Chapter 40 (1)

THE EUROPEAN COMMITTEE—THE RUSSIAN CONSUL AT NICE—LETTER TO A. F. ORLOV—PERSECUTION OF A CHILD—THE VOGTS—TRANSFERENCE FROM THE GRADE OF UPPER COURT COUNCILLOR TO THAT OF SIMPLE PEASANT—RECEPTION AT CHÂTEL (1850-1851)

A year after our arrival in Nice from Paris I wrote: ‘_In vain I rejoiced at my quiet seclusion, in vain I drew the pentagram on my doors: I have not found a quiet haven nor the peace I desired. Pentagrams protect us from unclean spirits—no polygons protect us from unclean men, unless perhaps the square of the prison-cell window._

‘_A tedious, wearisome, and extremely empty period, the exhausting journey between the halting place of 1848 and the halting place of 1852,—there is nothing new except perhaps some personal misfortune breaking the heart, another vital spring snapped._’—(‘Letters from France and Italy,’ June 1, 1851.)

Indeed, going over that time makes my heart ache as it does at the memory of funerals, operations, agonising illnesses. Without touching here upon my inner life, which was more and more overcast by dark storm-clouds, public events and the news in the papers were enough to make any one flee into the desert. France was dropping with the swiftness of a falling star to the 2nd of December. Germany lay at the feet of Nicholas, to which Hungary, sold and unhappy, had dragged her. The _condottieri_ of the police met at their œcumenical councils, and secretly consulted together concerning common measures of international espionage. The revolutionaries maintained their empty agitation. The men at the head of the movement, disappointed in their hopes, lost their heads. Kossuth returned from America somewhat less nationalistic, Mazzini together with Ledru-Rollin and Ruge was founding in London the Central European Committee ... while the reaction was growing more and more ferocious.

After our meeting in Geneva, and then again in Lausanne, I saw Mazzini in 1850; he was secretly in France, staying in some aristocratic family, and sent one of his intimate associates to fetch me. Then he told me of his project of an international league in London, and asked whether I would like to take part in it _as a Russian_; I made no definite answer. A year later Orsini came to me in Nice, handed me the programme, various manifestoes of the European Central Committee, and a letter from Mazzini renewing his proposition. I did not dream of joining the Committee; what element of Russian life could I have represented at that time, completely cut off from everything Russian as I was? But this was not the only reason why the European Committee did not attract me. It seemed to me that its basis lacked depth of thought and unity, that there had been no necessity for its foundation, and that its form was simply a mistake.

The side of the movement which the Committee represented—that is, the revolt of the oppressed nationalities—was not strong enough in 1851 to be openly represented by a league. The existence of such a Committee showed nothing but the tolerance of the English constitution, and partly too that the English Government did not believe in its power or they would have suppressed it, either by an alien bill or by a motion for the suspension of _habeas corpus_.

The European Committee, though it scared all the governments, did nothing, without perceiving that fact. Even the most earnest people are terribly easily led away by formalism, and persuade themselves that they are doing something by having periodical meetings, issuing masses of papers, minutes, motions, voting, accepting resolutions, printing manifestoes, _professions de foi_, and so on. The revolutionary bureaucracy dissolves things into words and forms just as our official bureaucracy does. In England there are masses of all sorts of associations which hold impressive meetings attended by dukes and lords, clergymen and secretaries. Treasurers collect funds, literary men write articles, and all of them together do absolutely nothing. These meetings, for the most part philanthropic and religious, on the one hand serve as an entertainment, on the other soothe the Christian conscience of people who are given up to worldly interests. But a revolutionary senate in London could not _en permanence_ maintain this meek-and-mild character. It was a public conspiracy, a conspiracy with open doors—that is, an impossible one.

A conspiracy is bound to be secret. The period of secret societies is over only in England and America. Everywhere where there is a minority, in advance of the understanding of the masses and hoping to realise an idea they have grasped, secret societies will be formed, if there is no freedom of speech or right of free assembly. I speak of this quite impartially; after my youthful attempts, ending in my exile in 1835, I have _never been a member of any secret society_, but not at all because I consider the spending of energy on individual effort more worth while. I have not been a member of such societies because I have not happened to come upon a society which was in harmony with my own aims, and in which I could have achieved anything. If it had been my lot to be in touch with Pestel’s or Ryleyev’s society,[73] I should have flung myself into it heart and soul.

Another error or another misfortune of the Committee lay in its lack of unity. This focussing together of heterogeneous ideals could only have developed the power of its component parts by common action. If each member of the Committee had brought nothing but his exclusive nationality, that would not have mattered; they would have had a unity in their hatred for the chief enemy they had in common, the Holy Alliance. But their views, agreed on two negative principles, opposition to monarchy and to socialism, differed on every other subject. To act in unison they must have made compromises, and compromises of that kind are destructive of the one-sided force of each, for the sake of common accord, tying just the strings which sound most sharply, and so making the combined effect colourless, blurred, and hesitating.

After reading the papers which Orsini had brought me, I wrote the following letter to Mazzini:—

‘DEAR MAZZINI,—I have a sincere respect for you, and so I am
not afraid to tell you my opinion frankly. In any case you will
give me a patient and indulgent hearing.

‘You are perhaps one of the chief political leaders of recent
times whose name has remained surrounded by sympathy and
respect. One may differ from you in opinion, in method, but
cannot fail to respect you personally. Your past, the Rome
of 1848 and 1849, compel you to bear proudly your great
bereavement until events call back their champion who is in
advance of them. That is why it is painful to me to see your
name coupled with the names of men of no ability who have
ruined the cause, with names which only recall the calamities
they have brought upon us.

‘Is an organisation with these elements possible? It can lead
to nothing but confusion.

‘These men are of no use to you nor to history; all that one
can do for them is to forgive them their transgressions. You
want to cover them with your name, you want to share with them
your influence and your past; they will share with you their
unpopularity and their past.

‘What is there new in the manifestoes, what is there new in
the _Proscrit_? Where are the signs of the terrible lessons
that should have been learnt from the twenty-fourth of
February? This is the continuation of the old liberalism and
not the beginning of a new freedom—it is an epilogue and not
a prologue. Why is there not in London the organisation you
desire? Because it cannot be formed on the basis of indefinite
ideals, but only on a great idea held in common: and where is
that?

‘The first publication made under such conditions as the
manifesto you have sent ought to have been full of sincerity,
but who can read without a smile the signature of Arnold Ruge
on a manifesto which speaks in the name of Divine Providence?
From 1838 Ruge has been preaching philosophic atheism; for him
(if his brain is constructed logically) the idea of Providence
ought to present itself as everything reactionary in embryo.
It is a compromise, a bit of diplomacy, of policy, a weapon in
the hands of our enemies. Moreover, all that is unnecessary.
The theological part of the manifesto is a pure luxury; it adds
neither to its meaning nor to its popularity. The common people
have a positive religion and church. Deism is the religion of
the rationalists, the representative system applied to faith,
religion surrounded by atheistic institutions.

‘For my part, I advocate a complete rupture with incomplete
revolutionaries. One scents the reaction a hundred yards from
them. Having taken the burden of a thousand blunders on their
shoulders, they go on justifying them to this day—the surest
proof that they will repeat them.

‘In the _Nouveau Monde_ there is the same _vacuum horrendum_;
the same melancholy chewing over of the cud, at once green and
dry, which still is not digested.

‘Please do not imagine that I am saying this in order to get
out of doing anything. No, I am not sitting with my arms
folded. I have too much blood in my veins and energy in my
character to be satisfied with the part of a passive spectator.
From my thirteenth year I have served the same idea and the
same standard—of war against every oppressive power, against
every form of slavery in the name of absolute personal freedom.
I should like to continue my little guerilla warfare—like a
true Cossack ... _auf eigene Faust_, as the Germans say, beside
the great revolutionary army—not entering into its regular
ranks until they are completely formed.

‘In the interval of waiting, I am writing. Perhaps that
interval of waiting will last long—it is not in my power to
change the fitful development of men; but to speak, to appeal,
to persuade is in my power—and I am doing this with all my
heart and with all my mind.

‘Forgive me, dear Mazzini, both the candour and the length of
my letter, and do not cease to love me a little and to reckon
me a man devoted to your cause—but also devoted to his own
convictions.’

‘NICE, _September 13, 1850_.’

To this letter Mazzini answered with a few friendly lines in which, without touching on the essential point, he spoke of the necessity of uniting all forces in one activity, deplored the difference of men’s views, and so on.

In the same autumn in which Mazzini and the European Committee remembered me, the anti-European Committee of Nicholas remembered me too, at last.

One morning our maid, with a somewhat anxious look, told me that the Russian consul was downstairs and asking whether I could see him. I looked upon my relations with the Russian Government as so completely at an end that I was surprised at this honour, and could not imagine what he wanted of me.

A German-looking official of the second order walked in.

‘I have the honour to make a communication to you.’

‘Although,’ I replied, ‘I do not know of what nature, I am almost certain that it will be unpleasant. I beg you to be seated.’

The consul flushed, was a little disconcerted; then sat down on the sofa, took a document out of his pocket, and after reading, ‘Adjutant-General Count Orlov has notified to Count Nesselrode and His Im...,’ rose to his feet again.

At that point I fortunately remembered that the secretary in our Embassy in Paris had risen from his chair on announcing to Sazonov the Tsar’s command that he should return to Russia, and Sazonov suspecting nothing had also got up from his chair, though the secretary had done this from a deep sense of duty which required that a loyal subject should be on his legs with his head a little bowed when conveying the sovereign’s will; and therefore, the more stiffly erect the consul stood, the more comfortably I buried myself in my armchair, and, wishing him to observe the fact, said with a nod: ‘Pray go on; I am listening.’

‘...perial Majesty,’ he went on, resuming his seat, ‘has been graciously pleased to command that So-and-so shall promptly return to Russia and should be informed thereof, accepting from him no reasons for delaying his departure and granting him no postponement under any circumstances.’

He paused. I continued sitting without saying a word.

‘What am I to answer?’ he asked, folding up the paper.

‘That I am not going.’

‘How do you mean “not going”?’

‘What I say: simply I’m not going.’

‘Have you considered that such a step...?’

‘I have considered.’

‘But this is beyond anything.... Kindly tell me what I am to write. For what reason...?’

‘You have been commanded not to accept any reasons.’

‘What am I to say, then? Why, this is disobedience to the will of His Imperial Majesty!’

‘Say so, then.’

‘This is impossible. I should never venture to write that ...’ and he crimsoned more than ever. ‘Really, you had better change your mind while it is all still within four walls.’ (The consul evidently thought the Third Section was a monastery.)

Philanthropic as I am, I was not willing, for the sake of facilitating the correspondence of the consul at Nice, to go into one of Father Leonty’s cells of the Peter-Paul Fortress or to Nertchinsk, especially as there seemed no prospect that Nicholas would sink into a decline.

‘Surely,’ I said to him, ‘when you were coming here you could not for one second have imagined that I should go? Forget that you are a consul and consider the position yourself. My estate has been sequestrated, my mother’s fortune was detained, and all that without asking me whether I wished to return. Can I go back after that without taking leave of my senses?’

He hesitated, continually flushing, and at last hit on a clever, adroit, and above all new idea.

‘I cannot,’ he said, ‘enter into ... I understand the difficulty of your position; on the other hand, the gracious mercy of the Sovereign!...’

I looked at him; he blushed again. ‘... Besides, why cut off all way of retreat. Write to me you are very ill; I’ll send that to the Count.’

‘That’s too stale; besides, what is the object of telling a lie for nothing?’

‘Well, then, will you be so kind as to give me your answer in writing.’

‘Certainly. Can you leave me a copy of the notice you read to me?’

‘That is not usual.’

‘What a pity! I am making a collection of them.’

Simple as my written answer was, the consul was alarmed by it. He seemed to think that he might be transferred on account of it to Beyrout or Tripoli, or I do not know where; he positively declined to venture, either to accept or to forward it. In spite of my assurances that no responsibility could fall on him, he refused, and begged me to write another letter.

‘That’s impossible,’ I answered. ‘I am not taking this step as a joke, and I am not going to write nonsensical reasons: here is the letter for you, and you can do what you like with it.’

‘Excuse me,’ said the mildest consul since the days of Junius Brutus and Calpurnius Bestia: ‘you write the letter, not to me but to Count Orlov, and I’ll simply forward it.’

‘That’s an easy matter; I’ve only to put _M. le Comte_ instead of _M. le Consul_. I agree to that.’

As I was copying my letter it struck me that there was no need for me to write to Orlov in French. If it were in Russian some cantonist in his office or in the office of the Third Section might read it; it might be sent to the Senate, and a young head secretary might show it to his clerks: why deprive them of this satisfaction? And so I translated the letter, and here it is:—

‘DEAR SIR, COUNT ALEXEY FYODOROVITCH,—The Imperial Consul at
Nice has notified me of the will of the Most High concerning my
return to Russia. With every inclination to do so, I find it
impossible to comply with it without making my position clear.

‘Before any summons to return, more than a year ago, an
injunction was placed on my estate, my business papers in
private hands were confiscated, and, finally, money, a sum
of ten thousand francs sent to me from Moscow, was seized.
Such severe and extreme measures against me prove that I am
not merely accused of some crime, but, before any inquiry,
any trial has been held, am found guilty and punished by the
deprivation of part of my property.

‘I cannot hope that my mere return can save me from the
melancholy consequences of a political trial. It is easy for me
to explain every one of my actions, but in cases of that kind
it is opinions and theories that are on trial. It is upon them
that verdicts are based. Can I, should I, expose myself and all
my family to such a trial?... Your Excellency will appreciate
the simplicity and candour of my answer, and will bring to the
consideration of the Most High the reasons that compel me to
remain in foreign parts in spite of my deep and genuine desire
to return to my country.’

‘NICE, _September 23, 1850_.’

I really do not know whether it was possible to answer more simply and discreetly; but the habit of slavish silence is so deeply rooted among us that the consul at Nice thought even this letter monstrously audacious, and probably Orlov himself thought the same.

To be silent, not to laugh and not to cry, and to answer on a set pattern, without praise or criticism, without signs of pleasure or grief, is the ideal to which despotism tries to reduce its subjects and has reduced the soldiers; but by what means? Well, I will tell you.

On one occasion, Nicholas, seeing a fine young soldier wearing a cross at a review, asked him: ‘Where did you receive your cross?’ Unluckily this soldier was a seminarist sent for a soldier in punishment for some prank, and, wishing to take advantage of the opportunity to display his eloquence, he answered: ‘Under the victorious eagles of Your Majesty.’ Nicholas looked sternly at him and at the general, pouted, and went on. When the general following him reached the soldier, white with rage he shook his fist in his face and said: ‘I’ll beat you into your coffin, you Demosthenes!’

Is it strange that eloquence does not flourish with such encouragement?

Having got rid of the emperor and the consul, I wanted to get out of the class of persons living without a passport.

The future was dark and gloomy.... I might die, and the thought that that same blushing consul would arrive to dispose of everything in my house, and to seize my papers, compelled me to think of obtaining the rights of citizenship somewhere. I need hardly say that I fixed upon Switzerland, in spite of the fact that just about that time the Swiss police had been playing pranks with me.

Within a year after the birth of my second son we noticed with horror that he was completely deaf. Various consultations and experiments soon proved that it was impossible to cure the deafness. But then the question arose whether we ought to leave him to become dumb, as is usually done. The schools I had seen in Moscow had seemed to me far from satisfactory. Talking on one’s fingers and by signs is not conversation; talking must be by the mouth and the lips. I knew by what I had read that attempts had been made in Germany and Switzerland to teach deaf mutes to speak as we speak, and to listen by watching the lips. In Berlin I saw for the first time an oral lecture given to deaf mutes and heard them recite verses. This was an immense step in advance of the method of the Abbé de l’Epée.

This teaching was carried to great perfection in Zurich. My mother, who was passionately fond of Kolya, determined to settle with him for a few years in Zurich in order to send him to the school.

The child was gifted with exceptional abilities: the everlasting stillness about him, by concentrating his lively, impulsive character, assisted his development in a wonderful way, and at the same time encouraged an exceptional power of plastic observation. His eyes glowed with intelligence and interest; at five years old he could imitate every one who came to see us with intentional caricature, and with such comic mimicry that no one could help laughing.

In six months he had made great progress at the school. His voice was _voilée_; he scarcely marked the accent, but already spoke German very fairly and understood everything said to him slowly; nothing could have been better. On my way through Zurich I thanked the director and council of the school and paid them various civilities, and they did the same to me.

But after I had gone away the elders of the town of Zurich learnt that I was not a Russian count but a Russian _émigré_, and, moreover, friendly with the radical party, which they could not endure; and, what is more, with socialists, whom they hated; and, what was worse than all that put together, that I was not a religious man and openly admitted the fact. This last they learned from an awful little book, _Vom andern Ufer_, which had, as though to mock them, come out under their very noses with the imprint of the best Zurich firm of publishers. On learning this their conscience troubled them at the thought that they were giving an education to the son of a man who believed neither in Luther nor in Loyola, and they set to work to find means to get rid of him. Since Providence was particularly interested in the question, it at once showed them the way. The town police suddenly demanded the _child’s passport_; I answered from Paris, supposing that it was a simple formality, that Kolya certainly was my son, that his name was on my passport, but that I could not obtain a separate one for him from the Russian Embassy, because I was not on the best of terms with them. The police were not satisfied, and threatened to turn the child out of the school and out of the town. I spoke of this in Paris; one of my acquaintances published a paragraph about it in the _National_. Put to shame by publicity, the police said that they did not insist on turning the child out, but only on the payment of an insignificant sum of money as a guarantee that the child was himself and not somebody else. What guarantee is there in a few hundred francs? On the other hand, if my mother and I had not had the money, the child would have been turned out. (I asked them about that through the _National_.) And this could happen in the nineteenth century in free Switzerland! After what had taken place I disliked the idea of leaving the child in this den of asses.

But what was to be done? The best teacher in the institution, a young man who devoted himself enthusiastically to the training of deaf mutes, a man of a thorough university education, luckily did not share the views of the police Sanhedrin, and was a great admirer of the very book which had so stirred the wrath of the pious police-constables of the canton of Zurich. We suggested to him that he should leave the school, enter my mother’s household as tutor, and go with her to Italy. He of course consented. The authorities of the school were furious, but could do nothing. My mother prepared to go with Kolya and with this young man, Spielmann, to Nice. Before leaving she sent for her deposit; it was not given to her, on the pretext that Kolya was still in Switzerland. I wrote from Nice. The Zurich police demanded proofs that Kolya had the legal right to live in Piedmont.

This was too much, and I wrote the following letter to the president of the Zurich canton:—

‘M. LE PRÉSIDENT,—In 1849, I placed my son, aged five years, in
the Zurich School for the Deaf and Dumb. A few months later the
Zurich police asked my mother for his passport. Since among us
passports are not required for newborn babies or for children
going to school, my son had not a separate one but was entered
upon mine. This explanation did not satisfy the Zurich police.
They demanded a deposit. My mother, fearing that the child who
had brought down upon himself such dangerous suspicions on the
part of the Zurich police would be expelled, paid it.

‘In August 1850, my mother, wishing to leave Switzerland,
asked for the deposit, but the Zurich police did not return
it; they wished to ascertain first that the child had actually
left the canton. On reaching Nice my mother asked Messieurs
Avigdor and Schultgess to receive the money, giving them a
proof that we, and above all my suspicious six-year-old son,
were in Nice and not in Zurich. The Zurich police, keeping
a tight hold on the deposit money, then demanded another
certificate, to be witnessed by the police here, “that my son
is officially permitted to live in Piedmont” (_que l’enfant est
officiellement toléré_). M. Schultgess communicated this to M.
Avigdor.

‘Seeing this eccentric curiosity on the part of the Zurich
police I refused M. Avigdor’s proposal to send a new
certificate, which he very graciously offered to take for
me himself. I did not want to afford the Zurich police this
satisfaction, since, for all the dignity of its position, it
has no right to constitute itself an international police, and
because its demand is insulting not only to me but to Piedmont.

‘The Sardinian Government, M. le Président, is a free and
civilised one; how is it possible that it should not permit
(_ne tolérera pas_) an invalid child of six years old to live
in Piedmont? I am really at a loss as to how I am to regard
this demand of the Zurich police, whether as a strange joke or
as the result of a partiality for deposits in general.

‘Presenting this affair for your scrutiny, M. le Président, I
beg you as a special favour, in case of another refusal, to
explain the proceeding, which is so curious and interesting
that I do not think I shall be justified in concealing it from
the knowledge of the public.

‘I have written again to M. Schultgess to receive the money,
and I can confidently assure you that neither my mother nor
myself nor the child who is the object of suspicion have the
smallest inclination to return to Zurich after these unpleasant
attentions from the police. There is not the faintest risk of
it.’

‘NICE, _September 9, 1850_.’

I need hardly say that after that the police of the town of Zurich, in spite of their œcumenical pretensions, paid the deposit.

Except my Swiss naturalisation, I would not have accepted citizenship in any European country, not even England; I disliked the idea of voluntarily becoming anybody’s subject. I did not want to change a bad master for a good one, but to escape from serfdom into being a free tiller of the soil. This was only possible in two countries: America and Switzerland.

America—I greatly respect. I believe that she is destined to a great future, I know that she is now twice as near to Europe as she was; but American life is distasteful to me. It is very likely that her angular, coarse, dry elements will be welded together into something different. America has not yet settled down, she is an unfinished edifice. Labourers and workmen in their workaday clothes are dragging about beams and stones, sawing, hewing, hammering. Why should outsiders settle in it before it is dry and warm?

Moreover, America, as Garibaldi said, is the ‘land for forgetting home’; let those who have no faith in their fatherland go there—they ought to get away from their graveyards. It was quite the contrary with me: the more I lost all hope of a Latin-German Europe, the more my belief in Russia revived again; but to dream of returning there while Nicholas was Tsar would have been madness.

And so there was nothing left for it but to ally myself with the free men of the Helvetian Confederation.

As early as 1849, Fazy had promised to naturalise me in Geneva, but kept putting it off; perhaps he simply did not want to add to the number of socialists in his canton. I got sick of this. I was passing through a black period, the very walls were tottering and might crumble about my head, misfortune is never far off.... Karl Vogt offered to write about my naturalisation to J. Schaller, who was at that time president of the Freiburg canton and leader of the radical party. But, having mentioned Vogt, I must say something about him first.

In the monotony of the shallow and slow-moving life of Germany one meets at times, as though to redeem it, sturdy, healthy families full of strength, persistence, and talent. One generation of gifted persons is followed by another more numerous, still preserving the same sturdiness of mind and body. Looking at some dingy, old-fashioned house, in a dark, narrow side-street, it is hard to believe how many have been the young lads, in a hundred years, who have come down the worn stone steps of its staircase with a wallet on their shoulder and all manner of souvenirs, made of hair or of flowers in it, followed by the blessings and tears of their mother and sisters ... and have gone out into the world with nothing but their own strength to look to, and have become distinguished men of science, celebrated doctors, naturalists, and literary men. And the little house, covered with tiles, is filled up again in their absence by a new generation of students, eagerly pressing forward into the unknown future.

In the lack of any other there is the inheritance of example, the inheritance of the family fibre. Each one begins for himself, and knows that the time will come when his old grandmother will lead him down the worn stone staircase: the grandmother who has seen three generations into the world, washed them in the little bath, and seen them off with full confidence in them. He knows that the proud old woman is sure of him, too, sure that he will do something ... and he invariably does do something.

_Dann und wann_ after many years all this scattered population is in the little old home again, all the originals—grown older—of the portraits hanging in the little drawing-room, in which they are wearing students’ _bérets_ and are wrapped in cloaks with a Rembrandt intention on the part of the artist: then there is bustle again in the little house, the two generations get to know each other, become intimate ... and then all go back to work again. Of course, with all this some one is bound to be in love with somebody; of course, sentimentality, tears, surprises, and sweet tarts are the inevitable accompaniment; but all that is effaced by the real, purely living poetry, full of strength and muscle such as I have rarely met with in the degenerate, rickety children of the aristocracy, and still less among the petty-bourgeois, who strictly check the number of their children in accordance with their account-book.

The ancestral home of Vogt belonged to this class of blessed ancient German families.

Vogt’s father was an extremely gifted professor of medicine in Berne; his mother was one of the Vollens, that eccentric Swiss-German family which was so much talked of at one time. The Vollens were leaders of Young Germany at the period of _Tugendbunds_ and _Burschenschafts_, of Karl Sand and of the political _Schwärmerei_ of 1817 and 1818. One Vollen was thrown into prison for the Wartburg celebration in memory of Luther: he certainly did deliver an incendiary speech, after which he made a bonfire of Jesuitical and reactionary books and various symbols of autocracy and the Papal power. The students dreamed of making him emperor of a one and undivided Germany. His grandson, Karl Vogt, actually was one of the _vicars of the empire_ in 1849. Healthy blood must have flowed in the veins of the son of the Berne professor, in the grandson of the Vollens—_au bout du compte_, everything depends on the chemical combination and the quality of the elements. Karl Vogt is not the man to dispute that with me.

In 1851 I was passing through Berne. Straight from the posting-chaise, I went to Vogt’s father with a letter from his son. The elder Vogt was at the university. His wife, a hospitable, lively, and extremely intelligent old woman, met me; she received me as her son’s friend, and at once took me to see his portrait. She did not expect her husband home before six o’clock; I very much wanted to see him, and came back at that time, but he had already gone to some patients for a consultation. The old lady greeted me the second time like an old friend, and led me into the dining-room, wishing me to take a glass of wine. One part of the room was filled by a large round table fixed immovably into the floor; I had heard of this table long ago from Vogt, and so was delighted to make its personal acquaintance. Its inner part moved on an axle: various dishes were placed upon it; coffee, wine, and everything wanted, such as plates, mustard, salt, so that any one could turn what he wanted to himself, ham or preserves, without troubling any one and without the aid of servants. The only thing was that it would not do to be too dreamy or to talk too much, or one might put a spoon into the sugar-basin instead of into the mustard-pot ... if any one had turned the disc. In this large population of brothers and sisters, intimate friends and relations, in which every one was differently engaged, and had to keep to fixed hours, a common dinner in the evening was difficult to arrange. Any one who came in, and wanted something to eat, sat down to the table, twirled it to the right or twirled it to the left and managed capitally. The mother and sisters superintended, and ordered this or that to be brought in.

I could not stay with them; Fazy and Schaller, who were in Berne at the time, wanted to come and see me in the evening. I promised to visit the Vogts again if I should stay another half-day, and, after inviting the younger brother, the law student, to supper with me, went home. I felt it was out of the question to invite the old father so late, and after such a day. But about twelve o’clock the waiter, respectfully opening the door to usher him in, announced: ‘Der Herr Professor Vogt.’ I got up from the table and went to meet him. A rather tall old man, extremely well preserved, with a clever, expressive face, walked into the room.

‘Your visit,’ I said, ‘is doubly welcome; I had not dared to ask you so late after your labours.’

‘I did not want to let you pass through Berne without seeing you. Hearing that you had been to us twice, and that you had invited Gustav, I invited myself. I am very, very glad to see you, both from what Karl writes of you, and, flattery apart, I wanted to make the acquaintance of the author of _From the Other Shore_.’

‘I thank you most truly: here is a place, please sit down with us; we are in the middle of supper: what will you take?’

‘I want nothing to eat, but I will drink a glass of wine with pleasure.’

There was so much ease and freedom in his appearance, words, and movements, together with not that good-heartedness characteristic of flabby, mawkish, and sentimental people, but with that special good-heartedness we see in strong natures confident in themselves. His appearance was not the least constraint to us; on the contrary, it made everything livelier.

The conversation passed from subject to subject; everywhere and in everything he was at home, intelligent, _éveillé_, original. The talk touched on the Federal concert which had been given in the morning in the Berne Cathedral, at which all had been present except Vogt. The concert was on an immense scale; musicians and singers had come from all parts of Switzerland to take part in it. It had, of course, been a concert of sacred music. Haydn’s celebrated composition had been performed with talent and understanding. The audience was attentive but cold; it walked out of the cathedral as people walk out of the morning service; I do not know how much reverence there was, but there was no enthusiasm. I experienced the same thing myself. In a moment of candour I said so to the friends with whom I had gone. Unluckily, they were orthodox, learned, ardent musicians; they fell upon me, declared I was a profane outsider who did not know how to listen to deep and serious music.

‘You care for nothing but Chopin’s mazurkas,’ they said.

‘There is no great harm in that,’ I thought, but, considering myself not a very competent judge, I held my peace.

One needs considerable courage to acknowledge impressions which run counter to the generally accepted prejudice or opinion. It was a long while before I could bring myself to say, in the presence of outsiders, that _Jerusalem Delivered_ was dull, that I could not finish reading the _New Héloïse_, that _Hermann and Dorothea_ was a masterly production but disgustingly tedious. I said something of the sort to Vogt, telling him what I had observed about the concert.

‘Well,’ he asked, ‘do you like Mozart?’

‘Extremely! without reservation.’

‘I knew as much, for I am in complete sympathy with you. How is it possible for an awakened modern man to force himself artificially into the religious mood which would make his enjoyment of it natural and complete? There is no sacred music for us, just as there is no religious literature; for us it has only an historical interest. In Mozart, on the other hand, we hear the note of the life familiar to us, he is singing out of the fulness of feeling and passion, not praying. I remember when _Don Giovanni_ and the _Nozze di Figaro_ were new, what a delight they were, what a revelation of a new source of enjoyment! Mozart’s music created an epoch, a revolution in men’s minds, like Goethe’s _Faust_, like the year 1789. We saw in his compositions the enlightened thought of the eighteenth century with its secularisation of life invading music; with Mozart the revolution and the new age have entered into art. How can we read Klopstock after _Faust_, or listen to these musical liturgies without faith?’

The old man talked at length and extraordinarily interestingly. He grew animated; twice I filled his glass, he did not refuse it, and was in no haste to drink. At last he looked at his watch: ‘Bah! it’s two o’clock; good-bye, I have to be with a patient at nine!’

With real affection I escorted him home.

Two years later he showed how much vigour was left in his grey head and how _real_ his theories were—that is, how close to practice. A Viennese refugee, Dr. Kudlich, courted one of Vogt’s daughters: the father consented to the marriage; but, all at once, the Protestant Consistory demanded the bridegroom’s certificate of baptism. Of course, as an exile, he could get nothing from Austria, and he presented the sentence which had been passed upon him in his absence. The mere testimony and permission of Vogt would have been sufficient for the Consistory, but the Berne pietists, instinctively hating Vogt and all exiles, persisted. Then Vogt gathered together all his friends, the professors and various leading personages of Berne, told them the position, then called his daughter and Kudlich, took their hands, made them clasp hands, and said to those present: ‘I call you, friends, to witness that I as father bless this marriage and give my daughter at her desire to this man.’

This action petrified the pious society of Switzerland; it looked with indignation and horror at the precedent created not by a hot-headed youth, nor a homeless refugee, but by an old man of irreproachable character, respected by every one.

Now let us pass from the father to the elder son.

I made his acquaintance in 1847, at Bakunin’s, but we became particularly intimate during the two years of our life at Nice. He had not only a serene intelligence, but one of the serenest characters of all the men I have seen. I should reckon him a very happy man if I knew that he would not live long; but there is no counting upon fate, though she has spared him hitherto, letting him off with nothing worse than a few migraines. His realistic temperament, full of life and open to everything, has much to ensure enjoyment, everything to make dullness impossible, and almost nothing to cause inner torment, the fretting of intellectual discontent, the suffering from theoretical doubt, and disappointment in practical life over dreams that cannot be fulfilled. A passionate worshipper of the beauties of nature, an indefatigable worker in science, he did everything with extraordinary ease and success; he was not in the least a dry pedant, but an artist in his own work, he enjoyed it; a radical by temperament, a realist by constitution, and a humane man through his clear and good-heartedly ironical outlook, he lived precisely in that sphere of life to which alone Dante’s words—_Qui è l’uomo felice_—apply.

He spent his life actively and carelessly, never lagging behind, but everywhere in the foremost rank. He had no fear of bitter truths, and looked as steadily at men as at polypi and medusæ, expecting nothing from either but what they could give. His researches were not superficial, but he felt no impulse to pass beyond a certain depth below which everything clear ends, and which is in truth, after a fashion, an escape from reality. He was not lured into those sloughs of despond in which men revel in their neurotic sufferings. His clear and simple attitude to life excluded from his healthy outlook the poetry of melancholy, the ecstasies and morbid humours, which we love as we do everything thrilling and pungent. His irony, as I observed, was good-natured, his mockery was light-hearted; he was the first to laugh, and from his heart, at his own jokes, with which he poisoned the ink and the beer of the pedantic professors and his parliamentary colleagues _in der Paul’s Kirche_.

This living realism was the common bond of sympathy between us, though our lives and development had been so different that we disagreed about many things.

I had not and could not have the harmony and unity that Vogt had. His education had been as regular as mine had been unsystematic; neither family continuity nor theoretical growth had ever been interrupted in him; he was carrying on the tradition of his family. His father stood beside him an example and a helper; following him, he took up the study of natural science. Among us each generation is usually at variance with the one before; there is no common moral tie between us. From my earliest years I was inevitably struggling against the outlook of every one surrounding me; I was in opposition in the nursery, because our elders, our grandfathers, were not Vollens but serf-owners and senators. When I left it, I flung myself with the same impetuosity into another struggle, and, as soon as I had finished at the university, was in prison and then in exile. My continuity of learning was destroyed by this, but it gave me another kind of training, experience of a world on the one hand wretched, and on the other hand dirty.

When I was sick of the study of this pathology, I flung myself greedily upon philosophy, for which Vogt felt an invincible aversion. When he had completed the medical course and had received his doctor’s diploma, he could not bring himself to practise, saying that he had not sufficient faith in the medical hocus-pocus, and devoted himself entirely to physiology again. His work very soon attracted the attention not only of German scientists but also of the Parisian Academy of Science. He was already Professor of Comparative Anatomy in Giessen and the colleague of Liebig (with whom he afterwards carried on a furious chemico-theological controversy), when the revolutionary hurricane of 1848 tore him from his microscope and flung him into the Frankfort Parliament.

I need hardly say that he was in the most radical section, that he made speeches full of wit and daring, and exhausted the patience of the mast moderate progressives, and sometimes even of the immoderate Prussian King. Being by no means a politician, he became, through his atomic weight, one of the leaders of the opposition; and when Archduke Johann, who had been a vicar of the Empire, finally threw off the mask of good-nature and popularity won by marrying the daughter of a stationmaster and sometimes wearing a frock-coat, Vogt and four others were elected in his place. Then the fortunes of the German revolution went rapidly downhill: the governments had attained their object, had gained time (as Metternich advised), and had no longer need to spare the parliament. Banished from Frankfort, the parliament had a brief, shadowy existence at Stuttgart under the melancholy title of _Nach-parlament_. And there the reactionaries made an end of it. There was nothing left for the vicars of the Empire but to get away as best they could from certain prison and penal servitude.... When he crossed the Swiss mountains Vogt shook the dust of the Frankfort assembly from off his feet, and inscribing himself in the traveller’s book as ‘K. Vogt, runaway vicar of the German Empire,’ set to work again upon natural science with the same untroubled serenity, light-hearted temper, and unwearying industry. He came to Nice in 1850, with the object of studying marine zoophytes.

Although we started from different directions and came by different paths, we met in sober maturity in science.

Was I as consistent as Vogt—and in life, did I look at it as soberly? Now I fancy not. Though indeed I do not know whether it is good to begin with being sober; it wards off not only many calamities, but also the best moments of life. It is a difficult question which luckily is settled for each man, not by choice nor by considerations of what is best, but by constitution and circumstance. It was not that I tried to retain all sorts of inconsistent convictions, but _they remained of themselves_, though I was theoretically emancipated. I outlived the romanticism of revolution, the mystic belief in progress and in humanity lasted longer than other theological dogmas; but when I had outlived them, I still had left a religious belief in individuals, a faith in two or three men, a confidence in myself, in the human will. There were, of course, contradictions in this; inner contradictions lead to misfortunes, the more painful and mortifying because they are deprived of the last comfort of man, justification in his own eyes....

In Nice, Vogt set to work with extraordinary zeal.... The calm, warm bays of the Mediterranean Sea is a rich breeding-ground for all _frutti di mare_, the water is simply full of them. At night the streaks of their phosphorescent light trail gleaming after a boat and drip from the oar, the _salpi_ can be picked up with the hand or with any cup or dish. So he had no lack of material. From early morning Vogt would sit at the microscope, would watch, would draw, write, or read, and at five o’clock rush, sometimes with me, into the sea (he swam like a fish); then he would come to us to dine, and, everlastingly good-humoured, was ready for a learned discussion or for any sort of nonsense, sang killing songs, accompanying them on the piano, or told the children stories with such masterly art that they listened to him for hours without moving.

Vogt possessed an immense talent for exposition. Half in joke he delivered several lectures on ‘physiology for ladies’ in our house. Everything came out so living, so simple, and so artistically expressed, that all the ground he had covered before attaining this clarity was not suspected. That is the whole problem in teaching—to render science so intelligible and well assimilated as to make it speak a simple, everyday language.

There are no difficult sciences; the difficulty lies in the exposition which is not fully digested. The language of learning, a technical language with coined words, a shorthand, temporary language, is of use for students; the meaning is concealed in its algebraic formulæ in order that in explaining the law the same thing may not be repeated a hundred times over. Passing through a series of scholastic methods, science has been overgrown by all this rubbish of the schools, where pedants have grown so accustomed to the monstrous jargon that they use no other, and it seems intelligible to them: in former years they even prized it as something won by hard labour and distinguished from the vulgar tongue. As we pass from students to real knowledge, props and scaffoldings become distasteful, and we look for simplicity. Who has not observed that beginners as a rule make use of many more abstruse words than those who have mastered the subject?

A second cause of obscurity in science arises from the unconscientiousness of those who teach it, shown in trying to conceal part of the truth and to avoid risky questions. Science which has any object except the knowledge of the truth is not science. It ought to have the courage of direct, open speech. No one could charge Vogt with lack of candour, with timid compromise. ‘Sensitive souls’ more readily reproach him with telling too directly and too simply what he holds for the truth, in direct contradiction with the generally received deception. The Christian attitude has trained us to dualism, to ideal imagery, so thoroughly that everything naturally healthy strikes us unpleasantly. Our intelligence, warped through ages, is disgusted by naked beauty, by daylight, and craves for twilight and a veil.

Many when reading Vogt are offended at his accepting the most startling consequences so readily, at his finding it so easy to sacrifice things, at his having to make no effort, at his not worrying to try to reconcile theology with biology; it is as though he had nothing to do with the former.

As a matter of fact, Vogt’s temperament was such that he never had thought differently and was incapable of thinking differently; that was just where his direct realism came in. Theological objections could have for him only an historical interest; the absurdity of dualism was so clear to his simple outlook that he could not enter into serious controversy with it, just as his opponents—the theologians of chemistry and the holy fathers of physiology—cannot seriously discuss magic or astrology. Vogt brushed aside their attacks with a jest—and, unluckily, that is not enough.

The nonsense with which they answered him is the nonsense believed all the world over, and for that reason very important. The childishness of the human brain is such that it will not accept the simple truth; for vague, muddled, and incoherent minds nothing is intelligible but what is incomprehensible, what is impossible or absurd.

There is no need to go to the common herd for examples; literary and cultivated circles, legal and learned institutions, governments and revolutionaries, vie with each other in maintaining the innate senselessness of mankind. And just as seventy years ago the frigid deist Robespierre executed Anacharsis Cloots,[74] so the Wagners and their like would to-day hand Vogt over to the hangman.

The struggle is impossible; all the strength is on their side. Against a handful of scientists, naturalists, doctors, two or three thinkers and poets, stands the whole world, from Pius IX. with the Immaculate Conception to Mazzini with the Republican Iddio; from the Moscow orthodox hysterics of Slavophilism to Lieutenant-General Radowitz, who when he was dying bequeathed to Wagner, the professor of physiology, what it had never occurred to any one to bequeath before—the immortality of the soul, and its defence; from American spiritualists who call up the dead, to English missionary colonels who preach the Word of God to Indians on horseback at the head of their soldiers. There is nothing left for free men but the consciousness of being right, and hope in future generations.

And suppose it is proved that this senselessness, this religious mania, is the essential condition of organised society, that for men to live quietly side by side they must be driven out of their wits and terrified, that this mania is the one dodge by which history is created?