Liberty

As I learnt subsequently, my identity and my stratagem were revealed to the authorities by one of my comrades of the convoy shortly after I left Irkoutsk. But when the gendarmes went to the village of Talminsky, I had already vanished. Every effort was, however, made to retake me, the quest being kept up night and day for six weeks. Then it was rumored that a body found in the forest had been identified as mine, and that I had perished of hunger. According to another story, I had been arrested at Nijni Oudinsk, and was being brought back to Irkoutsk. Among the vagabonds who at this time were captured right and left on the high roads throughout the province, were several whom it pleased to call themselves by my name. The deceit was naturally soon detected, but while it lasted the deceivers enjoyed certain advantages, which helped to render their detention tolerable. Instead of walking they rode in carriages, and were accompanied by an escort, and being regarded as important prisoners, they were both better fed and better treated than common malefactors, while their audacity rendered them highly popular with their vagabond and convict comrades. There were at one time no fewer than four false Debagorio Mokrievitches in the jail of Irkoutsk. The police sought me with great diligence among the political exiles of the province; a most stupid proceeding on their part, for to take refuge with the politicals would have been putting my head in the lion's mouth.

Three other men who about the same time attempted to escape were all recaptured.

I stayed in Siberia a year, making during that time several journeys to the eastward of Irkoutsk. At length the police having abandoned all hope of finding me, I resolved to leave the country. A passport being absolutely necessary, I borrowed the name and obtained the papers of a gentleman recently deceased – Ivan Alexandrovitch Selivanoff. It was in the winter of 1880 that I set out on my long journey of 3,600 miles. I travelled post, by way of Irkoutsk, Krasnoiarsk and Tomsk – towns through which, a twelvemonth before, I had passed as a prisoner. Rather a bold undertaking in the circumstances; but as I possessed an itinerary-card signed by the governor of the province, giving me the right to relays of horses, I ran no great danger, and left the home of my hospitable friend with an easy mind.

During the journey I met from time to time gangs of prisoners on the way from Russia to Irkoutsk. The clanking of the irons, the yellow pelisses, the worn faces, the weary walk, and the shorn heads of these unfortunates – how familiar they all were, and how the sight of them thrilled me to the soul! And behind the chain gang came the wagons of the political prisoners, among whom, more than once, I recognized the face of a dear friend. But instead of jumping from my carriage and folding the poor fellows in my arms, I had to look the other way!

All went well with me, but once I had a terribly narrow escape of falling a second time into the toils. It so chanced that I passed through the province of Tobolsk in company with a tchinovnik (government employé), whose acquaintance I had made on the road, a big-paunched, rosy-cheeked fellow, with merry eyes and a mellow voice; and, being on his way home after a long absence, in high good humor and full of fun. Once at the end of a long day's journey, we arrived about midnight at a town in the neighborhood of Tobolsk, and, being tired and sleepy, resolved to pass the rest of the night there. So we went into the travellers' room, ordered tea, and handed our itinerary cards to the starosta of the station, in order that he might make the necessary entries in the travellers' book. Before going to the sleeping room we requested that the horses might be ready at seven o'clock next morning.

I slept the sleep of the just, rose betimes, and called for the starosta.

“Are the horses ready?” I asked. “And be good enough to bring hither our itinerary-cards.”

“The station-master will himself bring your itinerary-cards, and as for the horses they are already yoked up.”

Half-an-hour later the station-master (otherwise director), came into our room, holding in his hand the itinerary-cards.

“I am sorry to trouble you,” he said politely; “but I should like to know which of you young gentlemen is Ivan Alexandrovitch Selivanoff?”

“At your service sir,” I answered, stepping forward.

The station-master looked at me with a ludicrous expression of bewilderment and surprise.

“A thousand pardons,” he said at length, with a low bow. “But really – I don't quite understand. The fact is, I knew Mr. Selivanoff, and here I see the same surname and Christian name; the name of the father is also the same, the tchin (rank) likewise! Yet I was told he had died – more than a year ago – but when I saw his name on the card I thought the news must be false, and I came to assure myself. I see that I am mistaken. A thousand pardons, sir, a thousand pardons,” and again he saluted me still more profoundly than before.

I felt as if the ground were opening under my feet, and was thinking how on earth I should get out of the scrape, when my companion came – without knowing it – to the rescue.

“What a capital joke!” he shouted, clapping me on the back, and laughing so that he could hardly speak. “One might suppose that the worthy director takes you for an escaped prisoner with a dead man's passport. Ha, ha, ha, what a capital joke to be sure!”

And holding his big belly with both hands, he balanced himself first on one foot and then the other, laughing the while, until he could hardly stand.

“You are quite right,” I said, also laughing, though with considerable effort. “It is really an excellent joke. But seriously (turning to the station-master), the thing is easily explained. In the part I come from the Selivanoffs are as plentiful as blackberries. The late Ivan Alexandrovitch, your friend, and I were kinsmen, and had a great affection for each other; the name is so common in the province that I could introduce you to a dozen of my namesakes any day.”

The station-master seemed satisfied with this explanation. At any rate, he made no objection to our departure, and shortly afterwards we were once more en route. But my companion, the tchinovnik did not cease laughing for a long time. “To take you for a fugitive convict with a false passport!” he would say “it is really too good,” and whenever he remembered the incident he would laugh as if he never meant to stop. I remembered it, as may be supposed, with very different feelings. The escape was a very narrow one, and showed me how much I was still at the mercy of the slightest mishap. But this proved to be my last adventure and my last peril. In May, 1881, I reached Geneva, and felt that I was at last really free.

As most stories of Russian revolutionary life have necessarily, if they be true, a tragical termination, readers of the foregoing narrative may be pleased to know that M. Mokrievitch is still in a land where he feels really free. Though one of the heroes of Russian liberty he has not yet become one of its martyrs. But the time may come when he, as many other fugitives have done, will return to the volcanic soil of his native country, there to take part in the struggle to death which, though unseen, goes always on, and must continue without truce and without surcease until the sun of Freedom shall dawn in the Empire of the Night. —Contemporary Review.

COLERIDGE AS A SPIRITUAL THINKER

BY PRINCIPAL TULLOCH

Mr. Traill's recent volume has recalled the poet-philosopher who died just fifty years ago, leaving a strongly marked but indefinite impression upon the mind of his time. The volume has done something to renew and vivify the impression both in respect of Coleridge's poetry and criticism. His work as a critic has never, perhaps, been better or more completely exhibited. It is recognised generously in all its largeness and profundity, as well as delicacy and subtlety; and justice is especially done to his Shakesperian commentary, which in its richness, variety, felicity, combined with depth and acuteness, is absolutely unrivalled. But Mr. Traill cannot be said to have even attempted any estimate of Coleridge as a spiritual thinker. It may be questioned how far he has recognised that there is a spiritual side to all his thought, without which neither his poetry nor his criticism can be fully understood, cleverly as they may be judged.

It is not only out of date, but outside of all intelligent judgment to quote at this time of day Mr. Carlyle's well-known caricature from his Life of Sterling, and put readers off with this as a “famous criticism.” We now know how to value utterances of this kind, and the unhappy spirit of detraction which lay beneath such wild and grotesque humors. Carlyle will always remain an artist in epithets – but few will turn to him for an intelligent or comprehensive estimate of any great name of his own or of recent time.

We propose to look at Coleridge for a little as a religious thinker, and to ask what is the meaning and value of his work in this respect now that we can calmly and fully judge it. If Coleridge was anything, he was not only in his own view, as Mr. Traill admits, but in the view of his generation, a religious philosopher. It is not only the testimony of men like Hare, or Sterling, or Maurice, or even Cardinal Newman, but of John Stuart Mill, that his teaching awakened and freshened all contemporary thought. He was recognised with all his faults as a truly great thinker, who raised the mind of the time and gave it new and wide impulses. This judgment we feel sure will yet verify itself. If English literature ever regains the higher tone of our earlier national life – the tone of Hooker and Milton and Jeremy Taylor – Coleridge will be again acknowledged, in Julius Hare's words, as “a true sovereign of English thought.” He will take rank in the same line of spiritual genius. He has the same elevation of feeling, the same profound grasp of moral and spiritual ideas, the same wide range of vision. He has, in short, the same love of wisdom, the same insight, the same largeness – never despising nature or art, or literature, for the sake of religion, still less ever despising religion for the sake of culture. In reading over Coleridge's prose works again, returning to them after a long past familiarity, I am particularly struck by their massive and large intellectuality, akin to our older Elizabethan literature. There is everywhere the play of great power – of imagination as well as reason – of spiritual perception as well as logical subtlety.

To speak of Coleridge in this manner as a great spiritual power, an eminently healthy writer in the higher regions of thought, may seem absurd to some who think mainly of his life, and of the fatal failure which characterised it. It is the shadow of this failure of manliness in his conduct, as in that of his life-long friend, Charles Lamb, which no doubt prompted the great genius who carried manliness, if little sweetness, from his Annandale home, to paint both the one and the other in such darkened colors. We have not a word to say on behalf of the failings of either. They were deplorable and unworthy; but it is the fact, notwithstanding, that the mind of both retained a serenity and a certain touch of respectfulness which are lacking in their great Scottish contemporary. They were both finer-edged than Carlyle. They inherited a more delicate and polite personal culture; and delicacy can never be far distant from true manliness. Neither of them could have written of the treasures of old religion as Carlyle did in his Life of Sterling. Whether they accepted for themselves those treasures or not, they would have spared the tender faith of others and respected an ancient ideal. And this is the higher attitude. Nothing which has ever deeply interested humanity or profoundly moved it, is treated with contempt by a good and wise man. It may call for and deserve rejection, but never insult. Unhappily this attitude of mind, reserved, as well as critical, reverent as well as bold, has been conspicuously absent in some of the most powerful and best known writers of our era.

There is a striking contrast between the career of Coleridge and that of his friend Wordsworth. Fellows in the opening of their poetic course, they soon diverged widely. With a true instinct, Wordsworth devoted himself, in quietness and seclusion, to the cultivation of his poetic faculty. He left aside the world of politics and of religious thought, strongly moved as he had been by the interests of both. It may be said that Wordsworth continued a religious thinker as well as poet all his life. And to some extent this is true. The “Wanderer” is a preacher and not only a singer. He goes to the heart of religion, and lays again its foundations in the natural instincts of man. But while Wordsworth's poetry was instinct with a new life of religious feeling, and may be said to have given a new radiancy to its central principles,² it did not initiate any movement in Christian thought. In religious opinion Wordsworth soon fell back upon, if he ever consciously departed from, the old line of Anglican traditions. The vague Pantheism of the Excursion implies rather a lack of distinctive dogma than any fresh insight into religious problems or capacity of co-ordinating them in a new manner. And so soon as definite religious conceptions came to the poet, the Church in her customary theology became a satisfactory refuge. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets mark this definite stage in his spiritual development. Wordsworth did for the religious thought of his time something more and better perhaps than giving it any definite impulse. While leaving it in the old channels, he gave it a richer and deeper volume. He showed with what vital affinity religion cleaves to humanity, in all its true and simple phases, when uncontaminated by conceit or frivolity. Nature and man alike were to him essentially religious, or only conceivable as the outcome of a Spirit of life, “the Soul of all the worlds.”³ Wordsworth, in short, remained as he began, a poet of a deeply religious spirit. But he did not enter the domain of theological speculation or attempt to give any new direction to it.

In all this Coleridge is his counterpart. He may be said to have abandoned poetry just when Wordsworth in his retirement at Grasmere (1799) was consecrating his life to it. Whether it be true, according to De Quincey, that Coleridge's poetical power was killed by the habit of opium-eating, it is certainly true that the harp of Quantock⁴ was never again struck save for a brief moment. The poet Coleridge passed into the lecturer and the poetical and literary critic, and then, during the final period of his life, from 1816 to 1834, into the philosopher and theologian. It is to this latter period of his life in the main that his higher prose writings belong, and especially the well-known Aids to Reflection which – disparaged as it is by Mr. Traill – may be said to contain, as his disciples have always held to contain, all the finer substance of his spiritual thought. It is true that it is defective as a literary composition. We are even disposed to allow that it has “less charm of thought, less beauty of style,” and in some respects even less “power of effective statement,”⁵ than is common with Coleridge; but withal it is his highest work. These very defects only serve to bring out the more its strong points, when we consider the wonderful hold the book has taken of many minds, and how it has been the subject of elaborate commentary.⁶ It is a book, we may at the same time say, which none but a thinker on divine things will ever like. All such thinkers have prized it greatly. To many such it has given a new force of religious insight; for its time, beyond all doubt, it created a real epoch in Christian thought. It had life in it; and the living seed, scattered and desultory as it was, brought forth fruit in many minds.

What, then, were its main contributions to religious thought, and in what respects generally is Coleridge to be reckoned a spiritual power?

(1.) First, and chiefly, in the Aids to Reflection, Coleridge may be said to have transformed and renewed the current ideas of his time about religion. He was, we know, a man of many ambitions never realised; but of all his ambitions, the most persistent was that of laying anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy. This was “the great work” to which he frequently alluded as having given “the preparation of more than twenty years of his life.”⁷