given to Granovsky in the year 1844. Khomyakov had raised his glass with the words, 'To the great Slavonic poet who is absent!' The name (which we dared not pronounce) was not needed; everyone raised his glass and, standing in silence, drank to the health of the exile. Chojecki was satisfied. Having thus arranged our extempore speeches, we sat down to the table. At the end of the supper, Chojecki proposed his toast. Mickiewicz got up and began speaking. His speech was elaborate and clever, and extremely adroit-that is to say Barbes2 and Louis-Napoleon could both have applauded it sincerely; it made me wince. As he developed his thought I began to feel painfully distressed and, that not the slightest doubt might be left, waited for one word, one name: it was not slow to appear!3

Mickiewicz worked up to the theme that democracy was now 2 Barbes, Armand ( 1 809-70), called the 'Bayard de Ia democratie,' was a people's representative in 1 848, imprisoned in 1 849, and sel free in 1 854. ( Tr.)

3 I.e., Louis-Napoleon. (A.S.)

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preparing to enter a new, open camp, at the head of which stood France; that it would once more rush to the liberation of all oppressed peoples under the same eagles, under the same standards, at the sight of which all tsars and powers had turned pale; and that it would once more be led forward by a member of that dynasty which had been crowned by the people, and, as it seemed, ordained by Providence itself to guide revolution by the well-ordered path of authority and victory.4

When he had finished a general silence followed, except for two or three exclamations of approval from his adherents.

Chojecki was very well aware of Mickiewicz's blunder and, wishing to efface the effect of the speech as quickly as possible, came up with a bottle, filled my glass and whispered to me:

'Well?'

'I am not going to say a word after that speech.'

'Please do say something.'

'Nothing will induce me.'

The silence continued ; some people kept their eyes fixed on their plates, others scrutinised their glasses, others fell into private conversation with their neighbours. Mickiewicz changed colour; he wanted to say something more, but a loud 'le demande la parole' put an end to the painful situation. Everyone turned to the man who had risen to his feet. A rather short man of about seventy, grey-haired, with a fine vigorous exterior, stood with a glass in his trembling hand; anger and indignation were apparent in his large, black eyes and excited face. It was Ramon de la Sagra.s

'To the 24th of February,' he said: 'that was the toast proposed by our host. Yes, to the 24th of. February, and to the downfall of every despotism whatever its name is, king or emperor, Bourbon or Bonaparte. I cannot share the views of our friend Mickiewicz 4 In 1 848 Adam Mickiewicz had shown himself to be a revolutionary and a democrat; but. like many other workers in the Polish nationailiberation movement, he was i{nbued with 1\'apoleonic illusions. which came out particula rly clearly after 10 December 1 849, when 1\'apoleon l's nephew, Louis Bonaparte. was elected President of France. M. saw in him the continuation of the work of ;\.'apolt>on I. which had been the work of the revolution. Although M. had beconw disappointed in Louisl\'apoleon even in 1 8-�9, IH' could not !'ven so fully overconw h is Illusions about 1\'apoleon I. (A.S.)

�. Ramon de Ia Sagra ( I i98-18i1 ) . a Spanish economist. took part in the n·,·olutionary movenwnt of 18-�8 in Frann'. and wrote advocating the views of Proudhon. In 1 8'>-1- hP r·eturn!'d to Spain. and was sPveral times electpd a mPmbPr of the CortPs. HC' was. of course. not SPventy in 1 848.

as Herzen mistakenly assumes. but fifty. ( Tr.)

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-he can look at things like a poet, and from his own point of view he is right; but I don't want his words to pass without protest in such a gathering' ; and so he went on and on, with all the fire of a Spaniard and the authority of an old man.

When he had finished, twenty glasses, mine among them, were held out to clink with his.

Mickiewicz tried to retrieve his position, and said a few words of explanation, but they were unsuccessful. De la Sagra did not give way. Everyone got up from the table and Mickiewicz weht away.

There could scarcely have been a worse omen for the new journal ; it succeeded in existing after a fashion till the 1 3th of June, and its disappearance was as little noticed as its existence.

There could be no unity in the editing of it. Mickiewicz had rolled up half his imperial banner use par la gloire. The others did not dare to unfurl theirs; hampered both by him and by the committee many of the contributors abandoned the journal at the end of the month; I never sent them a single line. If the police of Napoleon had been more intelligent the Tribune des Peuples would never have been prohibited for a few lines on the 1 3th of June. With Mickiewicz's name and devotion to Napoleon, with its revolutionary mysticism and its dream of a democracy in arms, with the Bonapartes at its head, the journal might have become a veritable treasure for the President, the clean organ of an unclean cause.

Catholicism, so alien to the Slavonic genius, has a destructive effect upon it. When the Bohemians no longer had the strength to resist Catholicism, they were crushed ; in the Poles Catholicism has developed that mystical exaltation which supports them perpetually in their world of phantoms. If they are not under the direct influence of the Jesuits, then instead of liberty they either invent some idol for themselves, or come under the influence of some visionary. Messianism, that mania of Wronski's, that delirium of Towjanski's, had turned the brains of hundreds of Poles, Mickiewicz himsel£6 among them. The worship of Napoleon 6 Chagrin at the defeat of 1 830-1 and the loss of hope in the liberation of Poland bred a mood of mysticism among the Polish emigrants and contributed to the rise of ideas of Messianism. Polish Messianism was the teaching of the peculiar role of 'martyred Poland' in the history of peoples, according to which the Polish-people-Messiah was redeeming and liberating all the other peoples by its sufferings and its struggle.

The representative of this doctrine was Joseph \Vronski. a mathematician and philosopher, the author of Mrssianism. From his idealistic system, which he called 'Messianistic,' \Vronski with the aid of the 'universal

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stands in the foreground of this insanity. Napoleon had clone nothing for them; he had no love for Poland, but he liked the Poles who shed their blood for him with the titanic, poetic courage displayed in their famous cavalry attack of Somma Sierra. In 1812 Napoleon said to Narbonne: 'I want a camp in Poland, not a forum. I will not permit either Warsaw or Moscow to open a club for demagogues'-and of this man the Poles made a military incarnation of God, setting him on a level with Vishnu and Christ.

Late one winter evening in 1 848 I was walking with one of the Polish followers of Mickiewicz along the Place Vendome.

When we reached the column the Pole took off his cap. 'Is it possible? . . .' I thought, hardly daring to believe in such stupidity, and meekly asked what was his reason for taking off his cap. The Pole pointed to the bronze emperor. How can we expect men to refrain from domineering or oppressing others

\vhen it wins so much devotion!

Mickiewicz's private life was dark; there was something unfortunate about it, something gloomy, some 'visitation of God.'

His wife was for a long time out of her mind. Towjanski recited incantations over her, and is said to have done her good ; this made a great impression on Mickiewicz, but traces of her illness remained . . . things went badly with them. The last years of the great poet, who outlived himself, were spent in gloom. He died in Turkey while taking part in an absurd attempt to organise a Cossack legion, which the Turkish government would not permit to be called Polish. Before his death he wrote a Latin ode to the honour and glory of Louis-Napoleon.

After this unsuccessful attempt to take part in the magazine I withdrew even more into a small circle of friends, enlarged by the arrival of new emigres. Formerly I had sometimes visited a mathematical formula' originated by himself deduced the idea of the unity of the Slavonic peoples. The :Wessianic-mystic mood overcame Mickiewicz, too, and induced his spiritual crisis in the 1 830s and the early 1 840s, when he joined the mystic sect of the adventurer Andrei Towjanski who came to Paris from Lithuania in 1 840 and gave out that he was a prophet. In one of his letters written in 1 841 Chopin, speaking of Towjanski as a clever rogue who could dull people's wits, grieves that M. has not seen through Towjanski. 1\I.'s religious and mystic ten·

dencies left their stamp on his work in the 1 830s and 1 840s and affected his life and activity for the worse. Yet even in the years of his spiritual crisis his revolutionary inclination had the upper hand and grew steadily stronger. He found inspiration in the revolution of 1 848 and was brought ideologically closer to it and to Polish revolutionary democracy. (A.S.)

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club, and I had participated in three or four banquets, that is I had eaten cold mutton and drunk sour wine, while I listened to Pierre Leroux or Father Cabet and joined in the 'I.Harseillaise.'

Now I was sick of that, too. With profound sorrow I watched and recorded the success of the forces of dissolution and the decline of the republic, of France, of Europe. From Russia came no gleam of light in the distance, no good news, no friendly greeting: people had given up writing to me; personal, intimate, family relations were suspended. Russia lay speechless, as though dead, covered with bruises, like an unfortunate peasant-woman at the feet of her master, beaten by his heavy fists. She was then entering upon those fearful five years from which she is at last emerging now that Nicholas7 is buried.

Those five years were for me, too, the worst time of my life; I have not now such riches to lose or such beliefs to be destroyed . . . .

. . . The cholera raged in Paris; the heavy air, the sunless heat produced a languor; the sight of the frightened, unhappy population and the rows of hearses which started racing each other as they drew near the cemeteries-all this corresponded with what was happening.

The victims of the pestilence fell near by, at one's side. My mother drove to St Cloud with a friend, a lady of five-andtwenty. When they were coming back in the evening, the lady felt rather unwell; my mother persuaded her to stay the night with us. At seven o'clock the next morning they came to tell me that she had cholera. I went in to see her, and was aghast. Not one feature was unchanged; she was still handsome ; but all the muscles of her face were drawn and contracted and dark shadows lay under her eyes. With great difficulty I succeeded in finding Rayer8 at the Institute, and brought him home with me.

After glancing at the sick woman, Rayer whispered to me:

'You can see for yourself what is to be done here.' He prescribed something and went away.

The sick woman called me and asked:

'What did the doctor say? He did tell you something, didn't he?'

'To send for your medicine.'

She took my hand, and her hand amazed me even more than her face: it had grown thin and angular as though she had been 7 Written in 1 856.

8 Rayer, P. F. 0., was a distinguished French physician and the author of numerous medical works. ( Tr.)

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through a month of serious illness since she had fallen sick : she fixed upon me a look that was full of suffering and horror and said:

'Tell me, for God's sake, what he said . . . is it that I am dying? . . . You are not afraid of me, are you?' she added.

I felt fearfully sorry for her at that moment; that frightful consciousness not only of death, but of the infectiousness of the d isease that was rapidly sapping her life, must have been intensely painful. Towards the morning she died.

I van Turgenev was about to leave Paris; the lease of his flat was up, and he came to me for a night. After dinner he complained of the suffocating heat; I told him that I had had a bath in the morning; in the evening he too went for a bath. When he came back he felt unwell, drank some soda-water with some wine and sugar in it, and went to bed. In the night he woke me.

'I am a lost man,' he said ; 'it's cholera.'

He really was suffering from sickness and spasms; fortunately he escaped with ten days' illness.

After burying her friend my mother had moved to the Ville d'Avray. When Turgenev was taken ill I sent Natalie and the children there and remained alone with him ; when he was a great deal better I moved there too.

On the morning of June the 12th Sazonov came to see me there.

He was in the greatest exaltation: he talked of the popular outbreak that was impending, of the certainty of its being successful, of the glory awaiting those who took part in it, and urgently pressed me to join in reaping the laurels. I told him that he knew my opinion of the present state of affairs-that it seemed to me stupid, without believing in it, to co-operate with people with whom one had hardly anything in common.

To this the enthusiastic agitator remarked that of course it was quieter and safer to stay at home and write sceptical articles while others were in the market-place championing the liberty of the world, the solidarity of peoples, and much else that was good.

A very vile emotion, but one that has led and will lead many men into great errors, and evPn crimes, impelled me to say:

'But what makes you imagine I am not going?'

'I concluded that from your words.'

'No: I said it was stupid, but I didn't say that I never do anything stupid.'

'That is just what I wanted! That's what I like you for! Well,

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it's no use losing time ; let us go to Paris. This evening the Germans and other refugees are meeting at nine o'clock; let us go to them first.'

'Where are they meeting?' I asked him in the train.

'In the Cafe Lamblin, in the Palais Royal.'

This was my first surprise.

'In the Cafe Lamblin?'

'That is where the "reds" usually meet.'

'That's just why I think that to-day they ought to have met somewhere else.'

'But they are all used to going there;'

'I suppose the beer is very good!'

In the cafe various habitues of the revolution were sJttmg with dignity at a dozen little tables, looking darkly and consequentially about them from under wide-brimmed felt hats and caps with tiny peaks. These were the perpetual suitors of the revolutionary Penelope, those inescapable actors who take pdrt in every popular demonstration and form its tableau, its background, and who are as menacing from afar as the paper dragons with which the Chinese wished to intimidate the English.

In the troubled times of social storms and reconstructions i n which states forsake their usual grooves for a long time, a new generation of people grows up who may be called the choristers of the revolution; grown on shifting, volcanic soil, nurtured i n an atmosphere o f alarm when work o f every kind is suspended, they become inured from their earliest years to an environment of political ferment-they like the theatrical side of it, its brilliant, pompous mis en scene. Just as to Nicholas marching drill was the most important part of the soldier's business, to them all those banquets, demonstrations, protests, gatherings, toasts, banners, are the most important part of the revolution.

Among them there are good, valiant people, sincerely devoted and ready to face a bullet; but for the most part they are very limited and extraordinarily pedantic. Immobile conservatives in everything revolutionary, they stop short at some programme and do not advance.

Dealing all their lives with a small number of political ideas, they only know their rhetorical side, so to speak, their sacerdotal vestments, that is the commonplaces which successively cut the same figure, a tour de role, like the ducks in the well known children's toy-in newspaper articles, in speeches at banquets and in parliamentary devices.

In addition to naive people and revolutionary doctrinaires, the

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unappreciated artists, unsuccessful literary men, students who did not complete their studies, briefless lawyers, actors without talent, persons of great vanity but small capa bility, with huge pretensions but no perseverance or power of work, all naturally drift into this milieu. The external authority which guides and pastures the human herd in a lump in ordinary times is weakened in times of revolution; left to themselves people do not know what to do. The younger generation is struck by the ease, the apparent ease, ·ith which celebrities float to the top i n times of revolution, and rushes into futile agitation; this inures the young people to violent excitements and destroys the habit of work. Life in the clubs and cafes is attractive, full of movement, flattering to vanity and free from restraint. One must not be left behind, there is no need to work: what is not done to-day may be done to-morrow, or may even not be done at all.

The choristers of the revolution, like the chorus in Greek tragedies, are further divided into two semi-choruses ; the botanical classification may be applied to them: some of them may be called cryptogamous and the others phanerogamous. Some of them become eternal conspirators, and several times change their lodgings and the shape of their beards. They mysteriously invite one to extraordinarily important interviews, at n ight if possible, or in some inconvenient place. Meeting their friends in public, they do not like saluting them with a bow, but greet them with a significant glance. Many of them keep their address a secret, never tell one what day they are going away, never say where they are going, write in cypher or invisible ink news which is plainly printed in printer's ink in the newspapers.

I was told by a Frenchman that in the days of Louis-Philippe, E., who had been mixed up in some political business, was in hiding in Paris. \Vith all its attractions such a life becomes a la longue \Yearisome and tedious. Delessert, a bon vivant and a rich man, was Police Prefect at that time; he served in the police not from necessity but for the love of it, and sometimes like a festive dinner. He and E. had many friends in common. One day 'between the pear and the cheese,' as the French say, one of them said to him:

'\Vhat a pity it is that you so persecute poor E. ! 'Ve are deprived of a capital talker, and he is obliged to hide like a criminal.'

'Upon my soul,' said Delessert, 'his case is completely forgotten! Why is he in hiding? '

His friend smiled ironically.

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'I shall try to convince him that he's behaving absurdly-and you, too.'

On reaching home he sent for one of his chief spies and asked him,

'Is E. in Paris?'

'Yes,' answered the spy.

'Is he in hiding?' asked Delessert.

'Yes,' answered the spy.

'Where?' asked Delessert.

The spy took out his notebook, looked in it, and read out E.'s address.

'Good ; then go to him early to-morrow morning and tell him that he need not be anxious; we are not looking for him and he can live peacefully at his flat.'

The spy carried out his orders exactly, and two hours after his visit E. mysteriously informed his friends that he was leaving Paris and would be in hiding in a remote town, because the Prefect had discovered where he had been hiding!

Just as conspirators try to conceal their secret with a transparent veil of mystery and an eloquent silence, so do the phanerogamous try to display and blurt out all that is in their hearts.

They are the permanent tribunes of the clubs and cafes; they are perpetually dissatisfied with everything, and fuss about everything; they tell about everything-even things that have not happened, while things that have happened they square and cube, like mountains on a relief map. One's eye is so used to seeing them that one involuntarily looks for them at every street row, at every demonstration, at every banquet.

. . . The spectacle of the Cafe Lamblin was still new to me; at that time I was not familiar with the back premises of the revolution. It is true that I had been about in Rome and in the Cafe delle Belle Arti and in the square; I had been in the Circolo Romano and in the Circolo Popolare; but the movement in Rome had not then that character of political garishness which particularly developed after the failures of 1 848. Ciceruacchio and his friends had a naivete of their own, their southern gesticulations which strike one as commonplace and their Italian phrases which seem to us to be rant; but they were in a period of youthful enthusiasm, they had not yet come to themselves after three centuries of sleep. ll popolano Ciceruacchio was not in the least a political agitator by trade; ht would have liked nothing better than to retire once more in peace to his little house in

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Strada Ripetta and to carry on his trade in wood and timber within his family-circle like a paterfamilias and free civis romanus.

The men surrounding him were free from that brand of vulgar, babbling pseudo-revolutionism, of that tare character which is so dismally common in France.

I need hardly say that in speaking of the cafe agitators and revolutionary lazzaroni I was not thinking of those mighty workers for the emancipation of humanity, those martyrs for the love of their fellow-creatures and fiery evangelists of independence whose words could not be suppressed by prison, exile, proscription or poverty--of the drivers, the motive powers of events, by whose blood, tears and words a new historical order is established. I was talking about the incrusted border covered with barren weeds, for which agitation itself is goal and reward, who like the process of national revolution for its own sake, as Chichikov's Petrushka9 liked the process of reading, or as Nicholas liked military drill.

There is nothing for reaction to rejoice at in this, for it is overgrown with worse burdocks and toadstools, not only on the borders but everywhere. In its ranks are whole multitudes of officials who tremble before their superiors, prying spies, volunteer assassins ready to fight on either side, officers of every repulsive species from the Prussian ;unker to the predatory French Algerian, from the guardsman to the page de chambre-and here we still have touched only on the secular side of the reaction, and have said nothing of the mendicant fraternity, the intriguing Jesuits, the priestly police, or the other members of the ranks of angels and archangels.

If there are among reactionaries any who resemble our dilettante revolutionaries, they are the courtiers employed for ceremonies, the men of exits and entrances, the people who are conspicuous at levees, christenings, royal weddings, coronations, and funerals, the people who exist for the uniform, for gold lace, who represent the rays and fragrance of power.

In the Cafe Lamblin, where the desperate citoyens were sitting over their petits verres and big glasses, I learned that they had no plan, that the movement had no real centre of momentum and no programme. Inspiration was to descend upon them as the Holy Ghost once descended upon the heads of the apostles. There was only one point on which all were agreed-to come to the meeting-place unarmed. After two hours of empty 9 A character in Gogol's Dead Souls. ( Tr.)

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chatter we went off to the office of the True Republic, agreeing to meet at eight o'clock next morning at the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, facing the Chateau d'Eau.

The editor was not at home: he had gone to the 'Montagnards'10 for instructions. About twenty people, for the most part Poles and Germans, were in the big, grimy, poorly lit and still more poorly furnished room which served the editorial board as an assembly hall and a committee room. Sazonov took a sheet of paper and began writing something; when he had written i t he read i t out to us: it was a protest in the name of the emigres of all nationalities against the occupation of Rome, and a declaration of their readiness to take part in the movement.

Those who wished to immortalise their names by associating them with the glorious morrow he invited to sign it. Almost all wished to immortalise their names, and signed. The editor came in, tired and dejected, trying to suggest to everyone that he knew a great deal but was bound to keep silent; I was convinced that he knew nothing at all.

'Citoyens,' said Thorez, 'Ia !11ontagne est en permanence.'

Well, who could doubt its success-en permanence! Sazonov gave the editor the protest of the democracy of Europe. The editor read it through and said:

'That's splendid, splendid! France thanks you, citoyens; but why the signatures? There are so few that if we are unsuccessful our enemies will vent all their anger upon you.'

Sazonov insisted that the signatures should remain; many agreed with him.

'I won't take the responsibility for it,' the editor objected;

'excuse me, I know better than you the people we have to deal with.'

With that he tore off the signatures and delivered the names of a dozen candidates for immortality to a holocaust in the candle, and the text he sent to the printer.

It "·as daybreak when we left the office ; groups of ragged boys and wretched, poorly dressed \vomen \Yere standing, sitting, and lying on the pavement near the various newspaper offices, waiting for the piles of newspapers-some to fold them, and others to run \vith them all over Paris. We walked out on to the boulevard: there was absolute stillness; now and then one came upon 1 0 The Jacohins were cal led Montag nards in I i93 h(•cause they occupied the highest seats in the Parlinment. In H H·S-9 the name was given to the supporters of Ledru-Rollin in the Constituent Assembly. ( A.S.)

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a patrol of National Guards, and police-sergeants strolled about looking slyly at us.

'How free from care the city sleeps,' said my comrade, 'with no foreboding of the storm that will wake it up to-morrow! '

'Here are those who keep vigil for u s all,' I said t o him, pointing upwards-that is, to a lighted window of the Maison d'Or.

'And very appropriately, too. Let us go in and have some absinthe; my stomach is a bit upset.'

'And I feel empty; it wouldn't be amiss to have some supper too. How they eat in the Capitole I don't know, but in the Conciergerie the food is abominable.'

From the bones left after our meal of cold turkey no one could have guessed either that cholera was raging in Paris, or that in two hours' time we were going to change the destinies of Europe.

We ate at the Maison d'Or as Napoleon slept before Austerlitz.

Between eight and nine o'clock, when we reached the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, numerous groups of people were already standing there, evidently impatient to know what they were to do; their faces showed perplexity, but at the same time something in the peculiar look of the groups manifested great exasperation. Had those people found real leaders the day would not have ended in a farce.

There was a minute when it seemed to me that something was really going to happen. A gentleman rode on horseback rather slowly down the boulevard. He was recognised as one of the ministers (Lacroix), who probably was having a ride so early not for the sake of fresh air alone. He was surrounded by a shouting crowd, \vho pulled him off his horse, tore his coat and then let him go-that is, another group rescued him and escorted him away. The crowd grew; by ten o'clock there may have been twenty-five thousand people. No one we spoke to, no one we questioned, knew anything. Chersosi, a carbonaro of old days assured us that the banlicuc was coming to the Arc de Triomphe with a shout of 'Vivc la Republiquc!'

'Above all,' the elders of the democracy repeated again, 'be unarmed, or you will spoil the character of the affair-the sovereign people must show the National Assembly its will peacefully and solemnly in order to give the enemy no occasiOn for calumny.'

At last columns were formed; we foreigners made up an honorary phalanx immediately behind thP leaders, among whom were E. Arago in the uniform of a colonel, Bastide, a former minister, and other celebrities of 1 848. We moved down the

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boulevard, voicing various cries and singing the Marseillaise.

One who has not heard the Marseillaise, sung by thousands of voices in that state of nervous excitement and irresolution which is inevitable before certain conflict, can hardly realise the overwhelming effect of the revolutionary hymn.

At that minute there was really something grand about the demonstration. As we slowly moved down the boulevards all the windows were thrown open; ladies and children crowded a t them and came out o n t o the balconies; the gloomy, alarmed faces of their husbands, the fathers and proprietors, looked out from behind them, not observing that in the fourth storeys and attics other heads, those of poor seamstresses and working girls, were thrust out-they waved handkerchiefs, nodded and greeted us. From time to time, as we passed by the houses of well known people, various shouts were uttered.

In this way we rE'ached the point where the Rue de Ia Paix joins the boulevards; it was closed by a squad of the Vincennes Chasseurs, and when our column came up to it the chasseurs suddenly moved apart like the scenery in a theatre, and Changarnier,11 mounted upon a small horse, galloped up at the head of a squadron of dragoons. With no summons to the crowd to disperse, with no beat of drum or other formalities prescribed by law, he threw the foremost ranks into confusion, cut them off from the others and, deploying the dragoons in two directions ordered them to clear the street in quick time. The dragoons in a frenzy fell to riding down people, striking them with the flat of their swords and using the edge at the slightest resistance. I hardly had time to take in what was happening when I found myself nose to nose with a horse which was almost snorting in my face, and a dragoon swearing likewise in my face and threatening to give me one with the flat if I did not move aside. I retreated to the right, and in an instant was carried away by the crowd and squeezed against the railings of the Rue Basse des Remparts. Of our rank the only one left beside me was Mi.iller

Stri.ibing. Meanwhile the dragoons were pressing back the foremost ranks with their horses, and people who had no room to get away were thrust back upon us. Arago leaped down into the Rue Basse des Remparts, slipped and dislocated his leg; Stri.ibing and I jumped down after him. We looked at each other in a frenzy of indignation; Stri.ibing turned round and shouted loudly: 'Aux 11 Changarnier, Nicolas ( 1 793-1 877), a prominent politician and general, was exiled at the coup d'etat of 1 85 1 , but lived to serve in the Franco

Prussian ·war of 1 870. ( Tr.)

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armes! Auz armes/' A man in a workman's blouse caught him by the collar, shoved him out of the way and said:

'Have you gone mad? Look there! '

Thickly bristling bayonets were moving down the street-the Chaussee d'Antin it must have been.

'Get away before they hear you and cut off all escape. All is lost, all ! ' he added, clenching his fist; he hummed a tune as though there was nothing the matter, and walked rapidly away.

'We made our way to the Place de la Concorde. In the Champs

Elysees there was not a single squad from the banlieue; why, Chersosi must have knO\vn that there was not. It had been a diplomatic lie to save the situation, and i t would perhaps have been the destruction of anyone who had believed i t.

The shamelessness of attacking unarmed people aroused great resentment. If anything really had been prepared, had there been leaders, nothing would have been easier than for fighting to have begun in earnest. Instead of showing itself in its full strength the Montagne, on hearing how ludicrously the sovereign people had been dispersed by horses, hid itself behind a cloud. Ledru-Rollin carried on negotiations with Guinard.12

Guinard, the artillery commander of the National Guard, wanted to join the movement, wanted to give men, agreed to give cannon, but would not on any consideration give ammunition-he seems to have wished to act by the moral influence of the guns; Forestier13 was doing the same with his legion.

Whether this helped them much we saw by the Versailles trial.14 Everyone wanted to do something, but no one dared; the most foresight was shown by some young men who hoped for a new order-they bespoke themselves prefects' uniforms, which they declined to take after the failure of the movement, and the tailor was obliged to hang them up for sale.

When the hurriedly rigged-up government was installed at the Arts et Nletiers the workmen, after walking about the streets with inquiring faces and finding neither advice nor leadership, 1 2 Guinard. Aug-uste-Joseph (born 1 799) , had been one of the first to proclaim thP republic in Fehru<� ry \ 848, and at the head of the 8th Legion had occupied the Hotel de Ville. (Tr.) l:l Forestier, Henri-Joseph ( born 1 78 7 ) , was a painter of merit. He was colow•l of the 8th Legion of the National Guard. ( Tr. ) 1 1 Aftpr th(' crushing of the dC'monstration of 1 3 June 1 849, in Paris, and of a series of manifestations in the provinces. the government of Odilon I3arrot dPprived thJrty-thre(' Montagnards of their status as deputies. declared them to he enPmies of the state and delivered them over for tria l . Those who had emigrated were tried in ab5entia. (A.S.)

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went horne, convinced once more of the bankruptcy of the Montagnard fathers of the country: perhaps they gulped down their tears like the man who said to us, 'All is lost! '-or perhaps laughed in their sleeves at the way the Montagne had been tousled.

But the dilatoriness of Ledru-Rollin, the pedantry of Guinard

-these wen• the external causes of the failure, and were just as a propos as are decisive characters and fortunate circumstances when they are needed. The internal cause was the poverty of the republican idea in which the movement originated. Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the vvorld for yearsmay even, like Christ, appear after death once or twice to their devotees; but it is hard for them ever again to lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of a man, or gain possession only of incomplete people. If the Montagne had been victorious on the 1 3th of June, what would it have done? There was nothing new they could call their own. It would have been a photograph in black and white of the grim, glO\ving Rembrandt or Salvator Rosa picture of 1 793 without the Jacobins, without the war, without even the naive guillotine . . . .

After the 1 3th of June [ 1 849] and the attempted rising at Lyons, arrests began. The mayor came to us with the police at Ville d'Avray to look for Karl Blind15 and Arnold Ruge; some of our acquaintances were seized. The Conciergerie was full to overflowing. In one small room there were as many as sixty men; in the middle stood a large slop-bucket, which was emptied once in the twenty-four hours-and all this in civilised Paris, with the cholera ;aging. Having not the least desire to spend some two months among those comforts, fed on rotten beans and putrid meat, I got a passport from a Moldo-Wallachian and went to Geneva. 16

15 Blind, Karl ( 1 826-1 907) , a writer and revolutionary, was for the part he took in the insurrections in South Germany sentenced to eight years'

imprisonment. but was rescued by the mob. He settled in England, where he continued journalistic and propaganda work up to the time of his death. ( Tr.)

16 How well founded my apprehensions were was shown by a police search of my mother's house at Ville d'Avray two days after my departure. They seized all the papers, even the correspondence of her maid with my cook. I thought it inopportune to publish my account of the 1 3th of June at the time.

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lrt Gerteva witlz

the Exiles of 1 848

THERE WAS A TIME when in a fit of irritation and bitter mirth I intended to vHite a pamphlet in the style of Grandville's! illustrations: Les refugies peints par eux-memes. I am glad I did not do it. !\'ow I look at things more calmly and I am less moved to laughter and indignation. Besides, exile is both lasting too long and is weighing too heavily on people . . . .

Nevertheless I do say even now that exile, not undertaken

•vith any definite object, but forced upon men by the triumph of the opposing party, checks development and draws men away from the activities of life into the domain of phantasy. Leaving their native land with concealed anger, with the continual thought of going back to it once more on the morrow, men do not move forwards but are continual ly thrown back upon the past; hope prevents them from settling down to any permanent work; irritation and trivial but exasperated disputes prevent their escaping from the familiar circle of questions, thoughts and memories which make up an oppressive, binding tradition. Men in general, and especially men in an exceptional position, have such a passion for formalism, for the guild spirit, for looking their part, that they immediately fall into a professional groove and acquire a doctrinaire stamp.

All emigres, cut off from the l iving environment to which they have belonged, shut their eyes to avoid seeing b itter truths, and grow more and more acclimatised to a closed, fantastic circle consisting of inert memot·ies and hopes that can never be realised.

If we add to this an a loofness from all who are not exiles and 1 Grandville, Jean Ignace Isidore ( 1 803-47) , was one of the most celebrated book-illustrators of his time. Pt•rhaps his most famous book is Les animaur pPints par Pur-memes. He was deeply interested in animals, insects, and fishes, and d rPw them wonderfully. He edited La Caricature, in which all the most eminent people of his time in Paris are depicted.

He died insane. ( Tr.)

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an element of exasperation, suspiciOn, exclusiveness and jealousy, this new, stiff-necked Israel becomes perfectly comprehensible.

The exiles of 1 849 did not yet believe in the permanence of their enemies' triumph; the intoxication of their recent successes had not yet passed off, the applause and songs of the exultant people were still ringing in their ears. They firmly believed that their defeat was a momentary reverse, and did not move their clothes from their trunks to a wardrobe. Meamvhile Paris was under police supervision, Rome had fallen under the onslaught of the French,2 the brother of the Prussian King was brutally triumphing in Baden,3 and Paskevich in the Russian style had outwitted Gorgei4 in Hungary by bribes and promises. Geneva was full to overflowing with refugees; it became the Coblenz5 of the revolution of 1 848. There were Italians from all parts; Frenchmen escaping from the Bauchart6 inquiry and from the Versailles trial; Baden militiamen, who entered Geneva marching in regular formation with their officers and with Gustav Struve; men who had taken part in the rising of Vienna; Bohemians and Poles from Posen and Galicia. All these people were crowded together between the Hotel des Bergues and the Cafe de la Poste. The more sensible of them began to guess that this exile would not be over soon, talked of America, and went away. With the majority it was just the opposite, especially with the French who, true to their temperament, were in daily expectation of the death of Napoleon and the birth of a republic-2 French troops under General Oudinot entered Rome on 3rd July, 1849.

(A.S.)

3 In 1 848 there was an insurrection in Baden, headed by Struve and Hecker, which aimed at establishing a republic. The troops sided with the insurgents, the Grand Duke fled, and in May 1 848 a Constituent Assembly was called. After several battles the Grand Duke was reinstated by Prussian aid in July of the same year. ( Tr. ) 4 Gorgei, Arthur ( 1 8 1 8- 1 916), Commander-in-Chief of the Hungarian forces in 1848, was victorious over the Austrians in the spring of that year, but was defeated early in August by the Russian general, Paskevich, and on the 1 3th of that month surrendered the Hungarian army unconditionally to Rudiger, another Russian general. He was accused of treachery. ( T r.)

5 Coblenz was one of the chief centres to which the emigres of the great French Revolution flocked from 1 790 onwards. ( Tr. ) 6 The Commission of Inquiry was presided over by Odilon Barrot; the report, drawn up by one Bauchart, is described as a 'monument imphissable de mauvaise foi et de basse fureur.' (Tr. )

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some looking for a republic both democratic and socialistic, others for one that should be democratic and not at all socialistic.

A few days after my arrival, as I was walking in Les Paquis, I met an elderly gentleman who looked like a Russian village priest, wearing a low, broad-brimmed hat and a black white overcoat, and walking along with a sort of priestly unction; beside him walked a man of terrific dimensions, who looked as though he had been casually put together of huge chunks of human flesh. F. Kapp,7 the young writer, was with me.

'Don't you know them ?' he asked me.

'No; but, if I 'm not mistaken, it must be Noah or Lot out for a walk with Adam, who has put on a badly cut overcoat instead of his fig-leaves.'

'They are Struve and Heinzen,' he answered, laughing;

'would you like to make their acquaintance?'

'Very much.'

He introduced me.

The conversation was trivial. Struve was on his way home, and invited us to come in ; so we went with him. His small lodging was crowded with people from Baden. A tall woman, very good-looking from a distance, with a mass of luxuriant hair flowing loose in an original fashion, was sitting in the midst of them; this was his wife, the celebrated Amalie Struve.

Struve's face made a strange impression on me from the very first; it expressed that moral rigidity which fanaticism gives to bigots and schismatics. Looking at his strong, narrow forehead, at the untroubled expression of his eyes, at his uncombed beard, his slightly grizzled hair, and his whole figure, I could have fancied that this was either a fanatical pastor of the army of Gustavus Adolphus who had forgotten to die, or a Taborite8

preaching repentance and communion in both kinds. There was a surly coarseness about the appearance of Heinzen,9 that 7 Kapp, Friedrich ( 1 820--84), a German historian, after the revolution of 1 848 went to New York, but returned to Berlin in 1 870, and became a Liberal member of the Reichstag. ( Tr.)

8 The more thoroughgoing of the followers of John Huss were called Taborites, from their headquarters at Mt. Tabor in Bohemia. ( Tr.) 9 Heinzen, Karl Peter ( 1 827-80) , wrote for the Leipzige Allgemeine Zeitung and the Rheinische Zeitung, and his articles led to the suppression of these two papers. He published an attack on the government, 'Die preussische Bureaukratie,' for which he was prosecuted. In 1 848 he was one of the leaders of the Baden revolution. Later on he escaped to America, where he edited The Pioneer. ( Tr.)

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Sobakevich10 of the German revolution; full-blooded and clumsy, he looked out angrily from under his brows, and was sparing of words. He wrote later on that it would be sufficient to massacre two millions of the inhabitants of the globe and the cause of revolution would go swimmingly. Anybody who had once seen him would not be surprised at his writing this.

I cannot refrain from relating an extremely funny incident which happened to me in connection with this cannibalistic project. There was, and indeed still is, living in Geneva a Dr R., one of the most good-natured men in the world and one of the most constant and Platonic lovers of the revolution, the friend of all the refugees; he doctored them gratis as well as giving them food and drink. However early one might arrive at the Cafe de la Paste, the Doctor would already be there and already reading his third or fourth newspaper; he would beckon one mysteriously and murmur in one's ear:

'I fancy it will be a hot day in Paris to-day.'

'Why so?'

'I can't tell you from whom I heard it, but only that it was a man closely connected \Vith Ledru-Rollin; he was here on his way through . . . .'

'Why, you were expecting something yesterday and the day before yesterday too, weren't you, my dear Doctor?'

'Well, what of that? Stadt Rom war nicht in einem Tage gebaut.'

So it was to him as a friend of Heinzen's that I appealed in the very same cafe when the latter published his philanthropic programme.

'Why,' I said to him, 'does your friend write such pernicious nonsense? The reaction is making an outcry, and indeed it has every reason to: he's a regular ;\iarat in a German setting! And how can one ask for two m illion heads?'

R. was confused, but did not like to give up his friend.

"ListPn,' he said at last; 'you ha,-e lost sight of one fact, perhaps: Heinzen is speaking of the v..lwle human race; in that number there would be at least tZL'o hundred thousand Chinese.'

'Oh, \Yell, that's a different matter; why spare them?' I answered and for a long time afterwards I could never think of this mitigating consideration without bursting into insane laughter.

Two days aftPr our meeting in Les Paquis, the gan;on of the Hotel des Bergues, ,..-here I was staying, ran up to my room and announced with an air of importance :

10 A character in Dead Souls hy K \'. Gogo!. (A.S.)

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'General Struve and his adjutants.'

I imagined either that someone had sent the gar�on up as a joke, or that he had made some blunder; but the door opened and-Mit bediichtigem Schritt

Gustav Struve trill . . . u

and with him four gentlemen: two were in the military uniform worn in those days by German Freisclziirler,12 and had in addition red armlets adorned with various emblems. Struve presented his suite to me, democratically referring to them as

'brothers in exile.' I learnt with pleasure that one of them, a young man of twenty, who looked like a Bursch who had recently emerged from being a 'Fuchs,'13 was already successfully occupying the post of Minister of Home Affairs per interim.

Struve at once began instructing me in his theory of the seven scourges, der sieben Geisseln-Popes, priests, kings, soldiers, bankers, etc.-and of the establishment of some new democratic, revolutionary religion. I remarked that, if it depended upon us whether to found a new religion or not, it would be better not to found one, but to leave it to the \Vill of God, since from the very nature of the affa ir it was more His concern. We argued, Struve made some remark about the W eltseele; I observed that, in spite of Schelling's having so clearly defined the world-soul by calling it das Schwebende, I found great difficulty in grasping it. He jumped up from his chair and, coming as close to me as possible, with the words, 'Excuse me, allow me,' began playing on my head with his fingers, pressing it \Vith them, as though my skull had been composed of the keyboard of a concertina. 'Yes, indeed,' he commented, addressing his four brothers in exile,

'Burger Her::.en hat kein, aber auch gar kein Organ de1 Venera::.ion!' All were satisfied with the lack of the 'bump of reverence' in me, and so was I .

Hereupon h e informed me that h e was a great phrenologist, and had not only written a book on Gall's14 system but had even 1 1 A pi!rilphrilse of two lines from SchiiiPr's The Glove: Und him•in mit brdiichtigem Schriu

F. in Lowr trill . . . . (A.S. )

1 2 VolunlePrs. (R.)

!3 U nc!Prgra(hwtt•s i n tlwir first )"Pilr werP cillled 'foxps' in GPrmiln uni·

YPrsitiPs. ( Tr. )

14 Gi!ll, Frilnz Joseph ( I i58- 1 828 ) , illl Austrian doctor, the disco\·erer of phrPnology. ( A .S. )

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selected his Amalie from it, after first feeling her skull. He assured me that the bump of the passions was almost completely absent in her, and that the back part of the skull where they are located was almost flat. On these grounds, sufficient for a divorce, he married her.

Struve was a very queer fish: he ate nothing but Lenten food, with the addition of milk, drank no wine, and kept his Amalie on a similar diet. He thought that this was not enough, and he went every day to bathe with her in the Arve, the water of which scarcely reaches a temperature of eight degrees in the middle of summer, since it flows down from the mountains so swiftly that it has not time to get warm.

Later on, it often happened that we talked of vegetarianism. I raised the usual objections: the structure of the teeth, the great loss of energy in the assimilation of vegetable fibre, and the lower development of the brain in herbivorous animals. He listened blandly without losing his temper, but stuck to his opinion. In conclusion, apparently wishing to impress me, he said:

'Do you know that a man always nourished on vegetable food so purifies his body as to be quite free from smell after death?'

'That's very pleasant,' I replied ; 'but what advantage will that be to me? I won't be sniffing myself after death.'

Struve did not even smile, but said to me with serene conviction:

'You will speak very differently one day!'

'When my bump of reverence develops,' I added.

At the end of 1 849 Struve sent me the calendar he had newly devised for 'free' Germany. The days, the months, everything had been translated into an ancient German jargon difficult to understand ; instead of saints' days, every day was dedicated to the memory of two celebrities-Washington and Lafayette, for instance; but to make up for this every tenth day was devoted to the memory of the enemies of mankind-Nicholas and Metternich, for instance. The holidays were the days when remembrance fell upon particularly great men, such as Luther, Columbus and so on. In this calendar Struve had gallantly replaced the twenty-fifth of December, the birth of Christ, by the festival of Amalie!

Meeting me in the street one day, he said among other things that there ought to be published in Geneva a journal common to all the exiles, in three languages, which would carry on the struggle against the 'seven scourges' and maintain the 'sacred

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fire' of the peoples that were now crushed by reaction. I answered that of course it would be a good thing.

The publishing of papers was at that time an epidemic disease: every two or three weeks new schemes were started, specimen copies appeared, prospectuses were sent about, then two or three numbers would come out-and it would all disappear without a trace. People who were incapable of anything none the less considered themselves competent to edit a paper, scraped together a hundred francs or so, and spent them on the first and last issue. Struve's intention, therefore, did not surprise me at all; but I was surprised, very much so, by his calling upon me at seven o'clock the next morning. I thought some misfortune had happened, but Struve, after calmly sitting down, brought a sheet of paper out of his pocket and said, as he prepared to read it: 'Burger, since you and I agreed yesterday on the need to publish a magazine, I have come to read you the prospectus of it.'

When he had read it he informed me that he was going to l\1azzini and many others to invite them to meet at Heinzen's for a conference. I went to Heinzen's too: he was sitting fiercely at the table, holding a manuscript in one hug!"' paw; the other he held out to me, muttering thickly, 'Bii.rgcr, Plat::J'

Some eight people, French and German, were present. Some representative of the people in the French legislative Assembly was making an estimate of the costs, and writing something in slanting lines. "When Mazzini came in Struve proposed reading the prospectus that had been written by Heinzen. Heinzen cleared his throat and began reading it in German, although the only language common to us all was French.

Since they had not the faintest shadow of a new idea, the prospectus was only the thousandth variation of those democratic lucubrations which constitute the same sort of rhetorical exercise on revolutionary texts as church sPrmons are on those of the Bible. Indirectly anticipating a charge of socialism, Heinzen said that the democratic republic would of itself solve the economic question to the general satisfaction. The man who did not flinch from a demand for two million heads was afraid that his organ would be considered communistic.

I urged some objPction to this when the reading was finished, hut from his abrupt replies, from Struve's intervention and from the gf'stures of the French deputy I perceived that we had been invited to the council to accept Heinzen's and Struve's prospectus, not at all to discuss i t; it was in complete agreement, by

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the way, with the theory of Elpidifor Antiokhovich Zurov, the military governor of Novgorod.

Mazzini listened with a melancholy air, but agreed, and was almost the first to subscribe for two or three shares. 'Si omnes consentiunt ego non dissentio,' I thought a La Grimm in Schiller's Robbers, and I too subscribed.

But the subscribers appeared to be too few; however often the French deputy calculated and verified, the sum subscribed was insufficient.

'Gentlemen,' said Mazzini, 'I have found a means of overcoming this difficulty: publish the journal at first only in French and German; as for the Italian translation, I shall print any remarkable articles in my ltalia del Popolo-that will save you onethird of the expenses.'

To be sure! what could be better! '

Mazzini's proposition was accepted by everybody and h e grew more cheerful. I was awfully amused, and very eager to show him that I had seen the trick he had played. I went up to him and watched for a moment when no one •vas near us; then I said:

'How capitally you got out of the journal ! '

'Well,' h e observed, 'an Italian part i s really superfluous, you know.'

'So are the two others ! ' I added.

A smile glided over his face and vanished as quickly as though it had nPver been there.

This was the second time that I saw him. Mazzini, who knev•.r of my stay in Rome, had wanted to make my acquaintance. One morning I \Wnt with L. Spinil" to spe him at Les Paqu is.

When we went in Mazzini was sitting dejectedly at the table listening to what was being said by a rather tall, graceful, handsome young man with fair hair. This was Garibaldi's bold companion-in-arms, the defender of Vascello, the leader of the Roman legionaries, Giacomo Medici. Another young man with an expression of melancholy preoccupation sat plunged in thought, paying no attention to what was going forward-this was Mazzini's colleague in the triumvirate, Marco Aurelio Saffi.I6

I a Spini, Leopold. an emigre who had taken part in the Italian movement for national liberation. (A.S.)

t r. Saffi was instructor in Italian lan�ua�e and literature at Oxford University from 1 853-60. ( A .S.)

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Mazzini got up and, looking me straight in the face with his piercing eyes, held out both hands in a friendly way. Even in Italy a head so severely classical, so elegant in its gravity, is rarely to be met with. At moments the expression of his face was harshly austere, but it quickly grew soft and serene. An active, concentrated intelligence sparkled in his melancholy eyes; there was an infinity of persistence and strength of will in them and in the lines on his brow. All his features showed traces of long years of anxiety, of sleepless nights, of storms endured, of powerful passions, or rather of one powerful passion, and also some element of fanaticism-perhaps of asceticism.

Mazzini is very simple and amiable in his manner, but the habit of ruling is apparent, especially in argument; he can scarcely conceal his annoyance at contradiction, and sometimes he does not conceal it. He knows his strength, and genuinely despises all the external signs of a dictatorial setting. His popularitY was at that time immense. In his little room, with the everlasting cigar in his mouth, Mazzini at Geneva, like the Pope in the old days at Avignon, held in his hands the threads that like a spiritual telegraph system brought him into living communication with the whole peninsula. He knew every heartthrob of his party, felt the slightest tremor in it, promptly responded to everyone, and, with an indefatigability that was striking, gave gem•ral guidance to everything and everybody.

A fanatic and at the same time an organiser, he covered Italy with a network of secret societies connected together and devoted to one object. Tlwse societies branched off into arteries that defied detPction, split up, grew smaller and smaller, and vanished in the Apennines and the Alps, in the regal palazzi of aristocrats and the dark alleys of Italian towns into which no police can penetrate. Village -priests, diligence guards, the principi of Lombardy, smugglers, innkeepers, women, bandits, all

\vere made use of, all were links in the chain that was in contact with him and was subject to h im.

From the times of Menotti17 and the brothers Bandiera,1s 17 The 'Bolognese insurrection' lwgan on 2nd FE'bruary, 1 83 1 , at the house of Ciro i\fpnotti at Modcnil. There thirty-one conspirators surprised by the ducal troops held the soldiers at bay for hours. (Tr.) IH Attil io and Emilio Bandiera. two young Venetians, lieutenants in the Austrian navy, attempted an insurrection in 1 8-B. On i ts failure they escaped to Corfu; but, misled by false information, landed in Calabria with twenty companions, and wt>re caught and shot at Cosenza in July of the same year. ThPir letters to Mazzini in London had been opened by the English authorities, who then rPsealed them and sent the informa-

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enthusiastic youths, vigorous men of the people, vigorous aristocrats, sometimes old men, have come forward in constant succession . . . and follow the lead of Mazzini, who had been consecrated by the elder Buonarrotti, the comrade and friend of Gracchus Babeu£,19 and advance to the unequal combat, disdainful of chains and the block, and sometimes at the point of death adding to the shout of 'Viva l'ltalia!' that of 'Evviva :1/a:;:;ini!'

There has never been such a revolutionary organisation anywhere, and it \vould hardly be possible anywhere but in Italy, unless in Spain. Now it has lost its former unity and its former strength ; it is exhausted by the ten years of martyrdom, it is dying from loss of blood and worn out with waiting; its ideas have aged ; and yet \vhat outbursts, what heroic examples, there are still:

Pianori, Orsini, Pisacane!

I do not think that by the death of one man a country could be raised from such decline as France has fallen into now.20

I do not seek to justify the plan on which Pisacane made his landing;21 it seemed to me as ill-timed as the two previous attempts at Milan: but that is not the point. I only mean to speak here of the way in which it was actually carried out.

These men overwhelm one with the grandeur of their tragic poetry, of their frightening strength, and silence all blame and criticism. I know no instance of greater heroism, among either the Greeks or the Romans, among the martyrs of Christianity or of the Reformation!

A handful of vigorous men sail to the luckless shore of Naples, serving as a challenge, an example, a living witness that all is not yet dead in the people. The handsome young leader is the first to fall, with the flag in his hand-and after him the rest fall, or worse still find themselves in the clutches of the Bourbon.

tion so gained to the Austrian gO\·ernment. Sir James Graham and Lord Aberdeen were principally responsible. ( Tr.)

19 Babeuf, Fran.;ois Noel, nicknamed Gracchus ( 1 760-9i), conspired against the Directoire, was condemned to death, but stabbed himself. He advocated a form of communism called babouvisme. ( Tr.) 20 The reference is to Orsini"s attempt to assassinate Napoleon III on 14th January, 1 858. ( Tr. )

21 'In 185 7 Pisacane seized the steamer Cagliari, freed the political prisoners on the island of Ponza, and with a small force effected a landing on the Neapolitan coast at Sapri, hoping to join others of the republican party: Met by 0\·en,·helming numbers, he fell at the head of his men, most of them falling with him.' ( Tr.)

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The death of Pisacane and the death of Orsini were two fearful thunderclaps in a sultry night. Latin Europe shuddered--the wild boar,22 terrified, retreated to Caserta and hid himself in his lair.

Pale with horror, the man who was driving France in her funeral hearse to the graveyard swayed on the box.

The Italian refugees v\·ere not superior to the other refugees either in talent or education. The greater number of them knew nothing, indeed, but their own poets and their own history. But they were free from the stereotyped, commonplace stamp of the French rank and file democrats (who argue, declaim, exult and feel exactly the same thing in herds, and express their feelings in an identical manner) , as well as from the unpolished, coarse, pothouse, state-educated-seminarist character which distinguishes the German emigrants. The French democrat who comes by the dozen is a bourgeois in spe; the German revolutionary, like the German Bursch, is just the philistine over again, but at a different stage of development. The Italians are more original, more individual.

The French are turned out ready-made by thousands on the same pattern. The present government did not originate this curtailment of individuality, but it has grasped the secret of it.

Absolutely in the French spirit, it has organised public education-that is all education, for there is no home education in France. In every town in the empire the same thing is being taught on the same day, at the same hour, from the same books.

At all examinations the same questions are asked, the same examples set; teachers who deviate from the text, or alter the syllabus, are promptly removed. This soulless, stereotyped education has only put into a compulsory, inherited form what was fermenting in men's minds before. It is the conventional democratic notion of equality applied to intellectual development.

There is nothing of the sort in Italy. The Italian, a federalist and an artist by temperament, flies with horror from every sort of barrack discipline, uniformity and geometrical regularity. The Frenchman is innately a soldier; he loves discipline, the military detachment, the uniform; he lo\·es to inspire fear. The Italian, if

!!2 The 'wild boar' is. of course, Ferdinand II of Naples, nicknamed Bomba because of the cruel bombardment of 1"\aples and other cities during the suppression of the insurrection. ( Tr.)

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it comes to that, is rather a bandit than a soldier, and by this I do not mean to say anything at all against him. He prefers at the risk of capital punishment to kill hi s enemy at his own desire rather than to kill by order; but it is without throwing any responsibility on others. He is fonder of living penuriously in the mountains, and concealing smugglers, than of discovering them, and serving honourably in the gendarmes.

The educated Italian, like us Russians, has been elaborated spontaneously, by life, by his passions and by the books that have fallen into his hands, and has found his way to understanding of one sort or another. This is why in him and in ourselves there are gaps, discords. He and we are in many respects inferior to the specialised finish of the French and the theoretical learning of the Germans; but to make up for this the colours are more brilliant both in us and in the Italians.

\Ve even have the same defects as they. The Italian has the same tendency to laziness as we: he docs not think of work as pleasure; he does not like the anxiety of it, the weariness, the lack of leisure. Industry in Italy is almost as backward as it i s with u s ; the Italians, like us, have treasures lying under their feet and they do not dig them up. Manners in Italy have not been influenced by the modern bourgeois tendency to the same degree as in France and in England.

The history of the Italian petite bourgeoisie is quite unlike the development of the bourgeoisie in France and in England. The wealthy bourgeois, the descendants del popolo grasso, have more than once successfully rivalled the feudal aristocracy, have been rulers of cities, and therefore they have been not further from but nearer to the plebeians and contadini than the rapidly enriched vulgarians of other lands. The bourgeoisie in the French sense is properly represented in Italy by a special class which has been formed since the first rcvolution,23 and which might be called, as in geology, the Piedmont stratum. It is distinguished in Italy as in the ,..,·hole continent of Europe by being constantly liberal in manr questions, and afraid in all of them of the people and of too indiscreet talk about labour and wages, and also by always giving way to the enemy above and never to its own followers below.

The Italian exiles were drawn from every possible stratum of society. There were all sorts to be found about Mazzini, from the old names that occur in the chronicles of Guicciardini and 23 Presumably the French Revolution of 1 789-94. ( A .S. )

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Muratori, to which the people's ear has been accustomed for centuries, such as the Litti and Borromei, del Verme, Belgiojoso, Nani, Visconti, to some half-savage runaway Romeo from the Abruzzi with his dark, olive-coloured face and indomitable daring! Here were clericals too, like Sirtori, the heroic priest who, at the first shot in Venice, tucked up his cassock, and all through the siege and defence of Marghera fought, rifle in hand, in the foremost ranks under a hail of bullets; and here were the brilliant staff of Neapolitan officers, such as Pisacane, Cosenz, and the brothers Mezzacapo. Here, too, were plebeians from Trastevere, case-hardened in loyalty and privations, rough, surly, dumb in distress, modest and invincible, like Pianori ; and by their side Tuscans, effeminate even in pronunciation, but equally ready for the struggle. Lastly, there were Garibaldi, a figure taken straight out of Cornelius Nepos, with the simplicity of a child and the valour of a lion ; and Felice Orsini, whose beautiful head has so lately rolled from the steps of the scaffold.

But on their names I must dwell awhile.

I myself made Garibaldi's acquaintance in 1 854, when he sailed from South America as the captain of a ship and lay in the West India Dock ; I went to see him accompanied by one of his comrades in the Roman war and by Orsini. Garibaldi, in a thick, light-coloured overcoat, with a bright scarf round his neck and a cap on his head, seemed to me more a genuine sailor than the glorious leader of the Roman militia, statuettes of whom in fantastic costume were being sold all over the world. The goodnatured simplicity of his manner, the absence of all affectation, the cordiality with which he received one, all disposed one in his favour. His crew consisted almost entirely of Italians; he was their chief and their authority, and I am sure he was a strict one, but they all looked gaily and affectionately at him; they were proud of their captain. Garibaldi gave us lunch in his cabin, regaling us with specially prepared oysters from South America, dried fruits, port-when suddenly he leapt up, saying, 'Wait a bit! With you I shall drink a different wine,' and ran up on deck; then a sailor brought in a bottle; Garibaldi looked at it with a smile and filled our glasses . . . . One might have expected anything from a man who had come from across the ocean, but it was nothing more nor less than Bellet from his native town, Nice, which he had brought with him to London from America.

Meanwhile, in his simple and unceremonious talk one was conscious little by little of the presence of strength ; sans phrases, without commonplaces the people's leader, who had amazed old

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soldiers b y his valour, was revealed, and i t was easy t o recognise in the ship's captain the wounded lion who, snarling at every step, retreated after the taking of Rome and, having lost his followers, mustered again at San Marino, at Ravenna, in Lombardy, in the Tyrol, at Tessino, soldiers, peasants, bandits, anyone of any sort to strike once more at the foe-and all this beside the body of his wife,24 who had succumbed to the hardships and privations of the campaign.

In 1 854 his opinions diverged widely from those of Mazzini, although he was on good terms with him. He told him in my presence that Piedmont ought not to be irritated, that the chief aim now was to shake off the Austrian yoke, and he greatly doubted whether Italy was as ready for union and a republic as Mazzini thought. He was entirely opposed to all ventures and experiments in insurrection.

When he was about to sail for coal to Newcastle upon Tyne and was from there setting off to the Mediterranean, I told him how immensely I liked his seafaring life, and that of all the exiles he was the one who had chosen the better part.

'And who forbids them doing the same?' he replied with warmth. 'This was my cherished dream; you may laugh at it if you like, but I cherish it still. I am known in America: I could have three or four such ships under my command. I could take all the refugees on them: the sailors, the lieutenants, the workmen, the cooks, might all be exiles. What can they do now in Europe? Grow used to slavery and be false to themselves, or go begging in England. Settling in America is worsf' still-that's the end, that's the land of "forgetting one's country": it is a new fatherland, there are other interests, everything is different; men who stay in America fall out of the ranks. What is better than my idea? (his face beamed ) ; 'what could be better than gathering together round a few masts and sailing over the ocean, hardening ourselves in the rough life of sailors, in conflict with the elements and with danger? A floating revolution, ready to put in at any shore, independent and unassailable ! '

A t that moment he seemed to m e a hero of antiquity, a figure out of the Aeneid . . . who-had he lived in another agewould have had his legend, his 'Arma virumque canol'

Orsini was a man of quite a different sort. He gave proof of his 24 Anita Riveira de Silva, a beautiful creole, whom G. eloped with and then married. She was his companion on his earliest campaigns and bore him two sons and a daughter. She died in July 1 849. (R.)

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wild strength and terrific energy on the 1 4th of January, 1 858,25

in the Rue Lepelletier; they vmn him a great name in history, and brought his thirty-six-year-old head under the knife of the guillotine. I made his acquaintance at Nice in 1 851 ; at times we were even very intimate, then \'\'e drifted apart, came together again, and in the end 'a grey cat ran between us' in 1 856 and, though we were reconciled, we no longer felt the same towards each other.

Such personalities as Orsini developed only in Italy ; but to make up for this they appear there at all times and in all ages: they are conspirators and artists, martyrs and adventurers, patriots, condottieri, Teverinos26 and Rienzis,27 anything you like, but not vulgar, petty, commonplace, bourgeois. Such personalities stand out vividly in the chronicles of every Italian city. They amau us by their goodness, they amaze us by their wickedness ; they impress us by the strength of their passions and by the strength of their will. The yeast of restlessness is fermenting in them from early years-they must have danger, they must have laurels, glory, praise; they are purely Southern natures, with hot blood in their veins, with passions almost beyond our umiPrstanding, ready for any privation, for any sacrifice, from a sort of thirst for Pnjoyment. Self-denial and devotion in them go hand in hand with revengefulness and intolerance; i n much they are simple, and cunning in much. Reckless as to the means they use, they are reckless, too, of dangers; descendants of the Roman 'fathers of their country' and children in Christ of the Jesuit Fathers, reared on classical memories and the traditions of mediaeval turmoils, a mass of ancient virtues and catholic vices is fermenting in their souls. They set no value on their own l ives nor on the life of their neighbour, either; their terrific persistence is on a level with Anglo-Saxon obstinacy. On the one hand there is a naive love of the external, an amour propre bordering on vanity, on a voluptuous desire to drink their fill of power, applause and glory; on the other, all the Roman heroism in face of privation and death.

People with energy of this sort can only be halted by the guillotine ; otherwise, scarcely do they escape from the gendarmes of Sardinia before they begin hatching plots in the very claws of the Austrian hawk; and the day after a miraculous

�� The date of Orsini's a t tempt on the life of Napoleon I I I. ( A.S. )

�ll The hero of Georg<' Sand's no\'el of the same name. (A.S. )

�7 Rienzi, Cola di ( 1 3 1 3-5+), seized power in Rome in 1 3+7 and fought for the unification of Italy. He was unsuccessful and had to flee. (A.S.)

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rescue from the dungeons of Mantua they begin, with their arms still bruised from the leap to freedom, to sketch a plan with grenades; then, face to face with danger, they hurl them under a carriage. In the hour of failure they grow to colossal dimensions, and by their death deal a blow more powerful than a bursting grenade . . . .

As a young man Orsini had fallen into the hands of the secret police of Pope Gregory XVI; he \vas condemned for taking part in the movement in Rome and sentenced to the galleys, and remained in prison till the amnesty of Pius IX. From this life with smugglers, with bravoes, with survivors of the Carbonari, he gained a temper of iron and an immense knowledge of the national spirit. From these men, who were in constant, daily conflict with the society which oppressed them, he learnt the art of self-control, the art of being silent not only before a judge but even with his friends.

Men like Orsini have a powerful influence on others: people are attracted by their reserved nature and at the same time are not at home \�ith them; one looks at them with the nervous pleasure mingled with tremors with which one admires the graceful movements and velvety gambols of a panther. They are children, but wicked children. Not only is Dante's hell 'paved'

with them, but all the later centuries nurtured on his menacing poetry and the malignant wisdom of Machiavelli are full of them. Mazzini, too, belongs to their family, as did Cosimo de'

Me9ici, Orsini, and Giovanni Procida.28 One cannot even exclude from them the great 'adventurer of the sea,' Columbus, nor the greatest 'bandit' of recent ages, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Orsini was strikingly handsome; his whole appearance, elegant and graceful, could not but attract attention; he was quiet, spoke little, gesticulated less than his fellow-countrymen, and never raised his voice. The long black beard, as he \vore it in Italy, made him look like some young Etruscan priest. His whole head \vas unusually beautifuL only a little marred by the irregular line of the nose.29 And with all this there was something in Orsini's features, in his eyes, in his frequent smile and his gentle voice, that discouraged intimacy. It was evident that he was 28 Procida, G. (c. 1 22:5; d. after 1 299 ) , fought for the liberation of Sicily from France. (A.S.)

29 Napoleon, so the newspapers wrote. ordered Orsini"s head to be steeped in nitric acid that it mil!ht be impossible to take a death mask from it.

'Vhat progress in humanity and chemistry >ince the days when the head of John the Baptist was given on a golden dish to the daughter of Herod !

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reining himself in, that he never fully let himself go and was wonderfully in command of himself; it was evident that not one word fell from those smiling lips without intention, that there were depths behind those inwardly shining eyes, that, where people like us would hesitate and shy away, he would smile and, without changing his expression or raising his voice, go forward remorseless and undoubting.

In the spring of 1 852 Orsini was expecting very important news about his family affairs: he was tormented at not getting a letter; he told me so several times, and I knew i n what anxiety he was living. At dinner-time one day, when two or three outsiders were present, the postman came into the entry: Orsini sent to ask whether there was a letter for him; it appeared that there was; he glanced at it, put it in his pocket, and went on with the conversation. An hour and a half later, when I was alone with him, Orsini said to me: 'Well, thank God, at last I have got an answer, and all is quite well.' I, knowing that he was expecting a letter, had not guessed that this was it, with so unconcerned an air had he opened it and then put it into his pocket. A man like that is a born conspirator; and indeed he was one, all his life.

And what was accomplished by him with his energy, by Garibaldi with his daring, by Pianori with his revolver, by Pisacane and the other martyrs whose blood is not yet dry? Italy will be delivered from the Austrians, if at all, by Piedmont; from the Bourbon of Naples by fat Murat, both under the patronage of Bonaparte. Oh. divina commcdia-or simply commedia! in the sense in which Pope Chiaramonti30 said it to Napoleon at Fontainebleau . . . .

One evening an argument sprang up between Mazzini and me about Leopardi.

There are poems of Leopardi with which I am passionately in sympathy. Much of his work, like Byron's, is spoilt by theorising, but sometimes a line of his, like one of Byron's, stabs, hurts, wrings the heart. There are such words, such lines, in Lermontov.

:Jo Pope Pius VII signed the Concordat of 1 5 th July, 1 801 with Napoleon, was forced by the lattPr to come to Par·is to consecrate him as Em1Jeror in 1 80·�. was l a ter on kept prisonPr at Fontainebleau, and only returned to Home in 1 8 1 4. ( Tr.) In January 1 8 1 3 Napoleon visited Pius VII at Fontainebleau and obtained his consent to a new Concordat. by which the Catholic Church became subject to the authority of the Emperor of the French, ami the secular a uthority of the Pope in Rome was abolished.

( H. )

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Leopardi was the last book Natalie read, the last she looked at before her death . . . .

To men of action, to agitators vvho move the masses, this venomous irresoluteness, these shattering doubts are incomprehensible. They see in them nothing but profitless lamentation, nothing but feeble despondency. Mazzini could not sympathise with Leopardi, that I knew beforehand ; but he attacked him with bitterness. I was greatly vexed ; of course, he was angry with him fot· being of no use to him for pmpaganda. In the same way Frederick II might have been angry . . . I do not know . . . well, with Mozart, for instance, because he was of no use as a guardsman. This is Lhe shocking restriction of the personality, the subjecting of men to categories and cadres-as though historical development were serf-labour to which the bailiffs drive weak and strong, \Yilling and unwilling alike, without consulting their wish!'s.

Mazzini was angry. I said to him, half in jest and half in earnest:

'I believe you have your knife into poor Leopardi for not having taken part in the Roman revolution ; but you know he has an excellent reason to urge in his defence-you keep forgetting it!'

'What reason?'

'Why, the fact that he died in 1 837.'

Wh!'n a man who has long been watching black curls and black eyes suddenly turns to a fair-haired woman with light eyebrovvs who is pale and nervous, his eyes always receive a shock and cannot at once get over it. The difference, of which he has not been thinking and which he has forgotten, forces itself upon him physically through no desire of his.

Exactly the same thing happens when one turns quickly from Italian emigre circles to German.

Undoubtedly the Ge1·mans are more developed on the theoretical side than any other people, but they have not gained much by it so far. From Catholic fanaticism they have passed to the Protestant pietism of transcendental philosophy and the romance of philology, and are now gradually making the transition to exact science; the German 'studies diligently at all his stages,'

and his whole history is summed up in that, and he will get marks for it on the Day of Judgment. The common people of Germany, who have studied less, have suffered a great dea l ; they bought the right to Protestantism by the Thirty Years' War, the right to an independent existence-that is, to a colourless exis-

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tence under the supervision d Russia-by the struggle with Napoleon. The liberation in 1814-1 5 was a complete victory of the reaction; and when, in place of Jerome Bonaparte, der Landesvatcr appeared in a pO\vdered wig and an old-fashioned uniform long laid by, and announced that next day was fixed, let us say, for the forty-fifth parade (the one before, the forty-fourth, had taken place before the revolution) , then all the liberated people felt as though they had suddenly lost tow::h with the present and gone back to another age, and everyone felt his head to see whether he had not grown a pigtail \vith a ribbon on it.

The people accepted this with simple-hearted stupidity, and sang Korner's songs. Science and learning advanced. Greek tragedies were performed in Berlin, there were dramatic festivals for Goethe-at ·weimar.

The most radical men among the Germans remain philistines in their private life. Bold as they are in logic, they feel no obligation to be consistent in practice, and fall into glaring contradictions. The German mind, in matters revolutionary as

\vell as in everything else, accepts the general idea in its absolute, of course-that is, inoperative-significance, and is satisfied with an ideal construction of it, imagining that a thing is done if it is conceived, and that the fact as easily follows the thought as the n_1eaning of the fact is grasped by the consciousness.

The English and the French are full of prejudices, while a German is free from them; but both French and English are more consistent in their lives-the rule they follo\v is perhaps absurd, but it is what they have accepted. A German accepts nothing except reason and logic, but he is ruled in many things by other considcrations-\vhich means acting against one's conscience in return for bribes.

The Frenchman is not morally free: though rich in initiative in practical life, he is poor in abstract thought. He thinks in received conceptions, in accepted forms; he gives a fashionable cut to commonplace ideas, and is satisfied with them. It is hard for him to take in anything new, although he does rush at it.

The Frenchman oppresses his family and believes it is his duty to do so, just as he believes in the 'Legion of Honour' and the judgments of the lawcourts. The German believes in nothing, but takes advantage of public prejudices \vhere it suits him. He is accustomed to a petty prosperity, to lVohlbehagcn, to peace and quiet and, as he goes from his study to the Pnmkzimmer or his bedroom, sacrifices his freedom of thought to his dressinggown, to his peace and quiet and to his kitchen. The German is a great sybarite, and this is not noticed in him, because his

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scanty comfort and petty mode of life are not conspicuous; but the Eskimo who is ready to sacrifice everything for fish-fat is as much an epicurean as Lucullus. Moreover the German, lymphatic by temperament, soon puts on weight and sends down a thousand roots into his familiar mode of life ; anything that might disturb him in his habits terrifies his philistine temper.

All German revolutionaries are great cosmopolitans, sie haben uberwunden den Standpunkt der Nationalitat, and are filled with the most touchy, most obstinate patriotism. They are ready to accept a universal republic, to abolish the frontiers between states, but Trieste and Danzig must belong to Germany. The Vienna students did not disdain to set off for Lombardy and to put themselves under the command of Radetsky; they even, under the leadership of some professor, took a cannon, which they presented to Innsbruck.

With this arrogant, bellicose patriotism, Germany has, from the time of the first revolution and up to this day, looked with horror to the right and with horror to the left. On this side, France with standards unfurled is crossing the Rhine; on that side, Russia is crossing the Niemen, ;md the people numbering twenty-five millions finds itself utterly forlorn and deserted, curses in its fright, hates because it is frightened and to comfort itself proves theoretically, according to the sources, that the existence of France is no longer existence, and the existence of Russia is not yet existence.

The 'council of war' assembled in St Paul's Church at Frankfurt, and consisting of various worthy professors, physicians, theologians, pharmacists and philologists, schr ausge::.cichneten in ihrem Fache, applauded the Austrian soldiers in Lombardy and oppressed the Poles in Posen. The very question of Schleswig

Holstein (stammvcrwandt!) touched on the quick only from the point of view of 'Teutschthum.' The first free word, uttered after centuries of silence by the representatives of libera ted Germany, was against weak, oppressed nationalities. This incapacity for freedom, these clumsily displayed inclinations to retain what had been wrongfully acquired, provoke irony: one forgives insolent pretensions only in return for vigorous actions, and there were none of these.

The revolution of 1 848 had everywhere the character of precipitateness and instability, but there was scarcely anything absurd about it in France or in Italy; in Germany, except in Vienna, it was full of a comicality incomparably more humorous than the comicality of Goethe's wrett:hed comedy, Der Burgergeneral.

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There was not a town, not a spot in Germany where at the time of the rising there was not an attempt at a 'committee of public safety' with all its principal actors, with a frigid youth as Saint-Just, with sombre terrorists, and a military genius representing Carnot. I knew two or three Robespierres personally: they always wore clean shirts, washed their hands and cleaned their nails. To make up for these there were also dishevelled Collot d'Herbois; and if in the club there was a man fonder of beer than the rest and more openly given to dangling after Stubenmiidchen-he was the Danton, eine schwelgende Natur!

French weaknesses and defects are partly dissipated by their owners' prompt, easy nature. In the German the same defects get a more solid, steady development, and hence are more conspicuous. One must see for oneself these German efforts to play so einen burschikosen Kamin de Paris in politics in order to appreciate them. They have always reminded me of the playfulness of a cow when that good, respectable animal, garnished with domestic benevolence, starts frisking and frolicking in the meadow, and with a perfectly serious mien kicks up her two hind legs or gallops sideways chasing her own tail.

After the Dresden affair,31 I met in Geneva one of the agitators who had taken part in it, and at once began questioning him about Bakunin. He praised him highly, and began describing how he had himself commanded a barricade under his orders. Inflamed by his own narrative he went on.

'A revolution is a thunderstorm; in it one must listen neither to the dictates of the heart nor to considerations of ordinary justice. . . . One must oneself have taken part in such events in order fully to understand the Montagne of 1 794. Imagine: we suddenly observe a vague movement in the royalist party, false reports are intentionally circulated, suspicious-looking men appear. I reflected and reflected, and at last resolved to terrorise my street. "l'.Iiinncr!" I said to my detachment, "under pain of courtmartial which in a 'state of siege' like this, may at once deprive you of life in case of disobedience, I order you that everyone, without distinction of sex, age or calling, who attempts to cross the barricade, shall be seized and brought under close guard to me." This was kept up for more than twenty-four hours. If the Burger who was brought to me was a good patriot, I let him 31 In May 1 849 M. A. Bakunin led a rising in Dresden. He was arrested and sentenced to be hanged; but the sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life. (A.S.)

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through; but if he was a suspicious character, then I gave a sign to the guard.'

'And,' I said with horror, 'and they?'

'And they took him off home,' the terrorist replied with pride and satisfaction.

All these absurd failings, together with the peculiar Plumpheit of the Germans, jar upon the Southern nature of the Italians and rouse in them a zoological, racial hatred. The worst of it is that the good side of the Germans, that is, their philosophical culture, is either of no interest to the Italian or beyond his grasp; while the vulgar, ponderous side always strikes his eye. The Italian often leads the most frivolous and idle life, and that is why he can least put up with the bear-like joking and clumsy familiarity of the jovial German.

The Anglo-Germanic race is much coarser than the Franco

Roman. There is no help for that: it is its physical characteristic ; it is absurd to be angry with it. The time has come to understand once for all that the different breeds of mankind, like different breeds of animals, have their different natures and are not to blame for this. No one is angry with the bull for not having the beauty of the horse or the swiftness of the stag; no one reproaches the horse because the meat of its fillet does not taste so good as that of the ox: all that we can require of them in the name of animal brotherhood is to graze peaceably in the same field without kicking or goring each other. In nature everything attains to whatever it is capable of attaining to, is formed as chance determines, and so takes i ts generic pli: training goes to a certain stage, corrects one thing and grafts on a11.other; but to demand beefsteaks from horses, or an ambling pace from bulls, is nevertheless absurd.

To get a visible conception of the difference between the two opposite traditions of the European races, one has but to glance at the street-boys in Paris and in London; it is they that I take as an example because they are absolutely spontaneous in their rudeness.

Look how the Parisian gamins jeer at any English eccentric, and how the London street-boys mock at a Frenchman; in this little example the two opposite types of two European races are sharply defined. The Parisian gamin is insolent and persistent,

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he can be insufferable: but, in the first place, he is witty, his mischief is confined to jests, and hf' is as amusing as he is annoying; and, in the second, there are words at which he blushes and at once desists, there are words which he never uses; it is difficult to stop him by rudeness, and if the victim l ifts his stick I do not ans\Yer for the consequences. It should be noted, too, that for French boys there must be something striking: a red waistcoat with dark-blue stripes, a brick-coloured coat, an unusual muffler, a flunkey carrying a parrot or a dog, things done only by Englishmen and, take note, only outside England. To be simply a foreigner is not enough to make them mock and run after you.

The wit of the London street-boy is simpler. It begins with guffawing at the sight of a foreigner,32 if only he has a moustache, a beard, or a wide-brimmed hat; then they shout a score of times: 'French pigl French dog/' If the foreigner turns to them with some reply, the neighings and bleatings are doubled ; if he walks away, the boys run after him-then all that is left is the ultima ratio of lifting a stick, and sometimes bringing it down on the first that comes to hand. After that the boys run away at break-neck speed, with showers of oaths and sometimes throwing mud or a stone from a distance.

In France a grown-up workman, shopman, or woman streetvendor never takes part with the gamins in the pranks they play upon foreigners; in London all the dirty women, all the grownup shopmen grunt like pigs and abet the boys.

In France there is a shield which at once checks the most persistent boy-that is, poverty. In England, a country that knows no word more insulting than the word beggar, the foreigner is the more persecuted the poorer and more defenceless he is.

One Italian refugee, who had been an officer in the Austrian cavalry and had left his country after the war, completely destitute, went about when winter came, in his army officer's greatcoat. This excited such a sensation in the market through which he had to pass every day, that the shouts of 'Who's your tailor?' the laughter, and finally tugs at his collar, went so far that the Italian gave up wearing his greatcoat and, shivering to the marrow of his bones, went about in his jacket.

This coarseness in street mockery, this lack of delicacy and tact in the common people, helps to explain how it is that women are nowhere beaten so often and so badly as in En-

�2 All this has grea tly changed since the Crimean \Var. ( 1 866.)

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gland,33 and how it is that an English father is ready to cast dishonour on his own daughter and a husband on his wife by taking legal proceedings against them.

The rude manners of the English streets are a great offence at first to the French and the Italians. The German, on the contrary, receives them with laughter and answers with similar swear-words; an interchange of abuse is kept up, and he remains very well satisfied. They both take it as a kindness, a nice joke.

'Bloody dog! '34 the proud Briton shouts at him, grunting like <\ pig. 'Beastly John Bull!' answers the German, and each goes on his way.

This behaviour is not confined to the streets: one has but to look at the polemics of Marx, Heinzen, Ruge, ct consorts, which never ceased after 1 849 and are still kept up on the other side of the ocean. We are accustomed to see such expressions in print, such accusations: nothing is spared, neither personal honour, family affairs nor confidential secrets.

Among the English, coarseness disappears as we rise higher in the scale of intelligence or aristocratic breeding; among the Germans it never disappears. The greatest poets of Germany (with the exception of Schiller) fall into the most uncouth vulgarity.

One of the reasons of the mauvais ton of Germans is that breeding in our sense of the word does not exist in Germany at all. Germans are taught, and taught a great deal, but they are not educated at all, even in the aristocracy, in which the manners of the barracks, of the Junker, are predominant. In their daily life they are completely lacking in the aesthetic sense. The French have lost it, just as they have lost the elegance of their language; the Frenchman of to-day rarely knows how to write a letter free from legal or commercial expressions-the counter and the barrack-room have deformed his manners.

I stayed in Geneva 'til the middle of December. The persecution which the Russian government was secretly commencing against 3.1 The Times reckoned two years ago that on an average in every police district in London (there are ten) there were two hundred cases of as·

saults on women and children per annum; and how many assaults never lead to proceedings?

34 In English in the text. (R.)

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me compelled me to go to Ziirich to try to save my mother's property, into which the never-to-be-forgotten Emperor had stuck his Imperial claws.

This was a frightful period in my life. A lull between two thunderclaps, an oppressive, heavy lull, but there was nothing pleasant about it . . . there were threatening signs, but even then I still turned away from them. Life was uneven, inharmonious, but there were bright days in it; for those I am indebted to the grand, natural scenery of Switzerland.

Remoteness from men, a nd beautiful natural surroundings, have a wonderfully healing effect. From experience I \\TOte in A Wreck:

'When the soul bears within it a great grief, when a man has not mastered himself sufficiently to grow reconciled with the past, to grow calm enough for understanding, he needs distance and mountains, the sea and warm, mild air. He needs them that grief may not turn into obduracy and despair, that he may not grow hard . . . .'

I was longing for rest from many things even then. A year and a half spent in the centre of political upheavals and dissensions, in constant provocation, in the midst of bloody sights, fearful downfalls and petty treacheries, had left a sediment of much bitterness, anguish and weariness at the bottom of my soul.

Irony began to take a different character. Granovsky wrote to me after reading From the Other Shore, which I wrote just at that time: 'Your book has reached us. I read it with joy and a feeling of pride . . . but for all that there is something of ·fatigue about it; you stand too much alone, and perhaps you will become a great writer, but what in Russia was lively and attractive to all in your talent seems to have disappeared on foreign soil. . . .'

Then Sazonov who, just before I left Paris in 1849, read the beginning of my story, Duty Before Everything, written two years previously, said to me: 'You won't finish that story, and you will never \Yrite anything more like it. Your light laugh and good-natured jokes are gone for ever.'

But could a man live through the ordeal of 1848 and 1 849 and remain the same? I was myself conscious of the change. Only at home, when no outsiders were present, we sometimes found moments as of old, not of 'light laughter' but of light sadness, which recalled the past and our friends, recent scenes of our life in Rom<>; beside the cots of our sleeping children or watching their play, the soul was attuned as formerly, as once upon a time-there came upon it a breath of freshness, of youthful

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poetry, of gentle harmony; there was peace and content in the heart, and under the influence of such an evening life was easier for a day or two.

These minutes were not frequent; a painful, melancholy distraction prevented them. The number of visitors kept increasing about us, and by the evening our little drawing-room in the Champs-Elysees was full of strangers. For the most part, these were newly arrived emigres, good, unfortunate people, but I was intimate with only one man . . . . And why was I intimate with him? . . .

35

I was glad to leave Paris, but in Geneva we found ourselves in the same society, though the persons in it were different and it's dimensions were narrower. In Switzerland at that time everything had been hurled into politics; everything-tables d'h6te and coffee-houses, watchmakers and women-all were divided into parties. An exclusive preoccupation with politics, particularly in the oppressive lull that always follows unsuccessful revolutions, is extremely wearisome with its barren aridity and monotonous censure of the past. It is like summer-time in big cities where everything is dusty and hot, airless, where through pale trees the glistening walls and the hot paving-stones reflect the glaring sun. A living man craves for air which has not yet been breathed a thousand times over, which does not smell of the picked bones of life, or ring with discordant jangling, where there is no greasy, putrid stench and incessant noise.

Sometimes we did tear ourselves away from Geneva, visit the shores of Lake Leman and go to the foot of Mont Blanc; and the sombre, frowning beauty of the mountain scenery with its intense shadows screened all the vanity of vanities, refreshing soul and body with the cold breath of its eternal glaciers.

I do not know whether I should like to stay for ever in Switzerland. To us dwellers in the valleys and meadows, the mountains after a time get in the way ; they are too huge and too near, they press in upon us and confine us; but sometimes it is good to stay for a while in their shadow. Moreover a pure, goodhearted race lives in the mountains, a race of people poor but not unhappy, with few wants, accustomed to a life of sturdy independence. The scum of civilisation, its verdigris, has not settled 35 Georg Herwegh ( 1 8 1 7-75), a German poet and radical who seduced Herzen's wife: see "A Family Drama" at the end of Volume II of his Memoirs (not included in this selection) and E. H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles (Gollancz, 1 933) . (D.M.)

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on these people; historical changes pass like clouds beneath their feet and scarcely affect them. The Roman world still endures in Graubiinden: anywhere in Appenzell the time of the peasant wars has scarcely passed. Perhaps in the Pyrenees, in the Tyrol or other mountains such a healthy stock of population is to be found, but it has ceased to -exist in Europe as a whole.

Westerrt European

Arabesques, I I

1 . A L A M E N T

AFTER THE JuNE DAYS I saw that the revolution was vanquished, but I still believed in the vanquished, in the fallen; I believed in the wonder-working power of the relics, in their moral strength.

At Geneva I began to understand more and more clearly that the revolution not only had been vanquished, but had been bound to be vanquished.

My head was dizzy with my discoveries, an abyss was opening before my eyes and I felt that the ground was giving way under my feet.

It was not the reaction that vanquished the revolution. The reaction showed itself everywhere densely stupid, cowardly, in its dotage; everywhere it retreated ignominiously round the corner before the shock of the popular tide, furtively biding its time in Paris, and at Naples, Vienna and Berlin. The revolution fell, like Agrippina, under the blows of its own children, and, what was worse than anything, without their being conscious of i t ; there was more heroism, more youthful self-sacrifice, than good judgment; and the pure, noble victims fell, not knowing for what. The fate of the survivors was almost more grievous.

Absorbed in wrangling among themselves, in personal disputes, in mt>lancholy self-df'ception, and consumed by unbridled vanity, they kt>pt dwelling on their unexpected days of triumph, and

• Herzen's t i t l e is "Il l'ianto," fr. Italian piangrr{', to weep. I have taken the liberty of translating it as "A Lament." ( D.M. )

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were unwilling to take off their faded laurels or wedding garments, though it was not the bride \vho had deceived them.

Misfortunes, idleness and need induced intolerance, obstinacy and exasperation . . . . The emigres broke up into little groups, which rallied not to principles but to names and hatreds. The fact that their thoughts continually turned to the past, and that they lived in an exclusive, closed circle, began to find expression in speech and thought, in manners and in dress; a new class was formed, the class of refugees, and ossified alongside the others.

And just as once Basil the Great wrote to Gregory Nazianzen that he 'wallowed in fasting and delighted in privations,' so now there appeared voluntary martyrs, sufferers by vocation, wretches by profession, among \vhom were some very conscientious people ; and indeed Basil the Great was sincere when he wrote to his friend of orgies of mortification of the flesh and of the voluptuous ecstasy of persecution. ·with all this, consciousness did not move a step forward and thought slumbered. . . . If these people had been summoned by the sound of a new trumpet and a new tocsin they would, like the nine sleeping maidens, have gone on with the day on which they fell asleep.

My heart almost broke at these painful truths; I had to live through a difficult page of my education .

. . . I was sitting mournfully one day in my mother's diningroom at gloomy, disagreeable Zurich ; this was at the end of December 1 849. I was going next day to Paris. It was a cold, snovvy day; two or three logs, smoking and crackling, were unwillingly burning on the hearth. Everyone was busy packing; I was sitting quite alone. My life at Geneva floated before my mind's eye ; everything ahead looked dark ; I was afraid of something, and it was so unbearable that if I could have, I would have fallen on my knees and wept and prayed ; but I could not and instead of a prayer I wrote my curse-my Epilogue to 18·19.

'Disillusionment, fatigue, Blasicrtheit!' The democratic critics said of those lines I vomited up. Disillusionment, yes! Fatigue, yes! . . . Disillusionment is a vulgar, hackneyed word, a veil under which lie hidden the sloth of the heart, egoism posing as love, the noisy emptiness of vanity with pretensions to everything and strength for nothing. All these exalted, unrecognised characters, wizened with envy and wrPtched from pretentiousness, have long wearied us in life and in novels. All that is perfectly true; but is there not something real, peculiarly characteristic of our times, at the bottom of these frightful spiritual sufferings which degenerate into absurd parodies and vulgar masquerade?

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The poet who found words and voice for this malady was too proud to pose and to suffer for the sake of applause; on the contrary, he often uttered his bitter thought with so much humour that his kind-hearted readers almost died of laughing.

Byron's disillusionment was more than caprice, more than a personal mood ; Byron was shattered because life deceived him.

And life deceived him not because his demands were unreal, but because England and Byron ,..,.ere of two different ages, of two different educations, and met just at the epoch when the fog was dispersing.

This rupture existed in the past, too, but in our age it has come to consciousness; in our age the impossibility of the intervention of any beliefs is becoming more and more manifest.

After the break-up of Rome came Christianity; after Christianity, the belief in civilisation, in humanity. Liberalism is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this. Its theology is political theory; it stands upon the earth and has no mystical conciliations, for it must have conciliation in fact. Triumphant and then defeated liberalism has revealed the rift in all its nakedness; the painful consciousness of this is expressed in the irony of modern man, in the scepticism with

\vhich he sweeps a\vay the fragments of his shattered idols.

Irony gives expression to the vexation aroused by the fact that logical truth is not the same as the truth of history, that as well as dialectical development it has its own development through chance and passion, that as \vell as reason it has its romance.

Disillusionment1 in our sense of the word was not known before the Revolution; the Pighteenth cPntury was one of the most religious periods of history. I am no longer speaking of the gn•at martyr Saint-Just or of the apostle Jean-Jacques; but was not Pope Voltair�, blessing Franklin's grandson in the name of God and FrPedom, a fanatic of his rdigion of humanity?

Scepticism \vas proclaimed togethPr with the republic of the 22nd of September, 1 792.

The Jacobins and revolutionaries in general belonged to a minority, separatPd from the life of the people by their culture: tlwy constituted a sort of S('cular clergy ready to shepherd their human florks. They r('presented the highest thought of their 1 On the \\"hole 'our' srPptirism \\"aS not kno\\"n in the last century ; England and Diclerot alOJH' a rc tlw PXcPptions. In England scepticism has hcPn at homl' for long ages, a nd Byron follo\\"s nilturally on ShakespPMe, Hobbes. and HumP.

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time, its highest but not its general consciousness, not the thought of all.

This new clergy had no means of coercion, either physical or fancied: from the moment that authority fell from their hands, they had only one weapon-conviction; but for conviction to be right is not enough; their whole mistake lay in supposing so; something more was necessary-mental equality.

So long as the desperate conflict lasted, to the strains of the hymn of the Huguenots and the hymn of the Marseillaise, so long as the faggots flamed and blood flowed, this inequality was not noticed; but at last the oppressive edifice of feudal monarchy crumbled, and slowly the walls were shattered, the locks struck off . . . one more blow struck, one more wall breached, the brave men advanced, gates are opened and the crowd rushes in . . . but it is not the crowd that was expected. Who are these men; to what age do they belong? They are not Spartans, not the great populus Romanus. An irresistible wave of filth flooded everything. The inner horror of the Jacobins was expressed in the Terror of 1 793 and 1 794: they saw their fearful mistake, and tried to correct it with the guillotine ; but, however many heads they cut off, they still had to bow their own before the might of the rising stratum of society. Everything gave way before it; it overpowered the Revolution and the reaction, it submerged the old forms and filled them up with itself because it constituted the one effective majority of its day. Sieyes was more right than he thought when he said that the petite bourgeoisie was everything.

The petits bourgeois were not produced by the Revolution; they were ready with their traditions and their customs, which were alien, in a different mode, to the revolutionary idea. They had been held down by the aristocracy and kept in the background; set free, they walked over the corpses of their liberators and established their own regime. The minority were either crushed or dissolved in the petite bourgeoisie.

A few men of each generation remained, in spite of events, as the tenacious preservers of the idea ; these Levites, or perhaps ascetics, are unjustly punished for their monopoly of an exclusive culture, for the mental superiority of the well-fed castes, the leisured castes that had time to work not only with their muscles.

We were angered, moved to fury, by the absurdity, by the injustice of this fact. As though someone (not ourselves) had promised that everything in the world should be just and elegant and should go like clockwork. We have marvelled enough at the

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abstract wisdom of nature and of historical development; it is time to perceive that in nature as in history there is a great deal that is fortuitous, stupid, unsuccessful and confused. Reason, fully developed thought, comes last. Everything begins with the dullness of the new-born child ; potentiality and aspiration are innate in him, but before he reaches development and consciousness he is exposed to a series of external and internal influences, deflections and checks. One has water on the brain ; another falls and flattens it; both remain idiots. A third does not fall nor die of scarlet fever-and becomes a poet, a military leader, a bandit or a judge. On the whole we know best, in nature, in history anrl in life, the advances and successes: we are only now beginning to feel that all the cards are not so well pre-arranged as we had thought, because we are ourselves a failure, a losing card.

It mortifies us to realise that the idea is impotent, that truth has no binding power over the world of actuality. A new sort of

;\fanichaeism takes possession of us, and we are ready, par depit, to believe in rational (that is, purposive) evil, as we believed in rational good-that is the last tribute we pay to idealism.

Tlw anguish will pass \vith time; its tragic and passionate character will calm down: it scarcely exists in the New World of the Unitr·d States. This young people, enterprising and more practical than intelligent, is so busy building its own dwellingplace that it knows nothing at all of our agonies. Moreover, there a re not two cultures there. The persons who constitute the classes in the society af that country are constantly changing, they rise and fall with the bank balance of each. The sturdy breed of English colonists is multiplying fearfully; if it gets the upper hand people will not be more fortunate for it, but they will be better contented. This contentment will be duller, poorer, more arid than that which hovered in the ideals of romantic Europe ; but with it there will be neither tsars nor centralisation, and perhaps there will be no hunger either. Anyone who can put off from himself the old Adam of Europe and be born again a new Jonathan had better take thP first steamer to some place in

'Wisconsin or Kansas; there he will certainly be better off than in decaying Europe.

Those who cannot will stay to l ive out their lives, as patterns of thP beautiful dream dreamt by humanity. They have lived too much by fantasy and ideals to fit into the age of American good sense.

Tht>n• is no great misfortune in this: we are not many, and we shall soon be extinct.

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But how is it men grow up so out of harmony with their environment? . . .

Imagine a hothouse-reared youth, the one, perhaps, who has described himself in Byron's The Dream; imagine him face to face with the most boring, with the most tedious society, face to face with the monstrous Minotaur of English life, clumsily welded together of two beasts-the one decrepit, the other kneedeep in a miry bog, weighed down like a Caryatid whose muscles, under a constant strain, cannot spare one drop of bloo_d for the brain. If he could have adapted himself to this life he would, instead of dying in Greece at thirty, now have been Lord Palmerston or Lord John Russell. But since he could not it is no wonder that, with his own Childe Harold, he says to his ship: Nor care what land thou bearest me to,

But not again to mine.

But wha t awaited him in the distance? Spain cut up by Napoleon, Greece sunk back into barbarism, the general resurrection after 1814 of all the stinking Lazaruses; there was no getting away from them at Ravenna or at Diodati. Byron could not be satisfied like a German with theories sub specie aeternitatis, nor like a Frenchman with political chatter; he was broken, but broken like a menacing Titan, flinging his scorn in men's faces and not troubling to gild the pill.

The rupture of which Byron, as a poet and a genius, was conscious forty years ago, now, after a succession of new experiences, afte1· the filthy transition from 1 830 to 1 848, and the abominable one from 1 848 to the present, shocks many of us.

And we, like Byron, do not know what to do with ourselves, where to lay our heads.

The realist Goethe, like the romantic Schiller, knew nothing of this rending of the spirit. The one was too religious, the other too philosophical. Both could find peace in abstract spheres.

When the 'spirit of negation' appears as such a jester as Mephistopheles, then the swift disharmony is not yet a fearful one; his mocking and for ever contradictory nature is still blended in the higher harmony, and in its own time will ring out with everything-sic ist gerettet. Lucifer in Cain is very different; he is the rueful angel of darkness and on his brow shines with dim lustre the star of bitter thought; he is full of an inner disintegration which can never be put together again. He does not make a jest of denial, he does not seek to amuse with the impudence of

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his unbelief, he does not allure by sensuality, he does not procure artless girls, wine or diamonds; but he quietly prompts to murder, draws towards himself, towards crime-by tha t incomprehensible power with which at certain moments a man is enticed by still, moonlit water, that promises nothing in its comfortless, cold, shimmering embraces, nothing but death.

Neither Cain nor Manfred, neither Don Juan nor Byron, makes any inference, draws any conclusion, any 'moral.' Perhaps from the point of view of dramatic art this is a d_efect, but it gives a stamp of sincerity a nd indicates the depth of the gulf.

Byron's epilogue, his last word, if you like, is The Darkness; here is the finish of a life that began with The Dream. Complete the picture for yourselves.

Two enemies, hideously disfigured by hunger, are dead, they are devoured by some crab-like animals . . . their ship is rotting away-a tarred rope swings in the darkness of dim waters; there is fearful cold, the beasts a re dying out, history has died already and space is being cleared for new life: our epoch will be reckoned as belonging to the fourth geological formation-that is, if the new world gets as far as being able to count up to four.

Our historical vocation, our work, consists in this: that by our disillusionment, by our sufferings, we reach resignation and humility in face of the truth, and spare following generations from these afflictions. By means of us humanity is regaining sobriety; we are its head-ache next morning, we are its birthpangs; but we must not forget that the child or mother, or perhaps both, may die by the way, and then-well, then history, like the Mormon it is, will start a new pregnancy . . . .

f� scmpre bene. gentlemen !

We know how Nature disposes of individuals: later, sooner, with no victims or on heaps of corpses, she cares not; she goes her way, or goes any \vay that chances. Tens of thousands of years she spends building a coral reef, every spring abandoning to death the ranks that have run ahead too far. The polyps die without suspecting that they have served the progress of the reef.

\Ye, too, shall serve something. To enter into the future as an element in it does not yet mean that the future will fulfil our ideals. Rome did not carry out Plato's idea of a republic nor the Greek idea in general. The Middle Ages were not the development of Rome. Modern \Vestern thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?

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Now I am accustomed to these thoughts; they no longer frighten me. But at the end of 1849 I was stunned by them ; and in spite of the fact that every event, every meeting, every contact, every person vied with each other to tear away the last green leaves, I still frantically and obstinately sought a way out.

That is why I now prize so highly the courageous thought of Byron. He saw that there is no way out, and proudly said so.

I was unhappy and perplexed when these thoughts began to haunt me; I tried by every means to run away from them . . .

like a lost traveller, like a beggar, I knocked at every door, stopped people I met and asked the way, but every meeting and every event led to the same result-to meekness before the truth, to self-sacrificing acceptance of it.

Three years ago I sat by Natalie's sick-bed and saw death drawing her pitilessly, step by step, to the grave ; that life was my whole fortune. Darkness spread around me; I was a savage in my dull despair, but did not try to comfort myself with hopes, did not betray my grief for one moment by the stultifying thought of a meeting beyond the grave.

So it is less likely that I should be false to myself over the impersonal problems of life.

2. P 0 S T S C H. I P T

O N P E T I T B O U H. G E O I S

I KNOW that my view of Europe will meet with a bad reception at home. We for our own comfort want a different Europe and believe in it as Christians believe in paradise. Destroying dreams is always a disagreeable business, but some inner force which I cannot overcome makes me come out with the truth even on occasions when it does me harm.

As a rule we know Europe from school, from literature-that is, we do not know it, but judge it a livre ouvert, from books and pictures, just as children judge the real world from their Orbis pictus, imagining that all the women in the Sandwich Islands hold their hands above their heads with a sort of tambourine, and that where-ever there is a naked negro there is sure to be standing five paces from him a lion with a tousled manP or a tiger with angry eyes.

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Our classic ignorance of the Western European will be productive of a great deal of harm; racial hatreds and bloody collisions will still develop from it.

In the first place all we know is the top, cultured layer of Europe, which conceals the heavy substratum of popular life formed by the ages, and evolved by instinct and by laws that are little known in Europe itself. Western culture does not penetrate into those Cyclopean works by which history has become rooted to the ground and borders upon geology. The European states are welded together of two peoples whose special characteristics are sustained by utterly different up-bringings. There is here none of the Oriental oneness, in consequence of which the Turk who is a Grand Vizier and the Turk who hands him his pipe resemble each other. Masses of the country population have, since the religious wars and the peasant risings, taken no active part in events; they have been swayed by them to right and left like standing corn, never for a minute leaving the ground in which they are rooted.

Secondly, that stratum with which we are acquainted, with which we do enter into contact, we only know historically, not as it is to-day. After spending a year or two in Europe we see with surprise that the men of the West do not on the whole correspond with our conception of them, that they are greatly inferior to it.

Elements of truth enter into the ideal we have formed, but either these no longer exist or they have completely changed.

The valour of chivalry, the elegance of aristocratic manners, the stern decorum of the Protestants, the proud independence of the English, the luxurious life of Italian artists, the sparkling wit of the Encyclopaedists and the gloomy energy of the Terrorists-all this has been melted down and transmuted into one integral combination of different predominant manners, bourgeois ones.

They constitute a complete whole, that is, a finished, selfcontained outlook upon life with its own traditions and rules, with its own good and evil, with its own ways and its own morality of a lower order.

As the knight was the prototype of the feudal world, so the merchant has become the prototype of the new world ; feudal lords are replaced by employers. The merchant in himself is a colourless intermediate figure; he is the middle-man between the producer and the consumer; he is something of the nature of a means of communication, of transport. The knight was more himself, more of a person, and kept up his dignity as he under-

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stood it, whence he was in essence not dependent either on wealth or on position ; his personality was what mattered. In the petit bourgeois the personality is concealed or does not stand out, because i t is not what matters ; what matters is the ware, the produce, the thing; what matters is propertr.

The knight was a fearful ignoramus, a bully, a swashbuckler, a bandit and a monk, a drunkard and a pietist, but he was open and genuine in everything: moreover he was always ready to lay down his life for wha t he thought right; he had his moral laws, his code of honour-very arbitrary, but one from which he did not depart without loss of his self-respect or the respect of his peers.

The merchant is a man of peace and not of war, stubbornly and persistently standing up for his rights, but weak in attack; calculating, parsimonious, he sees a deal in everything and, like the knight, enters into single combat with everyone he meets, but measures himself against him in cunning. His ancestors, mediaeval townsmen, were forced to be sly to save themselves from violence and pillage ; they purchased peace and wealth by evasiveness, by secretiveness and pretence, keeping themselves close and holding themselves in check. His ancestors, cap i n hand and bowing low, cheated the knight ; shaking their heads and sighing, they talked to their neighbours of their poverty, while they secretly buried money in the ground. All this has naturally passed into the blood and brains of their descendants, and has become the physiological sign of a particular human species called the middle estate.

While it was in a condition of adversity and joined with the enlightened fringe of the aristocracy to defend i ts faith and win its rights, it was full of greatness and poetry. But this did not last long, and Sancho Panza, having taken possession of his palace and lolling at full liberty without cen·mony, let himself go and lost his peasant humour and his common st>nse; the vulgar side of his nature got the upper hand.

Under the influence of the petit bourgeois everything was changed in Europe. Chivalrous honour was replaced by the honesty of the book-keeper, elegant manners by propriety, courtesy by affectation, pride by a readiness to take offence, parks by kitchen gardens, palaces by hotels open to all ( that is all who have money) .

The former, out-of-date but consistent conceptions of relationships bet\veen people were shaken, but no new consciousness of the true relationships between people was discovered. This

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chaotic liberty contributed greatly to the development of all the bad, shallow sides of petite bourgeoisie under the all-powerful influence of unbridled acquisition.

Analyse the moral principles current for the last half-century, and what a medley you will find! Roman conceptions of the state together with the Gothic division of powers, Protestantism and political economy, salus populi and chacun pour soi, Brutus and Thomas a Kempis, the Gospel and Bentham, book-keeping and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With such a hotch-potch in the head and with a magnet in the breast for ever attracted towards gold, it was not hard to arrive at the absurdities reached by the foremost countries of Europe.

The whole of morality has been reduced to the duty of him who has not, to acquire by every possible means: and of him who has, to preserve and increase his property ; the flag which is run up in the market-place to show that trading may begin has become the banner of a new society. The man has de facto become the appurtenance of property; life has been reduced to a perpetual struggle for money.

The political question since 1 830 has been becoming exclusively the petit bourgeois question, and the age-long struggle is expressed in the passions and inclinations of the ruling class.

Life is reduced to a gamble on the Stock Exchange; everythingthe publication of newspapers, the elections, the legislative chambers-all ha\·e become money-changers' shops and markets.

The English are so used to putting everything into shop nomenclature that they call their old Anglican Church the 'Old Shop.'2

All parties and shades of opinion in the petit bourgeois world have gradually divided into t\vo chief camps: on one hand the bourgeois property-owners, obstinately refusing to abandon their monopolies; on the other the bourgeois who have nothing, \Vho want to tear the wealth out of the others' hands but have not the power: that is on the one hand miserliness, on the other hand envy. Since there is no real moral principle in all this, the adherence of any individual to one or the other side i s determined bv Pxternal cond itions of fortune and social position.

One wave of the opposition after another achieves a victory: that is, prop<'l·ty or position, and passes naturally from the side of envy to the side of miserliness. For this transition nothing can be more favourable than the fruitless swing backwards and for-

� In English in tlw text. Ht>rz!'n has remembered a trifle incorrpctl y the phras<> usPcl hy certain Anglicans to dt>scribe the EstablishPd Church : Tlw Old Firm.' ( R . )

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wards of parliamentary debates-it gives movement and sets limits to i t, provides an appearance of doing something, and an external show of public interest in order to attain its private ends.

Parliamentary government, not as it follows from the popular foundations of the Anglo-Saxon Common Law but as it has taken shape in the law of the State, is simply the wheel in a squirrel's cage-and the most colossal one in the world. Would it be possible to stand still on one spot more majestically-while simulating a triumphant march forward-than is performed by the two English Houses of Parliament?

But just that maintenance of appearance is the main point.

Upon everything belonging to contemporary Europe two traits, obviously derived from the shop, are deeply imprinted: on one hand hypocrisy and secretiveness; on the other ostentation and etalage. It is all window-dressing, buying at half-price, passing off rubbish for the real thing, show for reality, concealing some condition, taking advantage of a literal meaning, seeming instead of being, behaving decorously instead of behaving well, keeping up external Respektabilitii.t instead of inner dignity.

In this world everything is so much a stage-set that even the coarsest ignorance has achieved an appearance of education.

Which of us has not been left blushing for the ignorance of Western European society? (I am not speaking here of men of learning, but of the people who make up what is called society. ) There can be no serious theoretical education; it requires too much time and is too distracting from business. Since nothing that lies outside trading operations and the 'exploitation' of their social position is essential in the petit bourgeois world, their education is bound to be limited. That is what accounts for the absurdity and slowness of mind which we see in the petit bourgeois whenever he has to step off the beaten track. Cunning and hypocrisy on the whole are by no means so clever and so farsighted as is supposed; their endurance is poor, and they are soon out of their depth.

The English are aware of this and so do not leave the beaten track, and put up with the not merely burdensome but, what is worse, absurd inconveniences of their mediaevalism through fear of any change.

The French petit bourgeois have not been so careful, and for all their slyness and duplicity have fallen headlong into an empire.

Full of confidence in their victory they proclaimed universal suffrage as the basis of their new regime. This arithmetical

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