Chapter 38: Switzerland—james Fazy and the Refugees—monte Rosa (2)

I was sitting mournfully one day in my mother’s dining-room in gloomy, disagreeable Zurich; it was at the end of December 1849. I was going next day to Paris. It was a cold, snowy day; two or three logs smoking and crackling burned reluctantly on the hearth. All were busy with packing. I sat utterly alone. My life in Geneva floated before my mind; the whole future looked dark; I felt afraid of something, and I was so insufferably miserable that if I could I would have fallen on my knees and wept and prayed; but I could not, and instead of prayer I wrote my curse—my _Epilogue_ to 1849.

‘Disillusionment, fatigue, _Blasiertheit_!’ The democratic critics said of those lines, wrung out of me by pain. Yes, disillusionment! Yes, fatigue!... Disillusionment is a vulgar, hackneyed word, the veil under which the sloth of the heart, egoism posing as love, the noisy emptiness of vanity with pretensions to everything and strength for nothing, lie hidden. All these exalted, misunderstood characters, thin with envy and miserable with superciliousness, have wearied us for years past, both in life and in novels. All that is perfectly true; but is there not something real, characteristic of our times, at the bottom of these spiritual sufferings which degenerate into absurd parody and vulgar masquerade?

The poet who found words and voice for this malady was too proud to pose and to suffer for the sake of applause; on the contrary, he often uttered his bitter thought with so much humour that simple-hearted readers were convulsed with merriment. Byron’s disillusionment was more than caprice, more than a personal mood; Byron was shattered because life deceived him. And life deceived him not because his demands were unreal, but because England and Byron were of different ages, were of different educations, and met just at the epoch when the mist was being dissipated.

This divergence has existed in the past, but in our age it has come to consciousness; in our age the impossibility of any conviction bridging the gulf has become more and more evident. After the Roman break-up came Christianity; after Christianity—the belief in civilisation, in humanity. Liberalism is the _latest religion_, though its church is not of the other world but of this. Its theology is political theory; it stands upon the earth and has no mystical conciliations, it aims at conciliation in real life. Triumphant and then defeated liberalism has revealed the rift in all its nakedness; the painful consciousness of this is expressed in the irony of the modern man, the scepticism with which he sweeps away the fragments of his shattered idols.

Irony gives expression to the vexation aroused by the fact that logical truth is not the same as the truth of history, that apart from dialectical development it has its own development through chance and passion, that apart from reason it has its romance.

Disillusionment[65] in our sense of the word was not known before the Revolution; the eighteenth century was one of the most religious periods of history. I am not speaking now of the great martyr Saint-Just or of the apostle Jean-Jacques; but was not the pope Voltaire, blessing Franklin’s grandson in the name of God and Freedom, a fanatic of his religion of humanity?

Scepticism was proclaimed together with the republic of the 22nd of September 1792.

The Jacobins and revolutionaries in general belonged to a minority, separated from the life of the people by their culture: they formed something like a secular clergy ready to shepherd their human flocks. They represented the _highest_ thought of their time, its _highest but not its common consciousness_, not the _thought of all_.

This new clergy had no means of coercion, neither physical nor supernatural: from the moment that the governing power dropped out of their hands, they had only one weapon—conviction. But for conviction to be _right_ is not enough; their whole mistake lay in supposing so; something more was necessary—_mental equality_.

So long as the desperate conflict lasted to the strains of the hymn of the Huguenots and the hymn of the Marseillaise, so long as men were burnt at the stake and blood was flowing, this inequality passed unobserved. But at last the oppressive edifice of feudal monarchy fell, and slowly the walls were shattered, the locks torn off the gates ... one more blow struck, and the brave men advance, the gates are flung open and the crowd rushes in. But it was not the crowd they expected. Who are these men; to what age do they belong? These are not Spartans, not the great _populus Romanus_. _Davus sum, non Œdipus!_ An overwhelming wave of filth flooded everything. The inner horror of the Jacobins was expressed in the Terror of 1793 and 1794: they saw their fearful mistake, tried to correct it with the guillotine; but, however many heads they cut off, they still had to bow their own before the might of the class of society that was rising to the top. Everything gave way before it; it overpowered the Revolution and the Reaction, it filled up the old forms and submerged them because it made up the one effective majority of its day. Sieyès was more right than he thought when he said that the petty-bourgeoisie _was everything_.

The petty-bourgeois were not produced by the Revolution; they were ready with their codes and their traditions, in a different way discordant with the revolutionary idea. The aristocracy had held them down and kept them in the background; set free, they passed over the dead bodies of those who had freed them and established their own regime. The minority were either crushed or swallowed up among the bourgeois.

A few men of each generation were, in spite of events, left the obstinate guardians of the idea; these Levites, or perhaps Aztecs, are unjustly punished for their monopoly of exclusive culture, for the mental superiority of the well-fed caste, the leisured caste that had time to work not only with muscles.

We are angered, moved to fury, by the absurdity, by the injustice of this fact. As though some one (apart from ourselves) had promised us that everything in the world should be just and beautiful and go easily. We have marvelled enough at the abstract wisdom of nature and of historical development; it is time to perceive that in nature as in history there is a great deal that is fortuitous, stupid, unsuccessful, and confused. Reason, fully developed thought, comes last. Everything begins with the foolishness of the newborn child; possibility and striving are innate in him, but before he reaches development and consciousness he is exposed to a series of external and internal influences, checks and obstacles. One has water on the brain, another falls and flattens his skull—both remain idiots; the third does not fall nor die of scarlet fever—and becomes a poet, a military leader, a bandit, or a judge. We know as a rule far more of the successes in nature, in history, and in life: we are only now beginning to feel that all the cards are not so well shuffled as we thought, because we are ourselves a losing card, a failure.

It mortifies us to find that the idea is impotent that truth has no compelling force over the world of actuality. A new sort of Manichæism takes possession of us, we are led, _par dépit_, to believe in rational (that is, purposive) evil, as we did believe in rational good—that is the last tribute we pay to idealism.

The anguish will pass with time; its tragic and passionate character will be softened: it scarcely exists in the new world of the United States. That young people, enterprising and more practical than intelligent, is so occupied in the organisation of its own life that it knows nothing at all of our agonies. Moreover, there are not two cultures there. The persons who make up the classes in that society are incessantly changing, they rise and fall with the bank account of each. The sturdy race of English colonists is multiplying terribly; if it gets the ascendency, people will not be the happier for it, but they will be more comfortable. That comfort will be duller, poorer, more arid than that which floated in the ideals of romantic Europe; but with it there will be neither Tsar nor centralisation, and perhaps there will be no hunger either. Any one, who can put off the old Adam of Europe from himself and be born again a new Jonathan, had better take the first steamer to some place in Wisconsin or Kansas; there he will certainly be better off than in decaying Europe.

Those who _cannot_, remain to live out their lives, representatives of the fair dream with which men lulled themselves to sleep. They have lived too much in fantasies and ideals to fit into the age of American good sense.

There is no great loss in that; we are not many, and we shall soon be extinct.

But how is it men grow up so out of harmony with their environment?...

Imagine a hothouse-reared youth—the one, for instance, who has described himself in _The Dream_; imagine him face to face with the most boring, with the most tedious society, face to face with the monstrous Minotaur of English life, uncouthly welded together of two beasts—the one sinking into decrepitude, the other knee-deep in filthy mire, weighed down like the Caryatides whose everlastingly strained muscles leave not a drop of blood to spare for the brain. If he could have adapted himself to this life, he would, instead of dying at thirty in Greece, by now have been Lord Palmerston or Lord John Russell. But since he could not, there is nothing surprising in his saying, like his Harold to his ship:

‘Nor care what land thou bearest me to,
But not again to mine.’

But what awaited him in the distance? Spain devastated by Napoleon, Greece sunk back into barbarism, the general resurrection after 1814 of all the stinking Lazaruses; there was no getting away from them in Ravenna or in Diodati. Byron could not be satisfied like a German with theories _sub specie æternitatis_, nor like a Frenchman with political chatter; he was crushed, but crushed like a menacing Titan, flinging his scorn in men’s faces and not troubling to soften the blow.

This discordance and disharmony, of which Byron as a poet and a genius was conscious forty years ago, has, after a succession of painful experiences, after the filthy transition from 1830 to 1848, and the infamous one from 1848 to the present, overwhelmed many of us to-day. And we, like Byron, do not know what to do with ourselves, where to lay our heads.

The realist Goethe, like the romantic Schiller, knew nothing of this rending of the spirit. The one was too religious, the other too philosophical. Both could find peace in abstract spheres. When the ‘spirit of negation’ appears as such a jester as Mephistopheles, then the disharmony is not yet tragic; his mocking and for ever contradictory nature is still blended in the higher harmony, and in its own due time will chime in with everything—_sie ist gerettet_. Lucifer in _Cain_ is very different; he is the gloomy angel of darkness, on whose brow shines with dim lustre the star of bitter thought, full of inner discords which can never be harmonised.

He does not jest with negation, he does not amuse with the impudence of his infidelity, he does not allure by sensuality, he does not procure simple maidens, wine, and diamonds, but calmly impels to murder, by some inexplicable force, like the lure of still moonlit water, that promises nothing but death in its comfortless, cold, glimmering embraces.

Neither Cain nor Manfred, neither Don Juan nor Byron, has any deduction, any solution, any ‘moral.’ Perhaps from the point of view of dramatic art this is a defect, but it gives a stamp of sincerity and shows the depths of the gulf. Byron’s epilogue, his last word, if you like, is _The Darkness_; that is the logical conclusion of a life that begins with _The Dream_. Complete the picture for yourselves.

Two enemies, hideously disfigured by hunger, are dead, they are devoured by some crab-like monsters ... a ship is rotting—the tarred rope sways in the muddy waters in the darkness, there is fearful cold, the animals are dying out, history has already perished and the place is cleared for new life: our period will be reckoned as the fourth formation—that is, if the new world arrives at being able to count up to four.

Our historical vocation, our work, lies in the fact that by our disillusionment, by our sufferings, we reach resignation and humility in face of the truth, and spare following generations from these troubles. With us humanity is regaining sobriety, with us recovering from its drunken orgy; we are its birth-pangs. If the birth-agony ends well, all is for the best; but we must not forget that the child or mother, or maybe both, may die by the way, and then—well, then history, like the Mormon it is, will begin the process over again.... _E sempre bene_, friends!

We know how Nature disposes of the individual: whether sooner or later, whether without sacrifice or over the bodies of the dead, she cares not; she goes her way, or goes any way that chances. Ten thousands of years she builds up a coral reef, every spring abandoning to death the foremost ranks. The polypi die without suspecting that they have served the _progress_ of the reef.

We, too, shall serve something. Entering into the future as an element in it does not mean that the future will fulfil our ideals. Rome did not carry out Plato’s idea of a republic nor the Greek idea in general. The Middle Ages were not the development of Rome. Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence in its place, just as our body passes into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is there to be done about it?

Now I am accustomed to these thoughts, they no longer terrify me. But at the end of 1849 I was overwhelmed by them; and in spite of the fact that every event, every meeting, every contact, every person seemed bent on tearing away the last green leaves, I still frantically and obstinately sought a _way of escape_.

That is why I prize now so highly the courageous thought of Byron. He saw that there is _no escape_, and proudly said so.

I was unhappy and perplexed when these thoughts began to haunt me; I tried by every means to run away from them ... like a lost traveller, like a beggar, I knocked at every door, stopped every one I met and asked my way, but every meeting and every event led to the same result—to _humility_ in the face of the _truth_, to meek acceptance of it.

Three years ago I sat by Natalie’s sick-bed and saw death drawing her mercilessly, step by step, to the grave; that life was all that was precious to me. About me all was darkness; I sat alone in dull despair, but did not comfort myself with hopes, did not betray my grief for one moment by the narcotic thought of meeting beyond the grave.

So it is hardly likely that I should be false to myself over the impersonal problems of life.

II

POST SCRIPTUM

I know that my outlook on Europe will meet with a bad reception at home. We for our own comfort _want_ a different Europe and believe in it as Christians believe in Paradise. Dissipating dreams is always a disagreeable thing to do, but some inner force which I cannot overcome makes me tell the truth even when it does me harm.

As a rule we know Europe from school, from literature—that is, we do not know it, but judge it _à livre ouvert_, from books and pictures, just as children judge the real world from their _Orbis pictus_, imagining that all the women in the Sandwich Islands hold their hands above their heads with a sort of tambourine, and, wherever there is a naked negro, there is sure to be standing five paces from him a lion with a dishevelled mane or a tiger with fierce eyes.

Our _classic_ ignorance of the Western European will be productive of a good deal of harm; race hatreds and bloody collisions will develop from it later on.

In the first place, we know nothing but the top, _cultured_ layer of Europe, which conceals the heavy substratum of popular life formed by the ages, and evolved by instincts and by laws that are little understood in Europe itself. European culture does not penetrate into those foundations in which, as in the works of the Cyclops, the hand of man is indistinguishable from that of nature and history passes into geology. The European states are welded together of two different peoples whose special characteristics are maintained by utterly different educations. There is here none of the Oriental unity which makes the Turk who is a Grand Vizier and the Turk who hands him his pipe just like each other. Masses of the country population have, since the religious wars and the peasant risings, taken no active part in events; they have been swayed by them to right and left like growing corn, never for a minute leaving the ground in which they are rooted.

Secondly, that stratum with which we do become acquainted, with which we do enter into contact, we only know historically, not as it is to-day. After spending a year or two in Europe we see with surprise that the men of the West do not correspond as a rule with our conception of them, that they are _greatly inferior_ to it.

Elements of truth enter into the ideal we have formed, but either these no longer exist or they have completely changed their character. The valour of chivalry, the elegance of aristocratic manners, the stern decorum of the Protestants, the proud independence of the English, the luxurious life of Italian artists, the sparkling wit of the Encyclopedists and the gloomy energy of the Terrorists—all that has been melted down and transmuted into one dead level of universally predominant _bourgeois manners_. They make up a complete whole—that is, a finished, self-contained outlook upon life with its traditions and rules, with its own good and evil, with its own manners and its own morality of a lower order.

As the knight was the leading type of the feudal world, so the merchant has become the leading type of the new world; feudal lords are replaced by employers. The merchant in himself is a colourless intermediate figure; he is the middle-man between the producer and the consumer; he is something of the nature of a means of communication, of transport. The knight was more in himself, more of a person, and kept up his dignity as he understood it, which made him in reality not dependent either on wealth or on position; his personality was what mattered. In the petty-bourgeois the personality is concealed or does not stand out, because it is not what matters; what matters is the ware, the produce, the thing, what matters is _property_.

The knight was a terrible ignoramus, a bully, a duellist, a bandit and a monk, a drunkard and a pietist, but he was open and genuine in everything: moreover, he was always ready to lay down his life for what he thought right; he had his moral tradition, his code of honour—very arbitrary, but one from which he did not depart without loss of his own respect or the respect of his peers.

The merchant is a man of peace and not of war, stubbornly and persistently sticking to his rights, but weak in attack; calculating, parsimonious, he sees trade in everything, and, like the knight, enters into single combat with every one he meets, but measures himself with him in cunning. His ancestors—mediæval townsmen—were forced to be sly to save themselves from violence and robbery; they purchased peace and wealth by evasiveness, by secretiveness and pretence, keeping themselves close and holding themselves in check. His ancestors, cap in hand and bowing low, cheated the knight; shaking their heads or sighing, they talked to their neighbours of their poverty, whilst they secretly buried their hoards in the earth. All this has naturally passed into the blood and brains of their descendants, and has become the physical characteristic of a special human species known as the _middle class_.

While it was in a difficult position and joined with the enlightened aristocracy in defending its faith, in fighting for its rights, it was full of greatness and poetry. But this was not for long, and Sancho Panza, having gained his place and lolling simply at his ease, let himself go and lost his peasant honour, his commonsense; the vulgar side of his nature got the upper hand.

Under the influence of petty-bourgeoisie everything is changed in Europe. Chivalrous honour is replaced by the honesty of the book-keeper, elegant manners by propriety, courtesy by stiff decorum, pride by a readiness to take offence, parks by kitchen gardens, palaces by hotels, open to _all_ (that is, all who have money).

The old, out-of-date, but consistent conceptions of relations between men have been shaken, while no new recognition of the _true_ relations between men has appeared. This chaotic void has greatly contributed to the development of all the bad and petty sides of bourgeoisie under the all-powerful influence of unbridled acquisitiveness.

Analyse the moral principles current for the last half-century, and what a medley you will find! The Roman conception of the state together with the Gothic division of powers, Protestantism and political economy, _salus populi_ and _chacun pour soi_, Brutus and Thomas à Kempis, the Gospel and Bentham, the balancing of income and expenditure and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With such a hotch-potch in the head and with a magnet in the breast, for ever attracted by gold, it was not hard to arrive at the absurdities reached by the foremost countries of Europe.

The whole of morality has been reduced to the duty of him who has not by every possible means to acquire, and of him who has to preserve and to increase his property; the flag which they run up in the market-place when trading begins has become the banner of a new society. The man has _de facto_ become the appurtenance of property; life has been reduced to a perpetual struggle for money.

The political question since 1830 is becoming exclusively the petty-bourgeois question, and the age-long struggle is expressed in the passions and tendencies of the ruling class. Life is reduced to a gamble on the Stock Exchange; everything—the publication of newspapers, the elections, the legislative chambers—all have become money-changers’ shops and markets. The English are so used to putting everything into shop language that they call their old English Church the _Old Shop_.

All parties and shades of opinion in the petty-bourgeois world have gradually divided into two camps: on one hand the bourgeois property-owners, obstinately refusing to abandon their monopolies; on the other the petty-bourgeois who have nothing, who want to tear the wealth out of the others’ hands but have not the power—that is, on the one hand _avarice_, on the other hand _envy_. Since there is no real moral principle in all that, the part taken by any individual on one or the other side is determined by external conditions of fortune and social position. One wave of the opposition after the other triumphs—that is, attains to property or position—and passes naturally from the side of envy to the side of avarice. Nothing can be more favourable for this transition than the fruitless swing backwards and forwards of parliamentary parties—it gives movement and sets limits to it, provides an appearance of _doing something_, and an external show of public interest in order to attain their private ends.

Parliamentary government, not as it follows from the popular foundations of the Anglo-Saxon _Common Law_, but as it has taken shape in the law of the state, is simply the wheel in a squirrel’s cage, and the most colossal one in the world. Could a show of a triumphant march forward whilst remaining majestically in the same spot be possibly achieved more perfectly than it is by the two English Houses of Parliament?

But just that maintenance of the show is the great point. Upon everything belonging to contemporary Europe, two characteristics obviously derived from the shop are deeply imprinted: on one hand, hypocrisy and secretiveness; on the other, ostentation and _étalage_. It is all window-dressing, buying at half-price, passing off rubbish for the real thing, show for reality, concealing some condition, taking advantage of a literal meaning, seeming instead of being, behaving properly instead of behaving well, keeping up external _Respektabilität_ instead of inner dignity.

In this world everything is so much a stage sham that even the coarsest ignorance assumes an air of education. Which of us has not blushed for the ignorance of Western European society? I am not here speaking of men of learning, but of the people who make up what is called society. There can be no serious theoretical education; it takes too much time and is too distracting from _business_. Since nothing that lies outside trading operations and the ‘exploitation’ of their social position is essential in the petty-bourgeois world, their education is bound to be limited. That is what accounts for the absurdity and slowness of mind which we see in the bourgeois, whenever he has to step off the common beaten track. Cunning and hypocrisy are by no means so clever and so far-sighted as is supposed; their range is poor, and they are soon out of their depth.

The English are aware of this, and so do not leave the beaten track, and put up with the not merely burdensome but, what is worse, absurd inconveniences of their mediævalism through fear of any change.

The French petty-bourgeois have not been so prudent, and for all their slyness and duplicity have fallen headlong into an empire.

Full of confidence in their victory, they proclaimed universal suffrage as the basis of their new regime. This arithmetical standard suited their taste; the truth is determined by addition and subtraction, it could be reckoned up and put down in figures.

And what did they put to the decision of the votes of all in the present state of society? The question of the existence of the republic. They wanted to crush it by means of the people, to make of it an empty word, because they did not like it. Is any one who respects the truth going to ask the opinion of the first stray man he meets? What if Columbus or Copernicus put America or the movement of the earth to the vote?

It was shrewdly conceived, but in the end the good souls overshot their mark.

The gap between the _parterre_ and the actors, covered at first by the faded carpet of Lamartine’s eloquence, has grown wider and wider; the blood of June has washed the channel deeper; and then the question of the president was put to the irritated people. As answer to the question, Louis-Napoleon, rubbing his sleepy eyes, stepped out and took everything into his hands—that is, even the petty-bourgeois, who fancied, from memory of old days, that he would reign and they would govern.

What you see on the great stage of political events is repeated in microscopic form on every hearth. The corruption of petty-bourgeoisie has crept into all the secret places of the family and private life. Never has Catholicism, never have the ideas of chivalry, been impressed on men so deeply, so many-sidedly, as the bourgeois ideas.

Noble rank had its obligations. Of course, since its rights were partly fantastic, its obligations were fantastic too, but they did provide a certain mutual security between equals. Catholicism laid still more obligations. Feudal knights and believing Catholics often failed to carry out their obligations, but the consciousness that, by so doing, they were guilty of a breach of the social bonds recognised by themselves prevented them from being free in their lapses and from justifying their behaviour. They had their holiday attire, their official setting which was not false but rather their ideal.

We are not now concerned with the nature of those ideals. They were tried and their cause was lost long ago. We only want to point out that petty-bourgeoisie on the contrary involves no obligations, not even the obligation to serve in the army, so long as there are volunteers; or rather, its only obligation is _per fas et nefas_ to have property. Its gospel is brief: ‘Heap up wealth, multiply thy riches till they are like the sands of the sea, use and misuse thy financial and moral capital, without ruining thyself, and in comfort and honour thou wilt attain length of years, marry thy children well, and leave an honoured memory behind thee.’

The destruction of the feudal and Catholic world was essential, and was the work not of the petty-bourgeois but simply of free men—that is, of men who had set themselves free from all wholesale classification. Among them were knights like Ulrich von Hutten, gentlemen like Voltaire, watchmakers’ apprentices like Rousseau, army doctors like Schiller, and merchants’ sons like Goethe. The petty-bourgeois took advantage of their work and showed themselves emancipated, not only from monarchs and slavery but from all social obligations, except that of contributing to the hire of the government who guarded their security.

Of Protestantism they made _their own_ religion, a religion that reconciles the conscience of the Christian with the practice of the usurer, a religion so bourgeois that the common people, who shed their blood for it, have abandoned it. In England the working class goes to church less than any.

Of the Revolution they tried to make their own republic, but it slipped between their fingers, just as the civilisation of antiquity slipped away from the barbarians—that is, with no place in real life, but with hope for _instaurationem magnam_.

The Reformation and the Revolution were both so terrified by the emptiness of the world which they had come into that they sought salvation in two forms of monasticism—the cold, dreary bigotry of Puritanism and the frigid, artificial civic morality of republican formalism.

Both the Quaker[66] and the Jacobin forms of intolerance were based on the fear that the ground was not firm under their feet; they saw that they needed to take strong measures, to persuade men in the one case that this was the church, in the other that it was freedom.

Such is the general atmosphere of European life. It is most oppressive and insufferable where the modern Western system is most developed, where it is most true to its principles, where it is most wealthy and most _cultured_—that is, most industrial. And that is why it is not so unendurably oppressive to live in Italy or Spain as it is in England or France.... And that is why poor, mountainous, rustic Switzerland is the only corner of Europe into which one can retreat in peace.[67]