Collected Works of A. I. Herzen, Volume 4

must be called statistical; for America is a country without history, without aristocratic origin, a parvenue upstart country possessing only statistics. The direction of Walter Scott was dominant at the beginning of our century; but it should never have left England, for it is incompatible with the spirit of other European nations.

In France, at the end of the last century, there was no time to write and read novels; they were busy with epics. But when it calmed down in the arms of the Bourbons, then it had full leisure to write all sorts of things. Do you know what the state called a hangover Russian: spokhmele is? This is a state when the head is empty, the chest is empty, and meanwhile, the head barely rises and it is hard to breathe. France was in exactly such a position after 1815; this was an awakening in one's room after a noisy bacchanalia, after a bank and a duel. Then this huge need for far niente idleness had to develop, which is not at all like the quietism of the East—a quietism based on mystical faith in oneself; for at the bottom of the soul was disappointment, repentance. They started to write novels in the likeness of Walter Scott; it did not succeed. Young France could no more sympathize with Walter Scott than with Wellington and the whole of Toryism. And so the French replaced this direction with another, deeper one; and it was here that these anatomical dissections of the human soul appeared, here they began to uncover all the stinking wounds of the social body, and novels became psychological treatises Balzac, Sue, Janin, A. de Vigny.. But do not imagine that this genre was born in France; no! Psychology is at home in Germany: the French carried it over to themselves entirely, adding their own disappointment and their own style.

The psychological direction of the novel appeared incomparably earlier in Germany; but not in such a convulsive form, not with such terrible experience as a premise, as in the case of the neighbors beyond the Rhine. You cannot rouse a German quickly: accustomed from youth to the fire of Schiller, to the depth of Goethe, he could never highly value the lukewarm prose of Walter Scott When Hitzig gave Hoffmann Walter Scott to read, he returned it unread; conversely, Walter Scott found only a madman in Hoffmann!; he needs a storm and thunder to admire nature; he needs a revolution to splash out Napoleon with the legions of the republic in order to leave the parental roof, close the book, and think about himself. In accordance with the national spirit, a special seal of depth of fantasy and feeling lies on German novels. Once, the novel and drama...