Chapter 33 (2)

She had a child; she was very ill, the baby died.... The bond which should have strengthened the tie between them broke it. Ketscher grew colder to S——, went to see her less often, and then abandoned her altogether. That this child of nature would not ‘cease to love him easily’ might have been confidently predicted. What had she left in all the wide world but her love? There was nothing else but to throw herself in the river Moskva. The poor girl used to go out when her day’s work was done, scantily clothed in her poor garments, regardless of rain or cold, along the road leading to Basmanny Street, and would wait for hours together to meet him, to watch him pass, and then to weep, to weep the whole night through; as a rule she hid herself, but sometimes she bowed and spoke. If he answered kindly, S—— was happy and ran home in good spirits. Of her ‘misfortune,’ of her love she dared not speak, she was ashamed. Two years or more passed like this. In silence, without repining, she endured her fate. In 1845 Ketscher moved to Petersburg. This was too much for her. Not to see him even in the street, not to observe him from a distance and watch him pass, to know that he was hundreds of miles away among strangers and not to know whether he was well or whether any trouble had befallen him—this she could not bear. Entirely without means and without assistance, S—— began saving up her kopecks, devoted all her efforts to this one object, worked for months, then vanished and made her way somehow or other to Petersburg. There, tired, thin, and hungry, she went to Ketscher, imploring him not to spurn her but to take her, telling him that she wanted nothing, that she would find a corner for herself, would find work and live on bread and water, if only she could stay in the city where he was and might sometimes see him. Only then Ketscher fully understood what a heart beat in her bosom. He was shattered, overwhelmed. Pity, remorse, the consciousness of being so loved changed his attitude: now she should remain there with him, this should be her home, he would be her husband, her friend, her protector. Her dreams had come true; forgotten were the cold autumn nights, forgotten the terrible journey and the tears of jealousy and bitter sobs: she was with him and would certainly never be parted from him living. Before Ketscher came back to Moscow no one knew all this story except Mihail Semyonovitch Shtchepkin, now it was neither possible nor necessary to conceal it; we two and all our circle received with open arms this child of nature who had performed so heroic a feat. And this girl, full of love for him as she was, did Ketscher an infinite amount of harm with her absolute devotion and submission. On her lay all the blessing and all the curse that lies upon the proletariat, especially upon ours.

We in our turn did her almost as much harm as she did Ketscher.

And in both cases it was done in complete ignorance and with the purest intentions. She completely ruined Ketscher’s life as a child may ruin a fine engraving with his paint-brush, supposing that he is adorning it. Between Ketscher and S——, between S—— and our circle, lay a vast, terrible chasm, steep and precipitous, and with no bridge, no pass to cross it. We and she belonged to different ages of mankind, to different geological formations, to different volumes in the history of the world. We were the children of New Russia fresh from the university and the academy, we were fascinated by the political splendour of the West and religiously cherished our infidelity, openly denying the Church, while she had been brought up in a dissenting community, in a Russia of the days before Peter, in all the bigotry of sectarianism, with all the superstitions of a hidden religion, with all the legendary marvels of old-world Russian life.

Having by an extraordinary effort of will fastened the severed ties again, she kept tight hold of the knot. Ketscher could not escape now. But indeed he did not wish to. Blaming himself for the past, he strove sincerely to efface it; S——’s stupendous effort had won him. Yielding before it, he knew that he too was making a sacrifice, but, being an extremely pure and generous nature, he was glad to make it as an atonement. But he knew only the material side of the sacrifice: the practical restriction of his freedom. The incongruity of an old student with Schilleresque dreams living with a woman for whom not merely the world of Schiller but even the world of reading and writing, of all secular education, did not exist, never entered his head.

People may say what they like, but the saying _inter pares amicitia_ is perfectly true and every _mésalliance_ is foredoomed to unhappiness. A great deal that is stupid, supercilious, and bourgeois is implied in the saying, but in essence it is true. In the worst of all forms of inequality, the inequality of culture, there is one salvation: the education of one person by the other; but for that two rare gifts are needed: one must know how to educate and the other must know how to be educated; one must be able to lead, the other to follow.

Far more often the companionship of an undeveloped personality, confined to the pettiness of personal life with no other interests to engross the heart, weighs the other down, induces foolishness and fatigue; imperceptibly he grows petty and narrow, and though he feels ill at ease, yet, entangled in nets and meshes, he reconciles himself to it. Sometimes it happens that neither of them yields, and then the marriage turns into a permanent war, an everlasting duel in which they grow set and remain for ever in fruitless efforts on the one side to lift up, on the other to drag down: that is, both trying to defend their several positions. When their strength is equal, this conflict swallows up their whole life and the strongest natures are exhausted and sink helpless by the way. The more cultured nature is the first to succumb, the aesthetic feelings are deeply wounded by the difference of level. The best moments, which should be bright and musical, are poisoned by it: expansive natures passionately desire that all who are near and dear to them should be near to their thoughts, to their religion; this is taken for intolerance. For them the proselytism of the home is the continuation of their apostolic work, their propaganda; their happiness is limited where they are not understood ... and most often there is no wish to understand them.

To educate a mature woman is a very difficult task; it is especially difficult in those marriages which are the consequence and not the commencement of intimate relations. Ties that have been lightly, frivolously begun rarely rise above the level of the bedroom and the kitchen. The common roof comes too late for education under it to be possible; only now and then some misfortune will rouse a soul that sleeps but is capable of awakening. For the most part _la petite femme_ never becomes a full-sized one, never becomes wife and sister together; she either remains mistress and courtesan, or becomes cook and mistress.

Living under the same roof is in itself a terrible thing over which half the marriages come to ruin. Living cramped up together, people come too close to each other, see each other too minutely, too much in deshabille, and gradually petal by petal tear away all the flowers of the wreath that crowned each with grace and poetry. But similarity of culture goes a long way to smooth things over. If it is absent and there is idle leisure, one cannot be for ever babbling nonsense, talking of housekeeping or paying compliments; and what is to be done with a woman when she is something between an odalisque and a servant, a creature bodily near and intellectually remote. She is not wanted by day and she is for ever on the spot; a man cannot share his interests with her and she cannot share her gossip with him.

Every uneducated woman living with an educated husband reminds me of Delilah and Samson, she cuts off his strength and there is no guarding oneself from her. Between dinner, even if it is late, and bed, even if one goes to it at ten o’clock, there is an endless period in which one does not want to go on working and yet is not ready for sleep, when the linen has been counted and expenses reckoned up. It is in those hours that the wife drags the husband down into the narrow circle of her trivialities, into the world of irritable resentments, tittle-tattle, and spiteful insinuations. This is bound to leave its traces. Relations of cohabitation between a man and a woman without equality of culture are sometimes enduring when they rest on convenience, on common housekeeping, I had almost said on hygiene. Sometimes these working associations are a mutual help combined with mutual satisfaction; for the most part a wife is taken as a nurse, as a good housewife _pour avoir un bon pot-au-feu_ as Proudhon said to me. The formula of the old jurisprudence is very clever, _a mensa et toro_; destroy the common bed and common board and they will separate with untroubled conscience.

These business-like marriages are scarcely better. The husband is continually at his work, professional or commercial, at his office, his counting-house, or his shop. His wife is continually busy with the linen and the stores. The husband returns tired; everything is ready for him, and everything goes with the same little even trot, to the gates of the cemetery to which their parents have preceded them. This is a purely town phenomenon and it is more often met with in England than anywhere; this is the petty-bourgeois happiness preached by the moralists of the French stage and dreamt of by the Germans[134]; different stages of culture can live together more easily within a year after the man leaves the university; there is a division of work and precedence given to the man. The husband, particularly if he has money, becomes what the popular sense calls him, _mon bourgeois_ of his wife. By this path and, thanks to the laws of inheritance, it is a path that never gets overgrown with grass, every woman remains perpetually a _kept woman_, her husband’s if not some other man’s. She knows this.

‘Dessen Brot man isst,
Dessen Lied man singt.’

But these marriages have a moral unity of their own, they have a similarity of outlook, a similarity of object. Ketscher himself had no object and was incapable of being either the ‘bourgeois’ or the tutor. He could not even struggle with S——, she always gave way. He frightened her with his loud voice and his grumbling temper. Though her heart was developed she had a heavy, stubborn intelligence, that stagnancy of brain which we often meet with in those who are quite unaccustomed to abstract thought, and which is one of the distinguishing traits of the period before Peter the Great. United to the man she loved so intensely, so devotedly, she desired nothing and feared nothing. And indeed what had she to fear? Poverty? but had she not been poor all her life, had she not suffered destitution, that humiliating poverty. Work? but she had toiled from morning till night in a workroom for a few coppers. Quarrelling, separation? Yes, that last had terrors, and great terrors too; but she so utterly abandoned all personal will that it was really difficult to quarrel with her, and ill-humour she would put up with, maybe she would have put up with blows even, so long as she were satisfied that he loved her a little and did not want to part with her. And that he did not want, and there was a fresh reason for not wanting it on the top of everything else. With the instinct of love S—— understood it very well. Dimly aware that she could not fully satisfy Ketscher, she took to making up for what she lacked by continual waiting upon him and solicitude for him.

Ketscher was over forty. He had not been spoilt in regard to domestic comfort. He had spent all his life at home as the Kirghiz in his cart, with no property and no desire to possess it, with no conveniences of any sort and no craving for them. By degrees everything was changed; he was surrounded by a network of attention and services, he saw a childish delight when he was pleased with anything, alarm and tears when he raised his eyebrows, and this went on every day from morning till night. Ketscher took to staying at home more often; he was sorry to leave her continually alone. Besides, it was hard for him not to be struck by the difference of her absolute submission and our growing opposition. S—— endured his most unjust outbursts with the gentleness of a daughter who, concealing her tears, smiles to her father and waits _sans rancune_ till the storm is over. S——, submissive, slavishly meek, trembling, ready to weep and kiss his hand, had an immense influence on Ketscher. Intolerance is fostered by giving way to it.

Did not Rousseau’s Thérèse, poor, stupid Thérèse, turn the prophet of equality into a petty vulgarian, perpetually absorbed in preserving his own dignity?

S——’s influence on Ketscher showed itself in the way Diderot describes when he complains of Thérèse. Rousseau was suspicious; Thérèse developed his suspiciousness into a petty readiness to take offence, and with no intention of doing so estranged him from his best friends. Remember that Thérèse could not read properly and could never be taught to read the time on the clock—which did not prevent her from fostering Rousseau’s hypochondria till it passed into gloomy madness. In the morning Rousseau would go to see Baron d’Holbach. A servant would bring in lunch and set places for three—Holbach, his wife, and Grimm; engaged in conversation, no one would notice it but Jean Jacques. He would pick up his hat. ‘But you must stay to lunch,’ Madame d’Holbach would say and order another place to be laid; but by then it was too late to set things right. Rousseau, livid with vexation and gloomily cursing the whole human race, would run home to Thérèse and tell her that no plate was set for him as a hint for him to go. Such tales were just to her taste, she could take warm interest in them, they put her on a level with him and indeed a little above him, and she herself began talking scandal, sometimes against Madame d’Houdetot, sometimes against David Hume, sometimes against Diderot. Rousseau would rudely break off all relations, would write senseless and insulting letters, sometimes calling forth terrible replies (for instance, from Hume), and withdrew to Montmorency abandoned by every one, and for lack of human beings cursing the sparrows and the swallows to whom he threw grain.

Once more:—without equality there can be no real marriage. The wife who is excluded from all the interests that occupy her husband, who is apart from them and does not share them, may be a concubine, a housekeeper, a nurse, but not a wife in the full, honourable sense of the word. Heine said of his ‘Thérèse’ that she ‘does not know and never will find out what he wrote about.’ This was thought charming, amusing, and it never occurred to any one to ask: ‘Why, then, was she his wife?’ Molière, who read his comedies aloud to his cook, was a hundred times more humane, but Madame Heine quite unintentionally paid her husband back. During the last years of his martyred existence she surrounded him with her own friends, faded _dames aux camellias_ of a past season, grown moral as they grew wrinkled, and their washed-out, grey-headed adorers.

I do not mean to say that a wife must necessarily do and like what her husband does and likes. The wife may prefer music and the husband painting, that does not disturb their equality. I have always thought that the official trailing of husband and wife about together was dreadful, absurd, and senseless, and the higher placed they are the more ludicrous it is. Why should the Empress Eugénie appear at cavalry drill, and why should Victoria draw her husband to the opening of parliament with which he had nothing to do? Heine did well not to take his better-half to the receptions at the Court functions of Weimar. The prose of their marriage did not lie in that, but in the absence of any common ground, any common interest to unite them apart from sexual attraction.

I will pass to the harm which we did to poor S——. The mistake we made was again the mistake of all Utopias and idealisms. When one side of a question is correctly grasped, no attention is commonly paid to that to which that side adheres and whether it can be separated from it, no attention to the vast network of veins connecting the raw flesh with the whole organism. We still think like Christians that we have but to say to the lame man: ‘Take up thy bed and walk.’

At one stroke we flung the solitary and half-savage S——, who had seen no one, from her loneliness into our circle. We liked her originality, we wanted to preserve it, and we destroyed the last chance of her developing by removing all desire for improvement, assuring her that she was all right as she was. But she did not herself care to remain simply as she was. What was the result? We—revolutionaries, socialists, champions of the emancipation of women—turned a naïve, devoted, simple-hearted creature into a Moscow petty-bourgeoise!

Did not the Convention, the Jacobins, and the Commune itself turn France into a petty-bourgeoise, turn Paris into an _épicier_?

The first house that was opened with love and warm-heartedness to S—— was ours. Natalie went to see her and forcibly brought her to us. For a year S—— behaved quietly and was shy of strangers; timid and reserved as before, she was full of the poetical charm of the peasant in a way. There was not the faintest desire to attract attention by her strangeness; on the contrary there was the desire to be unnoticed. Like a child or a weak little wild animal she took refuge under Natalie’s wing; her devotion in those days knew no bounds. She loved playing with Sasha for hours together and used to tell him and us details of her childhood, her life among the _raskolniks_, her suffering as an apprentice, _i.e._, in the workroom.

She became the plaything of our circle; that, of course, she liked; she saw that her position, that she herself was original, and from that time she was lost; no one could have saved her. Natalie alone thought seriously of her education. S—— did not belong to the common herd; she had escaped a number of mean defects; she was not fond of fine clothes, did not care for luxury, for expensive things, nor for money—so long as Ketscher was satisfied and found nothing wanting she did not mind about anything else. At first S—— loved to have long, long talks with Natalie and trusted her, meekly listened to her advice, and tried to follow it.... But after she had looked about her and was at home in our circle, perhaps worked up by others who were amused at her oddities, she began to display a sort of injured antagonism and would answer any criticism very far from naïvely: ‘Oh, I am such a poor creature, how could I change or improve? It seems I must go down to my grave just as silly and foolish.’ In these words there was a note of wounded vanity, conscious or not conscious. She ceased to feel free with us and came less and less often to see us. ‘Natalya Alexandrovna, God bless her,’ she would say, ‘no longer likes poor me.’ It was not natural to Natalie to be hail-fellow-well-met with everybody or to be effusive like a schoolgirl; an element of deep serenity and great aesthetic feeling was always predominant in her. S—— did not understand the value of the difference between Natalie’s attitude to her and that of others, and forgot who had been the first to hold out a hand to her and warmly welcome her; with her Ketscher too drew away from us and grew more and more morose and irritable.

His suspiciousness greatly increased. In every careless word he saw an intention, a spiteful motive, a desire to wound, and not to wound him only but also S——. She for her part wept, complained of her lot, resented slights to Ketscher, and by the law of moral reverberation his own suspicions returned to him multiplied tenfold. His scolding affection began to change into a desire to find us in fault, into a supervision, a continual espionage, and the petty faults of his friends came more and more to eclipse all their other qualities in his eyes. Our pure, lofty, mature circle began to be invaded by the tittle-tattle of servant girls and the bickerings of provincial government clerks.

Ketscher’s irritability became infectious; continual accusations, explanations, reconciliations, poisoned our gatherings. This corrosive dust settled in every crevice and by degrees dissolved the cement that united so firmly our relations with our friends. We all succumbed to the influence of gossip. Even Granovsky grew ill-humoured and irritable, took Ketscher’s part unfairly, and lost his temper. Ketscher used to go to Granovsky with his accusations against Ogaryov and me. Granovsky did not believe them, but pitying Ketscher, ‘who is ill, wounded and yet so fond of you,’ took his side emphatically and was angry with me for want of tolerance. ‘Why, you know what he is like; it’s an illness. The influence of S——, who is good-natured but uneducated and tiresome, is driving him farther and farther in that unfortunate direction.’

To end this melancholy tale I will quote two instances.... They show vividly how far we had got from the theory of making coffee at Pokrovskoe.

One evening in the spring of 1846 we had five intimate friends with us, and among them Mihail Semyonovitch Shtchepkin. ‘Have you taken the house at Sokolovo this year?’ he asked. ‘Not yet,’ I answered, ‘I haven’t the money and one has to pay the rent in advance.’ ‘Surely you are not going to stay all the summer in Moscow?’ ‘I shall wait a little, then we shall see.’ That was all. No one took any notice of this conversation, and other subjects followed peacefully a second afterwards. We were intending to go next day after dinner to Kuntsovo, which we had loved from childhood. Ketscher, Korsh, and Granovsky went with us. The excursion took place, and everything went well except that Ketscher raised his eyebrows more gloomily than ever. But in the end we all came in for a storm.

It was a spring evening, warm but not scorchingly hot; the trees had only just come out into leaf. We sat in the garden jesting and talking. All at once Ketscher, who had been silent for half an hour, got up and stood facing me. With the face of a prosecutor of the Vehme,[135] and with his lips quivering with indignation, he said: ‘I must say that you were clever in the way you reminded Mihail Semyonovitch yesterday that he hadn’t paid you the nine hundred roubles he borrowed from you.’

I really did not understand; especially as I certainly had not thought of Shtchepkin’s debt for the last four months.

‘It was delicate I must say: the old man has no money now and he is just going to the Crimea with his immense family, and here you tell him in the presence of five persons: “I haven’t the money to take a summer villa.” Ough, how disgusting!’

Ogaryov took my part. Ketscher flew at him and there was no end to the absurd accusations he brought against him; Granovsky tried to soothe him but could not and went away together with Korsh before the rest of us. I felt incensed and humiliated and answered very harshly. Ketscher looked at me from under his brows and without saying a word went back to Moscow on foot. We were left alone and in a state of something like pitiful irritability drove home. I wanted this time to give Ketscher a good lesson and to drop relations with him for a time, if I did not break them off altogether. He was penitent and shed tears: Granovsky insisted on our making peace, talked to Natalie, and was deeply distressed. I made it up, but not light-heartedly, and said to Granovsky: ‘You see, it will last for three days.’

That was one pleasure excursion, here is another.

Two months later we were at Sokolovo. Ketscher and S—— were going back to Moscow in the evening. Ogaryov rode part of the way with them on his Circassian horse, Kortik. There was no shadow of misunderstanding or ill-humour.

Ogaryov came back two or three hours later; we laughed together at the day having passed off so peacefully, and separated for the night.

Next day Granovsky, who had been in Moscow overnight, met me in our park; he was thoughtful and more melancholy than usual, and at last he told me he had something on his mind and wanted to talk to me. We went by the long avenue and sat down on the seat, the view of which is familiar to every one who has been at Sokolovo.

‘Herzen,’ Granovsky said to me, ‘if only you knew how difficult, how painful it is to me ... how I love you all in spite of everything, and I see with horror that everything is dropping to pieces. And now, as though in mockery, these petty mistakes, damnable carelessness, lack of delicacy....’

‘But tell me please what has happened,’ I asked, genuinely alarmed.

‘Why, Ketscher is furious with Ogaryov, and indeed, to tell the truth, it would be hard not to be; I try, I do what I can, but I haven’t the strength, particularly when people don’t care to do anything themselves.’

‘But what is the matter?’

‘Why, this: yesterday Ogaryov rode part of the way with Ketscher and S——.’

‘It was arranged in my presence, and indeed I saw Ogaryov in the evening afterwards and he did not say a word.’

‘On the bridge Kortik shied and began rearing, and Ogaryov pulling him up was so vexed that he swore before S—— and she heard and Ketscher heard too. I dare say he didn’t think, but Ketscher asks why he never happens to be so careless in the presence of your wife and mine. What is one to say to that?... And besides, for all her simplicity S—— is very sentimental, which is quite natural in her position.’

I said nothing. This was beyond all bounds.

‘What’s to be done?’

‘It’s very simple,’ I said. ‘We must break off all acquaintance with scoundrels who are capable of intentionally forgetting themselves before a woman. To be the intimate friend of such people is contemptible....’

‘But he doesn’t say that Ogaryov did it intentionally.’

‘Then what’s the talk about? And you, Granovsky, Ogaryov’s friend, repeat the ravings of a madman who ought to be put in an asylum. For shame!’

Granovsky was disconcerted.

‘My God!’ he said, ‘is it possible that our little group of friends—the one place where I found hope, repose, and love, where I took refuge from our oppressive environment—will break up in hatred and anger?’

He covered his eyes with his hand. I took the other hand; my heart was very heavy.

‘Granovsky,’ I said to him, ‘Ketscher is right: we have all come too close to each other, we are too cramped and we have stepped over each other’s traces.... _Gemach!_ my friend, _gemach!_ We need airing, refreshing. Ogaryov is going to the country in the autumn. I am soon going abroad—we will part without hatred and anger; what was true in our friendship will be set right, will be purified by absence.’

Granovsky wept. With Ketscher I had no explanation on that subject. Ogaryov did, as a fact, go to the country in the autumn, and afterwards we too went away.

News of our Moscow friends reached us more and more rarely. Frightened by the terror that followed 1848, they waited for a safe opportunity to send letters. These opportunities were rare, passports were hardly ever given. From Ketscher we had not a word for years together; he was never fond of writing, however.

The first living news was brought me in 1855 after I had moved to London. Ketscher, I heard, was in his element, conspicuous at banquets in honour of the heroes of Sebastopol, embracing Pogodin and Kokorev, embracing the sailors from the Black Sea, making an uproar, scolding, admonishing. Ogaryov, who had come straight from the graveside of Granovsky, told me little; what he did tell was gloomy.

Another year and a half passed. During that time I had finished this chapter, and to whom first of outsiders was it read?

Yes—_habeant sua fata libelli_.

In the autumn of 1857, Tchitcherin came to London; we were expecting him with impatience: once one of Granovsky’s favourite pupils and a friend of Korsh and Ketscher, he seemed to us one of our intimate circle. We had heard of his rudeness, his conservative leanings, his boundless vanity, and his _doctrinaire_ attitude, but he was still young ... many angles are rubbed down by the passage of time.

‘I have long hesitated whether I should come and see you or not; so many Russians visit you now that one needs more courage not to come than to come; I, as you know, though fully respecting you, do not agree with you in everything.’

That was how Tchitcherin began.

He made his approach not simply, not in the spirit of youth; he had stones hidden in his bosom, the light in his eyes was cold, there was a challenge and a dreadful, repellent conceit in the tones of his voice. From the first words I saw that this was not an opponent but an enemy; but I stifled the instinctive warning and we got into conversation.

Our talk soon passed to reminiscences and to questions from me. He described the last months of the life of Granovsky, and when he went away I felt better pleased with him than at first.

After dinner next day conversation turned on Ketscher. Tchitcherin spoke of him as a man whom he liked, laughing without malice at his sallies; from the details he told me I learned that his affection for his friends was still as denunciatory, that S——’s influence had reached such a point that many of his friends were up in arms against her, avoided their society, and so on. Carried away by the stories he told me and my own recollections, I offered to read Tchitcherin my unpublished chapter about Ketscher and read aloud the whole of it. I have many times repented doing this, not because he made a bad use of what I read, but because I was vexed and pained that at forty-five I was capable of exposing our past before a coarse man who afterwards jeered with such merciless impudence at what he called my ‘temperament.’

The wide differences that separated our views and our temperaments were soon made plain.

From the first days an argument sprang up from which it was clear that we differed in everything. He was a disciple of the French democratic order and had a dislike for English freedom, not reduced to any logical order. He saw in the empire the education of the people, and advocated a powerful state and the abasement of the individual before it. It will be readily understood what these ideas became when applied to Russia. He was a governmentalist, looked upon the government as far superior to society and its movements, and took the Empress Catherine II. for almost the ideal of what Russia needed. All this theory came from a regular edifice of dogma from which he could always and at once deduce his theosophy of bureaucracy.

‘Why do you want to be a professor,’ I asked him, ‘and try to get a lecturer’s chair? You ought to be a Minister and try to get a portfolio.’

Arguing with him, we saw him off at the railway station and parted agreeing about nothing but our mutual respect.

A fortnight later he wrote to me from France with enthusiasm about the working classes, about the institutions. ‘You have found what you were looking for,’ I answered, ‘and very quickly; that comes of going there with ready-made views.’ Then I suggested that we should begin a correspondence in print and wrote the beginning of a long letter.

He did not care to do so and said that he had no time and that such an argument would do harm....

A remark made in the _Bell_ concerning doctrinaires in general he took as aimed at himself; his _amour-propre_ was stung, and he sent me his ‘denunciation,’ which made a great talk at the time.

Tchitcherin got the worst of the campaign, of that I have no doubt. The outburst of indignation invoked by his letter printed in the _Bell_ was universal in the younger generation and in literary circles. I received dozens of articles and letters, one of which was published. We were still mounting an uphill path in those days, and had no need of Katkov’s[136] drags to hold us back. The coldly offensive, insolently smooth tone, more perhaps than was actually said, incensed the public and me alike; it was something new in those days. On the other hand, those who took Tchitcherin’s side were: Elena Pavlovna, the Iphigenia of the Winter Palace; Timashov, the head of the Third Section; and N. H. Ketscher.

Ketscher remained true to the reaction, not because he ‘preferred Grandison to Lovelace’ but because carried without a guiding compass _à la remorque_ of a circle he remained true to it without noticing that it was sailing in the opposite direction. The man of a coterie, for him questions followed the banner of personalities and not the other way about.

Never having worked through to a single clear understanding or to a single clear conviction, he advanced with noble aspirations and bandaged eyes, and was continually beating his enemies, not noticing that the positions were changed and that in their game of blind-man’s buff he beat us, beat others, is even now beating some one, even now imagining that he is accomplishing something.

I append the letter I wrote to Tchitcherin as the beginning of a friendly discussion which was prevented by his attacking me like a prosecutor:

‘MY LEARNED FRIEND,—It is impossible for me to argue with you;
you know so much, you know it so well, everything in your
brain is fresh and new, and what matters most is that you are
convinced you do know it, and so, untroubled, you resolutely
await the rational development of events in accordance with
the programme revealed by science. You cannot be in disharmony
with the present; you know if the past was this and that, the
present is bound to be this and that, and is bound to lead to
this and that in the future; you are able to reconcile yourself
to it through your ideas and your interpretation of it. Yours
is the happy lot of a priest, comforting the sorrowful with
the eternal truths of your theory and with your faith in them.
All these advantages you derive from your dogmatic belief,
because dogma excludes doubt. Doubt means that a question is
open; dogma, that the question is closed, settled. And so
every dogma is exclusive and uncompromising, while doubt can
never attain so sharp a finality; it is the very essence of
doubt to be ready to agree with the speaker or conscientiously
to seek significance in his words, even to the extent of
losing precious time needed for finding objections. Dogma sees
truth from a definite angle, accepted as the sole stronghold
of salvation, while doubt strives to escape from all angles,
looks all round, returns on its tracks, and often paralyses all
action by its humility before truth. You, my learned friend,
know definitely in what direction to go, how to lead; I do not
know. And so I feel that it is for us to observe and study,
and for you to teach others. It is true that we can say what
ought not to be done, we can unite men to act, rouse thought,
set it free from chains, dispel the phantoms of church and
police-station, of academy and criminal court—that is all; but
you can say what ought to be done.

‘The attitude of dogma to its object is the religious attitude,
that is the attitude from the point of view of eternity;
the temporary, the transitory, persons, events, generations
scarcely enter into the _Campo Santo_ of philosophy, or, if
they enter, it is only when purified from real life in the
form of an herbarium of logical shadows. Dogma as a whole
lives really in all times, and lives in its own period as
though it were the past, not spoiling its theoretical attitude
by too passionate an interest in it. Knowing the necessity
of suffering, dogma keeps itself as a Simeon Stylites on a
pedestal, sacrificing everything temporary to the eternal, the
living particulars to general ideas. In short, the dogmatists
are first of all historians, while we, together with the crowd,
are your substratum; you stand for history _für sich_, we—for
history _an sich_. You explain to us where our disease lies,
but are we diseased? You bury us, reward us, or punish us after
our death, you are our doctors and priests; but are we sick or
dying?

‘This antagonism is nothing new and it is of great value for
progress, for development. If all mankind could believe you, it
might be rational, but would die of universal boredom. The late
Filiminov put as an inscription on his “fool’s cap”: _Si la
raison dominait le monde, il ne s’y passerait rien_.

‘The geometrical dryness of dogma, the algebraic impersonality
of it, gives it the widest power of generalisation; it must
shun sensations and, like Augustus, command Cleopatra to be
veiled. But for active intervention passion is more essential
than dogma, and man has no algebraic passions. The general
he can understand, but it is the particular that he loves or
hates. Spinoza with all the outspoken vigour of his genius
maintained the necessity of reckoning as essential only the
incorruptible, the eternal, the unchanging substance, and
not resting one’s hopes on the fortuitous, the relative,
the personal. Every one understands this in theory, but man
attaches himself only to the particular, the personal, to the
accomplished fact; in the reconciling of these extremes, in
their harmonious combination, lies the highest wisdom of life.

‘If from this general definition of our opposite points of view
we pass to particular examples we shall find that though our
goal is the same, there is no less antagonism between us; even
in those instances in which we start from agreement. An example
will make this clear. We are completely agreed in our attitude
to religion; but this only goes so far as the denial of
supernatural religion, but as soon as we come into contact with
_sublunary_ religion the distance between us is immense. You
have moved from the dark, incense-laden walls of a cathedral
to a well-lighted government office, from Guelph you have
turned Ghibelline, you have replaced the hierarchies of heaven
by grades in the service, the absorption of the individual
soul in God by its absorption in the State, God is replaced by
centralisation, the priest by the police-inspector.

‘You see in this change an advance, a triumph, we see new
chains. We want to be neither Guelphs nor Ghibellines. Your
secular, civic, and legal religion is the more terrible
for being deprived of all that is poetical, fantastic, of
all that is childlike in character; in place of which you
have the red-tape of officialdom, the idol of the State with
the Tsar at the top and the hangman at the bottom. You want
man set free from the church to hang about for a couple of
centuries in the hall of a government office, while the caste
of high-priest officials and monks of dogma decide in what way
and to what degree he is to be free, like our committees for
the emancipation of the peasants. And all that repels us; we
can accept a great deal, make concessions, sacrifice something
to circumstance; but for you it is not a sacrifice. Of course
in that too you are happier than we. Losing your religious
faith you are not left without any support; and finding that
faith in the State may take the place of Christianity for
mankind, you have accepted it, and you have done very well for
your moral hygiene, for your peace of mind. But this remedy
sticks in our throat and we hate your government offices,
your centralisation, quite as much as the Inquisition, the
Consistory, the Book of Precepts.

‘Do you grasp the difference? You, as a teacher, want to
teach, to direct, to herd your flock. We, like a flock that
is becoming conscious, do not want to be herded, but want
to have our own village courts, our own representatives,
our own delegates, to whom we can entrust the management of
our affairs. That is why the authority of the government is
an insult to us at every step, while you applaud it as your
predecessors the priests applauded the temporal power. You may
even differ from it as the clergy has sometimes differed from
it or like people quarrelling on board ship: however great the
distance between you may be, you are still in the same boat,
and for us, laymen, you are still on the side of the government.

‘Civic religion—the apotheosis of the State—is a purely Roman
idea and in the modern world, principally French. It is
consistent with a strong state, but is incompatible with a
free people; through it you may get splendid soldiers, but
you cannot have independent citizens. The United States, on
the contrary, have, so far as it is possible, abolished the
religious character of the police and the administration.’