f the Bed Chamber at Court; in being, in fact,
what is called a reactionary. But it would be a mistake to imagine
that Pushkin was a Lost Leader who abandoned the cause of liberty for
a handful of silver and a riband to stick in his coat. The liberal
aspirations of Pushkin's youth were the very air that the whole of the
aristocratic youth of that day breathed. Pushkin could not escape
being influenced by it; but he was no more a rebel then, than he was a
reactionary afterwards, when again the very air which the whole of
educated society breathed was conservative and nationalistic. It may
be a pity that it was so; but so it was. There was no liberal
atmosphere in the reign of Nicholas I, and the radical effervescence
of the Decembrists was destroyed by the Decembrists' premature action.
It is no good making a revolution if you have nothing to make it with.
The Decembrists were in the same position as the educated elite of one
regiment at Versailles would have been, had it attempted to destroy
the French monarchy in the days of Louis XIV. The Decembrists by their
premature action put the clock of Russian political progress back for
years. The result was that men of impulse, aspiration, talent and
originality had in the reign of Nicholas to seek an outlet for their
feelings elsewhere than in politics, because politics then were simply
non-existent.

But apart from this, even if the opportunities had been there, it may
be doubted whether Pushkin would have taken them. He was not born with
a passion to reform the world. He was neither a rebel nor a reformer;
neither a liberal nor a conservative; he was a democrat in his love
for the whole of the Russian people; he was a patriot in his love of
his country. He resembled Goethe rather than Socrates, or Shelley, or
Byron; although, in his love of his country and in every other
respect, his fiery temperament both in itself and in its expression
was far removed from Goethe's Olympian calm. He was like Goethe in his
attitude towards society, and the attitude of the social and official
world towards him resembles the attitude of Weimar towards Goethe.

During the first part of his career he gave himself up to pleasure,
passion, and self-indulgence; after he was thirty he turned his mind
to more serious things. It would not be exact to say he _became_
deeply religious, because he was religious by nature, and he soon
discarded a fleeting phase of scepticism; but in spite of this he w