Count Ilya Rostov had resigned the position of Marshal of the Nobility because it involved him in too much expense, but still his affairs did not improve. Natasha and Nicholas often noticed their parents conferring together anxiously and privately and heard suggestions of selling the fine ancestral Rostov house and estate near Moscow. It was not necessary to entertain so freely as when the count had been Marshal, and life at Otradnoe was quieter than in former years, but still the enormous house and its lodges were full of people and more than twenty sat down to table every day. These were all their own people who had settled down in the house almost as members of the family, or persons who were, it seemed, obliged to live in the count's house. Such were Dimmler the musician and his wife, Vogel the dancing master and his family, Belova, an old maiden lady, an inmate of the house, and many others such as Petya's tutors, the girls' former governess, and other people who simply found it preferable and more advantageous to live in the count's house than at home. They had not as many visitors as before, but the old habits of life without which the count and countess could not conceive of existence remained unchanged. There was still the hunting establishment which Nicholas had even enlarged, the same fifty horses and fifteen grooms in the stables, the same expensive presents and dinner parties to the whole district on name days; there were still the count's games of whist and boston, at which--spreading out his cards so that everybody could see them--he let himself be plundered of hundreds of rubles every day by his neighbors, who looked upon an opportunity to play a rubber with Count Rostov as a most profitable source of income.
The buildings, begun under straitened circumstances, were more than simple. The immense house on the old stone foundations was of wood, plastered only inside. It had bare deal floors and was furnished with very simple hard sofas, armchairs, tables, and chairs made by their own serf carpenters out of their own birchwood. The house was spacious and had rooms for the house serfs and apartments for visitors. Whole families of the Rostovs' and Bolkonskis' relations sometimes came to Bald Hills with sixteen horses and dozens of servants and stayed for months. Besides that, four times a year, on the name days and birthdays of the hosts, as many as a hundred visitors would gather there for a day or two. The rest of the year life pursued its unbroken routine with its ordinary occupations, and its breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and suppers, provided out of the produce of the estate.
Not far remote, as thou shalt soon thyself Perceive, oh venerable Chief! he stands, Who hath convened this council. I, am He. I am in chief the suff'rer. Tidings none Of the returning host I have received, Which here I would divulge, nor bring I aught Of public import on a different theme, But my own trouble, on my own house fall'n, And two-fold fall'n. One is, that I have lost A noble father, who, as fathers rule Benign their children, govern'd once yourselves; The other, and the more alarming ill, With ruin threatens my whole house, and all My patrimony with immediate waste. Suitors, (their children who in this our isle Hold highest rank) importunate besiege My mother, though desirous not to wed, And rather than resort to her own Sire Icarius, who might give his daughter dow'r, And portion her to whom he most approves, (A course which, only named, moves their disgust) They chuse, assembling all within my gates Daily to make my beeves, my sheep, my goats Their banquet, and to drink without restraint My wine; whence ruin threatens us and ours; For I have no Ulysses to relieve Me and my family from this abuse. Ourselves are not sufficient; we, alas! Too feeble should be found, and yet to learn How best to use the little force we own; Else, had I pow'r, I would, myself, redress The evil; for it now surpasses far All suff'rance, now they ravage uncontroul'd, Nor show of decency vouchsafe me more. Oh be ashamed yourselves; blush at the thought Of such reproach as ye shall sure incur From all our neighbour states, and fear beside The wrath of the Immortals, lest they call Yourselves one day to a severe account. I pray you by Olympian Jove, by her Whose voice convenes all councils, and again Dissolves them, Themis, that henceforth ye cease, That ye permit me, oh my friends! to wear My days in solitary grief away, Unless Ulysses, my illustrious Sire, Hath in his anger any Greecian wrong'd, Whose wrongs ye purpose to avenge on me, Inciting these to plague me. Better far Were my condition, if yourselves consumed My substance and my revenue; from you I might obtain, perchance, righteous amends Hereafter; you I might with vehement suit O'ercome, from house to house pleading aloud For recompense, till I at last prevail'd. But now, with darts of anguish ye transfix My inmost soul, and I have no redress.
It does not appear that the Jesuits at Macao, Goa or other centres of Portuguese influence in the East took immediate advantage of the discovery of Japan. The pioneer propagandist was Francis Xavier, who landed at Kagoshima on the 15th of August 1549. During the interval of six (or seven) years that separated this event from the drifting of the junk to Tanegashima, the Portuguese had traded freely in the ports of Kiushiu, had visited Kioto, and had reported the Japanese capital to be a city of 96,000 houses, therefore larger than Lisbon. Xavier would certainly have gone to Japan even though he had not been specially encouraged, for the reports of his countrymen depicted the Japanese as "very desirous of being instructed," and he longed to find a field more promising than that inhabited by "all these Indian nations, barbarous, vicious and without inclination to virtue." There were, however, two special determinants. One was a request addressed by a feudatory, supposed to have been the chief of the Bungo fief, to the viceroy of the Indies at Goa; the other, an appeal made in person by a Japanese named Yajiro, whom the fathers spoke of as Anjiro, and who subsequently attained celebrity under his baptismal name, Paul of the holy faith. No credible reason is historically assigned for the action of the Japanese feudatory. Probably his curiosity had been excited by accounts which the Portuguese traders gave of the noble devotion of their country's missionaries, and being entirely without bigotry, as nearly all Japanese were at that epoch, he issued the invitation partly out of curiosity and partly from a sincere desire for progress. Anjiro's case was very different. Labouring under stress of repentant zeal, and fearful that his evil acts might entail murderous consequences, he sought an asylum abroad, and was taken away in 1548 by a Portuguese vessel whose master advised him to repair to Malacca for the purpose of confessing to Xavier. This might well have seemed to the Jesuits a providential dispensation, for Anjiro, already able to speak Portuguese, soon mastered it sufficiently to interpret for Xavier and his fellow-missionaries (without which aid they must have remained long helpless in the face of the immense difficulty of the Japanese language), and to this linguistic skill he added extraordinary gifts of intelligence and memory. Xavier, with two Portuguese companions and Anjiro, were excellently received by the feudal chiefs of Satsuma and obtained permission to preach their doctrine in any part of the fief. This permit is not to be construed as an evidence of official sympathy with the foreign creed. Commercial considerations alone were in question. A Japanese feudal chief in that era had sedulously to foster every source of wealth or strength, and as the newly opened trade with the outer world seemed full of golden promise, each feudatory was not less anxious to secure a monopoly of it in the 16th century than the Ashikaga shoguns had been in the 15th. The Satsuma daimyo was led to believe that the presence of the Jesuits in Kagoshima would certainly prelude the advent of trading vessels. But within a few months one of the expected merchantmen sailed to Hirado without touching at Kagoshima, and her example was followed by two others in the following year, so that the Satsuma chief saw himself flouted for the sake of a petty rival, Matsudaira of Hirado. This fact could not fail to provoke his resentment. But there was another influence at work. Buddhism has always been a tolerant religion, eclectic rather than exclusive. Xavier, however, had all the bigoted intolerance of his time. The Buddhist priests in Kagoshima received him with courtesy and listened respectfully to the doctrines he expounded through the mouth of Anjiro. Xavier rejoined with a display of aggressive intolerance which shocked and alienated the Buddhists. They represented to the Satsuma chief that peace and good order were inconsistent with such a display of militant propagandism, and he, already profoundly chagrined by his commercial disappointment, issued in 1550 an edict making it a capital offence for any of his vassals to embrace Christianity. Xavier, or, more correctly speaking, Anjiro, had won 150 converts, who remained without molestation, but Xavier himself took ship for Hirado. There he was received with salvoes of artillery by the Portuguese merchantmen lying in the harbour and with marks of profound respect by the Portuguese traders, a display which induced the local chief to issue orders that courteous attention should be paid to the teaching of the foreign missionaries. In ten days a hundred baptisms took place; another significant index of the mood of the Japanese in the early era of Occidental intercourse: the men in authority always showed a complaisant attitude towards Christianity where trade could be fostered by so doing, and wherever the men in authority showed such an attitude, considerable numbers of the lower orders embraced the foreign faith. Thus, in considering the commercial history of the era, the element of religion constantly thrusts itself into the foreground. Entry: VIII
Franklin early rebelled against New England Puritanism and spent his Sundays in reading and in study instead of attending church. His free-thinking ran its extreme course at the time of his publication in London of _A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain_ (1725), which he recognized as one of the great _errata_ of his life. He later called himself a deist, or theist, not discriminating between the terms. To his favourite sister he wrote: "There are some things in your New England doctrine and worship which I do not agree with; but I do not therefore condemn them, or desire to shake your belief or practice of them." Such was his general attitude. He did not believe in the divinity of Christ, but thought "his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is like to see." His intense practical-mindedness drew him away from religion, but drove him to a morality of his own (the "art of virtue," he called it), based on thirteen virtues each accompanied by a short precept; the virtues were Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity and Humility, the precept accompanying the last-named virtue being "Imitate Jesus and Socrates." He made a business-like little notebook, ruled off spaces for the thirteen virtues and the seven days of the week, "determined to give a week's strict attention to each of the virtues successively ... [going] thro' a course compleate in thirteen weeks and four courses in a year," marking for each day a record of his adherence to each of the precepts. "And conceiving God to be the fountain of wisdom," he "thought it right and necessary to solicit His assistance for obtaining it," and drew up the following prayer for daily use: "O powerful Goodness! bountiful Father! merciful Guide! Increase in me that wisdom which discovers my truest interest. Strengthen my resolution to perform what that wisdom dictates. Accept my kind offices to Thy other children, as the only return in my power for Thy continual favours to me." He was by no means prone to overmuch introspection, his great interest in the conduct of others being shown in the wise maxims of Poor Richard, which were possibly too utilitarian but were wonderfully successful in instructing American morals. His _Art of Virtue_ on which he worked for years was never completed or published in any form. Entry: A
HAMMAD AR-RAWIYA [Abu-l-Qasim Hammad ibn Abi Laila Sapur (or ibn Maisara)] (8th century A.D.), Arabic scholar, was of Dailamite descent, but was born in Kufa. The date of his birth is given by some as 694, by others as 714. He was reputed to be the most learned man of his time in regard to the "days of the Arabs" (i.e. their chief battles), their stories, poems, genealogies and dialects. He is said to have boasted that he could recite a hundred long _qasidas_ for each letter of the alphabet (i.e. rhyming in each letter) and these all from pre-Islamic times, apart from shorter pieces and later verses. Hence his name _Hammad ar-Rawiya_, "the reciter of verses from memory." The Omayyad caliph Walid is said to have tested him, the result being that he recited 2900 qasidas of pre-Islamic date and Walid gave him 100,000 dirhems. He was favoured by Yazid II. and his successor Hisham, who brought him up from Irak to Damascus. Arabian critics, however, say that in spite of his learning he lacked a true insight into the genius of the Arabic language, and that he made more than thirty--some say three hundred--mistakes of pronunciation in reciting the Koran. To him is ascribed the collecting of the _Mo'allakat_ (q.v.). No diwan of his is extant, though he composed verse of his own and probably a good deal of what he ascribed to earlier poets. Entry: HAMMAD
In the spring of the previous year (1791) Mirabeau had died, and with him had passed away the only man who was at all likely to prove a wise guide to the court. In June of that year the king and queen made a disastrous attempt to flee from their capital and their people. They were brought back once more to the Tuileries, which from that time forth they rightly looked upon more as a prison than a palace or a home. The popular exasperation was intense, and the constitutional leaders, of whom the foremost was Lafayette, became alarmed and lost their judgment. A bloody dispersion of a popular gathering, known afterwards as the massacre of the Champ-de-Mars (July 1791), kindled a flame of resentment against the court and the constitutional party which was never extinguished. The Constituent Assembly completed its infertile labours in September 1791. Then the elections took place to its successor, the short-lived Legislative Assembly. Danton was not elected to it, and his party was at this time only strong enough to procure for him a very subordinate post in the government of the Parisian municipality. Events, however, rapidly prepared a situation in which his influence became of supreme weight. Between January and August 1792 the want of sympathy between the aims of the popular assembly and the spirit of the king and the queen became daily more flagrant and beyond power of disguise. In April war was declared against Austria, and to the confusion and distraction caused by the immense civil and political changes of the past two years was now added the ferment and agitation of war with an enemy on the frontier. The distrust felt by Paris for the court and its loyalty at length broke out in insurrection. On the memorable morning of the 10th of August 1792 the king and queen took refuge with the Legislative Assembly from the apprehended violence of the popular forces who were marching on the Tuileries. The share which Danton had in inspiring and directing this momentous rising is very obscure. Some look upon him as the head and centre of it. Apart from documents, support is given to this view by the fact that on the morrow of the fall of the monarchy Danton is found in the important post of minister of justice. This sudden rise from the subordinate office which he had held in the commune is a proof of the impression that his character had made on the insurrectionary party. To passionate fervour for the popular cause he added a certain broad steadfastness and an energetic practical judgment which are not always found in company with fervour. Even in those days, when so many men were so astonishing in their eloquence, Danton stands out as a master of commanding phrase. One of his fierce sayings has become a proverb. Against Brunswick and the invaders, "_il nous faut de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace_,"--we must dare, and again dare, and for ever dare. The tones of his voice were loud and vibrant. As for his bodily presence, he had, to use his own account of it, the athletic shape and the stern physiognomy of the Liberty for which he was ready to die. Jove the Thunderer, the rebel Satan, a Titan, Sardanapalus, were names that friends or enemies borrowed to describe his mien and port. He was thought about as a coarser version of the great tribune of the Constituent Assembly; he was called the Mirabeau of the sansculottes, and Mirabeau of the markets. Entry: DANTON
The essay, as a species of literature, was invented by Montaigne, who had probably little suspicion of the far-reaching importance of what he had created. In his dejected moments, he turned to rail at what he had written, and to call his essays "inepties" and "sottises." But in his own heart he must have been well satisfied with the new and beautiful form which he had added to literary tradition. He was perfectly aware that he had devised a new thing; that he had invented a way of communicating himself to the world as a type of human nature. He designed it to carry out his peculiar object, which was to produce an accurate portrait of his own soul, not as it was yesterday or will be to-morrow, but as it is to-day. It is not often that we can date with any approach to accuracy the arrival of a new class of literature into the world, but it was in the month of March 1571 that the essay was invented. It was started in the second story of the old tower of the castle of Montaigne, in a study to which the philosopher withdrew for that purpose, surrounded by his books, close to his chapel, sheltered from the excesses of a fatiguing world. He wrote slowly, not systematically; it took nine years to finish the two first books of the essays. In 1574 the manuscript of the work, so far as it was then completed, was nearly lost, for it was confiscated by the pontifical police in Rome, where Montaigne was residing, and was not returned to the author for four months. The earliest imprint saw the light in 1580, at Bordeaux, and the Paris edition of 1588, which is the fifth, contains the final text of the great author. These dates are not negligible in the briefest history of the essay, for they are those of its revelation to the world of readers. It was in the delightful chapters of his new, strange book that Montaigne introduced the fashion of writing briefly, irregularly, with constant digressions and interruptions, about the world as it appears to the individual who writes. The _Essais_ were instantly welcomed, and few writers of the Renaissance had so instant and so vast a popularity as Montaigne. But while the philosophy, and above all the graceful stoicism, of the great master were admired and copied in France, the exact shape in which he had put down his thoughts, in the exquisite negligence of a series of essays, was too delicate to tempt an imitator. It is to be noted that neither Charron, nor Mlle de Gournay, his most immediate disciples, tried to write essays. But Montaigne, who liked to fancy that the Eyquem family was of English extraction, had spoken affably of the English people as his "cousins," and it has always been admitted that his genius has an affinity with the English. He was early read in England, and certainly by Bacon, whose is the second great name connected with this form of literature. It was in 1597, only five years after the death of Montaigne, that Bacon published in a small octavo the first ten of his essays. These he increased to 38 in 1612 and to 58 in 1625. In their first form, the essays of Bacon had nothing of the fulness or grace of Montaigne's; they are meagre notes, scarcely more than the headings for discourses. It is possible that when he wrote them he was not yet familiar with the style of his predecessor, which was first made popular in England, in 1603, when Florio published that translation of the _Essais_ which Shakespeare unquestionably read. In the later editions Bacon greatly expanded his theme, but he never reached, or but seldom, the freedom and ease, the seeming formlessness held in by an invisible chain, which are the glory of Montaigne, and distinguish the typical essayist. It would seem that at first, in England, as in France, no lesser writer was willing to adopt a title which belonged to so great a presence as that of Bacon or Montaigne. The one exception was Sir William Cornwallis (d. 1631), who published essays in 1600 and 1617, of slight merit, but popular in their day. No other English essayist of any importance appeared until the Restoration, when Abraham Cowley wrote eleven "Several Discourses by way of Essays," which did not see the light until 1668. He interspersed with his prose, translations and original pieces in verse, but in other respects Cowley keeps much nearer than Bacon to the form of Montaigne. Cowley's essay "Of Myself" is a model of what these little compositions should be. The name of Bacon inspires awe, but it is really not he, but Cowley, who is the father of the English essay; and it is remarkable that he has had no warmer panegyrists than his great successors, Charles Lamb and Macaulay. Towards the end of the century, Sir George Mackenzie (1636-1691) wrote witty moral discourses, which were, however, essays rather in name than form. Whenever, however, we reach the eighteenth century, we find the essay suddenly became a dominant force in English literature. It made its appearance almost as a new thing, and in combination with the earliest developments of journalism. On the 12th of April 1709 appeared the first number of a penny newspaper, entitled the _Tatler_, a main feature of which was to amuse and instruct fashionable readers by a series of short papers dealing with the manifold occurrences of life, _quicquid agunt homines_. But it was not until Steele, the founder of the _Tatler_, was joined by Addison that the eighteenth-century essay really started upon its course. It displayed at first, and indeed it long retained, a mixture of the manner of Montaigne with that of La Bruyère, combining the form of the pure essay with that of the character-study, as modelled on Theophrastus, which had been so popular in England throughout the seventeenth century. Addison's early _Tatler_ portraits, in particular such as those of "Tom Folio" and "Ned Softly," are hardly essays. But Steele's "Recollections of Childhood" is, and here we may observe the type on which Goldsmith, Lamb and R.L. Stevenson afterwards worked. In January 1711 the _Tatler_ came to an end, and was almost immediately followed by the _Spectator_, and in 1713 by the _Guardian_. These three newspapers are storehouses of admirable and typical essays, the majority of them written by Steele and Addison, who are the most celebrated eighteenth-century essayists in England. Later in the century, after the publication of other less successful experiments, appeared Fielding's essays in the _Covent Garden Journal_ (1752) and Johnson's in the _Rambler_ (1750), the _Adventurer_ (1752) and the _Idler_ (1759). There followed a great number of polite journals, in which the essay was treated as "the bow of Ulysses in which it was the fashion for men of rank and genius to try their strength." Goldsmith reached a higher level than the Chesterfields and Bonnel Thorntons had dreamed of, in the delicious sections of his _Citizen of the World_ (1760). After Goldsmith, the eighteenth-century essay declined into tamer hands, and passed into final feebleness with the pedantic Richard Cumberland and the sentimental Henry Mackenzie. The _corpus_ of eighteenth-century essayists is extremely voluminous, and their reprinted works fill some fifty volumes. There is, however, a great sameness about all but the very best of them, and in no case do they surpass Addison in freshness, or have they ventured to modify the form he adopted for his lucubrations. What has survived of them all is the lightest portion, but it should not be forgotten that a very large section of the essays of that age were deliberately didactic and "moral." A great revival of the essay took place during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and foremost in the history of this movement must always be placed the name of Charles Lamb. He perceived that the real business of the essay, as Montaigne had conceived it, was to be largely personal. The famous _Essays of Elia_ began to appear in the _London Magazine_ for August 1820, and proceeded at fairly regular intervals until December 1822; early in 1823 the first series of them were collected in a volume. The peculiarity of Lamb's style as an essayist was that he threw off the Addisonian and still more the Johnsonian tradition, which had become a burden that crushed the life out of each conventional essay, and that he boldly went back to the rich verbiage and brilliant imagery of the seventeenth century for his inspiration. It is true that Lamb had great ductility of style, and that, when he pleases, he can write so like Steele that Steele himself might scarcely know the difference, yet in his freer flights we are conscious of more exalted masters, of Milton, Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor. He succeeded, moreover, in reaching a poignant note of personal feeling, such as none of his predecessors had ever aimed at; the essays called "Dream Children" and "Blakesmoor" are examples of this, and they display a degree of harmony and perfection in the writing of the pure essay such as had never been attempted before, and has never since been reached. Leigh Hunt, clearing away all the didactic and pompous elements which had overgrown the essay, restored it to its old _Spectator_ grace, and was the most easy nondescript writer of his generation in periodicals such as the _Indicator_ (1819) and the _Companion_ (1828). The sermons, letters and pamphlets of Sydney Smith were really essays of an extended order. In Hazlitt and Francis Jeffrey we see the form and method of the essay beginning to be applied to literary criticism. The writings of De Quincey are almost exclusively essays, although many of the most notable of them, under his vehement pen, have far outgrown the limits of the length laid down by the most indulgent formalist. His biographical and critical essays are interesting, but they are far from being trustworthy models in form or substance. In a sketch, however rapid, of the essay in the nineteenth century, prominence must be given to the name of Macaulay. His earliest essay, that on Milton, appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1825, very shortly after the revelation of Lamb's genius in "Elia." No two products cast in the same mould could, however, be more unlike in substance. In the hands of Macaulay the essay ceases to be a confession or an autobiography; it is strictly impersonal, it is literary, historical or controversial, vigorous, trenchant and full of party prejudice. The periodical publication of Macaulay's Essays in the _Edinburgh Review_ went on until 1844; when we cast our eyes over this mass of brilliant writing we observe with surprise that it is almost wholly contentious. Nothing can be more remarkable than the difference in this respect between Lamb and Macaulay, the former for ever demanding, even cajoling, the sympathy of the reader, the latter scanning the horizon for an enemy to controvert. In later times the essay in England has been cultivated in each of these ways, by a thousand journalists and authors. The "leaders" of a daily newspaper are examples of the popularization of the essay, and they point to the danger which now attacks it, that of producing a purely ephemeral or even momentary species of effect. The essay, in its best days, was intended to be as lasting as a poem or a historical monograph; it aimed at being one of the most durable and precious departments of literature. We still occasionally see the production of essays which have this more ambitious aim; within the last quarter of the nineteenth century the essays of R.L. Stevenson achieved it. His _Familiar Studies_ are of the same class as those of Montaigne and Lamb, and he approached far more closely than any other contemporary to their high level of excellence. We have seen that the tone of the essay should be personal and confidential; in Stevenson's case it was characteristically so. But the voices which please the public in a strain of pure self-study are few at all times, and with the cultivation of the analytic habit they tend to become less original and attractive. It is possible that the essay may die of exhaustion of interest, or may survive only in the modified form of accidental journalism. Entry: ESSAY