For how many centuries, I had almost said millennia, was the
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Greek people wiped off the face of the earth as a nation, and still it remained alive, and at the very moment when the whole of Europe was suffocating in the fumes of the Restoration, Greece awoke and alarmed the whole world. But were the Greeks of Capodistria2" lik<> the Gn'eks of P<>ricles or the Greeks of Byzantium? All tha t was left of tlwm was the name and a far-fetched memory. Italy, too, may be renewed, but then she will have to begin a new history. Her emancipation is no more than a right to exist.
The example of Greece is very apt; it is so far away from us that it awakens fewer passions. The Greece of Athens, of Macedon, deprived of independence by Rome, appears again politically independent in the Byzantine period. What does she do in it? l'\othing, or worse than nothing: theological controversy, seraglio revolutions par anticipation. The Turks come to the help of stick-in-the-mud nature and add the brilliance of a conflagration to her violent death. Ancient Greece had lived out her life when the Roman Empire covered and preserved her as the lava and ashes of the volcano preserved Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The Byzantine period raised the coffin-lid, and the dead remained dead, controlled by priests and monks as every tomb is, administered by eunuchs who were perfectly in place as representatives of barrenness. "'ho does not kno\'\" the tales of crusaders in ByzantiumJ Incomparably inferior in culture, in refinement of manners, these savage men-at-arms, these rude swash-bucklers, were yet full of strength, daring and impetuosity; the�· were advancing, and the god of history was with them. He likes men, not for their good qualities but for their sturdy vigour and for their coming upon the stage a propos. That is why as we read the tedious chronicles we rejoice \vhen the Varangians sweep down from their northern snows, and the Slavs float down in cockleshells and leave the mark of their targets on the proud walls of Byzantium. As a schoolboy I was overjoyed at the savage in his shirt21 paddling his canoe alone and going with a gold ear-ring in his ear to an interview with the effeminate, luxurious, scholar!�- Emperor,22 John Tsimisces.
Think a little about Byzantium. Until our Slavophils bring
� ° Capodistria. Joannis Antonios. Count of. was President of th e Greek Republic from 1 828 to 1 831, when he was assassinated. ( Tr.) 2 ! Svvatoslm·. Prince of Kie,·. is meant. ( Tr.) 22 John Tsimisces bee ami' EmpC'ror in 969 by marriage with Theophania.
th<' widow of Romanus II. and rPigned till 9i6. HI' \\"as. in fact. victorious oYer the Russians. ( Tr. )
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into the world a new chronicle adorned with old ikon paintings, and until it receives the sanction of the government, Byzantium will explain a great deal of what it is hard to put into words.
Byzantium could live, but there was nothing for her to do; and nations in general only take a place in history while they are on the stage, that is, while they are doing something.
I think I have mentioned the answer Thomas Carlyle gave to me when I spoke to him of the severities of the Parisian censorship.
'But why are you so angry with it?' he said. 'In compelling the French to keep quiet Napoleon has done them the greatest service. They have nothing �o say, but they want to talk . . . .
Napoleon has given them an official justification . . . .'
I do not say how far I agree with Carlyle, but I do ask myself: Will Italy have anything to say and do on the day after the taking of Rome? And sometimes, without finding an anS\'Iier, I begin to wish that Rome may long remain a quickening desideratum.
Until Rome is taken everything will go fairly well ; there will be energy and strength enough, if only there is money enough .
. . .'Til then, Italy will put up with a great deal : taxes, the Piedmontese struggle for precedence, an extortionate administration and a quarrelsome and importunate bureaucracy; while waiting for Rome, everything seems unimportant. In order to have it people will put up with constraints and they must stand together. Rome is the boundary line, the flag; it is there before their eyes, it stops them sleeping, it prevents their attending to business, it keeps up the fever. In Rome everything will be changed, everything will snap . . . . There, they fancy, is the conclusion, the crown ; not at all . . . there is the beginning.
Nations that are trying to redeem their independence never know ( and it is a very good thing too) that independence of itself gives them nothing except the rights of th ir majority, a place among their peers, and the recognition of their· capability as citizens to pass acts, and that is all.
F R A :\ C E , G E I\ M A X Y . . .
A N 0 A :\1 E R I C :\
IN THE MIDST of these reflections I happrned to come across Quinet's pamphlet, France arzd German;-. I was fearfully pleased with it-not that I specially depended upon the judgments of the
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celebrated historical thinker, though I have a great respect for him personally, but it was not on my own account that I l·ejoiced.
In old days in Petersburg a friend of mine well known for his humour, finding on my table a book of the Berlin Michelet,2:l On the Immortality of the Soul, left me a note which read as follows: 'Dear friend, when you have read this book, be so good as to tell me briefly whether there is an immortality of the soul or not. It does not matter for me, but I should like to kno\•; in order to set at rest the minds of my relations.' VVell, it is for the sake of my relations that I am glad I have come upon Quinet. In spite of the supercilious attitude many of them have taken up in regard to European authorities, our friends still pay more attention to them than to the likes of us. That is why I have tried when I could to put my O\vn thoughts under the protection of a European nurse. Availing myself of Proudhon, I said that not Catiline but death was at the doors of France; hanging on to the coattails of Stuart Mill, I learnt by heart what he said about the Chineseness of the English ; and I am very glad that I can take Quinet by the hand and say: 'Here my honoured friend Quinet says in 1 867 about Latin Europe what I said about the whole of it in 1 847 and all the following years.'
Quinet sees with horror and grief the degradation of France, the softening of her brain, her increasing shallowness. He does not understand the cause; he seeks it in her deviation from the principles of 1 789 and in her loss of political liberty, and so through his grief there is a hint in his words of a hidden hope of recovery by a return to a genuine parliamentary regime, to the great principles of the Revolution.
Quinet does not observe that the great principlPs of which he speaks, and the political ideas of the Latin world generally, have lost their significance, their musical-box spring has played as much as it could and has almost snapped. Les principes de 1 789