Chapter VI: Letter 3

... Phew, what a disgusting summer! Cold, darkness, sleet, continual winds, constant irritation of the nerves and also of the membrane of the nose; and all that has been going on for three months, and there were seven months before that on this side of the Sign of the Ram.

At last the sun has come out in a cloudless sky. The sea is smooth and sparkling. I am sitting at my window in a tiny farm; I cannot take my eyes off it; it is so long since I saw the sun and the distance. To-day it is actually warm. I am simply delighted, seeing that Nature is not played out yet. The rejoicing is endless: bees and birds are flying, buzzing, singing, droning; in the little yard of the farm the cock, dry at last, is crowing his loudest; and the old dog, oblivious of his age and social position, lies on his back like a puppy, with his legs in the air, rolling from side to side with an unconscious epicurean growl. There are no people to be seen from my window, but fields, trees, and gardens without end; in spite of the sea on one side, this view reminds one of our great Russian landscapes, and there is the scent of grass and trees, too.

It was more than time for the weather to improve, for I had really begun to be afraid not of a social, but of a geological catastrophe; I had begun to expect that after ten months of bad weather Europe would crack, and by volcanic means cut the Gordian knot of contemporary problems and _impasses_, bidding those who will to begin, not from their ABC, but from a second Adam.

You, as a poet and idealist, probably don’t believe in such nonsense, but Lamé,[30] as one of the greatest mathematicians of our age, is not of that opinion. He fancies that the equilibrium of the crowded continents is very insecure, and that, taking also into account their rapid movement in one direction, and certain facts of the shifting of contours in Iceland, the earthly globe may crack in Europe at any moment. He has even drawn up a series of formulas and made a series of calculations.... But there is no need to frighten you; the crack won’t reach as far as the province of Orel.

We had better, taking advantage of the phenomenally fine weather, return to our discussion of ‘Ends and Beginnings,’ and if the earthquake comes it will settle things.

The Don Quixote of the Revolution sticks in my head. That austere, tragic type is vanishing, vanishing like the aurochs of the White Russian forest, like the Red Indian, and there is no artist to record his old clear-cut features, marked with the traces of every sorrow, every grief that comes from general principles and faith in humanity and reason. Soon these features will perish, still unyielding, still wearing an expression of proud and reproachful disdain, then their image will be effaced and the memory of man will lose one of its noblest and loftiest types.

These are the peaks in which the mountain range of the eighteenth century ends; with them it reaches the limit; with them a series of ascending efforts breaks off. There is no reaching a higher level through volcanic action.

Titans, left after the struggle, after defeat, representatives of unsatisfied ambitions, for all their Titanic effort turn from great men into melancholy Don Quixotes. History rises and falls between the prophets and the Knights of the Grievous Countenance. Roman patricians, republicans, stoics of the early ages, hermits fleeing into the wilderness from a Christianity vulgarised into the official religion, Puritans who passed a whole century gnashing their teeth over failure to attain their tedious ideal—all these, left by the retreating tide, obstinately struggling forward and sticking in the mud, unsupported by the wave, all are Don Quixotes, but Don Quixotes who have found their Cervantes. For the champions of the early church, there are volumes of legends, there are ikons and paintings, there are mosaics and sculpture. The type of Puritanism is firmly fixed in English literature and in Dutch painting, but the type of the Don Quixote of the Revolution is fading before our eyes, growing rarer and rarer, and no one thinks of even photographing it.

Fanatics of earthly religion, dreamers not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the Kingdom of Man, they are left the last sentinels of the ideal, long ago deserted by the army; in gloomy solitude they stand for half a century, incapable of changing, still expecting the coming of the republic on earth. The ground sinks lower and lower; they refuse to see it. I still come upon some of these apostles of the ’nineties; their clear-cut, melancholy, striking figures, standing out above two generations, seem to me like austere, immovable Memnons, falling into ruins stone by stone in the Egyptian desert.... While at their feet tiny men and little camels swarm, bustle, drag their goods, hardly visible through the whirling sand.

Death gives more and more warning of his approach; the aged, lustreless eye is sterner, grows weary with the effort of seeking a successor, looking for one to whom to yield place and honour. Son?—the old man frowns. Grandson?—he waves his hand in despair. Poor King Lear in democracy, whenever he turns his dimming eyes upon those of his own household, everywhere he is met by lack of understanding, lack of sympathy, disapproval, half-concealed reproach, petty considerations and petty interests. They are afraid, before strangers, of his Jacobin words; they beg pardon for him, pointing to his scanty grey hair. His daughter-in-law worries him to be reconciled with the Church, and a Jesuit _abbé_ flits in at times, like a passing crow, to see what strength and consciousness is left, so as to catch him for God in his deathbed delirium. Well it is for Citoyen Lear if there is somewhere in his neighbourhood a Citoyen Kent who finds that ‘he is every inch’ a hero of 1794, some obscure comrade of Santerre,[31] a soldier of the army of Marceau and Hoche, Citoyen Spartacus Brutus junior, childishly faithful to his tradition, and proudly keeping shop with the hand which held a lance crowned with the Phrygian cap. Lear will visit him sometimes to relieve his heart, to shake his head, and to recall old days, with their immense hopes, with their great events, to abuse Tallien[32] ... and Barras[32] ... the Restoration, with its _cafards_, the shopkeeper king, and _ce traître de Lamartine_. Both _know_ that the hour of revolution will strike, that the people will awaken like a lion and again hoist the Phrygian cap, and one of them will fall asleep in these dreams.

Scowling Lear will follow the coffin of Spartacus Brutus junior, or Spartacus Brutus junior, not concealing his profound loathing of all the kindred of the deceased, will follow the coffin of Lear, and of the two majestic figures one only will be left, and that one absolutely superfluous.

‘He, too, is no more; he, too, has not lived to see it,’ thinks the old man who is left, as he comes back from the funeral. Can superstition and monarchy, the party of Pitt and of Coburg, have triumphed for good and all? Can all our long lifetime, our efforts, our sacrifices?... No, that cannot be; the truth is on our side, and the victory will be with us.... Reason and justice will triumph, in France first of all, of course, and then in all humanity, and ‘Vive la République Une et Indivisible’! The old man at eighty prays with his aged lips, just as another old man, giving up his soul in peace to his Maker, murmurs ‘Thy Kingdom come,’ and both tranquilly close their eyes and do not see that neither the Kingdom of Heaven on earth nor the sole and indivisible Republic in France is coming at all, and do not see it, because not the Lord but their decaying body has received their soul in peace.

Holy Don Quixotes, the earth rest lightly upon you!

This fanatical conviction of the possibility of bringing about harmonious order and the common weal, of the possibility of realising the truth because it is the truth, this renunciation of everything private and personal, this devotion which survives every ordeal, every blow, is the topmost peak.... The mountain ends there; higher, beyond, is icy air, darkness, nothing. We must go down again. Why cannot we go on? Why does not Mont Blanc stand on Chimborazo and one of the Himalayas continue them? That would be a mountain!

But no—every geological cataclysm has its romance, its mountain poem, its individual peaks of granite and of basalt, whose mass towers above the lower slopes. Monuments of the revolutions of the planets, they have long ago been overgrown with forest and moss, bearing witness to thousands of years of immobility. Our pioneers of the Revolution have left their Alps in history; the traces of their titanic efforts have not passed away, and it will be long before they pass. What more would you have?

Yes, that is enough for history. It has its own wholesale, ruthless valuation; in it, as in the description of battles, we have the movement of companies, the action of artillery, the attack of the left flank, the retreat of the right; it has its leading figures, the ‘30th Light Cavalry and afterwards the 45th.’ The bulletin goes no further; it is satisfied with the sum total of the dead, but the ‘fifth act’ of every soldier goes further, and it has a purely civilian interest.

What was not endured by these men of the latest flood-tide, left stranded in the slime and mud by its ebb! What did not these fathers endure—more solitary in their own families than monks in their cells! What terrible conflicts every hour, every day!... What moments of weariness and despair?

Is it not strange that in the long series of ‘_Misérables_’ brought before us by Victor Hugo there are old men ... but _the_ miserable old man _par excellence_ is thrust into the background, neglected? Hugo scarcely noticed that side by side with the agonising sense of guilt there is another anguish, the agonising sense of one’s useless rectitude, the recognition of one’s fruitless superiority over the feebleness of every young creature near that has survived.... The great rhetorician and poet, while dealing with the sorrowful lives in modern France, scarcely touches upon the greatest sorrow in the world—that of the old man, young in soul, surrounded by a generation growing more and more shallow.

Beside them what are the poignant but useless and purely subjective sufferings of Jean Valjean described with such wearisome minuteness in Hugo’s omnibus of a novel? Of course, one may feel compassion for every form of unhappiness, but one cannot feel deep sympathy for all. The pain of a broken leg and the pain of a broken life stir a different kind of sympathy.

We are not sufficiently Frenchmen to understand such ideals as Jean Valjean, and to sympathise with such heroes of the police as Javert. To us Javert is simply loathsome. Probably Hugo had no idea, when he drew this typically national figure of the jackal of Law and Order, how he was branding his ‘charming France.’ In Jean Valjean all we can understand is his external struggle of the good-luckless wild beast, baited by a whole pack of hunting dogs. His inner conflict does not touch us; this man, so strong in will and muscles, is in reality a singularly weak man. A saintly convict, an Ilya Muromets[33] from the galleys of Toulon, an acrobat at fifty, and a lovesick boy at almost sixty, he is a mass of superstition. He believes in the brand on his shoulder, he believes in his sentence, he believes that he is an outcast, because thirty years ago he stole a loaf, and that not for himself. His virtue is morbid remorse, his love is senile jealousy. His strained existence is raised to truly tragic significance only at the end of the book by the heartless narrow-mindedness of Cosette’s husband and the boundless ingratitude of herself. And here Jean Valjean really has something in common with our old men—the remorse of the one and the rectitude of the others blend in burning suffering. The mercury frozen in the thermometer scalds like the molten lead of the bullet. The consciousness of rectitude, consuming half the heart, half the existence, is as painful as the gnawings of conscience, and worse indeed. In the latter case there is the relief of confession, the prospect of reward; in the former there is nothing. Between the old man of the ’nineties—fanatic, dreamer, idealist—and the son, older than he in prudence, good sense, and disillusionment, the son so extremely well satisfied with things on a lower plane, and the grandson who, swaggering in his uniform of _Guide Impérial_, dreams of how to get a berth as a _sous-préfet pour exploiter sa position_, the natural relation is violated, the balance is destroyed, and the normal succession of generations is distorted.

Jean Valjean in his aged virginity, in his lyrical personal concentration, did not himself know what he wanted from the younger generation. What did he really want from Cosette? Could she have been a friend to him? In the inexperienced innocence of his heart, he went beyond the love of a father.... He wanted to love her exclusively for his own sake, and a father’s love is not like that. Moreover, though he has mentally been draping himself all his life in the jacket of a convict, he is crushed under the burden of repulsion evinced for him by the very narrow-minded young man—the typical representative of a generation sinking into vulgarity.

I don’t know what Hugo meant to make of his Marius, but to me he is as much a type of his generation as Javert is of his. In the instincts of the young man there is still a glimmer of the virtues of another period—warm and generous impulses, with no reflection, no roots, almost no significance, springing from tradition and example. There is in him no trace of the leaven of the eighteenth century, that restless itch for analysis and criticism, that menacing summons of everything in the world to the test of the intellect; he has no intellect, but he is still a good comrade; he goes to the barricades, not knowing what is to come afterwards; he lives by routine, and, knowing _à code ouvert_ what is good and what is evil, troubles his head as little about it as a man who knows for certain that it is sinful to eat meat in Lent. With this generation, the revolutionary epoch comes finally to a standstill and begins its descent; another generation, and there will be no more generous impulses; everything will fall into its commonplace routine, personality will be effaced, and the succession of individual specimens will be scarcely perceptible in the daily routine of life.

I imagine that there must have been something of the sort in the development of animals. The species in course of formation stirring towards what is above its strength, while failing to make the most of its powers, has gradually gained equilibrium and proportion, and lost its anatomical eccentricities and physiological excesses while gaining fertility, and beginning from generation to generation, from age to age, to repeat its distinct form and its individuality in the image and semblance of the first forefather who adopted steady habits.

When the species is evolved development almost stops; at any rate, it is slower and on a humbler scale, as it is with our planet. Having reached a certain stage of cooling, it changes its crust very slowly; there are floods, but there are no world-wide deluges; there are earthquakes here and there, there is no universal cataclysm. Species become stationary, and are consolidated in various forms more or less one-sided in one direction or another, and are satisfied with them; they are scarcely able to escape from them, and if they did, or if they do, the result would be just as one-sided. The mollusc does not try to become a crab, the crab a trout, or Holland Sweden.... If we could presuppose ideals in animals, the ideal of a crab would still be a crab, but with a more perfect equipment. The nearer a country is to its final condition, the more it regards itself as the centre of all civilisation and of every perfection, like China, which stands unrivalled; like England and France, which in their antagonism, in their rivalry, in their mutual hatred, never doubt each that she is the foremost country in the world. Some species are at rest in the position they have attained; development continues in the unfinished species, beside the finished which have completed their cycles.

Everywhere where human swarms and ant-heaps have attained comparative prosperity and equilibrium, progress becomes slower and slower, imagination and ideals are dimmed. The satisfaction of the rich and the strong suppresses the efforts of the poor and the weak. Religion appears as the comforter of all the heavy laden. Everything that gnaws at the heart, that makes men suffer, every craving left unsatisfied on earth, all are set right and satisfied in the eternal realm of Ormuzd, loftier than the Himalayas at the foot of Jehovah’s throne. And the more unrepiningly men endure the temporary sorrows of earthly life, the fuller the heavenly consolation, and that for no brief period, but for ever and ever. It is a pity that we know little of the inner story of the Asiatic peoples who have dropped out of history, know little of those uneventful periods which preceded the violent inroads of savage races who devastated everything, or the predatory civilisation which uprooted or reconstructed everything. It would show us in simple and elementary form, in those plastic biblical images which only the East creates, the transition of the people from historical upheavals into a peaceful _status quo_ of life, persisting in the accepted, untroubled sequence of generations, like winter into spring, spring into summer....

With slow, untroubled steps England is advancing to that repose, to that unruffled stagnation of forms, ideas, convictions. The other day _The Times_ congratulated her on the lack of interest in parliamentary debates, on the unrepining submission with which workmen starve to death, ‘while so lately their fathers, the contemporaries of O’Connor,’ agitated the country with their menacing murmurs. As firmly as an aged oak stands the English Church, its roots deep in the soil, graciously tolerating all forms of Dissent, and convinced that they will not move far away.

Swaggering and resisting, as is her wont, France is shoved backwards while making a show of progress. Behind these giants will come in two columns others, once prophetically united under one sceptre ... on the one hand, the thin, austere, ascetic type of the Spaniard, brooding without thought, enthusiastic without an object, anxious without cause, taking everything to heart, unable to improve anything, in short, a type of a true Don Quixote de la Mancha; on the other, the sturdy Dutchman, content when he has had a good meal, reminiscent of Sancho Panza.

Is not the reason that the children of to-day are older than their fathers, older than their grandfathers, and able _à la_ Dumas junior to talk of their ‘prodigal fathers,’ that senility is the leading characteristic of the present age? At any rate, wherever I look I see grey hairs, wrinkles, bent backs, last wills and testaments, balanced accounts, funerals, _ends_, and I am always seeking and seeking beginnings. They are only to be found in theories and abstractions.

_August 10, 1862._