were not mere words, but now they have become mere words, like the liturgy and the words of a prayer. Their service has been enormous: by them., through them, France has accomplished her revolution, she has raised the veil of the future and has sprung back in dismay.
A dilemma has presented itself.
Either free institutions will once more set their hands to the 23 Karl Ludwig Michelet ( 1 801-93) , a professor at the University of Berlin. (A.S. )
The Later Years
6 1 7
sacred veil, or there will be government tutelage, external order and internal slavery.
If in the life of the peoples of Europe there had been one single a im, one single aspiration, one side or the other would have gained the upper hand long ago. But as the history of vVestern Europe is constituted, it has led to everlasting struggle.
In the fundamental fact of its everyday life, that its culture is twofold, lies the organic obstacle to consistent development. To live in two civilisations, on two levels, in two \\·orlds, at two stages of development, to live not as a whole organism but -as one part of it, \vhile using the other for food and fuel, and to be always talking about liberty and equality, is becoming more and more difficult.
Attempts to reach a more harmonious, better-balanced system have not been successful. But if they have failed in any given place, that rather proves the unsuitability of the place than the falsity of the principle.
The whole gist of the matter lies in that.
The States of North America with their unity of civilisation will easily outstrip Europe; their situation is simpler. The standard of their civilisation is lower than that of \Vestern Europe, but they have one standard and all attain to it: in that is their fearful strength.
Twenty years ago France burst like a Titan into another life, struggling in the dark, meaninglPssly, without plan and \vith no other knowlPdge than of lwr insufferable agony. She was beaten
'by order and civilisation,' but it was the victor who retreated .
ThP bourgeoisie have had to pay for their melancholy victory with all they had gained by ages of effort, of sacrifice, of wars and revolutions, with the best fruits of their culture.
The centres of pmver, the paths of development-all have changed ; the hidden activity and suppressed work of social reconstruction have passed to other lands beyond the borders of France.
As soon as the Germans were con vinced that the French tide had ebbed, that its frightening revolutionary ideas had fallen into decay, that there was no need to fear her, the Prussian helmet appeared behind the walls of the fortresses on the Rhine.
France still fell back, the helmet still moved fonvard. Bismarck has never thought much of his own people, he has kept both ears cocked tmvards France, he has sniffed the air coming from there, and, convinced of the permanent degradation of that country, he understood that Prussia's day was at hand. Having
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
6 1 8
understood this he ordered a plan from Moltke, h e ordered needles from the gun-smiths, and systematically, with unmannerly German churlishness, gathered the ripe German pears and poured them into the apron of the ridiculous Friedrich Wilhelm, assuring him that he was a hero by a special miracle of the Lutheran god.
I do not believe that the destinies of the world will be left for a long time in the hands of the Germans and the Hohenzollerns.
This is impossible, it is contrary to the good sense of humanity, repugnant to the aesthetic of history. I shall say, as Kent said to Lear, only the other way about: 'In thee, oh Prussia, there is nothing that I could call a king.' But nevertheless, Prussia has thrust France into the background and herself taken the front seat. But nevertheless, having painted the motley rags of the German fatherland all one colour, she will lay down the law to Europe so long as her laws are laid down by the bayonet and carried out by grape-shot, for the very simple reason that she has more bayonets and more grape-shot.
Behind the Prussian wave there will arise another that will not trouble itself much whether the old men with their classical principles like it or not.
England craftily preserves the appearance of strength, standing on one side, as though proud of her pretended non-participation . . . . She has fPlt in the depth of ht>r innards the same social ache that she cured so easily in 1 848 with policemen's stavps; but the throes are more violent . . . and she is drawing in her far-reaching tentacles to meet the conflict at home.
France, amazed, embarrassed by her changed condition, threatens to make \Yar not 011 Prussia Lut on Italy if the latter touches the temporal possessions of the eternal father, and she collects money for a monument to Voltaire.
\Viii the Par-splitting Prussian trumpet of the last judgment by ba ttle bring Latin Europe to life? Will the approach of the learned barbarians awaken her?
Chi lo sa?
I arrh·ed at Genoa with some Americans who had only just crossPd the ocean. They werP impressed by Genoa. Everything they had rPad in books about the Old World tlwy now saw with their own eyes, and thPy were never tired of gazing at the precipitous, na rrow, black, mf•diaPval strPets, thP singular hPight of tlw houses, the half-ruined passages, fortifications and so on.
\Ne wpnt into the wstibule of some palace. A cry of delight hrokP from onP of tlw AmPricans: '! Iow these people did live!
Bow tlwv did liw! What dimensions, what elegance' No, you
The Later Years
6 1 9
will find nothing like it among us.' And h e was ready t o blush for his America. We peeped inside a huge salon. The portraits of former owners, the pictures, the faded walls, the old furniture, the old coats of arms, the unlived-in air, the emptiness, and the old custodian in a black, knitted skull-cap and a threadbare, black frock-coat, with his bunch of keys . . . all said as plainly as words that this was not a house but a curiosity, a sarcophagus, a sumptuous relic of past life.
'Yes,' I said to the Americans as we went out, 'you arc perfectly right, these people did live well.'
March 1 867
The Sztper:Jluozts
ltnd the J£tundicecl l(1 860)
The Onegins and the Pechorins2 were perfectly true to life; they expressed the real sorrow and breakdown of Russian life at that time. The melancholy type of the man who was superfluous, lost merely because he had developed into a man, was to be seen in those days not onlr in poems and novels but in the streets and the villages, in the hotels and the towns . . . . But the dar of the Onegins and the Pechorins is over. There are rzo superfluous men rzow in Russia: on the contrary, now there arc not hands enough to till the vast fields of ours that need ploughing. One who docs not find work now has no one else to blame for it. He must be really a hollow man, a worm-eaten waster or a sluggard.
The Bell, 1 8-J9.
THESE two classes of superfluous men,3 between whom Nature herself raised up a mountain chain of Oblomovs,� and History, 1 First published in The Bell. 1 5th October. 1 860. ( A.S. )
� Pechorin, the hero of Lermontoy's A Hero of Our Time. ( Tr. ) 3 Cf. \Villiam E. Harkins: Dictionary of Russian Literature. ( R . )