In view of all this, it may be imagined what a weary and monotonous existence I led in the strange monastic seclusion of my home. There was no encouragement for me, and no variety ; my father, who showed no fondness for me after I was ten, was almost always displeased with me ; I had no companions. My teachers came and went ; I saw them to the door, and then stole off to play with the servants' children, which was strictly forbidden. At other times I wandered about the large gloomy rooms, where the windows were shut all day and the lights burnt dim in the evening ; I either did nothing or read any books I could lay hands on.
My only other occupation I found in the servants' hall and the maids' room ; they gave me real live pleasure. There I found perfect freedom ; I took a side in disputes ; together with my friends downstairs, I discussed their doings and gave my advice ; and though I knew all their secrets, I never once betr;�yed them by a slip of the tongue in the drawing-room.
3
This is a subject on which I must dwell for a little. I should say that I do not in general mean to avoid digressions and disquisitions ; every conversation is full of them, and so is life itself.
As a rule, children are attached to servants. Parents, especially Russian parents, forbid this intimacy, but the children do not obey orders, because they are bored in the drawing-room and happy in the pantry. In this case, as in a thousand others, parents don't know what they are doing. I find it impossible to imagine that our servants' hall was a worse place for children than our morningroom or sinoking-room. It is true that children pick up coarse expressions and bad manners in the company of servants ; but in the drawing-room they learn coarse ideas and bad feelings.
The mere order to keep at a distance from people with whom the children are in constant relations, is in itself revolting.
C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E
Much is said in Russia about the profound immorality of servants, especially of serfs. It is true that they are not distinguished by exemplary strictness of conduct. Their low stage of moral development is proved by the mere fact that they put up with so much and protest so seldom. But that is not the question. I should like to know what class in Russia is less depraved than the servant class. Certainly not the nobles, nor the officials. The clergy, perhaps ?
What makes the reader laugh ?
Possibly the peasants, but no others, might have some claim to superiority.
The difference between the class of nobles and the class of servants is not great. I hate, especially since the calamities of the year 1848, democrats who flatter the mob, but I hate still more aristocrats who slander the people. By representing those who serve them as profligate animals, slave-owners throw dust in the eyes of others and stifle the protests of their own consciences. In few cases are we better than the common people, but we express our feelings with more consideration, and we are cleverer at concealing selfish and evil passions ; our desires are not so coarse or so obvious, owing to the easiness of satisfying them and the habitual absence of self-restraint; we are merely richer, better fed, and therefore more difficult to please. When Count Almaviva named to the barber of Seville all the qualifications he required in a servant, Figaro said with a sigh, 'If a servant must possess all these merits, it will be hard to find masters who are fit for a servant's place.'
In Russia in general, moral corruption is not deep. It might truly enough be called savage, dirty, noisy, coarse, disorderly, shameless ; but it is mainly on the surface. The clergy, in the concealment of their houses, eat and drink to excess with the merchant class.
The nobles get drunk in the light of day, gamble recklessly, strike their men-servants and run after the maids, mismanage their affairs and fail even worse as husbands and fathers. The official class are as bad in a dirtier way ; they curry favour, besides, with their superiors and they are all petty thieves. The nobles do really steal less : they take openly what does not belong to them, though without prejudice to other methods, when circumstances are favourable.
All these amiable weaknesses occur in a coarser form among ser-
N U R S E R Y A N D U N I V E R S I T Y
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vants - that class of 'officials' who are beneath the fourteenth grade - those 'courtiers' who belong, not to the Tsar, but to the landowners.2 But how they, as a class, are worse than others, I have no idea.
When I run over my recollections on the subject - and for twenty-five years I was well acquainted, not only with our own servants, but with those of my uncle and several neighbours - I remember nothing specially vicious in their conduct. Petty thefts there were, no doubt ; but it is hard to pass sentence in this case, because ordinary ideas are perverted by an unnatural status : the human chattel is on easy terms with the chattels that are inanimate, and shows no particular respect for his master's property.
One ought, in justice, to exclude exceptional cases - casual favourites, either men or women, who bask in their master's smiles and carry tales against the rest; and besides, their behaviour is exemplary, for they never get drunk in the daytime and never pawn their clothes at the public-house.
The misconduct of most servants is of a simple kind and turns on trifles - a glass of spirits or a bottle of beer, a chat over a pipe, absence from the house without leave, quarrels which sometimes proceed as far as blows, or deception of their master when he requires of them more than man can perform. They are as ignorant as the peasants but more sophisticated ; and this, together with their servile condition, accounts for much that is perverted and distorted in their character ; but, in spite of all this, they remain grown-up children, like the American negroes. Trifles make them laugh or weep ; their desires are limited and deserve to be called simple and natural rather than vicious.
Spirits and tea, the public-house and the tea-shop - these are the invariable vices of a servant in Russia. For them he steals ; because of them he is poor; for their sake he endures persecution and punishment and leaves his wife and children to beggary. Nothing is easier than to sit, like Father Matthew,3 in the seat of judgement and condemn drunkenness, while you are yourself intoxicated 2. In Russia civil-service officials (chinovniki) are divided into fourteen classes. Nobles are called dvoryane, and servants attached to a landowner's house dvorovye ; Herzen plays on the likeness of the two names.
3· An Irish priest who preached temperance in the middle of the nineteenth century.
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C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E
with sobriety ; nothing simpler than t o sit a t your own tea-table and marvel at servants, because they will go to the tea-shop instead of drinking their tea at home, where it would cost them less-Strong drink stupifies a man and makes it possible for him to forget ; it gives him an artificial cheerfulness, an artificial excitement ; and the pleasure of this state is increased by the low level of civilisation and the narrow empty life to which these men are confined. A servant is a slave who may be sold, a slave condemned to perpetual service in the pantry and perpetual poverty : how can such a man do otherwise than drink? He drinks too much when he gets the chance, because he cannot drink every day ; this was pointed out by Senkovsky in one of his books fifteen years ago. In Italy and the south of France, there are no drunkards, because there is abundance of wine. And the explanation of the savage drunkenness among English workmen is just the same. These men are broken in a hopeless and ill-matched struggle against hunger and beggary ; after all their efforts, they have found everywhere a leaden vault above their heads, and a sullen opposition which has cast them down into the nether darkness of society and condemned them to a life of endless toil - toil without an object and equally destructive of mind and body. What wonder that such a man, after working six days . as a lever or wheel or spring or screw, breaks out on Saturday night, like a savage, from the factory which is his prison, and drinks till he is dead drunk ? His exhaustion shortens the process, and it is complete in half an hour.