That is why neither lectures nor sermons have any effect; that is why neither the learned fathers nor the spiritual fathers can bring us any relief; the monks of knowledge, like the monks of ignorance, know nothing outside the walls of their monasteries and do not test their theories or their deductions by events, and whi le men are perishing from the eruption of the volcano they are blissfully beating time, listening to the music of the heavenly spheres and marvelling at its harmony.
Lord Verulam, Bacon, ages ago divided the learned into spiders and bePs. There are epochs in which the spiders are decidedly in the ascendant, and then masses of spiders' webs are spun, but little honey is gathered. There are conditions of life which are particularly favourable to spiders. Lime groves, flowering meadows and, above all, wings and a social form of life, are necessary for the production of honey. For spiders' webs a quiet corner is enough, with untroubled leisure, plenty of dust and indifference towards everything except the internal process.
At ordinary times it is still possible to plod drowsily along a dusty, smooth road without breaking the spiders' webs, but as soon as it comes to crossing rough ground and tussocks there is trouble.
There \vas a n'ally good, quiet belt of European history beginning with V.'aterloo and lasting till the year 1 848 There was no \\·ar then but plenty of international law and standing armies. ThP governments openly encouraged 'true enlightenmPnt' and quietly suppressPd the falsr; then' was not much freedom but thPre was not much slavery eithPr. Even the despotic rulers werP all good-naturPd in the style of the patriarchal
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669
Francis II, the pietist Friedrich Wilhelm, and Alexander the friend of Arakcheyev. The king of Naples and Nicholas came by way of dessert. Industry flourished, trade flourished even more, factories worked, masses of books were written ; it was the golden age for all cobwebs; in academic aulae and in the studies of the learned endless webs were woven! . . .
History, criminal and civil law, international law, and religion itself were all brought into the field of pure science and thence they dropped like the lacy fringes of a spider's web. The spiders swung at their own sweet will by their filaments, never touching the earth. Which was very fortunate, however, since the earth was covered with other crawling insects, who represented the great idea of the State armed for self-defence, and clapped over-bold spiders into Spandau and other fortresses. The doctrinaires understood everything most perfectly a vol d'araignee.
The progress of humanity was as certain in those days as the route mapped out for His Imperial Majesty when he travelled incognito-from stage to stage with horses ready at the stations.
And then came--February the 24th, June the 24th, the 25th, the 26th and December the 2nd.
These flies were too big for a spider's web.
Even the comparatively slight shock of the July revolution fairly killed such giants as Niebuhr and Hegel. But the triumph was still to the advantage of the doctrinaires; the journalists, the College de France, the political economists sat on the top steps of the throne together with the Orleans dynasty; those who remained alive recovered and adapted themselves somehow to 1 830; they would have probably got on all right even with the republic of the troubadour, Lamartine.
But how could they cope with the days of June?
And the 2nd of December?
Of course, Gervinus�4 teaches us that a democratic revolution is followed by an epoch of centralisation and despotism, but yet something was amiss. Some began asking whether we should not go back to the Middle Ages; others quite simply urged a return to Catholicism. The Stylites of the Revolution pointed with undeviating finger along the whole railway line of time to the year 1 793; the Jews of doctrinairism went on lecturing regardless of facts, in the expectation that mankind would have had its fling and return to Solomon's temple of wisdom.
�4 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried ( 1805-il ) , a German historian. ( R.)
1\l Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
670
Ten years have passed.
Nothing of all that has come off. England has not become Catholic, as Dono so Cortes25 desired ; the nineteenth century has not become the thirteenth, as certain Germans desired ; the peoples resolutely refuse French fraternity (or death ! ) , international law after the pattern of the Peace Society, honourable poverty after Proudhon and a Kirgiz diet of milk and honey.
While the Catholics
The mediaevalists . . .
The Stylites of 1 793 . .
And all the doctrinaires harp on the same strings.
Where is humanity going since it despises such authorities?
Perhaps it does not know i tself.
But we ought to know for it.
Apparently not wh!'re we expected it to go. And, indeed, it is hard to tell where one will get to, travelling on a globe which a few months ago only just missed a comet and may crack any day, as I informed you in my last letter.
1 st Septembl'r, 1 862
-Letter 4 of Ends and Beginnings: Letters to I. S. Turgenev ( 1 862-3 )
V I 26
Be a man, stop and make answer! . .
'Halte-la! Stop!' was said to me this time not by a lunatic but, quite the contrary, by a very well-adjusted gentleman who walked into my room with The Bell in his hand. 'I have come,'
he said, 'to have it out with you. Your Ends and Beginnings have exceeded all bounds; it is time to know when to stop, and really put an end to them, with regrets for having begun.'
"Has it really come to that?'
'It has. You know I'm fond of you, I respect your talent.
'"Well,' I thought, 'it's a bad look-out; it is clear that this "well-
�:; Juan Francisco Donoso Cortes. :\larques Valdegamas ( 1 803-5 3 ) , a Spaniard. was a moderate liberal until the revolution of 1 848 and after that an extreme reactionary. ( R . )
2G This i s t h e eighth. a n d last. o f Herzen's "letters" t o Tuq�enev, which he ran as a series titled Ends and Beginnings in his magazine The Bell, 1 862-3. I t is uncut. (D.M. )
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671
adjusted man" means to abuse me in earnest, or he wouldn't have attacked me with such flattering approaches.'
'Here is my breast,' I said; 'strike.'
My resignation, together with the classical allusion, had a happy effect on my irritated friend, and with a more goodnatured air he said: 'Hear me out calmly, laying aside the vanity of the author and the narrow exclusiveness of the exile: with what object are you writing all this?'
'There are many reasons for it; in the first place, I believe what I write to be the truth, and every man who is not indifferent to the truth has a weakness for spreading it abroad. Secondly
. . . but I imagine the first reason is sufficient.'
'No. You ought to know the public whom you are addressing, the stage of development it has reached, and the circumstances in which it is placed. I'll tell you straight: you have the most pernicious influence on our young people, who are learning from you disrespect for Europe and her civilisation, and consequently do not care to study it seriously but are satisfied with a smattering and think that the breadth of their own nature is enough.'