THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB
 
 
 
 
 " ^' '■' ' ^ 
 
 if 
 
 
 DMITRI MEREJKOVSKI
 
 The Menace of the Mob 
 
 By 
 
 DMITRI MEREJKOVSKI 
 
 Translated from the Russian 
 By 
 
 BERNARD GUILBERT GUERNET 
 
 NICHOLAS L. BROWN 
 
 NEW YORK MCMXXI
 
 Copyright, 1921 
 
 BY 
 
 NICHOLAS L. BROWN
 
 •'.o ^- 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Menace of the Mob 19 
 
 The Blossoms of Bourgeoisie 85 
 
 When Christ Shall Rise Again 103 
 
 <f^oor>,a «t>
 
 INTRODUCTION
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 To say that the world to-day is passing through 
 the most crucial period of all history is, of course, 
 a commonplace; but the fact will, none the less, 
 bear constant reiteration. 
 
 Everything is seething and in a turmoil; there 
 are wars and rumors of wars; the world is ill and 
 bewildered. Yet, though there are many men cry- 
 ing in this wilderness — how many are there who 
 are true prophets; and how many of these are not 
 merely crying, but also pointing a way out of the 
 wilderness? 
 
 It is little short of astonishing to see how many 
 of the warnings in The Menace of the Mob have 
 come true. There is scarce a line where a pin 
 would not prick upon a prophecy fulfilled. And, 
 were we to use it as a volume for sortes — there is 
 scarce a line that is not pregnant with other fore- 
 warnings, still more dire. "There shall be a 
 slaughter the like of which has never been before" 
 — to which the Great World War is, perhaps, as 
 but the blossom to the fruit. 
 
 \ Kuprin, in one of his impressionistic sketches, 
 
 9
 
 10 INTRODUCTION 
 
 describes a rural school recitation of the fable of 
 the grasshopper and the ant. He writes: 
 
 "An oppressive, sad, and fearful thought seemed 
 to unfold itself in my mind. 'Here,' I thought, 
 'stand we, a small group of intelligents, face to 
 face with a numberless people, the most enig- 
 matic, the greatest and the most oppressed on earth. 
 What binds us to them? Nothing. Neither 
 tongue, nor faith, nor work, nor art. Our poetry 
 is laughable to them, as nonsensical and incompre- 
 hensible as to a child. Our refined painting is to 
 them a useless and undecipherable daubing. Our 
 search for a God and our creation of a God is 
 sheer raving to them who believe equally holily in 
 a calendar saint and in the hobgoblin who lives in 
 the bath-house. Our music seems dreary noise to 
 them. Our science is insufficient for them. Our 
 complicated labor is ludicrous and pitiful to them, 
 so wise, patient, and simple is the cruel face of 
 nature to the tiller. Yes — on the terrible day of 
 reckoning, what shall we say to this infant and 
 beast, this sage and animal, this giant numbering 
 many millions? Nothing. We shall say: 'We 
 sang the summer through,' and they will answer, 
 with the cunning smile of the peasant: 'Then go 
 and dance a bit. . . .' ' 
 
 Has the terrible day of reckoning come? Just
 
 INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 as the above gives us a picture of the position of 
 the cultured classes — not only in Russia, but 
 throughout the world — helpless before the turbu- 
 lent masses, so every forewarning of Merejkovski's 
 applies not only to Russia, but to all the world. 
 
 Dmitri Sergeivitch Merejkovski was bom August 
 14, 1865, on one of the small islands near St. 
 Petersburg. He was the youngest son of Sergeii 
 Ivanovitch Merejkovski, and Varvara Vasilievna, 
 nee Chestrokova. He had three sisters and five 
 brothers, and was his mother's favorite son ; writing 
 of his mother, he acknowledges that "if there is 
 any good in me, I have her to thank for it." His 
 father, however, was very stern; and later on, when 
 he speaks of his education, he plainly states that 
 he owes as little to his schooling as to his father. 
 When his brother Constantin proved to be a nihilist, 
 the father, who considered nihilists as not even 
 human beings (Unmenschen) , drove him out of 
 the house, despite the mother's pleading. 
 
 The melancholy pervading the old marshy park 
 with its wooded parts, its ponds, and the view of 
 the sea, could not but exert its influence upon his 
 childhood — he tells us that he was shy and secre- 
 tive as a school-boy; nor must we forget "the holy 
 legends and folk-tales" of his old nurse — even be- 
 fore thirteen he was full of mysticism, and wrote
 
 12 INTRODUCTION 
 
 poetry. His first critical effort was written also 
 at about the same age. 
 
 And it is significant that, as a child, his winters 
 were spent in an old house built at the time of Peter 
 the Great, and within sight of his palace, his hut, 
 and his church. 
 
 He received his education at the end of the seven- 
 ties and the beginning of the eighties — the days of 
 the severest classicism. In 1884 he graduated 
 from the Gymnasia, and entered the Historical- 
 Philosophical course at the University of St. Peters- 
 burg. There he first came in contact with the gov- 
 ernment: he organized a Moliere club, which was 
 duly raided by the political police, while he escaped 
 exile only through the influence of his father. He 
 tells us frankly that he owes his freedom of speech 
 throughout his career only to a lucky chance. 
 
 While in the University, he took up positivism 
 in earnest, and studied Spencer, Comte, Mill, and 
 Darwin. "But being religious," he writes, "I sur- 
 mised darkly the instability of the positivistic phil- 
 osophy. I pondered, but found no way out, and 
 was beset with pains and doubts." The way out 
 is bodied forth most definitely in The Menace of 
 the Mob, but it is shown, in greater or lesser degree, 
 in practically all of his other writings as well. But 
 this discovery was to be the result of later years.
 
 INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 In 1880 he met Dostoievsky, whom his father 
 knew; also Nadson, the poet, whom he grew to love 
 as a brother, and with whom he held endless reli- 
 gious disputes. At the house of PlescheiefF, the 
 editor, he met the great satirical writer, Schedrin- 
 Saltykoff — also at this period. 
 
 Mme. DavidofF, the wife of the well-known musi- 
 cian and director of the Conservatory of St. Peters- 
 burg, had a salon frequented by all the celebrities 
 of that day. It was there that he met Goncharov — 
 "a blind, gray old man" — and the poets Maikov 
 and Polonsky; later on — Korolenko, Garshin, 
 Michailovsky and Uspenski. The last two he calls 
 his first real teachers; Michailovsky, he admits, 
 exercised a great influence on his life and person- 
 ality. During a visit to Uspenski, he argued the 
 whole night through with his host over "a ques- 
 tion which concerned me in the highest degree — 
 the religious spirit in life." 
 
 Influenced by Tolstoy's Confessions, he under- 
 takes a journey on foot through the Volga district, 
 conversing with peasants whenever an opportunity 
 presented itself. He is constantly haunted by the 
 dim surmise that naturalistic positivism is not the 
 ultimate truth. It was also at this period that he 
 wanted to become a country school-teacher, but 
 "was laughed out of it."
 
 14 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Merejkovski made his first appearance in print 
 in 1882, when a poem of his appeared in The 
 Illustrated Survey, edited by Schiller-Michailov. 
 His later works appeared in Notes of the Father' 
 land. To the Northern Messenger he contributed a 
 "ponderous dramatic poem, Sylvia,^' and an essay 
 on Chekhov, who was just appearing then, and was 
 as yet unrecognized. 
 
 Under the influence of Dostoievsky, and several 
 foreign poets, such as Baudelaire and Poe, Me- 
 rejkovski has championed the moderns, but not so 
 much the decadents as the symbolists. He gave 
 the title of Symbols to a volume of his verse ap- 
 pearing in 1890, and was the first to bring the word 
 "symbol" into Russian literature. 
 
 After finishing the University, he went on a trip 
 to the Caucasus, where he met the famous poetess, 
 Hippius, and proposed to her. They were married 
 at Tiflis the following winter, and returned to St. 
 Petersburg. 
 
 His mother died shortly after. "I found that 
 this death," he writes, "the illness of my wife, and 
 other calamities were the foundation of the literary 
 strain I underwent. The accusation that my re- 
 ligiousness is derived from books is false." 
 
 The volume Eternal Journeys, and several trans- 
 lations of old Greek dramas were the fruit of his
 
 INTRODUCTION ' 15 
 
 journeys in Rome, Florence, Taormina, Athens, 
 and Constantinople. 
 
 In 1893 he commenced the trilogy of Christ 
 and Anti-Christ, which took twelve years to com- 
 plete. Julian the Apostate was refused every- 
 where, but was finally accepted by the Northern 
 Messenger — "and there the novel was taken really 
 only through pity." Further he tells us: "I was 
 especially poorly welcomed in Russian literature, 
 and to this day have to withstand a certain attitude 
 of enmity. I can already celebrate my twenty- 
 fifth anniversary of unfair persecution on the part 
 of Russian critics." 
 
 It was also at the end of the nineties that he 
 founded a religious and philosophical society, the 
 first impulse for which he received from his wife. 
 Needless to say, the society was suppressed. 
 
 Merejkovski admits that he was not quite just in 
 his book on Tolstoy. In 1914, in company with 
 his wife, he visited Yasnaya Poliana. They found 
 Tolstoy very friendly, and held religious disputes 
 with him. "At parting he looked at me with his 
 good-natured, rather uncanny, small eyes, like 
 those of a bear. 'I have heard that you don't like 
 me. I am glad that is not so.' " 
 
 All of his activities in 1905-1906 helped vari- 
 ously in his development. He does not, however.
 
 16 INTRODUCTION 
 
 consider his development completed as yet, as he 
 tells us in an autobiographical sketch published in 
 1914, from which these biographical data have 
 been taken. 
 
 After the Moscow uprising, Merejkovski went to 
 Paris with his wife. There he published, in 
 French, The Czar and The Revolution, in collabora- 
 tion with PhilosofF. The drama of Paul I was 
 presented, also in 1908, and was forbidden by the 
 authorities after the first performance. The accu- 
 sation of lese majeste was withdrawn only four 
 years later. Upon his return to Russia during 
 1908, the manuscript of Alexander I was confis- 
 cated. 
 
 The deep connection of political Russia with 
 religion has become fully apparent to Merejkovski, 
 and he has learned, "not abstractedly, but with 
 flesh and soul, that in Russia orthodoxy and the 
 existing order are inseparably bound up with one 
 another, and that we can attain to a new conception 
 of Christianity only if both autocracy and ortho- 
 doxy are equaly discarded." 
 
 That is why, perhaps, he considers the Russian 
 revolutionaries he met in Paris as the best of all 
 the Russians he had ever seen in his life, and is 
 still of the same opinion. 
 
 The reader of these essays cannot but perceive
 
 INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 Merejkovski's supreme and unerring insight into 
 the Russian heart and mind. All the books written 
 about Russia by outsiders cannot tell us one jot 
 as much as the self-analytical study in contrasts in 
 The Blossoms of Bourgeoisie. Nor can there be 
 any doubt of his sincerity, his earnestness — he 
 spares himself not one whit in When Christ Shall 
 Rise Again — one of the most powerful pleas in all 
 literature against a universal infamy. 
 
 He is not a logician, perhaps; he is frankly a 
 mystic, and his appeal is to a more poetical factor 
 than logic — emotion. Yet though he may probe 
 our wounds mercilessly, he has a good oil which 
 heals to offer us, if we will but take it. All his 
 works, practically, are imbued with the same spirit 
 and purpose — Christ and Christianity. He is con- 
 sistently a Christian. One cannot sum up his atti- 
 tude and aims better than in his own words, in 
 conclusion to his foreword to the trilogy of Christ 
 and Anti-Christ: 
 
 *7 would like to dedicate my labor — our labor 
 — to that generation of Russian people which shall 
 understand, that Christianity not only has been, but 
 is and shall be; that Christ is not only a perfect but 
 a constantly growing Truth; that the liberation of 
 Russia, the liberation of the world, cannot take 
 place otherwise than in the name of Christ.'*
 
 18 INTRODUCTION 
 
 There are many prophets crying in the wilder- 
 ness; if there be among them one who does not 
 merely cry, but also points a way out of the wilder- 
 ness, shall we not heed and follow him, if he be 
 also a seer whose previous prophecies have been 
 fulfilled? 
 
 Bernard Guilbert Guerney. 
 
 New York City, 
 October, 1920
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB
 
 B 
 
 ' ' X^ OURGEOISIE will conquer, and must 
 conquer," wrote Hertzen in 1864, in his 
 essay. Ends and Beginnings. "Yes, 
 my dear friend, it is time to come to the calm and 
 submissive realization that bourgeoisie is the final 
 form of civilization in the South." 
 
 Hertzen can hardly be suspected of a lack of 
 love for Europe. For he is precisely one of those 
 Russians who, as Dostoievsky expresses it, have 
 "two native lands: our Russia and Europe." Per- 
 haps he did not know himself which he loved more 
 — Russia or Europe. Like his friend Bakunin, he 
 was convinced that the final liberation is the deed 
 not of any single nation, but of all the nations to- 
 gether, of all mankind; and that a nation can liber- 
 ate itself completely only by renouncing its national 
 individualism and entering the circle of the life 
 of all mankind. "Universal Humanity," which 
 was an aesthetic contemplation to Pushkin, in the 
 case of Hertzen becomes a life influence, a grand 
 exploit. He sacrificed his love for Russia to his 
 
 21
 
 22 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 love for Europe, not in the abstract but in reality. 
 He became a life-long exile for Europe, he lived 
 for her, and he was ready to die for her. In his 
 periods of dejection and disenchantment he re- 
 gretted not having taken the rifle off^ered to him by 
 a workman at the time of the revolution of 1848 
 in Paris, and not dying at the barricades. 
 
 If such a man as this had come to doubt in Eu- 
 rope, it was not because he had little faith in it, but 
 because he had too much. And when he pro- 
 nounces his sentence: "I see the inevitable ruin of 
 old Europe, and regret nothing in existence;" when 
 he asserts that within the portals of the old world 
 is "not Catiline, but Death," and on his brow the 
 Ciceronian '^vixerimt" — then, though one may not 
 accept this sentence, — I personally do not accept it, 
 — one cannot but admit that, coming from the lips 
 of Hertzen, it has a fearful weight. 
 
 In support of his reasonings anent the inevitable 
 victory of bourgeoisie in Europe, Hertzen refers to 
 one of the noblest representatives of European cul- 
 ture, to one of its "knights beyond fear or re- 
 proach" — to John Stuart Mill. 
 
 "Bourgeoisie," says Hertzen, "is no other than 
 the sovereign mob of John Stuart Mill's 'conglom- 
 erated mediocrity,' which reigns over all things, — 
 the mob without ignorance, but without education
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 23 
 
 as well. . . . Mill beholds everything around him 
 becoming vulgar, small; he looks with despair upon 
 these crushing masses of some prolific spawn, com- 
 pressed out of the myriads of bourgeois shallow- 
 ness. ... He does not at all exaggerate when he 
 speaks of the contraction of intellect and energy; 
 of the obliteration of personalities; of the constant 
 degeneration of life ; of the constant exclusion from 
 it of all universally human interests; of its resolv- 
 ing itself into the interests of the counting room 
 and the well-being of the bourgeoisie. Mill pro- 
 claims plainly that by following this course Eng- 
 land will become China — we will add: and not 
 England alone. 
 
 "It may be that some crisis may even save it 
 from the Chinese marasmus. But whence will it 
 come, and how? — this I do not know, and even 
 Mill does not know." "Where is that mighty 
 thought, that passionate faith, that fervent hope, 
 which can steel the body, bring the soul to an ec- 
 static rapture, which feels neither pain nor priva- 
 tions, and with a firm step marches on to the heads- 
 man's block and the burning stake? Look around 
 you — what is capable of elevating the nations?" 
 
 ''Christianity has grown shallow, and come to 
 rest in the quiet, rocky harbor of reformation; re- 
 volution also has grown shallow, and come to rest
 
 24 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 in the quiet, sandy harbor of liberalism. . . . 
 With such a complacent church, with such a tame 
 revolution, southern Europe has begun to settle, to 
 seek its equilibrium." 
 
 "Wherever the human ant-hills and bee-hives at- 
 tained a relative contentment and equilibrium, the 
 forward movement became more and more quiet, 
 until, in the end, came the final calm of China." 
 
 In the track of the "Asiatic nations, passed out of 
 history," all Europe, with a calm, imperturbable 
 step is marching on to this final calm of a con- 
 tented ant-hill, to "the crystallization of bour- 
 geoisie," to Chinafication. 
 
 Hertzen agrees with Mill: "If some unexpected 
 upheaval, which shall regenerate human individ- 
 ualism and give it strength to conquer bourgeoisie, 
 does not occur in Europe, then, regardless of its 
 noble antecedents and its Christianity, Europe shall 
 become China." 
 
 "Ponder upon it," Hertzen concludes this letter 
 to an unknown Russian, — to all the people of Rus- 
 sia, it would seem, — "ponder upon it, and your 
 hair will stand on end." 
 
 Neither Mill nor Hertzen perceived the ultimate 
 cause of this spiritual bourgeoisie. "We are not 
 at all the physicians — we are the pain," warns 
 Hertzen. And, actually, in all these prophecies —
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 25 
 
 prophecies upon one's own head, not only for Mill, 
 but partly for Hertzen as well — there is no result, 
 no knowledge, but only the cry of an unknown 
 pain, an unknown horror. Hertzen and Mill could 
 not see the cause of bourgeoisie, as a man cannot 
 see his face without a mirror. That with which 
 they suffer and which they fear in others, lodges 
 not only in others, but in themselves, — in the ulti- 
 mate, insurmountable, and, even to them, invisible 
 limits of their own religious, or, more correctly, 
 their antireligious, consciousness. 
 
 The last limit of all contemporary culture in 
 Europe is positivism, or, in the terminology of 
 Hertzen, "scientific realism," as a method not only 
 of the individual scientist, but of all philosophical 
 and even religious thought in general. Having its 
 birth in science and philosophy, positivism has 
 growTi out of a scientific and philosophical con- 
 sciousness into an unconscious religion, which 
 strives to abolish and replace by itself all former 
 religions. Positivism, in this broad sense, is an 
 affirmation of a universe revealed to physical expe- 
 rience, as the only real one, and a denial of a super- 
 physical universe; a denial of the beginning and 
 end of the universe in God and the affirmation of a 
 continuance, without beginning or end, of a uni- 
 verse of phenomena, of a medium of phenomena —
 
 26 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 a medium without beginning or end, impermeable 
 to man; a mediety, mediocrity — that absolute 
 "conglomerated mediocrity," as perfectly solid as 
 the Great Wall of China, that absolute bourgeoisie, 
 of which Mill and Hertzen speak without under- 
 standing the ultimate metaphysical depth of what 
 they are saying. 
 
 In Europe positivism is only becoming a religion, 
 in China it has already become one. The spiritual 
 foundation of China — the teachings of Lao-tse and 
 Confucius — is a perfect positivism, a religion with- 
 out a God, "an earthly religion, without a heaven," 
 as Hertzen expresses himself about European scien- 
 tific realism. There are no mysteries of any sort, 
 no depths and longings for "other worlds than 
 ours." Everything is simple, everything is on a 
 plane. Insuperable common sense, insuperable 
 positiveness. All that is, is; and there is nothing 
 more, nor need for anything more. This world is 
 all, and there is no other world save this. Heaven 
 is not the beginning and the end, but a continua- 
 tion, without beginning or end, of the earth. Earth 
 and heaven shall not be one, as Christianity affirms, 
 but one substance. The greatest empire on earth is 
 verily the Celestial Empire, the heaven on earth, 
 the Median Kingdom — the kingdom of the eternal 
 mean, of eternal mediocrity, absolute bourgeoisie,
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 27 
 
 "a kingdom not of God, but of man," as Hertzen, 
 once more, defines the common idealism of posi- 
 tivism. The European worship of descendants — 
 the golden age of the future — corresponds to the 
 Chinese worship of ancestors — the golden age of 
 the past. If not we, then our descendants shall see 
 an earthly paradise, a heaven on earth, asserts the 
 religion of progress. Both in the worship of ances- 
 tors and the worship of descendants, the only visage 
 of man is equally sacrificed: personality to imper- 
 sonality, to a countless race, to the people, to man- 
 kind — "the masses of some prolific spawn, com- 
 pressed out of the myriads of bourgeois shallow- 
 ness," the coming universal polyp and ant-hill. 
 Denying God, denying an absolute Divine Person- 
 ality^ man inevitably denies his own human per- 
 sonality. Refusing, for the sake of a pottage of 
 lentils of a moderate repletion, his divine hunger 
 and divine primogeniture, man inevitably falls into 
 absolute bourgeoisie. 
 
 Chinamen are perfect yellow-faced positivists; 
 Europeans are as yet imperfect white-faced China- 
 men. In this respect Americans are nearer per- 
 fection than the Europeans. Here furthest South 
 joins furthest East. 
 
 That collision of China with Europe, which is be- 
 ginning, but probably will not end before our eyes,
 
 28 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 would have an especially prophetic and threatening 
 meaning for Hertzen and Mill. China has brought 
 to perfection positivistic contemplation, but posi- 
 tivistic action, all the applied technical side of posi- 
 tive knowledge, was lacking to China. Japan, not 
 only the military, but the cultural vanguard of the 
 East, took from the Europeans this technical side 
 of civilization and at once became invincible to 
 them. As long as Europe opposed her best can- 
 nons to the Chinese wretched ones, she conquered, 
 and this victory appeared a triumph of culture over 
 barbarism. But when the cannons became equal, 
 cultures became equal as well. It was found that 
 Europe never even had anything save cannons 
 whereby she could show her cultural superiority 
 over the barbarians. Christianity? But "Chris- 
 tianity has grown shallow;" it still has a certain 
 significance, though quite a dubious one, however, 
 for the internal politics of Europe; but when con- 
 temporary Christianity, passing beyond the boun- 
 dary of Europe, finds it necessary to exchange its 
 bills of credit for pure gold, none will give any- 
 thing for them. And even in Europe the most 
 barefaced are ashamed to talk of Christianity, be- 
 cause of such serious things as war. At one time 
 a fountain-head of great power, Christianity has 
 now become a fountain-head of great impotence, of
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 29 
 
 suicidal inconsistency, of the contradiction of all 
 culture in southern Europe. Christianity — the old 
 Semitic yeast in the Aryan blood — is verily just 
 that which does not let it settle definitely, interferes 
 with the final "crystallization," the Chinafication 
 of Europe. It would seem that the positivism of 
 the white race is forever spoiled, "wet underneath" 
 with "the metaphysical and theological period." 
 The positivism of the yellow race in general and of 
 the Japanese in particular — this newly-laid little 
 egg of the little Mongolian hen by the little white 
 Aryan rooster — is unspoiled by anything: as it has 
 been through two or three millennia, so has it re- 
 mained, so shall it remain forever. European posi- 
 tivism is still too intellectual — superficial, that is: 
 of the skin, so to say; the yellow people are posi- 
 tivists to the marrow of their bones. And the cul- 
 tural heritage of the ages — Chinese metaphysics 
 and theology — do not weaken but strengthen this 
 natural physiological gift. 
 
 He who is true to his physiology is consistent; he 
 who is consistent is strong; and he who is strong 
 conquers. Japan conquered Russia. China will 
 conquer Europe, unless a great spiritual change be 
 achieved within it, which shall overturn the last 
 metaphysical foundations of her culture, and allow 
 it to oppose to the cannons of the positivistic East
 
 30 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 not alone the cannons of the positivistic South, but 
 something more real, more substantial. 
 
 That is where the chief "yellow peril" is — not 
 without, but within; not in that Qiina is going into 
 Europe, but in that Europe is going into China. 
 Our faces are still white; but already under the 
 white skin flows not the former rich, crimson Aryan 
 blood, but a "yellow" blood, thinner and thinner, 
 resembling Mongolian ichor; the slit of our eyes 
 is straight, but the outlook is beginning to slant 
 and narrow. And the direct white light of the 
 European day is turning into the oblique "yellow" 
 light of the Chinese setting sun, or the Japanese 
 rising sun. At the present time the Japanese seem 
 to be the dressed-up apes of the Europeans; who 
 knows but that, in time, Europeans and even Amer- 
 icans may seem the dressed-up apes of the Japanese 
 and Chinese, incorrigible idealists, romanticists of 
 the old world, who only pretend to be positivists, 
 masters of the new world. It may be that the war 
 of the yellow race with the white was only a mis- 
 understanding: kin did not recognize kin. When 
 they shall recognize each other, however, war shall 
 end with peace, and then there shall be "a peace 
 of all the world," the final calm and quietude of 
 heaven, the Celestial Empire, the Median Kingdom 
 over all the world, from East to South, the final
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 31 
 
 "crystallization, the bee-hive and ant-hill of all 
 mankind, the solid "compressed spawn" of bour- 
 geoisie encrusting the earthly sphere, — and not 
 even bourgeoisie, but the canaille, because bour- 
 geoisie having reached its limits and come into 
 power is the canaille. 
 
 "Ponder upon it," we may conclude these reflec- 
 tions, as Hertzen concluded them formerly, "pon- 
 der upon it, and your hair will stand on end." 
 
 Hertzen had two hopes for the salvation of 
 Europe from China. 
 
 The first — the weaker one — for a social over- 
 turn. Hertzen stated the dilemma thus: 
 
 "If the people will be broken, a new China is 
 inevitable. But if the people break, a social over- 
 turn is inevitable." 
 
 Query: Having broken down the social oppres- 
 sion, with what, and in the name of what, will the 
 people break down as well the inner spiritual be- 
 ginning of bourgeois culture? With what new 
 faith, what source of new nobility? With what 
 volcanic explosion of human individuality against 
 the impersonal ant-hill? 
 
 Hertzen himself asserts: 
 
 "Behind the majority now in power (i. e., behind 
 the majority of the capitalistic bourgeoisie), stands 
 a still greater majority of candidates for it {i. e., the
 
 32 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 proletariat), for whom the manners, conceptions, 
 and the ways of living of the bourgeoisie are the 
 only goal of all their endeavors; there are enough 
 of them for ten changes. A world without land, 
 the world of the city proletariat, has no other way 
 of salvation, and will be all permeated with bour- 
 geoisie, which in our eyes has retrograded, but in 
 the eyes of the rustic population and proletarians 
 represents education and development." 
 
 But if the people "will be all permeated with 
 bourgeoisie," then, it may be asked, where will it 
 arrive? Will it be out of the present, imperfect 
 bourgeoisie into a future and perfect one; out of 
 the unhappy, capitalistic ant-hill into a happy, 
 socialistic one; out of the dark, iron age of Europe 
 into the "yellow," golden age and eternity of 
 China? The hungry proletariat and the satiated 
 bourgeois have diflferent economical interests, but 
 their metaphysics and religion are the same — the 
 metaphysics of a sober common sense, a religion 
 of a sober bourgeois repletion. The war of the 
 fourth estate with the third, economically real, is 
 just as unreal metaphysically and religiously as the 
 war of the yellow race with the white; both there 
 and here is might against might, and not God 
 against God. In both cases there is one and the
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 53 
 
 same misunderstanding: behind an external, tem- 
 porary war there is an internal, perpetual peace. 
 
 And so, to the question with what the people will 
 conquer bourgeoisie, Hertzen has no answer of any 
 sort. True, he could have borrowed the answer 
 of his friend, the anarchist Bakunin; he could have 
 gone over from socialism to anarchism. Socialism 
 desires to replace one social order with another, 
 the rule of the minority with the rule of the ma- 
 jority; anarchism denies every social order, every 
 external rule, in the name of absolute freedom, 
 absolute individuality — this beginning of all be- 
 ginnings and end of all ends. Bourgeoisie, in- 
 vincible to socialism, seems vincible to anarchism 
 — although only till a certain time, until new, still 
 more extreme inferences, which, however, neither 
 Hertzen nor Bakunin foresaw. The strength and 
 weakness of socialism, as a religion, is in that it 
 predetermines a future social creative power and 
 just through this involuntarily includes within itself 
 the spirit of the eternal Mean, of bourgeoisie, the 
 inevitable metaphysical consequence of positivism 
 as a religion, on which socialism itself is builded. 
 The strength and weakness of anarchism is in that 
 it does not predetermine any social creative power, 
 does not bind itself before the past with any respon-
 
 34 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 sibility for the future, and from the historical shoal 
 of bourgeoisie sails out upon the open sea of un- 
 plumbed historical depths, where it is on the brink 
 either of a total wreck, or the discovery of a new 
 heaven and a new earth. "We must destroy, 
 destroy only, without thinking of creating, — it is 
 not our business to create," preaches Bakunin. 
 But here conscious positivism already ceases, and 
 hidden, unconscious mysticism commences — athe- 
 istic, antitheistic, if you will, but mysticism still. 
 When Bakunin in Dieu et Vetat supposes that his 
 "antitheologism" — more correctly, antitheism, — is 
 a basis for anarchy, he touches upon limits of nega- 
 tion far too dangerous, where minus by minus 
 produces an unexpected plus, an accidental affirma- 
 tion of some converse, unconscious religion. "The 
 absolutely free man" of Bakunin too greatly resem- 
 bles a fantastic "superman," a non-man, to be re- 
 ceived with peace at heart by Hertzen, who fears 
 mysticism more than anything else, even more than 
 bourgeoisie itself, not realizing that this supersti- 
 tious fear of mysticism already has something of 
 the mystical in it. Be that as it may, Hertzen, a 
 socialist of the true faith, shrank back from 
 Bakunin the anarchist, who had fallen into heresy. 
 Towards the end of his life Hertzen lost, or al- 
 most lost, hope in the social overturn in Europe;
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 35 
 
 apparently, however, because he had ceased to be- 
 lieve not so much in its possibility as in its salutari- 
 ness. 
 
 Then it was that the last light began to glimmer 
 in the advancing gloom, the last hope of the on- 
 coming despair, — a hope in Russia, in the Russian 
 rural commune, which, it would seem, was to save 
 Europe.
 
 11 
 
 IF Hertzen was the Mephistopheles of Bakunin 
 in the unveiling of the unconscious mysticism 
 of the anarchistic "underworld," then Bak- 
 unin, in his turn, was the Mephistopheles of Hert- 
 zen in the unveiling of just as unconscious a mysti- 
 cism about the Russian commune as a savior of 
 Europe. 
 
 "You are ready to forgive everything," wrote 
 Bakunin to Ogarev and Hertzen from Ischia in 
 1866, "ready, if you like, to support everything, 
 if not directly then indirectly, if only your mystical 
 holy of holies remain inviolable, the commune of 
 Great Russia, from which mystically — do not grow 
 angry at an offensive but true word — you expect 
 the salvation not only of the people of Great Russia, 
 but also of all the Slavic lands, of Europe, of the 
 world. And, by the way, tell me why you have 
 not deigned to answer seriously and plainly to the 
 serious reproach made to you: you have caught in 
 the Russian peasant hut, which, with its landed 
 
 rights, has itself caught, and so stands for ages, in 
 
 S7
 
 38 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 a Chinese immobility. Why has this commune, 
 from which you expect such wonders in the future, 
 produced nothing from itself during all of ten 
 centuries, except the most abominable serfdom? 
 An abominable corruption and the patriarchal cus- 
 toms, v/ith their complete lack of rights, a lack of 
 rights of the individual before the community, and 
 the all-oppressive burden of this community, kill- 
 ing every possibility of individual initiative; the ab- 
 sence not only of juridicial rights, but of common 
 justice in the decisions of this very community 
 and the cruel unceremoniousness of its attitude to- 
 ward every poor or weak member; its systematic 
 oppression of those members who show pretensions 
 to the least independence, and the readiness to sell 
 every right and every truth for a bucket of whisky 
 — here, in the entirety of its real character, is the 
 peasant commune of Great Russia." 
 
 What answer could the orthodox Hertzen have 
 made to this anathema of Bakunin, the heretic? 
 Nothing positive, but only mystical, rather: credo, 
 quia absurdum, — just as, however, Bakunin could 
 not answer anything to Hertzen in the matter of the 
 "antitheological," but still too theological, founda- 
 tion of anarchism, this absolute liberation of abso- 
 lute individuality, incomprehensible from the posi- 
 tive — relative, that is, — point of view. Therein is
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 39 
 
 the whole crux of the matter: both Hertzen and 
 Bakunin had bordering deductions, having reached 
 which, they, looking each other in the eye, should 
 have burst into laughter, like augurs. But they 
 both desired to be not the augurs, the priests, of 
 the old gods, but to be the prophets of the new, and 
 therefore avoided looking into each other's eyes. 
 Each one, in order not to laugh at himself, laughed 
 at his opponent; but during this mutual laughter 
 both were grievously sad at heart. 
 
 Why, indeed, must the common ownership of the 
 ant-hill deliver the ants from the lot of ants? And 
 wherein is savage serfdom better than cultured 
 beastliness? 
 
 When Hertzen ran away from Russia into Eu- 
 rope, he fell out of one bondage into another, — 
 from the material into the spiritual. And when 
 he wanted to run away from Europe back into Rus- 
 sia, he fell out of the European movement toward 
 a new China — into the old "Chinese immobility" 
 of Russia. In both cases, out of the frying pan into 
 the fire. Which of the two Chinas is better — the 
 old or the new? "Both are worse," as the children 
 answer. Hertzen knew this, yet did not want to 
 know it. And when he ran from one China into 
 another, he was running away from himself, beat- 
 ing about in the last horror of the last realization,
 
 40 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 that there was no longer anything to believe in, 
 neither in Europe nor in Russia. "Pray, what does 
 all history lead to, after this?" he asks himself in 
 one of his hopeless Hamletian monologues. 
 
 "But then, what does everything in this world 
 lead to? As for history, I do not make it, and 
 therefore do not answer for it." 
 
 But this is the answer of Cain. Why, this is the 
 Byronian Darkness, the last darkness, the limit 
 of despair of which the soul of man is capable. 
 For if all history is nonsense, there was nothing to 
 make a fuss about — to fight with bourgeoisie, des- 
 potism, reaction: come what may, what does it mat- 
 ter? — all the world is "the devil's vaudeville," and, 
 addressing all the world, there only remains to cry 
 out, as in 1849, after the revolution, Hertzen cries 
 out, addressing old Europe: 
 
 "Long live destruction and chaos! Long live 
 death! 
 
 Or, what is still worse: long live bourgeoisie!" 
 
 "Christianity has grown shallow," asserts Hert- 
 zen. If it has grown shallow, it means that it was 
 deep at one time. Why, then, does he not sound 
 this depth of Christianity? Is it not because the 
 positivistic plummet, adapted to the shoal of Chris- 
 tianity, does not reach to the bottom in deep places? 
 
 Together with Christianity — adds Hertzen —
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 41 
 
 "revolution has grown shallow as well." If they 
 have both grown shallow in common, does it not 
 mean that their shoal is in common, and their depth 
 also? The shoal — positivistic — is the absolute 
 bourgeoisie of man without God; the depth — relig- 
 ious — the absolute nobility of man in God. Hert- 
 zen himself acknowledges the connection of revolu- 
 tionary ideas with religious ones; understands that 
 the Declaration and Bill of Rights could not have 
 appeared before, and without, Christianity. 
 
 "Revolution," he says, "just as reformation, 
 stands in a churchyard. Voltaire, blessing Frank- 
 lin's nephew, 'in the name of God and Liberty,' is 
 as much of a theologian as Saint Basil the Great or 
 Gregory of Nazianzin, only in a diiferent sense. 
 The cold lunar reflection of Catholicism (i. e., one 
 of the greatest attempts of universal Christianity) 
 is permeated with all the destinies of revolution. 
 The last word of Catholicism is spoken by reforma- 
 tion and revolution; they have exposed its mystery; 
 the mystic redemption is solved by political libera- 
 tion. The symbol of the faith of the Nicene Coun- 
 cil expressed itself in the acknowledgment of the 
 rights of every man — the symbol of the last uni- 
 versal council, i. e., the Convention of 1792. The 
 morality of Matthew the Evangelist is the very same 
 which the deist Jean Jacques Rousseau preaches.
 
 42 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 Faith, hope, and charity — at the entrance; liberty, 
 fraternity, and equality — at the exit." 
 
 If that be so, then it would seem that, before 
 pronouncing the death sentence of European culture 
 and running from it to Russian barbarism, in the 
 despair of a final unbelief, one ought to think if 
 these two shoaled beginnings of universal culture 
 — religion and sociality — could not somehow be 
 moved from their common positivistic shoal into 
 their common religious depths. Why, then, does 
 not Hertzen think of it? For still the same reason, 
 it would seem: he fears religious depths still more 
 than positivistic shoals; he seems to see in the 
 depth of any mysticism the ferocious beast of reac- 
 tion, in its way a beast of the Apocalypse, coming 
 out of its abyss. 
 
 The reckless Bakunin has thought, and made an- 
 swer, for the cautious Hertzen; Bakunin, who has 
 resolved the dilemma of Hertzen into the theologi- 
 cal, or "anti-theological," dilemma: "Dieu est, 
 done Vhomme est esclave. L'homme est libre, 
 done il ny a point de Dieu. — Je defie qui que ce 
 soit de sortir de ce cercle et maintenant choisis- 
 sons." 
 
 "God is, therefore man is a slave. Man is free, 
 therefore there is no God. I maintain that no one
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 43 
 
 can escape out of this circle — and now let us 
 choose." 
 
 "The religion of humanity," concludes Bakunin, 
 "must be founded on the ruins of the religion of 
 Divinity." 
 
 Voltaire asserted: if there is no God, He must 
 be invented. Bakunin asserts the very opposite: 
 if there is a God, He must be abolished. This re- 
 minds one of the Devil's words to Ivan Karamazov: 
 
 "The idea of a God must be destroyed in human- 
 ity — we must start work from that. Once human- 
 ity denies God, everything new will come." 
 
 In 1869, at the Congress of the League for Peace 
 and Liberty at Berne, Bakunin proposed to adopt 
 into the basis of the socialistic program a denial 
 of all religions and the avowal that "the existence 
 of a God is inconsistent with the happiness, dig- 
 nity, reason, morality and liberty of men." 
 
 When the majority rejected this resolution, 
 Bakunin with certain members of the minority 
 formed a new Alliance, Alliance Socialiste, the 
 first paragraph of whose code proclaimed: "The 
 Alliance declares itself Godless {athee)^ 
 
 This zealous "antitheologism" is already not 
 only the denial of religion, but the religion of 
 denial as well, some new religion without a God,
 
 44 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 full of a jealousy no less fanatical than the old re- 
 ligions with a God. Turgeniev, hearing of Bak- 
 unin's prank at Berne, was astonished. "What has 
 happened to him!" Turgeniev asked of all. "Why, 
 he was always a believer, he even scolded Hertzen 
 for his atheism. Just what, then, has happened to 
 him?" 
 
 It is plain why it is necessary for the Devil to 
 destroy in men the idea of a God : that is why he is 
 a Devil, in order to hate God. But A. M. Bakunin, 
 regardless of all his antitheological zeal, is not a 
 devil, but a simple man, and a religious one to boot. 
 What, then, has happened to him indeed? Why 
 has he suddenly come to hate the name of God, 
 and, like one possessed, begun to blaspheme? 
 
 "If there is a God, man is a slave," asserted 
 Bakunin. Why? Because "liberty is a denial of 
 all authority, and God is authority." This propo- 
 sition Bakunin considers an axiom. And truly, 
 this would be an axiom, if there were no Christ. 
 Christ has revealed to men that God is not author- 
 ity, but love; not an external power of authority, 
 but an inner power of love. He who loves does 
 not desire slavery for the one beloved. Between 
 him who loves and him who is loved there is no 
 other power save love; but the power of love is no 
 longer power, but freedom.
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 45 
 
 Perfect love is perfect freedom. God is perfect 
 love, and, consequently, perfect freedom. When 
 the Son says to the Father: "Not my will, but thine, 
 be done," it is not the submission of bondage, but 
 the freedom of love. The Son does not wish to 
 infringe upon the will of the Father not because 
 he cannot, but he cannot because he does not wish 
 to. 
 
 To the dilemma of Bakunin, affirming a God of 
 hatred and bondage, i. e., in reality not a God, but 
 a Devil, can be opposed another dilemma, affirm- 
 ing the true God, a God of love and freedom: 
 
 "God is, therefore man is free; man is a slave, 
 therefore there is no God. I maintain that no one 
 can escape out of this circle — and now let us 
 choose." 
 
 All those who have believed in God have always 
 been slaves, Hertzen would have agreed with 
 Bakunin. But the idea of God, the idea of a higher 
 metaphysical order, cannot be subordinated to the 
 experience of a lower historical order. And, after 
 all, have all those who have believed in God been 
 slaves? What of Jacob, who wrestled with God; 
 what of Job, who complained against God; what 
 of the prophets of Israel, what of the Christian 
 martyrs? 
 
 Bakunin and Hertzen, desiring to strive against
 
 46 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 the metaphysical idea of God, in reality strive 
 against historical phantoms, distorted with the re- 
 fractions of this idea in the mists of political low 
 places; they strive not against the name of God, but 
 with those blasphemies with which "the prince of 
 this earth," an eternal politician, endeavors to 
 screen from men that name which to him, the devil, 
 is the holiest and most fearful of all the names of 
 God: Freedom. 
 
 Of course, the greatest crime in history, as if of 
 a second crucifixion no longer of the God-man, but 
 of God-mankind, consists in this: that on the cross, 
 the sign of divine freedom, human freedom has 
 been crucified. But can it be possible that Bak- 
 unin and Hertzen would be bold enough to assert 
 that the Crucified Himself participated in this 
 crime, that Christ desired bondage for men? Can 
 it be possible that Bakunin and Hertzen have never 
 thought of the meaning of Christ's answer to the 
 Devil, when he offers Him power over all the king- 
 doms of this earth: "For it hath been delivered 
 unto me," said the Devil, "and to whomsoever I 
 will I give it." If He, Who said, "All authority 
 hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth," 
 renounced all power of ruling as belonging to the 
 Devil, does it not mean that, between the true, inner 
 power of love, the freedom of Christ, and the out-
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 47 
 
 ward, false power, bondage, there is the same dif- 
 ference as between the Kingdom of God and the 
 Kingdom of the Devil? Can it be possible that 
 Bakunin and Hertzen have never thought of the 
 meaning of this saying of Christ also: "Ye shall 
 know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." 
 If to them this is a word that has not been kept, 
 it is perhaps because they are indeed words not 
 understood, not fully assimilated: "Ye cannot bear 
 them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, 
 is come, he shall guide you into all truth." And 
 into the final truth of love, which shall make men 
 free. 
 
 In the first kingdom of the Father, the Old Tes- 
 tament, was revealed the power of God, as truth; 
 in the second kingdom of the Son, the New Testa- 
 ment; the truth reveals itself as love; in the third, 
 and last, kingdom of the Spirit, the Coming Testa- 
 ment, love will be revealed as freedom. And in 
 this last kingdom will be pronounced and heard the 
 last name of the Coming Lord, a name as yet un- 
 pronounced and unheard of any: The Liberator. 
 
 But here we already cast off not only from this 
 shore, on which stands European culture, with its 
 bourgeoisie of the past and the present, but from 
 the other shore as well, on which Hertzen stands 
 before the bourgeoisie of the future; we float out
 
 48 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 into the open ocean, in which all shores disappear; 
 into the ocean of the Coming Christianity, as one 
 of the three revelations of the unified Revelation of 
 the Trinity. 
 
 The tragedy of Hertzen is in this halving: with 
 his consciousness he rejected God, — unconsciously, 
 he sought Him. Just as in the Bakunian dilemma, 
 from the accepted premise: man is free, — through 
 his consciousness he made the deduction: therefore 
 there is no God; unconsciously, he felt the incon- 
 trovertibility of the converse dilemma: if there is 
 no God, there is also no freedom. But to say: 
 there is no freedom, was for Hertzen tantamount to 
 saying: there is no meaning in life, there is nothing 
 to live for, there is nothing to die for. And, in 
 fact, he lived for, and died for the sake of, that in 
 which he already well-nigh did not believe. 
 
 This is not the first prophet and martyr of a 
 new, but the last warrior, the dying gladiator of the 
 old world, of old Rome. 
 
 ". . . The buzz of eager nations ran 
 
 In . . . loud-roared applause. . . . 
 
 I see before me the gladiator lie; 
 
 He leans upon his hand; his manly brow 
 
 Consents to death, but conquers agony. . . ." 
 
 The beast with which this gladiator fights is the 
 bourgeoisie of the future. In the manner of his
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 49 
 
 ancestors, the northern barbarians, he has come out 
 to the combat naked, without shield or weapon. 
 And the other beast, "the thousand-headed hydra, 
 the mukitudinous spawn," of the bourgeoisie of 
 the past and the present, watches the young Scyth- 
 ian from the steps of the ancient amphitheater. 
 
 "And through his side, the last drops, ebbing slow. 
 From the red gash, fall heavy one by one, . . . 
 
 And now 
 The arena swims around him, — he is gone. . , . 
 
 He heeded not — 
 His eyes were with his heart, and that was far away." 
 
 Hertzen's vision before death is of Russia as "a 
 land of free existence" and of the Russian peasant 
 commune as the salvation of the world. He took 
 his old love for a new faith, but, it would seem, at 
 the last minute understood that even this last faith 
 was a deception. If faith deceived him, however, 
 love did not; in his love for Russia there was some 
 true foresight: not the peasant commune, but a 
 Christian sociality may, indeed, be the new faith 
 which the young barbarians will bring to old Rome. 
 
 But in the meantime, the dying man is still dying, 
 — without any faith: 
 
 "Forgive, Rome corrupt! Forgive, native land!" 
 In the fate of Hertzen, the greatest Russian intel-
 
 50 THE IVIENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 ligent, is forecast a question on which depends the 
 fate of the whole Russian intelligentzia: will it 
 comprehend that only in the coming Christianity 
 consists the power capable of conquering bourgeoi- 
 sie and the coming rabble? If it will compre- 
 hend, then it shall be the first confessor and martyr 
 of a new world; but if not, then, like Hertzen, it 
 shall be only the last warrior of the old world, the 
 dying gladiator.
 
 W' 
 
 III 
 
 ' '^^ "^^ "^HEN they are saying Peace and 
 safety, then sudden destruction 
 cometh upon them." This proph- 
 ecy has never seemed nearer its fulfillment than in 
 our day. 
 
 At the same time that the South, in the person 
 of Russia, is concluding a peace with the East, 
 and all the nations are repeating: peace, peace, — 
 a war-like meeting takes place in Swinemiinde. 
 Two of the most enlightened nations came together 
 only to show their mailed fists to each other. Just 
 as if two beasts of prey had stolen up to each 
 other, put their muzzles together, and, snarling 
 and baring their teeth, sniffed each other, had 
 bristled up, all ready for a lunge to tear each other, 
 and, backing away, had silently gone their ways. 
 
 This is not an actuality, but an idealized sign of 
 modern European culture. External policies are 
 only a cynical exposure of the internal. "By their 
 fruits shall ye know them." The fruit of internal, 
 spiritual bourgeoisie is external, international bru- 
 tality, — militarism, chauvinism. 
 
 51
 
 52 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 The ancient she-wolf of Rome, too, had sharp 
 teeth, and a blood-thirsty rapacity in politics. 
 But when it came to certain ideas held in common 
 — Pax romana, the idea of a universal peace, and 
 the Eternal City, the incarnation of eternal Reason, 
 — Rome paused, and reverently lowered before 
 these unalterable sanctities its fasces, the insignia 
 of its legions with the all-conquering eagles. And 
 in the darkest night of mediaeval barbarism, in 
 the midst of feudal intestine dissension, the nations 
 ceased war and laid down their arms at the beck 
 of a meek old man, a Roman pontiff who brought 
 to their minds the will of Christ: "There shall be 
 one fold, and one shepherd." 
 
 Now there is neither the empire of Rome, nor a 
 Roman church. There is no idea held in common, 
 no common sanctity. Over the "Christian" king- 
 doms — these old gothic shops — still rears here and 
 there the half-rotted wooden cross of Protestantism, 
 or the corroded brazen cross of Catholicism; but 
 no longer does any one pay the least attention to 
 them. The religion of modern Europe is not 
 Christianity, but bourgeoisie. From the prudence 
 of well-fed bourgeoisie to an insane, famishing 
 brutality is only one step. Not only is man a wolf 
 to man, but nation to nation as well. Only a mu- 
 tual fear restrains them from a mutual devouring;
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 53 
 
 the rein is entirely too weak for the infuriated 
 beasts. If not to-day, then to-morrow they shall 
 spring upon each other, and there shall begin a 
 slaughter the like of which has never been before. 
 
 A French writer, Villiers de L'isle-Adam, has a 
 fantastic story of tvvo neighboring towns, peopled 
 with good, honest burghers and shop-keepers; quar- 
 reling over some trifle town goes to war against 
 town, and, despite their cowardice — or in conse- 
 quence of their cowardice, — the shop-keepers ex- 
 terminate the shop-keepers so, that of the whole 
 prosperous bourgeoisie culture only scraps and 
 ends are left. 
 
 The international politics of modern Europe re- 
 mind one of the politics of these cowardly and fero- 
 cious shop-keepers. 
 
 When one looks upon the faces of those in whose 
 hands lies the fate of Europe, one recalls the 
 prophecies of Mill and Hertzen about the inevit- 
 able victory of a spiritual China. Before there 
 have been monsters in history — Tamerlanes, At- 
 tilas, Borgias. Now there are no monsters — just 
 men, like all men. Instead of a scepter, — a yard- 
 stick; instead of a Bible, — a ledger; instead of an 
 altar, — a counter. What self-satisfied vulgarity 
 and insipidity in the expression of the faces! One 
 gazes, and wonders with a great wonder, as the
 
 54 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 Apocalypse has it: ^ Whence have sprung these 
 crowned lackeys, these triumphant beasts? 
 
 Yes, bourgeoisie has made fearful successes in 
 Europe since the time of Hertzen and Mill. 
 
 All the nobility of culture, having withdrawn 
 from the province of public affairs, has concen- 
 trated itself in isolated personalities, in such great 
 eremites as Nietzsche, Ibsen, Flaubert, and — still 
 the most youthful of the young — the aged Goethe. 
 In the midst of the even plain of bourgeoisie, these 
 bottomless artesian wells of humanity witness that 
 under the parched earth living waters are hidden 
 still. But a geological upheaval, an earthquake, 
 is necessary that the subterranean waters may burst 
 forth and flood the plain, carry away the ant-hills, 
 overturn the old shops of bourgeois Europe. But 
 meanwhile there is a dead drought. 
 
 And, just as soon as they come out of the circle 
 of individual culture, and touch upon sociality, 
 even these great anchorites of European genius lose 
 their nobility, become trivial, shallow, exhausted, 
 like rivers of the plains come upon sands. 
 
 When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, 
 
 1 "I wondered with great admiration." Revelation, XVII, 6. 
 The archaic meaning of admiration, as defined by Webster, is 
 wonder, astonishment. Trans.
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 55 
 
 he suddenly droops down to the earth; as if through 
 some evil enchantment the giant flattens down, 
 shrivels into a dwarf; from a Hellenic demi-god he 
 becomes a German burgher, and— may the shade 
 of the Olympian forgive me! — a German philister, 
 "Herr von-Goethe," a privy councilor to a duke of 
 Weimar and an honest son of an honest shop-keeper 
 of Frankfort. When Flaubert asserts: la politique 
 est faite pour la canaille, — one recalls with sad- 
 ness the salon of the Princess Mathilda and other 
 gilt pig-sties of the Second Empire, where this 
 Simeon the Stylite of aesthetics cast pearls before 
 the swine, preaching his new oligarchy of "the 
 mandarins of learning." When Nietzsche makes 
 eyes not merely at Bismarck, but the Russian auto- 
 crat as well, as the greatest manifestation of "the 
 Will to Might," Wille zur Macht, in the midst of 
 modern European impotence, — then, on the pale 
 brow of "the crucified Dionysos" also appears the 
 same black spot of bourgeois contamination. The 
 noblest, because the frankest, of all seems Ibsen, 
 who expressed his attitude toward sociality in a 
 few words: An Enemy of the People. 
 
 But the friends of the people, such genial leaders 
 of democracy as Lasalle, Engels, Marx, while 
 preaching socialism not only do not warn prac-
 
 56 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 tically, but even theoretically do not foresee that 
 danger of "a new China," "a spiritual bourgeoisie," 
 which Hertzen and Mill feared so greatly. 
 
 And in answer to the socialists resounds the fear- 
 ful song of the new troglodytes: 
 
 "Vive le son, vive le son 
 De Vexplosion!" 
 
 Anarchism is the last spasm, no longer of social, 
 but of individual revolt against the unbearable 
 weight of state bourgeoisie. 
 
 At one time such singers of solitary despair as 
 Leopardi and Byron plumbed all the depth of the 
 world's sorrow, bound up with this downfall of 
 European sociality. Now there is no one whose 
 eye could plumb this depth: it has proven bottom- 
 less. In silence the seeing pass around it; the 
 blind fall into it silently. 
 
 But here our gaze, in a last despair or with a 
 final hope, even as the gaze of Hertzen, "the dying 
 gladiator," involuntarily turns from one of "our 
 two native lands," from Europe to Russia — from 
 the dark South to the East, darker still though al- 
 ready ensanguined either with the dawn or a con- 
 flagration. For Hertzen this "light of the East" 
 was a resurrection of "the peasant commune"; for 
 us it is a resurrection of Christian sociality. And
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 57 
 
 here again arises at the beginning of the twentieth 
 century the question put in the middle of the nine- 
 teenth: Will Russia conquer bourgeoisie, the un- 
 conquered of Europe?
 
 T 
 
 IV 
 
 ' *^ ■ ^HE Russian intelligentzia is the best in 
 the world," declared Gorky recently. 
 I will not say this; not because I do 
 
 not desire it, or think so, but because it is embar- 
 assing to praise one's self. For both Gorky and I 
 are Russian intelligents. And consequently it is 
 not for us to assert that the Russian intelligent is 
 the very best of all possible intelligents in the best 
 of all possible worlds. Such an optimism is dan- 
 gerous, especially in these times in Russia, when 
 every frog is praising its own bog. No, it is bet- 
 ter according to the other adage: Whom I love, I 
 chastise. It is more painful, but more wholesome. 
 And so, I do not undertake to decide whether the 
 Russian intelligentzia is a miracle or a monster; I 
 only know that it is, indeed, a thing unique in 
 modern European culture. 
 
 Bourgeoisie has seized all sociality in Europe; 
 individual personalities flee from it into the nobil- 
 ity of higher culture. In Russia it is just the oppo- 
 site: individual personalities are not guarded from 
 
 59
 
 60 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 bourgeoisie by the low level of our culture; but 
 then our sociality is noble through and through. 
 
 "Indeed, there is something insane in our life: 
 but there is nothing vulgar, nothing bourgeois." 
 
 If to this be added: not in our personal, but our 
 public life, — then these words of Hertzen, spoken 
 half a century ago, remain true to the present day. 
 
 Russian sociality is noble through and through 
 because it is tragic through and through. The sub- 
 stance of tragedy is opposed to the substance of the 
 idyll. The source of all bourgeoisie is an idyllic 
 welfare, even though in bad taste; "a golden 
 dream," even though of Chinese gilt tinsel. Trag- 
 edy, the veritable iron of the crucifying nails, is 
 the source of all nobility, that ruby-red blood which 
 maketh all those who receive its sacrament of "the 
 blood royal." The existence of the Russian intel- 
 ligentzia is a continual unhappiness, a continual 
 tragedy J 
 / It would seem that there is in the world no situa- 
 tion more helpless than that in which the Russian 
 intelligentzia has found itself — a position between 
 two pressures: a pressure from above, of the auto- 
 cratic order; and a pressure from below, of the 
 dark element of the people, not so much hating as 
 not understanding — but at times failure to under- 
 stand is worse than any hatred. Between these two
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 61 
 
 fearful pressures Russian sociality is grinding, like 
 the clean wheat of God, — if God wills, it will be 
 ground and there shall be meal, the meal for that 
 bread with which, at last, the great hunger of the 
 people shall be appeased; but in the meanwhile 
 the lot of the Russian intelligent is still the lot of 
 the grain of wheat — to be crushed, ground, — a 
 tragic lot. There is no longer any thought of 
 bourgeoisie — it is not a question of getting off well, 
 but of getting out alive! 
 
 Look closely: what an amorphous state of society, 
 indeed; what strange personages! 
 
 Here is a young man, "poorly dressed, with deli- 
 cate features," the murderer of a usurious old 
 woman, an imitator of Napoleon, a student who has 
 not completed his education, — Rodion Raskolni- 
 kov. Here is a medical student who disembowels 
 with his scalpel and scepsis live frogs and dead 
 philosophers, and preaches Stoff und Kraft with 
 the same cut-throat bravado as the merry men of 
 Stenka Razin upon a time used to cry Sarin na 
 kichku! ^ — the nihilist Bazarov. Here is a noble- 
 man-philosopher, grown common and tilling the 
 soil — Nikolai Levin. Here is a novice, as modest 
 
 2 All hands to the proiv! — probably as a preliminary to walking 
 the plank; a command once in use by Volga robbers upon cap- 
 turing a ship. Trans.
 
 62 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 as a girl — "a red-cheeked realist," "a precocious 
 philanthropist," — Alesha Karamazov. And his 
 brother Ivan — the precocious misanthrope; Ivan, 
 — "the inner conscience." And, finally, the most 
 unusual of them all, "the man from the under- 
 world," with lips twisted as if from a perpetual 
 convulsion of maliciousness, with eyes full of a 
 new love, as yet unknown to the world — the love of 
 a St. John; with the heavy glance of an epileptic; 
 an ex-convict and prisoner at the Fortress of St. 
 Peter; a future unnatural hybrid of the reaction- 
 ary with the terrorist — ^the half-possessed, half- 
 sainted, Fedor Michailovitch Dostoievsky. 
 
 Behind them are other, nameless ones, — faces of 
 a still more severe, classical nobility, as if hewn 
 out of marble: the images of new Harmodiuses and 
 Aristogitons, Saint Justs and Camille Desmoulins, 
 the wroth cherubim of national tempests. And 
 there are maidens, like chaste vestals, like new 
 Judiths, going into the camp of Holofernes, with 
 prayer at heart and sword in hand. 
 
 But in the very darkest depth, midst the thunder 
 and lightnings of our Sinai, on the fourteenth of 
 December, are the already well-nigh inhuman vis- 
 ages of the first prophets and the forefathers of 
 Russian liberty, — carvings no longer of marble
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 63 
 
 but of granite. Is it not the same granite whose 
 mass the Bronze Horseman ^ tramples? 
 
 All these are whatever you will, but not bour- 
 geois. If Flaubert had dared assert in their pres- 
 ence: la politique est faite pour la canaille^ he 
 would sooner have become one of the rabble him- 
 self than have made them into a rabble. For 
 them politics are a passion, an intoxication, "a 
 consuming fire," in which the will, like steel, be- 
 comes white-hot. These are the heroes famed m 
 no national legends, martyrs recorded in no church 
 calendars, — but veritable heroes, veritable martyrs 
 •till. 
 
 "From the exulting and idly chattering, 
 Encrimsoning their hands with gore, 
 Lead me away to the camp of those perishing 
 For the great work of love they adore." 
 
 When "the great work of love" is consummated, 
 when the movement for liberation which they have 
 begun and are carrying on is ended, — only then 
 shall Russia understand the worth of these men and 
 what they have done. 
 
 What, then, is this unprecedented society, the 
 only one of its kind in tlie world, — is it an order, 
 
 3 A famous statue in St. Petersburg, showing Peter the Great 
 on a rearing horse. Trans.
 
 64 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 or a caste, or a faith, or a conspiracy? This is 
 neither a caste, nor a faith, nor a conspiracy; it 
 is all of them in one — it is the Russian intelli- 
 gentzia. 
 
 Wlience has it appeared? Who created it? 
 The same one who created, or rather gave birth to, 
 all of the new Russia : Peter the Great. 
 
 I have already spoken once, and repeat anew 
 and insist: the first Russian intelligent was Peter. 
 He has imprinted, struck off, as on the bronze of a 
 coin, his image on the blood and body of the Rus- 
 sian intelligentzia. The sole legitimate heirs, the 
 children of Peter, are we, all Russian intelligents. 
 He is in us; we are in him. He who loves Peter, 
 loves us; he who hates him, hates us as well. 
 
 What is Peter? A miracle or a monster? 
 Again, I do not undertake to decide. He is too 
 dear to me, too much a part of myself, for me to 
 judge of him impartially. I only know — there 
 will be no other Peter; Russia has but one of him; 
 and she has but one Russian intelligentzia, she 
 will have no other. And while Peter is alive in 
 Russia, the great Russian intelligentzia is alive as 
 well. 
 
 Every day we perish. We have many enemies, 
 few friends. Great is the danger threatening us, 
 but great also is our hope: Peter is with us.
 
 AMID all the sad and fearful phenomena 
 which Russian society has to live through 
 of late, — the saddest and most fearful is 
 that savage baiting of the Russian intelligentzia, 
 which, as yet, is fortunately taking place only in 
 the dark and obscure underground cellars of the 
 Russian press. 
 
 Is the Russian intelligentzia necessary to Rus- 
 sia? The question is so absurd, that it seems, at 
 times, not worth while answering. Who are those 
 who ask save the intelligents themselves? Doubt- 
 ing the Russian intelligentzia's right to existence, 
 they doubt their own right to existence, — however, 
 perhaps they do well, because the degree of their 
 own "intelligence" is too insignificant. Verily, 
 there is 'something suicidal in this baiting, border- 
 ing on violent mania, for which are necessary not 
 the deductions of reason, but a strait -jacket. 
 There are times, however, when there is nothing 
 left for reason itself save to put on this strait- 
 jacket against the violence of the insane. 
 
 65
 
 66 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 Amid the inarticulate lamentations and revile- 
 ments can be made out only one accusation having 
 some faint resemblance of reasoning, — the accusa- 
 tion of "groundlessness," of a detachment from the 
 famous "three estates," the three leviathans of na- 
 tional life. 
 
 Here, if you will, is not only "groundlessness," 
 we are ready to agree, — here is an abyss, the same 
 "abyss" over which the Bronze Horseman has "up- 
 reared" Russia — all of Russia, and not merely the 
 Russian intelligentzia. Let her accusers, then, say 
 directly: Peter is not a Russian. But in such a 
 case we "groundless" intelligents will prefer to 
 remain with Peter, and with Pushkin, who loved 
 Peter as if he were the nearest of kin, rather than 
 remain with those to whom Peter and Pushkin are 
 strangers. 
 
 "The Russian is fearfully free in spirit,' says 
 Dostoievsky, pointing to Peter. In just this fear- 
 ful freedom of spirit, in this ability to break away 
 suddenly from the earth, from existence and his- 
 tory, to burn all its ships, to break up all its past 
 in the name of an unknown future, — in just this 
 spontaneous groundlessness consists one of the deep- 
 est particularities of the Russian spirit. It is very 
 difficult to move us; but once we have moved, we 
 reach the extreme in everything, in good and evil,
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 67 
 
 in truth and falsehood, in wisdom and insanity. 
 "All we Russians love to wander along brinks and 
 precipices," complained even in the seventeenth 
 century our first Slavophile, Knijanin. A partic- 
 ularity very dangerous, perhaps, but what is to be 
 done? To be one's own self is not always devoid 
 of danger. To deny one's self is to become not 
 merely "groundless," but impersonal, incapable. 
 This resembles a paradox, but at times it seems as 
 if our "groundlings," independents, and national- 
 ists are far less Russian than our nihilists and de- 
 niers, our intellectual "runners" and "no-sayers." 
 Self-denial, self-consuming, are inconceivable, im- 
 possible anywhere save Russia. Between the arch- 
 presbyter Awacuum, ready to be burned and to 
 burn others for the old faith, and the anarchist 
 Bakunin, proposing, during the revolution of Dres- 
 den, to put out on the walls of the besieged town 
 the Sistine Madonna as a protection against the 
 Prussian bombs, — the Prussians, d'ye see, being 
 educated people, will not dare to shoot at Raphael, 
 — between these two Russian extremes there is far 
 more in common than would appear at first sight. 
 Pushkin compared Peter with Robespierre and 
 in Peter's reorganization saw "a revolution from 
 above," "a white terror." Indeed, Peter is not 
 only the first Russian intelligent, but the first Rus-
 
 68 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 sian nihilist as well. When the "archdeacon of 
 the all-fools' cathedral" scoffs at the greatest na- 
 tional sanctities, it is a nihilism far more daring 
 and dangerous than the nihilism of Pisarev when 
 he scatters Pushkin right and left. 
 
 The Russian peasant Dukhobortzi, upon finding 
 themselves somewheres at the world's end — in Can- 
 ada — set their cattle free and harnessed themselves 
 to the plows, out of mercy for the animals, — is this 
 not "groundlessness"? And, at the same time, are 
 these not Russian people? "Dukhoborchestvo," — 
 an excessive spirituality, distractedness; a rational- 
 ism, reaching to the limits of its deductions, to the 
 edge of the "abyss," — revealing itself in the sec- 
 tarianism of our common people, reveals itself in 
 our intelligentzia as well. The nihilist Bazarov 
 says, "When I die, a burdock will grow." Nil 
 Sorsky orders in his will not to bury him, but to 
 throw him somewhere in a field, like a "dead 
 hound": in both cases, regardless of the difference 
 in the conclusions, there is the very same uncon- 
 scious metaphysics — the ascetic contempt of the 
 spirit for the flesh. The intelligents' "groundless- 
 ness" — a deflected idealism — is one of the final, 
 but very vital, off-shoots of a national asceticism. 
 
 The misfortune of the Russian intelligentzia is 
 not in that it is not sufficiently, but that it is exceed-
 
 t 
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 69 
 
 ingly Russian, Russian only. When Dostoievsky 
 sought the "all-man," the universal man, in the 
 depths of the Russian, he felt and wanted to fore- 
 stall this danger. 
 
 "Groundlessness" is a trait genuinely Russian, 
 but, be it understood, as yet not of all Russia, of 
 course. It is only one of the contradictory ex- 
 tremes which so amazingly dwell together in Rus- 
 sia. Side by side with the intelligents and the na- 
 tional Dukhobor-rationalists, are the intelligent and 
 national mystics of the Khlisty sect. 
 
 Side by side with the excessively sober are the 
 excessively intoxicated. Beside the Russia, ex- 
 tending into the distance like a somewhat drear and 
 gray plain, the everyday Russia of Pisarev and 
 Chernishevsky: 
 
 "These poor settlements, 
 This scanty nature," 
 
 there is a Russia of the heights and of the under- 
 ground, extending up to the summit and down into 
 the depths, a mysterious, starry, nocturnal Russia 
 of Dostoievsky and Lermontov: 
 
 "Night is still; and all the desert hearkens 
 Unto God; and star to star converses. . . ." 
 
 Which of these two Russias is authentic? Both 
 are equally authentic.
 
 70 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 Their separation has at present reached its final 
 limits. How they are to be united? — That is the 
 great question of the future.
 
 VI 
 
 THE second accusation, bound up with the 
 first one of "groundlessness," is the "God- 
 lessness" of the Russian intelligentzia. 
 
 It is scarcely a simple coincidence that this accu- 
 sation of Godlessness proceeds almost always from 
 people of whom it has been said: "These people 
 honor me with their lips, but their heart is far 
 from me." 
 
 Of the Russian intelligentzia one wants to say 
 at times: "With their lips they do not honor me, but 
 their hearts are not far from me." 
 
 Faith and a consciousness of faith are not one 
 and the same. Not all those who intend to believe, 
 believe; and not all those who intend not to be- 
 lieve, do not believe. The Russian intelligentzia 
 as yet has no religious consciousness, has not been 
 confessed, but there is already a great and con- 
 stantly growing thirst for religion. "Blessed are 
 they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for 
 they shall be filled." 
 
 There exist many opposite ways to God, not only 
 
 71
 
 72 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 positive but also negative. The God-wrestling of 
 Jacob, the murmuring of Job, the unbelief of 
 Thomas, — all these are authentic ways to God. 
 
 Let the Russian intelligents be "publicans and 
 sinners" — the last of the last. "Publicans and sin- 
 ners go into the kingdom of God before" those 
 pharisees and scribes who "shut up the kingdom 
 of heaven against men: for ye neither go in your- 
 selves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to 
 go in. . . . 'The last shall be first.' Neither suf- 
 fer ye them that are entering to go in." 
 
 At times it seems that this very atheism of the 
 Russian intelligenzia is some peculiar, mystical 
 atheism. Here it has the same denial of religion 
 as Bakunin's, passing into a religion of denial; 
 the same tragic halving of mind and heart, like 
 Hertzen's: the mind rejects, the heart seeks, God. 
 
 A great void is necessary for a great filling. Is 
 not the "Godlessness" of the Russian intelligentzia 
 the void of a deep vessel which awaits filling? 
 
 "And there were s-et there six waterpots of stone 
 
 • • • 
 
 "Jesus saith unto them. Fill the waterpots with 
 water. And they filled them up to the brim. 
 
 "And he saith unto them, Draw out now, and 
 bear unto the governor of the feast. And they 
 bare it.
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 73 
 
 "When the ruler of the feast had tasted the 
 water that was made wine, . . . the governor of 
 the feast called the bridegroom, 
 
 "And saith unto him. Every man at the begin- 
 ning doth set forth good wine; and when men have 
 well drunk, then that which is worst: thou hast kept 
 the good wine until now." 
 
 Our hope is in that our Cana of Galilee is be- 
 fore us: our waterpots yet stand empty; we are 
 drinking the worse wine, but Architriclion has kept 
 the good until now. 
 
 Dostoievsky, recalling in some way after thirty 
 years one of his conversations with Belinsky, ex- 
 claims with as much indignation as if the conver- 
 sation had taken place only yesterday: "This man 
 reviled Christ in my presence!" 
 
 And he makes a frantic inference: 
 
 "Belinsky is the most stupid and most fetid phe- 
 nomenon of Russian life." There is some dread- 
 ful misunderstanding here. That Belinsky could 
 revile Christ is a dreadful thing. But it is per- 
 haps still more dreadful that, on the basis of these 
 revilings, Dostoievsky after thirty years could pro- 
 nounce such a sentence over Belinsky, not having 
 understood that even if this man — consumed like 
 a candle before Some One, Whom he did not know 
 after all, nor could call by name, — was not with
 
 74 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 Christ, Christ was with him. "And whosoever 
 shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall 
 be forgiven him." When Belinsky uprose against 
 Gogol, because in his Correspondence With Friends 
 Gogol tried to consecrate serfdom in the name of 
 Christ, Belinsky, "reviling" Christ, was of course 
 then nearer to Him than Gogol, the shriven of 
 Christ. 
 
 Of the Russian intelligentzia, at times, the same 
 may be said as of Belinsky: as yet it is not with 
 Christ, but Christ is already with it. 
 
 We ought not, of course, reassure ourselves with 
 this: He stands at the door and knocks; but if we 
 hear Him not and do not open, — He shall go away 
 to others.
 
 VII 
 
 THE "Godlessness" of the Russian intelli- 
 gentzia is dependent upon a deficiency not 
 of all its entity, but of only some part of it, 
 — not in its feeling, conscience, will; but in its 
 judgment, in the mind, the intellectus, i. e., just 
 that which makes the intelligentzia the intelligent- 
 zia. 
 
 It may be that this word in itself does not coin- 
 cide altogether exactly with the sweep of the under- 
 standing. The power of the Russian intelligentzia 
 is not in the intellectus, the mind, but in the heart 
 and conscience. Its heart and conscience are 
 nearly always in the right path; the mind often 
 strays. The heart and conscience are free; the 
 mind is bound. The heart and conscience are fear- 
 less and "radical"; the mind is timid, and in its 
 very radicalism conservative and imitative. With 
 an excess of social sentiments there is a deficiency 
 of common ideas. All these Russian nihilists, ma- 
 terialists, Marxists, idealists, realists, — are only the 
 waves of a spent surge, coming from the North * 
 Sea into the Baltic. 
 
 * Called the German Sea in Russian. Trans. 
 
 75
 
 76 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 "Whatever the last book to him may but say 
 That on the surface of his soul shall stay." 
 
 Just take our Marxists, for instance. There is 
 never a doubt that these are most excellent people. 
 And of course they love the people no less than the 
 nationalists do. But when they talk of the "iron 
 law of economic necessity," they seem the ferocious 
 priests of Marx-Moloch, who are ready to sacrifice 
 the whole Russian nation. And they have talked 
 themselves into the willies. They have become re- 
 pugnant not only to others, but to themselves as 
 well. And at last, they took their Marx, their 
 little god, by his little leg, — and crash against the 
 ground with him. Or, as another adage has it: a 
 worthless god is licked even by calves, — the Bern- 
 stein calves are licking the neglected Marx. 
 
 The Marxian cant dragged on and on — and then 
 that of the tramps began to drag. 
 
 At first we thought that the tramps, at least, would 
 be an independent phenomenon. But when we 
 looked and listened more carefully, we found that, 
 just as the Russian Marxists were repeating Marx, 
 the German, the Russian tramps also were repeat- 
 ing Nietzsche, the German. The tramps took one 
 half of Nietzsche — our decadents-orgiasts took the 
 other. "Dancing Foot" had not yet had time to 
 hide, before the worshippers of the new Dionysos
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 77 
 
 began to chant: "Raise higher your dithyrambic 
 legs!" * One German cut in two suffices for two 
 Russian derniers cris. 
 
 Looking upon all these innocent intellectual 
 games side by side with the deepest moral and 
 social tragedy, one wants at times to cry out in 
 involuntary vexation: Hearts of gold, heads of 
 clay! 
 
 But the aesthetics is wooden. "Boots above 
 Shakespeare" — no one, of course, will say this in 
 so many words now, but it has stuck somewhere in 
 the sinuosities of our physiology, and, willy-nilly, 
 but it will tell in an "evil eye" against all outward 
 aesthetic form as a useless luxury. Not that we 
 assert directly: the beautiful is immoral; but we 
 are too much accustomed to the moral being ugly; 
 too easily reconciled to this contradiction. If our 
 ethics is "Shakespeare," then our aesthetics is at 
 times really not much above "boots." In any 
 case, Pisarev's "destruction of aesthetics" is, it is to 
 be regretted, deeply national. It is in the nature 
 of Russia, of Great Russia; a grayish sky, grayish 
 weekdays — 
 
 "Fir-woods, pines, and sand." 
 And here, in the mind, the intellectus, as well as 
 
 » V. IvANOV, The Religion of Dionysos, in The Problems of Life.
 
 78 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 in the heart and wiH of our intelligentzia, is the 
 same national leaning toward asceticism, to Duk- 
 hoborchestvo ; a monkish fear of flesh and blood, 
 a fear of all nakedness and beauty as a tempta- 
 tion of the fiend. Hence — with a truly religious 
 regard for outward, social liberty, — there is a dis- 
 respect for inner, personal liberty. And hence the 
 intolerance of the most radical of radicals for 
 schismatics and statute-makers; the mutual eaves- 
 dropping, lest some one eat meat at Lent, or be- 
 come filthy with the filth of the world. And so 
 those without priests are realists, and the idealists 
 believe in priests, and the Theodosians are Marx- 
 ists, and the Molokan sectarians are nationalists; 
 and every order, every persuasion, eats out of its 
 own bowl, and drinks out of a separate little "image 
 lamp," holding no communion with the heretics. 
 And all have the same fast — an abstract, rational- 
 istic xerophagy. "We taste no meat; we drink no 
 wine." 
 
 There is a legend that the holy Seraphim Sarov- 
 ski subsisted for many years upon snitka — a sort 
 of swamp-grass. All these realisms, idealisms, 
 monisms, pluralisms, empiriocriticisras, and other 
 dried "isms" upon which the Russian intelligentzia 
 subsists even to this day are reminiscent of the 
 snitka grass.
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 79 
 
 All faces have become crest-fallen from this in- 
 tellectual hunger — crest-fallen, and pale, and wan. 
 All are the "gloomy people" of Chekhov. The 
 sun is already rising in their hearts, but "dusk" is 
 still in their thoughts; flaming fire is in their hearts, 
 but a cooling warmth, lukewarm water, a warmed- 
 up German Habersuppe in their thoughts; riotous 
 youth in their hearts, but a resigned old age in their 
 thoughts. 
 
 At times, looking at these young ancients, these 
 intelligent ascetics and fasters, one longs to cry 
 out: 
 
 "Dear Russian youths! You are noble, honest, 
 sincere. You are our hope, you are the salvation 
 and future of Russia. Why, then, are your faces 
 so sad, your eyes so cast down? Be merry, smile; 
 lift up your heads and look the devil straight in 
 the eyes. Fear not the foolish old devil of political 
 reaction, who still glimmers before you, now in 
 heathen aesthetics, now in Christian mysticism. 
 Fear no temptations, no trials, no freedom, — not 
 only external, social freedom, but the inner, per- 
 sonal freedom as well, because without the second 
 the first is also impossible. Fear but one thing: 
 bondage; and the worst of all bondages, that of 
 bourgeoisie, and the worst of all bourgeoisies, that 
 of the rabble; for the slave come into power is a
 
 80 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 beast, and the beast come into power is the devil, — 
 no longer the old, the fantastic, but a new, a real 
 devil, truly frightful, more frightful than he is 
 painted, — the coming prince of this world, the 
 "Coming Beast."
 
 o 
 
 VIII 
 
 ' * ^~^\^ UR struggle is not against the blood 
 and the flesh, but against the powers 
 and authorities, against the world 
 rulers of the darkness of this age, the spirits of 
 evil on this earth." 
 
 And the world ruler of this age is the bourgeoisie 
 coming into power, the Coming Beast. 
 
 This Beast in Russia has three faces. 
 
 The first — of the present — is over us: the face of 
 autocracy, the dead positivism of bureaucracy, the 
 Chinese Wall of the table of ranks, separating the 
 Russian people from the Russian intelligentzia and 
 the Russian church. 
 
 The second face — of the past — alongside of us, 
 is the face of orthodoxy, rendering unto Caesar that 
 which is God's; that church of which Dostoievsky 
 said that it was in "a paralysis." "Our bishops 
 are so bridled that you can lead them where you 
 will," complained one Russian prelate of the eigh- 
 teenth century; and modem prelates could say the 
 same with a still greater right. Spiritual bondage 
 
 is in the very fountain-head of every liberty; spirit- 
 si
 
 82 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 ual bourgeoisie is in the fountain-head of every 
 nobility. The dead positivism of orthodox bu- 
 reaucracy is in the service of the positivism of auto- 
 cratic bureaucracy. 
 
 The third face — of the future — is imder us; the 
 face of beastliness, coming up from below, — of 
 the hooligans, of trampdom, of the black hundred, 
 — the most fearful of the three faces. 
 
 These three beginnings of spiritual bourgeoisie 
 have united against the three beginnings of spirit- 
 ual nobility: against the land and people, — the 
 living body; against the church, — the living soul; 
 against the intelligentzia, — the living spirit of Rus- 
 sia. 
 
 In order that the three beginnings of spiritual 
 nobility and freedom may in their turn unite 
 against the three beginnings of spiritual beastli- 
 ness and bondage, — a common idea is necessary; 
 but such a common idea only a religious regenera- 
 tion, together with a social regeneration, can give. 
 Neither religion without sociality, nor sociality 
 without religion, but only a religious sociality will 
 save Russia. 
 
 And, first of all, a religious-social consciousness 
 must awaken where there is already a conscious 
 sociality and an unconscious religiousness — in the 
 Russian intelligentzia, which not only in name but
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 83 
 
 in its essence must become the intelligence, the in- 
 tellectus incarnate, that is — the reason, the con- 
 sciousness of Russia. Reason, carried out to the 
 end, arrives at the idea of God. The intelligentzia, 
 carried out to its end, will arrive at religion. 
 
 This seems improbable. But not in vain did the 
 movement for liberation in Russia commence with 
 religion. Not in vain did such people as Novikov, 
 Katazin, and Qiaadaev, — as the masons, Martinists 
 and other mystics of the end of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury and the beginning of the nineteenth, — find 
 themselves in the very closest inner ties with the 
 Decembrists. This was, and shall be. Russian 
 sociality was baptized with a religious fire in its 
 infancy, and the same fire will descend upon it at 
 the time of its coming of age, will burst into flame 
 on its brow, like unto the "forked tongue of flame" 
 in the new Descent of the Holy Ghost upon the 
 living spirit of Russia — the Russian intelligentzia. 
 That is why, perhaps, it has found itself even in 
 the total darkness of religious consciousness, in its 
 "Godlessness," because it has made a complete 
 revolution from light to light, from the setting sun 
 to the rising sun, from the First Advent to the 
 Second. For this is verily the path not only of the 
 Russian intelligentzia, but of all Russia — from 
 Christ Come to the Coming Christ.
 
 84 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 And when this shall come to pass, the Russian 
 intelligentzia will cease to be the intelligentzia, 
 merely the intelligentzia, — human, merely human, 
 reason; then it shall become the Mind of all Hu- 
 manity, the Logos of Russia as a member of a uni- 
 versal body of Christ; a new true Church, no longer 
 a temporary, local, Graeco-Russian, but an eternal, 
 universal Church of the Coming Lord; the Church 
 of St. Sophia of the Great Wisdom of God; the 
 Church of the Trinity, inseparable and infusible, 
 — the kingdom not only of the Father and the Son, 
 but of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. 
 
 "Verily, verily this shall 6e/" 
 
 And in order that this may be, it is necessary to 
 tear apart the union of religion with reaction, a 
 union scoffing at sacred things; it is necessary that 
 men understand, at last, the meaning of this say- 
 ing, which has become the Flesh: 
 
 "// the Son therefore shall make you free, ye 
 shall be free indeed." (St. John, viii. 36.) 
 
 On to liberty, not against Christ, but with Christ. 
 Christ shall free the world — and none other than 
 Christ. On with Christ — against slavery, the bour- 
 geoisie, and the rabble. 
 
 Only the Coming Christ shall conquer the Com- 
 ing Mob.
 
 THE BLOSSOMS OF BOURGEOISIE
 
 I 
 
 MY meetings with Jaures and France were 
 so fleeting that perhaps it would not be 
 worth while telling about them, if it 
 were not that there is something of the symbolical 
 therein for us and for them; for us Russians and 
 for tlie Frenchmen — for Europeans in general, per- 
 haps. 
 
 To travel is not sufficient — it is necessary to live 
 in Europe to understand our incommensurability 
 with them, not in conceptions merely, or feelings, — 
 but in even the first sensations, in that physics which 
 is the foundation of all metaphysics. We may be- 
 come acquainted, even; may sympathize with each 
 other; but sooner or later a moment arrives when 
 they cease to understand us and look upon us as 
 the inhabitants of another planet. I say this with- 
 out pride — on the contrary, with humility: for we 
 must learn much from them, seek help from them 
 in many things — there is no doubt of that; but 
 whether we also can help them in anything — that 
 is as yet doubtful. At any rate, at present they 
 feel no need of us; in their consciousness or un- 
 
 87
 
 88 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 consciousness the coming destinies of Europe are 
 not bound up with our destiny; it seems, that if 
 Russia were to go down, they would survive; but if 
 Europe disappear — we perish. 
 
 It is difficult, scarcely possible, even, to define in 
 an exact formula this incommensurability, but 
 what stares one in the face is this: they are individ- 
 ualists; we are collectivists. Of course, in a cer- 
 tain sense, European sociality is more perfect than 
 the Russian; but there it has poured into firm, 
 crystal-clear governmental forms; our Russian soci- 
 ality, however, is as yet unmined ore, or metal 
 boiling in the furnace, which can pour into what- 
 ever forms you will, beautiful or monstrous. They 
 are a river in its channel; we are a river at flood- 
 tide. "The rising of rivers like unto seas" — that 
 seems to have been said especially of Russian soci- 
 ality. Perhaps we may some day find a channel, 
 but at present we have not found it, and it seems 
 that we have well-nigh limitless possibilities — good 
 and evil. 
 
 Whether our strength be in that, or our weak- 
 ness, we yet still believe in a universally historical 
 breaking off, in that sudden overturn, the apoca- 
 lypse of "a new heaven and a new earth," which 
 at one time appeared as in a dream to European 
 Sociality also; but there they have long ceased to
 
 THE BLOSSOMS OF BOURGEOISIE 89 
 
 believe in it, and now gradation, deliberativeness, 
 and uninterruptedness of development are for them 
 not only the external law of being, but the inner 
 law of the spirit. They are in evolution, we in 
 revolution. They, no matter how much they riot, 
 are submissive; we, no matter how much we sub- 
 mit, are rioting. 
 
 But the chiefest feature of our incommensura- 
 bility with Europe is the hardest of all to express 
 — namely, the religious feature. Simply to say: 
 we have religion, they have not, is immodest; yes, 
 even incorrect, if you will; for if religion is not 
 already with us, then as yet there is none. But we 
 all, those denying and those affirming, could, in a 
 greater or lesser degree say of ourselves what one 
 Russian decadent has said: "I desire that which is 
 not of this world." Europeans will not say this; 
 they, at any rate, do want that which is of this 
 world. They are in contact with this world; we 
 are in touch with "other worlds than ours." They, 
 when believing, still know; we, when we know, still 
 believe. That is why, even in the most frantic 
 extremes of negation, we appear mystics still; they, 
 even at the very last limits of affirmation, appear 
 skeptics to us. 
 
 They and we are not halves of one whole, tne 
 two poles of one force. If we have any preemi-
 
 90 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 nence before them, it is solely in that we have begun 
 to ponder this question before them. We under- 
 stood that they are necessary to us; they cannot con- 
 ceive that we might ever be of need to them. 
 
 They are "first," we are "last"; but "whosoever 
 . . . will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all." 
 It would seem that this is forgotten by them; if 
 we recall it, all shall be well with us. 
 
 II 
 
 With Jaures I became acquainted through An- 
 drei Bielyi, who had met him at a little table 
 (Thote in a little pension on the quiet Rue Rane- 
 lagh, in the quiet Parisian suburb of Auteuil 
 where Bielyi had settled down in my neighbor- 
 hood. It was just there that Jaures came to break- 
 fast before the sessions of the Chamber of Depu- 
 ties. It was at one of these very breakfasts that 
 they fell to talking of Social Democracy, with 
 which our poet, it is known, is captivated, con- 
 necting "the coming art" with its triumph. I be- 
 lieve in the Socialism of Bielyi as greatly as in his 
 "Symphonies," these magically beautiful and ten- 
 derly insane "songs without words." Be that as 
 it may, only that superficial sociability of the New 
 Athens made possible a conversation such as the
 
 THE BLOSSOMS OF BOURGEOISIE 91 
 
 one of the two "comrades" — the young Russian 
 symbolist and the venerable leader of French Social 
 Democracy. 
 
 When I entered the idyllically bourgeois dining 
 room on the lower floor of the little Ranelaghian 
 pension, where the air seemed to be growing darker 
 and thicker from the old, old smell of dishes, I 
 saw at the far end of the empty and long table 
 Jaures with two or three "comrades" — his insep- 
 arable retinue, they must have been, — and with 
 Andrei Bielyi. 
 
 A stout man of fifty arose to meet me; slightly 
 unwieldy and slow, not of great height, with the 
 stiff bristles of his hair and beard a reddish gray; 
 the skin on his face ruddy, as if weather-beaten; 
 with a prominently projecting chin, and simple 
 and kind eyes of a pale blue. Either the senior 
 cashier of an insurance company, or a teacher of 
 German in a Russian high-school. Nothing of 
 lightness, of the South, of the Latin. Teutonic 
 ponderosity and solidity. Not well cut but 
 strongly sewn. 
 
 Almost immediately after we had settled down, 
 we began talking of the Russian Revolution. 
 
 From the first words of my companion in con- 
 versation I sensed his curiosity of one who looks 
 out upon a shipwreck from the safety of a harbor.
 
 92 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 Whether Russia free herself, or remain in bondage, 
 he, Jaures, would be neither hot nor cold. I also 
 felt that he spoke of the revolution not as a sea- 
 man would speak of the sea, but as a geographer 
 might. 
 
 "At the present time in Russia the Cadets are 
 the only party which has a feeling of the real 
 political possibilities. All that is more extreme 
 than that is insane. Your extremists are either 
 fanatics or dreamers, living in a kingdom of chim- 
 eras. One cannot but wonder at their heroism. 
 But the wonder is mingled with a feeling of sad- 
 ness, and — forgive me — of vexation. Everything 
 with you Russians is an impulse. You are ready 
 to jump out of the window and break your necks, 
 instead of descending by the stairs. You can die 
 better than you can live. . . ." 
 
 "And you Europeans — can both die and live?" 
 I asked with an involuntary smile. 
 
 "Live well, die well," he parried, with that inno- 
 cent and amiable self-satisfaction which disarms. 
 
 A few months back I had heard his speech at a 
 "protest meeting" at the Winter Circus, occasioned 
 by the Bielostok pogrom, with a crowd of thousands 
 of Russian revolutionaries and French working- 
 men. He spoke of human rights, of the great cov- 
 enants of the French Revolution: of the universal
 
 THE BLOSSOMS OF BOURGEOISIE 93 
 
 brotherhood of nations, — of everything that at one 
 time was of moment, even here in Europe, but 
 now has long since become the music of words. 
 Jaures is an inspired orator. For an hour and a 
 half, without a breathing space, he shouted, he 
 roared, he bellowed, he thundered — a veritable 
 Zeus the Thunderer. But somehow just then I 
 recalled the saying of Grigorievitch about the late 
 Stasov: "A Vesuvius, erupting cotton." I can eas- 
 ily imagine that in the Chamber this florid, inflated 
 eloquence explodes like a punctured bladder under 
 the sharply pointed needles of Clemenceau. 
 
 I looked my neighbors over; French workingraen 
 — simple, honest, kindly faces, that one cannot but 
 love. Attentive, compassionate, almost reveren- 
 tial; just like people in a church at prayer, listen- 
 ing to an organ. But just as those who in our day 
 pray in church will not go on a crusade, so these 
 people will not go in for a revolution. The com- 
 mon face of the crowd — the face of the bourgeois 
 republic — is that of imperturbable, invincible bour- 
 geoisie: "we desire that which is of this world; a 
 bit at a time, and quiet-like, we'll build up a king- 
 dom of heaven on earth — smooth and easy does it." 
 Something unshakeable, absolute; a stronghold of 
 strongholds; a "present eternity" — scarcely any 
 other save the same in which Hertzen saw a portent
 
 94 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 of a "European China." When I bethought me 
 of the police agents placed near the doors of the 
 hall, I felt like laughing. Why the police? To 
 quiet whom? The Russian revolutionaries, per- 
 haps; but even they had become weaker, quieter, 
 dissolved in this crowd like acid in lye. What 
 revolution can there be here! Water was never 
 made to bum, bourgeoisie was never made to riot. 
 Coming out of the meeting, I got out of one 
 meeting into another. At the Place de Repub- 
 lique, on occasion of a holiday, a carnival had been 
 arranged, with show-booths and carrousels with 
 music. The night was calm, warm; with a full 
 moon in the cloudless sky. But in the blindingly 
 white electric light, like the light of day, the lumi- 
 nary of night seemed to be extinguished. In one 
 of the carrousels, instead of horses, gigantic pigs 
 were going around; the little tails curled into little 
 rings; tlie pink, bare bodies seeming alive; the 
 snouts with teeth bared, as if in laughter; and with 
 cunning in their little eyes, as if they knew some- 
 thing, but did not want to tell. The music was 
 playing a military march, and with a vertiginous 
 speed the men, women, and children were whirling 
 around astride the pigs. They, as well as the pigs, 
 were laughing. Suddenly, I fancied the same 
 thing that I had fancied there, at the meeting: here
 
 THE BLOSSOMS OF BOURGEOISIE 95 
 
 was some limit attained; an eternity arrived, calm 
 and smooth waters, God's bounty of a "Median 
 Kingdom," of a "heaven on earth." A sadness, as 
 though in a dream, contracted my heart. Some- 
 thing eerie, ominous, of the apocalyptic, was in 
 this black crowd and the light of nocturnal suns ex- 
 tinguishing the light of the moon, and in the rosily- 
 naked, laughing swine. "All this has been before, 
 only I cannot recall when." Or will it be? 
 
 "Yes, you can die, but live you cannot," Jaures 
 had repeated in conclusion of our conversation 
 about the Russian revolution. 
 
 Then we spoke of French Social Democracy — I 
 cannot now recall what, but the chief impression 
 which remained with me was the same as on that 
 evening at the Bielostok meeting: of a socialism 
 without a revolution — a lion without claws; a 
 socialism digested in the ostrich-like stomach of 
 bourgeoisie; a socialism which is the extinguished 
 lava of a volcano, that nurtures the plump clusters 
 of Lacrima Christi in the earthly paradise of bour- 
 geoisie. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In the salon of a certain French authoress of 
 Russian origin, Ivan Strannik, who has long lived
 
 96 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 in Paris, and who, it would seem, is the only one 
 in that city who attempts to unite oil with water — 
 the Russians with the French, — I became acquainted 
 with Anatole France. The amiable hostess had 
 invited the famous guest especially for me. But, 
 through unpardonable Russian barbarism, I was 
 late and arrived after France. 
 
 Do you recollect, in one of Chekhov's stories, 
 that delicate boy, resembling a girl, who moved 
 softly, who had a soft voice, soft, flaxen curls, soft, 
 tender eyes, a soft, little velvet jacket? France re- 
 minds one of this boy of Chekhov's. As soft as 
 soft can be, caressingly downy, tenderly velvety. 
 When you gaze at him for long, it is as if you were 
 passing your hand over silver-gray velvet. But 
 the impression of this inward softness does not 
 exclude an external distinctness, a firmness of coun- 
 tenance as exquisite as if it were carved. The 
 silver-gray head, splendid with the splendor of 
 age; the noble profile, that might have been struck 
 off on an ancient Florentine medal. The kind, 
 old courtiers, of the kind, old King Henry the 
 Fourth would be like that. 
 
 With me were my friends, also Russians; with 
 France, his inseparable friend of many years, a 
 very clever woman of the world in the spirit of the 
 eighteenth century, half Jewess, half French.
 
 THE BLOSSOMS OF BOURGEOISIE 97 
 
 Their mutual salon is at her house. France is mar- 
 ried, but no one knows his wife. 
 
 The hostess tried to start the conversation rolling 
 about Russian literature, about Tolstoy and Dos- 
 toievsky. But, as it proved, France was indifferent 
 to Tolstoy, and did not like Dostoievsky. Out of 
 politeness he did not say this, but it could be sur- 
 mised that Russian mysticism was not to his, a 
 perfect classic's, liking, and seemed almost nothing 
 else but "bad taste." The conversation did not get 
 along well. In vain did the charming hostess throw 
 little rainbow-bridges across the gulf separating 
 us; we could not step upon them, and fell through. 
 
 It would also seem, however, that France does 
 not willingly converse with, or listen to, others; but 
 then, he loves to listen to himself. And, indeed, 
 one would scarcely have the courage to reproach 
 him for it. When he speaks, one listens and cannot 
 have his fill, as if in his throat were a Stradivarius, 
 or that nightingale which, in Andersen's fairy-tale, 
 beguiled the death throes of the Chinese emperor. 
 Of whatever trifles he may speak, his speech is a 
 dainty for the gods; whatever bitter truths he may 
 utter, they, from his lips, are full of ambrosial 
 sweetness. But when one recalls what has been 
 said, one sees that it is almost nothing, over almost 
 nothing; everything melts like foam — but is it not
 
 98 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 that foam out of which was bom the goddess of 
 eternal beauty? 
 
 In reference to the collection of his political 
 speeches, he confessed that the delivery of even 
 the shortest speech before a gathering is for him 
 a veritable torture; that several days before, he 
 already worries, loses his presence of mind, and, 
 stepping upon the platform, becomes as timid as a 
 schoolboy. 
 
 "Alas, I am not born an orator!" he concluded 
 with jocose plaintiveness. 
 
 "Why, then, do you torture yourself?" 
 
 "What can I do? One must serve the common 
 good in some way." 
 
 "Socialism?" asked the hostess, winking at us. 
 
 "Well, yes, of course. But you, it seems, do 
 not believe in my socialism?" 
 
 "Not altogether." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "Why, even because you are the greatest of all 
 skeptics who have ever been in this world, for one 
 thing," some one of us took up the conversation. 
 "For how can one unite the doubt with the deed? 
 How do anything, not believing in what one does?" 
 
 "One may not be able to do; but one may play," 
 retorted France. "The struggle of the political 
 parties is for me a titanic game of chess. But
 
 THE BLOSSOMS OF BOURGEOISIE 99 
 
 are not all the deeds of mankind games? The 
 gods play with us — in that lies our tragedy; let us, 
 then, play with the gods — it may be that then our 
 tragedies will end in an idyll. He who has lost 
 faith in everything, derives the innocent ease and 
 delight of divine games from everything. 'Oh, 
 how sweet it is to rest upon the pillow of doubts!' " 
 
 The infinite charm with which he pronounced 
 these words of Montaigne's I shall never forget. 
 
 Yes, I thought, everything in play, a smile for 
 everything, doubt in everything — that is the final 
 wisdom of bourgeoisie. Contemplation corre- 
 sponds to action, France corresponds to Jaures. 
 Just as once upon a time the political insurrection 
 transformed itself into bourgeois liberalism, so 
 now the social-economic revolution will transform 
 itself into bourgeois socialism. Evolution is 
 stronger than revolution, the calm is stronger than 
 the storm: herein is the unconquered truth of bour- 
 geoisie — unconquerable, it may even be, on that 
 plane where the battle is being waged. Clemen- 
 ceau would have understood France; France would 
 have reconciled Clemenceau with Jaures. 
 
 What is in one, that also is in all; what is on top, 
 that is also at the bottom. There, on the Place de 
 Republique, in the black crowd and the pinkly- 
 naked, laughing pigs is the deep, rich soil, the
 
 100 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 unctuous manure; while here is the fragrant blos- 
 som, like a mystic rose of bourgeoisie. 
 
 Absolute bourgeoisie is absolute swinishness. 
 After all, is that not so? All the golden harvest 
 of culture — science, art, sociality, — has it not 
 sprung up from the bourgeoisie manure? Is there 
 not a righteous, wise, kind, — holy — bourgeoisie? 
 Who has not cursed it, and who has conquered it? 
 
 Only too frequently now in Russia is European 
 bourgeoisie denied by us, not in the name of a 
 new nobility and a new culture, but in the name 
 of the old Russian barbarism, and the new Russian 
 hooliganism. But if it is necessary to choose the 
 lesser of two evils, then, if you will, bourgeoisie is 
 better than hooliganism. 
 
 At times it seems that the Russian revolutionary 
 sociality has given the oath of a Hannibal, to con- 
 quer or perish in the struggle with the bourgeoisie 
 of the cultured South — having no power given from 
 above thereto. It is time, at last, to think of that 
 power, to understand that the religious shallowness 
 of bourgeoisie can be conquered only through 
 spiritual nobility. 
 
 We believe that it shall alight upon Russian 
 sociality, and if then Russia proved opposed to 
 Europe, let us be so. We are opposed to Euro- 
 peans; it may be that even at that time it will come
 
 THE BLOSSOMS OF BOURGEOISIE 101 
 
 to pass, that the last shall be first, not that they 
 may rear up above all others, but that they may 
 serve unto all.
 
 WHEN CHRIST SHALL RISE AGAIN
 
 I 
 
 ' ' "^ N this land of ours, rather than in any other, 
 will the Glorious Resurrection of Christ be 
 celebrated. Is that a dream? But why- 
 does this dream come to no one else but the Rus- 
 sian? What does it mean, in reality, that the holi- 
 day itself has disappeared, while the visible signs 
 of it are so plainly borne upon the face of our 
 land: that the words 'Christ is risen!' are spoken, 
 along with the kiss, and every time just as triumph- 
 antly approaches the holy midnight, and the peal- 
 ings of resounding bells ring on and on over all 
 the earth, as though they were awakening us? 
 Where the signs are borne so manifestly, not in 
 vain are they borne; where men are called, they 
 shall awake." 
 
 Thus Gogol, whose birthday falls on the Holiday 
 of Glory: — can it be in order that, dead, the eter- 
 nally living one may tell us anew that which he 
 has said when living, heeded of none? Can it be 
 that now also we shall not heed? 
 
 "No, this age is not the one to celebrate the 
 
 Glorious Holiday as it ought to be celebrated," 
 
 he concludes. 
 
 105
 
 106 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 Why, then, not celebrate it? Why, indeed, this 
 holiday which does not fall on a holiday? Why 
 has it vanished, as though it were forever eclipsed? 
 
 Do you remember, in our childhood it seemed to 
 us that on this day the sun in heaven sparkled as 
 on none of the other days in the year? Why, then, 
 does it grow dim and tarnished, as though the light 
 had gone out of our eyes? Why do "the pealings 
 of resounding bells" ring on and on above us not 
 with holiday pealing, but as though tolling? The 
 lips pronounce: "Christ is risen!" the lips reply: 
 "Verily is He risen;" but the heart keeps silence, 
 — the heart keeps silence: is it because, even 
 though He be risen. He is still not risen for us? 
 
 "I know that people who commit crimes which 
 they call executions will not hear, because they do 
 not want to hear that which I am crying out, that 
 which I am beseeching them: but still I will not 
 cease to cry out, to beseech always about the one 
 and only thing till the last minute by my life," says 
 Tolstoy, in his recent essay: Christianity and Cap- 
 ital Punishment. 
 
 "Liev Nikolaievitch begs to write you that Jukov- 
 ski's essay on capital punishment is known to him, 
 and has always aroused his indignation. — Liev 
 Nikolaievitch thinks that you have done well in- 
 deed in recalling to the memory of readers this old.
 
 WHEN CHRIST SHALL RISE AGAIN 107 
 
 horrible scoffing at sacred things," writes Tolstoy's 
 secretary, in a private letter in reference to a cer- 
 tain essay on capital punishment, also a recent one. 
 And at the end of the letter Tolstoy himself adds, 
 in an aged, weakening hand: 
 
 "During the last few days I feel myself very 
 weak from renewed ill-health — in reality, from 
 age; but I want to write you myself, if only a few 
 words, in gratitude for your essay, and, especially, 
 for your fine letter. I try, as much as I can and 
 may, to struggle with this evil of the representation 
 of a churchly lie in place of the truth of Chris- 
 tianity, which you point out; but I think that liber- 
 ation from falsehood is reached not through the 
 pointing out of the falsehood of falsehood, but 
 through a full adoption of truth — such an adoption 
 wherein truth becomes the sole, or even the chief 
 guide of life. . . ." 
 
 Alone, amid a silence as of the grave, he is cry- 
 ing out, his voice sinking lower and lower, as if, 
 in reality, "a soaped rope had been thrown around 
 his old neck," He is crying out, and will cry out 
 to the last minute of his life, repeating always the 
 same words, stubbornly, wearily monotonously, 
 hopelessly, almost senselessly, almost dully: "This 
 is horrible, horrible, horrible! . . . Yes, the atti- 
 tude of Christian humanity at present is horrible!
 
 108 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 ... It is not good to kill one another! . . .'* 
 "To murder for murder," says Dostoievsky, "is 
 a punishment immeasurably greater than the crime 
 itself. Murder under a sentence is immeasurably 
 more horrible than murder by a cut-throat ; here all 
 final hope, with which it is ten times easier to die, 
 is taken away by certainty; here is a sentence, and 
 precisely in that there is certainly no escape lies all 
 the horrible torture — and there is no torture more 
 powerful in all the world. Who has said that the 
 nature of man is capable of enduring this without 
 insanity? Wherefore this revilement, — hideous, 
 unnecessary, futile? Of this torture and of this 
 horror even Christ has spoken. No, man cannot 
 be treated thus." 
 
 "We in Russia have no capital punishment," re- 
 joices Dostoievsky, never suspecting what mockery 
 these words would become forty years after. 
 
 "The priest was reading the prayers in a low 
 voice. Two other assistants approached, nimbly 
 took the waistcoat off Tropman, put his hands be- 
 hind his back, tied them together, crosswise, and 
 wound the whole body up with straps. . . . Trop- 
 man submissively bent his head. The priest 
 drawled out the words of the prayer. ... I could 
 not take my gaze off the slender, youthful neck. 
 . . . The imagination involuntarily drew a trans-
 
 WHEN CHRIST SHALL RISE AGAIN 109 
 
 versal line upon it. . . . *Right there,' I thouglit, 
 'in a few moments, dismembering the vertebrae, 
 cleaving muscles and veins, a thirty pound axe will 
 go through. . . .' I saw how a headsman suddenly 
 grew up on the left side of the guillotine platform; 
 I saw how Tropman made his way up the steps. 
 . . . How he halted at the top, how from the right 
 and left two men pounced upon him, just like 
 spiders upon a fly, how he suddenly fell down head 
 first, and how his heels gave a kick. . . . But here 
 I turned away and began to wait, while the ground 
 started quietly floating underfoot. . . . Ensued a 
 breathless pause. . . . Then something roared 
 dully and rolled on — heaved a sigh. ... As if an 
 enormous beast had coughed. . . . Everything be- 
 came confused. . . ." ® 
 
 Everything has become confused, has grown dark 
 in our eyes also. The Glorious Resurrection has 
 grown dark as well. 
 
 That is why the holiday does not fall on a holi- 
 day to us. We can not, we do not want to, we 
 must not, celebrate the Resurrection of Him Who 
 Died, where the putting to death of the living takes 
 place. Christ can not arise where Christ is still 
 being crucified. One can not sing "Christ is 
 risen!" with the same lips which clamor "Crucify 
 
 •TuRGENiEV, Th« Execution of Tropman (1870).
 
 no THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 Him!" For what is every new execution among 
 mankind if not a new crucifixion of the Son of 
 God? Is not the execution of Him who was exe- 
 cuted for all repeated in the execution of all the 
 executed? 
 
 "For I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat: 
 I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: 
 
 "I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, 
 and ye clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and ye 
 visited me not." I was upon the headsman's block, 
 and ye knew me not. 
 
 It will be said that it is scoffing at sacred things 
 to compare Christ with evil-doers. But did not the 
 people shout about Him also: "Away with this 
 man, and release unto us Barabbas"? Was not 
 He also crucified between two thieves, and num- 
 bered with the transgressors? 
 
 What is the cross save a Roman engine of exe- 
 cution — the same as the French guillotine, the Rus- 
 sian gallows? Wherefore did He die upon the 
 cross if not to make the engine of execution the 
 engine of salvation? Through Death He van- 
 quished Death — does it not mean that through cap- 
 ital punishment of himself he vanquished capital 
 punishment — annulled, abolished, destroyed it for 
 all eternity? But if it is necessary to execute after 
 Him, it means that He has died and is not yet
 
 WHEN CHRIST SHALL RISE AGAIN 111 
 
 risen; it means — that the cross is still an engine of 
 execution, "the accursed wood," and that "accursed 
 is he who is upon the wood." 
 
 Where a gallows rears up, the cross is laid low. 
 In place of the Cross of God is the Cross of Anti- 
 Christ — the gallows. 
 
 From this very cross of Anti-Christ a black 
 shadow has stretched over all Russia; from it as 
 well has the sun of the Resurrection grown dim. 
 It is as if the "pealings of resounding bells" are 
 ringing out: "Christ is not risen!" — and our heart 
 answers: "Verily is He not risen!" "Easter is 
 radiant!" chants the Church — but to us it seems 
 that rather it is ruddy with blood. 
 
 Shall we ask. Wherefore the blessing of God is 
 not over us, as though God had abjured us, and 
 Holy Russia become as though accursed? Here 
 is the cup of wrath in the hand of the Lord; the 
 wine is seething within it, full of confusion, and 
 He pours out of it for us; even its lees we shall 
 press out and drink. Calamity upon calamity, dis- 
 grace upon disgrace, Tsushima upon Tsushima.^ 
 It seems as if we could not fall any lower, but still 
 are we falling. Wherefore? Is it not because 
 we are so used to the sight of blood, to the cry of 
 
 '' An island in Korea Strait ; scene of a naval battle disastrous 
 to the Russians during the Russo-Japanese War. Trans.
 
 112 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 blood, that we no longer see, no longer hear, this 
 infamy of infamies? . . . 
 
 And still we dare talk of "Great Russia," of the 
 "honest, kind face of our nation," — dare to ask 
 where it has gone, why it is not to be seen. The 
 headsman has bent it down to the block — that is 
 why it is not to be seen. 
 
 That it is horrible and repulsive to eat human 
 flesh ought not be proven to man. Just so it ought 
 not be proven that capital punishment is horrible 
 and repulsive, that "murder under sentence is im- 
 measurably more horrible than murder by a cut- 
 throat." 
 
 A common murder destroys the religious life of 
 the murderer; capital punishment destroys the re- 
 ligious life of the entire nation. Executing one, 
 we are executing all; killing the body of one, we 
 are killing the soul of all. Who, then, has done 
 this thing to us? Who is guilty? 
 
 Let us not, accusing others, justify ourselves. 
 There is none righteous, all are guilty, — both I, 
 who write, and thou, who readest this, — all are 
 guilty. With blood is bought the life we live, with 
 blood is permeated the air we breathe, with blood is 
 wetted the bread we eat, with blood is mixed the 
 water we drink. We know, we see this; others are
 
 WHEN CHRIST SHALL RISE AGAIN 113 
 
 blind, or wiH not see. The seeing are more crim- 
 inal; the blind are unhappier. 
 
 Nor let them say to us that capital punishment is 
 necessary for the salvation of Russia. If it were 
 necessary, let us say, to crucify Christ anew in 
 order to save Russia, would we crucify Him? — 
 At this day, at least, — at this day we believe that 
 we would not crucify Him. 
 
 "Wherefore this holiday which has lost its mean- 
 ing?" asks Gogol. "Wherefore does it come anew 
 to summon more and more faintly parted people 
 into one family, and, having called out sadly, de- 
 parts like one unknov/n and a stranger to all? Is 
 it truly unknown and a stranger to all? But why, 
 then, have people survived in some places, to whom 
 it seems as though they grew brighter on this day, 
 and who celebrate their infancy, that infancy whose 
 celestial kiss, like the kiss of eternal spring, pours 
 upon the soul? . . . Wherefore is all this, and to 
 what end? — This: that some, though even a few, 
 who still sense the breath of spring in this holiday, 
 may suddenly grow exceedingly pensive, as pensive 
 as an angel in heaven is pensive, and that they may 
 cry out with a heart-rending cry, and fall down at 
 the feet of their brethren, beseeching them to 
 snatch out this one day, at least, out of the rank of
 
 114 THE MENACE OF THE MOB 
 
 the others; for one day, at least, to embrace and 
 clasp a man as a guilty friend embraces a gen- 
 erous friend who has forgiven him all. . . . Even 
 to wish thus, even as though compelling one's self 
 to do this, to seize upon this as a man drowning 
 seizes upon a board! God knows, perhaps for this 
 wish alone there is a ladder all ready to be thrown 
 down to us from heaven and a hand stretched out 
 to help us fly up on it." 
 
 Yea, it may not be in vain that upon the day of 
 the Resurrection the risen Gogol newly, as of yore, 
 falls at our feet and cries out with a heart-rending 
 cry: 
 
 "Even to wish thus!" 
 
 There is in man an omnipotent will, there is a 
 faith in miracles, which of itself is already a 
 miracle. Let us wish, then, with such a will; let 
 us believe with such a faith in the miracle of the 
 Resurrection of Christ, in the miracle of a resur- 
 rection of Russia. 
 
 Let us not implore: "Annul it!" — but with 
 Christ, who vanquished death through death, Who 
 annulled execution through execution, let us annul 
 capital punishment ourselves. 
 
 And then only shall we celebrate the Glorious 
 Holiday; then only will the sun begin to sparkle in
 
 WHEN CHRIST SHALL RISE AGAIN 115 
 
 heaven, and the pealings of resounding bells will 
 ring out: Qirist is risen! 
 
 And all Russia will answer: 
 
 Verily is He risen! 
 
 THE END
 
 A SELECTED LIST 
 IN BELLES-LETTRES
 
 Hermann Bahr 
 
 THE MASTER. A drama in three acts. Adapted for the 
 American stage by Benjamin F. Glazer. Cloth, $1.00. 
 
 John Lloyd Balderston 
 
 THE GENIUS OF THE MARNE. A play in three scenes 
 with an introduction by George Moore. Boards, $1.20. 
 
 Mitchell S. Buck 
 
 EPHEMERA. Hellenic prose poems. Printed on Japan 
 paper, and bound in half-vellum. Gilt top. Edition lim- 
 ited to 750 copies. $3.00. 
 
 THE SONGS OF PHYRNE. All that is known of Phryne's 
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 BOOK REPAIR AND RESTORATION. A manual of prac- 
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 Donald Evans 
 
 IRONICA. Mr. Evans has written these poems with a new 
 dignity and a true maturity. Mist gray boards, $1.20. 
 
 SONNETS FROM THE PATAGONIAN. This book opened 
 the Modernists' war against musty literary traditions. 
 Printed on Japan paper. Edition limited to 750 copies. 
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 TWO DEATHS IN THE BRONX. A series of pitiless pho- 
 tographs of profligate men and women who fritter away 
 life, seeking new pleasures, new sensations. Boards, 
 $1.20. 
 
 NINE POEMS FROM A VALETUDINARIUM. The arch- 
 attitudinist suddenly becomes grave and simple and writes 
 in a mood of supreme reverence. Boards, $1.00,
 
 DISCORDS. The sixty or more poems that make up the 
 volume offer vivid glimpses of the stress and strain of 
 modern life. Boards, $1.20. 
 
 Alfred Kreymborg 
 
 BLOOD OF THINGS. A second book of Free Forms. 
 More than a hundred new poems in every mood and every 
 form. Greater in every way, broader in its contacts, 
 deeper in its emotional actions, richer in its exquisite 
 artistry, and therefore destined to be even more popular. 
 Boards, $2.00. 
 
 OTHERS FOR 1919. An Anthology of the New Verse. 
 Edited by Alfred Kreymborg. Others for 1919 contains 
 the best work of twenty-six of our most distinguished 
 poets. The book affords ample demonstration of the 
 truth that America is as polyglot in her poetry as she 
 is as a nation. Boards, $2.00. 
 
 Ernest Lacy 
 
 PLAYS AND SONNETS. Two volumes. Vol. I: The Bard 
 of Mary Redcliffe, a play in five acts. Vol. II: Rinaldo, 
 the Doctor of Florence, a play in five acts. Chatterton, 
 a one-act play. Sonnets. With seven etchings, cloth, 
 $3.50 the set. Memorial one-volume edition, with por- 
 trait of author. Cloth, $2.25. 
 
 Ame Norrevang 
 THE WOMAN AND THE FIDDLER. A play in three 
 acts. Translated from the Norwegian by Mrs. Herman 
 Sandby. Cloth, $1.00. 
 
 Stanislaw Przybyszewski 
 SNOW. A play in four acts by one of the foremost writers 
 of modem Europe. Boards, $1.50. 
 
 Pitts Sanborn 
 
 VIE DE BORDEAUX. A volume of poems in English. In 
 free verse the author has interpreted the soul of old Bor- 
 deaux in the hour of war. Boards, $1.20,
 
 August Strindberg 
 
 FROKEN JULIE (Countess Julia). Translated from the 
 Swedish. A naturalistic tragedy. Cloth, $1.00. 
 
 MOTHERLOVE. One of Strindberg's most effective one- 
 act plays. Second edition. Boards, 35c. 
 
 SWANWHITE. A fairy drama, translated by Francis J. 
 Ziegler. Second edition. Cloth, $1.00. 
 
 THE CREDITOR. A tragic comedy. A searching psycho- 
 logical study of the divorce question. Cloth, $1.00. 
 
 John Addington Symonds 
 
 LAST AND FIRST. The first appearance in book form of 
 " The New Spirit " and " Arthur Hugh Clough," the lat- 
 est and the earliest essays of a great critic and humanist. 
 Cloth, 11.50. 
 
 Grover Theis 
 
 NUMBERS. Five one-act plays that will be welcomed by 
 the lover of modem drama. Boards, $1.35. 
 
 Leo N. Tolstoi 
 
 THE LIVING CORPSE. Translated by Anna Monosso- 
 vitch Evarts, from the only authorized Russian edition 
 based on the MSS. in the possession of Countess A. L. 
 Tolstoi. A drama in six acts and twelve tableaux. Pro- 
 duced as " Redemption " it has been one of the greatest 
 successes on the New York stage in recent years. Cloth, 
 $1.00. 
 
 Frank Wedekind 
 
 THE AWAKENING OF SPRING. A tragedy of childhood 
 dealing with the sex question in its relationship to the 
 education of the young. Sixth edition. Cloth, $1.50. 
 
 SUCH IS LIFE. A satiric play with mediaeval background 
 but modem significance. Second edition. Qoth, $1.25. 
 
 RABBI EZRA AND THE VICTIM. Two impressive 
 sketches full of color and action. Boards, 35c.
 
 THE GRISLEY SUITOR. A remarkable study in grim hu- 
 mor. Boards, 35c. 
 
 Emile Zola 
 
 FOR A NIGHT. A novelette translated by Alison M. Le- 
 derer. A gripping story of abnormality, together with 
 two characteristic sketches, The Maid of the Dawber and 
 Complements. Qoth, |1.25. 
 
 Paul Gauguin 
 
 NOA NOA. Translated by 0. F. Theis. The great French 
 painter's own story of his flight from civilization and his 
 life among the natives of Tahiti, in the South Seas. With 
 ten reproductions from paintings of Gauguin, in half- 
 tone. Boards, §2.00. 
 
 Dmitri Merejkovski 
 
 THE MENACE OF THE MOB. Translated from the Rus- 
 sian by B. Guilbert Guemey. In the present volume, it 
 is not the novelist who speaks, but the philosopher and 
 God-seeker. The essays describe the spiritual ferment 
 and crisis through which Russia was passing, emd of 
 which the present turmoil is the harvest Will it be a 
 good harvest or an evil to the human race that is to come? 
 This is one of the problems that occupy the author, 
 and what he has to say is more important and illuminat- 
 ing than thousands of editorials and leading articles. 
 Boards, $1.50. 
 
 John Vamey 
 
 SKETCHES OF SOVIET RUSSIA. Whole Cloth and 
 Patches. An unusual book by an American who spent 
 a good part of the turbulent years of 1918 and 1919 in 
 Russia. The author's method of approach is neither 
 one of condemnation nor of praise. This is especially 
 true of the imaginary dialogue which closes the book.
 
 Here the different political doctrines which have torn 
 Russia asunder are analyzed and opposed to each other 
 with fine dramatic skill. Anyone interested in modern 
 Russia and her problems, which are also a world prob- 
 lem, will find this a valuable and instructive volume. 
 Goth, $2.25. 
 
 Evelyn Scott 
 
 PRECIPITATIONS. A volume of poems, containing the 
 best and most characteristic of an author whose name 
 is coming more and more to the front among contem- 
 porary poets. There is a dominating passion of seeking 
 the essence of things, and at times the way in which 
 she tears away the discreet and sentimental investitures 
 seems almost hejurtless. There is flesh and blood in her 
 work, because each thing she tests out by herself. 
 Boards, $1.50. 
 
 HISTORICAL MINIATURES 
 A Series of Monographs Edited by Dr. F. L. Glaser 
 
 SCENES FROM THE COURT OF PETER THE GREAT. 
 Based on the Latin Diary of Korb, a Secretary of the 
 Austrian Legation at the Court of Peter the Great. This 
 is a vivid description of the life in Moscow toward the 
 end of the 17th Century when, under the impetus of 
 Peter the Great, Russia was finding itself. One of the 
 most thrilling portions of the book is the description of 
 the rebellion and punishment of the Stryelitz, the Russian 
 guard of the period. Cloth, $2.00. 
 
 POPE ALEXANDER VI AND HIS COURT. Based on the 
 Diary of Johannes Burchardus, Master of Ceremonies to 
 Alexander VI. The spirit of the Renaissance at its height 
 fills the volume, and we are given an intimate and vivid 
 portrait of the life at Rome as it was lived under the 
 great Borgia. Qoth, $2.00.
 
 THE SEA GULL LIBRARY 
 Edited by O. F. Theis 
 
 A new series of books in belles-lettres, designed to in- 
 clude works of the world's literature, which have hitherto 
 not been translated into English, or which for various 
 reasons are not known except to the few. In the selec- 
 tion of titles the only standard that has been kept in view 
 is that the work in question must be literature, and more 
 than a mere ephemeral production. Through the Sea Gull 
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 available in convenient form and at a reasonable price. 
 Each volume contains an introduction. Special attention 
 has been given to the make-up and binding of the vol- 
 umes. Bound in gray vellum de luxe cloth of two shades 
 with a cover-design by Orland Campbell. Price, per vol- 
 ume, $1.50. 
 
 Francis Jammes 
 
 ROMANCE OF THE RABBIT. Authorized translation 
 from the French by Gladys Edgerton. In this work hov- 
 ers both the spirit of Virgil and of the gentle St. Francis 
 of Assisi. Francis Jammes tells of Rabbit's fears and 
 joys, of his life on this earth, of his pilgrimage to para- 
 dise with St. Francis and his animal companions, and of 
 his death. 
 
 Jens Peter Jacobsen 
 
 MOGENS AND OTHER STORIES. Translated from the 
 Danish by Anna Grabow. The author is known as one 
 of the greatest stylists in Scandinavian literature. The 
 stories in the present volume are pastels of wonderful 
 delicacy, filled with the keenest psychological observation. 
 
 Other Volumes in Preparation
 
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