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Kipling came sometimes, I think, but I never met him; and Stepniak, the nihilist, whom I knew well elsewhere but not there, said 'I cannot go more than once a year, it is too exhausting. Henley got the best out of us all, because he had made us accept him as our judge and we knew that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor changed, nor turned aside.
He had but one source of inspiration, religious zeal, and but one form of relaxation, the love of his devoted Empress. It is needless to refer to the later phases of the revolutionary movement. Despite their well-laid plans, the revolutionaries gradually lost ground; and in 1892 even Stepniak confessed that they alone could not hope to overthrow the autocracy.
But such incidents were merely the last fitful sputterings of a lamp that was going out for want of oil. In 1892 Stepniak declared it evident to all that the professional revolutionists could not alone overthrow autocracy, however great their energy and heroism; and he arrived at the same conclusion as the writer just quoted. Of course, immediate success was not to be expected.
"I have just been reading a review of that book by Stepniak. Their social and religious views are terrible; free-love, atheism, everything that could bring ruin on the human race. Is he indeed a Nihilist?" Mr. Blackthorne's conscience gave him a sharp prick, for he knew that he ought not to have passed me on.
After the many years of an acquaintance which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old age she survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city endures.
"Among us," says Stepniak, "a revolution or even a rising of any importance, such as those in Paris, is absolutely impossible. Our towns contain barely a tenth of the total population, and most of them are merely great villages, miles and miles away one from another.
So much for Madame Stepniak, and her account of her lodger's simple existence: one which furnishes us no little insight into the process and progress of that inner impetus towards a career so far from his inherited position: a yearning, from which he had suffered acutely up to the time of his sudden freedom.
At that time, too, a band of writers, of whom the novelist Turgenieff is the best known, were extolling the triumphs of scientific research and the benefits of Western democracy. "The fundamental principle of Nihilism," says "Stepniak," "was absolute individualism.
Julia and Kate Mitchell, sisters practicing medicine in London, I met Stepniak, the Russian Nihilist, a man of grand presence and fine conversational powers. He was about to go to America, apprehensive lest our Government should make an extradition treaty with Russia to return political offenders, as he knew that proposal had been made.
He was flogged. The time selected for this settling of accounts was when the busy season was over; and Stepniak tells us it was not an unusual thing for more than one thousand peasants in the winter in a single commune to be seen awaiting their turn to have their taxes "flogged out." Of course, before this was endured all means had been exhausted for raising the required amount.
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