'You arc not going to Russia, and The Bell is not ruined,' I answered him.
He \\·cnt out without another word, leaving me heavily weighed down by this second prediction and by a dim consciousness that a blunder had been made.
Martyanov did as he had said ; he returned home in the spring of 1 863 and went to die in penal servitude, exiled by his 'People's Tsar' for his love for Russia and his trust in him.
2o A. A. Potebnya commanded a detachment which participated m the Polish rising; he died in battle, March 1863. (A.S.)
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
586
Towards the end of 1863 the circulation of The Bell dropped from two thousand or two thousand five hundred to five hundred, and never again rose above one thousand copies. The Charlotte Corday from Orlov and the Daniel from the peasants had been right.21
21 The 'Charlotte Corday' was the young Russian woman who visited H. in London in 1 862 and prophesied, 'Your friends and supporters will abandon you.' Daniel was Martyanov, who had warned H. of the de·
crease of The Bell's influence in Russia because of his defence of the 1 863 Polish revolt. (A.S.)
T H E
L A T E R
Y E A R S
( 1 8 6 0 - 1 8 6 8 )
FrcLgn1ents
S 'V I S S V I E W S
I REACHED FREIBURG at ten o'clock in the evening and went straight to the Zahringhof. The same landlord in a black velvet skull-cap who had received me in 1 85 1 , with the same regular features and superciliously polite face of a Russian master of the ceremonies, or an English hall-porter, came up to the omnibus and congratulated us on our arrival.
And the dining-room is the same, the same little rectangular folding sofas upholstered in red velvet.
Fourteen years have passed over Freiburg like fourteen days!
There is the same pride in the cathedral organ, the same pride in their suspension bridge.
The breath of the new restless spirit, continually shifting and casting down barriers, that was raised by the equinoctial gales of 1 848, scarcely touched towns which morally and physically stand apart, such as Jesuitical Freiburg and pietistic Neuchatel.
These towns, too, have advanced, though at the pace of a tortoise; they have improved, though to us they seem backward in their unfashionable, stony garb . . . . And of course much in the life of former days was not bad; it was more comfortable, more stable; it was better calculated for the small number of the chosen, and just for that reason it does not suit the huge number of the newly called, who are far from being spoiled or difficult to please.
Of course, in the present state of technical development, with the discoveries that are being made every day, with the facilitation of resources, it has been possible to organise modern life on a free and ample scale. But the Western European, as soon as he has a place of his own, is satisfied with little. In general, he has been falsely charged, and chiefly he has charged himself, with the passion for comfort and that self-indulgence of which people talk. All that, like everything else in him, is rhetoric and flourish. He has had free institutions without freedom, why not have a brilliant setting for a narrow and clumsy life? There are 1 This is Herzen's title for the eighty-odd p11gl's of "miscellaneous pieces"
at the end of Volwne III. They were written between 1 865 and 1 868.
(D.M.)
591
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
592
exceptions. One may find all sorts of things among English aristocrats and French camelias and the Jewish princes of this world . . . . All that is personal and temporary; the lords and bankers have no future and the camelias have no heirs. We are talking about the whole world, about the golden mean, about the chorus and the corps de ballet, which now is on the stage and acting, leaving aside the father of Lord Stanley, who has 20,000
francs a day, and the father of that child of twelve who flung himself into the Thames the other day to ease for his parents the task of feeding him.
The old tradesman who has grown rich loves to talk of the conveniences of life. For him it is still a novelty that he is a gentleman, qu'il a ses aises, 'that he has the means to do this, and that doing that will not ruin him.' He marvels at money and knows its value and how quickly it flies, \vhile his predecessors in wealth believed neither in its worth nor in its exhaustibility, and so have been ruined. But they ruined themselves with taste.
The bourgeois has little notion of making ample use of his accumulated capital. The habit of the former narrow, hereditary, niggardly life remains. He may indeed spend a great deal of money, but he does not spend it on the right things.
A generation which has passed through the shop has absorbed standards and ambitions which are not those of spaciousness, and cannot get a\vay from them. Enrything with them is done as though for sale, and they naturally have in view the greatest possible benefit, profit and that end of the stuff that will make the best show. The proprietaire instinctively diminishes the size of his rooms and increases their number, �ot knowing why he makes the windows small and the ceilings Ion·; he takes advantage of every corner to snatch it from his lodger or from his own family. That corner is of no use to him but, just in case, he will take it away from somebody. V\'ith peculiar satisfaction he builds two inconvenient kitchens instead of one decent one, and puts up a garret for his maid in which she can neither work nor turn round, but to make up for that it is damp. To compensate for this economy of light and space he paints the front of the house, packs the drawing-room with furniture, and lays out bt>fore the hous(• a flower-bed with a fountain in it, which is a source of tribulation to children, nurses, dogs and tenants.
\\"hat is not spoilt by misPrliness is finished off by sluggishness of intellect. Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of da ily lift• without mingling with it, casts its vvealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for
The Later Years
593
it. All the profit goes to the wholesale dealers and for the others it is reckoned in scanty drops ; the wholesale dealers are changing the face of the earth, while private life trails along beside their steam-engines in its old lumbC'ring waggon with its broken-down nags. . . .
A fireplace which does not smoke is a dream. A landlord in Geneva said to me soothingly: 'This fireplace only smokes in the bise': that is just when one most needs a firC' ; and he says this as though the bise \vere an accident or a new invention, as though it had not blown before the birth of Calvin and would not blow after the death of Fazy. In all Europe, not excepting Spain or Italy, one must make one's \vill at the approach of winter, as men used to do formerly when they set off from Paris to Marseilles, and must hold a service to the Iversky Madonna in mid
April.
If these people tell me that they arC' not occupied with the vanity of vanities, and that they have many other things to do, I will forgive them their smoky chimneys, and the locks that open the door and your veins at the same time, and the stench in the passage, and so on ; but I shall ask, what is their work, what are their higher interests? They have none . . . . They only make a display of them to cover the inconceivable emptiness and senselessness of their lives.