But could a man live through the ordeal of 1848 and 1 849 and remain the same? I was myself conscious of the change. Only at home, when no outsiders were present, we sometimes found moments as of old, not of 'light laughter' but of light sadness, which recalled the past and our friends, recent scenes of our life in Rom<>; beside the cots of our sleeping children or watching their play, the soul was attuned as formerly, as once upon a time-there came upon it a breath of freshness, of youthful
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poetry, of gentle harmony; there was peace and content in the heart, and under the influence of such an evening life was easier for a day or two.
These minutes were not frequent; a painful, melancholy distraction prevented them. The number of visitors kept increasing about us, and by the evening our little drawing-room in the Champs-Elysees was full of strangers. For the most part, these were newly arrived emigres, good, unfortunate people, but I was intimate with only one man . . . . And why was I intimate with him? . . .
35
I was glad to leave Paris, but in Geneva we found ourselves in the same society, though the persons in it were different and it's dimensions were narrower. In Switzerland at that time everything had been hurled into politics; everything-tables d'h6te and coffee-houses, watchmakers and women-all were divided into parties. An exclusive preoccupation with politics, particularly in the oppressive lull that always follows unsuccessful revolutions, is extremely wearisome with its barren aridity and monotonous censure of the past. It is like summer-time in big cities where everything is dusty and hot, airless, where through pale trees the glistening walls and the hot paving-stones reflect the glaring sun. A living man craves for air which has not yet been breathed a thousand times over, which does not smell of the picked bones of life, or ring with discordant jangling, where there is no greasy, putrid stench and incessant noise.
Sometimes we did tear ourselves away from Geneva, visit the shores of Lake Leman and go to the foot of Mont Blanc; and the sombre, frowning beauty of the mountain scenery with its intense shadows screened all the vanity of vanities, refreshing soul and body with the cold breath of its eternal glaciers.
I do not know whether I should like to stay for ever in Switzerland. To us dwellers in the valleys and meadows, the mountains after a time get in the way ; they are too huge and too near, they press in upon us and confine us; but sometimes it is good to stay for a while in their shadow. Moreover a pure, goodhearted race lives in the mountains, a race of people poor but not unhappy, with few wants, accustomed to a life of sturdy independence. The scum of civilisation, its verdigris, has not settled 35 Georg Herwegh ( 1 8 1 7-75), a German poet and radical who seduced Herzen's wife: see "A Family Drama" at the end of Volume II of his Memoirs (not included in this selection) and E. H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles (Gollancz, 1 933) . (D.M.)
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on these people; historical changes pass like clouds beneath their feet and scarcely affect them. The Roman world still endures in Graubiinden: anywhere in Appenzell the time of the peasant wars has scarcely passed. Perhaps in the Pyrenees, in the Tyrol or other mountains such a healthy stock of population is to be found, but it has ceased to -exist in Europe as a whole.
Westerrt European
Arabesques, I I
1 . A L A M E N T
AFTER THE JuNE DAYS I saw that the revolution was vanquished, but I still believed in the vanquished, in the fallen; I believed in the wonder-working power of the relics, in their moral strength.
At Geneva I began to understand more and more clearly that the revolution not only had been vanquished, but had been bound to be vanquished.
My head was dizzy with my discoveries, an abyss was opening before my eyes and I felt that the ground was giving way under my feet.
It was not the reaction that vanquished the revolution. The reaction showed itself everywhere densely stupid, cowardly, in its dotage; everywhere it retreated ignominiously round the corner before the shock of the popular tide, furtively biding its time in Paris, and at Naples, Vienna and Berlin. The revolution fell, like Agrippina, under the blows of its own children, and, what was worse than anything, without their being conscious of i t ; there was more heroism, more youthful self-sacrifice, than good judgment; and the pure, noble victims fell, not knowing for what. The fate of the survivors was almost more grievous.
Absorbed in wrangling among themselves, in personal disputes, in mt>lancholy self-df'ception, and consumed by unbridled vanity, they kt>pt dwelling on their unexpected days of triumph, and
• Herzen's t i t l e is "Il l'ianto," fr. Italian piangrr{', to weep. I have taken the liberty of translating it as "A Lament." ( D.M. )
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were unwilling to take off their faded laurels or wedding garments, though it was not the bride \vho had deceived them.
Misfortunes, idleness and need induced intolerance, obstinacy and exasperation . . . . The emigres broke up into little groups, which rallied not to principles but to names and hatreds. The fact that their thoughts continually turned to the past, and that they lived in an exclusive, closed circle, began to find expression in speech and thought, in manners and in dress; a new class was formed, the class of refugees, and ossified alongside the others.
And just as once Basil the Great wrote to Gregory Nazianzen that he 'wallowed in fasting and delighted in privations,' so now there appeared voluntary martyrs, sufferers by vocation, wretches by profession, among \vhom were some very conscientious people ; and indeed Basil the Great was sincere when he wrote to his friend of orgies of mortification of the flesh and of the voluptuous ecstasy of persecution. ·with all this, consciousness did not move a step forward and thought slumbered. . . . If these people had been summoned by the sound of a new trumpet and a new tocsin they would, like the nine sleeping maidens, have gone on with the day on which they fell asleep.
My heart almost broke at these painful truths; I had to live through a difficult page of my education .
. . . I was sitting mournfully one day in my mother's diningroom at gloomy, disagreeable Zurich ; this was at the end of December 1 849. I was going next day to Paris. It was a cold, snovvy day; two or three logs, smoking and crackling, were unwillingly burning on the hearth. Everyone was busy packing; I was sitting quite alone. My life at Geneva floated before my mind's eye ; everything ahead looked dark ; I was afraid of something, and it was so unbearable that if I could have, I would have fallen on my knees and wept and prayed ; but I could not and instead of a prayer I wrote my curse-my Epilogue to 18·19.
'Disillusionment, fatigue, Blasicrtheit!' The democratic critics said of those lines I vomited up. Disillusionment, yes! Fatigue, yes! . . . Disillusionment is a vulgar, hackneyed word, a veil under which lie hidden the sloth of the heart, egoism posing as love, the noisy emptiness of vanity with pretensions to everything and strength for nothing. All these exalted, unrecognised characters, wizened with envy and wrPtched from pretentiousness, have long wearied us in life and in novels. All that is perfectly true; but is there not something real, peculiarly characteristic of our times, at the bottom of these frightful spiritual sufferings which degenerate into absurd parodies and vulgar masquerade?