Blavatsky H.P. - The English and the Russians

The English and the Russians

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Great Britain, the only nation in Europe, is absolutely peculiar – even in the fashions it adopts from France; peculiar in its moral isolation, in its psychopathic self-conceit and all other characteristics. By the geographical location of his country, the Englishman is an amphibian, by arrogant restraint he is a turtle. Just as this interesting reptile is inseparable from its horny armor, so the Englishman is inseparable from his national shell, from England, which he carries everywhere with him, which follows him like a traveling exhibition of paintings, from which he only occasionally sticks his head out, immediately hiding it inside his "personal England" at the slightest attempt by someone who is not an Englishman to look deeper under the surface of this armor... You can only recognize him at home, on his foggy island, just as you can distinguish one Englishman from another. But whether John Bull is at home or abroad, he, indifferent towards other nations, hates Russia alone! Since, in his own mind, he is the only king on the world chessboard, and all other nations are pawns, John Bull despises them, and hates Russia, perhaps because he fears her alone in the future. He hates her chronically and venomously, not losing his temper or worrying, but, on the contrary, methodically and according to a plan drawn up once and for all; he hates her solemnly and seriously, so to speak, as if he were performing a national and patriotic rite. In the best times of political calm, the English – that is, the entire nation collectively – demonstrates to the "Russian bear" condescending and mocking contempt. But once the Russians do something in Central Asia, all the English, from palaces to tents of tourists and planters in Asia and America, the whole nation, as one person, jump to their feet, make no headway, show their fists to an invisible enemy.

The English, no matter what they do at home, during their party internecine strives, have an enormous advantage over all other nations, the advantage of solidarity in every expression of national feeling. They favor and hate, suspect, and even sometimes – mirabile dictum – trust another nation with one accord, so to speak, all together. The Jews alone show such extraordinary unanimity throughout the Kahal; but the Jews are not a nation, but only the memory of a nation. That's why the English are so strong, because they always sing in unison and in tune in everything that directly concerns their nationality, no matter how much individual voices of minority are out of tune. That's how they hate everything Russian without grounds.

Due to our innate good nature, we Russians believed until now that this hatred was only a temporary, intermittent echo of cabinets hostile to Russia. We imagined that under Disraeli and Salisbury, Russians were not loved and are not loved, but under Gladstone, they were loved; that the people were innocent of the slanders spread about Russia and the alleged secret tricks of her insidious diplomacy, etc. In fact, both the offices and the press have little to do with all this. The main instigators are not Salisbury, not even the perky little Randolph Churchill, despite all their innate Russophobia, but the whole nation, the solidarity mentioned above in the islanders in everything, and the force of habit, which has long been transformed into a psychic law. This hostility first manifested itself greatly during the Crimean campaign and spread widely in two or three years, like contagious scabies, among the entire English people. The popular feeling was reflected in journalism and the press in general, because in England, where a newspaper is more necessary than bread for every Briton, even if he is poor, it is not newspaper rumor that affects the masses, but popular feelings that affect the press, and this feeling grew, developed and eventually became part of national traditions. The new generation has already begun to suck in this strange antipathy along with its mother's milk, and in the last, newly born generations over this decade, it has already become a natural, distinctive feature of the race. Now it has come to the point that an Englishman who says a kind word about Russia or about Russians, or dares to doubt the slanders leveled against them, immediately becomes unpopular. The Pall Mall Gazette lost hundreds of subscribers and half a dozen fashionable clubs at once just for writing a eulogy for the late Mikhail Katkov.

It's time for the Russian public to find out, as much as possible, the truth about England and the English, to get to know them as they are, and not as they present themselves. "Count Vasily" described the aristocracy and the great of this world in London, as well as in other capitals, photographically correctly, but he did not even touch on its middle classes, i.e. the real England. And it is these classes–the world of the City, finance, and all kinds of professions, from lawyering to shoe makers, beer makers, and soap factories–that control public opinion, and the latter – the entire British press. It is in them, in these classes, that the national monster "cant" (or, in the words of Sidney Whitman, "that homogeneous, pure essence of Pharisaism which forms such a characteristically exceptional feature of the Protestant islanders") originates and lives by them, and to it England owes her entire hypocritical social system.

Do those who have not read Carlyle know what "cant" really is? This is what the historian Fraude says in his essay "The Life of Carlyle" about this incurable ulcer and the opinion of the most truthful of modern English writers about it.

“There was a horror of lying hidden in the depths of his soul! To look at the facts as they really are, to be sincere with himself, and to tell people literally what he thought was his first duty to humanity. That's why he felt such hatred for cant.

“For him, cant was organized hypocrisy, the art of presenting things differently from what they are: an art so fatal that it kills the soul of those who practice it, dragging them beyond deliberate lies to the point where you begin to believe in the reality of your own illusions.... He saw this kind of cant reigning all over Europe, all over America, but mostly and more strongly than anywhere else in his England! She appeared to him plump with cant: “Cant in religion, in politics, in morals, in art – everywhere!” The middle classes, under the leadership and with the active cooperation of the clergy, have so successfully managed to force this idiosyncrasy (usually disguised as respectability) into everyday practice that even the aristocracy pays tribute to it, and the poor inevitably suffer even more from it. It alone (cant) should be attributed to a greater extent the lack of real sympathy in us for the poor, both for private individuals and for the whole class in general, and then again it (this vicious cant), it alone branded poverty as something worse than misfortune, as a crime. Cant, applied to practice, erected a barrier around our poor classes, which completely isolated them and became the cause of their brutality, their ignorance and their desperate drunkenness.”

Sidney Whitman has just published his essay "The Land of Cant". He searches in it for the original cause of this exclusively English moral ulcer and finds its origin in the secularism of the state church and the English Protestant clergy. Indeed, in no class of European states, in no other society or caste, not even excluding the Jesuits, is there so much living, obligatory and omnipresent hypocrisy as in the 239 sects of the Protestant religion! A Jesuit lies when he finds it necessary to achieve his set goal. The Protestant clergy, from the highest church to the last dissident, is being cunning from morning to night, in front of others, alone with itself and even in a dream.

The entire press mocked France and rejoiced at the moral slap she received in the Caffarel case. Sarcasm about the Legion of Honor in general and the French passion for medals in particular accounted for two thirds of the gossip in the living rooms. How different it is in the UK! An Englishman becomes a knight, a baronet, or even a peer in proportion to his monetary merits and the offerings to one or another party. In England, everything is for sale – from the ducal crown to husbands and wives, as it happens every day in the divorce courts. The decorations are given here and obtained from the auction. This is simply a commercial transaction; the money is paid by future cavaliers to the government in advance, and the decoration or title is a symbol of the government's receipt for receiving some and some thousands of pounds. The decoration is given to money bags, not to a person.

And the worship of Pluto or "plutocracy" is allowed only in England – in England, the rest of the world must remain penniless; even artists who are not lucky enough to be pure-blooded Englishmen have no right to sell their paintings and thereby profane the temple of art, called "Grosvenor Gallery".

Because of the Russian artist Vereshchagin, who exhibited his paintings here, a war broke out in London. Prince of Wales patronizes him, he has the audacity to admire the works of the Russian artist in front of the whole of Britain and turn away from homegrown Raphaels. Nothing more was needed to accuse the Russian artist.

That's the whole incident "in a nutshell." Ten years ago, in 1877, there was only one famous art gallery in London, the Academy of Arts. Others were only temporary. But this Academy has long been known as an "art shop", as paintings were exhibited there only for sale. The artists conspired and opened the Grosvenor Gallery, where nothing is bought or sold except for the entrance price, but where the best private paintings in the country are temporarily exhibited and then taken back. The famous Watts donated all his paintings to the country during his lifetime, and no less famous (?) artists Hallé, Comyns Carr and Alma-Tadema were directors on the salary of this gallery with Sir Coutts Lindsay at the head. Why and how it happened that the latter turned out to be unpopular is best known to Lady Lindsay, who has just divorced him because of some model. But the fact is that Sir Coutts, eager to regain popularity, yielded, as they say, to the wishes of the Prince of Wales and provided Vereshchagin with the Grosvenor Gallery for his exhibition. This permission proved to be unprecedented. "The artist was putting his paintings up for sale," and so the virgin gallery turned out to be, according to other directors, "disgraced." All the directors resigned without explaining the real reason to the public, as the Crown Prince was involved.

Because of a penny candle, Moscow caught fire, because of paintings by Vereshchagin running into thousands of pounds, the war in London broke out for a long time. But what is the Russian artist's fault here? And it is the fact that he is a Russian, not an Englishman. ... After all, paintings by native painters that had already been sold were exhibited before him. Yes! But those were the English, and they were not protected by the future king of England.

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