Many blessings may have been ordained by fate for the epoch of \vhich the last expression is to be found in the notes of Verdi, but the artistic vocation was certainly not among them. Its own creation-the cafe chantant-an amphibious product, half-way between the beer-cellar and the boulevard theatre, fits it perfectly. I have nothing against cafes chantants, but I cannot give them serious artistic significance; they satisfy the 'average customer,' as the English say, the average consumer, the average bidder, the hundred-headed hydra of the middle class, and there is nothing more to be said.
The \vay out of this situation is still far in the distance.
Behind the multitude now ruling stands an even greater multitude of candidates for it, to whom the manners, ideas and habits of life of the middle class appeal as the one goal to strive for.
There are enough to fill their places ten times over. A world without land, a world dominated by town life, with the right of property carried to the extreme, has no other way of salvation, and it will all pass through petite bourgeoisie, which in our
!'yes is inferior, but in the eyes of the agricultural population and the proletariat stands for culture and progress. Those who
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are in advance live in tiny cliques like secular monasteries, taking no interest in what is being done by the world outside their walls.
The same thing has happened before, but on a smaller scale and less consciously; moreover, in the past there were ideals and beliefs, words which set beating both the simple heart of the poor citizen and the heart of the haughty knight; they had holy things in common, to which all men bowed down as before the blessed sacrament. Where is there a hymn which could be sung nowadays with faith and enthusiasm in every storey of the house from the cellar to the garret? Where is our 'Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott' or our 'Marseillaise'?
When Ivanov was in London he used to say with despair that he was looking for a new religious type, and could find it nowhere in the world about him. A pure artist, fearing to lie with his brush as if it had been perjury, penetrating rather by imagination than by analysis, he required us to show him where were the picturesque features in which a new Redemption would shine forth. We did not show them to him. 'Perhaps Mazzini will,' he thought.
Mazzini would have pointed out to him 'the unity of Italy,' or perhaps Garibaldi in 1 861, as the forerunner, the last of the great men.
Ivanov died still knocking; the door was not opened to him.
Isle of Wight, 1 0th June, 1 862
-from Letter 1 of Ends and Beginnings: Letters to I. S. Turgenev ( 1862-3 )
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 21 This fourth "letter" to Turl!:enev is here uncut, as is the following eighth letter, both examples of the remarkable political prose Herzen was writing toward the end of his life. I know little else comparable in its unusual combination of an easy, spontaneous, flexibly varied style with original insights drawn from a lifetime of experience as an activist in radical politics-and. more important, one who reflected on his actions . . . . Also I couldn't bear to cut them, wildly digressive as they are-indeed, for that very reason, since even more than in the rest of the memoirs, which is saying a lot, the detours are obviously the main road. (D.M.)
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said this to me, but I who say it to you) for so continually
\vandering from the point. Parentheses are my joy and my m:sfortune. 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 Academy fashion which will soon have passed away altogether: 'Notre ami abuse de la parenthese avec intemperance!' It is for the sake of digressions and parentheses that I prefer writing in the form of letters, that is, letters to friends; one can then write without embarrassment whatever comes into one's head.
Well, so my Saratov Fourierist is in Devonshire and says to me: 'Do you know what is odd? I have just been in Paris for the first time. Well--of course . . . there's no denying . . . but, if you look a bit deeper, Paris is a dull place--really dull !'
'What next!' I said to him.
'Upon my soul, it is.'
'But why did you think it was gay there?'
'Upon my word, after the wilds of Saratov! '
'Perhaps it i s just because of that. But really, weren't you bored in Paris just because it's so excessively gay there?'
'You are playing the fool, just as you always did.'
'Not at all. London, that always looks like September, is more to our taste; though the boredom here, too, is frightful.'
'VVhere 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 apparently it was not very long nor particularly important, stirred in me a whole series of old notions concerning the fact that the brain of modern man is short of a sort of fish-glue; that is why his mind does not settle, and is thick with sediment-new theories, old practice, new practice, old theories.
And what logic was that? 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 remark, 'I fancy you are drunk, my lad,'
they usually 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 upper limits of this better life?
Is it so according to Reichardt's guide-book?
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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 most complete representatives of Western Europe are declining along with it. The audacity and recklessness in general conversations which float, as the Spirit of God before, 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 grandmother's store-room. Decayed 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 perhaps is burnt to ashes?
In that case continue to baptise it with water, and do not be bored in Paris. Take my father, for example: he spent eight years in Paris and was never bored. Thirty years afterwards he loved to tell of the fetes given by the marechaux and by Napoleon himself, the suppers at the Palais Royal in company with actresses and opera dancers decked in diamonds that had bec>n plucked out of conquered royal crowns, of the Yusupovs, the Tyufyakins and other princes russes who staked there more souls of peasants than fell 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 Honore to the Champs