When I was imprisoned at Clairvaux he wrote to me, and we exchanged a few letters. He wrote that though our letters would be read by the Russian police in Siberia, and by the French prison authorities in France, we might as well write to each other even under this double supervision. He spoke of his family life, of his three children, whom he described interestingly, and of his work. He earnestly advised me to keep a watchful eye upon the development of science in Italy, where excellent and original researches are conducted, but remain unknown in the scientific world until they have been exploited in Germany; and he gave me his opinions about the probable progress of political life in Russia. He did not believe in the possibility with us, in a near future, of constitutional rule on the pattern of the West European parliaments; but he looked forward—and found it quite sufficient for the moment—to the convocation of a sort of deliberative National Assembly (Zémskiy Sobór or Etats Généraux). It would not make laws, but would only work out the schemes of laws, to which the imperial power and the Council of State would give definitive form and final sanction.
Above all he wrote to me about his scientific work. He had always had a decided leaning towards astronomy, and when we were at St. Petersburg he had published in Russian an excellent summary of all our knowledge of the shooting stars. With his fine critical mind he soon saw the strong or the weak points of different hypotheses; and without sufficient knowledge of mathematics, but endowed with a powerful imagination, he succeeded in grasping the results of the most intricate mathematical researches. Living with his imagination amongst the moving celestial bodies, he realized their complex movements often better than some mathematicians—especially the pure algebraists—who are apt to lose sight of the realities of the physical world and see nothing but their own formulae. Our St. Petersburg astronomers spoke to me with great appreciation of that work of my brother’s. Now, he undertook to study the structure of the universe; to analyze the data and the hypotheses about the worlds of suns, star-clusters, and nebulae in the infinite space, and to work out the problems of their grouping, their life, and the laws of their evolution and decay. The Púlkova astronomer, Gyldén, spoke highly of this new work of Alexander’s, and introduced him by correspondence to Mr. Holden in the United States, from whom, while at Washington lately, I had the pleasure of hearing an appreciative estimate of the value of these researches. Science is greatly in need, from time to time, of such scientific speculations of a higher standard, made by a scrupulously laborious, critical, and, at the same time, imaginative mind.
But in a small town of Siberia, far away from all the libraries, unable to follow the progress of science, he had only succeeded in embodying in his work the researches which had been made up to the date of his exile. Some capital work had been done since. He knew it, but how could he get access to the necessary books, so long as he remained in Siberia? The approach of the time of his liberation did not inspire him with hope either. He knew that he would not be allowed to stay in any of the university towns of Russia, or of Western Europe, but that his exile to Siberia would be followed by a second exile, perhaps even worse than the first, to some hamlet of Eastern Russia.
“A despair like Faust’s takes hold of me at times,” he wrote to me. When the time of his liberation was at hand, he sent his wife and children to Russia, taking advantage of one of the last steamers before the close of navigation, and, on a gloomy night, this despair put an end to his life.
A dark cloud hung upon our cottage for many months—until a flash of light pierced it, when, the next spring, a tiny being, a girl who bears my brother’s name, came into the world, and with her helpless cry set new strings vibrating in my heart.
XVI
In 1886 the socialist movement in England was in full swing. Large bodies of workers had openly joined it in all the principal towns, as well as a number of middle-class people, chiefly young, who helped it in different ways. An acute industrial crisis prevailed that year in most trades, and every morning, and often all the day long, I heard groups of workers going about in the streets singing “We’ve got no work to do,” or some hymn, and begging for bread. People flocked
