Chapter X: Letter 7

Six days for labour and the seventh for rest. Moses and Proudhon were right to defend the Sabbath day. Monotonous work is terribly exhausting. A man must have periodical pauses, in which, after washing his hands and putting on clean clothes, he can go out, not to work but for a walk, have a look at his fellow-creatures and at Nature, possess his soul, breathe freely, be [39]‘resurrected.’[40]

Here I, too, have made of my periodical chatter about ‘Ends and Beginnings’ my Sunday rest, and in it I withdraw from the daily discords, the journalistic rascalities and the workaday wrangles, in which the hours and days of the month change, but opinions and the expression of them remain the same.... I withdraw as into some remote cell from the windows of which many details are unseen, many sounds unheard, though the silent outlines of mountains, far and near, are clearly visible, and the murmur of the sea comes in distinctly.

Perhaps you will think that I am not spending my holiday very gaily; remember that I am in England, where of all the dull days Sunday is the dullest.

Well, there is no help for it. You must be bored once more, while, for my part, I will try to tell you as amusingly as I can about the melancholy matters which we discuss.

But are they really melancholy? And if it really is so, is it not high time we were resigned to them? We really should not talk for ever about things which it is not in our power to change. Would it not be better, like a sensible man, to make up the account-books we have inherited, and, forgetting our inordinate expenses and irreparable losses, accept the total in meekness of spirit as a new starting-point. Grieve as you will, you will not mend things; there are plenty of ways of using inherited capital; there are plenty of dreams men cherish when they receive it. We have had such dreams too.... The _symphonia heroica_ is over, practical life is beginning. The wine has gone flat, let us drink the dry _tisane de champagne_. It is not so nice, but they say it is more wholesome. Part of the cultured world pines, with the old maid’s yearning for happiness which she has not lost but has never had, and, instead of firmly making up her mind to widowhood without marriage, laments that the _ideal_ of her youth has not carried her off.... Well, what is to be done? It has not, and now it is too late.

People are vexed at not having wings, and so will not trouble to be well shod. The painfulness of European life in its more cultured classes is directly due to their false position between dreams of what is not and contempt for what is.

Side by side with the ideals of seraphic wings which are retreating more and more into the darkness of the past and the ideals of other wings that are vanishing into the future, there is a whole independent world at which the dreamers are incensed, because it has achieved what it could and not what the dreamers expected, that is, not wings. So long as the authority and power of this world is not recognised, so long will the feverish ferment, the perpetual falsity in life, the involuntary faithlessness both to its ideal and to practical life, which is revealed in the continual contradiction of words and deeds, phrases and conduct, continue. That world is not nimble in words and not eloquent, although it has created a great lever, comparable with steam and electricity, the lever of advertisement, of proclamation, of _réclame_.

With all that, it cannot stand at its full height in all its breadth and say aloud to the people: ‘I am the alpha and omega of your development; come to me and I will comfort you, I will give what can be given; but leave off knocking at all the doors which are not opened to you, some because there is no one to open them, others because they lead nowhere. Remember at last that you have no other god but me, and cease to bow down to all sorts of idols and desire all sorts of wings. Understand that you cannot preach at the same time Christian poverty and political economy, socialist theories and the unlimited right of property. So far my power exists as a fact, but not as the recognised foundation of morality, not even as a flag, and, what is worse, I am denounced, I am insulted in churches, in academies, in aristocratic halls and clubs, in speeches and in sermons, in novels and in newspapers.... I am sick of playing the part of a provincial relation from whom city fops take money and domestic supplies, but about whom they keep quiet or speak with a blush. I want not only to rule, but to wear the purple.’

Yes, my dear friend, it is time to come to recognising with all meekness and humility that bourgeoisie is the final form of Western European civilisation, its coming of age—_état adulte_; this closes the long series of its visions; with this the epic of its growth, the romance of its youth, everything that has brought so much poetry and calamity into the life of the nations, ends. After all men’s dreams and efforts ... this offers them modest repose and a less troubled life and a comfort within their capacity, not beyond the reach of any one, though insufficient for the majority. By hard work the nations of the West have won their winter quarters. Let others show their mettle. From time to time, of course, men of a different leaven, of heroic times, of other formations—monks, knights, Quakers, Jacobins—will be seen again, but their transient appearance will not be able to affect the prevailing tone.

The mighty elemental hurricanes, that tossed up the whole surface of the European sea, have sunk into a quiet sea-breeze, not perilous for ships, but helping them to sail along the coast. Christianity has grown shallow and quietened down into the calm stony haven of the Reformation; the Revolution, too, has grown shallow and sunk into the calm sandy haven of liberalism. Protestantism, a religion austere in trifles, has found the secret of reconciling the Church which despises earthly goods, with the supremacy of commerce and profit. Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned even more artfully to unite a continual protest against the government with a continual submission to it.

With so indulgent a Church, with so docile a Revolution, Western Europe has begun to settle down, to find its equilibrium: everything that hindered it has been drawn gradually into the solidifying waves, like insects caught in amber. Byron, unable to breathe, let out a scream of anger and fled, one of the first, anywhere ... to Greece.[41] Stoically remaining in Frankfort, Schopenhauer slowly expired, noticing, like Seneca when his veins had been opened, the progress of death and welcoming it as his deliverer.... This did not in the least hinder the tendency of all European life towards stillness and crystallisation; on the contrary, this tendency grew more and more distinct. Individuality was effaced, the racial type concealed everything strikingly original, restless, or eccentric. Men, like goods, were turned into something wholesale, ready-made, cheaper, and commoner, individually, but stronger and more numerous in the mass. Individual characteristics were lost, like the drops of a cataract in the general flood, without even the poor consolation of

‘Gleaming bright in the rainbow’s passing streak.’

Hence their hateful but natural indifference to the life of their neighbours and the fate of individuals; it is the type, the race, the work that matters, not the person. To-day one hundred men are buried in a coal-mine, to-morrow fifty more will be buried; to-day ten men are killed on one railway, and to-morrow five more will be; and every one looks on this as individual misfortune. Society suggests insurance.... What more can it do?... There can be no shortage in the transport of stock because somebody’s son or father has been killed; there can be no shortage in the living apparatus for coal-mining either. A horse is needed, a workman is needed, and whether it is a bay, or whether it is Tom or Harry, is absolutely no matter. In this _no matter_ lies the whole secret of persons being replaced by masses, of individuals being swallowed up by the race.

A storm seemed about to arise, threatening to awaken every one and 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._