impossible. Of course it is sometimes suicidal to try to assert oneself.
One cannot try and go up a staircase down which an army is trying
to march. That is done by tyrants, conservatives, fools and criminals.
'Destroy a man's altruism, and you get a savage orang-utan, but
if you destroy his egoism you generate a tame monkey.'
Human problems are too complex to demand simple solutions. Even
the peasant commune in Russia, in which Herun believed so deeply
as a 'lightning conductor', because he believed that peasants in Russia
at least had not been infected by the distorting, urban vices of the
European proletariat and the European bourgeoisie-even the peasant
commune did not, after all, as he points out, preserve Russia from
slavery. Liberty is not to the taste of the majority-only of the educated.
There are no guaranteed methods, no sure paths to social welfare.
We must try and do our best; and it is always possible that we shall fail.
The heart of his thought is the notion that the basic problems are
perhaps not soluble at all, that all one can do is to try to solve them,
but that there is no guarantee, either in socialist nostrums or in any
other human construction, no guarantee that happiness or a rational
life can be attained, in private or in public life. This curious combination of idealism and scepticism-not unlike, for all his vehemence, the oudook of Erasmus, Montaigne, Montesquieu-runs through all
his writings.
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Her-zen wrote novels, but they are largely forgotten, because he was
not a born novelist. His stories are greatly inferior to those of his
friend, Turgenev, but they have something in common with them.
For in Turgenev's novels, too, you will find that human problems
are not treated as if they were soluble. Bazarov in Fathn-s and Childrm
sufFers and dies; Lavretsky in A House of Gmtlifoll is left in melancholy uncertainty at the end of the novel, not because something had not been done which could have been done, not because there is a
solution round the corner which someone simply had not thought of,
or had refused to apply, but because, as Kant once said, ' From the
crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.' Everything is partly the fault of circumstance, partly the fault of the individual character, partly in the nature of life itself. This must be faced, it
must be stated, and it is a vulgarity and, at times, a crime to believe
that permanent solutions are always possible.
Her-zen wrote a novel called Who is to IJ/amt ? about a typical
tragic triangle in which one of the 'superfluous men' of whom I spoke
earlier falls in love with a lady in a provincial town who is married
to a virtuous, idealistic� but dull and naive husband. It is not a good
novel, and its plot is not worth recounting, but the main point, and
what is most characteristic of Herzen, is that the situation possesses,
in principle, no solution. The lover is left broken-hearted, the wife
falls ill and probably dies, the husband contemplates suicide. It sounds
like a typically gloomy, morbidly self-centred caricature of the Russian
novel. But it is not. It rests on an exceedingly delicate, precise, and
at times profound description of an emotional and psychological situation to which the theories of a Stendhal, the method of a Flaubert, the depth and moral insight of George Eliot are inapplicable because
they are seen to be too literary, derived from obsessive ideas, ethical
doctrines not fitted to the chaos of life.
At the heart of Herzen's outlook (and of Turgenev's too) is the
notion of the complexity and insolubility of the central problems, and,
therefore, of the absurdity of trying to solve them by means of political
or sociological instruments. But the difference between Herzen and
Turgenev is this. Turgenev is, in his innermost being, not indeed
heartless but a cool, detached, at times slightly mocking observer who
looks upon the tragedies of life from a comparatively remote point of
view; oscillating between one vantage point and another, between
the claims of society and of the individual, the claims of love and of
daily life; between heroic virtue and realistic scepticism, the morality
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of Hamlet and the morality of Don Quixote, the necessity for efficient
political organisation and the necessity for individual self-expression;
remaining suspended in a state of agreeable indecision, sympathetic
melancholy, ironical, free from cynicism and sentimentality, perceptive, scrupulously truthful and uncommitted. Turgenev neither quite believed nor quite disbelieved in a deity, personal or impersonal;
religion is for him a normal ingredient of life, like love, or egoism,
or the sense of pleasure. He enjoyed remaining in an intermediate
position, he enjoyed almost too much his lack of will to believe, and
because he stood aside, because he contemplated in tranquillity, he
was able to produce great literary masterpieces of a finished kind,
rounded stories told in peaceful retrospect, with well-constructed
beginnings, middles and ends. He detached his art from himself; he
did not, as a human being, deeply care about solutions; he saw life
with a peculiar chilliness, which infuriated both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and he achieved the exquisite perspective of an artist who treats his material from a certain distance. There is a chasm between
him and his material, within which alone his particular kind of
poetical creation is possible.
Herzen, on the contrary, cared far too violently. He was looking
for solutions for himself, for his own personal life. His novels were
certainly failures. He obtrudes himself too vehemently into them,
himself and his agonised point of view. On the other hand, his autobiographical sketches, when he writes openly about himself and about his friends, when he speaks about his own life in Italy, in France, in
Switzerland, in England, have a kind of palpitating directness, a sense
of first-handness and reality, which no other writer in the nineteenth
century begins to convey. His reminiscences are a work of critical
and descriptive genius with the power of absolute self-revelation that
only an astonishingly imaginative, impressionable, perpetually reacting
personality, with an exceptional sense both of the noble and the
ludicrous, and a rare freedom from vanity and doctrine, could have
attained. As a writer of memoirs he is unequalled. His sketches of
England, or rather of himself in England, are better than Heine's or
Taine's. To demonstrate this one need only read his wonderful
account of English political trials, of how judges, for example, looked
to him when they sat in court trying foreign conspirators for having
fought a fatal duel in Windsor Park. He gives a vivid and entertaining
description of bombastic French demagogues and gloomy French
fanatics, and of the impassable gulf which divides this agitated and
..
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slightly grotesque emigre society from the dull, frigid, an d dignified
institutions of mid-Victorian England, typified by the figure of the