Chapter VII: Letter 4

Last summer a friend, a Saratov landowner, and a great Fourierist, came to see me in Devonshire.

Please don’t be angry with me (it was not the landowner who said that to me, but I who say it to you) for so continually wandering from the point. Parentheses are my joy and my misfortune. A French literary man of the days of the Restoration, a classic and a purist, more than once said to me, taking a pinch of snuff in the prolonged academic fashion which will soon have passed away altogether: ‘_Notre ami abuse de la parenthèse avec intempérance!_’ It is for the sake of digressions and parentheses that I prefer writing in the form of letters, especially letters to friends; one can write without check whatever comes into one’s head.

Well, so my Saratov Fourierist came to Devonshire and said to me: ‘Do you know what is odd? I have just been for the first time in Paris. Well—of course ... it is all very fine, but, seriously speaking, Paris is a dull place—really dull!’

‘What next?’ I said to him.

‘Upon my soul, it is.’

‘But why did you expect it to be amusing?’

‘Upon my word, after the wilds of Saratov!’

‘Perhaps it is just owing to that. But were not you bored in Paris because it’s so excessively gay there?’

‘You are just as silly as you always were.’

‘Not at all. London, looking like a permanent autumn, is more to our taste; though the boredom here, too, is awful.’

‘Where is it better, then? It seems the old proverb is right. It is where we are not!’

‘I don’t know: but it must be supposed that it is not very nice there either.’

This conversation, though it is apparently not very long, nor particularly important, stirred in me a whole series of old notions concerning the absence of a sort of fish-glue in the brain of the modern man; that is why his mind is cloudy and thick with sediment—new theories, old habits, new habits, old theories.

And what logic! I say it is dull in Paris and London, and he answers, ‘Where is it better, then?’ Not noticing that this was the line of argument employed by our house-serfs of the old style: in reply to the observation, ‘I fancy you are drunk, my boy,’ they answered, ‘Well, did you stand treat?’ What grounds are there for the idea that men are happy anywhere? that they can or ought to be happy? And what men? And happy in what? Let us assume that men do have a better life in one place than another. Why are Paris and London the pinnacles of this better life?

Is it from Reichardt’s guidebook?

Paris and London are closing a volume of world-history—a volume in which few pages remain uncut. People, trying with all their might to turn them as quickly as possible, are surprised that as they approach the end there is more in the past than in the present, and are vexed that the two fullest representatives of Western Europe are setting together with it. The audacity and recklessness in general conversations which float, as once the Spirit of God, over the waters, are terrific, but as soon as it comes to action, or even to a critical appreciation of events, all is forgotten, and the old weights and measures are hauled out of the grandmother’s storeroom. Worn-out forms can only be restored by a complete rebirth: Western Europe must rise up like the Phoenix in a baptism of fire.

‘Oh, well, in God’s name, into the flames with it.’

What if it does not rise up again, but singes its beautiful feathers, or maybe is burnt to ashes?

In that case continue to baptize it with water, and don’t be bored in Paris. Take my father, for example: he spent eight years in Paris and was never bored there. Thirty years afterwards he was fond of describing the fêtes given by the maréchals and by Napoleon himself, the suppers at the Palais Royal in company with actresses and opera dancers, decked in diamonds that had been wrenched out of conquered royal crowns, of the Yussupovs, the Tyufyakins and other _princes russes_ who lost there more souls of peasants than were laid low at Borodino. With various changes and _un peu plus canaille_ the same thing exists even now. The generals of finance give banquets as good as those of the generals of the army. The suppers have moved from the Rue St. Honoré to the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne. But you are a serious person; you prefer to look behind the scenes of world-history rather than behind the scenes of the Opera.... Here you have a parliament, even two. What more do you want?... With what envy and heartache I used to listen to people who had come home from Europe in the ’thirties, as though they had robbed me of everything they had seen and I had not seen. They, too, had not been bored, but had great hopes, some of Odilon Barrot, some of Cobden. You, too, must learn not to be bored; and in any case be a little consistent; and if you still feel dull, try to find the cause. You may find that your demands are fantastic, then you must try to get over it; that it is the boredom of idleness, of emptiness, of not knowing how to adapt yourself. And perhaps you will find something else: that you are bored because Paris and London have no answer to make to the yearnings that are growing stronger and stronger in the heart of the man of to-day—which does not prevent their standing for the highest culture and most brilliant result of the past, and being rich endings of a rich period.

I have said this a dozen times. But it is impossible to avoid repetitions. Persons of experience are well aware of it. I spoke to Proudhon of the fact that articles which are almost identical, with only slight variations, often appeared in his journal.

‘And do you imagine,’ Proudhon answered, ‘that once a thing has been said, it is enough? That a new idea will be accepted straight off? You are mistaken. It has to be repeated, it has to be dinned into people, repeated over and over again, so that the mind is no longer surprised by it, so that it is not merely understood, but is assimilated, and obtains real rights of citizenship in the brain.’

Proudhon was perfectly right. There are two or three ideas which are particularly precious to me; I have been repeating them for about fifteen years; fact upon fact confirms them with unnecessary abundance. Part of what I anticipated has come to pass, the other part is coming to pass before our eyes, yet these ideas seem as wild, as unaccepted, as they were.

And what is most mortifying, people seem to understand you; they agree, but your ideas remain like aliens in their heads, always irrelevant, never passing into that integral part of consciousness and the moral being, which as a rule forms the undisputed foundation of our acts and opinions.

It is owing to this inconsistency that people apparently highly cultured are continually being startled by the unexpected, caught unawares, indignant with the inevitable, struggle with the insurmountable, pass by what is springing into life, and apply all sorts of remedies to those who are at their last gasp. They know that their watch was properly set, but, like the late ‘unlamented’ Kleinmihel, cannot grasp that the meridian is not the same.

Pedantry and scholasticism prevent men from grasping things with simple lively understanding more than do superstition and ignorance. With the latter the instincts are left, hardly conscious, but trustworthy; moreover, ignorance does not exclude passionate enthusiasm, and superstition does not exclude inconsistency, while pedantry is always true to itself.

At the time of the Italian war a simple-hearted, worthy professor lectured on the great triumphs of ‘international law,’ describing how the principles of Hugo Grotius had developed and entered into the conscience of nations and governments, how questions which had in old times been decided by rivers of blood and the miseries of entire provinces, of whole generations, were now settled, like civil disputes between private persons, on the principles of national right.

Who, apart from some old professional condottiere, would not agree with the professor that this is one of the greatest victories of humanity and culture over brute violence? The trouble is not that the lecturer’s judgment is wrong, but that humanity is very far from having gained this victory.

While the professor in eloquent words was inspiring his young audience to the contemplation of these triumphs of peace, very different commentaries on international law were taking place on the fields of Magenta and Solferino. It would not have been easy for any international court to avert the Italian war, since there was no international cause for it, for there was no subject in dispute. Napoleon waged this war as a remedial measure to pacify the French by the gymnastics of liberation and the galvanic shocks of victory. What Grotius or Vattel[34] could have solved such a problem? How was it possible to avert a war which was essential for domestic interests? If it had not been Austria the French would have had to beat somebody else. One can only rejoice that the Austrians presented themselves.

Then, India, Pekin—war waged by democrats to maintain the slavery of the blacks, war waged by republicans to obtain the slavery of political unity. And the professor goes on lecturing; his audience are touched; they fancy that they have heard the last creak of the gates of the temple of Janus, that the warriors have laid down their weapons, put on crowns of myrtle and taken up the distaff, that the demobilised armies are tilling the fields.... And all this at the very moment when England is covered with volunteers, when at every step you meet a uniform, when every shopkeeper has a gun, when the French and Austrian armies stand with lighted matches, and even a prince—I think it was of Hesse Cassel—put on a military footing and armed with revolvers the two hussars who had from the time of the Congress of Vienna ridden peacefully without weapons behind his carriage.

If war breaks out again—and that depends on thousands of chances, on one casual shot—in Rome or on the borders of Lombardy, a sea of blood would flow from Warsaw to London. The professor would be surprised, the professor would be pained. But one would have thought he should not be surprised nor pained. The trend of history is plain for all to see! The misfortune of the doctrinaires is that they, like our Diderot, shut their eyes when arguing, that they may not see that their opponent wants to retort; and their opponent is nature itself, history itself.

To complete the absurdity we ought not to lose sight of the fact that in abstract logic the professor is right, and that if not a hundred but a hundred million men had grasped the principles of Grotius and Vattel, they would not slaughter each other either for the sake of exercise or for the sake of a bit of land. But the misfortune is that under the present political _régime_ only a hundred and not a hundred million men can understand the principles of Grotius and Vattel.

That is why neither lectures nor sermons have any effect, that is why neither the learned fathers nor the spiritual fathers can bring us any relief; the monks of knowledge, like the monks of ignorance, know nothing outside the walls of their monasteries, do not test their theories by facts, their deductions by events, and, while men are perishing from the eruption of the volcano, they are blissfully beating time, listening to the music of the heavenly spheres and marvelling at its harmony.

Lord Bacon long ago divided the learned into the spiders and the bees. There are periods in which the spiders are distinctly in the ascendancy, and then masses of spiders’ webs are spun, but little honey is gathered. There are conditions of life which are particularly favourable to spiders. Lime trees, thickets, and flowering meadows, above all, wings and a social conception of life, are necessary for the production of honey. A quiet corner, untroubled leisure, plenty of dust, and lack of interest in anything outside the inner process, is all that is needed for producing spiders’ webs.

At ordinary times it is even possible to saunter along the dusty, smooth highroad without breaking the spiders’ webs, but as soon as it comes to crossing rough ground and hillocks there is trouble.

There was a really good, quiet period of European history beginning with Waterloo and lasting till the year 1848. There was no war then, but plenty of international law and standing armies.

The governments openly encouraged ‘true enlightenment’ and quietly suppressed the _false_; there was not much freedom, but there was not much slavery; even the despotic rulers were all good-natured in the style of the patriarchal Francis II., the pious Friedrich Wilhelm, and Alexander the friend of Araktcheyev. The King of Naples and Nicholas came by way of dessert. Manufactures flourished, trade flourished even more, factories worked, masses of books were written; it was the golden age for all the spiders; in academic retreats and in the libraries of the learned endless spiders’ webs were spun!...

History, criminal and civil law, international law, and religion itself, were all brought into the region of pure science and thence dropped in lacy fringes of spider’s web. The spiders swung at their own sweet will in their meshes, never touching the earth. Which was very fortunate, however, since the earth was covered with other crawling insects, who stood for the idea of the state _armed for self-defence_, and clapped over-bold spiders into Spandau and other fortresses. The doctrinaires understood everything most perfectly _à vol d’araignée_. The progress of humanity was as certain in those days as the route mapped out for the Most High when he travelled incognito—from stage to stage with horses ready at the stations. And then came—February the 24th, June the 24th, the 25th, the 26th, and December the 2nd.

These flies were too big for a spider’s web.

Even the comparatively slight shock of the July revolution gave the final death-blow to such giants as Niebuhr and Hegel. But its triumph was still to the advantage of the doctrinaires; the journalists, the Collège de France, the political economists sat on the top steps of the throne beside the Orleans dynasty, those who remained alive recovered and adapted themselves somehow to 1830; they would have probably got on all right even with the republic of the troubadour, Lamartine.

But how could they compromise with the days of June?

How could they live with the 2nd of December?

* * * * *

Of course, Gervinus teaches us that an epoch of centralisation and despotism necessarily follows a democratic revolution, but yet something seemed amiss. Some began asking whether we should not go back to the Middle Ages, others simply urged a return to Catholicism. The fakirs of the Revolution pointed out with undeviating finger along the whole railway line of time to the year 1793; the doctrinaires went on lecturing regardless of facts, in the expectation that mankind will have had its fling and return to Solomon’s temple of wisdom.

Ten years have passed.

Nothing of all that has come off. England has not become Catholic, as Donoso-Cortès desired; the nineteenth century has not become the thirteenth, as some of the Germans desired; the peoples resolutely refuse French fraternity (or death!), international law after the pattern of the Peace Society, honourable poverty after Proudhon, and a Kirghiz diet of milk and honey.

While the Catholics....

The mediaevalists....

The fakirs of 1793....

And all the doctrinaires go on preaching....

Where is humanity going since it despises such authorities?

Perhaps it does not know.

But we ought to know for it.

Apparently not where we expected it to go. And, indeed, it is hard to tell where one will get to, travelling on a globe which a few months ago only just missed a comet, and may any day crack, as I informed you in my last letter.

_September 1, 1862._