to the feat of reckless daring, from the woman dressed in black to the
secret preserved by the whole people—everything that had faded away in
the old world, from the mitre and the sword of chivalry to the Phrygian
cap—has appeared once more in all its poetic brilliance in rebellious
Poland, as though to deck with the flowers of youth the _elders of
civilisation_, as they slowly move into the conflict that they dread.
On the other hand, the ‘Beginnings’ glimmer faintly through the
smoke of burnt cities and villages.... What is happening here is the
exact opposite.... All the surviving relics of the _old world_ have
risen up in defence of the rule of Petersburg, and are defending its
ill-gotten gains with all the weapons bequeathed by the barbarous ages
of military violence and the corrupt period of diplomatic intrigue.
These range from the torture and murder of prisoners to false amnesties
and sham declarations, from the barbaric exile of whole sections of
the population to newspaper articles and the filigree rhetoric of
Gortchakov’s notes.
The storms of recent days have ruffled the still waters of our pool.
Much that has lain buried in silence under the coffin-lid of past
oppression has come to the surface and revealed its utter putrefaction.
Only now we can measure the depth of the corruption which the Imperial
Government has developed in the cause of Germanising us for a century
and a half. The German lymph has matured in the coarse Russian blood,
the healthy organism has given it fresh strength, and, while infected by
it, has lost nothing of its own vice. The inhuman narrow ugliness of the
German officer and the petty vulgarity of the German official has long
ago blended in Russia with the features of the Mongol, the savage and
unrelenting cruelty of the oriental slave and of the Byzantine eunuch.
But we have not been used to seeing this composite personality outside
the army barracks and the government offices; it has never appeared so
strikingly outside the Service: scantily educated, it not only wrote
little but even read little. Now our Minotaurs come to the surface
not only in the palaces and torture-chambers, but in society, in the
universities, in literature.
We thought that our literature was so lofty, that our professors were
such apostles; we were mistaken in them, and how painful it is! we are
revolted by it as by every display of moral degradation. We cannot but
protest against the dreadful things that are being said and done; we
cannot but be repelled by the frenzy of violence, the inhuman butchery
and still more inhuman applause. Perhaps it may be our lot to fold our
hands and die in our retreat before this delirium of ‘cultured’ Russia is
over.... But this storm will not uproot the seed that lies hidden in the
soil; it will not hurt it, and maybe it will strengthen it. A new vital
force is strengthened by everything—ill deeds and good alike. It alone
can pass through blood, unstained, and say to the savage combatants: ‘I
know you not; you have worked for me, but it was not for my sake you
worked.’
Look at the savage satrap in Lithuania: he strangles the Polish element,
but the Russian autocracy will bear the marks of the struggle; he hunts
down the Polish nobles, but it will be the Russian nobles who will flee.
Like house-porters, they know not for whom they are sweeping, for whom
they are clearing a path, as little as the Roman she-wolf knew whom she
was suckling, whom she was rearing. Not Romulus, but Remus, wronged in
the past, will tread the bloodstained path: it is for him that Tsar and
satraps are clearing a road.
But before he comes much blood yet will flow, and there will be a fearful
collision of two worlds. Why must it flow? Why, indeed? There is no
help for it, if men gain no more sense. Events move rapidly and the
brain develops slowly. Under the influence of dark forces, of fantastic
images, the peoples move as though sleep-walking through a succession
of insoluble problems; after fighting together, and seeing nothing
clearly, during all the fifteen hundred years from the fearful collapse
of the Roman world, they reach the nineteenth century, which is no more
civilised than the times of Germanicus and Alaric.
_August 1, 1863._
Letter 1
And so, dear friend,[26] you will positively go no further, you want to
rest amidst the rich autumn harvest, in shady parks, languidly ruffling
their leaves after the long, hot summer. You are not alarmed at the
days growing shorter, at the mountain-tops turning white, and the cold,
sinister wind that blows at times; you are more afraid of our spring
floods, of the knee-deep mud, of the wild overflow of the rivers, of
the bare earth showing under the snow, and, in fact, of our dreams of a
future harvest from which we are separated by storms and hail, by drought
and deluge, and all the hard work we have not yet accomplished....
Well, in God’s name, let us part in love and concord like good
fellow-travellers.
You have only a little way further to go, you have arrived, here is the
brightly lighted house, the sparkling river and the garden, and leisure
and books at hand, while I, like an old post hack, always in harness,
shift from one task to another till I drop dead between two stations.
Believe me that I fully understand your dislike and dread of a life with
no order nor beaten paths, and your affection for established civic and
political forms, and, moreover, such as may become ‘better,’ but are so
far the ‘best’ existing.
We men of European town civilisation can, as a rule, only exist under
the established conventions. Town life accustoms us from early childhood
to the fact that discordant forces are balanced and kept in check behind
the scenes. When we are by chance thrown off the beaten track on which,
from the day of our birth, it guides and carefully moves us, we are as
completely at a loss as the theoretical savant, accustomed to museums
and herbariums and to wild beasts in glass cases, is at a loss when
confronted with the traces of a geological cataclysm, or with the dense
population of the Mediterranean Sea.
I have chanced to see two or three desperate haters of Europe who have
returned from beyond the ocean. They had gone thither, so revolted by the
Reaction after 1848, so exasperated against everything European, that
they had hastened on to Kansas or California, hardly willing to stop
at New York. Three or four years later they reappeared in the familiar
cafés and beer-shops of old Europe, ready to make any concession to avoid
seeing the virginal forests of America and her untilled soil, to avoid
being _tête-à-tête_ with Nature and meeting wild animals, rattlesnakes,
and men with revolvers. You must not imagine, however, that they were
simply terrified by danger, material privations, or the necessity of
work; here, too, men die of hunger if they do not work, and here, too,
they work sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, while the police and
the spies in the old continent are more dangerous than wild beasts and
revolvers. They were, above all, terrified and depressed by Nature
untouched by man, by the absence of that well-ordered organisation, that
peace secured by the administration, that artistic and epicurean comfort
which depend on permanent habitation, are protected by a strong wall of
police, rest upon the ignorance of the masses, and are defended by the
Church, the Law, and the Army. For the sake of this mess of pottage,
_well served_, we sacrifice our share of human dignity, our share of
sympathy for our neighbour, and give our _negative_ support to the
_régime_ which is in reality hateful to us.
In France we have seen another example: the literary men who lived in
rhetoric, the artists who lived in art for art’s sake and for money’s
sake, were beside themselves at the disturbance caused by the Revolution
of February. We have an acquaintance, a teacher of singing, who, to
escape 1848, moved from Paris to London, to the home of sore throats,
bronchitis, asthma, and speaking through the teeth—only to avoid hearing
the alarm bell and the masses singing in chorus.
In the Russia of to-day the causes which led men to flee from Paris
and from Arkansas are combined. In America what was most alarming was
naked Nature, wild Nature with the dew of creation not yet dry upon its
leaves, the Nature we love so ardently in pictures and poems. (The man
with the revolver naïvely killing his neighbour is as much in place in
the Pampas as the naïve tiger with teeth an inch long.) In France Nature
is not to be feared, it is swept and garnished, tigers do not walk about,
and the vine flourishes; but, on the other hand, in 1848, passions broke
loose again, and again the foundations of good order tottered. Among
us in Russia, while Nature is untouched, men and institutions, culture
and barbarism, the past that died an age ago, and the future which
will be born in ages to come—all are in ferment and dissolution, being
pulled down and built up, everywhere there are clouds of dust, posts
and rafters. Indeed, if one adds to our primitive means of travel the
highly developed means of making money in the Service, to the natural
mud of our roads the filth of the life of our landowners, to our winter
tempests the Winter Palace, together with the generals, the Cabinet
Ministers, the refreshment bars, and the Filarets, ‘the gendarme vanguard
of civilisation’ made in Germany, and the rearguard with axes in their
belt, primeval in their force and their simplicity, one must have a great
passion or a mighty madness to plunge of free will into that whirlpool,
which redeems its chaos by the rainbow-lights of prophecy and the grand
visions, for ever glimmering behind the fog and for ever unable to
disperse it.
Passion and madness are talents of a sort, and do not come at will. One
is irresistibly drawn into the whirlpool, another is repelled by its
froth and uproar. The point is that to one man sleep is dearer than
father and mother, and to another his dream. Which is better? I do not
know: and, indeed, both may lead to the same delirium.
But we will not give way to these philosophic reflections; they commonly
by one path or another conduct us to the unpleasant conclusion that
whether you batten in a feather-bed or fret yourself in a squirrel’s
wheel, you will do no good one way or the other, except perhaps to enrich
the soil when you are dead. Every life, as the students’ song has it,
begins with _Juvenes dum sumus_, and ends with _Nos habebit humus_!
We must not dwell on this mournful reduction of everything in the world
to nullity, or you will call me a nihilist, and that is now the term of
abuse which has replaced Hegelian, Byronist, and suchlike.
A living man thinks of what is living. The question between us is not
whether a man has the right to withdraw into a peaceful retreat, to turn
aside like an ancient philosopher from the Nazarene madness and the
influx of barbarians. Of that, there can be no question. I only want to
make clear to myself whether the ancient sanctuaries, built so solidly
and overgrown with the moss of mediaeval Europe, are so peaceful and
convenient, above all, so secure as they were; and, on the other hand,
whether there is not a magic spell in the visions we see in the snowstorm
and the ringing of the sledge-bells, and whether there is not some real
force in that magic.
There was a time when you defended the ideas of Western Europe, and you
did well; the only pity is that it was entirely unnecessary. The ideas of
Western Europe, that is, scientific ideas, have long ago been recognised
by all as the inalienable property of humanity. Science is entirely
without latitude or longitude; it is like Goethe’s ‘Divan,’ Western and
Oriental.
Now you want to maintain that the actual forms of Western European life
are also the heritage of mankind, and you believe that the manner of
life of the European upper classes, as evolved in the historic past, is
alone in harmony with the aesthetic needs of human development, that it
alone furnishes the conditions essential for literary and artistic life;
that in Western Europe art was born and grew up, and to Western Europe
it belongs; and finally, that there is no other art at all. Let us pause
first at this point.
Pray do not imagine that I shall from the point of view of civic
austerity and Puritanism protest against the place which you give to art
in life. I am in agreement with you on that point. Art—_c’est autant de
pris_; together with the summer lightnings of personal happiness, it is
our one indubitable blessing. In all the rest, we are either toiling or
drawing water in a sieve for humanity, for our country, for fame, for our
children, for money, and at the same time are solving an endless problem.
In art we find enjoyment, in it the goal is attained; it, too, is an
‘End’ in itself.
And so, giving to Diana of Ephesus what is due to Diana, I ask you
of what exactly you are speaking, of the present or the past? Of the
fact that art has developed in Western Europe, that Dante and Michael
Angelo, Shakespeare and Rembrandt, Mozart and Goethe, were by birth and
opinion ‘Westerners’? But no one disputes it. Or do you mean that a long
historical life has prepared both a better stage for art and a finer
framework for it, that museums are more sumptuous in Europe than anywhere
else, galleries and schools richer, students more numerous, teachers more
gifted, theatres better decorated, and so on? And that, too, is true. Or
nearly so, for ever since the great opera has returned to its primitive
state of performers strolling from town to town, only grand opera is
_überall und nirgends_. In the whole of America there is no such Campo
Santo as in Pisa, but still Campo Santo is a graveyard. It is quite
natural, indeed, that where there have been most corals there you find
most coral-reefs.... But in all this where is the new living creative
art, where is the artistic element in life itself? To be continually
calling up the dead, to be repeating Beethoven, to be playing Phèdre and
Athalie, is all very well, but it says nothing for creativeness. In the
dullest periods of Byzantium, Homer was read and Sophocles recited at the
literary evenings; in Rome, the statues of Pheidias were preserved, and
the best sculpture collected on the eve of the Genserics and the Alarics.
Where is the new art, where is the artistic initiative? Is it to be found
in Wagner’s ‘music of the future’?
Art is not fastidious; it can depict anything, setting upon all the
indelible imprint of the spirit of beauty, and impartially raising to the
level of the madonnas and demigods every casual incident of life, every
sound and every form, the slumbering pool under the tree, the fluttering
bird, the horse at the drinking-trough, the sunburnt beggar-boy. From
the sinister, savage fantasy of hell and the Day of Judgment to the
Flemish tavern with the back view of a peasant, from Faust to Faublas,
from the Requiem to the Kamarinsky, all lie within the domain of art....
But even art has its limit. There is a stumbling-block which neither the
violinist’s bow nor the painter’s brush nor the sculptor’s chisel can
deal with; art to conceal its impotence mocks at it and turns it into
caricature. That stumbling-block is petty-bourgeois vulgarity. The artist
who excellently portrays a man completely naked, covered with rags, or
so completely dressed that nothing is to be seen but armour or a monk’s
cassock, is reduced to despair before the bourgeois in a swallow-tail.
Hence the necessity of flinging a Roman toga upon Robert Peel; hence
a banker is stripped of his coat and his cravat, and his shirt is
unbuttoned, so that if he could see his own bust after death he would be
covered with blushes before his own wife.... Robert Macaire and Prudhomme
are great caricatures. Sometimes caricatures are works of genius; in
Dickens they are tragically true to life, but still they are caricatures.
Beyond Hogarth that style cannot go. The Vandyke and Rembrandt of petty
bourgeoisie are Punch and Charivari, they are its portrait gallery and
pillory; they are the family records and the whipping-post.
The fact is that the whole petty-bourgeois character, both in its good
qualities and its bad qualities, is opposed to art and cramping to it;
art withers in it like a green leaf in chlorine, and only the passions
common to all humanity can at times, by breaking into bourgeois life,
or, even better, breaking out of its decorum, raise it to artistic
significance.
Decorum, that is the real word. The petty bourgeois, like Moltchalin,[27]
has two talents, and he has the same ones, Prudence and Punctuality. The
life of the middle class is full of petty defects and petty virtues; it
is self-restrained, often niggardly, and shuns what is extreme, what
is superfluous. The park is transformed into the kitchen garden, the
thatched cottage into the little town house with an escutcheon painted
on the shutters, but every day they drink tea in it, and every day they
eat meat. It is an _immense step_ in advance, but not at all artistic.
Art is more at home with poverty and luxury than with crude prosperity,
with comfort when it is an end in itself; if it comes to that, it is more
at home with the harlot selling herself than with the respectable woman
selling at three times the cost the work of the starving seamstress.
Art is not at ease in the stiff, over-neat, careful house of the petty
bourgeois, and his house is bound to be such; art feels instinctively
that in that life it is reduced to the level of external decoration
such as wallpaper and furniture, to the level of a hurdy-gurdy; if the
hurdy-gurdy man is in the way he is kicked out, if they want to listen
they give him a halfpenny and with that have done with him.... Art which
is pre-eminently elegance of proportion cannot endure the yard-measure; a
life self-satisfied with its narrow mediocrity is defiled for art by the
worst of blots—vulgarity.
But that does not in the least prevent the whole cultured world from
passing into petty bourgeoisie, and the vanguard has arrived there
already. Petty bourgeoisie is the ideal to which Europe is everywhere
striving and ascending. It is the ‘hen in the soup,’ of which Henry the
Fourth dreamt. A little house, with little windows looking into the
street, a school for the boy, a dress for the girl, a servant for the
hard work—all that makes up indeed a haven of refuge—Havre de Grace! The
man turned off the soil which he had tilled for ages for his master,
the descendant of the villager, crushed in the struggle, the homeless
workman, doomed to everlasting toil and hunger, the day-labourer, born
a beggar and dying a beggar, can only wipe the sweat from their brows
and look without horror at their children by becoming property owners,
masters, bourgeois; their sons will not be kept in lifelong bondage for
a crust of bread, their daughters will not be condemned to the factory
or the brothel. How should they not strive to be bourgeois? The bright
image of the shopkeeper—who has replaced the knight and the priest for
the middle classes—hovers as the ideal before the eyes of the casual
labourer, until his tired and horny hands drop on his sunken chest, or
until he looks at life with that Irish tranquillity of despair which
precludes every hope, every expectation, except the hope of a whole
bottle of whisky next Sunday.
Bourgeoisie, the last word of civilisation, founded on the absolute
despotism of property, is the ‘democratisation’ of aristocracy, the
‘aristocratisation’ of democracy. In this order Almaviva is the equal
of Figaro—everything below is straining up into bourgeoisie, everything
above sinking down into it through the impossibility of maintaining
itself. The United States present the spectacle of one class—the middle
class—with nothing below it and nothing above it, and the petty bourgeois
manners and morals are retained. The German peasant is the petty
bourgeois of agriculture; the workman of every country is the petty
bourgeois of the future. Italy, the most poetical land in Europe, was
not able to hold out, but at once forsook her fanatical lover, Mazzini,
and betrayed her husband, the Hercules Garibaldi, as soon as Cavour, the
petty bourgeois of genius, the little fat man in spectacles, offered to
keep her as his mistress.
With the coming of bourgeoisie, individual characters are effaced, but
these effaced persons are better fed; clothes are made by the dozen,
not to measure or to order, but there are more people who wear them.
With the coming of bourgeoisie, the beauty of the race is effaced, but
its prosperity increases, the statuesque beggar from Transteverino is
employed for rough work by the puny shopkeeper of the Via del Corso. The
crowds of holiday-makers in the Champs-Élysées or Kensington Gardens,
or the audiences in churches or theatres, depress one with their
vulgar faces, their dull expressions; but the holiday-makers in the
Champs-Élysées, the audiences listening to the sermons of Lacordaire or
the songs of Levasseur,[28] are not concerned at that, they do not notice
it. But what is very important to them and very striking is that their
fathers and elder brothers were not in a position to go holiday-making or
to the theatre as they are; that their elders sometimes drove on the box
of carriages, but they drive about in cabs, and very often too.
It is for this reason that bourgeoisie is triumphing and is bound to
triumph. It is useless to tell a hungry man, ‘It suits you much better to
be hungry; don’t look for food.’ The sway of bourgeoisie is the answer
to emancipation without land, to the freeing of men from bondage while
the soil is left in bondage to a few of the elect. The masses that have
earned their halfpence have come to the top and are enjoying themselves
in their own way and possessing the world. They have no need of strongly
marked characters, of original minds. Science cannot help stumbling upon
the discoveries that lie closest at hand. Photography—that barrel-organ
version of painting—replaces the artist; if a creative artist does appear
he is welcome, but there is no desperate need of him. Beauty, talent,
are altogether out of the normal; they are the exceptions, the luxury
of Nature, its highest limit or the result of great effort, of whole
generations. The voice of Mario, the points of the winner of the Derby,
are rarities. But a good lodging and a dinner are necessities. There is
a great deal that is bourgeois in Nature herself, one may say; she very
often stops short in the middle, half-way, and evidently has not the
spirit to go further. Who has told you that Europe will have it?
Europe has been through a bad quarter of an hour. The bourgeois were
all but losing the fruits of a long lifetime, of prolonged efforts, of
hard work. A vague but terrible protest has arisen in the conscience of
humanity. The petty bourgeois have been reminded of their wars for their
rights, their heroic age and biblical traditions. Abel, Remus, Thomas
of Münster have been slain once more, and long will the grass grow upon
their tombs as a warning how the all-powerful bourgeoisie punishes its
enemies. Since then all has returned to its normal routine, which seems
secure, which is based on reason, which is strong and growing, but has
no artistic plan, no aesthetic chord: it does not seek to have them; it
is too practical; it agrees with Catherine II. that it is not becoming
for a serious man to play the piano well; the Empress, too, regarded men
from the practical point of view. The gardens are too heavily manured for
flowers to grow; flowers are too unprofitable for the petty bourgeois’
garden; if he does sometimes grow them, it is for sale.
In the spring of 1850 I was looking for lodgings in Paris. By that time
I had lived so long in Europe that I had grown to hate the crowding
and crush of civilisation, which at first we Russians like so much. I
looked with horror mixed with disgust at the continually moving, swarming
crowd, foreseeing how it would rob me of half my seat at the theatre and
in the diligence, how it would dash like a wild beast into the railway
carriages, how it would heat and pervade the air—and for that reason I
was looking for a flat, not in a crowded place, and to some extent free
from the vulgarity and deadly sameness of the lodgings _à trois chambres
à coucher de maître_.[29]