Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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;

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

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.