liquidattd . . . I am sorry [for the death of civilisation]. But the masses
will not regret it; the masses to whom it gave nothing but tears,
want, ignorance and humiliation.
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ALEXAN D E R H E RZEN
He is terrified of the oppressors, but he is terrified of the liberators too.
He is terrified of them because for him they are the secular heirs of
the religious bigots of the ages of faith; because anybody who has a
cut and dried scheme, a straitjacket which he wishes to impose on
humanity as the sole possible remedy for all human ills, is ultimately
bound to create a situation intolerable for free human beings, for men
like himself who want to express themselves, who want to have some
area in which to develop their own resources, and are prepared to
respect the originality, the spontaneity, the natural impulse towards
self-expression on the part of other- human beings too. He calls this
Petrograndism-the methods of Peter the Great. He admires Peter
the Great. He admires him because he did at least overthrow the
feudal rigidity, the dark night, as he thinks of it, of medieval Russia.
He admires the Jacobins because the Jacobins dared to do something
instead of nothing. Yet he is dearly aware, and became more and
more so the longer he lived (he says all this with arresting clarity in
his open letters To an Old Comrade- Bakunin-written in the late
1 86os), that Petrograndism, the behaviour of Attila, the behaviour
of the Committee of Public Safety in 1 792 -the use of methods which
presuppose the possibility of simple and radical solutions-always in
the end lead to oppression, bloodshed and collapse. He declares that
whatever the justification in earlier and more innocent ages of acts
inspired by fanatical faith, nobody has any right to act in this fashion
who has lived through the nineteenth century and has seen what
human beings are really made of-the complex, crooked texture of
men and institutions. Progress must adjust itself to the actual pace
of historical change, to the actual economic and social needs of society,
because to suppress the bourgeoisie by violent revolution-and there
was nothing he despised more than the bourgeoisie, and the mean,
grasping, philistine financial bourgeoisie of Paris most of all-before
its historical role has been played out, would merely mean that the
bourgeois spirit and bourgeois forms would persist into the new social
order. 'They want, without altering the walls [of the prison], to give
them a new function, as if a plan for a jail could be used for a free
existence.' Houses for free men cannot be built by specialists in prison
architecture. And who shall say that history has proved that Herzen
was mistaken?
His loathing of the bourgeoisie is frantic, yet he does not want a
violent cataclysm. He thinks that it may be inevitable, that it may come,
but he is frightened of it. The bourgeoisie seems to him li-ke a collection
;I
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o f Figaros, but o f Figaros grown fat and prosperous. H e declares that,
in the eighteenth century, Figaro wore a livery, a mark of servitude
to be sure, but still something different from, detachable from, his
skin; the skin, at least, was that of a palpitating, rebellious human
being. But today Figaro has won. Figaro has become a millionaire.
He is judge, commander-in-chief, president of the republic. Figaro
now dominates the world, and, alas, the livery is no longer a mere
livery. It has become part of his skin. It cannot be taken off; it has
become part of his living flesh.
Everything that was repellent and degrading in the eighteenth
century, against which the noble revolutionaries had protested, has
grown into the intrinsic texture of the mean middle-class beings who
now dominate us. And yet we must wait. Simply to cut off the;r
heads, as Bakunin wanted, can only lead to a new tyranny and a new
slavery, to the rule of the revolted minorities over majorities, or worse
still, the rule of majorities-monolithic majorities-over minorities, the
rule of what John Stuart Mill, in Herzen's view with justice, called
conglomerated mediocrity.
Herzen's values are undisguised : he likes only the style of free
beings, only what is large, generous, uncalculating. He admires pride,
independence, resistance to tyrants; he admires Pushkin because he
was defiant; he admires Lermontov because he dared to suffer and to
hate; he even approves of the Slavophils, his reactionary opponents,
because at least they detested authority, at least they would not let
the Germans in. He admires Belinsky because he was incorruptible,
and told the truth in the face of the arrayed battalions of German
academic or political authority. The dogmas of socialism seem to him
no less stifling than those of capitalism or of the Middle Ages or of
the early Christians.
What he hated most of all was the despotism of formulas- the submission of human beings to arrangements arrived at by deduction from some kind of a priori principles which had no foundation in
actual experience. That is why he feared the new liberators so deeply.
'If only people wanted,' he says, ' . . . instead of liberating humanity, to
liberate themselves, they would do much for . . . the liberation
of man .' He knew that his own perpetual plea for more individual
freedom contained the seeds of social atomisation, that a compromise
had to be found between the two great social needs-for organisation
and for individual freedom-some unstable equilibrium that would
preserve a minimal area within which the individual could express
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ALEXANDER H E RZEN
himself and not be utterly pulverised, and he utters a great appeal
for what he calls the value of egoism. He declares that one of the
great dangers to our society is that individuals will be tamed and
suppressed disinterestedly by idealists in the name of altruism, in the
name of measures designed to make the majority happy. The new
liberators may well resemble the inquisitors of the past, who drove
herds of innocent Spaniards, Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen,
Italians to the autos-da-fl, and 'then went home peacefully with a
quiet conscience, with the feeling that they had done their duty, with
the smell of roasting human Besh still in their nostrils', and slept-the
sleep of the innocent after a day's work well done. Egoism is not to
be condemned without qualification. Egoism is not a vice. Egoism
gleams in the eye of an animal. Moralists bravely .thunder against it,
instead of building on it. What moralists try and deny is the great,
inner citadel of human dignity. 'They want . . /to make men tearful,
sentimental, insipid, kindly creatures, asking to be made slaves • . .
But to tear egoism from a man's heart is to rob him of his living
principles, of the yeast and salt of his personality.' Fortunately this is