Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Impressions of Russian Literature - VI
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grateful to the Tsar Nicholas for it. He imagined that
without it he would have become insane; thought that
the secret horror he always felt at the approach of
darkness, under normal conditions would have deprived him
of his reason; now it deprived real sufferings of their
power.
In the next place he had obtained a thorough knowledge
of the inner life of the Russian people. His fate
had opened to him an insight into that which is generally
regarded as the sewer of humanity; and there he found
in every one, even in those who had sunken the
deepest, something of value in spite of all their depravity.
At the same time that he had lost all faith in the use or
possibility of a political revolution, he had found the
faith in a moral revolution, starting from the bottom, in
the spirit of the gospel. Thus he returned as the
philanthropist among the Russian authors, as the author
of the helpless pariahs. It has somewhere been justly
said that what Wilberforce was in the English
Parliament for the negro, he became in the Russian
literature for the proletariats, — that is, their spokesman.
As an artist he is true enough not to embellish the
pariah; as a poet he is visionary enough to proclaim the
presence of “a divine spark,” even among the wretched.
Nay more, the morality he preaches is, perhaps, the
purest expression of the morality of the pariah, of
the morality of the slave.
We are indebted to the philosopher Frederick
Nietzsche for the establishment of the real and wide
contrast between the morality of gentlemen and the
morality of slaves. The expressions originate with
him. By the morality of gentlemen is meant all that
morality which emanates from self-esteem, positive
animal spirits: the morality of Rome, of Iceland, of the
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