Look how the Parisian gamins jeer at any English eccentric, and how the London street-boys mock at a Frenchman; in this little example the two opposite types of two European races are sharply defined. The Parisian gamin is insolent and persistent,
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he can be insufferable: but, in the first place, he is witty, his mischief is confined to jests, and hf' is as amusing as he is annoying; and, in the second, there are words at which he blushes and at once desists, there are words which he never uses; it is difficult to stop him by rudeness, and if the victim l ifts his stick I do not ans\Yer for the consequences. It should be noted, too, that for French boys there must be something striking: a red waistcoat with dark-blue stripes, a brick-coloured coat, an unusual muffler, a flunkey carrying a parrot or a dog, things done only by Englishmen and, take note, only outside England. To be simply a foreigner is not enough to make them mock and run after you.
The wit of the London street-boy is simpler. It begins with guffawing at the sight of a foreigner,32 if only he has a moustache, a beard, or a wide-brimmed hat; then they shout a score of times: 'French pigl French dog/' If the foreigner turns to them with some reply, the neighings and bleatings are doubled ; if he walks away, the boys run after him-then all that is left is the ultima ratio of lifting a stick, and sometimes bringing it down on the first that comes to hand. After that the boys run away at break-neck speed, with showers of oaths and sometimes throwing mud or a stone from a distance.
In France a grown-up workman, shopman, or woman streetvendor never takes part with the gamins in the pranks they play upon foreigners; in London all the dirty women, all the grownup shopmen grunt like pigs and abet the boys.
In France there is a shield which at once checks the most persistent boy-that is, poverty. In England, a country that knows no word more insulting than the word beggar, the foreigner is the more persecuted the poorer and more defenceless he is.
One Italian refugee, who had been an officer in the Austrian cavalry and had left his country after the war, completely destitute, went about when winter came, in his army officer's greatcoat. This excited such a sensation in the market through which he had to pass every day, that the shouts of 'Who's your tailor?' the laughter, and finally tugs at his collar, went so far that the Italian gave up wearing his greatcoat and, shivering to the marrow of his bones, went about in his jacket.
This coarseness in street mockery, this lack of delicacy and tact in the common people, helps to explain how it is that women are nowhere beaten so often and so badly as in En-
�2 All this has grea tly changed since the Crimean \Var. ( 1 866.)
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gland,33 and how it is that an English father is ready to cast dishonour on his own daughter and a husband on his wife by taking legal proceedings against them.
The rude manners of the English streets are a great offence at first to the French and the Italians. The German, on the contrary, receives them with laughter and answers with similar swear-words; an interchange of abuse is kept up, and he remains very well satisfied. They both take it as a kindness, a nice joke.
'Bloody dog! '34 the proud Briton shouts at him, grunting like <\ pig. 'Beastly John Bull!' answers the German, and each goes on his way.
This behaviour is not confined to the streets: one has but to look at the polemics of Marx, Heinzen, Ruge, ct consorts, which never ceased after 1 849 and are still kept up on the other side of the ocean. We are accustomed to see such expressions in print, such accusations: nothing is spared, neither personal honour, family affairs nor confidential secrets.
Among the English, coarseness disappears as we rise higher in the scale of intelligence or aristocratic breeding; among the Germans it never disappears. The greatest poets of Germany (with the exception of Schiller) fall into the most uncouth vulgarity.
One of the reasons of the mauvais ton of Germans is that breeding in our sense of the word does not exist in Germany at all. Germans are taught, and taught a great deal, but they are not educated at all, even in the aristocracy, in which the manners of the barracks, of the Junker, are predominant. In their daily life they are completely lacking in the aesthetic sense. The French have lost it, just as they have lost the elegance of their language; the Frenchman of to-day rarely knows how to write a letter free from legal or commercial expressions-the counter and the barrack-room have deformed his manners.
I stayed in Geneva 'til the middle of December. The persecution which the Russian government was secretly commencing against 3.1 The Times reckoned two years ago that on an average in every police district in London (there are ten) there were two hundred cases of as·
saults on women and children per annum; and how many assaults never lead to proceedings?
34 In English in the text. (R.)
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me compelled me to go to Ziirich to try to save my mother's property, into which the never-to-be-forgotten Emperor had stuck his Imperial claws.
This was a frightful period in my life. A lull between two thunderclaps, an oppressive, heavy lull, but there was nothing pleasant about it . . . there were threatening signs, but even then I still turned away from them. Life was uneven, inharmonious, but there were bright days in it; for those I am indebted to the grand, natural scenery of Switzerland.
Remoteness from men, a nd beautiful natural surroundings, have a wonderfully healing effect. From experience I \\TOte in A Wreck:
'When the soul bears within it a great grief, when a man has not mastered himself sufficiently to grow reconciled with the past, to grow calm enough for understanding, he needs distance and mountains, the sea and warm, mild air. He needs them that grief may not turn into obduracy and despair, that he may not grow hard . . . .'
I was longing for rest from many things even then. A year and a half spent in the centre of political upheavals and dissensions, in constant provocation, in the midst of bloody sights, fearful downfalls and petty treacheries, had left a sediment of much bitterness, anguish and weariness at the bottom of my soul.
Irony began to take a different character. Granovsky wrote to me after reading From the Other Shore, which I wrote just at that time: 'Your book has reached us. I read it with joy and a feeling of pride . . . but for all that there is something of ·fatigue about it; you stand too much alone, and perhaps you will become a great writer, but what in Russia was lively and attractive to all in your talent seems to have disappeared on foreign soil. . . .'
Then Sazonov who, just before I left Paris in 1849, read the beginning of my story, Duty Before Everything, written two years previously, said to me: 'You won't finish that story, and you will never \Yrite anything more like it. Your light laugh and good-natured jokes are gone for ever.'