Unfortunately for the progress of humanity there are serious obstacles in the way of this radical change of system. The absurd, antiquated and pernicious institutions and customs are supported by abstruse metaphysical reasons and enshrined in mystical romantic sentiment, and in this way they may still be preserved for generations unless the axe be laid to the root of the tree. Now is the critical moment. Russia must be made to rise at once from the metaphysical to the positivist stage of intellectual development; metaphysical reasoning and romantic sentiment must be rigorously discarded; and everything must be brought to the touchstone of naked practical utility.
One might naturally suppose that men holding such opinions must be materialists of the grossest type—and, indeed, many of them gloried in the name of materialist and atheist—but such an inference would be erroneous. While denouncing metaphysics, they were themselves metaphysicians in so far as they were constantly juggling with abstract conceptions, and letting themselves be guided in their walk and conversation by a priori deductions; while ridiculing romanticism, they had romantic sentiment enough to make them sacrifice their time, their property, and sometimes even their life, to the attainment of an unrealisable ideal; and while congratulating themselves on having passed from the religious to the positivist stage of intellectual development, they frequently showed themselves animated with the spirit of the early martyrs! Rarely have the strange inconsistencies of human nature been so strikingly exemplified as in these unpractical, anti-religious fanatics. In dealing with them I might easily, without very great exaggeration, produce a most amusing caricature, but I prefer describing them as they really were. A few years after the period here referred to I knew some of them intimately, and I must say that, without at all sharing or sympathising with their opinions, I could not help respecting them as honourable, upright, quixotic men and women who had made great sacrifices for their convictions. One of them whom I have specially in view at this moment suffered patiently for years from the utter shipwreck of his generous illusions, and when he could no longer hope to see the dawn of a brighter day, he ended by committing suicide. Yet that man believed himself to be a Realist, a Materialist, and a Utilitarian of the purest water, and habitually professed a scathing contempt for every form of romantic sentiment! In reality he was one of the best and most sympathetic men I have ever known.
To return from this digression. So long as the subversive opinions were veiled in abstract language they raised misgivings in only a comparative small circle; but when school-teachers put them into a form suited to the juvenile mind, they were apt to produce startling effects. In a satirical novel of the time a little girl is represented as coming to her mother and saying, "Little mamma! Maria Ivan'na (our new school-mistress) says there is no God and no Tsar, and that it is wrong to marry!" Whether such incidents actually occurred in real life, as several friends assured me, I am not prepared to say, but certainly people believed that they might occur in their own families, and that was quite sufficient to produce alarm even in the ranks of the Liberals, to say nothing of the rapidly increasing army of the Reactionaries.
To illustrate the general uneasiness produced in St. Petersburg, I may quote here a letter written in October, 1861, by a man who occupied one of the highest positions in the Administration. As he had the reputation of being an ultra-Liberal who sympathised overmuch with Young Russia, we may assume that he did not take an exceptionally alarmist view of the situation.
"You have not been long absent—merely a few months; but if you returned now, you would be astonished by the progress which the Opposition, one might say the Revolutionary Party, has already made. The disorders in the university do not concern merely the students. I see in the affair the beginning of serious dangers for public tranquillity and the existing order of things. Young people, without distinction of costume, uniform and origin, take part in the street demonstrations. Besides the students of the university, there are the students of other institutions, and a mass of people who are students only in name. Among these last are certain gentlemen in long beards and a number of revolutionnaires in crinoline, who are of all the most fanatical. Blue collars—the distinguishing mark of the students' uniform—have become the signe de ralliement. Almost all the professors and many officers take the part of the students. The newspaper critics openly defend their colleagues. Mikhailof has been convicted of writing, printing and circulating one of the most violent proclamations that ever existed, under the heading, 'To the young generation!' Among the students and the men of letters there is unquestionably an organised conspiracy, which has perhaps leaders outside the literary circle. . . . The police are powerless. They arrest any one they can lay hands on. About eighty people have already been sent to the fortress and examined, but all this leads to no practical result, because the revolutionary ideas have taken possession of all classes, all ages, all professions, and are publicly expressed in the streets, in the barracks, and in the Ministries. I believe the police itself is carried away by them! What this will lead to, it is difficult to predict. I am very much afraid of some bloody catastrophe. Even if it should not go to such a length immediately, the position of the Government will be extremely difficult. Its authority is shaken, and all are convinced that it is powerless, stupid and incapable. On that point there is the most perfect unanimity among all parties of all colours, even the most opposite. The most desperate 'planter'* agrees in that respect with the most desperate socialist. Meanwhile those who have the direction of affairs do almost nothing and have no plan or definite aim in view. At present the Emperor is not in the Capital, and now, more than at any other time, there is complete anarchy in the absence of the master of the house. There is a great deal of bustle and talk, and all blame they know not whom."**
* An epithet commonly applied, at the time of the
Emancipation, to the partisans of serfage and the defenders
of the proprietors' rights.
** I found this interesting letter (which might have been
written today) thirty years ago among the private papers of
Nicholas Milutin, who played a leading part as an official
in the reforms of the time. It was first published in an
article on "Secret Societies in Russia," which I contributed
to the Fortnightly Review of 1st August, 1877.
The expected revolution did not take place, but timid people had no difficulty in perceiving signs of its approach. The Press continued to disseminate, under a more or less disguised form, ideas which were considered dangerous. The Kolokol, a Russian revolutionary paper published in London by Herzen and strictly prohibited by the Press-censure, found its way in large quantities into the country, and, as is recorded in an earlier chapter, was read by thousands, including the higher officials and the Emperor himself, who found it regularly on his writing-table, laid there by some unknown hand. In St. Petersburg the arrest of Tchernishevski and the suspension of his magazine, The Contemporary, made the writers a little more cautious in their mode of expression, but the spirit of the articles remained unchanged. These energetic intolerant leaders of public opinion were novi homines not personally connected with the social strata in which moderate views and retrograde tenderness had begun to prevail. Mostly sons of priests or of petty officials, they belonged to a recently created literary proletariat composed of young men with boundless aspirations and meagre national resources, who earned a precarious subsistence by journalism or by giving lessons in private families. Living habitually in a world of theories and unrestrained by practical acquaintance with public life, they were ready, from the purest and most disinterested motives to destroy ruthlessly the existing order of things in order to realise their crude notions of social regeneration. Their heated imagination showed them in the near future a New Russia, composed of independent federated Communes, without any bureaucracy or any central power—a happy land in which everybody virtuously and automatically fulfilled his public and private duties, and in which the policeman and all other embodiments of material constraint were wholly superfluous.