Chapter IX: Letter 6

We stopped at the reflection that we must not be angry with squirrels for losing their fur, nor at the winter for following the summer every year. To recognise the inevitable is a source of strength. It is only by knowing the currents of the sea and the continually shifting equatorial winds, apart from any desire to correct them, that one can navigate the ocean.

Look how things are done as a rule in Nature. In every species, in the shaping of every form, development goes on the principles by which the germ was determined.

It grows, is defined, and acquires a more or less unalterable character from the mutual interaction of the elements and environment. New factors may arise, new conditions may alter the direction of growth, may arrest what has begun, and change it into something quite different; but if the development does not lose its individuality, if it continues, the form will inevitably progress on the same lines, with its own special characteristic, and will develop its one-sidedness, that is, its individual case. This does not in the least hinder its neighbours, either in space or time, from developing all sorts of variations on the same theme with various complements and differences, with their own one-sidedness in accordance with other conditions and another environment. Only at the beginning of the development of forms there is an undefined and characterless epoch, an epoch of, so to speak, the pre-zoological stage in the egg and the embryo.

Of the transmutation of animal species we know very little. Their whole history has taken place behind man’s back and covers whole periods of time in which there has been no witness. We are confronted now with finished, settled types, so far removed from each other that any interchange between them is impossible. Behind every animal there glimmers a long history—of efforts, of progress, of _avortements_, and of reaching the equilibrium, in which its forms have come to rest at last, not reaching its vague ideal, but coming to a standstill at the possible, at what will just do.

Needless to say, there are no sharp limits nor irrevocable decisions in any natural phenomena. The creative process that has come to a standstill, that has been reduced to mere repetition, may always be re-awakened; in some cases it has passed from the influence of the stars under the influence of man; by his cultivation he has developed vegetable and animal species which would not have developed of themselves.

All this casts an immense light on the question we are considering.

History presents us with a formation, caught in the very act, not yet settled but settling, and preserving in its memory the leading phases of its development and their ebbs and flows. Some sections of the human race have attained consistent forms and have conquered their history, so to speak; others in the heat of struggle and activity are creating it; while others, like the bottom of a sea that has only recently dried up, are ready for any sort of seeds, any sort of sowings, and give an unexhausted rich soil for everything.

As it is impossible looking at a calm sea to say that it will not within an hour be ruffled into a storm, so we cannot positively assert that China, for instance, or Japan, will for ages and ages maintain their aloof, cramped, stagnant form of existence. How can we tell that some word will not fall like a drop of yeast among those sleepy millions, and rouse them to a new life? But if we have no right to form a final, unconditional conclusion, it does not follow that after careful observation we have not the right to draw some conclusions. The fisherman, looking at a cloudless sky, and noting that there is no wind, will almost certainly be right if he concludes there will not be a storm for an hour.

This is all I ask in my scrutiny of modern history. To me it is evident that Western Europe has developed up to certain limits ... and at the last moment has not the spirit either to cross them, or to be satisfied with what it has gained. The difficulty of the position to-day rests on the fact that at this moment the active minority does not feel itself capable, either of creating forms of existence consistent with modern thought, or renouncing its old ideals, or frankly accepting the petty-bourgeois state that has been built up incidentally, as a form of life suitable for the Germanic Latin people just as the Chinese civilisation is for China.

This agonising state of hesitation and uncertainty makes the life of Europe unendurable. Whether it will come to rest by casting off the prejudices of the past and the hopes of the future, or the restless spirit of the Western European heights and depths will wash away the new dams, I do not know; but in any case I consider the present condition a period of agony and exhaustion. Life is impossible between two ideals.

History provides us with one example in full detail.

The long process of the decline of the ancient world and the rise of the Christian world presents us with every form of historical death, transmigration of souls and rebirth. Whole States stood still, remained outside the movement, did not come into the Christian formation, grew decrepit, and fell into ruins. Savage races, as yet hardly gathered into orderly herds, developed at their side into new and powerful State-organisations.... While Rome, pre-eminently the classical city, was transformed into a city pre-eminently Catholic.

Those who deny the inner inevitability of the death of ancient Rome, and hold that it was slain by violence, forget one thing, that every death is violent. Death does not enter into our conception of the living organism; it is outside it, beyond its limit. Old age and disease protest against death in their sufferings, and do not invoke it, and, if they could find strength in themselves, or means outside themselves, they would conquer death.

The barbarians are all very well, but we must not assume that the whole sickness of the ancient world was due to their onslaughts. From the days of Tacitus, its thought had unmistakably become gloomy and despondent. The depression, the misery, reached the pitch of suicide; such a pitch, in fact, that all the world almost went out of its mind and really became unhinged, believing in the most incredible theodicy and the most unnatural salvation, taking despair for consolation and the religion of death for a new life. Men who could not go out of their minds withdrew from the general saturnalia of death, the funerals in wreaths of roses, with amphoras of wine, the funerals in crowns of thorns, with lamentations over the sins of this world, and withdrew through the two narrow gates of stoicism and scepticism.

Beside the men who disdained death, beside the men who disbelieved in life, beside the fanatics who went forth to destroy the ancient world to the last stone, and the fanatics who expected the old world to rise up again with all the virtues of the days before the Punic Wars, there was a pinchbeck mediocre class, a crowd of those who were neither blind nor seeing, a crowd of the myopic who saw nothing, neither Catiline nor death behind the bustle of their daily cares, the news of war, the affairs of the senate, the gossip of the Court, the puzzles of scholasticism and the endless problems of household management, who shrugged their shoulders, listening to the ravings of the Christian Jacobins, despised the barbarians and laughed at their uncouthness, never guessing that these forest Hottentots, with their long hair and flaxen eyebrows, were coming to take their place in history.

The barbarians, too, have played their part, their duty is over; an immensely rich and ample period was developed by them, but they have reached the limits of their formation; they must reject their fundamental principles or come to a standstill in them.

It is very hard for the modern civilised world to come to terms with the new principles which are harassing it. What could be improved has been improved, what could be overturned has been overturned; it has next to preserve what it has gained, or to move out of the _one-sidedness_, the individual variation which constitutes its personality. The last word of Catholicism was uttered by the Reformation and the Revolution; they revealed its mystery; the mystic redemption was solved by the political emancipation. The Nicene Creed founded on the remission of sin to the Christian was expressed in the recognition of the rights of every man in the Creed of the last œcumenical council, that is, the Convention of 1792. The morality of the Judean proletarian, Matthew the Evangelist, is the same as that professed by the Geneva proletarian and deist, Jean Jacques Rousseau. It came in as faith, hope, and charity, and goes out as liberty, fraternity, and equality.

The Germanic Latin world reached its climax in the storms and the hurricanes that followed the triumphal year 1789. The upheaval of the French Revolution went on by summits and abysses, the great and the terrible, victories and the Terror, partial landslides and earthquakes, till 1848; then came _Amen, Ne plus ultra_. The cataclysm that had begun with the Renaissance and the Reformation was over.

The work goes on inwardly: the weaving of the microscopic web, the slow growth of drift from wind and water, the scurrying to and fro of history, the volcanic labours underground, the impenetrable passing of last year’s autumn into this year’s spring. Overhead are terrible apparitions, dead men in old armour and old tiaras, and fantastic figures, incredibly radiant shapes, agonisings, sufferings, frantic hopes, the bitter consciousness of weakness and the impotence of reason. Below is the bottomless pit of elemental passions, of primeval slumber, of childish dreams, of cyclopean mole-like labour. The voice of man does not reach to these depths, as the wind does not reach to the bottom of the sea; only at times the trumpet-blasts and drum-beats of war are heard there, calling to blood, promising slaughter and dealing destruction.

Between the fantastic dreamers at the top and the savages beneath hovers the middle class, having neither the strength proudly to utter its: I am king! nor the self-sacrifice to join the Jesuits or the Socialists.

Hesitating between two moralities, they furnish precisely by this hesitation the material for developing that corruption of which I am speaking.

But how is it between two moralities? What does it mean, ‘between two moralities’? And are there two moralities? Is there not one eternal morality, _une et indivisible_?

Absolute morality is bound to share the fate of everything absolute; it has no existence at all outside theory, outside abstract thought. There are several moralities, and they are all very relative, that is, historical.

The first Christians stated this very directly, very boldly, without beating about the bush, and, having announced that the new Adam brought a new morality, that the heathen virtues were for the Christian but brilliant vices, they closed Plato, closed Cicero, and proceeded to drag from their pedestals golden-haired Aphrodite, ox-eyed Hera, and the other sinful saints of the old morality.

Pliny looked upon them as fools, Trajan despised them, Lucian laughed at them, but they ushered in a new world and a new morality. Their new morality has grown old in its turn. And that is just what we are talking about.

The Revolution secularised what it could out of the catechism, but the Revolution, like the Reformation, took its stand in the precincts of the Church. Egmont and Alva, Calvin and Guise, Louis XVI. and Robespierre, had the same general convictions; they differed, like Dissenters, in shades only of opinion. Voltaire, who arrived wrapped up in a fur cloak, in a carriage, to see the sunrise, and who fell on his trembling knees with a prayer on his lips, Voltaire, who blessed Franklin’s grandson ‘in the name of God and liberty,’ is as religious as St. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus, only of a different sect. The cold moonlight of Catholicism has passed through all the vicissitudes of revolution, and at its last gasp has unfurled a new standard inscribed _Deo et Popolo_!

Somewhere on the heights the dawn of a new day is struggling with the moonlight, revealing the glaring incompatibility of faith and knowledge, of church and science, of law and conscience; but of that they know nothing in the plains below—that is for the small band of the elect.

The union of science and religion is impossible, but there _is_ an irregular union, from which one can draw one’s conclusion as to the morality which rests on such a union. The fact is that Reason, fearing a scandal, conceals the truth she knows; Science conceals that she is with child, not by Jehovah but by Pan, and will bear a new redeemer; and both are keeping it quiet, whispering, talking in cypher or simply lying, leaving men in an utter chaos of confused ideas, in which prayers for rain are mixed up with barometers, chemistry with miracles, telegraphs with rosaries. And all this is somehow through routine, through habit; you may believe or not, so long as you maintain certain forms of propriety. Who is deceived? What is it all for? One obligatory rule has remained, strong and accepted. Think what you please, but lie like the rest.

Prophets may guide the people by visions and passionate words, but they cannot guide them if they conceal the gift of prophecy or bow down to Baal.

Is it any wonder that life grows emptier with terrible rapidity, driving men by lack of understanding and by deadly dullness to every kind of frenzy, from gambling on the Exchange to playing at turning tables?

Apparently everything is going in the usual way; respectable people are occupied with their daily cares and business, with practical objects, they hate every sort of Utopia and all far-reaching ideals; but in reality this is not so, and the most respectable people as well as their forefathers have won everything good that they have won by constantly running after the rainbow and accomplishing impossibilities, such as Catholicism, the Reformation, the Revolution. These rainbow visions are no more, or, at any rate, the optical illusion deceives no more.

All the old ideals are dead, every one of them, from the Crucifixion to the Phrygian cap.

Do you remember that awful picture after the style of Jean Paul Richter’s inspired rhapsody, in which he depicts, apropos of what I forget, all the penitent nations on the dread Day of Judgment fleeing terrified to the Cross, praying for salvation and the good offices of the Son of God? Christ answers briefly: ‘I have no father!’

A similar answer is heard now from all the crosses, to which the yearning peoples, worn out with struggle, weary and heavy laden, appeal. From every Golgotha the answer comes more and more loudly: ‘I have no liberty!’ ‘I have no equality!’ ‘I have no fraternity!’ And one hope after another grows dim, casting its last dying light on the melancholy figures of the Don Quixotes, who obstinately refuse to hear the voices from Golgotha ... they beckon to men to follow them more quickly, and one after another vanish in the dark night of winter.

And that is not all; with redoubled horror men have begun to discern that the Revolution not only has no father, but no son.

The terrible fruitless days of June 1848 were the protest of despair; they did not create, they destroyed ... but what they attacked turned out to be the strongest. With the taking of the last barricade, with the deportation of the last batch of untried exiles, came the era of order. The Utopia of the democratic republic proved to be as evanescent as the Utopia of the kingdom of heaven on earth. Emancipation has turned out to be as much a failure as redemption.

But the social ferment has not calmed down sufficiently to allow people to be occupied with their own affairs; they must occupy their minds, and without Utopias, without epidemics of enthusiasm for ideals, they are badly off. It would not be so bad if the masses of the people, disappointed in their expectations, would simply rot and mildew in the Irish manner, like stagnant water; but, as it is, they may rise up in exasperation and test their Samson-like muscles, and see how strong are the pillars of the social edifice in which they are fettered!

Where are we to find ideals that are free from danger?

No need to look far—in the soul of man are many mansions. The classification of man by nationalities becomes more and more the wretched ideal of this world which has buried the revolution.

Political parties have dissolved into national parties: that is not merely a backsliding from the Revolution, it is a backsliding from Christianity. The human ideals of Catholicism and the Revolution have given place to a heathen patriotism; and the honour of the flag is the one honour of the peoples that has remained inviolate.

When I recall how twelve years ago the rake and buffoon Romieu[38] used to preach in the Paris salons to all who would listen that the revolutionary forces that had been roused should be turned from their path to national, maybe dynastic, questions, I cannot help blushing with shame at the memory.

There must be fighting whatever it is for, or a Chinese slumber will fall upon the people in this stagnation, and it will be long before there is an awakening. But is there any need of an awakening? That is just the question.

The last of the Mohicans of the eighteenth century, the Don Quixotes of the Revolution, the Socialists, some of the literary men, the poets, and the eccentric folk of all sorts, are not sleepy, and, as far as they can, they prevent the masses from sleeping.

The taciturn bourgeois is ashamed to confess that he is sleepy and, half-asleep, goes on muttering incoherent phrases about progress and liberty....

He needs war to awaken him. And is there in all the arsenal of the past a standard, a banner, a word, an idea for which men would go out to fight, which they have not seen put to shame and trampled in the mud?... Universal suffrage, perhaps?...

No; no man of our day will go out to fight for a deposed idol with the radiant self-sacrifice with which his forefather went to the stake for the right to sing psalms, with the proud self-confidence with which his father faced the guillotine for the sake of the one and indivisible republic. To be sure, he knows that neither psalms sung in German nor the emancipation of the people _à la française_ will lead to anything.

And no one can die for a god of whom he knows nothing, and who keeps hidden behind a wall. Let him first speak out who he is, let him own himself for a god, and with the impertinence of St. Augustine declare in the face of the old world that ‘its virtues are vices, its truths falsehood and absurdity.’

Well, that will not be to-day nor to-morrow.

The sensible man of our age is like Frederick II., an _esprit fort_ in his study and an _esprit accommodant_ in the market-place. When he entered his study from which his lackeys were dismissed, the king became a philosopher; but when he came out of it, the philosopher became a king....

Here, too, ‘the bulls stand before the mountain.’ And yet it cannot be denied that the light of reason is more and more widely dissipating the darkness of prejudice.... What is most annoying is that people have no time and die early—a man is only beginning to grow sensible when in a trice he is carried to the cemetery. One cannot help recalling the celebrated horse whose master trained it to eat nothing, but death interfered with his plans.

In the Alpine glaciers every summer a crust of ice melts, but its mass is so great that the autumn always catches the work of the sunbeams half-way, and the crust begins to freeze again, though sometimes it does not attain its former thickness. The meteorologists have reckoned many times how many ages and ages the summer will need to beat the winter at its work and melt all the ice. Many doubt whether the sun itself will last long enough to do all the work: possibly a volcanic eruption will help.

A similar calculation has not yet been worked out in history.

_October 20, 1862._