Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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

..

203

R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

slightly grotesque emigre society from the dull, frigid, an d dignified

institutions of mid-Victorian England, typified by the figure of the

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 . . . '

204

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

•

zos

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;

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

206

ALEXANDER H ERZEN

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