but, at times, uncannily penetrating critic: Herzen's views or mode of
life naturally found little favour in his eyes).
Herzen declares that any attempt to explain human conduct in
terms of, or to dedicate human beings to the service of, any abstraction,
be it never so noble-justice, progress, nationality-even if preached by
impeccable altruists like Mazzini or Louis Blanc or Mill, always leads
in the end to victimisation and human sacrifice. Men are not simple
enough, human lives and relationships are too complex for standard
formulas and neat solutions, and attempts to adapt individuals and fit
them into a rational schema, conceived in terms of a theoretical ideal,
be the motives for doing it never so lofty, always lead in the end to a
terrible maiming of human beings, to political vivisection on an ever
increasing scale. The process culminates in the liberation of some
only at the price of enslavement of others, and the replacing of an old
tyranny with a new and sometimes far more hideous one-by the
imposition of the slavery of universal socialism, for example, as a
remedy for the slavery of the universal Roman Church.
There is a typical piece of dialogue between Herzen and Louis
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Blanc, the French socialist (whom . he respected greatly), which
Herzen quotes, and which shows the kind of levity with which
Herzen sometimes expressed his deepest convictions. The conversation
is described as having taken place in London somewhere in the early
sos. One day Louis Blanc observed to Herzen that human life was
a great social duty, 'that man must always sacrifice himself to society.
'Why?' I asked suddenly.
'How do you mean "Why?" [said Louis Blanc] -but surely the
whole purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?'
'But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices and
nobody enjoys himself.'
'You are playing with words.'
'The muddle-headedness of a barbarian,' I replied, laughing.
In this gay and apparently casual passage, Herzen embodies his
central principle-that the goal of life is life itself, that to sacrifice the
present to some vague and unpredictable future is a form of delusion
which leads to the destruction of all that alone is valuable in men and
societies-to the gratuitous sacrifice of the flesh and blood of live
human beings upon the altar of idealised abstractions.
Herzen is revolted by the central substance of what was being
preached by some of the best and purest-hearted men of his time,
particularly by socialists and utilitarians, namely, that vast suffering
in the present must be undergone for the sake of an ineffable felicity
in the future, that thousands of innocent men may be forced to die
that millions might be happy-battle cries that were common even in
those days, and of which a great deal more has been heard since. The
notion that there is a splendid future in store for humanity, that it is
guaranteed by history, and that it justifies the most appalling cruelties
in the present-this familiar piece of political eschatology, based on
belief in inevitable progress, seemed to him a fatal doctrine directed
against human life.
The profoundest and most sustained -and the most brilliantly
written-of all Herzen's statements on this topic is to be found in
the volume of essays which he called From tht Othtr Short, and wrote
as a memorial to his disillusionment with the European revolutions of
1 848 and 1 849. This great polemical masterpiece is Herzen's profession of faith and his political testament. Its tone and content are well conveyed in the characteristic (and celebrated) passage in which
he declares that one generation must not be condemned to the role of
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being a mere means to the welfare of its remote descendants, which
is in any case none too certain. A distant goal is a cheat and a deception.
Real goals must be closer than that- 'at the very least the labourer's
wage or pleasure in work performed'. The end of each generation is
itself-each life has its own unique experience; the fulfilment of its
wants creates new needs, claims, new forms of life. Nature, he
declares (perhaps under the influence of Schiller), is careless of human
beings and their needs, and crushes them heedlessly. Has history a
plan, a libretto? If it did 'it would lose all interest, become . . . boring,
ludicrous'. There are no timetables, no cosmic patterns; there is only
the ' Row of life', passion, will, improvisation; sometimes roads exist,
sometimes not; where there is no road 'genius will blast a path'.
But what if someone were to ask, 'Supposing all this is suddenly
brought to an end? Supposing a comet strikes us and brings to an end
life on earth? Will history not be meaningless? Will all this talk suddenly
end in nothing? Will it not be a cruel mockery of all our efforts, all
our blood and sweat and tears, if it all ends in some sudden, unexplained
brute fashion with some mysterious, totally unexplained event?' Herzen
replies that to think in these terms is a great vulgarity, the vulgarity
of mere numbers. The death of a single human being is no less absurd
and unintelligible than the death of the entire human race; it is a
mystery we accept; merely to multiply it enormously and ask 'Supposing millions of human beings die?' does not make it more mysterious or more frightening.
In nature, as in the souls of men, there slumber endless possibilities
and forces, and in suitable conditions . . . they develop, and will
develop furiously. They may fill a world, or they may fall by the
roadside. They may take a new direction. They may stop. They
may collapse . . . Nature is perfectly indifferent to what happens . . .
[But then, you may ask,] what is all this for? The life of people
becomes a pointless game . . . Men build something with pebbles
and sand only to see it all collapse again; and human creatures
crawl out from underneath the ruins and again start clearing spaces
and build huts of moss and planks and broken capitals and, after
centuries of endless labour, it all collapses again. Not in vain did
Shakespeare say that history was a tedious tale told by an idiot . . .
. . . [To this I reply that] you are like . . . those very sensitive people
who shed a tear whenever they recollect that 'man is born but to
die'. To look at the end and not at the action itself is a cardinal
error. Of what use to the Rower is its bright magnificent bloom?
Or this intoxicating scent, since it will only pass away? . . . None
..
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at all. But nature i s not so miserly. She does not disdain what is
transient, what is only in the present. At every point she achieves all
she can achieve . . . Who will find fault with nature because flowers
bloom in the morning and die at night, because she has not
given the rose or the lily the hardness of flint? And this miserable
pedestrian principle wt wish to transfer to the world of history . . .
Life has no obligation to realise the fantasies and ideas [of civilisation] . . . Life loves novelty . . .