Chapter IV: Letter 1

And so, dear friend,[26] you will positively go no further, you want to rest amidst the rich autumn harvest, in shady parks, languidly ruffling their leaves after the long, hot summer. You are not alarmed at the days growing shorter, at the mountain-tops turning white, and the cold, sinister wind that blows at times; you are more afraid of our spring floods, of the knee-deep mud, of the wild overflow of the rivers, of the bare earth showing under the snow, and, in fact, of our dreams of a future harvest from which we are separated by storms and hail, by drought and deluge, and all the hard work we have not yet accomplished.... Well, in God’s name, let us part in love and concord like good fellow-travellers.

You have only a little way further to go, you have arrived, here is the brightly lighted house, the sparkling river and the garden, and leisure and books at hand, while I, like an old post hack, always in harness, shift from one task to another till I drop dead between two stations.

Believe me that I fully understand your dislike and dread of a life with no order nor beaten paths, and your affection for established civic and political forms, and, moreover, such as may become ‘better,’ but are so far the ‘best’ existing.

We men of European town civilisation can, as a rule, only exist under the established conventions. Town life accustoms us from early childhood to the fact that discordant forces are balanced and kept in check behind the scenes. When we are by chance thrown off the beaten track on which, from the day of our birth, it guides and carefully moves us, we are as completely at a loss as the theoretical savant, accustomed to museums and herbariums and to wild beasts in glass cases, is at a loss when confronted with the traces of a geological cataclysm, or with the dense population of the Mediterranean Sea.

I have chanced to see two or three desperate haters of Europe who have returned from beyond the ocean. They had gone thither, so revolted by the Reaction after 1848, so exasperated against everything European, that they had hastened on to Kansas or California, hardly willing to stop at New York. Three or four years later they reappeared in the familiar cafés and beer-shops of old Europe, ready to make any concession to avoid seeing the virginal forests of America and her untilled soil, to avoid being _tête-à-tête_ with Nature and meeting wild animals, rattlesnakes, and men with revolvers. You must not imagine, however, that they were simply terrified by danger, material privations, or the necessity of work; here, too, men die of hunger if they do not work, and here, too, they work sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, while the police and the spies in the old continent are more dangerous than wild beasts and revolvers. They were, above all, terrified and depressed by Nature untouched by man, by the absence of that well-ordered organisation, that peace secured by the administration, that artistic and epicurean comfort which depend on permanent habitation, are protected by a strong wall of police, rest upon the ignorance of the masses, and are defended by the Church, the Law, and the Army. For the sake of this mess of pottage, _well served_, we sacrifice our share of human dignity, our share of sympathy for our neighbour, and give our _negative_ support to the _régime_ which is in reality hateful to us.

In France we have seen another example: the literary men who lived in rhetoric, the artists who lived in art for art’s sake and for money’s sake, were beside themselves at the disturbance caused by the Revolution of February. We have an acquaintance, a teacher of singing, who, to escape 1848, moved from Paris to London, to the home of sore throats, bronchitis, asthma, and speaking through the teeth—only to avoid hearing the alarm bell and the masses singing in chorus.

In the Russia of to-day the causes which led men to flee from Paris and from Arkansas are combined. In America what was most alarming was naked Nature, wild Nature with the dew of creation not yet dry upon its leaves, the Nature we love so ardently in pictures and poems. (The man with the revolver naïvely killing his neighbour is as much in place in the Pampas as the naïve tiger with teeth an inch long.) In France Nature is not to be feared, it is swept and garnished, tigers do not walk about, and the vine flourishes; but, on the other hand, in 1848, passions broke loose again, and again the foundations of good order tottered. Among us in Russia, while Nature is untouched, men and institutions, culture and barbarism, the past that died an age ago, and the future which will be born in ages to come—all are in ferment and dissolution, being pulled down and built up, everywhere there are clouds of dust, posts and rafters. Indeed, if one adds to our primitive means of travel the highly developed means of making money in the Service, to the natural mud of our roads the filth of the life of our landowners, to our winter tempests the Winter Palace, together with the generals, the Cabinet Ministers, the refreshment bars, and the Filarets, ‘the gendarme vanguard of civilisation’ made in Germany, and the rearguard with axes in their belt, primeval in their force and their simplicity, one must have a great passion or a mighty madness to plunge of free will into that whirlpool, which redeems its chaos by the rainbow-lights of prophecy and the grand visions, for ever glimmering behind the fog and for ever unable to disperse it.

Passion and madness are talents of a sort, and do not come at will. One is irresistibly drawn into the whirlpool, another is repelled by its froth and uproar. The point is that to one man sleep is dearer than father and mother, and to another his dream. Which is better? I do not know: and, indeed, both may lead to the same delirium.

But we will not give way to these philosophic reflections; they commonly by one path or another conduct us to the unpleasant conclusion that whether you batten in a feather-bed or fret yourself in a squirrel’s wheel, you will do no good one way or the other, except perhaps to enrich the soil when you are dead. Every life, as the students’ song has it, begins with _Juvenes dum sumus_, and ends with _Nos habebit humus_!

We must not dwell on this mournful reduction of everything in the world to nullity, or you will call me a nihilist, and that is now the term of abuse which has replaced Hegelian, Byronist, and suchlike.

A living man thinks of what is living. The question between us is not whether a man has the right to withdraw into a peaceful retreat, to turn aside like an ancient philosopher from the Nazarene madness and the influx of barbarians. Of that, there can be no question. I only want to make clear to myself whether the ancient sanctuaries, built so solidly and overgrown with the moss of mediaeval Europe, are so peaceful and convenient, above all, so secure as they were; and, on the other hand, whether there is not a magic spell in the visions we see in the snowstorm and the ringing of the sledge-bells, and whether there is not some real force in that magic.

There was a time when you defended the ideas of Western Europe, and you did well; the only pity is that it was entirely unnecessary. The ideas of Western Europe, that is, scientific ideas, have long ago been recognised by all as the inalienable property of humanity. Science is entirely without latitude or longitude; it is like Goethe’s ‘Divan,’ Western and Oriental.

Now you want to maintain that the actual forms of Western European life are also the heritage of mankind, and you believe that the manner of life of the European upper classes, as evolved in the historic past, is alone in harmony with the aesthetic needs of human development, that it alone furnishes the conditions essential for literary and artistic life; that in Western Europe art was born and grew up, and to Western Europe it belongs; and finally, that there is no other art at all. Let us pause first at this point.

Pray do not imagine that I shall from the point of view of civic austerity and Puritanism protest against the place which you give to art in life. I am in agreement with you on that point. Art—_c’est autant de pris_; together with the summer lightnings of personal happiness, it is our one indubitable blessing. In all the rest, we are either toiling or drawing water in a sieve for humanity, for our country, for fame, for our children, for money, and at the same time are solving an endless problem. In art we find enjoyment, in it the goal is attained; it, too, is an ‘End’ in itself.

And so, giving to Diana of Ephesus what is due to Diana, I ask you of what exactly you are speaking, of the present or the past? Of the fact that art has developed in Western Europe, that Dante and Michael Angelo, Shakespeare and Rembrandt, Mozart and Goethe, were by birth and opinion ‘Westerners’? But no one disputes it. Or do you mean that a long historical life has prepared both a better stage for art and a finer framework for it, that museums are more sumptuous in Europe than anywhere else, galleries and schools richer, students more numerous, teachers more gifted, theatres better decorated, and so on? And that, too, is true. Or nearly so, for ever since the great opera has returned to its primitive state of performers strolling from town to town, only grand opera is _überall und nirgends_. In the whole of America there is no such Campo Santo as in Pisa, but still Campo Santo is a graveyard. It is quite natural, indeed, that where there have been most corals there you find most coral-reefs.... But in all this where is the new living creative art, where is the artistic element in life itself? To be continually calling up the dead, to be repeating Beethoven, to be playing Phèdre and Athalie, is all very well, but it says nothing for creativeness. In the dullest periods of Byzantium, Homer was read and Sophocles recited at the literary evenings; in Rome, the statues of Pheidias were preserved, and the best sculpture collected on the eve of the Genserics and the Alarics. Where is the new art, where is the artistic initiative? Is it to be found in Wagner’s ‘music of the future’?

Art is not fastidious; it can depict anything, setting upon all the indelible imprint of the spirit of beauty, and impartially raising to the level of the madonnas and demigods every casual incident of life, every sound and every form, the slumbering pool under the tree, the fluttering bird, the horse at the drinking-trough, the sunburnt beggar-boy. From the sinister, savage fantasy of hell and the Day of Judgment to the Flemish tavern with the back view of a peasant, from Faust to Faublas, from the Requiem to the Kamarinsky, all lie within the domain of art.... But even art has its limit. There is a stumbling-block which neither the violinist’s bow nor the painter’s brush nor the sculptor’s chisel can deal with; art to conceal its impotence mocks at it and turns it into caricature. That stumbling-block is petty-bourgeois vulgarity. The artist who excellently portrays a man completely naked, covered with rags, or so completely dressed that nothing is to be seen but armour or a monk’s cassock, is reduced to despair before the bourgeois in a swallow-tail. Hence the necessity of flinging a Roman toga upon Robert Peel; hence a banker is stripped of his coat and his cravat, and his shirt is unbuttoned, so that if he could see his own bust after death he would be covered with blushes before his own wife.... Robert Macaire and Prudhomme are great caricatures. Sometimes caricatures are works of genius; in Dickens they are tragically true to life, but still they are caricatures. Beyond Hogarth that style cannot go. The Vandyke and Rembrandt of petty bourgeoisie are Punch and Charivari, they are its portrait gallery and pillory; they are the family records and the whipping-post.

The fact is that the whole petty-bourgeois character, both in its good qualities and its bad qualities, is opposed to art and cramping to it; art withers in it like a green leaf in chlorine, and only the passions common to all humanity can at times, by breaking into bourgeois life, or, even better, breaking out of its decorum, raise it to artistic significance.

Decorum, that is the real word. The petty bourgeois, like Moltchalin,[27] has two talents, and he has the same ones, Prudence and Punctuality. The life of the middle class is full of petty defects and petty virtues; it is self-restrained, often niggardly, and shuns what is extreme, what is superfluous. The park is transformed into the kitchen garden, the thatched cottage into the little town house with an escutcheon painted on the shutters, but every day they drink tea in it, and every day they eat meat. It is an _immense step_ in advance, but not at all artistic. Art is more at home with poverty and luxury than with crude prosperity, with comfort when it is an end in itself; if it comes to that, it is more at home with the harlot selling herself than with the respectable woman selling at three times the cost the work of the starving seamstress. Art is not at ease in the stiff, over-neat, careful house of the petty bourgeois, and his house is bound to be such; art feels instinctively that in that life it is reduced to the level of external decoration such as wallpaper and furniture, to the level of a hurdy-gurdy; if the hurdy-gurdy man is in the way he is kicked out, if they want to listen they give him a halfpenny and with that have done with him.... Art which is pre-eminently elegance of proportion cannot endure the yard-measure; a life self-satisfied with its narrow mediocrity is defiled for art by the worst of blots—vulgarity.

But that does not in the least prevent the whole cultured world from passing into petty bourgeoisie, and the vanguard has arrived there already. Petty bourgeoisie is the ideal to which Europe is everywhere striving and ascending. It is the ‘hen in the soup,’ of which Henry the Fourth dreamt. A little house, with little windows looking into the street, a school for the boy, a dress for the girl, a servant for the hard work—all that makes up indeed a haven of refuge—Havre de Grace! The man turned off the soil which he had tilled for ages for his master, the descendant of the villager, crushed in the struggle, the homeless workman, doomed to everlasting toil and hunger, the day-labourer, born a beggar and dying a beggar, can only wipe the sweat from their brows and look without horror at their children by becoming property owners, masters, bourgeois; their sons will not be kept in lifelong bondage for a crust of bread, their daughters will not be condemned to the factory or the brothel. How should they not strive to be bourgeois? The bright image of the shopkeeper—who has replaced the knight and the priest for the middle classes—hovers as the ideal before the eyes of the casual labourer, until his tired and horny hands drop on his sunken chest, or until he looks at life with that Irish tranquillity of despair which precludes every hope, every expectation, except the hope of a whole bottle of whisky next Sunday.

Bourgeoisie, the last word of civilisation, founded on the absolute despotism of property, is the ‘democratisation’ of aristocracy, the ‘aristocratisation’ of democracy. In this order Almaviva is the equal of Figaro—everything below is straining up into bourgeoisie, everything above sinking down into it through the impossibility of maintaining itself. The United States present the spectacle of one class—the middle class—with nothing below it and nothing above it, and the petty bourgeois manners and morals are retained. The German peasant is the petty bourgeois of agriculture; the workman of every country is the petty bourgeois of the future. Italy, the most poetical land in Europe, was not able to hold out, but at once forsook her fanatical lover, Mazzini, and betrayed her husband, the Hercules Garibaldi, as soon as Cavour, the petty bourgeois of genius, the little fat man in spectacles, offered to keep her as his mistress.

With the coming of bourgeoisie, individual characters are effaced, but these effaced persons are better fed; clothes are made by the dozen, not to measure or to order, but there are more people who wear them. With the coming of bourgeoisie, the beauty of the race is effaced, but its prosperity increases, the statuesque beggar from Transteverino is employed for rough work by the puny shopkeeper of the Via del Corso. The crowds of holiday-makers in the Champs-Élysées or Kensington Gardens, or the audiences in churches or theatres, depress one with their vulgar faces, their dull expressions; but the holiday-makers in the Champs-Élysées, the audiences listening to the sermons of Lacordaire or the songs of Levasseur,[28] are not concerned at that, they do not notice it. But what is very important to them and very striking is that their fathers and elder brothers were not in a position to go holiday-making or to the theatre as they are; that their elders sometimes drove on the box of carriages, but they drive about in cabs, and very often too.

It is for this reason that bourgeoisie is triumphing and is bound to triumph. It is useless to tell a hungry man, ‘It suits you much better to be hungry; don’t look for food.’ The sway of bourgeoisie is the answer to emancipation without land, to the freeing of men from bondage while the soil is left in bondage to a few of the elect. The masses that have earned their halfpence have come to the top and are enjoying themselves in their own way and possessing the world. They have no need of strongly marked characters, of original minds. Science cannot help stumbling upon the discoveries that lie closest at hand. Photography—that barrel-organ version of painting—replaces the artist; if a creative artist does appear he is welcome, but there is no desperate need of him. Beauty, talent, are altogether out of the normal; they are the exceptions, the luxury of Nature, its highest limit or the result of great effort, of whole generations. The voice of Mario, the points of the winner of the Derby, are rarities. But a good lodging and a dinner are necessities. There is a great deal that is bourgeois in Nature herself, one may say; she very often stops short in the middle, half-way, and evidently has not the spirit to go further. Who has told you that Europe will have it?

Europe has been through a bad quarter of an hour. The bourgeois were all but losing the fruits of a long lifetime, of prolonged efforts, of hard work. A vague but terrible protest has arisen in the conscience of humanity. The petty bourgeois have been reminded of their wars for their rights, their heroic age and biblical traditions. Abel, Remus, Thomas of Münster have been slain once more, and long will the grass grow upon their tombs as a warning how the all-powerful bourgeoisie punishes its enemies. Since then all has returned to its normal routine, which seems secure, which is based on reason, which is strong and growing, but has no artistic plan, no aesthetic chord: it does not seek to have them; it is too practical; it agrees with Catherine II. that it is not becoming for a serious man to play the piano well; the Empress, too, regarded men from the practical point of view. The gardens are too heavily manured for flowers to grow; flowers are too unprofitable for the petty bourgeois’ garden; if he does sometimes grow them, it is for sale.

In the spring of 1850 I was looking for lodgings in Paris. By that time I had lived so long in Europe that I had grown to hate the crowding and crush of civilisation, which at first we Russians like so much. I looked with horror mixed with disgust at the continually moving, swarming crowd, foreseeing how it would rob me of half my seat at the theatre and in the diligence, how it would dash like a wild beast into the railway carriages, how it would heat and pervade the air—and for that reason I was looking for a flat, not in a crowded place, and to some extent free from the vulgarity and deadly sameness of the lodgings _à trois chambres à coucher de maître_.[29]

Some one suggested to me the lodge of a big old house on the further side of the Seine in the Faubourg St. Germain, or close by. I went there. The old wife of the concierge took the keys and led me by the yard. The house and the lodge stood behind a fence; within the courtyard behind the house, there were green trees. The lodge was neglected and deserted-looking, probably no one had been living there for many years. The somewhat old-fashioned furniture was of the period of the First Empire, with Roman straight lines and blackened gilt. The lodge was by no means large or sumptuous, but the furniture and the arrangement of the rooms all pointed to a different idea of the conveniences of life. Near the little drawing-room to one side, next the bedroom, was a tiny study with cupboards for books and a big writing-table. I walked through the rooms, and it seemed to me that after long wanderings I had come again upon a dwelling for a man, _un chez soi_, not a hotel room nor a human stall.

Everything—the theatre, holiday-making, books, pictures, clothes—everything has gone down in quality and gone up terribly in numbers. The crowd of which I was speaking is the best proof of success, of strength, of growth; it is bursting through all the dams, overflowing and flooding everything; it is content with anything, and can never have enough. London is crowded, Paris is cramped. A hundred railway carriages linked on are insufficient; there are forty theatres and not a seat free; a play has to be running for three months for the London public to be able to see it.

‘Why are your cigars so inferior?’ I asked one of the leading London tobacconists.

‘It is hard to get them, and, indeed, it is not worth the trouble; there are few connoisseurs and still fewer well-to-do ones.’

‘Not worth while? You charge eightpence each for them.’

‘That brings us hardly any profit. While you and a dozen like you will buy them, is there much gain in that? In one day I sell more twopenny and threepenny cigars than I do of these in a year. I am not going to order any more of them.’

Here was a man who had grasped the spirit of the age. All trade, especially in England, is based now on quantity and cheapness, and not at all on quality, as old-fashioned Russians imagine when they reverently buy Tula penknives with an English trademark on them. Everything has a wholesale, ready-made, conventional character, everything is within the reach of almost every one, but does not allow of aesthetic distinction or personal taste. Everywhere the hundred-thousand-headed hydra lies in wait close at hand round a corner, ready to listen to everything, to look at everything indiscriminately, to be dressed in anything, to be fed on anything—this is the all-powerful crowd of ‘conglomerated mediocrity’ (to use Stuart Mill’s expression) which purchases everything, and so dominates everything. The crowd is without ignorance, but also without culture. To please it art screams, gesticulates, falsifies, and exaggerates, or in despair turns away from men and paints animal portraits and pictures of cattle, like Landseer and Rosa Bonheur.

Have you seen in the last fifteen years in Europe an actor, a single actor, who is not a clown, a buffoon of sentimentality, or a buffoon of burlesque? Name him!

Many blessings have been vouchsafed to the epoch of which the last expression is to be found in the notes of Verdi, but the artistic vocation was certainly not among them. Its own creation—the _café chantant_—an amphibious product, half-way between the beer-cellar and the boulevard theatre, is precisely on its level. I have nothing against _cafés chantants_, but I cannot give them serious artistic value; they satisfy the ‘average customer,’ as the English say, the average purchaser, the average bidder, the hundred-headed hydra of the middle class, and there is nothing more to be said.

The way out from this position is far off. Behind the multitude now ruling stands an even greater multitude of candidates eager to enter it, to whom the manners, ideas, and habits of life of the middle class appear as the one goal to strive for. There are enough to multiply their numbers ten times over. A world without land, a world predominated by town life, with the rights of property carried to the extreme point, has no other way of salvation, and it will all pass through petty bourgeoisie, which in our eyes has not reached a high level, but in the eyes of the agricultural population and the proletariat stands for culture and progress. Those who are in advance live in tiny cliques like secular monasteries, taking no interest in what is being done by the world outside their walls.

The same thing has happened before, but on a smaller scale and less consciously; moreover, in the past there were ideals, convictions, words which set both the simple heart of the poor citizen and the heart of the haughty knight beating; they had holy things in common, to which all men did homage as before the sacrament. Where is there a hymn nowadays which could be sung with faith and conviction in every storey of the house from the cellar to the garret? Where is our ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’ or our ‘Marseillaise’?

When Ivanov was in London he used to say with despair that he was looking for a new religious type, and could find it nowhere in the world about him. A pure artist, dreading falsehood in his painting like blasphemy, understanding rather by imagination than by analysis, he asked us to show him where were the picturesque features in which a new Atonement would shine forth. We could not show them. ‘Perhaps Mazzini will,’ he thought.

Mazzini would have pointed him to the unity of Italy, perhaps to Garibaldi in 1861, to that _last of the great men_ as to a _forerunner_.

Ivanov died knocking in vain, the door was not opened to him.

ISLE OF WIGHT.

_June 10, 1862._