Bitter is unjust reproach in the mouths of people
whom one loves.... But even that can be endured....
“Beat me—but hear me out!”
said the Athenian chieftain to the Spartan chieftain.
“Beat me—but be healthy and full
fed!” is what we ought to say.
February, 1878.
Along a street of the capital is skipping a man who
is still young.—His movements are cheerful,
alert; his eyes are beaming, his lips are smiling,
his sensitive face is pleasantly rosy.... He is
all contentment and joy.
What has happened to him? Has he come into an
inheritance? Has he been elevated in rank?
Is he hastening to a love tryst? Or, simply, has
he breakfasted well, and is it a sensation of health,
a sensation of full-fed strength which is leaping
for joy in all his limbs? Or they may have hung
on his neck thy handsome, eight-pointed cross, O Polish
King Stanislaus!
No. He has concocted a calumny against an acquaintance,
he has assiduously disseminated it, he has heard it—that
same calumny—from the mouth of another
acquaintance—and has believed it himself.
Oh, how contented, how good even at this moment is
that nice, highly-promising young man.
February, 1878.
“If you desire thoroughly to mortify and even
to injure an opponent,” said an old swindler
to me, “reproach him with the very defect or
vice of which you feel conscious in yourself.—Fly
into a rage ... and reproach him!
“In the first place, that makes other people
think that you do not possess that vice.
“In the second place, your wrath may even be
sincere.... You may profit by the reproaches
of your own conscience.
“If, for example, you are a renegade, reproach
your adversary with having no convictions!
“If you yourself are a lackey in soul, say to
him with reproof that he is a lackey ... the lackey
of civilisation, of Europe, of socialism!”
“You may even say, the lackey of non-lackeyism!”
I remarked.
“You may do that also,” chimed in the
old rascal.
February, 1878.
A DREAM
It seems to me as though I am somewhere in Russia,
in the wilds, in a plain country house.
The chamber is large, low-ceiled, with three windows;
the walls are smeared with white paint; there is no
furniture. In front of the house is a bare plain;
gradually descending, it recedes into the distance;
the grey, monotoned sky hangs over it like a canopy.
I am not alone; half a score of men are with me in
the room. All plain folk, plainly clad; they
are pacing up and down in silence, as though by stealth.
They avoid one another, and yet they are incessantly
exchanging uneasy glances.
