denial on the one hand and blind faith on the other-often led to
perplexity and misunderstandings between him and his friends, and
sometimes to quarrels and scenes. But it is precisely in this crucible
of argument, in its Rames, that up to the very day of his departure
for Europe, people's devotion to him used to be tested and
strengthened instead of disintegrating. And this is perfectly intelli-
I QO
ALEXAND E R H E RZEN
gible. In all that Herzen did and all that Herzen thought at this
time there never was the slightest trace of anything false, no
malignant feeling nourished in darkness, no calculation, no treachery.
On the contrary, the whole of him was always there, in every one
of his words and deeds. And there was another reason which made
one sometimes forgive him even insults, a reason which may seem
unplausible to people who did not know him.
With all this proud, strong, energetic intellect, Herzen had a
wholly gentle, amiable, almost feminine character. Beneath the stem
outward aspect of the sceptic, the :>atirist, under the cover of a most
unceremonious, and exceedingly unreticent humour, there dwelt
the heart of a child. He had a curious, angular kind of charm, an
angular kind of delicacy . . . [but it was given] particularly to those
who were beginning, who were seeking after something, people who
were trying out their powers. They found a source of strength and
confidence in his advice. He took them into the most intimate communion with himself and with his ideas-which, nevertheless, did not stop him, at times, from using his full destructive, analytic
powers, from performing exceedingly painful, psychological experiments on these very same people at the very same time.
This vivid and sympathetic vignette tallies with the descriptions
left to us by Turgenev, Belinsky and others of Herzen's friends.
It is borne out, above all, by the impression which the reader
gains if he reads his own prose, his essays or the autobiographical
memoirs collected under the title My Post and Thoughts. The impression that it leaves is not conveyed even by Annenkov's devoted words.
The chief influence on Herzen as a young man in Moscow
University, as upon all the young Russian intellectuals of his time,
was of course that of Hegel. But although he was a fairly orthodox
Hegelian in his early years, he turned his Hegeliaqism into something
peculiar, personal to himself, very dissimilar from the theoretical conclusions which the more serious-minded and pedantic of his contemporaries deduced from that celebrated doctrine.
The chief effect upon him of Hegelianism seems to have been the
belief that no specific theory or single doctrine, no one interpretation
of life, above all, no simple, coherent, well-constructed sc-hemaneither the great French mechanistic models of the eighteenth century, nor the romantic German edifices of the nineteenth, nor the visions
of the great Utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, nor the socialist
programmes of Cabet or Leroux or Louis Blanc-could conceivably
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R U S S IAN T H I N KE R S
be true solutions to real problems, at least not i n the form i n which
they were preached.
He was sceptical if only because he believed (whether or not he
derived this view from Hegel) that there could not in principle be
any simple or final answer to any genuine human problem; that if a
question was serious and indeed agonising, the answer could never be
dear-cut and neat. Above all, it could never consist in some symmetrical set of conclusions, drawn by deductive means from a collection of self-evident axioms.
This disbelief begins in Herzen's early, forgotten essays which he
wrote at the beginning of the I 84os, on what he called dilettantism
and Buddhism in science; where he distinguishes two kinds of intellectual personality, against both of which he inveighs. One is that of the casual amateur who never sees the trees for the wood; who is terrified,
Herzen tells us, of losing his own precious individuality in too much
pedantic preoccupation with actual, detailed facts, and therefore
always skims over the surface without developing a capacity for real
knowledge; who looks at the facts, as it were, through a kind of
telescope, with the result that nothing ever gets articulated save
enormous, sonorous generalisations floating at random like so many
balloons.
The other kind of student-the Buddhist-is the person who escapes
from the wood by frantic absorption in the trees; who becomes an
intense student of some tiny set of isolated facts, which he views
through more and more powerful microscopes. Although such a man
might be deeply learned in some particular branch of knowledge,
almost invariably-and particularly if he is a German (and almost all
Herzen's gibes and insults are directed against the hated Germans,
and that despite the fact that he was half German himself)-he becomes
intolerably tedious, pompous and blindly philistine; above all, always
repellent as a human being.
Between these poles it is necessary to find some compromise, and
Herzen believed that if one studied life in a sober, detached, and
objective manner, one might perhaps be able to create some kind of
tension, a sort of dialer.tical compromise, between these opposite ideals;
for if neither or' them can be realised fully and equally, neither of them
should be altogether deserted ; only thus could human beings be made
capable of understanding life in some profounder fashion than if they
committed themselves recklessly to one or the other of the two
extremes.
ALEXAND E R H E RZEN
This ideal of detachment, moderation, compromise, dispassionate
objectivity which Herren at this early period of his life was preaching,
was something deeply incompatible with his temperament. And indeed,
not long after, he bursts forth with a great paean to partiality. He
declares that he knows that this will not be well received. There
are certain concepts which simply are not received in good societyrather like people who have disgraced themselves in some appalling way. Partiality is not something which is well thought of in comparison,
for example, with abstract justice. Nevertheless, nobody has ever said
anything worth saying unless he was deeply and passionately partial.
There follows a long and typically Russian diatribe against the
chilliness, meanness, impossibility and undesirability of remaining
objective, of being detached, of not committing oneself, of not
plunging into the stream of life. The passionate voice of his friend
Belinsky is suddenly audible in Herzen's writings in this phase of his
development.
The fundamental thesis which emerges at this time, and is then
developed throughout his later life with marvellous poetry and
imagination, is the terrible power over human lives of ideological
abstractions (I say poetry advisedly; for as Dostoevsky in later years
very truly said, whatever else might be said about Herzen, he was
certainly a Russian poet; which saved him in the eyes of this jaundiced