lively understanding more than do superstition and ignorance. With
the latter the instincts are left, hardly conscious, but trustworthy;
moreover, ignorance does not exclude passionate enthusiasm, and
superstition does not exclude inconsistency, while pedantry is always
true to itself.
At the time of the Italian war a simple-hearted, worthy professor
lectured on the great triumphs of ‘international law,’ describing how the
principles of Hugo Grotius had developed and entered into the conscience
of nations and governments, how questions which had in old times been
decided by rivers of blood and the miseries of entire provinces, of whole
generations, were now settled, like civil disputes between private
persons, on the principles of national right.
Who, apart from some old professional condottiere, would not agree with
the professor that this is one of the greatest victories of humanity
and culture over brute violence? The trouble is not that the lecturer’s
judgment is wrong, but that humanity is very far from having gained this
victory.
While the professor in eloquent words was inspiring his young audience to
the contemplation of these triumphs of peace, very different commentaries
on international law were taking place on the fields of Magenta and
Solferino. It would not have been easy for any international court to
avert the Italian war, since there was no international cause for it, for
there was no subject in dispute. Napoleon waged this war as a remedial
measure to pacify the French by the gymnastics of liberation and the
galvanic shocks of victory. What Grotius or Vattel[34] could have solved
such a problem? How was it possible to avert a war which was essential
for domestic interests? If it had not been Austria the French would
have had to beat somebody else. One can only rejoice that the Austrians
presented themselves.
Then, India, Pekin—war waged by democrats to maintain the slavery of
the blacks, war waged by republicans to obtain the slavery of political
unity. And the professor goes on lecturing; his audience are touched;
they fancy that they have heard the last creak of the gates of the
temple of Janus, that the warriors have laid down their weapons, put on
crowns of myrtle and taken up the distaff, that the demobilised armies
are tilling the fields.... And all this at the very moment when England
is covered with volunteers, when at every step you meet a uniform,
when every shopkeeper has a gun, when the French and Austrian armies
stand with lighted matches, and even a prince—I think it was of Hesse
Cassel—put on a military footing and armed with revolvers the two hussars
who had from the time of the Congress of Vienna ridden peacefully without
weapons behind his carriage.
If war breaks out again—and that depends on thousands of chances, on
one casual shot—in Rome or on the borders of Lombardy, a sea of blood
would flow from Warsaw to London. The professor would be surprised, the
professor would be pained. But one would have thought he should not be
surprised nor pained. The trend of history is plain for all to see! The
misfortune of the doctrinaires is that they, like our Diderot, shut their
eyes when arguing, that they may not see that their opponent wants to
retort; and their opponent is nature itself, history itself.
To complete the absurdity we ought not to lose sight of the fact that
in abstract logic the professor is right, and that if not a hundred but
a hundred million men had grasped the principles of Grotius and Vattel,
they would not slaughter each other either for the sake of exercise or
for the sake of a bit of land. But the misfortune is that under the
present political _régime_ only a hundred and not a hundred million men
can understand the principles of Grotius and Vattel.
That is why neither lectures nor sermons have any effect, that is why
neither the learned fathers nor the spiritual fathers can bring us any
relief; the monks of knowledge, like the monks of ignorance, know nothing
outside the walls of their monasteries, do not test their theories by
facts, their deductions by events, and, while men are perishing from the
eruption of the volcano, they are blissfully beating time, listening to
the music of the heavenly spheres and marvelling at its harmony.
Lord Bacon long ago divided the learned into the spiders and the bees.
There are periods in which the spiders are distinctly in the ascendancy,
and then masses of spiders’ webs are spun, but little honey is gathered.
There are conditions of life which are particularly favourable to
spiders. Lime trees, thickets, and flowering meadows, above all, wings
and a social conception of life, are necessary for the production of
honey. A quiet corner, untroubled leisure, plenty of dust, and lack of
interest in anything outside the inner process, is all that is needed for
producing spiders’ webs.
At ordinary times it is even possible to saunter along the dusty, smooth
highroad without breaking the spiders’ webs, but as soon as it comes to
crossing rough ground and hillocks there is trouble.
There was a really good, quiet period of European history beginning with
Waterloo and lasting till the year 1848. There was no war then, but
plenty of international law and standing armies.
The governments openly encouraged ‘true enlightenment’ and quietly
suppressed the _false_; there was not much freedom, but there was not
much slavery; even the despotic rulers were all good-natured in the
style of the patriarchal Francis II., the pious Friedrich Wilhelm, and
Alexander the friend of Araktcheyev. The King of Naples and Nicholas came
by way of dessert. Manufactures flourished, trade flourished even more,
factories worked, masses of books were written; it was the golden age for
all the spiders; in academic retreats and in the libraries of the learned
endless spiders’ webs were spun!...
History, criminal and civil law, international law, and religion itself,
were all brought into the region of pure science and thence dropped in
lacy fringes of spider’s web. The spiders swung at their own sweet will
in their meshes, never touching the earth. Which was very fortunate,
however, since the earth was covered with other crawling insects, who
stood for the idea of the state _armed for self-defence_, and clapped
over-bold spiders into Spandau and other fortresses. The doctrinaires
understood everything most perfectly _à vol d’araignée_. The progress of
humanity was as certain in those days as the route mapped out for the
Most High when he travelled incognito—from stage to stage with horses
ready at the stations. And then came—February the 24th, June the 24th,
the 25th, the 26th, and December the 2nd.
These flies were too big for a spider’s web.
Even the comparatively slight shock of the July revolution gave the
final death-blow to such giants as Niebuhr and Hegel. But its triumph
was still to the advantage of the doctrinaires; the journalists, the
Collège de France, the political economists sat on the top steps of the
throne beside the Orleans dynasty, those who remained alive recovered and
adapted themselves somehow to 1830; they would have probably got on all
right even with the republic of the troubadour, Lamartine.
But how could they compromise with the days of June?
How could they live with the 2nd of December?
* * * * *
Of course, Gervinus teaches us that an epoch of centralisation and
despotism necessarily follows a democratic revolution, but yet something
seemed amiss. Some began asking whether we should not go back to the
Middle Ages, others simply urged a return to Catholicism. The fakirs
of the Revolution pointed out with undeviating finger along the whole
railway line of time to the year 1793; the doctrinaires went on lecturing
regardless of facts, in the expectation that mankind will have had its
fling and return to Solomon’s temple of wisdom.
Ten years have passed.
Nothing of all that has come off. England has not become Catholic,
as Donoso-Cortès desired; the nineteenth century has not become the
thirteenth, as some of the Germans desired; the peoples resolutely
refuse French fraternity (or death!), international law after the pattern
of the Peace Society, honourable poverty after Proudhon, and a Kirghiz
diet of milk and honey.
While the Catholics....
The mediaevalists....
The fakirs of 1793....
And all the doctrinaires go on preaching....
Where is humanity going since it despises such authorities?
Perhaps it does not know.
But we ought to know for it.
Apparently not where we expected it to go. And, indeed, it is hard to
tell where one will get to, travelling on a globe which a few months ago
only just missed a comet, and may any day crack, as I informed you in my
last letter.
_September 1, 1862._
Letter 5
In the early days of my youth I was struck by a French novel which I have
not met since; it was called _Arminius_. Possibly it has no great merits,
but at the time it had a great influence on me, and I remember the chief
incidents to this day.
We all know something of the meeting and conflict between two different
worlds; the one, the classical world of culture, corrupt and effete;
the other, savage as a wild beast of the forest, but full of slumbering
forces and chaotic impulses. But we only, for the most part, know the
official public side of this contact, not that side concerned with
details and the privacy of home life. We know the events in the rough,
but not individual fortunes; not the dramas in which lives were silently
broken and perished in personal struggle, in which blood was replaced
by bitter tears, and devastated towns by ruined families and forgotten
graves.
The author of _Arminius_ tried to reproduce these two worlds—the one
moving from the jungle to history, the other from history into the
grave—as they met at the domestic hearth. In this, world history is
reduced to personal gossip, is brought nearer to us, more within our
grasp and comprehension.[35]
It never entered my head then that I should find myself in a similar
conflict, that a similar conflict would come into my own life with all
its ruinous force, and that my hearth would be devastated and shattered
at the meeting of two historic worlds.
In our attitude to the Europeans, in spite of all the points of
difference, which I understand quite well, there are points of
resemblance to the attitude of the Germans to the Romans. In spite of our
exterior, we are still barbarians. Our civilisation is skin-deep, our
corruption is crude, our coarse hair bristles through the powder on our
heads, and our sunburn shows through the powder on our cheeks. We have
plenty of the cunning of savages and the evasiveness of slaves. We are
ready to give blows indiscriminately and to fall at a man’s feet, when
we are guiltless, but I obstinately repeat we are very far behind the
corrosive hereditary subtleties of West European corruption.
Among us, intellectual development serves as a purification and
a guarantee—at least it has done so hitherto;[36] exceptions are
exceedingly rare, culture among us is a barrier which much that is
infamous never crosses; and it is owing to this that all through the
reign of Nicholas the government could not succeed in establishing a
secret police nor a literature in the pay of the police, like the French.
In Western Europe this is not so, and that is how it is that Russian
dreamers who have made their way into freedom readily surrender to any
man who touches with sympathy on their holy things, who understands
their cherished thoughts, forgetting that for him these holy things have
long ago passed into a commonplace, into a convention, that, for the
most part, they repeat them possibly even sincerely, but in the way in
which a priest, thinking of something else, blesses any one he meets. We
forget how many other elements are tangled in the complex, exhausted,
morbidly struggling soul of the Western European, how utterly he is
exhausted, worn out with envy, penury, vanity and _amour-propre_, and
into what a terrible epicureanism of the higher morbidly nervous kind the
humiliation, poverty, and struggle of competition have developed.
We find out all this when the blow has fallen; it stuns us. We feel
ourselves made fools of, and want to revenge ourselves. Looking at this I
sometimes think that much blood will flow from the ‘conflict of these two
different forms of culture....’ These lines were written some years ago.
I am still of the same opinion despite the fact that in Europe Russians
enjoy the reputation of a most depraved people. This is due to the lack
of polish in our conduct and the rustic habits of our landowners. We
have convinced the whole world of our viciousness, just as the English
have convinced it of their domestic virtue. As a matter of fact,
neither the vice nor the virtue goes very deep. Russians abroad not
only lead a disorderly life, but boast of their savage and dissolute
habits. Unfortunately, being brought into contact as soon as they pass
the frontier with the clumsy and servile country of _kellners_ and
_hofraths_, the Russians, like half-educated people in general, cease
to stand on ceremony, and let themselves go further and further, and
in this reckless mood arrive in Paris and London. It has happened to
me many times to observe how conspicuous Russians make themselves by
absolute trifles, and they keep up the first impression by the sort of
defiant _nargue_ with which they refuse to obey the received conventions
(though they are models of submissiveness and correctness at home!). A
man is recognised as a Russian in the big hotels, because he shouts in
the public room, guffaws loudly, and invariably protests at smoking being
forbidden in the dining-room. All this aggressiveness of an upper servant
outside his master’s house shows far more immaturity and unfamiliarity
with freedom than deep depravity; bragging always goes with this moral
‘unripeness.’ Like boys of fourteen, we not only want to drink too much,
but to show off to all the world: ‘Look how I have been going it!’ But
all the world judges differently. Looking at what the Russians lay bare,
it thinks, shaking its head, ‘What must they have concealed?’ And all the
while there is nothing there, just as there is nothing in the soldier’s
haversack on parade, though it looks as though it were stuffed.
Ages of civilisation, passing from generation to generation, acquire a
special bouquet which one does not catch at once; in this the fate of
man is similar to the fate of Rhine wine. There is nothing particularly
attractive about the propriety that is gained, though it is pleasanter
to go by its rules, as it is to go along a well-swept path. We, it must
be admitted, are badly swept, and there are a good many hard stones and
plenty of mud on our path.
Our breaking-in to culture is fresh in our memory: it was accomplished by
rough-and-ready means, just as a peasant taken into the master’s house is
shaved like a German and turned into a servant. Renouncing at the command
of the Most High the whole structure of the national life, the nobility
have obstinately retained all its bad qualities; flinging overboard
together with its prejudices the severe decorum and propriety of the
national manners, they have retained all the coarse habits of the master
and the Tatar lack of respect for self and for others. The oppressive
traditional morality of old days has been replaced neither by the
aristocratic conception of honour nor the citizen’s conception of public
duty and independence; it has been replaced much more simply by German
barrack discipline _in the army_, mean servility and cringing dependence
_in the public service_, and nothing at all _outside it_.
Outside the government service, the nobleman was transformed from the
servant who is beaten to a Peter the Great who is beating; in the
country he had full scope: there he became at once corporal, emperor,
grand gentleman, and father of his domain. This life of both wolf and
enlightener produced colossal monstrosities, from torturers like Bühren
and Potyomkin on the grand scale to the hangmen and Potyomkins on a
microscopic scale; from Izmailov flogging police captains to Nozdryov
with one whisker torn off; from the ‘Araktcheyev of all the Russias’
to the minor Araktcheyevs of battalions and companies who flogged the
soldier into his grave; from the bribe-takers of the first three grades
to the hungry swarms of clerks who scribbled the poor peasants into
their graves; with endless variations of drunken officers, bullies,
cardsharpers, heroes of fairs, dog-fanciers, brawlers, devotees of
flogging, and seraglio-keepers. Here and there among them is a landowner
who has turned a foreigner in order to remain a human being, or a ‘noble
soul,’ a Manilov,[37] a turtle-dove of a nobleman, cooing in his mansion
beside the stable where chastisement was administered.
One might wonder what good thing could arise, grow, and flourish in this
soil between the Araktcheyevs and the Manilovs? What could be reared by
these mothers who sent men for soldiers, cut off women’s hair, and beat
their servants, by these fathers who fawned on all above them and were
savage tyrants to all below them? Yet it was among them that the men of
the 14th of December arose, a phalanx of heroes, suckled like Romulus
and Remus on the milk of a wild beast.... Finely they throve on it! They
were heroes, wrought out of pure steel from head to foot, martyr warriors
who went forth consciously to inevitable ruin to awaken the younger
generation to new life and to purify the children, born in the midst of
brutality and slavishness. But who cleansed their souls with the fire
of purification, what virgin force renounced in them its filth and its
corruption, and made them the martyrs of the future?
It was in them; that is enough for me for the present. I make a note
of it and return to what I was saying: there is a sort of unstable,
unbalanced ferment and frenzy in the pothouse debauchery of our vice; it
is the delirium of intoxication which has taken hold of an entire class,
that has strayed off the path with no serious plan and aim. But it has
not that deeply penetrating, deeply rooted, subtle, nervous, intelligent,
fatal depravity from which the educated classes of Western Europe are
suffering, dying, and decaying.
But how has it come to pass, what moral simoom has blown on the civilised
world?... There has always been progress and more progress, there are
free institutions, railways, reforms, and telegraphs.
Much that is good is being accomplished, much that is good is being
accumulated, but the simoom still blows and blows like a _memento mori_,
continually increasing, and sweeping everything in the world before it.
To be wroth at this is as useless as to be wroth with the squirrels for
losing their fur, at the sea because after full tide, as though to mock
us at its very best moment, it begins to ebb. It is high time that we
accepted this fluctuation, this rhythm of all creation, this alternation
of night and day.
The period of ‘moulting’ in which we have found Western Europe is the
hardest; the new fur is scarcely showing while the old skin has grown
stiff, like that of the rhinoceros; here is a crack, there is a crack,
but _en gros_ it holds fast. This position between two skins is extremely
disagreeable. Everything strong suffers, everything weak that struggles
to the surface is ruined; the process of renewal is inextricably
connected with the process of decay, and there is no telling which will
get the upper hand.
Let me explain my thought further in the next letter. Perhaps I shall
succeed in proving to you that this is not a _manière de dire_, not
subjective indignation (indeed, it is difficult to have a personal
quarrel with world history), but a few facts noted by eyes free from the
myopia of scholastic pedantry and the blindness of mysticism.
Letter 6
We stopped at the reflection that we must not be angry with squirrels
for losing their fur, nor at the winter for following the summer every
year. To recognise the inevitable is a source of strength. It is only by
knowing the currents of the sea and the continually shifting equatorial
winds, apart from any desire to correct them, that one can navigate the
ocean.
Look how things are done as a rule in Nature. In every species, in the
shaping of every form, development goes on the principles by which the
germ was determined.
It grows, is defined, and acquires a more or less unalterable character
from the mutual interaction of the elements and environment. New
factors may arise, new conditions may alter the direction of growth, may
arrest what has begun, and change it into something quite different; but
if the development does not lose its individuality, if it continues,
the form will inevitably progress on the same lines, with its own
special characteristic, and will develop its one-sidedness, that is,
its individual case. This does not in the least hinder its neighbours,
either in space or time, from developing all sorts of variations on
the same theme with various complements and differences, with their
own one-sidedness in accordance with other conditions and another
environment. Only at the beginning of the development of forms there
is an undefined and characterless epoch, an epoch of, so to speak, the
pre-zoological stage in the egg and the embryo.
Of the transmutation of animal species we know very little. Their
whole history has taken place behind man’s back and covers whole
periods of time in which there has been no witness. We are confronted
now with finished, settled types, so far removed from each other that
any interchange between them is impossible. Behind every animal there
glimmers a long history—of efforts, of progress, of _avortements_, and of
reaching the equilibrium, in which its forms have come to rest at last,
not reaching its vague ideal, but coming to a standstill at the possible,
at what will just do.
Needless to say, there are no sharp limits nor irrevocable decisions
in any natural phenomena. The creative process that has come to a
standstill, that has been reduced to mere repetition, may always be
re-awakened; in some cases it has passed from the influence of the stars
under the influence of man; by his cultivation he has developed vegetable
and animal species which would not have developed of themselves.
All this casts an immense light on the question we are considering.
History presents us with a formation, caught in the very act, not yet
settled but settling, and preserving in its memory the leading phases of
its development and their ebbs and flows. Some sections of the human race
have attained consistent forms and have conquered their history, so to
speak; others in the heat of struggle and activity are creating it; while
others, like the bottom of a sea that has only recently dried up, are
ready for any sort of seeds, any sort of sowings, and give an unexhausted
rich soil for everything.
As it is impossible looking at a calm sea to say that it will not
within an hour be ruffled into a storm, so we cannot positively assert
that China, for instance, or Japan, will for ages and ages maintain
their aloof, cramped, stagnant form of existence. How can we tell
that some word will not fall like a drop of yeast among those sleepy
millions, and rouse them to a new life? But if we have no right to
form a final, unconditional conclusion, it does not follow that after
careful observation we have not the right to draw some conclusions. The
fisherman, looking at a cloudless sky, and noting that there is no wind,
will almost certainly be right if he concludes there will not be a storm
for an hour.