type is vanishing, vanishing like the aurochs of the White Russian
forest, like the Red Indian, and there is no artist to record his old
clear-cut features, marked with the traces of every sorrow, every grief
that comes from general principles and faith in humanity and reason.
Soon these features will perish, still unyielding, still wearing an
expression of proud and reproachful disdain, then their image will be
effaced and the memory of man will lose one of its noblest and loftiest
types.
These are the peaks in which the mountain range of the eighteenth century
ends; with them it reaches the limit; with them a series of ascending
efforts breaks off. There is no reaching a higher level through volcanic
action.
Titans, left after the struggle, after defeat, representatives of
unsatisfied ambitions, for all their Titanic effort turn from great
men into melancholy Don Quixotes. History rises and falls between the
prophets and the Knights of the Grievous Countenance. Roman patricians,
republicans, stoics of the early ages, hermits fleeing into the
wilderness from a Christianity vulgarised into the official religion,
Puritans who passed a whole century gnashing their teeth over failure
to attain their tedious ideal—all these, left by the retreating tide,
obstinately struggling forward and sticking in the mud, unsupported by
the wave, all are Don Quixotes, but Don Quixotes who have found their
Cervantes. For the champions of the early church, there are volumes of
legends, there are ikons and paintings, there are mosaics and sculpture.
The type of Puritanism is firmly fixed in English literature and in Dutch
painting, but the type of the Don Quixote of the Revolution is fading
before our eyes, growing rarer and rarer, and no one thinks of even
photographing it.
Fanatics of earthly religion, dreamers not of the Kingdom of Heaven,
but of the Kingdom of Man, they are left the last sentinels of the
ideal, long ago deserted by the army; in gloomy solitude they stand for
half a century, incapable of changing, still expecting the coming of
the republic on earth. The ground sinks lower and lower; they refuse
to see it. I still come upon some of these apostles of the ’nineties;
their clear-cut, melancholy, striking figures, standing out above two
generations, seem to me like austere, immovable Memnons, falling into
ruins stone by stone in the Egyptian desert.... While at their feet tiny
men and little camels swarm, bustle, drag their goods, hardly visible
through the whirling sand.
Death gives more and more warning of his approach; the aged, lustreless
eye is sterner, grows weary with the effort of seeking a successor,
looking for one to whom to yield place and honour. Son?—the old man
frowns. Grandson?—he waves his hand in despair. Poor King Lear in
democracy, whenever he turns his dimming eyes upon those of his own
household, everywhere he is met by lack of understanding, lack of
sympathy, disapproval, half-concealed reproach, petty considerations
and petty interests. They are afraid, before strangers, of his Jacobin
words; they beg pardon for him, pointing to his scanty grey hair. His
daughter-in-law worries him to be reconciled with the Church, and a
Jesuit _abbé_ flits in at times, like a passing crow, to see what
strength and consciousness is left, so as to catch him for God in his
deathbed delirium. Well it is for Citoyen Lear if there is somewhere in
his neighbourhood a Citoyen Kent who finds that ‘he is every inch’ a hero
of 1794, some obscure comrade of Santerre,[31] a soldier of the army of
Marceau and Hoche, Citoyen Spartacus Brutus junior, childishly faithful
to his tradition, and proudly keeping shop with the hand which held a
lance crowned with the Phrygian cap. Lear will visit him sometimes to
relieve his heart, to shake his head, and to recall old days, with their
immense hopes, with their great events, to abuse Tallien[32] ... and
Barras[32] ... the Restoration, with its _cafards_, the shopkeeper king,
and _ce traître de Lamartine_. Both _know_ that the hour of revolution
will strike, that the people will awaken like a lion and again hoist the
Phrygian cap, and one of them will fall asleep in these dreams.
Scowling Lear will follow the coffin of Spartacus Brutus junior, or
Spartacus Brutus junior, not concealing his profound loathing of all
the kindred of the deceased, will follow the coffin of Lear, and of the
two majestic figures one only will be left, and that one absolutely
superfluous.
‘He, too, is no more; he, too, has not lived to see it,’ thinks the old
man who is left, as he comes back from the funeral. Can superstition and
monarchy, the party of Pitt and of Coburg, have triumphed for good and
all? Can all our long lifetime, our efforts, our sacrifices?... No, that
cannot be; the truth is on our side, and the victory will be with us....
Reason and justice will triumph, in France first of all, of course, and
then in all humanity, and ‘Vive la République Une et Indivisible’! The
old man at eighty prays with his aged lips, just as another old man,
giving up his soul in peace to his Maker, murmurs ‘Thy Kingdom come,’ and
both tranquilly close their eyes and do not see that neither the Kingdom
of Heaven on earth nor the sole and indivisible Republic in France is
coming at all, and do not see it, because not the Lord but their decaying
body has received their soul in peace.
Holy Don Quixotes, the earth rest lightly upon you!
This fanatical conviction of the possibility of bringing about harmonious
order and the common weal, of the possibility of realising the truth
because it is the truth, this renunciation of everything private and
personal, this devotion which survives every ordeal, every blow, is the
topmost peak.... The mountain ends there; higher, beyond, is icy air,
darkness, nothing. We must go down again. Why cannot we go on? Why does
not Mont Blanc stand on Chimborazo and one of the Himalayas continue
them? That would be a mountain!
But no—every geological cataclysm has its romance, its mountain poem, its
individual peaks of granite and of basalt, whose mass towers above the
lower slopes. Monuments of the revolutions of the planets, they have long
ago been overgrown with forest and moss, bearing witness to thousands of
years of immobility. Our pioneers of the Revolution have left their Alps
in history; the traces of their titanic efforts have not passed away, and
it will be long before they pass. What more would you have?
Yes, that is enough for history. It has its own wholesale, ruthless
valuation; in it, as in the description of battles, we have the movement
of companies, the action of artillery, the attack of the left flank, the
retreat of the right; it has its leading figures, the ‘30th Light Cavalry
and afterwards the 45th.’ The bulletin goes no further; it is satisfied
with the sum total of the dead, but the ‘fifth act’ of every soldier goes
further, and it has a purely civilian interest.
What was not endured by these men of the latest flood-tide, left stranded
in the slime and mud by its ebb! What did not these fathers endure—more
solitary in their own families than monks in their cells! What terrible
conflicts every hour, every day!... What moments of weariness and despair?
Is it not strange that in the long series of ‘_Misérables_’ brought
before us by Victor Hugo there are old men ... but _the_ miserable old
man _par excellence_ is thrust into the background, neglected? Hugo
scarcely noticed that side by side with the agonising sense of guilt
there is another anguish, the agonising sense of one’s useless rectitude,
the recognition of one’s fruitless superiority over the feebleness of
every young creature near that has survived.... The great rhetorician and
poet, while dealing with the sorrowful lives in modern France, scarcely
touches upon the greatest sorrow in the world—that of the old man, young
in soul, surrounded by a generation growing more and more shallow.
Beside them what are the poignant but useless and purely subjective
sufferings of Jean Valjean described with such wearisome minuteness in
Hugo’s omnibus of a novel? Of course, one may feel compassion for every
form of unhappiness, but one cannot feel deep sympathy for all. The pain
of a broken leg and the pain of a broken life stir a different kind of
sympathy.
We are not sufficiently Frenchmen to understand such ideals as Jean
Valjean, and to sympathise with such heroes of the police as Javert. To
us Javert is simply loathsome. Probably Hugo had no idea, when he drew
this typically national figure of the jackal of Law and Order, how he was
branding his ‘charming France.’ In Jean Valjean all we can understand
is his external struggle of the good-luckless wild beast, baited by a
whole pack of hunting dogs. His inner conflict does not touch us; this
man, so strong in will and muscles, is in reality a singularly weak man.
A saintly convict, an Ilya Muromets[33] from the galleys of Toulon, an
acrobat at fifty, and a lovesick boy at almost sixty, he is a mass of
superstition. He believes in the brand on his shoulder, he believes in
his sentence, he believes that he is an outcast, because thirty years
ago he stole a loaf, and that not for himself. His virtue is morbid
remorse, his love is senile jealousy. His strained existence is raised to
truly tragic significance only at the end of the book by the heartless
narrow-mindedness of Cosette’s husband and the boundless ingratitude of
herself. And here Jean Valjean really has something in common with our
old men—the remorse of the one and the rectitude of the others blend in
burning suffering. The mercury frozen in the thermometer scalds like the
molten lead of the bullet. The consciousness of rectitude, consuming
half the heart, half the existence, is as painful as the gnawings of
conscience, and worse indeed. In the latter case there is the relief
of confession, the prospect of reward; in the former there is nothing.
Between the old man of the ’nineties—fanatic, dreamer, idealist—and the
son, older than he in prudence, good sense, and disillusionment, the
son so extremely well satisfied with things on a lower plane, and the
grandson who, swaggering in his uniform of _Guide Impérial_, dreams of
how to get a berth as a _sous-préfet pour exploiter sa position_, the
natural relation is violated, the balance is destroyed, and the normal
succession of generations is distorted.
Jean Valjean in his aged virginity, in his lyrical personal
concentration, did not himself know what he wanted from the younger
generation. What did he really want from Cosette? Could she have been
a friend to him? In the inexperienced innocence of his heart, he went
beyond the love of a father.... He wanted to love her exclusively for his
own sake, and a father’s love is not like that. Moreover, though he has
mentally been draping himself all his life in the jacket of a convict,
he is crushed under the burden of repulsion evinced for him by the very
narrow-minded young man—the typical representative of a generation
sinking into vulgarity.
I don’t know what Hugo meant to make of his Marius, but to me he is as
much a type of his generation as Javert is of his. In the instincts
of the young man there is still a glimmer of the virtues of another
period—warm and generous impulses, with no reflection, no roots, almost
no significance, springing from tradition and example. There is in him
no trace of the leaven of the eighteenth century, that restless itch
for analysis and criticism, that menacing summons of everything in the
world to the test of the intellect; he has no intellect, but he is
still a good comrade; he goes to the barricades, not knowing what is to
come afterwards; he lives by routine, and, knowing _à code ouvert_ what
is good and what is evil, troubles his head as little about it as a
man who knows for certain that it is sinful to eat meat in Lent. With
this generation, the revolutionary epoch comes finally to a standstill
and begins its descent; another generation, and there will be no more
generous impulses; everything will fall into its commonplace routine,
personality will be effaced, and the succession of individual specimens
will be scarcely perceptible in the daily routine of life.
I imagine that there must have been something of the sort in the
development of animals. The species in course of formation stirring
towards what is above its strength, while failing to make the most of
its powers, has gradually gained equilibrium and proportion, and lost
its anatomical eccentricities and physiological excesses while gaining
fertility, and beginning from generation to generation, from age to
age, to repeat its distinct form and its individuality in the image and
semblance of the first forefather who adopted steady habits.
When the species is evolved development almost stops; at any rate, it is
slower and on a humbler scale, as it is with our planet. Having reached
a certain stage of cooling, it changes its crust very slowly; there are
floods, but there are no world-wide deluges; there are earthquakes here
and there, there is no universal cataclysm. Species become stationary,
and are consolidated in various forms more or less one-sided in one
direction or another, and are satisfied with them; they are scarcely able
to escape from them, and if they did, or if they do, the result would be
just as one-sided. The mollusc does not try to become a crab, the crab a
trout, or Holland Sweden.... If we could presuppose ideals in animals,
the ideal of a crab would still be a crab, but with a more perfect
equipment. The nearer a country is to its final condition, the more it
regards itself as the centre of all civilisation and of every perfection,
like China, which stands unrivalled; like England and France, which in
their antagonism, in their rivalry, in their mutual hatred, never doubt
each that she is the foremost country in the world. Some species are at
rest in the position they have attained; development continues in the
unfinished species, beside the finished which have completed their cycles.
Everywhere where human swarms and ant-heaps have attained comparative
prosperity and equilibrium, progress becomes slower and slower,
imagination and ideals are dimmed. The satisfaction of the rich and
the strong suppresses the efforts of the poor and the weak. Religion
appears as the comforter of all the heavy laden. Everything that gnaws
at the heart, that makes men suffer, every craving left unsatisfied on
earth, all are set right and satisfied in the eternal realm of Ormuzd,
loftier than the Himalayas at the foot of Jehovah’s throne. And the more
unrepiningly men endure the temporary sorrows of earthly life, the fuller
the heavenly consolation, and that for no brief period, but for ever and
ever. It is a pity that we know little of the inner story of the Asiatic
peoples who have dropped out of history, know little of those uneventful
periods which preceded the violent inroads of savage races who devastated
everything, or the predatory civilisation which uprooted or reconstructed
everything. It would show us in simple and elementary form, in those
plastic biblical images which only the East creates, the transition of
the people from historical upheavals into a peaceful _status quo_ of
life, persisting in the accepted, untroubled sequence of generations,
like winter into spring, spring into summer....
With slow, untroubled steps England is advancing to that repose, to
that unruffled stagnation of forms, ideas, convictions. The other day
_The Times_ congratulated her on the lack of interest in parliamentary
debates, on the unrepining submission with which workmen starve to death,
‘while so lately their fathers, the contemporaries of O’Connor,’ agitated
the country with their menacing murmurs. As firmly as an aged oak stands
the English Church, its roots deep in the soil, graciously tolerating all
forms of Dissent, and convinced that they will not move far away.
Swaggering and resisting, as is her wont, France is shoved backwards
while making a show of progress. Behind these giants will come in two
columns others, once prophetically united under one sceptre ... on the
one hand, the thin, austere, ascetic type of the Spaniard, brooding
without thought, enthusiastic without an object, anxious without cause,
taking everything to heart, unable to improve anything, in short, a type
of a true Don Quixote de la Mancha; on the other, the sturdy Dutchman,
content when he has had a good meal, reminiscent of Sancho Panza.
Is not the reason that the children of to-day are older than their
fathers, older than their grandfathers, and able _à la_ Dumas junior
to talk of their ‘prodigal fathers,’ that senility is the leading
characteristic of the present age? At any rate, wherever I look I see
grey hairs, wrinkles, bent backs, last wills and testaments, balanced
accounts, funerals, _ends_, and I am always seeking and seeking
beginnings. They are only to be found in theories and abstractions.
_August 10, 1862._
Letter 4
Last summer a friend, a Saratov landowner, and a great Fourierist, came
to see me in Devonshire.
Please don’t be angry with me (it was not the landowner who said that to
me, but I who say it to you) for so continually wandering from the point.
Parentheses are my joy and my misfortune. A French literary man of the
days of the Restoration, a classic and a purist, more than once said to
me, taking a pinch of snuff in the prolonged academic fashion which will
soon have passed away altogether: ‘_Notre ami abuse de la parenthèse avec
intempérance!_’ It is for the sake of digressions and parentheses that I
prefer writing in the form of letters, especially letters to friends; one
can write without check whatever comes into one’s head.
Well, so my Saratov Fourierist came to Devonshire and said to me: ‘Do you
know what is odd? I have just been for the first time in Paris. Well—of
course ... it is all very fine, but, seriously speaking, Paris is a dull
place—really dull!’
‘What next?’ I said to him.
‘Upon my soul, it is.’
‘But why did you expect it to be amusing?’
‘Upon my word, after the wilds of Saratov!’
‘Perhaps it is just owing to that. But were not you bored in Paris
because it’s so excessively gay there?’
‘You are just as silly as you always were.’
‘Not at all. London, looking like a permanent autumn, is more to our
taste; though the boredom here, too, is awful.’
‘Where is it better, then? It seems the old proverb is right. It is where
we are not!’
‘I don’t know: but it must be supposed that it is not very nice there
either.’
This conversation, though it is apparently not very long, nor
particularly important, stirred in me a whole series of old notions
concerning the absence of a sort of fish-glue in the brain of the modern
man; that is why his mind is cloudy and thick with sediment—new theories,
old habits, new habits, old theories.
And what logic! I say it is dull in Paris and London, and he answers,
‘Where is it better, then?’ Not noticing that this was the line of
argument employed by our house-serfs of the old style: in reply to the
observation, ‘I fancy you are drunk, my boy,’ they answered, ‘Well, did
you stand treat?’ What grounds are there for the idea that men are happy
anywhere? that they can or ought to be happy? And what men? And happy
in what? Let us assume that men do have a better life in one place than
another. Why are Paris and London the pinnacles of this better life?
Is it from Reichardt’s guidebook?
Paris and London are closing a volume of world-history—a volume in which
few pages remain uncut. People, trying with all their might to turn
them as quickly as possible, are surprised that as they approach the
end there is more in the past than in the present, and are vexed that
the two fullest representatives of Western Europe are setting together
with it. The audacity and recklessness in general conversations which
float, as once the Spirit of God, over the waters, are terrific, but
as soon as it comes to action, or even to a critical appreciation of
events, all is forgotten, and the old weights and measures are hauled
out of the grandmother’s storeroom. Worn-out forms can only be restored
by a complete rebirth: Western Europe must rise up like the Phoenix in a
baptism of fire.
‘Oh, well, in God’s name, into the flames with it.’
What if it does not rise up again, but singes its beautiful feathers, or
maybe is burnt to ashes?
In that case continue to baptize it with water, and don’t be bored in
Paris. Take my father, for example: he spent eight years in Paris and
was never bored there. Thirty years afterwards he was fond of describing
the fêtes given by the maréchals and by Napoleon himself, the suppers at
the Palais Royal in company with actresses and opera dancers, decked in
diamonds that had been wrenched out of conquered royal crowns, of the
Yussupovs, the Tyufyakins and other _princes russes_ who lost there more
souls of peasants than were laid low at Borodino. With various changes
and _un peu plus canaille_ the same thing exists even now. The generals
of finance give banquets as good as those of the generals of the army.
The suppers have moved from the Rue St. Honoré to the Champs-Élysées and
the Bois de Boulogne. But you are a serious person; you prefer to look
behind the scenes of world-history rather than behind the scenes of the
Opera.... Here you have a parliament, even two. What more do you want?...
With what envy and heartache I used to listen to people who had come home
from Europe in the ’thirties, as though they had robbed me of everything
they had seen and I had not seen. They, too, had not been bored, but had
great hopes, some of Odilon Barrot, some of Cobden. You, too, must learn
not to be bored; and in any case be a little consistent; and if you still
feel dull, try to find the cause. You may find that your demands are
fantastic, then you must try to get over it; that it is the boredom of
idleness, of emptiness, of not knowing how to adapt yourself. And perhaps
you will find something else: that you are bored because Paris and London
have no answer to make to the yearnings that are growing stronger and
stronger in the heart of the man of to-day—which does not prevent their
standing for the highest culture and most brilliant result of the past,
and being rich endings of a rich period.
I have said this a dozen times. But it is impossible to avoid
repetitions. Persons of experience are well aware of it. I spoke to
Proudhon of the fact that articles which are almost identical, with only
slight variations, often appeared in his journal.
‘And do you imagine,’ Proudhon answered, ‘that once a thing has been
said, it is enough? That a new idea will be accepted straight off? You
are mistaken. It has to be repeated, it has to be dinned into people,
repeated over and over again, so that the mind is no longer surprised by
it, so that it is not merely understood, but is assimilated, and obtains
real rights of citizenship in the brain.’
Proudhon was perfectly right. There are two or three ideas which are
particularly precious to me; I have been repeating them for about fifteen
years; fact upon fact confirms them with unnecessary abundance. Part of
what I anticipated has come to pass, the other part is coming to pass
before our eyes, yet these ideas seem as wild, as unaccepted, as they
were.
And what is most mortifying, people seem to understand you; they agree,
but your ideas remain like aliens in their heads, always irrelevant,
never passing into that integral part of consciousness and the moral
being, which as a rule forms the undisputed foundation of our acts and
opinions.
It is owing to this inconsistency that people apparently highly cultured
are continually being startled by the unexpected, caught unawares,
indignant with the inevitable, struggle with the insurmountable, pass by
what is springing into life, and apply all sorts of remedies to those who
are at their last gasp. They know that their watch was properly set, but,
like the late ‘unlamented’ Kleinmihel, cannot grasp that the meridian is
not the same.