other ingenious device which had caught his fancy in England or in
France. Such enthusiasts would endlessly discuss the need for this or
that change, but always with the melancholy implication that little or
nothing could or would be done; or, alternatively, they would give in
entirely and fall into a species of gloom or stupor or violent despair,
becoming self-devouring neurotics, destructive personalities slowly
poisoning both themselves and the life round them.
Herzen was resolved to escape from both these familiar predicaments. He was determined that of him, at any rate, nobody would say that he had done nothing in the world, that he had offered no
resistance and collapsed. When he finally emigrated from Russia in
1 847 it was to devote himself to a life of activity. His education was
that of a dilettante. Like most young men brought up in an aristocratic
milieu, he had been taught to be too many things to too many men,
to reflect too many aspects of life, and situations, to be able to concentrate sufficiently upon any one particular activity, any one fixed design.
Herzen was well aware of this. He talks wistfully about the good
fortune of those who enter peacefully upon some steady, fixed profession, untroubled by the many countless alternatives open to gifted and often idealistic- young men who have been taught too much, are
too rich, and are offered altogether too wide an opportunity of doing
too many things, and who, consequently, begin, and are bored, and
go back and start down a new path, and in the end lose their way
and drift aimlessly and achieve nothing. This was a very characteristic
piece of self-analysis: filled with the idealism of his generation in
Russia that both sprang from and fed the growing sense of guilt
towards 'the people', Herzen was passionately anxious to do something
memorable for himself and his country. This anxiety remained with
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him all his life. Driven by it he became, as everyone knows who has
any acquaintance with the modern history of Russia, perhaps the
greatest of European publicists of his day, and founded the first freethat is i:o say, anti-tsarist- Russian press in Europe, thereby laying the foundation of revolutionary agitation in his country.
In his most celebrated periodical, which he called The Bell ( KDIDkol),
he dealt with anything that seemed to be of topical interest. He exposed,
he denounced, he derided, he preached, he became a kind of Russian
Voltaire of the mid-nineteenth century. He was a journalist of genius,
and his articles, written with brilliance, gaiety and passion, although,
of course, officially forbidden, circulated in Russia and were read by
radicals and conservatives alike. Indeed it was said that the Emperor
himself read them; certainly some among his officials did so; during
the heyday of his fame Herzen exercised a genuine influence within
Russia itself-an unheard of phenomenon for an tmtigre-by exposing
abuses, naming names, but, above all, by appealing to liberal sentiment
which had not completely died, even at the very heart of the tsarist
bureaucracy, at any rate during the I 8 50s and I 86os.
Unlike many who find themselves only on paper, or on a public
platform, Herzen was an entrancing talker. Probably the best descri�
tion of him is to be found in the essay from which I have taken my
title-'A Remarkable Decade', by his friend Annenkov. It was written
some twenty years after the events that it records.
I must own [ Annenkov wrote] that I was puzzled and overwhelmed,
when I first came to know Herzen-by this extraordinary mind
which daned from one topic to another with unbelievable swiftness,
with inexhaustible wit and brilliance; which could see in the tum
of somebody's talk, in some simple incident, in some abstract idea,
that vivid feature which gives expression and life. He had a most
astonishing capacity for instantaneous, unexpected juxtaposition of
quite dissimilar things, and this gift he had in a very high degree,
fed as it was by the powers of the most subtle observation and a
very solid fund of encyclopedic knowledge. He had it to such a
. degree that, in the end, his listeners were sometimes exhausted by
the inextinguishable fireworks of his speech, the inexhaustible
fantasy and invention, a kind of prodigal opulence of intellect
which astonished his audience.
After the always ardent but remorselessly severe Belinsky, the
glancing, gleaming, perpetually changing and often paradoxical
and irritating, always wonderfully clever, talk of Herzen demanded
of those who were with him not only intense concentration, but
..
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also perpetual alertness, because you had always to be prepared to
respond instantly. On the other hand, nothing cheap or tawdry
could stand even half an hour of contact with him. All pretentiousness, all pompousness, all pedantic self-importance, simply Red from him or melted like wax before a fire. I knew people, many of them
what are called serious and practical men, who could not bear
Herzen's presence. On the other hand, there were others . . . who
gave him the most blind and passionate adoration . . .
He had a natural gift for cr:ticism-a capacity for exposing and
denouncing the dark sides of life. And he showed this trait very
early, during the Moscow period of his life of which I am speaking.
Even then Herzen's mind was in the highest degree rebellious and
unmanageable, with a kind of innate, organic detestation of anything which seemed to him to be an accepted opinion sanctified by general silence about some unverified fact. In such cases the
predatory powers of his intellect would rise up in force and come
into the open, sharp, cunning, resourceful.
He lived in Moscow . . . still unknown to the public, but in his
own familiar circle he was already known as a witty and a dangerous
observer of his friends. Of course, he could not altogether conceal
the fact that he kept secret dossiers, secret protocols of his own,
about his dearest friends and distant acquaintances within the
privacy of his own thoughts. People who stood by his side, all
innocence and trustfulness, were invariably amazed, and sometimes extremely annoyed, when they suddenly came on one or other side of this involuntary activity of his mind. Strangely enough,
Herzen combined with this the tenderest, most loving relations with
his chosen intimates, although even they could never escape his
pungent analyses. This is explained by another side of his character.
As if to restore the equilibrium of his moral organism, nature took
care to place in his soul one unshakeable belief, one unconquerable
inclination. Herzen believed in the noble instincts of the human
heart. His analysis grew silent and reverent before the instinctive
impulses of the moral organism as the sole, indubitable truth of
existence. He admired anything which he thought to be a noble or
passionate impulse, however mistaken; and he never amused himself at its expense.
This ambivalent, contradictory play of his nature-suspicion and