of wind the cloud succeeds the picture, and soon the cloud vanishes in turn. Dust, smoke, and chaotic nothingness, are all that can issue from such inconsistent heads.
No plant takes root in a soil thus profoundly agitated. Every thing is swept away; every thing becomes levelled; all is wrapt in vapour. But from this fluid element nothing is finally expelled. Friendship or love that was imagined lost, will often again rise, evoked by a glance or a single word, and at the very moment when least thought of; though, in truth, it is only thus revived to be almost as quickly again dismissed. Under the ever-waving wand of these magicians, life is one continued phantasmagoria— one long fatiguing game, in which, however, the clumsy alone ruin themselves; for when all the world is cheating, nobody is being cheated : in a word, they are false as water, to use the poetical expression of Shaks-peare, the broad strokes of whose pencil are the revelations of nature.
This explains to me why hitherto they have appeared to be doomed by Providence to a despotic government: it is in pity as much as through custom that they are tyrannised over.
If, in addressing myself to the friend to whom I send this chapter, I addressed myself to but one philosopher, here would be the place for inserting details of manners which resemble nothing that he has ever i·ead of, even in France, where every thing is written and described; but, behind him, I see the public,
OF POLITICAL FREEDOM.75
and this consideration stops me. My friend must therefore imagine what I do not relate ; or rather, to speak more correctly, that friend will never be able to imagine it. The excesses of despotism, which can alone give birth to the moral anarchy that here reigns around me, being only known by hearsay, their consequences would appear incredible. `Vhere legitimate liberty is wanted, illegitimate liberty is sure to spring up ; where the use is interdicted, the abuse will certainly creep in : deny the right, and you create the fraud; refuse justice, and you open the door to crime.
Under the influence of these principles, Moscow is, of all the cities in Europe, the one in which the dissolute man of the fashionable world has the widest field for his career. The government is too well informed not to know that under an absolute rule some kind of revolt must somewhere break out; but it prefers that this revolt should be in manners rather than in politics. Here lies the secret of the licence of the one party and the tolerance of the other. The corruption of manners in Moscow has also other causes. One is, that the greater number of well-born, but, by their conduct, ill-famed persons, retire when disgraced, and here establish themselves.
After the orgies which our modern literature takes pleasure in depicting, if we are to believe the authors, with a moral intention, we ought to be familiar with all the feauires of dissolute life. I pass over the question of the pretended utility of their aim; I can tolerate their long though useless sermons: but there is in literature something more dangeroits even than the immoral; it is the ignoble. If, under the pretext of provoking salutary reforms in the lowest classes E 2
76OBSERVATIONS ON
of societyj the taste of the superior classes is corrupted, evil is done. To present to women the language of the pot-houses, to make men of rank in love with coarse vulgarities, is to injure the manners of a nation in a way for which no legal reform can compensate. Literature is lost among us, because our most intellectual writers, forgetting all poetical sentiment, all respect for the beautiful, write for the taste of the town ; and, instead of elevating their new readers to the views of delicate and noble minds, they lower themselves to the point of ministering to their coarsest appetites. They have rendered literature an ardent liquor, because, with sensibility, the faculty of tasting and feeling simple things is lost. This is a more serious evil than all the inconsistencies that have been noted in the laws and manners of the former state of society. It is another consecpienee of the modern materialism, which would reduce every thing to the useful, and which can only discern the useful in immediate and positive results. Woe to the land where the men of genius lower themselves to play the part of commissioners of police! When an author feels himself called upon to describe vice he should at least redouble his respect for good taste ; he should propose to himself the ideal truth for type even of his most vulgar characters. But too often, under the professions of our moralist, or rather moralising romance-writers, we discover less love of virtue than cynic indifference to good taste. There is a want of poetry in their works, because there is a want of faith in their hearts. To ennoble the picture of vice, as Kich-ardson has done in his ' Lovelace,' is not to corrupt the mind, but to avoid soiling the imagination and
MODERN LITERATURE.77
lowering the tone of sentiment. Such respect for the delicacy of the reader has, if yon like, a moral object; it is far more essential to civilised society than an exact knowledge of the turpitude of its bandits, and the virtues of its prostitutes. I must ask pardon for this excursion in the fields of conteinporary criticism, and hasten to return to the strict and painful duties of the veracious traveller, duties that are unfortunately too often opposed to these laws of literary composition which a respect for my language and my country has induced me to refer to.
The writings of our boldest painters of manners are but weak copies of the originals which have been daily presented to my eyes since I have been in Russia.
Bad faith injures every thing, but more especially the affairs of commerce: here it has yet another sphere of action; it incommodes the libertines in the execution of their most secret contracts. The continual alterations of money, favour, in Moscow, every species of subterfuge ; nothing is clear and precise in the mouth of a Russian, nothing is well defined nor well guaranteed ; and the purse always gains something by the slipperiness of the language. This extends even to amorous transactions: each party, knowing the duplicity of the other, requires payment in advance, whence much difficulty arises.
The female peasants are more cunning than even the women of the town. Sometimes these young and doubly-corrupted savages violate the primary laws of prostitution, and escape with their booty, without paying the dishonourable debt they had contracted. The bandits of other lands observe their oaths, and E 3
78MONGOLIAN KAPACITY.
maintain the good faith of comradeship in crime. The dissolute and abandoned in Russia know nothing that is sacred, not even the religion of debauchery, though it be a guarantee essential to the exercise of their profession, — so true is it that the commerce even of shame cannot be carried on without probity.
Civilisation, which elsewhere elevates the mind, here perverts it. It had been better for the Russians had they remained savages : — to polish slaves is to betray society. It is needful that a man possess a fund of virtue to enable him to bear culture.
Under the influence of their government the Russian people have become taciturn and deceitful, although naturally gentle, lively, docile and pacific. Assuredly these are rare endowments: and yet, where there is a want of sincerity there is nothing. The Mongolian avidity of this race, and its incurable suspicion and distrust, are revealed by the least as well as the most important circumstances of life. Should you owe twenty roubles to a workman, he would return twenty times a day to ask for them, unless, at least, you were a dreaded nobleman. In Latin lands a promise is a sacred thing—a pledge to the giver as well as the receiver. Among the Greeks, and their disciples the Russians, the word of a man is nothing better than the false key of a robber — it serves to break into the interests of others.
To make the sign of the cross in the streets before an image, and on sitting down to table, is all that the Greek religion teaches.
Intemperance is here carried to such excess, that one of the men, the most liked, and whose society is the most courted in Moscow, disappears every year
