Collected Works of A. I. Herzen, Volume 4

II.

What is the singer’s fatherland? . . . the land of oaks, The free land, the German land, That was my fatherland! Körner.

It is boring to live in England: the eternal parliament with its Gothic antics, the eternal news from the East Indies, the eternal hunger in Ireland, the eternal damp weather, the eternal smell of coal, and the eternal accusations against the Prime Minister for all of this. Well, to help with this boredom, one English Sir-Tory an English gentleman of the Tory party, a terrible chatterbox, decided to tell the old legends of his Scotland, so sweetly that, listening to him, one is completely transported to the blessed memory of the feudal ages. Lately, there has been doubt about the historical accuracy of his paintings—what has there not been doubt about lately? I cannot decide whether this doubt is justified; but I know that one great historian original: "Lettres sur l'histoire de la France, par Aug. Thierry." advises studying the history of England through the novels of Walter Scott. In my opinion, Walter Scott has another drawback: he is an aristocrat, and the common drawback of aristocratic stories is a certain apathy. He sometimes resembles a secretary of a criminal court who reports the most emotional events with the greatest cold-bloodedness; everywhere in his novel, you see a Tory lord with an aristocratic smile, narrating with gravity. His business is to describe, and just as he, in describing nature, does not delve into plant physiology and geological research, so he acts with man: his psychology is weak, and all his attention is focused on that surface of the soul which is so like the surface of a geode, covered with an earthen crust, by which one cannot judge the crystals found in its interior. Do not look in Walter Scott for the poetic insight into the character of a great man, do not look for those marvelous creations of burning fantasy, those Schwankende Gestalten wavering figures that remain forever in the memory: Faust, Hamlet, Mignon, Claude Frollo; look for a story, and you will find a charming, elegant one. Walter Scott has a double, just like Hoffmann’s Medardus: this is Cooper, this is his alter ego other self, the novelist of the United States, that alter ego of England. The American repetition of Walter Scott is entirely similar to him; sometimes it is more interesting than Scotland. If Walter Scott’s novels are historical, then Cooper’s...