Page:Chernyshevsky.whatistobedone.djvu/220

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200
A VITAL QUESTION.

insulted. All right, hiss and cast insults, drive them away and curse; you have gained your benefit from them; that is sufficient for them, and amid the noise of hissings, amid the thunder of curses, they will leave the scene, proud and modest, stern and kind, as they have ever been. And will nothing be left of them on the stage? No. How will the world get along without them? Wretchedly. But after them it will be still better than if they had not been. And years will pass, and people will say, "After they left, the world was better, but still it is bad enough." And when this is said, it shows that the time for this type has come again, and it will come again and be represented in greater numbers, in better forms, because then there will be more of good in the world; and again the same history will be repeated in a new light. And so it will come to pass that men shall say, "Well, now we are enjoying life"; and then it will not be an exceptional type, because all people will be of this same type, and they will find it difficult to understand how there ever was a time when it was considered a peculiar type, and not the general nature of all people.


IX.

But as Europeans among Chinamen are all of one face and one way of acting, only so far as the Chinamen are concerned, but in reality, among the Europeans there are incomparably wider differences than among the Chinese; so in this apparently monotonous type, the variety of individualities is developed into more classes and are more distinguishable from each other than among all the varieties of all the different types that are separate from each other. Here you find all sorts of people,—sybarites, ascetic, severe, and tender-hearted, and every other kind. But, as the sternest of Europeans is very kind, the most cowardly is very brave, the most passionate is very moral in comparison with the Chinaman, so it is with these; the most ascetic of them deems it more necessary for all men to be more comfortable than is imagined by the people not of this type; the most passionate are more stern in their moral rules than the greatest moralizers not of this type. But all this they interpret according to their own fashion; and morality, comfort, and sensuality and goodness, they understand in a peculiar way; and they all understand them in the same way, and not only