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

barbarians—mockers both by nature and by the feeling of their inferiority—light-minded in appearance only;

the Russians are essentially fit for serious affairs. ЛИ have the requisite disposition for acquiring an extraordinarily acute tact, but none are magnanimous enough to rise above finesse; and they have therefore disgusted me with that faculty, so indispensable to those who would live among them. With their continual surveillance of self, they seem to me the men the most to be pitied on earth. This police of the imagination is incessantly leading them to sacrifice their sentiments to those of others: it is a negative quality which excludes positive ones of a far superior character; it is the livelihood of ambitious eourtiers, whose business is to obey the will and to guess the impulses of another, but who would be scouted should they ever pretend to have an impulse of their own. To give an impulse requires genius; genius is the tact of energy; tact is only the genius of weakness. The Russians are all tact. Genius acts, tact observes; and the abuse of observation leads to mistrust, that is, to inaction; genius may ally itself with a great deal of art, but never with a very refined tact, because tact

that supreme virtue of subalterns who respect the enemy, that is, the master, so long as they dare not strike — is always united with a degree of artifice. Under the influence of this talent of the seraglio, the Russians are impenetrable: it is true that we always see they are concealing something, but we cannot tell what they conceal, and this is sufficient for them. They wñll be truly formidable and deeply skilful men when they succeed in masking even their finesse.

Some of them have already attained to that profì-