presiding judge at the Old Bailey, who looks like the wolf in Red
Riding Hood, i n his white wig, his long skirts, with his sharp little
wolf-like face, thin lips, sharp teeth, and harsh little words that come
with an air of specious benevolence from the face encased in disarming
feminine curls-giving the impression of a sweet, grandmotherly, old
lady, belied by the small gleaming eyes and the dry, acrid, malicious
judicial humour.
He paints classical portraits of German exiles, whom he detested,
of Italian and Polish revolutionaries, whom he admired, and gives
little sketches of the differences between the nations, such as the
English and the French, each of which regards itself as the greatest
nation on earth, and will not yield an inch, and does not begin to
understand the other's ideals-the French with their gregariousness,
their lucidity, their didacticism, their neat formal gardens, as against
the English with their solitudes and dark suppressed romanticism, and
the tangled undergrowth of their ancient, illogical, but profoundly
civilised and humane institutions. And there are the Germans, who
regard themselves, he declares, as an inferior fruit of the tree of which
the English are the superior products, and come to England, and
after three days 'say "yes" instead of "ja", and "well" where it is not required'. It is invariably for the Germans that both he and
Bakunin reserved their sharpest taunts, not so much from personal
dislike as because the Germans to them seemed to stand for all that
was middle-class, cramping, philistine and boorish, the sordid despotism
of grey and small-minded drill sergeants, aesthetically more disgusting
than the generous, magnificent tyrannies of great conquerors of
history.
Where they are stopped by their conscience, we are stopped by a
policeman. Our weakness is arithmetical, and so we yield; their
weakness is an algebraic weakness, it is part of the formula itself.
This was echoed by Bakunin a decade later:
When an Englishman or an American says 'I am an Englishman',
'I am an American', they are saying 'I am a free man'; when a
German says 'I am a German' he is saying ' . . . my Emperor is
stronger than all the other Emperors, and the German soldier who
is strangling me will strangle you all . . . '
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ALEXANDER H E RZEN
This kind of sweeping prejudice, these diatribes against entire nations
and classes, are characteristic of a good many Russian writers of this
period. They are often ill-founded, unjust and violently exaggerated,
but they are the authentic expression of an indignant reaction against
an oppressive milieu, and of a genuine and highly personal moral
vision which makes them lively reading even now.
.
His irreverence and the irony, the disbelief in final solutions, the
conviction that human beings are complex and fragile, and that there
is value in the very irregularity of their structure which is violated
by attempts to force it into patterns or straitjackets - this and the
irrepressible pleasure in exploding all cut and dried social and political
schemata which serious-minded and pedantic saviours of mankind,
both radical and conservative, were perpetually manufacturing,
inevitably made Herun unpopular among the earnest and the devout
of all camps. In this respect he resembled his sceptical friend Turgenev,
who could not, and had no wish to, resist the desire to tell the truth,
however 'unscientific' -to say something psychologically telling, even
though it might not fit in with some generally _accepted, enlightened
system of ideas. Neither accepted the view that because he was on
the side of progress or revolution he was under a sacred obligation
to suppress the truth, or to pretend to think that it was simpler than
it was, or that certain solutions would work although it seemed
patently improbable that they could, simply because to speak otherwise
might give aid and comfort to the enemy.
This detachment from party and doctrine, and the tendency to utter
independent and sometimes disconcerting judgements, brought violent
criticism on both Herzen and Turgenev, and made their position
difficult. When Turgenev wrote Fathtrl and Childrm, he was duly
attacked both from the right and from the left, because neither was
clear which side he was supporting. This indeterminate quality
particularly irritated the 'new' young men in Russia, who assailed
him bitterly for being too liberal, too civilised, too ironical, too
sceptical, for undermining noble idealism by the perpetual oscillation
of political feelings, by excessive self-examination, by not engaging
himself and declaring war upon the enemy, and perpetrating instead
what amounted to a succession of evasions and minor treacheries.
Their hostility was di rectcd at all the 'men of the 4os', and in particular
at Herun, who was rightly looked on as their most brilliant and most
formidable representative. His answer to the stern, brutal young
revolutionaries of the 1 86os is exceedingly characteristic. The new
•
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R U SSIAN T H I N K E RS
revolutionaries had attacked him for nostalgic love of an older style
of life, for being a gentleman, for being rich, for living in comfort,
for sitting in London and observing the Russian revolutionary struggle
from afar, for being a member of a generation which had merely
talked in the salons, and speculated and philosophised, when all round
them were squalor and misery, bitterness and injustice; for not seeking
salvation in some serious, manual labour-in cutting down a tree, or
making a pair of boots, or doing something 'concrete' and real in
order to identify himself with the suffering masses, instead of endless
brave talk in the drawing-rooms of wealthy ladies with other welleducated, nobly-born, equally feckless young men -self-indulgence and escapism, deliberate blindness to the horrors and agonies of their
world.
Herzen understood his opponents, and declined to compromise. He
admits that he cannot help preferring cleanliness to dirt; decency,
elegance, beauty, comfort, to violence and austerity, good literature
to bad, poetry to prose. Despite his alleged cynicism and 'aestheticism',
he declines to admit that only scoundrels can achieve things, that in
order to achieve a revolution that will liberate mankind and create a
new and nobler form of life on earth one must be unkempt, dirty,
brutal and violent, and trample with hob-nailed boots on civilisation
and the rights of men. He does not believe this, and sees no reason
why he should believe it.
As for the new generation of revolutionaries, they are not sprung
from nothing: they are the fault of his generation, which begat them
by its idle talk in the I 8.+os. These are men who come to avenge the
world against the men of the 4os-'the syphilis of our revolutionary
passions'. The new generation will say to the old : ' "you are hypocrites,
we will be cynics; you spoke like moralists, we shall speak like
scoundrels; you were civil to your superiors, rude to your inferiors;