hinder the bourgeois crystallisation, to bring down belfries and towers
and frontiers and customs-houses, but it was turned aside in time by
the lightning conductors, and had not a chance. It is easier to picture
Europe returning to the Catholicism of the times of Gregory Hildebrandt
at the summons of Donoso Cortès and Count Montalembert, than turning into
a socialist republic of Fourier’s or Cabet’s pattern. But who speaks
seriously of socialism nowadays? The European world may rest easy on that
score; the shutters are put up, there are no lightnings on the horizon,
the storm is far away ... the bourgeois can quietly tuck himself up in
his quilt, tie his kerchief round his head, and put out his candle.
‘Gute Nacht, gute Nacht,
Liebe Mutter Dorothee!’
But poor Mother Dorothy, like Gretchen, has a brother a soldier, and
like all soldiers he is fond of noise and fighting and will not let her
sleep. She would have got rid of him long ago, but she has some valuable
belongings, so she must have a guard in case of hungry neighbours. Well,
it is not enough for her brother to be her guard; he is ambitious. ‘I am
a knight,’ he says, ‘I thirst for heroic deeds and promotion.’
Yes, if the army could be reduced to the defenders of property, the
bodyguard of capital, everything would quickly reach its stable
final order. But there is nothing perfect in this world, and the
hereditary knightly spirit keeps up the ferment and prevents life
from settling down. However tempting is plunder and however natural
is blood-thirstiness to men in general, the dash of a hussar, the
aggressiveness of a Suvorov, are not compatible with maturity, with
quiet unruffled culture. The dislike for everything military in China
is much more comprehensible in a mature people than the passion of a
Nicholas for ‘braid and epaulettes and buttonholes.’
That is just the trouble. What is to be done with the great people which
boasts of being a military people, which is all made up of Zouaves,
_pioupious_, and Frenchmen, who are also soldiers?
_Peuple de France, peuple de braves!_
It is absurd to talk about quiet nights, moonlight walks, free trade,
political freedom, or freedom of any sort, while five hundred thousand
bayonets, bored and idle, are clamouring for their ‘right to work.’
The Gallic cock sees to it that no turkey, duck, or goose in Europe can
sleep in peace.
As a matter of fact, if France would abandon the army and enter the
Civil Service (she cannot exist without being an official of some sort)
everything would go swimmingly. England would fling the useless guns
bought for her riflemen into the sea, my grocer Johnson (and Son) would
be the first to exchange his weapon for a fishing-rod, and go fishing
in the Thames. Cobden would weaken everything that Palmerston had
strengthened, and the Duke of Cambridge would be elected President of the
Peace Society.
But France does not dream of leaving military service—and, indeed, how
could she? Who would look after Mexico, the Pope, and the _almost_ united
Italy? The honour of the flag is involved, there is no help for it!
_Peuple de France, peuple de braves!_
What is to be done?
Allow me to break off here and to describe another meeting with an old
friend: he from his ‘crazy’ standpoint has found a bolder solution of
these questions than I have.
Some two years ago I was walking along the Strand, when I saw busily
engaged in the doorway of a big shop of travelling requisites a fat,
nimble little figure, startlingly out of place in London, and in various
ways suggestive of Italy, wearing a light grey hat, and a thin yellow
overcoat, and adorned with an immense black beard: I fancied I had seen
this figure before somewhere.... I looked more closely ... it was he,
it really was he, my vigorous, jolly medical student, with teeth like a
wolf’s and the good humour of a good digestion, the demonstrator with
whom in old days I had ‘cut up cats and dogs,’ as he expressed it, and
not in Italy, but in the anatomical theatre of the Moscow University.
This time I said to my Russian-Italian, ‘You can’t claim to be the first
to recognise an old friend.’
‘_Eccolo!_ How charming! Upon my soul!’ and he impetuously kissed me, so
intimately had he come to know me during his absence.
‘If you often fling up both hands like that,’ I observed to him, ‘you
certainly will have your travelling wallet stolen.’
‘I know, I know. It is the traditional home of thieving.... Do you
remember Don Juan, at the end of the poem, when he goes back to London?’
‘I remember. Well, and is your eccentric friend with you?’
‘To be sure. He is expecting me at the hotel; he did put his nose out
into the street, but went back at once. He said it was so crowded and
stuffy that he was afraid he would be sea-sick. So he sent me to buy a
few things for the journey. To-morrow we are setting out for Texas.’
‘Where?’
‘To Texas, you know, in America.’
‘What for?’
‘What we lived in Calabria for. My Telemachus has not changed one bit,
only he discourses with more assurance than ever. You remember how he
used to explain to you that the terrestrial globe was sick, and that it
was high time for men to be cured of civilisation, so now he is convinced
that the cure is progressing too slowly in Europe, so he is going off
to Texas or somewhere. I am used to him; we spend the whole day, as we
always did, in arguing, and it is wonderful what a tie that is. Oh, well,
we’ll have a look at America!’
‘And how did you get on in Calabria?’
‘At first he liked it there, though to my thinking the humblest district
town in the province of Saratov, say, is superior to the whole of
Calabria. You can get billiards there, anyway, and, maybe, some little
widow, or at any rate a soldier’s wife in a neighbouring village, but we
found none but brigands, shepherds, and priests, and there was no telling
which was a brigand, which was a shepherd, and which was a priest. We
took a tumbledown ruin of a Radcliffe castle; lizards, the beasts, ran
over the floor in broad daylight, while at night the bats flew about the
drawing-room, _flop, flop_, against the wall. But I did go away several
times to Naples and to Palermo.... And what do you think of Garibaldi?
Now he is a man! you can depend upon him!... But our friend stayed on
in his castle; he only once left it to go to Rome. Rome suited him, as
though the choir had just left off singing, “May he rest in peace with
the Saints.” He is a Hamlet, a grave-digger!’
‘Well, will your Hamlet show himself?’
‘Not a doubt. He has mentioned you several times; you are still astray at
times, but are on the right path, he says. Ha, ha, ha!’
‘I am glad to hear it. Let us go to him.’
‘Delighted.’
I found Yevgeny Nikolayevitch greatly aged. His face, much calmer, had
gained a shade of a sort of clerical pensiveness: the dry, even pallor
of his face gave it a lifeless appearance; the dark rings round his
eyes, which were more sunk than ever, gave a sinister look to their old
melancholy expression.
‘You are fleeing from us across the ocean, Yevgeny Nikolayevitch,’ I said
to him.
‘And I advise you to do the same.’
‘Why so?’
‘It is very wearisome here.’
‘Well, you knew that in the past. You told me so eight years ago.’
‘That is true. But I confess I thought there would be war.’
‘What war?’
‘War!’ and he waved his hand.
‘Have you grown so bloodthirsty in Calabria?’
‘It does not matter to me personally, but it is painful to be the witness
of it; I am sorry for the young generation.’
‘But what do you want war for? To help the young generation?’
‘I can’t help it. That is what it has come to.’
‘I frankly confess I do not clearly understand what you mean.’
‘You have hit on a knotty point!’ put in Filipp Danilovitch.
‘That is because you both doubt and believe. That is the trouble. It is
clear that tables do not turn, but when the question arises: but what
if tables really do turn, then it is not clear. Filipp Danilovitch here
is quite a different matter; he is orthodox; he knows that there is
progress, and that everything is for the best. But however I look at it,
I see that men have kicked over the traces and are plunging deeper and
deeper into the morass.’
‘The horse has kicked over the trace, so off with his leg, amputate it at
once. Drastic treatment!’ observed Filipp Danilovitch.
‘Find a remedy and amputation will not be necessary. But since there
is none, would you leave the invalid alone? The nations of West Europe
are tired out, and they have reason to be; they want to rest, to live
for their own pleasure; they are sick of perpetually remodelling and
reconstructing, and knocking down each other’s houses. They have
everything they need—capital and experience and order and moderation
... what hinders them? They had difficult problems, they had cherished
dreams: all that is over. Even the problem of the proletariat has
subsided. The hungry have become zealous admirers of other men’s property
in the hope of obtaining their own; they have become the quiet lazzaroni
of industry, whose murmuring and indignation have been stifled, together
with all their faculties, and that is undoubtedly one of the greatest
debts we owe the factory system.... But still there is no peace, no peace
... armies are kept up, fleets are kept up, all that is gained is wasted
on defence—and what can put an end to armaments except war?’
‘That is knocking out one nail with another in the homeopathic way,’
observed Filipp Danilovitch.
‘Is it possible,’ my queer friend continued, ‘to work in one’s own little
garden, with a light heart, knowing that there is a gang of bandits,
pandours, janissaries, in a cave close by?’
‘Allow me one word,’ Filipp Danilovitch interrupted. ‘I bet you a bottle
of Burgundy that you don’t know who these brakes on the wheels of
progress and enlightenment, these pandours and janissaries, are!’
‘Austria and Russia, I suppose.’
‘Ha, ha, ha! I knew I should win it. Pay up with a bottle of Chambertin;
it is the only wine I care for.’
‘Upon my word,’ Yevgeny Nikolayevitch observed reproachfully, ‘what can
Austria do? The country is exerting every effort to keep alive, straining
every muscle to hold its parts together. How could she be a menace to
any one? She is like a man holding his leg with one hand for fear it
should walk off without him, and his head with the other for fear it
should drop off his shoulders, and then people talk of her rushing into a
quarrel. It is high time after the last campaign to strike Russia, too,
off the list of bogeys: far from any one’s being afraid of her, no one
even builds any hopes on her now, neither Serbs nor Bulgars, nor any of
the Slav patriots who have been trying ever since the fourth century to
discover their fatherland and their independence. And a good thing too!
Let Russia “look for the life of the world to come,” while in the present
she is teaching her officials not to steal and her landowners not to use
their fists. In Europe there are systems of oppression better organised
which prevent the lungs from breathing and the heart from being at rest.’
‘So it is England and France whom you honour in this way?’
‘Of course, one might put up with England still, though she is
stealthily, indirectly, negatively oppressive, on the one hand supporting
what is decayed, on the other oppressing what is young, so that it cannot
grow: she tells the hungry man when she meets him: “Go your way and
God bless you, you are a free man, I won’t keep you.” While France ...
oh, well—it is one battalion: all France will follow the drum and fife
wherever you like—to Kazan or Ryazan, while she would make a dash at
England even without a drum if only to play the master of the house in
the docks and in the City, as she does in the Palace of Pekin. Who can
hope that these two sworn foes will go on calmly gazing at each other
with a hatred which centuries, education, and commercial interests have
been unable to overcome, while they move closer and closer together, so
that already it is only ten hours’ journey between Paris and London? On
the one side of the Channel the _légion d’honneur_, on the other the
_Habeas Corpus_, and they put up with each other! Do you understand what
it means to cherish that passionate hatred, and not to have the spirit to
fight? It makes me decide to go to Texas.’
‘It is difficult to understand, that’s true, but it is not altogether a
bad thing that it is so. You know, when your war does come and the French
cross the Channel to emancipate England, then I shall start for Texas
too.’
‘_À la bonne heure!_’ exclaimed Filipp Danilovitch, delighted.
‘It is drainage; war is a system of drainage for the purification of the
soil and the air. How could they remain in London? Moscow is not London,
and even the Russians picked up Germans on the way, and invaded Paris.’
‘Have you got a Louis XIX. up your sleeve?’
‘He won’t be wanted.’
‘Yevgeny Nikolayevitch,’ I said, after a pause, ‘and all this is simply
in order to reach a Dutch stagnation, and for this mess of pottage to
part with the finest dreams, the most sacred aims.’
‘And what is wrong,’ observed Filipp Danilovitch, showing his white teeth
again, ‘with eating herrings and pancakes, with a clear conscience and a
clean table-napkin in a house which has just been scrubbed, with a wife
of Rubens contours, and a ring of little toddlers about you! Schiedam,
faro, and curaçao, they are the only things Dutch I know. Ha, ha, ha!
What were all your Fouriers and Owens struggling to find?’
‘Not only they: the Catholics and the Protestants, the Encyclopaedists
and the Revolutionists ... what were they all struggling for ... and
their toil, their faith, their doom, does it all count for nothing? Do
you expect the City of God and the _Feste Burg_ and the Phalanstery and
the Jacobin Republic all to be realised in fact? I remember ...’ he
paused, and then, with some inner emotion, asked me: ‘Have you ever
experienced what a man feels when he imparts his outlook to another and
sees how it grows up in him?’
‘That is all very well, saving your presence,’ the pupil of Hippocrates
interrupted, ‘but what is the use of idle talk, what is the use of
bothering?’
‘_Ech_, Filipp Danilovitch, what is the use of you or me bothering? we
have not succeeded in finding a remedy for death, and you know the peace
of death is worse than Dutch stagnation. But there, God will forgive you;
you are orthodox. But you, now, how can you make such a blunder?’ he
added, turning to me, and shaking his head mournfully.
And then suddenly breaking into his nervous, mirthless laugh, he said: ‘I
have just remembered a German book in which the laborious existence of
the mole is described—it is very funny. The little beast, with big paws
and little chinks instead of eyes, tunnels in the dark, underground, in
the damp, tunnels day and night, without weariness, without recreation,
with passionate persistence. It barely stops to eat some little grains
and worms and sets to work again, but the hole is ready for the children,
and the mole dies in peace, while the children begin boring holes in all
directions for their children. What is the price paid for the lifetime
of toil underground? What correspondence is there between effort and
attainment? Ha, ha, ha! The funniest thing about it is that after making
his splendid corridors and passages which cost him the labour of a
lifetime, he cannot see them, poor mole!’
With this moral drawn by my crazy friend, I will conclude the first part
of my ‘Ends and Beginnings,’ and the last month of 1862. Within two days
we shall have the New Year, and I wish you a happy one; in it we must
gather up fresh strength for our mole-like labour; my paws are itching to
begin.
_December 29, 1862._
Letter 8
_Be a man, stop and make answer?_
‘_Halte-là! Stop!_’ was said to me this time, not by a lunatic, but,
quite the contrary, by a very sane gentleman who walked into my room with
a number of the _Bell._ in his hand. ‘I have come,’ he said, ‘to have it
out with you. Your “Ends and Beginnings” have passed every limit; it is
high time to take leave and put an end to them, with regrets for having
begun them.’
‘Has it really come to that?’
‘It has. You know I love you, I respect your talent....’
‘Well,’ I thought, ‘it’s a bad look-out; it is clear that he means
to abuse me in earnest, or he wouldn’t have attacked me with such a
flattering introduction.’
‘Here is my heart,’ I said; ‘strike.’
My resignation, together with the classical allusion, had a happy effect
on my irritated friend, and with a more good-natured air he said: ‘Listen
to me quietly, laying aside the vanity of the author and the narrow
exclusiveness of the exile: with what object are you writing all this?’
‘There are many reasons for it; in the first place, I believe what I
write to be the truth, and every man who is not indifferent to the truth
has a weakness for spreading it abroad. Secondly ... but I imagine the
first reason is sufficient.’
‘No. You ought to know the public whom you are addressing, the stage of
development it has reached, and the circumstances in which it is placed.
I’ll tell you plainly: you have the most fatal influence on our young
people, who are learning from you to despise Europe and her civilisation,
and consequently do not care to study it seriously, but are satisfied
with a smattering of the newest ideas and think that the breadth of their
own nature is enough.’
‘Ough! how elderly you have grown since I saw you last! you abuse the
young and want to rear them on falsehoods, like nurses who tell children
that the midwife brings the babies, and the difference between the boy
and the girl is the cut of their clothes. You had better consider for how
many centuries men have been lying shamelessly with a moral object, and
morality has been none the better. Why not try speaking the truth? If
the truth turns out to be bad, the example would be good. As to my bad
influence on the young—I’ve long been resigned to that, remembering how
all who have been of any use to the younger generation have invariably
been accused of corrupting it, from Socrates to Voltaire, from Voltaire
to Shelley and Byelinsky. Besides, I am comforted by the fact that it is
very difficult to corrupt our young Russians. Brought up on the estates
of slave-owners by Nicholas’ officials and officers, completing their
studies in army barracks, government offices, or the houses of the
gentry, they are either incapable of being corrupted, or their corruption
is already so complete that it would be hard to add to it by any bitter
truth about Western Europe.’
‘Truth!... But allow me to ask you whether your truth really is the
truth?’
‘I can’t answer for that. You may rely on one thing, that I say
conscientiously what I think. If I am mistaken, unaware of it, what can I
do? It is more your job to open my eyes.’
‘There’s no convincing you—and you know why; it’s because you are
partly right; you are a good dissector, as you say yourself, and a bad
accoucheur.’
‘But you know I am not living in a maternity hospital, but in a clinic
and an anatomical theatre.’
‘And you are writing for nursery-schools. Children must be taught that
they may not snatch each other’s porridge and pull each other’s hair. But
you regale them with the subtleties of your pathological anatomy, and
keep on telling them besides: Look here, how nasty the entrails of these
old Europeans are! What is more, you use two different measures and two
different standards. If you do take up the scalpel, you should be fair in
your dissection.’
‘What, am I dissecting the living too? How awful! And children too! You
do make me out a Herod!’
‘You may joke as you like, you won’t put me off with that. With great
insight you diagnose the malady of modern man, but when you have analysed
every symptom of chronic disease, you say that it is all due to the
patient’s being French or German. And our people at home actually imagine
that they have youth and a future. Everything that is precious to us in
the traditions, the civilisation, and the history of the Western nations
you cut open relentlessly and unsparingly, exposing horrible sores, and
in that you are performing your task as a demonstrator. But you are sick
of messing about for ever with corpses. And so, abandoning every ideal in
the world, you are setting up for yourself a new idol, not a golden calf,
but a woolly sheepskin, and you set to bowing down to it and glorifying
it as “The Absolute Sheepskin, the Sheepskin of the Future, the Sheepskin
of Communism, of Socialism!” You who have made for yourself a duty and a
profession of scepticism, expect from a people, which has done nothing
so far, a new and original form of society in the future and every other
blessing; and, in the excess of your fanatical ecstasy, you stuff up
your ears and close your eyes that you may not see that your god is as
crude and hideous as any Japanese idol, with its threefold belly and
flattened nose and moustaches like the King of Sardinia. Whatever you are
told, whatever facts are brought forward, you talk in “ardent ecstasy”
of the freshness of spring, of rising crops, of beneficent tempests, of
rainbows full of promise! It is no wonder that our young people, after
drinking deep of your still fermenting brew of Slavophil socialism, are
staggering, drunk and dizzy, till they break their necks or knock their
noses against our _real_ reality. Of course, it is as hard to sober them
as it is to sober you—history, philology, statistics, incontestable
facts, go for nothing with both of you.’
‘But excuse me, I, too, must tell you to call a halt. What are these
incontestable facts?’
‘There are masses of them.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as the fact that we Russians belong both by race and language to
the European family, _genus europaeum_, and consequently by the most
inevitable laws of physiology we are bound to follow the same line of
development. I have never heard of a duck belonging to the genus of ducks
breathing with gills....’
‘Only fancy, I haven’t either.’
I pause at this agreeable moment of complete agreement with my opponent
to turn to you again and submit to your judgment such attacks on the
honour and virtue of my epistles.
My whole sin lies in avoiding dogmatic statement and perhaps relying
too much on my readers; this has led many into temptation and given my
_practical_ opponents a weapon against me—not always of the same quality
and equal purity. I will try to condense into a series of aphorisms the
grounds of the theory on the basis of which I thought myself entitled
to draw the conclusions, which I have passed on like apples without
mentioning the ladder which I had put up to the tree, nor the pruner
with which I picked them. But before I proceed to do this, I want to
show you by one example that my stern judges cannot be said to be on
very firm ground. The learned friend who came to trouble the peace of my
retreat takes it as you see for an incontestable fact, for an invariable
physiological law, that if the Russians belong to the European family
the same line of development awaits them as that followed by the Latin
and Germanic peoples. But there is no such paragraph in the laws of
physiology. It reminds me of the typically Moscow invention of all sorts
of institutions and regulations in which every one believes, which every
one repeats, and which have never existed. One friend of mine and of
yours used to call them the laws of the English Club.