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An involuntary revelation — it bursts directly from the heart, and speaks directly to the hearts of others: art can but imperfectly supply it; it is born of emotion : in short, this music of speech reaches beyond the ideas that it conveys; it embodies also the indefinable, involuntary extension of those ideas. Herein lies the reason of Madame Sand's having so quickly obtained among us the reputation winch she deserves.
Sacred love of solitude, thou art no less than a real necessary of mental life ! The world is so false, that a mind imbued with a passionate love of truth must needs be disposed to shun society. Misanthropy is a calumniated sentiment; it is a hatred of lies. There are no misanthropes; but there are souls which would rather fly than feign.
Alone with God, and man becomes humble under the influence of internal sincerity; in his retreat he expiates, by silence and meditation, all the successful frauds of worldly spirits, their triumphant duplicities, their vanities, their hidden and too often rewarded treacheries : incapable of being duped, unwilling to dupe, he becomes a voluntary victim, and conceals himself with as much care as the courtiers of fashion take to display themselves. Such is undoubtedly the secret of the life of saints, — a secret easily penetrated, but a life difficult to imitate. t` Vere I a saint I should no longer feel curiosity in travelling, nor yet a desire to relate my travels. I am seeking: the saints have found.
While thus seeking, I have surveyed the Russian empire. I wished to see a country where reigns the calm of a power assured of its own strength : but arrived there, I found only the reign of silence main-
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tained by fear; and I have drawn from the spectacle a lesson very different from the one which I came to seek. Russia is a world scarcely known to foreigners: the Russians who travel to escape it, pay, when at a distance, in crafty encomiums, their tribute to their country; and the greater number of travellers who have described it to us have been unwilling to discover in it any thing but that which they went to find. If people will defend their prejudices against evidence, where is the good of travelling ? When thus determined to view nations as they wish to view them, there is no longer a necessity for leaving their own country.
The following is the
In Russia, all that strikes the eye, every thing that passes around, bears the impress of a regularity that is startling; and the first thought that enters the mind of the traveller, when he contemplates this symmetrical system, is that a uniformity so complete, a regularity so contrary to the natural inclinations of men, cannot have been established, and cannot be maintained except by violence. Imagination vainly implores a little variety, like a bird uselessly beating its wings against a cage. Under such a system, a man may know the first day of his life all that he will see and do until the last. This hard tyranny is called, in official language, respect for unity, love of order; and it is a fruit of despotism so precious to methodical minds, that they think they cannot pay too dear for it.
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In France, I had imagined myself in accord with these rigorous disciplinarians; but since I have lived under a despotism which imposes military rule upon the population of an entire empire, I admit that I prefer a little of the disorder which announces vigour to the perfect order which destroys life.
In Russia, the government interferes with every thing and vivifies nothing. In that immense empire, the people, if not tranquil, are mute ; death hovers over all heads, and strikes capriciously whom it pleases: man there has two coffins, the cradle and the tomb. The Russian mothers, ought to weep the birth more than the death of their children.
I do not believe that suicide is common there : the people suffer too much to kill themselves. Singular disposition of man ! — when terror presides over his life, he does not seek death ; he knows what it is already. *
But if the number of suicides in Russia were ever so great, no one would know it; the knowledge of
* Dickens says — speaking of the solitary prison of Philadelphia — ' Suicides are rare among the prisoners ; are almost, indeed, unknown. But no argument in favour of the system can reasonably be deduced from this circumstance, although it is very often urged. AH men who have made diseases of the mind their study, know perfectly well that such extreme depression and despair, as to change the whole character, and beat down all its powers of elasticity and self-resistance, may be at work within a man, and yet stop short of self-destruction.'—
The great writer, the profound moralist, the Christian philosopher from whom I borrow these lines, has not only the authority of talent, and of a style which engraves his thoughts on brass, but his opinion on this subject is law.
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numbers is a privilege of the Russian police: I am ignorant whether they arrive correct before the eyes of the Emperor; but I do know that no misfortune is published under his reign until he has consented to the humiliating confession of the superiority of Providence. The pride of despotism is so great that it seeks to rival the power of God. Monstrous jealousy ! into what aberrations hast thou not plunged princes and subjects ! Who will dare to love truth, who will defend it in a country where idolatry is the principle of the constitution ? A man who can do every thing is the crowned impersonification of a lie.
It will be understood that I am not now speaking of the Emperor Nicholas, but of the Emperor of Russia. We often hear mention made of customs which limit Iris power : I have been struck with its abuse, but have seen no remedy.
In the eyes of real statesmen, and of all practical minds, the laws are, I admit, less important than our precise logicians and political philosophers believe them ; for it is the manner in which they are applied that decides the life of the people. True ; but the life of the Russian people is more gloomy than that of any other of the European nations ; and when I say the people, I speak not only of the peasants attached to the soil, but of the whole empire.
A government that makes profession of being vigorous, and that causes itself to be dreaded on every occasion, must inevitably render men miserable. Wherever the public machine is rigorously exact, there is despotism, whatever be the fiction, monarchical or democratical, which covers it. The best government is that which makes itself the least felt;
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but such lightness of the yoke is only procured by the labours of genius and superior wisdom, or by a certain relaxation of social discipline. Governments, which were beneficent in the youth of nations, when men, still half savages, honoured every thing that snatched them from a state of disorder, become so again in the old age of
