side of the Seine in the Faubourg St. Germain, or close by. I went
there. The old wife of the concierge took the keys and led me by the
yard. The house and the lodge stood behind a fence; within the courtyard
behind the house, there were green trees. The lodge was neglected and
deserted-looking, probably no one had been living there for many years.
The somewhat old-fashioned furniture was of the period of the First
Empire, with Roman straight lines and blackened gilt. The lodge was by no
means large or sumptuous, but the furniture and the arrangement of the
rooms all pointed to a different idea of the conveniences of life. Near
the little drawing-room to one side, next the bedroom, was a tiny study
with cupboards for books and a big writing-table. I walked through the
rooms, and it seemed to me that after long wanderings I had come again
upon a dwelling for a man, _un chez soi_, not a hotel room nor a human
stall.
Everything—the theatre, holiday-making, books, pictures,
clothes—everything has gone down in quality and gone up terribly in
numbers. The crowd of which I was speaking is the best proof of success,
of strength, of growth; it is bursting through all the dams, overflowing
and flooding everything; it is content with anything, and can never have
enough. London is crowded, Paris is cramped. A hundred railway carriages
linked on are insufficient; there are forty theatres and not a seat free;
a play has to be running for three months for the London public to be
able to see it.
‘Why are your cigars so inferior?’ I asked one of the leading London
tobacconists.
‘It is hard to get them, and, indeed, it is not worth the trouble; there
are few connoisseurs and still fewer well-to-do ones.’
‘Not worth while? You charge eightpence each for them.’
‘That brings us hardly any profit. While you and a dozen like you will
buy them, is there much gain in that? In one day I sell more twopenny and
threepenny cigars than I do of these in a year. I am not going to order
any more of them.’
Here was a man who had grasped the spirit of the age. All trade,
especially in England, is based now on quantity and cheapness, and not at
all on quality, as old-fashioned Russians imagine when they reverently
buy Tula penknives with an English trademark on them. Everything has a
wholesale, ready-made, conventional character, everything is within the
reach of almost every one, but does not allow of aesthetic distinction
or personal taste. Everywhere the hundred-thousand-headed hydra lies in
wait close at hand round a corner, ready to listen to everything, to look
at everything indiscriminately, to be dressed in anything, to be fed on
anything—this is the all-powerful crowd of ‘conglomerated mediocrity’
(to use Stuart Mill’s expression) which purchases everything, and
so dominates everything. The crowd is without ignorance, but also
without culture. To please it art screams, gesticulates, falsifies,
and exaggerates, or in despair turns away from men and paints animal
portraits and pictures of cattle, like Landseer and Rosa Bonheur.
Have you seen in the last fifteen years in Europe an actor, a single
actor, who is not a clown, a buffoon of sentimentality, or a buffoon of
burlesque? Name him!
Many blessings have been vouchsafed to the epoch of which the last
expression is to be found in the notes of Verdi, but the artistic
vocation was certainly not among them. Its own creation—the _café
chantant_—an amphibious product, half-way between the beer-cellar and
the boulevard theatre, is precisely on its level. I have nothing against
_cafés chantants_, but I cannot give them serious artistic value;
they satisfy the ‘average customer,’ as the English say, the average
purchaser, the average bidder, the hundred-headed hydra of the middle
class, and there is nothing more to be said.
The way out from this position is far off. Behind the multitude now
ruling stands an even greater multitude of candidates eager to enter it,
to whom the manners, ideas, and habits of life of the middle class appear
as the one goal to strive for. There are enough to multiply their numbers
ten times over. A world without land, a world predominated by town
life, with the rights of property carried to the extreme point, has no
other way of salvation, and it will all pass through petty bourgeoisie,
which in our eyes has not reached a high level, but in the eyes of the
agricultural population and the proletariat stands for culture and
progress. Those who are in advance live in tiny cliques like secular
monasteries, taking no interest in what is being done by the world
outside their walls.
The same thing has happened before, but on a smaller scale and less
consciously; moreover, in the past there were ideals, convictions, words
which set both the simple heart of the poor citizen and the heart of the
haughty knight beating; they had holy things in common, to which all men
did homage as before the sacrament. Where is there a hymn nowadays which
could be sung with faith and conviction in every storey of the house from
the cellar to the garret? Where is our ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’ or
our ‘Marseillaise’?
When Ivanov was in London he used to say with despair that he was looking
for a new religious type, and could find it nowhere in the world about
him. A pure artist, dreading falsehood in his painting like blasphemy,
understanding rather by imagination than by analysis, he asked us to show
him where were the picturesque features in which a new Atonement would
shine forth. We could not show them. ‘Perhaps Mazzini will,’ he thought.
Mazzini would have pointed him to the unity of Italy, perhaps to
Garibaldi in 1861, to that _last of the great men_ as to a _forerunner_.
Ivanov died knocking in vain, the door was not opened to him.
ISLE OF WIGHT.
_June 10, 1862._
Letter 2
Apropos of Mazzini. A few months ago the first volume of his collected
works appeared. Instead of a preface or notes, Mazzini connected the
articles written by him at various times, by means of a series of
amplifications; there is a mass of the most living interest in these
explanatory pages. The poem of his monastic life dedicated to one god and
one service is unintentionally revealed in these disconnected jottings,
possibly more fully than he meant.
An enthusiast, a fanatic with Ligurian blood in his veins, Mazzini was
from youth up irrevocably devoted to the great cause of the freedom of
Italy, and to that cause he remains faithful for ever—_ora e sempre_, as
his motto says: he finds his youth, love, family, faith, duty, all in
that. Espoused to one wife, he has not betrayed her, and grey-headed,
emaciated, sick, he holds off death, he refuses to die before Rome is the
capital of United Italy and the lion of Saint Mark tears to tatters the
black-and-yellow rag which flies above him.
The testimony of such a man, one, too, who attacked scepticism,
socialism, and materialism, a man who lived in every heart-throb of
European life for forty years, is extremely important.
After the first schoolboy enthusiasm of every revolutionary career, after
the romance of conspiracies, mysterious passwords, meetings at night,
vows over bloodless daggers, the young man reconsiders things.
In spite of the fascination for a youthful Latin soul of the setting and
ritual, the earnest and ascetic Mazzini soon discerned that there was
in Carbonarism far more ceremony and empty form than action, far more
meeting and preparing than doing. We, too, perceived long ago that the
political liturgy of the priests of conspiracy, like the church liturgy,
is only a dramatic performance; however much feeling and sincerity the
priests sometimes bring to the service, still the Lamb is slain in bread
and bleeds in wine. Mazzini noticed that thirty-five years ago.
Having reached that point, it was hard for the young Carbonaro to
stop. Watching recent events in the crumbling Empire, an eye-witness
of monarchical restorations, revolutions, constitutional attempts and
republican failures, Mazzini reached the conclusion that contemporary
European life had, as he expressed it, ‘no initiative of any sort,’ that
the conservative idea and the revolutionary idea have only negative
significance: one destroys, not knowing to what end, the other preserves,
not knowing to what end; that in everything that was going on (and
the revolution of 1830 was going on at that time) there was nothing
inaugurating a new order of things.
In these words of the future rival of the Pope there are echoes of the
funeral knell struck by the Pope’s friend, Maistre.
The void of which Mazzini was sensible may well be understood.
The flood-tide of the revolutionary sea rose triumphantly in 1789 and,
untroubled by any doubts, drowned the old world. But when everything was
covered by its waves, and when mitres, plumed hats, and heads without
bodies (among them one wearing a crown) had bobbed up for a moment and
sunk again to the bottom, then for the first time a fearful freedom
and emptiness was felt. The forces set free attacked one another, then
stopped, exhausted; they had nothing to do, they waited for the events
of the day as casual labourers wait for work. Those standing armies of
the Revolution boiled with martial energy, but there was no war to fight;
above all, there was no clear aim to fight for. And when there is no aim,
anything may become the aim. Napoleon assured them that he was the aim,
that war was the aim, and set blood flowing faster than the revolutionary
tide had flooded the world with ideas.
Mazzini saw that, and, before uttering his final verdict, he looked
beyond the political walls. There he was met by the colossal egotism
of Goethe, his serene callousness, his interest as of a naturalist in
human affairs; there he was met by the self-consuming colossal egotism
of Byron; the poetry of scorn beside the poetry of contemplation;
lamentation, laughter, proud flight, and revulsion from the modern world
beside the haughty satisfaction in it. The heroes of Byron impress
Mazzini; he tries to discover the origin of these strange hermits with
no religion and no monastery, these egoists, concentrated on themselves,
useless, unhappy, without work, without fatherland, without interests,
these ascetics, ready for sacrifices which they know not how to make,
ready to despise themselves as human beings. And again Mazzini stumbles
upon the same cause. Byron’s heroes are lacking in faith, in an objective
ideal; the poet’s vision, turning aside from his barren, repellent
surroundings, was reduced to the lyrical expression of states of feeling,
to the impulses of activity turned inwards, to morbid nerves, to the
spiritual abysses where madness and sense, vice and virtue, lose their
limits and turn to phantoms, to gnawing remorse and, at the same time,
morbid ecstasy.
Mazzini’s active spirit could not stop at this analysis of the malady.
At all costs he longed to find motive for action, the word of a new
faith,—and he found them.
Now the lever is in his hands. He will turn the world upside-down, he
will re-create Europe, he will exchange the coffin for the cradle, will
turn the demolishers into architects, will solve the problem of society
and the individual, of freedom and authority, will give faith to the
heart without robbing the mind of reason.... What, you may wonder, is
this _magnum ignotum_? _The unity and freedom of Italy with ancient Rome
for its centre._
In all this, of course, there is no place for analysis nor for criticism.
Was it not because Mazzini had found a new revelation, a new redemption
of the world, and an Italian _resorgimiento_, that he failed to foresee
one thing—Cavour? He must have hated Cavour more than Antonelli. Cavour
was the prose translation of his poem, he fulfilled the prosaic part of
Mazzini’s programme, _à la longue_ Rome and Venice will follow suit.
Cavour is the Italian Martha, thwarting the all-absorbing dream of the
Italian Mary with household trivialities; and while Mary, with tender
ecstasy, saw the redemption of the world in liberated Italy, Martha was
cutting out a Belgian dress for Italy, and the country, pleased that the
new garment did not pinch her, went along the beaten European track, the
great trade route, though there is no reaching a regeneration of the
world without risking a more perilous path.
The fanatic Mazzini was mistaken; the immensity of his error made
Cavour and United Italy possible. But for us it matters little how
Mazzini solved the question; what is of interest to us is that as soon
as a Western European stands on his own feet and shakes off ready-made
formulas, as soon as he begins to look at the state of contemporary
Europe, he is conscious of something amiss, he feels that things are
not going the right way, that progress has taken the wrong turning.
Revolutionaries and conservatives can easily cheat this feeling by
replacing what they lack with the principle of nationalism, especially
if, luckily for them, their native country is under foreign rule. But
what comes next? What are they to do when they have established the
independence of their people? Or what are they to do if it is already
independent?
Mazzini, conscious of the emptiness of the democratic idea, points to
the emancipation of Italy from the ‘Tedeschi.’ Stuart Mill sees that
everything around him is growing vulgar and petty; he looks with despair
at the overwhelming myriads of petty bourgeois massed together like
pressed caviare, with no initiative, no understanding, but in England
they have no Austrian yoke, no Pope, no Neapolitan Bourbon. What is to be
done there?
I foresee the wrath of our bond-slaves of the factories of learning and
the foundries of scholasticism; I can see how malignantly in the light
of day they will look at me with their night-owls’ eyes and say: ‘What
nonsense is he talking? As though historical development could turn
aside, as though it did not move according to its laws, like the planets
which never turn aside, and never break away from their orbits.’
To this last contention it may be said that anything may happen, and
that there is no reason why a planet should not sometimes break away
from its orbit. Saturn’s ring has been preserved and revolves with it,
while Jupiter’s necklace has broken into separate beads, and the earth
has one moon like a cataract in the eye. But one has but to glance into
a hospital instead of an observatory to see how the living _go off
the track_, develop in their abnormality and carry it to comparative
perfection, distorting and sometimes destroying the whole organism. The
delicate equilibrium of every living creature is uncertain and to some
extent adapts itself to abnormalities: but one step too far in that
direction, and the overstrained knot is broken and the elements released
form into new combinations.
The general laws, of course, remain the same, but they may vary in their
particular applications, till they appear absolutely opposite in their
manifestations. Fluff flies and lead falls in obedience to the same law.
In the absence of a set plan and fixed date, of a yard-measure and a
clock, development in nature and in history, far from not being able to
turn aside, is bound to be continually turning aside, in accordance with
every influence and by virtue of its irresponsible passivity and lack of
definite aim. In the individual organism the deviation reveals itself by
pain, and the warning of pain often comes too late. Complex, composite
organisms fly off at a tangent and are carried downhill, unconscious of
the road or the danger, owing to the constant change of generations.
There is very little possibility of stopping the deviation, arresting the
downward flight or overtaking it, and there is little desire to do so;
such a desire would in every case presuppose consciousness and aim.
Consciousness is a very different thing from practical application. Pain
does not cure, but calls for treatment. The diagnosis may be correct,
but the treatment may be bad; one may have no knowledge of medicine, yet
clearly perceive the disease. To demand a cure from a man who points out
some evil is exceedingly rash. The Christians who wept over the sins of
this world, the socialists who exposed the sores of the social order, and
we, dissatisfied, ungrateful children of civilisation, we are not the
physicians, we are the pain; what will come of our moaning and groaning
we do not know; but the pain is recorded.
We are confronted with a civilisation which has developed consistently on
the basis of a landless proletariat and the unlimited right of the owner
over his property. What Sieyès prophesied has come to pass: the middle
class has become all-important because it possesses property. Whether
we know how to emerge from petty-bourgeois rule to the rule of the
people or not, we have the right to regard bourgeois rule as a one-sided
development, a monstrosity.
By the word monstrosity, disease, we commonly understand something
unnatural, exceptional, not reflecting that abnormality and disease are
more _natural_ than the normal, which is merely the algebraical formula
of the organism, an abstraction, a generalisation, an ideal formed
from different particulars by the exclusion of what is accidental. The
deviation and the abnormality follow the same law as the organisms; if
they were not subjected to it, the organism would die. But, in addition
to that, they rest on their peculiar rights, they have their private
laws, the consequences of which we have again the right to deduce,
apart from any ability to correct them. Seeing that the forepart of the
giraffe has acquired a one-sided development, we could surmise that this
development was at the expense of the hind part, and that in consequence
there would infallibly be a series of defects in his organism
corresponding with his one-sided development, but for him natural and
comparatively normal.
Bourgeoisie makes up the forepart of the European camelopard; that might
be disputed, if the fact were not so obvious; but, once that is accepted,
we cannot overlook all the consequences of this supremacy of the shop and
trade. It is clear that the man at the helm of this world will be the
tradesman, and that he will set his trademark on all its manifestations.
The ineptitude of an aristocracy by birth and the misery of a proletariat
by birth are equally helpless against him. The government must die
of hunger or become his menial; its comrades in unproductivity, the
guardians of the human race in its immaturity, the lawyers, notaries,
judges and such, are equally under his yoke. Together with his supremacy,
the whole of moral life is degraded, and Stuart Mill, for instance,
did not exaggerate when he talked of the narrowing of men’s minds and
energies, the filing down of individuality, life continually becoming
more shallow, and wide human interests being continually more excluded
from it by its being confined to the interests of the counting-house and
bourgeois prosperity. Mill says plainly that, going by that road, England
will become a second China; to which we would add, and not England alone.
Perhaps some crisis will save us from the Chinese decay. But whence
and how will it come, and will the aged body survive it? That I cannot
tell, nor can Stuart Mill. Experience has taught us; more cautious than
Mazzini, we humbly adhere to the point of view of the dissector. We know
of no remedies and have little faith in surgery.
I have been particularly fortunate, I have lived next door to the
hospital and have had a first-rate seat in the anatomical theatre; I
had not to look in the atlas, nor to attend lectures on parliamentary
therapeutics, nor theoretical pathology; disease, death, and dissolution
were taking place before my eyes.
The death agony of the July monarchy, the fever of the Papacy, the
premature birth of the Republic and her death, the June days following
on the February twilight, all Europe in a fit of somnambulism falling
from the roof of the Pantheon into the muddy pond of the police! And then
ten years in the spacious museum of pathological anatomy, the London
Exhibition of specimens of all the progressive parties in Europe, side by
side with the indigenous specimens of every form of conservatism from the
times of the Judean high priests to the Puritans of Scotland.
Ten years!
I had leisure to look deeply into that life, into what was going on
around me; but my opinion has not changed since in 1848 I ventured, not
without horror, to decipher on the brow of those men the _Vixerunt_ of
Cicero!
With every year I struggle more and more against the lack of
comprehension of men here, their indifference to every interest, to
every truth, the trivial frivolity of their senile intellects, the
impossibility of persuading them that routine is not the infallible
criterion, and that habit proves nothing. Sometimes I stop short, I fancy
that the worst time is over, I try to be inconsistent: I fancy, for
instance, that suppressed speech in France is growing into thought.... I
expect, I hope.... Exceptions do happen sometimes.... Something seems to
be dawning.... No, nothing!
And no one feels this.... People look at you with a sort of pity as
at one deranged.... But I have happened to meet with old, old men who
shake their heads very mournfully. Evidently these old men are ill at
ease with the strangers of their household, that is, with their sons and
grandsons....
Yes, _caro mio_, there is still in the life of to-day a great type for a
poet, a type altogether untouched.... The artist who would look intently
at the grandfathers and grandsons, at the fathers and children, and
fearlessly, mercilessly embody them in a gloomy, terrible poem, would be
the laureate at the graveside of this world.
That type—the type of the Don Quixote of the Revolution, the old man
of 1789, living out his old age on the bread of his grandsons, French
petty bourgeois grown rich—has more than once moved me to horror and
depression. Think of him a little and your hair will stand on end.
ISLE OF WIGHT, COWES.
_July 20, 1862._
Letter 3
... Phew, what a disgusting summer! Cold, darkness, sleet, continual
winds, constant irritation of the nerves and also of the membrane of the
nose; and all that has been going on for three months, and there were
seven months before that on this side of the Sign of the Ram.
At last the sun has come out in a cloudless sky. The sea is smooth and
sparkling. I am sitting at my window in a tiny farm; I cannot take my
eyes off it; it is so long since I saw the sun and the distance. To-day
it is actually warm. I am simply delighted, seeing that Nature is not
played out yet. The rejoicing is endless: bees and birds are flying,
buzzing, singing, droning; in the little yard of the farm the cock, dry
at last, is crowing his loudest; and the old dog, oblivious of his age
and social position, lies on his back like a puppy, with his legs in the
air, rolling from side to side with an unconscious epicurean growl. There
are no people to be seen from my window, but fields, trees, and gardens
without end; in spite of the sea on one side, this view reminds one of
our great Russian landscapes, and there is the scent of grass and trees,
too.
It was more than time for the weather to improve, for I had really begun
to be afraid not of a social, but of a geological catastrophe; I had
begun to expect that after ten months of bad weather Europe would crack,
and by volcanic means cut the Gordian knot of contemporary problems and
_impasses_, bidding those who will to begin, not from their ABC, but from
a second Adam.
You, as a poet and idealist, probably don’t believe in such nonsense, but
Lamé,[30] as one of the greatest mathematicians of our age, is not of
that opinion. He fancies that the equilibrium of the crowded continents
is very insecure, and that, taking also into account their rapid movement
in one direction, and certain facts of the shifting of contours in
Iceland, the earthly globe may crack in Europe at any moment. He has even
drawn up a series of formulas and made a series of calculations.... But
there is no need to frighten you; the crack won’t reach as far as the
province of Orel.
We had better, taking advantage of the phenomenally fine weather, return
to our discussion of ‘Ends and Beginnings,’ and if the earthquake comes
it will settle things.