No revolutionary papers could be printed in France at - that time, under Marshal MacMahon. Even the singing of the “‘ Marseillaise ”’ was considered a crime; and I was once very much amazed at the terror which seized several of my co-passengers in a train when they heard a few recruits singing the revolutionary song (in May, 1878). “Is it _ permitted again to sing the ‘ Marseillaise’? ”’ they asked one another with anxiety. The French press had consequently no socialist papers. The Spanish papers were very well _ edited, and some of the manifestoes of their congresses were _ admirable expositions of anarchist socialism; but who knows _ anything of Spanish ideas outside of Spain? As to the _ [alian papers they were all short-lived, appearing, disap- 390 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST pearing, and reappearing elsewhere under different names; and admirable as some of them were, they did not spread beyond Italy. Consequently, the Jura Federation, with its papers printed in French, became the centre for the main- tenance and expression in the Latin countries of the spirit which —I repeat it—saved Europe from a very dark period of reaction, And it was also the ground upon which | the theoretical conceptions of anarchism were worked out by Bakunin and his followers in a language that was under- | stood all over continental Europe.
III Quite a number of remarkable men, of different nation- alities, nearly all of whom had been personal friends of Bakunin, belonged at that time to the Jura Federation. The editor of our Ey the Bulletin of the federation, was James Guillaumefa teacher by profession, who belonged to one of the aristocratic families of Neuchatel. Small, thin, with the stiff appearance and resoluteness of Robespierre, and with a truly golden heart which opened only in the intimacy of friendship, he was a born leader by his phe- nomenal powers of work and his stern activity. For eight years he fought against all sorts of obstacles to maintain the ‘paper in existence, taking the most active part in every detail of the federation, till he had to leave Switzerland, where he could find no work whatever, and settled in France, where his name will be quoted some day with the utmost respect in the history of education.
Adhémar Schwitzguébel, also a Swiss, was the type of the jovial, lively, clear-sighted French-speaking watchmakers of the Bernese Jura hills. A watch engraver by trade, he never attempted to abandon his position of manual worker, and, always merry and active, he supported his large family through the severest periods of slack trade and curtailed earnings. His gift of taking a difficult economic or political question, and, after much thought about it, considering it from the workingman’s point of view, without divesting it of its deepest meaning, was wonderful. He was known far and wide in the “ mountains,” and with the workers of all countries he was a general favorite.
His direct counterpart was another Swiss, also a watch- Boe MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST — ca | maker, Spichiger. He was a philosopher, slow in botl movement and thought, English in his physical aspect. always trying to get at the full meaning of every fact, anc| impressing all of us by the justness of the conclusions h¢ reached while he was pondering over all sorts of cial | during his work of scooping out watch lids.
Round these three gathered a number of solid, stanclh middle-aged or elderly workmen, passionate lovers of liberty happy to take part in such a promising movement, and ¢ hundred or so bright young men, also mostly watchmakers: —all very independent and affectionate, very lively, anc ready to go to any length in self-sacrifice.
Several refugees of the Paris Commune had joined the federation. Elisée Reclus, the great geographer, was 0; their number, —a type of the true Puritan in his manne? of life, and of the French encyclopedist philosopher oj the last century in his mind; the man who inspires others, but never has governed any one, and never will do so; the anarchist whose anarchism is the epitome of his broad) intimate knowledge of the forms of life of mankind unde1| all climates and in all stages of civilization; whose books! rank among the very best of the century; whose style, of a striking beauty, moves the mind and the conscience; and who, as he enters the office of an anarchist paper, says tc the editor, —— maybe a boy in comparison to himself, E | “Tell me what I have to do,” and will sit down, like ¢ newspaper subordinate, to fill up a gap of so many lines in the current number of the paper. In the Paris Commun¢ he simply took a rifle and stood in the ranks; and if he invites a contributor to work with him upon a volume of his world-famed Geography, and the contributor timidly, asks, ‘‘ What have I to do?” he replies: ‘ Here are the books, here is a table. Do as you like.” [ By his side was Lefrangais, an elderly man, formerly ¢ teacher, who had been thrice in his life an exile: afte [ SOME MEMBERS OF THE JURA FEDERATION 393 June, 1848, after Napoleon’s coup d’état, and after 1870. _ An ex-member of the Commune, and consequently one of those who were said to have left Paris carrying away ‘millions in their pockets, he worked as a freight handler at the railway at Lausanne, and was nearly killed in that work, which required younger shoulders than his. His _ book on the Paris Commune is the one in which the real historical meaning of that movement was put in its proper ‘light. ‘A communalist, not an anarchist, please,” he would gay. “I cannot work with such fools as you are;” and he worked with none but us, “ because you fools,” as he said, ‘‘are still the men whom I love best. With you one can ) work and remain one’s self.”
Another ex-member of the Paris Commune who was ' with us was Pindy, a carpenter from the north of France, an adopted child of Paris. He became widely known at Paris, during a strike supported by the International, for his vigor and bright intelligence, and was elected a member of the Commune, which nominated him commander of the ' Tuileries palace. When the Versailles troops entered Paris, ' shooting their prisoners by the hundred, three men, at least, ' were shot in different parts of the town, having been mistaken for Pindy. After the fight, however, he was concealed by a brave girl, a seamstress, who saved him by her calm- - ness when the house was searched by the troops, and who ) afterward became his wife. Only twelve months later they My ' succeeded in leaving Paris unnoticed, and came to Switzerland. Here Pindy learned assaying, at which he became skillful; spending his days by the side of his red-hot stove, and at night devoting himself passionately to propaganda _ work, in which he admirably combined the passion of a revolutionist with the good sense and organizing powers characteristic of the Parisian worker. Paul Brousse was then a young doctor, full of mental activity, uproarious, sharp, lively, ready to develop any idea ; 394 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST with a geometrical logic to its utmost consequences; powers ful in his criticisms of the state and state organization; finding enough time to edit two papers, in French and in German, to write scores of voluminous letters, to be the soul of a workmen’s evening party; constantly active in organizing men, with the subtle mind of a true “‘ southerner.” Among the Italians who collaborated with us in Switzer- land, two men whose names stood always associated, and will be remembered in Italy by more than one generation, two close personal friends of Bakunin, were Cafiero and Malatesta. Cafiero was an idealist of the highest and the purest type, who gave his considerable fortune to the cause, and who never after asked himself what he should live upon in the future; a thinker plunged in philosophical specula- tion; a man who never would harm any one, and yet took the rifle and marched in the mountains of Benevento, when he and his friends thought that an uprising of a socialist character might be attempted, were it only to show the people that their uprisings ought to have a deeper meaning © than that of a mere revolt against tax collectors. Malatesta was a student of medicine, who had left the medical profes- sion and also his fortune for the sake of the revolution; | full of fire and intelligence, a pure idealist, who all his life—and he is now approaching the age of fifty — has never thought whether he would have a piece of bread for | his supper and a bed for the night. Without even so much | as a room that he could call his own, he would sell sherbet _ in the streets of London to get his living, and in the evening i write brilliant articles for the Italian papers. Imprisoned | in France, released, expelled, re-condemned in Italy, con- | fined in an island, escaped, and again in Italy in disguise; always in the hottest of the struggle, whether it be in Italy | or elsewhere, —he has persevered in this life for thirty | years in succession. And when we meet him again, re- | leased from a prison or escaped from an island, we find him | } SOME MEMBERS OF THE JURA FEDERATION 399 just as we saw him last; always renewing the struggle, with the same love of men, the same absence of hatred toward his adversaries and jailers, the same hearty smile for a friend, the same caress for a child.
The Russians were few among us, most of them follow- ing the German social democrats. We had, however, Jou- kdévsky, a friend of Hérzen, who had left Russia in 1863, — a brilliant, elegant, highly intelligent nobleman, a favorite with the workers, — who better than any of the rest of us had what the French call /’oreille du peuple (the ear of the workers), because he knew how to fire them by show- ing them the great part they had to play in rebuilding society, to lift them by holding before them high historical views, to throw a flash of light on the most intricate economic problem, and to electrify them with his earnest- ness and sincerity. Sokoldff, formerly an officer of the Russian general staff, an admirer of Paul Louis Courier for his boldness and of Proudhon for his philosophical ideas, who had made many a socialist in Russia by his review articles, was also with us temporarily.
I mention only those who became widely known as writers, or as delegates to congresses, or in some other way. And yet, I ask myself if I ought not rather to speak of those who never committed their names to print, but were as important in the life of the federation as any one of the writers; who fought in the ranks, and were always ready to join in any enterprise, never asking whether the work ‘would be grand or small, distinguished or modest, — ‘whether it would have great consequences, or simply result ‘in infinite worry to themselves and their families.
I ought also to mention the Germans Werner and Rinke, the Spaniard Albarracin, and many others; but I am afraid ‘that these faint sketches of mine may not convey to the ‘reader the same feelings of respect and love with which every one of this little family inspired those who knew him or her personally.
Or all the towns of Switzeriand that I know, La Chaux: de-Fonds is perhaps the least attractive. It lies on a high plateau entirely devoid of any vegetation, open to bitterly cold winds in the winter, when the snow lies as deep as at Moscow, and melts and falls again as often as at St. Peters- burg. But it was important to spread our ideas in that centre, and to give more life to the local propaganda. Pindy, Spichiger, Albarracin, the Blanquists Ferré and Jallot were there, and from time to time I could pay visits to Guillaume at Neuchatel, and to Schwitzguébel in the valley of St. Imier.: A life full of work that I liked began now for me. We held many meetings, ourselves distributing our announce- ments in the cafés and the workshops. Once a week we held our section meetings, at which the most animated dis- cussions took place, and we went also to preach anarchism | at the gatherings convoked by the political parties. I traveled a good deal, visiting other sections and helping them. | During that winter we won the sympathy of many, but. our regular work was very much hampered by a crisis in the watch trade. Half the workers were out of work or only partially employed, so that the municipality had to open, dining-rooms to provide cheap meals at cost price. The co-| operative workshop established by the anarchists at La Chaux- | de-Fonds, in which the earnings were divided equally among all the members, had great difficulty in getting work, in spite of its high reputation, and Spichiger had to resort several. times to wool-combing for an upholsterer, in order to get. his living.
CARRYING THE RED FLAG AT BERN 397 We all took part, that year, in a manifestation with the red flag at Bern. ‘The wave of reaction spread to Switzer- land, and the carrying of the workers’ banner was prohib- ited by the Bern police, in defiance of the constitution. It was necessary, therefore, to show that at least here and ‘there the workers would not have their rights trampled ‘underfoot, and would offer resistance. We all went to ‘Bern on the anniversary of the Paris Commune, to carry ‘the red flag in the streets, notwithstanding the prohibition. Of course there was a collision with the police, in which ‘two comrades received sword cuts and two police officers ‘were rather seriously wounded. But the red flag was car- ‘ried safe to the hall, where a most animated meeting was ‘held. I hardly need say that the so-called leaders were in ‘the ranks, and fought like all the rest. The trial involved nearly thirty Swiss citizens, all themselves demanding to be prosecuted, and those who had wounded the two police ‘officers coming forward spontaneously to say that they had ‘done it. A great deal of sympathy was won to the cause during the trial; it was understood that all liberties have to be defended jealously, in order not to be lost. The sentences were consequently very light, not exceeding three However, the Bern government prohibited the carrying of the red flag anywhere in the canton; and the Jura Ved- “eration thereupon decided to carry it, in defiance of the prohibition, in St. Imier, where we held our congress that ‘year. This time most of us were armed, and ready to de- fend our banner to the last extremity. A body of police had been placed in a square to stop our column; a detach- ment of the militia wac kept in readiness in an adjoining field, under the pretext of target practice, — we distinctly heard their shots as we marched through the town. But when our column appeared in the square, and it was judged from its aspect that aggression would result in serious 398 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST | bloodshed, the mayor let us continue our march, undi. turbed, to the hall where the meeting was to be hel None of us desired a fight; but the strain of that march, i) fighting order, to the sound of a military band, was suc) that I do not know what feeling prevailed in most of us during the first moments after we reached the hall, — relic} at having been spared an undesired fight, or regret that th fight did not take place. Man is a very complex being. f Our main activity, however, was in working out thi practical and theoretic aspects of anarchist socialism, and it this direction the federation has undoubtedly accomplishec something that will last, We saw that a new form of society is germinating in the elvilized nations, and must take the place of the old one: a scope will be left for every individual initiative. This soci-. ety will be composed of a multitude of associations, federated | for all the purposes which require federation: trade federa- | tions for production of all sorts, — agricultural, industrial, | intellectual, artistic; communes for consumption, making © provision for dwellings, gas works, supplies of food, sanitary _ arrangements, etc.; federations of communes among them- selves, and federations of communes with trade organiza- _ tions; and finally, wider groups covering all the country, | or several countries, composed of wien who collaborate for the satisfaction of such economic, intellectual, artistic, and i moral needs as are not limited to a given territory. All these will combine directly, by means of free agreements | between them, just as the railway companies or the postal A NEW FORM OF SOCIETY 399 departments of different countries codperate now, without having a central railway or postal government, — even though the former are actuated by merely egotistic aims, and the latter belong to different and often hostile states; or as the meteorologists, the Alpine clubs, the lifeboat stations in Great Britain, the cyclists, the teachers, and so on, combine for all sorts of work in common, for intel- ~ lectual pursuits, or simply for pleasure. There will be full freedom for the development of new forms of production, invention, and organization; individual initiative will be encouraged, and the tendency toward uniformity and centralization will be discouraged. Moreover, this society will not be crystallized into certain unchangeable forms, but will _ continually modify its aspect, because it will be a living, evolving organism; no need of government will be felt, _ because free agreement and federation take its place in all _ those functions which governments consider as theirs at the _ present time, and because, the causes of conflict being reduced in number, those conflicts which may still arise can be submitted to arbitration.
None of us minimized the importance and magnitude of _ the change which we looked for. We understood that the current opinions upon the necessity of private ownership in land, factories, mines, dwelling-houses, and so on, as the means of securing industrial progress, and of the wage-sys- tem as the means of compelling men to work, would not soon give way to higher conceptions of socialized ownership and production. We knew that a tedious propaganda and a long succession of struggles, of individual and collective revolts against the now prevailing forms of property-holding, of individual self-sacrifice, of partial attempts at reconstruc- tion and partial revolutions, would have to be lived through, before the current ideas upon private ownership would be modified. And we understood also that the prevalent ideas concerning the necessity of authority —in which all 400 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST of us have been bred — would not and could not be aban doned by civilized mankind all at once. Long years o propaganda and a long succession of partial acts of revolt against authority, as well as a complete revision of the teachings now derived from history, would be required be. fore men would perceive that they had been mistaken ir attributing to their rulers and their laws what was deriveé in reality from their own sociable feelings and habits. We knew all that. But we also knew that in preaching reform in both these directions, we should be working with the tide of human progress.
When I made a closer acquaintance with the working population and their sympathizers from the better educatec classes, I soon realized that they valued their persona) freedom even more than they valued their personal well. being. Fifty years ago, the workers were ready to sel! their personal liberty to all sorts of rulers, and even to é Cesar, in exchange for a promise of material well-being; but now, this was no longer the case. I saw that the blind faith in elected rulers, even if they were taken from amongs| the best leaders of the labor movement, was dying away amongst the Latin workers. ‘‘We must know first what we want, and then we can do it best ourselves,” was an) idea which I found widely spread among them, — far more| widely than is generally believed. The sentence which was put in the statutes of the International Association, ‘The emancipation of the workers must be accomplished) by the workers themselves,” had met with general sympathy, and had taken root in minds. The sad experience of the| Paris Commune only confirmed it.
When the insurrection broke out, a considerable nambil| of men belonging to the middle classes themselves were pre- pared to make, or at least to accept, anew start in the social) direction. ‘When my brother and myself, coming from our little room, went out into the streets,” Elisée Reclus THE VALUE OF PERSONAL FREEDOM 401 _ said to me once, “‘we were asked on all sides by people belonging to the wealthier classes: ‘Tell us what is to be done? We are ready to try anew start.’ But we were not yet prepared to make the suggestions.”
Never before had a government been as fairly representa- tive of all the advanced parties as was the Council of the Commune, elected on the 25th of March, 1871. All shades _ of revolutionary opinion — Blanquists, Jacobinists, Internationalists — were represented in it in a true proportion. And yet, the workers themselves having no distinct ideas of social reform to impress upon their representatives, the _ Commune government did nothing in that direction. The very fact of having been isolated from the masses and shut up in the Hotel de Ville paralyzed them. For the success of socialism, the ideas of no-government, of self-reliance, of free initiative of the individual, — of anarchism, in a word. _-—had thus to be preached side by side with those of socialized ownership and production.
We certainly foresaw that if full freedom were left to the individual for the expression of his ideas and for action, we should have to fate a certain amount of extravagant exaggeration of our principles. JI had seen it in the nihilist movement in Russia. But we trusted —and experience | has proved that we were right—that social life itself, sup- ported by a frank, open-minded criticism of opinions and actions, would be the most effective means for threshing out opinions and for divesting them of the unavoidable exagger- ations. We acted, in fact, in accordance with the old say- . ing that freedom remains still the wisest cure for freedom’s temporary inconveniences. There is, in mankind, a nucleus _ of social habits —an inheritance from the past, not yet duly appreciated — which is not maintained by coercion and is superior to coercion. Upon it all the progress of mankind is based, and so long as mankind does not begin to deteriovate physically and mentally, it will not be destroyed by \ 402 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST any amount of criticism or of occasional revolt against it, These were the opinions in which I grew confirmed more and more in proportion as my experience of men and things increased.
We understood at the same time that such a change can- not be produced by the conjectures of one man of genius, that it will not be one man’s discovery, but that it must result from the constructive work of the masses, just as the forms of judicial procedure which were elaborated in the early medieval period, the village community, the guild, the medieval city, and the foundations of international law were worked out by the people.
Many of our predecessors had undertaken to picture ideal.
commonwealths, basing them sometimes upon the principle of authority, and, on some rare occasions, upon the principle. of freedom. Robert Owen and Fourier had given the world their ideals of a free, organically developing society, in oppo-. sition to the pyramidal ideals which had been copied from. the Roman Empire or from the Roman Church. Proudhon had continued their work, and Bakunin, applying his wide and clear understanding of the philosophy of history to the criticism of present institutions, ‘built up while he was” demolishing.” But all that was preparatory work only.
t The International Workingmen’s Association inaugurated. a new method of solving the problems of practical sociology by appealing to the workers themselves. The educated. men who had joined the association undertook only to en- lighten the workers as to what was going on in different | countries of the world, to analyze the obtained results, and, later on, to aid them in formulating their conclusions. We | did not pretend to evolve an ideal commonwealth out of our theoretical views as to what a society ought to be, but we invited the workers to investigate the causes of the present evils, and in their discussions and congresses to consider the practical aspects of a better social organization than the one | STUDYING SOCIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS 403 we live in. A question raised at an international congress was recommended as a subject of study to all labor unions. In the course of the year it was discussed all over Europe, in the small meetings of the sections, with a full knowledge of the local needs of each trade and each locality; then the work of the sections was brought before the next congress of each federation, and finally it was submitted in a more elaborate form to the next international congress. The structure of the society which we longed for was thus ' worked out, in theory and practice, from beneath, and the dura Federation took a large part in the elaboration of the anarchist ideal.
For myself, placed as I was in such favorable conditions, I gradually came to realize that anarchism represents more than a mere mode of action and a mere conception of a free society; that it is part of a philosophy, natural and social, which must be developed in a quite different way from the metaphysical or dialectic methods which have been em- ployed in sciences dealing with man. I saw that it must be treated by the same methods as natural sciences; not, however, on the slippery ground of mere analogies such as Herbert Spencer accepts, but on the solid basis of induction applied to human institutions. And I did my best to accomplish what I could in that direction.
V T'wo congresses were held in the autumn of 1877 in Belgium: one of the International Workingmen’s Associa. tion at Verviers, and the other an international socialist congress at Ghent. ‘The latter was especially important, as it was known that an attempt would be made by the German social democrats to bring all the labor movement of Europe under one organization, subject to a central com. mittee, which would be the old general council of the Inter. national under a new name. It was therefore necessary to preserve the autonomy of the labor organizations in the Latin countries, and we did our best to be well represented at this congress. I went under the name of Levashdff; two Germans, the compositor Werner and the engineer Rinke, walked nearly all the distance from Basel to Bel- gium; and although we were only nine anarchists at Ghent, we succeeded in checking the centralization scheme.
Twenty-two years have passed since; a number of inter. national socialist congresses have been held, and at every one of them the same struggle has been renewed, — the social democrats trying to enlist all the labor movement of Kurope under their banner and to bring it under their con- trol, and the anarchists opposing and preventing it. What an amount of wasted force, of bitter words exchanged and| efforts divided, simply because those who have adopted the formula of “conquest of power within the existing states | do not understand that activity in this direction cannot embody all the socialist movement! From the outset socialism took three independent lines of development, which found their expression in Saint-Simon, Fourier, and FORCED TO GO TO ENGLAND AGAIN 405 Robert Owen. Saint-Simonism has developed into social democracy, and Fourierism into anarchism; while Owenism "js developing, in England and America, into trade-unionism, eodperation, and the so-called municipal socialism, and _ remains hostile to social democratic state socialism, while it has many points of contact with anarchism. But because of failure to recognize that the three move toward a com- mon goal in three different ways, and that the two latter bring their own precious contribution to human progress, a "quarter of a century has been given to endeavors to realize the unrealizable Utopia of a unique labor movement of the ' social democratic pattern.
The Ghent congress ended for me in an unexpected way. Three or four days after it had begun, the Belgian police ’ learned who Levashoff was, and received the order to arrest me for a breach of police regulations which I had committed in giving at the hotel an assumed name. My Belgian friends warned me. ‘They maintained that the clerical ministry which was in power was capable of giving me up to Russia, and insisted upon my leaving the congress at once. They would not let me return to the hotel. Guillaume barred the way, telling me that I should have to use force against him if I insisted upon returning thither. I had to go with some Ghent comrades, and as soon as I joined them, muf- fled calls and whistling came from all corners of a dark square over which groups of workers were scattered. It all looked very mysterious. At last, after much whispering and subdued whistling, a group of comrades took me under escort to a social democrat worker, with whom I had to spend the night, and who received me, anarchist though I was, in the most touching way as a brother. Next morn- ing I left once more for England, on board a steamer, pro- voking a number of good-natured smiles from the British custom-house officers, who wanted me to show them my 406 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST luggage, while I had nothing to show but a small hand. bag.
I did not stay long in London. In the admirable collec- tions of the British Museum I studied the beginnings of the French Revolution, —how revolutions come to break out, — but I wanted more activity, and soon went to Paris. A revival of the labor movement was beginning there, after the rigid suppression of the Commune. With the Italian Costa and the few anarchist friends we had among the Paris workers, and with Jules Guesde and his colleagues, who were not strict social democrats at that time, we started the first socialist groups.
Our beginnings were ridiculously small. Half a dozen of us used to meet in cafés, and when we had an audience of a hundred persons at a meeting we felt happy. No one would. have guessed then that two years later the movement would be in full swing. But France has its own ways of development. When a reaction has gained the upper hand, all visible traces of a movement disappear. ‘Those who fight against the current are few. But in some mysterious way, by a sort of invisible infiltration of ideas, the reaction is undermined; a new current sets in, and then it appears, all of a siden) that the idea which was thought to be dead was there alive, spreading and growing all the time; and as soon as public agitation becomes possible, thousands: of adherents, whose existence nobody suspected, come to the front. “There are at Paris,’ old Blanqui-used to say, | “fifty thousand men who never come to a meeting or toa | demonstration; but the moment they feel that the people | can appear in the streets to manifest their opinion, they are there to storm the position.”” So it was then. There were not twenty of us to carry on the movement, not two | hundred openly to support it. At the first commemoration | of the Commune, in March, 1878, we surely were not two | hundred. But two years later the amnesty for the Com- CALLED TO SWITZERLAND 407 mune was voted, and the working population of Paris was in the streets to greet the returning Communards; it flocked by the thousand to cheer them at the meetings, and the socialist movement took a sudden expansion, carrying with it the radicals.
The time had not yet come for that revival, however, and one night in April, 1878, Costa and a French comrade were arrested. A police court condemned them to imprisonment for eighteen months as Internationalists. I escaped arrest only by mistake. The police wanted Levashéff, and went to arrest a Russian student whose name sounded very much like that. JI had given my real name, and continued to stay at Paris under that name for another month. Then I was called to Switzerland.
VI VI DurineG this stay at Paris I made my first acquaintance with Turguéneff. He had expressed to our common friend P. L. Lavréff the desire to see me, and, as a true Russian, to celebrate my escape by a small friendly dinner. It was with a feeling almost of worship that I crossed the threshold of hisroom. If by his ‘ Sportsman’s Notebook ”’ he rendered to Russia the immense service of throwing odium upon serfdom (I did not know at that time that he took a lead- ing part in Hérzen’s powerful ‘“ Bell”), he has rendered no less service through his later novels. He has shown what the Russian woman is, what treasuries of mind and heart she possesses, what she may be as an inspirer of men; and he has taught us how men who have a real claim to supe- riority look upon women, how they love. Upon me, and upon thousands of my contemporaries, this part of his teaching made an indelible impression, far more powerful than the best articles upon women’s rights. | His appearance is well known. Tall, strongly built, the head covered with soft and thick gray hair, he was certainly beautiful; his eyes gleamed with intelligence, not devoid | of a touch of humor, and his whole manner testified to that simplicity and absence of affectation which are charac- teristic of the best Russian writers. His fine head revealed | a vast development of brain power, and when he died, and | Paul Bert, with Paul Reclus (the surgeon), weighed his | brain, it so much surpassed the heaviest brain then known, | ~—— that of Cuvier, — reaching something over two thousand | grammes, that they would not trust to their scales, but got | new ones, to repeat the weighing.
TURGUENEFF 409 — His talk was especially remarkable. He spoke, as he wrote, in images. When he wanted to develop an idea, he did not resort to arguments, although he was a master in philosophical discussions; he illustrated his idea by a “scene presented in a form as beautiful as if it had been taken out of one of his novels. — You must have had a great deal of experience in your ‘life amongst Frenchmen, Germans, and other peoples,” he “said to me once. ‘‘ Have you not remarked that there is a “deep, unfathomable chasm between many of their concep- tions and the views which we Russians hold on the same subjects, — that- there are points upon which we can never agree?”
I replied that I had not noticed such points.