Much is said in Russia about the profound immorality of servants, especially of serfs. It is true that they are not distinguished by exemplary strictness of conduct. Their low stage of moral development is proved by the mere fact that they put up with so much and protest so seldom. But that is not the question. I should like to know what class in Russia is less depraved than the servant class. Certainly not the nobles, nor the officials. The clergy, perhaps?
What makes the reader laugh?
Possibly the peasants, but no others, might have some claim to superiority.
The difference between the class of nobles and the class of servants is not great. I hate, especially since the calamities of the year 1848, democrats who flatter the mob, but I hate still more aristocrats who slander the people. By representing those who serve them as profligate animals, slave-owners throw dust in the eyes of others and stifle the protests of their own consciences. In few cases are we better than the common people, but we express our feelings with more consideration, and we are cleverer at concealing selfish and evil passions; our desires are not so coarse or so obvious, owing to the easiness of satisfying them and the habitual absence of self-restraint; we are merely richer, better fed, and therefore more difficult to please. When Count Almaviva named to the barber of Seville all the qualifications he required in a servant, Figaro said with a sigh, “If a servant must possess all these merits, it will be hard to find masters who are fit for a servant’s place.”
In Russia in general, moral corruption is not deep. It might truly enough be called savage, dirty, noisy, coarse, disorderly, shameless; but it is mainly on the surface. The clergy, in the concealment of their houses, eat and drink to excess with the merchant class. The nobles get drunk in the light of day, gamble recklessly, strike their men-servants and run after the maids, mismanage their affairs, and fail even worse as husbands and fathers. The official class are as bad in a dirtier way; they curry favour, besides, with their superiors and they are all petty thieves. The nobles do really steal less: they take openly what does not belong to them, though without prejudice to other methods, when circumstances are favourable.
All these amiable weaknesses occur in a coarser form among servants—that class of “officials” who are beneath the fourteenth grade—those “courtiers” who belong, not to the Tsar, but to the landowners.[[16]] But how they, as a class, are worse than others, I have no idea.
[16]. In Russia civil-service officials (chinóvniki) are divided into fourteen classes. Nobles are called dvoryáne, and servants attached to a landowner’s house dvoróvië; Herzen plays on the likeness of the two names.
When I run over my recollections on the subject—and for twenty-five years I was well acquainted, not only with our own servants, but with those of my uncle and several neighbours—I remember nothing specially vicious in their conduct. Petty thefts there were, no doubt; but it is hard to pass sentence in this case, because ordinary ideas are perverted by an unnatural status: the human chattel is on easy terms with the chattels that are inanimate, and shows no particular respect for his master’s property. One ought, in justice, to exclude exceptional cases—casual favourites, either men or women, who bask in their master’s smiles and carry tales against the rest; and besides, their behaviour is exemplary, for they never get drunk in the daytime and never pawn their clothes at the public-house.
The misconduct of most servants is of a simple kind and turns on trifles—a glass of spirits or a bottle of beer, a chat over a pipe, absence from the house without leave, quarrels which sometimes proceed as far as blows, or deception of their master when he requires of them more than man can perform. They are as ignorant as the peasants but more sophisticated; and this, together with their servile condition, accounts for much that is perverted and distorted in their character; but, in spite of all this, they remain grown-up children, like the American negroes. Trifles make them laugh or weep; their desires are limited and deserve to be called simple and natural rather than vicious.
Spirits and tea, the public-house and the tea-shop—these are the invariable vices of a servant in Russia. For them he steals; because of them he is poor; for their sake he endures persecution and punishment and leaves his wife and children to beggary. Nothing is easier than to sit, like Father Matthew,[[17]] in the seat of judgement and condemn drunkenness, while you are yourself intoxicated with sobriety; nothing simpler than to sit at your own tea-table and marvel at servants, because they will go to the tea-shop instead of drinking their tea at home, where it would cost them less.