we shall be rude to all ; you bow without feeling respect, we shall
push and jostle and make no apologies . . . " ' He says in effect:
Organised hooliganism can solve nothing. Unless civilisation-the
recognition of the difference of good and bad, noble and ignoble,
worthy and unworthy-is preserved, unless there are some people who
are both fastidious and fearless, and are free to say what they want to
say, and do not sacrifice their lives upon some large, nameless altar,
and sink themselves into a vast, impersonal, grey mass of barbarians
marching to destroy, what is the point of the revolution? It may come
whether we like it or not. But why should we welcome, still less work
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for, the victory of the barbarians who will sweep away the wicked
old world only to leave ruins and misery on which nothing but a
new despotism can be built? The 'vast bill of indictment which
Russian literature has been drafting against Russian life' does not
demand a new philistinism in place of the old. 'Sorrow, scepticism,
irony . . . the three strings of the Russian lyre' are closer to reality
than the crude and vulgar optimism of the new materialists.
Herzen's most constant goal is the preservation of individual liberty.
That is the purpose of the guerrilla war which, as he once wrote to
Mazzini, he had fought from his earliest youth. What made him
unique in the nineteenth century is the complexity of his vision, the
degree to which he understood the causes and nature of confticting
ideals simpler and more fundamental than his own. He understood
what made-and what in a measure justified-radicals and revolutionaries: and at the same time he grasped the frightening consequences of their doctrines. He was in full sympathy with, and had a profound
psychological understanding of, what it was that gave the Jacobins
their severe and noble grandeur, and endowed them with a moral
magnificence which raised them above the horizon of that older
world which he found so attractive and which they had ruthlessly
crushed. He understood only too well the misery, the oppression, the
suffocation, the appalling inhumanity, the bitter cries for justice on
the part of the crushed elements of the population under the ancim
rlgime, and at the same time he knew that the new world which had
risen to avenge these wrongs must, if it was given its head, create its
own excesses and drive millions of human beings to useless mutual
extermination. Herzen's sense of reality, in particular of the need for,
and the price of, revolution, is unique in his own, and perhaps in any
age. His sense of the critical moral and political issues of his time is a
good deal more specific and concrete than that of the majority of the
professional philosophers of the nineteenth century, who tended to try
to derive general principles from observation of their society, and to
recommend solutions which are deduced by rational methods from
premises formulated in terms of the tidy categories in which they
sought to arrange opinions, principles and forms of conduct. Herzen
was a publicist and an essayist whom his early Hegelian training had
not ruined : he had acquired no taste for academic classifications: he
had a unique insight into the 'inner feel' of social and political predicaments: and with it a remarkable power of analysis and exposition.
Consequently he understood and stated the case, both emotional and
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R U S S IA N TH INKERS
intellectual, for violent revolution, for saying that a pair of boots was
of more value than all the plays of Shakespeare (as the 'nihilistic'
critic Pisarev once said in a rhetorical moment), for denouncing
liberalism and parliamentarism, which offered the masses votes and
slogans when what they needed was food, shelter, clothing; and understood no less vividly and dearly the aesthetic and even moral value of civilisations which rest upon slavery, where a minority produces
divine masterpieces, and only a small number of persons have the
freedom and the self-confidence, the imagination and the gifts, to be
able to produce forms of life that endure, works which can be shored
up against the ruin of our time.
This curious ambivalence, the alternation of indignant championship of revolution and democracy against the smug denunciation of them by liberals and conservatives, with no less passionate attacks
upon revolutionaries in the name of free individuals; the defence of
the claims of life and art, human decency, equality and dignity, with
the advocacy of a society in which human beings shall not exploit or
trample on one another even in the name of justice or progress or
civilisation or democracy or other abstractions-this war on two, and
often more, fronts, wherever and whoever the enemies of freedom
might turn out to be-makes Herren the most realistic, sensitive,
penetrating and convincing witness to the social life and the social
issues of his own time. His greatest gift is that of untrammelled understanding: he understood the value of the so-called 'superfluous' Russian idealists of the +OS because they were exceptionally free, and morally
attractive, and formed the most imaginative, spontaneous, gifted,
civilised and interesting society which he had ever known. At the
same time he understood the protest against it of the exasperated,
deeply earnest, rrooltls young radicals, repelled by what seemed to
them gay and irresponsible chatter among a group of aristocratic
jl4nmrs, unaware of the mounting resentment of the sullen mass of
the oppressed peasants and lower officials that would one day sweep
them and their world away in a tidal wave of violent, blind, but justified hatred which it is the business of true revolutionaries to foment and direct. Herren understood this conflict, and his autobiography
conveys the tension between individuals and classes, personalities and
opinions both in Russia and in the west, with marvellous vividness
and precision.
My Past and Thoughts is dominated by no single clear purpose, it
is not committed to a thesis; its author was not enslaved by any formula
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ALEXANDER H E RZEN
or any political doctrine, and for this reason, it remains a profound
and living masterpiece, and Herzen's greatest title to immortality. He
possesses other clai;ns: his political and social views were arrestingly
original, if only because he was among the very few thinkers of his
time who in principle rejected all general solutions, and grasped, as
very few thinkers have ever done, the crucial distinction between
words that are about words, and words that are about persons or
things in the real world. Nevertheless it is as a writer that he survives.
His autobiography is one of the great monuments to Russian literary
and psychological genius, worthy to stand beside the great novels of
Turgenev and Tolstoy. Like War and Peau, like Fathers and
Children, it is wonderfully readable, and, save in inferior translation,