THE ORIGIN OF NIHILISM.

A curious article on "Nihilism in China" is publish by the Presse of Vienna. The writer says that Nihilist doctrines first made their appearance in China in the 10th century, Buddhism began to take the place of the old national religion based on the worship of the forces of Nature. The doctrine of the Nirvana, the extinction of the individual, was taken in its material sense, and the State, society, and the family were represented as only deserving of destruction. A succession of bad harvests, which caused a general famine, inclined the masses of the people to support the Nihilist tendency to pull down all existing institutions ; and the consequence was a series of civil wars which put an end to no fewer than six dynasties in a single century. The reign of Nihilism, which produced anarchy and chaos in China, was succeeded in the middle of the eleventh century by that of Socialism, under Wang-ngan-tche, a leader immeasurably superior, we are told, to Proudhon, Lassalle, Bakounin, or Karl Marx. Wang-ngan-tche thought he would be able to construct on the social basis which Nihilism had levelled a new organization of humanity. He was born in 1027, and even the most hostile of his biographers praise his learning, intelligence, and eloquence. The ability and success with which he confuted the arguments of the Nihilists made him popular; and the Emperor Tchentsung invited him to his Court and made him his chief Minister. In 1069 this Chinese Socialist was the most powerful man in the empire next to the Emperor himself. He first issued a decree abolishing all personal properly in land ; the whole country was to be cultivated by the State and its produce equally divided among the people. Other decrees placed all private industries under State management and made them State property, and compelled all capitalists to pay to the State a fifth of their capital every year for five years. Thus the State became the sole possessor of property, both in land and in money, and the only employer of labour ; there were neither rich nor poor in the country, and each man derived his only means of subsistence from the State. It soon appeared, however, that this complicated machinery gave rise to many abuses ; the State proved, as might have been expected, incapable of discharging the gigantic task which had been imposed upon it, and unprincipled persons took advantage of its difficulties to enrich themselves by peculation. Sse-ma-Kuang, one of the most eminent of Chinese statesmen and poets, got up a powerful opposition to the Socialist Minister, who, however, maintained his system for 15 years. At the end of that period the Emperor died, and his widow, who was appointed Regent, recalled Sse-ma-Kuang to the post of Prime Minister, which he had been obliged to vacate on the appointment of Wang-ngan-tche. This was the end both of Socialism and Nihilism in China.
[Emperor Shen tsung ; Scholar Ssu-ma Kuang; Minister Wang An-shih]

 The Sydney Morning Herald 10 May 1880,

NIHILISM.

[By Magister.]

Nihilism, like Socialism in Germany, Communism in France, Trades Unionism in Great Britain, and, to some extent, Fenianism in Ireland, owes its origin to what was recently called "a certain rough but widespread desire to set wrongs down and see right done." This, perhaps, will be doubted by those who see in Nihilism only a political movement, an agitation directed by men of all ranks against a corrupt autocracy. But, if we examine more closely, we cannot fail to see that it was the miserable condition of the subject classes which first called Nihilism into existence. Other causes have indeed aided in promoting its present strength by attracting men of position into its ranks ; but originally it was a branch of the great European social movement. A brief review of its history will convince us of this.
And, first, it is well to be guarded against the common error that the movement had its origin within the past twenty years, for we can find traces of its spirit so far back as the St. Petersburg insurrection of 1823. This occurrence was the outcome of the dissemination amongst the more educated clashes of the ideas which found their chief expression in the French Revolution. It was thought by Czar Nicholas that the leaders of this insurrection would be taught their mistake by means of such correctives as death and banishment to Siberia ; but, thirty years later, the release of the survivors gave an impetus to the cause of Russian freedom which can hardly be exaggerated. In the interval between 1825 and 1855 the revolutionary spirit in Russia was inflamed by the spread of foreign thought, especially German philosophy. About ten years after Nicholas's grape-shot had proved his divine right to autocracy a Club for studying Hegel's metaphysics was formed at Moscow by several Russian students. The leading men in this Club were Herzen and Bakunin. Both of these men were what we should call advanced thinkers. The first principle of Herzen's political creed was contained in the cry 'Let the whole world perish !' Nothing might be saved from the wreck, for all present institutions had been proved to be utterly bad, and even the smallest remnant might corrupt the new order of things. A still further step in advance was taken when Schopenhauer's doctrines of negation and annihilation were adopted as the gospel of the regenerate. Hear Michael Bakunin, the 'Father of Nihilism':— " The old world must be destroyed and replaced by a new one. The lie must be stamped out and give way to truth. The first lie is God. The second lie is Right. Might invented the fiction of Right, in order to ensure and strengthen her reign. Might forms the sole groundwork of society. It makes and unmakes laws, and that Might should be in the hands of the majority. When you have freed your minds from the fear of a God, and from that childish respect for the fiction of Right, then all the remaining chains which bind you, and which are called science, civilization, property, marriage, morality, and justice, will snap asunder like threads." Such wild pessimism as this is evidently the outcome of an intense disgust with the present state of society, linked to an utter despair of reforming it.
But we should be far from the truth were we to take such frenzied utterances as these to be a political creed to which all Nihilists would subscribe. In this, as in every confederacy, there are enthusiasts whose voices rise above the cries of the main body ; and, besides, it is important to notice that the name Nihilist strictly connotes nothing further than one discontented with the present state of society. There are two distinct classes of Nihilists. The one class contains men who are nothing more than advanced Liberals, who have an objection— rational, surely, and almost universal — to the Russian form of Government, and who wish to change it into a free constitution. The extreme opposite to this class is furnished by men driven frantic by oppression and goaded to despair by the accumulated wrongs of centuries.
These two classes are an evidence of the two streams which produced what we know as Nihilism. It is well to bear this in mind ; the only thing in which all agree is the necessity of completely abolishing autocracy. The one stream is that supplied by the higher classes. But their chief object is to obtain that political freedom which the rest of Europe owes to the French Revolution. Were that freedom once secured there can be but l ?  that they would secede from the revolutionary ranks. The tradition of their order would influence the nobility, the consideration of capital as against proletarianism would influence the middle class to withdraw from a Society whose doctrines cannot be milder than fraternity and equality. Nay, it is very probable, judging from the revelations made of the secret workings of the similar Society in Ireland, that there are even now numbered amongst the adherents of Nihilism many whose fidelity to the cause is only secured by dread of their associates' revenge. 

It was then a desire to set wrongs down and see right done that was the raison d'etre of Nihilism. For it will be remembered that it was nearly thirty years before the emancipation of the serfs that the Club of Russian students, which included Herzen and Bakunin, was formed at Moscow. This Club was composed entirely of members of the higher classes— the set of men that is whose object was a reformed constitution, not annihilation. The years between the dates of the foundation of this Club and of the return of the St. Petersburg rebels from Siberia were occupied by the study of advanced political writers, and by comparisons pointed by exiles between Russian and foreign systems of government. These comparisons could not fail to be in favour of foreign constitutions, and it was when the popular mind was inflamed by such considerations as these that Alexander II. released the surviving exiles. These were men of the highest social position, and they were, as was natural, received with great enthusiasm by the society of the capital. Nor had the liberal opinions of the nobles escaped the notice of the Government. Nicholas saw clearly that the only way to check the aristocracy was to elevate the proletariate; and so Alexander II., in obedience to his dying father's advice, took the step, which could no longer be delayed, of emancipating the serfs. This consideration ought always to be taken into account when the crime of assassinating Alexander is represented as further blackened by the sin of ingratitude to a liberal ruler — the consideration that in reality the emancipation of the 23,000,000 serfs was nothing more or less than an act of State policy rendered necessary by the disaffection of the upper classes. It was, political expediency apart, a tardy act of justice. That all men are born equal is not true ; that any man is born a slave is a monstrous anomaly. Czar Alexander, then, had no claim to the gratitude of the serfs for giving them that which, in the first place, was their own inherently, and, secondly, was extorted from him by the exigencies of his tyranny. This it is which renders surprising the heroics of indignation in which some portions of the English Press assailed the murderers of Alexander for ingratitude. All of us sincerely join in the assertion that that murder was a heinous crime. Politically there is no doubt that it was a mistake. But it is impossible to see in what the ingratitude of the serfs is manifested. In the first place, Nihilists are not all serfs, as has been shown above ; and, secondly, even if they were, they could hardly be expected to feel gratitude for an act which but conceded their rights— a concession which they knew was only made because it was a matter of political expediency, and could no longer be withheld.
But this plan which Alexander adopted to humble the nobles has unexpectedly tended to make them more powerful. The untaught minds of barbarians newly endowed with freedom are the most fruitful fields in which to sow the seeds of revolution. The first generations of emancipated slaves cannot free themselves at once from mental shackles. By one act they might be raised from serfdom to freedom, but the traditions of centuries of slavery can only be erased from their minds by a continued state of independence. Their former masters found in the peasantry the readiest tools for conspiracy. They had been absolutely ignorant; their finest instincts had been blunted by thorough despotism. It was easy to persuade them, as we find the Irish peasantry persuaded, that riches and influence could be only, but easily, obtained in the same way as past rights had been accorded— by loud and, if necessary, armed insistence on their rights. It was told them, and told them truly, that they would not have been freed were it not for the fact that they could be kept in slavery no longer ; and they were taught that before they gained power they must show that it would be dangerous to deny it to them.
The fact is we English cannot understand Nihilism, because we have no adequate idea of the state of life to which it owes its being. It arose from a sense of the wrongness of things. Our own victory over autocracy was consummated more than six hundred years ago. And even then Englishmen had no such wrongs to complain of as the Russian serfs of our own nineteenth century. Arbitrary imprisonment, insecurity of life and honour and property are common, in name at least, to Englishmen before Magna Charta was signed, and to Russians in our own time. True, Alexander II. introduced trial by Jury and a reformed judicial system, but they only agree in name with our institutions. It is true that the serfs have been freed, but since 1862 upwards of 17,000 persons have been exiled to Siberia for political offences. Why we sympathize so little with the Nihilists is due to two reasons. We are so ignorant of Russian mode of life and the present state of Russian civilization that we do not understand that we are hundreds of years in advance of them ; and, in the next place, their plan of operations is not in accordance with British love of fairplay.
To sum up briefly. Before the emancipation of the serfs we find a marked disaffection amongst the upper classes. They compared their position with that of the corresponding classes in foreign countries, and used means— legitimate and illegitimate —to improve their condition. Whilst engaged in this effort they were joined by a large body of their fellow-subjects, who, having won personal freedom, were striving to obtain a share in the government of their country, for these peasants in their turn saw how inferior their position was to that of the masses in other European countries. Of the future Nihilism takes no count. Its business is to annihilate the present order of things. When that is once done it will be time to deliberate on the form of the order which is to succeed. Nihilists are firmly convinced that nothing can be worse than the present ; but here their unanimity ends. Even the most sanguine of them cannot sketch a plan of government which will command the approbation of the Society. All of them feel that their wrongs must be set down, however roughly. They have not yet discovered the best way to see right done.
 

South Australian Register 21 May 1883,

CHARACTERISTICS OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE.

(From Temple Bar.)

No two masters can be more opposite in their styles and manner of proceeding than Tourgenief and Dostoievsky, whose names have been mode familiar to all of us by means of French and English translations, more or less true to the original. And yet common to both is the same ardent desire to regenerate Russia and the same hopeless and helpless undercurrent of negation (of the utter vanity and nothingness of everything) which distinguishes all this group of writers. Nothing can be more sauve, more poetical more perfect than Tourgenief's descriptions of scenery. We have here neither the rugged strength of Tolstoi nor the brilliant and bitter sarcasms of Gogol, nor the tormented if inspired ravings of Dostoievsky. Tourgenief has caught something of the Western spirit of harmony and proportion. His work is, as we say, more artistic. None the less is there a deep purpose underlying it? He was the first to foresee, to define and describe Russia's modern malady, Nihilism or Anarchism. In order to understand fully the entire significance of these terms, we should recall the origin (as far as it can be traced back) of the Muscovite race, and reflect upon the result of the conversion to Christianity of a people naturally inclined by their Asiatic temperament to the more contemplative attitude of Buddhism, and accepting not unwillingly here and hereafter a state of renunciation and annihilation. It is difficult to explain clearly in few words this fatalistic bent of the Russian mind. Upon it has become grafted the religion of sacrifice and suffering, intermingled with the negations of to-day, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and his school, and the multiplicity of new ideas of which the seeds sown in the French Revolution have developed and expanded through the light of science during this wonderful nineteenth century into all those doctrines of progress with which we are so familiar, and from which some of us expect to be ushered in the reign of true happiness and peace. But it seems as if there will always be certain natures who, endowed with vivid imagination and highly-wrought sympathies will continue to suffer from the contemplation of Nature's seeming eternal immorality, even when their own lot or the general lot of their country is ameliorated. They will continue to ask, why all this senseless sunning in the past, why these longings for unattainable perfection ? They will probe and search—we shall always have such amongst us—and the result will for ever be the same, pain and confusion and the last cry of bewildered humanity seeking guidance and comfort in the hours of anguish, " My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?" Let those who think that material gratifications alone will satisfy the passionate eager soul of man keep their faith. It suits them. But those who hunger for the ideal and the difficult of attainment will, as heretofore, be torn and wounded in life's struggle, will bear their cross and wear their crown of thorns until they sleep in death, and then, as Hamlet says, " the rest is silence."

To return to Tourgenief. He paints with rare skill the interesting physiognomies of his countrywomen. Gogol was perfectly incapable of pourtraying a woman. His women are mere shadows, none have the breath of life. But with what characters has not Tourgenief presented us! Indeed all critics concur in finding Tourgeneif's heroines far superior to his male creations. They possess the courage, the determination, the fire, the practical ability wanting in these latter. They initiate and carry out the boldest designs without faltering without repenting, without repining. And we should remember that these are not the mere creations of a poets fancy—they are real, living portraits. These women or others like them, lived, suffered, braved everything for the cause they held sacred. The names of the martyrs of "the coming Russia" are household words; we are proud to claim them as of our sex, to class them with the Madame Rolands, the Charlotte Cordays, and all those generous noble spirits who have helped to keep alight the ardent flame which serves to feed ever and anon our cooling enthusiasm for humanity.

Every question is discussed in all its aspects by these so called Nihilists. Nothing is considered too sacred. Old prejudices are swept aside as cobwebs. We have only, over here, advanced timidly to the point of inquiring whether marriage, as an institution, may not be a failure. These audacious iconoclasts demand boldly (in Tourgenief's "Fathers and Sons") whether "Marriage is a folly or a crime! " Now, whether we like them or not, such mental shocks are beneficial, and dispose us to ask whether—although, of course the English are the most moral and advanced people in the world — we may not have something to learn even of our savage neighbours, the Russians. And I warn those who may feel tempted from curiosity, and for no deeper motive, to study this people and their literature, that unless they really desire to understand and to learn and to admire candidly, they will be continually out of harmony with their novel mode of thinking and of dealing with the eternal problems, of existence. Dostoievsky introduces us to yet another world, where all our preconceived notions of right and wrong become confused and disorganised, and where all social conventions are set at nought. The most prominent figures in "Crime and Punishment " are a murderer and a prostitute; in the " Idiot," all the interest of the story centres round an epileptic, and always the poor and the humble and the diseased and the simple and the criminal are exalted, pitied and uncondemned. And do not think for a moment that the murderer is not an ordinary murderer, or the prostitute any exception to her class. By no means. But by the simple and sublime power of genius, the workings of these minds are laid bare before us, and, comprehending at last these abnormalities, we do for a moment, what is not done in real life, we forgive. We are led to see how any one of us if unprepared by previous training, if placed in certain circumstances, may be led to commit certain actions which we term immoral, just as we think every day certain thoughts which are immoral, but which by force of will, habit, or fear, do not develop into actions. Whoever denies this neither understands human nature nor the laws which govern it. There is no abrupt line of demarcation between health and disease, between physiology and pathology between right and wrong. Indeed is it not certain that what is right in one instance may be wrong in another ? This is the vast field of analysis of motive and action living before the modern romancer. There is a physiognomy of the mind as of the countenance. When Raskolnikoff, the murderer, throws himself at the feet of the unfortunate who feeds her parents with the price paid for her degradation, she who has led Raskolnikoff to expiation and rehabilitation, he cries out when she wishes to raise him; "It is not before thee that I prostrate myself, but before all the suffering of humanity;" and these beautiful and touching words are the keynote to the whole of Dostoievsky's teachings: Dostoievsky, whose nerves have been shattered during those terrible moments when, a youth of 22 with breast bared and eyes bound, he stood awaiting the fatal bullet which was to end his existence. The death-sentence was remitted at the last moment, and long years of exile in Siberia replaced it. The fruit of those years' experience we have in these strange volumes. Be not astonished, therefore, at being introduced into an atmosphere of madness, incoherence, folly, and crime Dostoievsky never once complains of losing what the Russians affectionately denominate their "dear little liberty;" no, he accepts without murmuring his initiation into others' miseries which he strives to cure or to mitigate by boundless comprehension and compassion. As for his opinions, here is a quotation which must serve as a sample of the rest: —
"Socialism is the progeny of Romanism and of the Romanistic spirit and essence. But it and its brother Atheism proceed from despair, from the inconsistency of Catholicism with moral sense, in order that it might replace in itself the best moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it, not by Christ, but by force. Do not dare to believe in God, do not dare to possess any individuality, any personality, 'fraternity or death,' two million heads, you shall know them by their works we are told. And we must not suppose that all this is harmless and safe for ourselves. Oh, no, we must resist, we must fortify, and quickly, quickly. We must let our Christ shine forth upon the buttresses of the Western nations, our Christ whom we have preserved intact, and whom they have not so much as known. Not as slaves, allowing ourselves to be caught by the hooks of Jesuit anglers, but by carrying our religion to them. We must stand before them at the head of the Christian army "

I cannot conclude more fitly this inadequate sketch than by rendering Gogol's apostrophe to Russia, written when he was in Italy: —
"Russia, Russia, from the beautiful country I inhabit I see thee, I see thee distinctly, oh, my country ! Nature has not been prodigal to thee. Thou hast nothing either to charm or to startle the eye. No nothing in thee, Russia, either splendid or marvellous. All is open, desert, flat. The little towns are scarcely perceptible. Nothing to seduce or to flatter the eyesight. What secret, mysterious force draws me, then, to thee ? Why does thy sad, monotonous, troubled song—carried through all thy length and breadth, from one sea to another—sound for ever in my ears ? What is this song ? Whence come those accents and those sobs re-echoing in my heart ? What are those painful chords which penetrate my soul, and awake remembrances ? Russia, what will'st thou of me ? What is this obscure, mysterious tie which binds us together ? Why dost thou look at me thus ? My lips are sealed in presence of thy immensity. From thy infinite vastness what is to be prophesied ? Thou art the mother-country of thoughts, the greatness of which cannot be measured. Thy unmeasured extent is powerfully reflected in my soul, and an unknown force penetrates into the depths of my being. What a dazzling future, what a grand, splendid mirage unknown to Earth, O Russia !"

 The Sydney Morning Herald 15 August 1890,