But this kind of transition, however quickly it approaches, is not achieved all at once, especially at forty. A long time passed
\vhile I was coming to terms with my new ideas. Though I had made up my mind to work, for a long: time I did nothing, or did not do what I wanted to do.
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The idea with which I had come to London, to seek the tribunal of my own people, was a sound and right one. I repeat this even now, with full, considered conviction. To whom, i n fact, are w e to appeal for judgment, for the re-establishment of the truth, for the unmasking of falsehood?
It is not for us to litigate in the court of our enemies, who judge by other principles, by laws which we do not recognise.
One can settle one's quarrels for oneself; no doubt one can. To take the law in one's own hands is to snatch back by force what has been taken by force, and so restore the balance; vengeance is just as sound and simple a human feeling as gratitude ; but neither revenge nor taking the law into one's own hands explains anything. It may happen that a clear explanation is what matters most to a man. The re-establishment of the truth may be dearer to him than revenge. My own error lay not in the main proposition but in the underlying assumption ; in order that there may be a tribunal of one's own people one must first of all have one's own people. \Vhere were mine . . . ?
I had had my own people once in Russia. But I was so completely cut off in a foreign land; I had at all costs to get into communication with my own people; I wanted to tell them of the weight that lay on my heart. Letters were not allowed in, but books would gpt through of themselves; \'>Tiling letters was impossible: I would print ; and little by little I set to work upon My Past and Thoughts, and upon setting up a Russian printingpress.
The En1L{j·rctn ts il1 Lorldon
By the waters of Babylon we sat doun and wept.
PsALMs 1 37 : 1
If any one had conceived the idea of writing from the outside the inner history of the political emigres and exiles from the year 1 848 in London, what a melancholy page he would have added to the records of con temporary man. \Vha t sufferings, what privations, wha t tears . . . and what triviality, what narrowness, wha t poverty of intellectual powers, of resources, of understanding, what obstinacy in wrangling, what pettiness of wounded vanity! . . .
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On one hand those simple-hearted men, who by heart and instinct have understood the business of revolution and have made for its sake the greatest sacrifice a man can make, that of voluntary beggary, form the small group of the blessed. On the other hand there are men, actuated by secret, ill-concealed ambition, for whom the revolution meant office, position sociale, and who scuttled into exile when they failed to attain a position.
Then there were all kinds of fanatics, monomaniacs with every sort of monomania, madmen with every variety of madness. It was due to this nervous, strained, irritable condition that tableturning numbered so many victims among the exiles. Almost every one was turning tables, from Victor Hugo and Ledru
Rollin to Quirico Filopanti1 who went farther still and found out everything that a man was doing a thousand years ago.
And with all that not a step forward. They are like the court clock at Versailles, which pointed to one hour, the hour at which the King died . . . . And, like the clock, it has been forgotten to move them on from the time of the death of Louis XV. They point to one event, the extinction of some event. They talk about i t, they think about it, they go back to it. Meeting the same men, the same groups, in five or six months, in two or three years, one becomes frightened: the same arguments are still going on, the same personalities and recriminations: only the furrows drawn by poverty and privation are deeper; jackets and overcoats are shabbier; there are more grey hairs, and they are all older together and bonier and more gloomy . . . and still the same things are being said over and over again.
The revolution with them has remained the philosophy of social order, as it was in the 'nineties, but they have not and cannot have the naive passion for the struggle which in those days gave vivid colouring to the most meagre generalisations and body to the dry outlines of their political framework; generalisations and abstract concepts were a joyful novelty, a revelation in those days. At the end of the eighteenth century men for the first time-not in books but in actual fact-began to free themselves from the fatal, mysteriously oppressive world of theological tradition, and were trying to base on conscious understanding the whole political system which had grown up apart from will or consciousness. In the attempt at a rational state, as in the attempt to found a religion of reason, there was in 1 793 a mighty, titanic poetry, which bore its fruits, but for all that, has withered and weakened in the last sixty years. Our I The pseudonym of Giuseppe Barilli ( 1 8 1 2-94) , mathematician, philosopher and patriot. (R.)
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heirs of the Titans do not notice this. They are like the monks of Mount Athas, who busy themselves about their own affairs, deliver the same speeches \vhich were delivered in the time of Chrysostom and keep up a manner of life blocked long ago by the Turkish sovereignty, which now is drawing towards an end itself . . . and they go on meeting together on certain days to commemorate certain events with the same ritual, the same prayers.
Another brake that slows down the emigres is their constant defending of themselves against each other; this is fearfully destructive of intellectual effort and every sort of conscientious work. They have no objective purpose; all the parties are obstinately conservative, and a movement forward seems to them a weakness, almost a desertion. You have stood under the banner?
Then stand under it, even though in time you have seen that its colours are not quite what they seemed.
So the years pass: gradually everything about them changes.
Where there were snowdrifts, the grass is growing; where there were bushes, there is a forest ; where there was a forest are only tree-stumps . . . they notice nothing. Some ways out have completPly crumbled away and are blocked up: they go on knocking at them; new chinks have opened and beams of light pierce through them, but they look the other way.
ThP relationships formed between the different emigres and the English might furnish by themselves wonderful data for the chemical affinity of various nationalities.
English life at first dazzles the Germans, overwhelms them, then swallows them up, or rather breaks them down into inferior Englishmen. As a rule, if a German undertakes any kind of business, he at once shaves, turns his shirt collar up to his ears, says yes instead of ja and well where there is no need to say anything at all. In a couple of years, he writes his letters and his notes in English, and liws entirely in an English circle. Germans never treat Englishmen as equals, but behave with them as our workpeople behave with officials, and our officials behave with noblPmen of ancient standing.
When they entPr English life, Germans do not really become Englishmen, but affect to be English, and partly cease to be Germans. The English are as whimsical in their relationships