Chapter 25 (2)

Often, utterly exhausted, he would come to us to rest, and lie on the floor with our two-year-old child; he would play with him for hours together. While we were only the three of us things went swimmingly, but if there came a ring at the bell, a spasmodic grimace passed over his face and he would look about him uneasily, trying to find his hat; though with Slav weakness he often remained. Then a word, an observation uttered not to his liking would lead to the most original scenes and disputes....

Once he went in Passion Week to dine with a literary man and Lenten dishes were served. ‘Is it long,’ he asked, ‘since you became so devout?’ ‘We eat Lenten fare,’ answered the literary gentleman, ‘simply for the sake of the servants.’ ‘For the sake of the servants,’ said Byelinsky, and he turned pale. ‘For the sake of the servants,’ he repeated, and flung down his dinner napkin. ‘Where are your servants? I’ll tell them that they are deceived, any open vice is more humane than this contempt for the weak and uneducated, this hypocrisy in support of ignorance. And do you imagine that you are free people? You are in the same boat with all the tsars and priests and slaveowners. Good-bye, I don’t eat Lenten fare for the edification of others, I have no servants!’

Among the Russians who might be classified as inveterate Germans, there was one graduate of our university who had lately arrived from Berlin; he was a good-natured man in blue spectacles, stiff and decorous; he had come to a standstill for ever after upsetting and enfeebling his brains with philosophy and philology. A doctrinaire and to some extent a pedant, he was fond of holding forth in edifying style. On one occasion at a literary evening in the house of the novelist who kept the fasts for the sake of his servants, this gentleman was preaching some sort of _honnéte et modéré_ twaddle. Byelinsky was lying on a couch in the corner and as I passed him he took me by the lapel of my coat and said: ‘Do you hear the rubbish that monster is talking? My tongue has been itching to answer him, but my chest hurts and there are a lot of people. Be a father to me, make a fool of him somehow, squash him, crush him with mockery, you can do it better—come, comfort me.’

I laughed and told Byelinsky that he was setting me on like a bulldog at a rat. I scarcely knew the man and had hardly heard what he said.

Towards the end of the evening, the gentleman in blue spectacles, after abusing Koltsov for having abandoned the national costume, suddenly began talking of Tchaadayev’s famous letter and concluded his commonplace remarks, uttered in that didactic tone which of itself provokes derision, with the following words: ‘Be that as it may, I consider his action contemptible and revolting: I have no respect for such a man.’

There was in the room only one man closely associated with Tchaadayev, and that was I. I shall have a great deal to say about Tchaadayev later on, I always liked and respected him and was liked by him; I thought it was unseemly to let this absurd remark pass. I asked him dryly whether he supposed that Tchaadayev had written his letter disingenuously or from interested motives.

‘Not at all,’ answered the gentleman.

An unpleasant conversation followed; I mentioned that the epithets ‘revolting and contemptible’ were themselves revolting and contemptible when applied to a man who had boldly expressed his opinion and had suffered for it. He talked to me of the people making up one whole, of the unity of the fatherland, of the crime of disturbing that unity, of sacred things that must not be touched.

All at once Byelinsky cut short my words, he leapt up from his sofa, came up to me as white as a sheet and, slapping me on the shoulder, said: ‘Here you have them, they have spoken out—the inquisitors, the censors—keeping thought in leading-strings ...’ and so he went on and on. With savage inspiration he spoke, interspersing grave words with deadly sarcasms: ‘We are strangely sensitive: men are flogged and we don’t resent it, sent to Siberia and we don’t resent it, but here Tchaadayev, you see, has picked holes in the national honour, he mustn’t dare to speak; to talk is impudence, a flunkey must never speak! Why is it that in more civilised countries where one would expect national susceptibilities to be more developed than in Kostroma and Kaluga words are not resented?’

‘In civilised countries,’ replied the gentleman in blue spectacles with inimitable self-complacency, ‘there are prisons in which they confine the senseless creatures who insult what the whole people respect ... and a good thing too.’

Byelinsky seemed to tower above us, he was terrible, great at that moment. Folding his arms over his sick chest, and looking straight at his opponent, he answered in a hollow voice: ‘And in still more civilised countries there is a guillotine for those who think that a good thing.’

Saying this, he sank exhausted in an easy-chair and ceased speaking. At the word guillotine our host turned pale, the guests were uneasy and a pause followed. The blue-spectacled gentleman was annihilated, but it is just at such moments that human vanity gets out of hand. Turgenev advises that, when one has gone such lengths in argument that one begins to feel frightened, one should move one’s tongue ten times round the inside of one’s mouth before uttering a word.

Our opponent, unaware of this homely advice, continued uttering feeble trivialities, addressing himself rather to the rest of the company than to Byelinsky. ‘In spite of your intolerance,’ he said at last, ‘I am certain that you would agree with me....’

‘No,’ answered Byelinsky, ‘whatever you might say I shouldn’t agree with anything!’

Every one laughed and went in to supper. The gentleman in blue spectacles picked up his hat and went away.

Suffering and privation soon completely undermined Byelinsky’s sickly constitution. His face, particularly the muscles about his lips, and the gloomily fixed look in his eyes testified equally to the intense workings of his spirit and the rapid dissolution of his body.

I saw him for the last time in Paris in the autumn of 1847; he was in a very bad way, afraid of speaking aloud, and only at moments his old energy revived and its ebbing fires glowed brightly. It was at such a moment that he wrote his letter[30] to Gogol.

The news of the revolution of February found him still alive; he died taking its glow for the flush of the rising dawn.

* * * * *

So this chapter ended in 1854; since that time much has changed. I have been brought much closer to that period, nearer to the more remote past, through persons who are here, through the arrival of Ogaryov and two books, Annenkov’s _Biography of Stankevitch_ and the two first parts of Byelinsky’s complete works. From the windows suddenly thrown open the fresh air of the fields, the young breath of spring has been wafted into the hospital wards....

Stankevitch’s correspondence was unnoticed when it came out. It appeared at the wrong moment. At the end of 1857 Russia had not yet come to herself after the funeral of Nicholas, she was expectant and hopeful; that is the worst mood for receiving reminiscences ... but the book is not lost. It will remain one of the rare monuments from which any man who can read can find what was buried without a word in the wretched graveyard of those days. The dead years, from 1825 to 1855, will soon be utterly lost; the human tracks, swept away by the police, will have vanished, and future generations will come to a standstill in bewilderment before the smooth level waste, seeking the lost channels of thought which were really never interrupted. The current was apparently checked, Nicholas tied up the main artery—but the blood flowed along side-channels. And it is just these capillaries which have left their trace in the works of Byelinsky and the correspondence of Stankevitch.

Thirty years ago, the Russia of the future existed exclusively among a few boys, hardly more than children, so insignificant and unnoticed that there was room for them under the heels of the great boots of the autocracy—and in them was the heritage of the 14th of December, the heritage of a purely national Russia, as well as of the learning of all humanity. This new life struggled on like the grass that tries to grow at the mouth of the still smouldering crater.

In the very jaws of the monster these children stand out unlike other children; they grow, develop, and begin to live a different life. Weak, insignificant, unsupported, on the contrary persecuted by all, they might easily have perished, leaving no trace, but they survive, or, if they die on their way, all does not die with them. They are the rudimentary germs, the embryos of history, barely perceptible, barely existing, like embryos in general.

Little by little, groups of them are formed. What is more nearly akin to them gathers round their centres; then the groups repel one another. This splitting up gives them width and many-sidedness in their development; after developing to the end, that is to the extreme, the branches unite again by whatever names they may be called—Stankevitch’s circle, the Slavophils, or our little circle.

The leading characteristic of them all is a profound feeling of aversion for official Russia, for their environment, and at the same time the impulse to get out of it—and in some a vehement desire to get rid of it.

The objection that these circles, unnoticed both from above and from below, form an exceptional, a casual, a disconnected phenomenon, that the education of the young people was for the most part exotic, alien, and that they rather express the translation of French and German ideas into Russian than anything of their own, seems to us quite groundless.

Possibly at the end of last and the beginning of this century there was in the aristocracy a sprinkling of Russian foreigners who had sundered all ties with the national life; but they had neither living interests, nor circles based on convictions, nor a literature of their own. They died out without leaving fruit. Victims of the divorce from the people brought about by Peter the Great, they remained eccentric and whimsical, they were men not merely superfluous but undeserving of pity. The war of 1812 put an end to them—the old generation lived on, but none of the younger developed in that direction. To include among them men of the stamp of Tchaadayev would be the greatest mistake.

Protest, denunciation, hatred for one’s country if you will has a completely different significance from indifferent aloofness. Byron, lashing at English life, fleeing from England as from the plague, remained a typical Englishman. Heine, trying through exasperation at the loathsome political state of Germany to turn French, remained a genuine German. The highest protest against Judaism—Christianity—is filled with the spirit of Judaism. The separation of the states of North America from England could lead to war and hatred, but it could not make the Americans un-English.

As a rule, it is with great difficulty that men abandon their physiological memories and the mould in which they are cast by heredity; to do so a man must either be peculiarly passionless and lacking in individual characteristics or must be absorbed in abstract pursuits. The impersonality of mathematics, the unhuman objectivity of nature do not call forth those sides of the soul and do not awaken them; but as soon as we touch upon questions of life, of art, of morals, in which a man is not only an observer and investigator, but at the same time himself an interested party, then we find a physiological limit—which it is very hard to cross with old blood and brains unless one could erase from them all traces of the songs of the cradle, of the fields and the hills of home, of the customs and whole setting of the past.

The poet or the artist in his truest work is always national. Whatever he does, whatever aim and thought he may have in his work, he consciously or unconsciously expresses some elements of the national character and expresses them more deeply and more clearly than the very history of the people. Even when renouncing everything national, the artist does not lose the chief characteristics from which it can be recognised to what people he belongs. Both in the Greek ‘Iphigenia’ and in the Oriental ‘Divan’ Goethe was a German. Poets really are, as the Romans called them, prophets; only they do not foretell what is not and will be by chance, but put into words what is unrecognised, what exists in the dim consciousness of the masses, what is already slumbering in them.

Everything that has existed from time immemorial in the soul of the Anglo-Saxon peoples is drawn together as in a ring by one personality; and every fibre, every hint, every attempt, fermenting from generation to generation, unconscious of itself, has taken form and language.

Probably no one supposes that the England of the Elizabethan times—the majority of the people anyway—had a clear understanding of Shakespeare; they have no distinct understanding of him even now—but then they have no distinct understanding of themselves either. But I do not doubt that when an Englishman goes to the theatre he understands Shakespeare instinctively, through sympathy. At the moment when he is listening to the play, something becomes clearer and more familiar to him. One would have thought that a people so capable of rapid comprehension as the French might have understood Shakespeare too. The character of Hamlet, for instance, is so universally human, especially in the stage of doubts and hesitation, in the consciousness of some black deeds being perpetrated about him, some betrayal of what is great for the sake of something that is mean and trivial, that it is hard to imagine that any people could fail to understand him, but in spite of every trial and effort, Hamlet remains alien to the Frenchman.

If the aristocrats of the past century, who systematically despised everything Russian, remained in reality incredibly more Russian than the house-serfs remained peasants, it is even more impossible that the younger generation could have lost their Russian character because they studied science and philosophy and French and German books. A section of the Slavs at Moscow reached the point of ultra-Slavism with Hegel in their hands.

The very circles of which I am speaking came into existence in natural response to a deep inner need of the Russian life of that period.

We have spoken many times of the stagnation that followed the catastrophe of 1825. The moral level of society sank, development was interrupted, everything progressive and energetic was struck out of life. Those who remained—frightened, weak, distracted—were petty and insignificant; the worthless creatures of the generation of Alexander occupied the foremost place; little by little they changed into cringing officials, lost the savage poetry of revelry and of the audacity of the privileged class together with every shadow of independent dignity; they served persistently, they served until they reached high positions, but they never became great personages. Their day was over.

Under this great world of society, the great world of the people maintained an indifferent silence; nothing was changed for them—their plight was bad, but no worse than before, the new blows fell not on their scourged backs. Their time had not yet come. Between this roof and this foundation children were the first to raise their heads, perhaps because they did not suspect how dangerous it was; but, be that as it may, with these children Russia, stunned and stupefied, began to come to life again.

What impressed them was the complete contradiction of the words they were taught with the facts of life around them. Their teachers, their books, their university spoke one language and that language was intelligible to heart and mind. Their father and mother, their relations, and all their surroundings spoke another with which neither mind nor heart was in agreement—but with which the dominant authorities and financial interests were in accord. This contradiction between education and ordinary life nowhere reached such proportions as among the nobility of Russia. The shaggy German student with his round cap covering a seventh part of his head, with his world-shaking sallies, is far nearer to the German _Spitzburger_ than is supposed, while the French _collégien_, thin with vanity and emulation, is already _en herbe l’homme raisonnable qui exploite sa position_.

The number of educated people amongst us has always been extremely small; but those who were educated have always received an education, not perhaps very thorough, but fairly general and humane: it made men of all with whom it succeeded. But a man was just what was not wanted either for the hierarchical pyramid or for the successful maintenance of the landowning régime. The young man had either to dehumanise himself—and the greater number did so—or to stop short and ask himself: ‘But is it absolutely essential to go into the service? Is it really a good thing to be a landowner?’ After that for some, the weaker and more impatient, there followed the idle existence of a cornet on the retired list, the sloth of the country, the dressing-gown, eccentricities, cards, wine; for others a time of trial and inner travail. They could not live in complete moral disharmony, nor could they be satisfied with a negative attitude of withdrawal; awakened thought demanded an outlet. The various solutions of these questions, all equally harassing for the young generation, determined their distribution into various circles.

Thus, for instance, our little circle was formed in the university and found Sungurov’s circle there already. His, like ours, was concerned rather with politics than with learning. Stankevitch’s circle, which came into existence at the same time, was equally near both and equally remote from both. He went by another path, his interests were purely theoretical.

Between 1830 and 1840 our convictions were too youthful, too ardent and passionate, not to be exclusive. We could feel a cold respect for Stankevitch’s circle, but we could not be intimate with its members. They traced philosophical systems, were absorbed in self-analysis, and found peace in a luxurious pantheism from which Christianity was not excluded. We were dreaming how to get up a new league in Russia on the pattern of the Decembrists and looked upon knowledge itself as merely a means. The government did its best to strengthen us in our revolutionary tendencies.

In 1834 all Sungurov’s circle was sent into exile and—vanished.

In 1835 we were exiled. Five years later we came back, hardened by our experience. The dreams of youth had become the irrevocable determination of maturity. This was the most brilliant period of Stankevitch’s circle. Stankevitch himself I did not find in Moscow—he was in Germany; but it was just at that moment that Byelinsky’s articles were beginning to attract the attention of every one.

On our return we measured our strength with them. The battle was an unequal one; basis, weapons, and language—all were different. After fruitless skirmishes we saw that it was our turn now to undertake serious study and we too set to work upon Hegel and the German philosophy. When we had sufficiently assimilated that, it became evident that there was no ground for dispute between us and Stankevitch’s circle.

The latter was inevitably bound to break up. It had done its work—and had done it most brilliantly; its influence on the whole of literature and academic teaching was immense—one need but recall the names of Byelinsky and Granovsky; Koltsov was formed in it, Botkin, Katkov, and others belonged to it. But it could not remain an exclusive circle without passing into German formalism—men who are alive and Russian are not capable of that.

Besides Stankevitch’s circle, there was another circle, formed during our exile and in the same relation with them as we; its members were afterwards called Slavophils. The Slavophils approached from the opposite side the vital questions which occupied us, and were far more absorbed in living work and real conflict than Stankevitch’s circle.

It was natural that Stankevitch’s society should split up between them and us. The Aksakovs and Samarin joined the Slavophils, that is, Homyakov and the Kireyevskys. Byelinsky and Bakunin joined us. The closest friend of Stankevitch, the most nearly akin to him in his whole nature, Granovsky, was one of us from the day he came back from Germany.

If Stankevitch had lived, his circle would still have broken up. He would himself have gone over to Homyakov or to us.

By 1842 the sifting in accordance with natural affinity had long been complete, and our camp stood in battle array face to face with the Slavophils. Of that conflict we will speak in another place.

In conclusion I will add a few words concerning the elements of which Stankevitch’s circle was composed; that will throw a light on the strange underground currents which were silently undermining the strong crust of the Russo-German régime.

Stankevitch was the son of a wealthy landowner of the province of Voronezh, and was at first brought up in all the ease and freedom of a landowner’s life in the country; then he was sent to the Ostrogozhsk school (and that was something quite original). For fine natures a wealthy and even aristocratic education is very good. Comfort gives unfettered freedom and space for growth and development of every sort, it saves the young mind from premature anxiety and apprehension of the future, and provides complete freedom to pursue the subjects to which it is drawn.

Stankevitch’s development was broad and harmonious; his artistic, musical, and at the same time reflective and contemplative nature showed itself from the very beginning of his university career. Stankevitch’s special faculty, not only for deeply and warmly understanding, but also for reconciling, or as the Germans say ‘removing’ contradictions, was due to his artistic temperament. The craving for harmony, proportion, and enjoyment makes such people indulgent as to the means; to avoid seeing the well they cover it over with canvas. The canvas will not stand a push, but the yawning gulf does not vex the eye. In this way the Germans reached pantheistic quietism and slumbered tranquilly upon it; but such a gifted Russian as Stankevitch could not remain ‘tranquil’ for long.

This is evident from the first question which involuntarily troubled Stankevitch immediately after he left the university.

His university studies were finished, he was left to himself, he was no longer led by others, _but he did not know what he was to do_. There was nothing to go on with, there was no one and nothing around that appealed to a living man. A youth, taking stock of his surroundings and having had time to look about him after school, found himself in the Russia of those days in the position of a traveller awakening in the steppe; one might go where one would—there were traces, there were bones of those who had perished, there were wild beasts and the empty desert on all sides with its dull menace of danger, in which it is easy to perish and impossible to struggle. The one thing which could be pursued was study.

And so Stankevitch persevered in the pursuit of learning. He imagined that it was his vocation to be an historian, and began studying Herodotus; it could be foreseen that nothing could come of that pursuit.

He would have liked to be in Petersburg in which there was such a rush of activity of a sort and to which he was attracted by the theatre and by nearness to Europe; he would have liked to be an honorary superintendent of the school at Ostrogozhsk. He determined to be of use in that ‘modest career’—that was even less successful than Herodotus. He was in reality drawn to Moscow, to Germany, to his own university circle, to his own interests. He could not exist without intimate friends (another proof that there were at hand no interests very near to his heart). The craving for sympathy was so strong in Stankevitch that he sometimes invented intellectual sympathy and talents and saw and admired in people qualities which were completely non-existent in them.[31]

But—and in this lay his personal power—he did not often need to have recourse to such fictions, at every step he met wonderful people, he had the faculty of meeting them, and every one to whom he opened his heart remained his passionate friend for life; and to every such friend Stankevitch’s influence was either an immense benefit or an alleviation of his burden.

In Voronezh Stankevitch used sometimes to go to the one local library for books. There he met a poor young man of humble station, modest and melancholy. It turned out that he was the son of a cattle-dealer who had business with Stankevitch’s father over sales. Stankevitch befriended the young man; the cattle-dealer’s son was a great reader and fond of talking of books. Stankevitch got to know him well. Shyly and timidly the youth confessed that he had himself tried his hand at writing verses and, blushing, ventured to show them. Stankevitch was amazed at the immense talent not conscious nor confident of itself. From that minute he did not let him go until all Russia was reading Koltsov’s songs with enthusiasm. It is quite likely that the poor cattle-dealer, oppressed by his relations, unwarmed by sympathy or recognition, might have wasted his songs on the empty steppe beyond the Volga over which he drove his herds, and Russia would never have heard those exquisite, truly national songs, if Stankevitch had not crossed his path.

When Bakunin finished his studies at the school of artillery, he received a commission as an officer in the Guards. It is said that his father was angry with him and himself asked that he should be transferred into the regular army. Cast away in some God-forsaken village of White Russia with his battery, he grew morose and unsociable, left off performing his duties, and would lie for whole days together on his bed wrapped in a sheepskin. The commander of his battery was sorry for him; he had, however, no alternative but to remind him that he must either do his duties or go on the retired list. Bakunin had no suspicion that he had a right to take the latter course and at once asked to be relieved of his commission. On receiving his discharge he came to Moscow, and from that date (about 1836) life began in earnest for him. He had studied nothing before, had read nothing, and scarcely knew German. With great dialectical abilities, with a gift for obstinate, persistent thinking, he had strayed without map or compass in a world of fantastic projects and efforts at self-education. Stankevitch perceived his talents and set him down to philosophy. Bakunin learnt German on Kant and Fichte and then set to work upon Hegel, whose method and logic he mastered to perfection, and to whom did he not preach it afterwards? To us and to Byelinsky, to ladies and to Proudhon.

But Byelinsky drew as much from the same source; Stankevitch’s views on art, on poetry and its relation to life, grew in Byelinsky’s articles into that powerful modern criticism, into that new outlook upon the world and upon life which impressed all thinking Russia and made all the pedants and doctrinaires draw back from Byelinsky with horror. It was Stankevitch’s lot to initiate Byelinsky into the mysteries; but the passionate, merciless, fiercely intolerant talent that carried Byelinsky beyond all bounds wounded the aesthetically harmonious temperament of Stankevitch.

And at the same time it was Stankevitch who encouraged the gentle, loving, dreamy, and at that time melancholy Granovsky. Stankevitch was a support and an elder brother to him. His letters to Granovsky are full of charm and beauty—and how Granovsky loved him!

‘I have not yet recovered from the first shock,’ wrote Granovsky soon after Stankevitch’s death, ‘real grief has not touched me yet; I am afraid of it in the future. Now I am still unable to believe that my loss is possible—only at times there is a stab at my heart. He has taken with him something essential to my life. To no one in the world was I so much indebted. His influence over us was always unbounded and always fruitful of good.’

And how many could say that! Perhaps have said it!

In Stankevitch’s circle only he and Botkin[32] were well-to-do and completely free from financial anxieties. The others made up a very mixed proletariat. Bakunin’s relations gave him nothing; Byelinsky, the son of a petty official of Tchembary, expelled from Moscow University for ‘lack of ability,’ lived on the scanty pay he got for his articles. Krassov,[33] on taking his degree, went to a situation at a landowner’s in some province, but life with this patriarchal slaveowner so terrified him that he came back on foot to Moscow with a wallet on his back, in the winter, together with some peasants in charge of a train of wagons. Probably a father or mother of each one of them when giving them their blessing had said—and who dare reproach them for it—‘Come, mind you work hard at your studies; and when you have taken your degree you must make your own way, there is nobody to leave you anything, we’ve nothing to give you either; you must make a career for yourself and think about us too.’ On the other hand, Stankevitch had probably been told that he could take a prominent position in society, that he was called by wealth and birth to play a great part—while in Botkin’s household every one, from his old father down to the clerks, urged upon him by word and example the necessity of making money, of piling up more and more.

What was it touched these men? what inspiration re-created them? They had no thought, no care for their social position, for their personal advantage, for their security; their whole life, all their efforts were bent on the public good regardless of all personal interests; some forgot their wealth, others their poverty, and went forward, without looking back, to the solution of theoretical questions. The interests of truth, the interests of learning, the interests of art, _humanitas_, swallowed up everything.

And note that the renunciation of this world was not confined to the time at the university and two or three years of youth. The best men of Stankevitch’s circle are dead; the others have remained what they were to this day. Byelinsky, worn out by work and suffering, fell a fighter and a beggar. Granovsky, delivering his message of learning and humanity, died as he mounted his platform. Botkin did not, in fact, become a merchant ... not one of them ‘distinguished themselves’ in the government service.

It was just the same in the two other circles, the Slavophils and ours. Where, in what corner of the Western world of to-day, do you find such groups of devotees of thought, of zealots of learning, of fanatics of conviction—whose hair turns grey but whose enthusiasms are for ever young?

Where? Point to them. I boldly throw down the challenge—and I only except for the moment one country, Italy—and measure the paces for the conflict, _i.e._, I will not let my opponent escape from statistics into history.

We know how great was the interest in theory and the passion for truth and religion in the days of such martyrs for science and reason as Bruno, Galileo, and the rest; we know, too, what the France of the Encyclopaedists was in the second half of the eighteenth century; but later? Later _sta viator_!

In the Europe of to-day there is no youth and there are no young men. The most brilliant representative of the France of the last years of the Restoration and of the July dynasty, Victor Hugo, has protested against my saying this. He speaks especially of the young France of the ’twenties, and I am ready to admit that I have been too sweeping[34]—but beyond that I will not yield one step even to him. I have their own admissions. Take _Les Mémoires d’un Enfant du Siècle_, and the poems of Alfred de Musset, recall the France depicted in George Sand’s letters, in the contemporary drama and novels, and in the cases in the law courts.

But what does all that prove? A very great deal; and in the first place that the Chinese shoes of German manufacture in which Russia has hobbled for a hundred and fifty years, though they have caused many painful corns, have evidently not crippled her bones, since whenever she has had a chance of stretching her limbs, such fresh young energies have been apparent. That does not guarantee the future, but it does make it extremely _possible_.