# The Spirit of Russia/Volume 1/Chapter 12

CHAPTER TWELVE
ALEKSANDR HERZEN.PHILOSOPHICAL AND POLITICAL RADICALISM
§ 78.
EVEN before Bělinskii's weary eyes had closed, Herzen was preparing to carry on the work of literary opposition and revolution. A political thinker, and animated by a strong impulse towards political activity, Herzen could not possibly remain unmolested in the Russia of Nicholas. He was already attracting the attention of the authorities when Uvarov was formulating the official program, and after he had been prosecuted several times be determined to take refuge in Europe. Quitting Russia in 1847, he spent the rest of his life in Europe. Even during the era of comparative freedom under Alexander II, he was unable to return home.
The significance of the emigration and of Herzen's journalistic activities during the reign of Nicholas has already been discussed in connection with our account of the reaction of 1848. Among his collaborators, Herzen had men of the finest intelligence—Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Aksakov for a time, Kavelin. Samarin, etc. He had many sources of trustworthy information regarding the defects of the administration and the government. It may be imagined how the uncensored articles written by and for Herzen would exercise a striking influence in Russia. The circulation of Herzen's publications in Russia was well organised. They were read by young and old, and the Tsar perused every issue of "Kolokol." The effect of the detailed criticism and of the revelations was enhanced by a brilliant style. At first his literary efforts were somewhat weak, but he soon became one of the best if not the best Russian author of the day. His work was characterised by Gallicisms and anomalies which shocked Turgenev, but Turgenev himself ​recognised how living, ardent, nay scorching, were Herzen's writings. Herzen cultivated a literary form peculiar to himself, producing a species of memoirs wherein the history of his own time was philosophically expounded and criticised. His literary works might have been published under the general title, "The Development of Russia and Europe as I see it." This intimately personal outlook gives a peculiar charm to his narrative of the events of the day. He coined words to suit his ideas, speaking as a materialist of "pure brain" and "brain equality"; he ventured on audacious neologistic phrases and incisive figures of speech, such as "Petrograndism," the "puritans of demagogy," the "theology of the scourge," "baptised property" (serfs); he was resolute to call a spade a spade, then a bold thing to do in other places besides Russia; all these characteristics, in conjunction with the emotional strength of his conviction, his use of irony and paradox, the poetry of his language, and the unaffected art with which his sentences were combined to produce an impressive whole, could not fail to attract public attention. On suitable occasions Herzen availed himself of imaginative writings for the conveyance of his ideas, composing a novel entitled Who is to Blame? and a number of short stories. These are novels with a purpose; pros and cons are actively debated; but the description of the circumstances amid which the characters move and act are admirable, and form notable contributions to the psychological depiction of the time.
Herzen was the most brilliant representative of the progressive generation that flourished under Nicholas. After the collapse at Sevastopol he became the boldest spokesman of the liberal era of Alexander II, and was teacher of the young reformers of the so-called sixties.
​An incomplete edition of Herzen's works has been published in Geneva in the Russian tongue. They cannot even yet [1913] be freely published in Russia. The first Russian edition appeared in St. Petersburg in 1905, but there had been many excisions.
In philosophical matters Herzen, like his friends in Moscow, was nourished on Hegel and Feuerbach. Bělinskii played the part of John the Baptist to Herzen, and Herzen provided the organic continuation of Bělinskii's work. Just as Hegel and the Hegelian left attacked romanticism from the positivist ​standpoint, so was Herzen's whole outlook an attack on romanticism, and he had to wage war against the romanticism rooted in his own nature. Here, again, he resembled Bělinskii. Basing himself upon Feuerbach, he endeavoured to eradicate the inborn tendency to myth and mysticism, calling positivism and materialism to his aid, appealing to Comte as well as to Feuerbach, and to Vogt as well as to Comte.
Herzen came to Europe and to Paris at the very time when the February revolution was in its inception. In boyhood he ​had been an enthusiast for the revolution and the republic, and his study of the French socialists had strengthened in the man the imaginative longings of the child. Animated by a positively mystical faith in the revolution and in human progress, he hastened to the promised land of revolutions. In France during 1848 he was in intimate spiritual sympathy with the forward movement, but his experience of this revolution and of the rapidly ensuing reaction and restoration taught him that the revolution is destroyed, not by the reaction, but by itself. As a result he lost faith in revolution.
The first of his works to be issued in Europe (From the Other Shore, 1850) is an analysis of this sobering from the mysticism of revolution. For the Russian edition of this work he wrote the Epilogue to 1849, which opens with the words: "A curse upon thee, year of blood and madness, year of victorious stupidity, brutality, and dullness. A curse upon thee!"
The old social order was based upon religious illusion. Since religion and the church are one with politics and the state, it seemed to Herzen that the first awakening of mankind from the religious dream of the Catholic and feudal (aristocratic) middle ages was effected in the revolution which introduced Protestantism and philosophy and which terminated for the time being in the great revolution of the eighteenth century. This revolution was led by a minority; the masses were unmoved by it. The minority repudiated its principles as soon as it attained to power; even Robespierre had Anacharsis Cloots guillotined for professing a religion different from his own. The revolution had fallen, and its fate was inevitable because its ideals were the ideals of a minority. All these ideals, all these enthusiasms and convictions, were unavailing, for faith in the justice of one's ideals did not suffice; brain equality was no less essential, and this did not exist. Hence the heroes of freedom and the leading revolutionaries were not the heirs of the revolution, and its fruits were harvested by the bourgeoisie. But the bourgeoisie contented itself with half-measures in religion and politics, with Protestantism and liberalism. Liberalism is the religion of the bourgeois, of the trader, of the man without individuality, of the intermediator between the possessor and the non-possessor. An instrument, a means to an end—such is the bourgeois.
The bourgeois fondness for half-measures is well suited by ​English parliamentarism, this gigantic treadmill which seems specially created to demonstrate the internal arrest and marasmus of bourgeois liberalism, whilst French republican formalism is of identical character. A bourgeois republic is worth just as much or just as little as a monarchy. The very men, the very bourgeois, who brought about the great revolution, hastened thereafter to set Napoleon and then the kings upon the throne. After the July revolution came Louis Philippe. After the February revolution, as early as June, and under the republican regime, the workers were shot down by Cavaignac (Herzen and Turgenev were confined to their dwellings by the police, and listened to the rattle of the musketry; these writers gave brilliant descriptions of the June days). The masquerade terminated with the accession of Napoleon III.
What is the significance of these chronic revolutions and restorations? Hitherto the revolutions have been mere Don Quixotisms, the republics nothing but forms of the old regime, which must be destroyed from its foundations if the revolution is to have any real meaning. The sentiments of the European masses remain monarchical and Christian, and, pending the destruction of authoritarianism and religion, political scene-shifting is devoid of significance. A true revolution to-day must be socialist, atheist, and materialist. While the masses, while the revolutionaries themselves, are still Christian believers, bourgeois revolts terminate in cæsarism. The struggle of the non-possessors with the possessors, communism, will destroy cæsarism, but therewith will destroy civilisation, to which the masses owe nothing but tears, misery, ignorance, and debasement. Socialism will conquer, but will do so in utterly foolish forms. In the struggle between the revolution and "order," Europe will be transformed until it comes to resemble Bohemia after the Hussite wars; civilisation will take flight to England, or more probably to America, where the new social order is already flourishing. But the new order will be driven out by a yet newer order, the minority will once again revolt—the flux and reflux of history. "Thus will revolutions break forth anew, thus again will blood flow in streams. And the upshot? Who can tell! But come what may it is enough that in this flaming up of folly, hatred, revenge, and strife, there will perish the world which oppresses the men of the new time, which restricts their lives, which forbids the realisation of the future. Long live chaos, therefore, long ​live destruction! Vive la mort! Make way for the future. We are the executioners of the past!"
Again: "Our historic mission, our peculiar task, is that through our disillusionment and our sufferings we attain to repose and humility in face of the truth, and are enabled to preserve future generations from like sorrows. Through our work mankind will be sobered; we are the crapulence, we are the birth pangs of humanity. Should the end of the birthpangs be fortunate, all will be well; but we must not forget that in the process child or mother may succumb; perhaps both may perish—and history with its Mormonism will begin a new pregnancy. . . . E sempre bene!" In a word, the meaning of life and history is that life and history have no meaning.
The French revolution and German science are the Pillars of Hercules of Europe. The French revolution proclaimed freedom of thought and life, but failed to recognise that this freedom was irreconcilable with the Catholic organisation of Europe (Herzen frequently employs the word Catholic as a synonym of Christian, regarding Protestantism and liberalism as mere phases of Catholicism). German science is a speculative religion, is nothing more than the latest phase of Catholicism—Rousseau and Hegel were Christians; Robespierre and Saint-Just were monarchists.
The republic of the National Convention was a pentarchical absolutism and at the same time a church with civil dogmas; the people remained "laymen," subject to guidance.
But the world of custom, ceremonial, and authority, trembles at the dread name of liberty, and the old body cannot survive with this poison in its veins. Hence, after the irrational epoch of emperordom, people awakened to a sense of the national danger, and all profound thinkers awaited a cataclysm— Chateaubriand, Lamennais (in his ﬁrst phase), de Maistre, Hegel, and Niebuhr. At last came two giants to bring this historic epoch to a splendid close: Goethe and Byron. Byron was "the poet of doubt and indignation, at once confessor, executioner, and victim.
Byronic pride, the mood of Lucifer in Cain this is the only way to salvation. Even Goethe's Faust remains a play for children; his Mephistopheles is still content with vacillation; the tragedy, the temporary despair, end in salvation, after the German manner sub specie æternitatis. The French help ​themselves through their troubles with political chatter. Byron, the "terrible titan," had the courage to express his contempt without circumlocution, to say without circumlocution that there was no issue. He gives us no brilliant phrases about negation; he does not sport with unbelief; he does not delude himself with sensuality; he does not attempt to job us off with simple girls, wine, and brilliants; unemotionally he depicts for us murder and crime. This disillusioned certainty can alone bring peace. Herzen refers to his own example, tells us how he has learned to endure the death of the being who meant everything to him. "The mists seemed to close in around me, I passed through a period of savage and dull despair but I did not attempt to console myself with false hopes. Not for a moment did I endeavour to stifle my sorrow with the stultifying idea of reunion beyond the grave." To Kavelin, in like manner, when Kavelin's son died, Herzen recommended work and duty as sole consolations.
The task of the few, of the righteous men in Sodom and Gomorrah, those who are strong of spirit though weak of hand, remains the preaching of the tidings of death as joyful tidings of approaching deliverance. To the objection that this gospel of the death and destruction of civilisation may deprive us of all delight in action, Herzen makes answer that to understand is itself to act, to realise.
The work on which Herzen thus buries and destroys his revolutionary illusions is dedicated to his son, then fifteen years of age. "I do not wish to delude you; I desire that you should know the truth as I know it; this truth shall be yours as a birthright, so that you need not discover it through painful errors, through murderous disillusionments. . . . Seek no unriddlings in this book; you will not find them; they are not for the men of our time. What is unriddled is done with, but the coming transformation is only in its inception. Not our task to build, but to destroy; we promise no new revelation, but we destroy the ancient lies. The man of to-day, an unhappy pontifex maximus, does no more than build the bridge, which will be crossed by an unknown in the unknown future. You, perhaps, will catch a glimpse of that unknown. . . . Do not stay on the old shore. . . . It is better to perish than to remain safe in the madhouse of reaction. The religion of the coming social reconstruction is the only ​religion I bequeath you. In that religion there is no paradise, no recompense, outside the individual consciousness, the personal conscience. When the right hour comes make your way homeward to our own people to preach to them this gospel; there men once liked to hear me and perchance will recall my name. . . .
"My blessings upon you in the name of human reason, personal liberty, and brotherly love."
§ 79.
I DO not know if I shall have succeeded in giving the reader an impression of Herzen's literary art. As far as possible I have employed his own words and have followed his expositions uninterruptedly.
In his analysis of religious illusion we have a charming synthesis of the views of those two philosophers with whom Herzen was best acquainted, Comte and Feuerbach, but there is intermingled here some of Stirner's pitilessly logical desecration. Comte is responsible for Herzen's identification of Christianity with Catholicism, for his depreciation of Protestantism as the negation of Catholicism, for his estimate of metaphysics and for his insistence on the political character of Catholicism. Herzen's setting of the problem, however, is derivable rather from Proudhon, and in part from Saint-Simon. Moreover it was by Čaadaev that Herzen was awakened to the significance of Catholicism. Herzen's first literary efforts, A Young Man's Memoirs and Further Memoirs of a Young Man, written in 1840 and 1841, dealt with Čaadaev's work, and the two writers were on terms of friendship. Herzen's historico-philosophical estimate of civilisation betrays the influence of Rousseau and the French socialists. His description of history as moving in a circle recalls the terminology of Vico, whose views were modified, however, for Herzen by the influence of Carlyle. Herzen owed his inexorable materialism to Vogt, with whom he was personally acquainted, and we recall in this connection the breach with Granovskii owing to Herzen's disbelief in personal immortality. His mood was at times influenced by Schopenhauer and Voltaire, and we have reminiscences of Goethe's Mephistopheles. His views on practical conduct were suggested by Byron's Lucifer.
Herzen has been accused of ecclecticism, but the reproach ​is not entirely deserved. He was acquainted with European thinkers; he lived in Europe and derived his culture from Europe; but he adopted only what was congenial to him, and from the diverse elements that have been enumerated he constructed a whole that was expressive of his own individuality. He displayed the energy of organic synthesis.
Some of the European cultural elements by which he was influenced were operative in Russian elaborations. We trace in his mind the influence of Bělinskii, Homjakov, Kirěevskii, Čaadaev, Bakunin, and above all Černyševskii; he read Puškin and Gogol as well as Goethe and Byron.
There is no occasion to undertake a detailed exposition of the points in which Herzen agrees with his predecessors, teachers, and friends, or to trace the derivation of his views from theirs. Nor need I consider further how far Herzen modified his opinions in the year 1848. A close study will convince us that he carried Feuerbach's thought to its logical conclusion, moving in the direction of Stirner; but nevertheless Herzen's mood differed greatly from Stirner's. For Herzen, positivist disillusionment destroyed, not the religious illusion alone, but also the political illusion, the illusion of revolution.
Herzen's philosophy of religion and philosophy of history are of interest to us. First of all it must be pointed out that Herzen, like Bělinskii (and like Feuerbach, Comte, and Hume), confused religion with mythology. Moreover, Herzen failed to distinguish clearly between religion and the church, between religion and ecclesiastical religion.
​Christianity to him, like all religion and all mythology, is from the ethical standpoint a system of passivity, and he speaks of it as "the apotheosis of death." He writes: "Sub specie æternitatis death has no meaning, but from this outlook there is no meaning in anything else." Thus does Herzen characterise the Christian renunciation of the world. We may assume that when Herzen adduced this argument against Christianity (1853), he was thinking chiefly of the Orthodoxy of his native land. This is manifest in his judgment of Catholicism, which he contrasts with Orthodoxy as capable of further development. His judgment of Orthodoxy and Byzantinism is most unfavourable; they represent for him a lower form of Christianity; the characteristics of Byzantine art are to him a proof of this thesis. In 1843 he spoke of Orthodoxy as in a condition of absolute arrest. Nevertheless in the weakness of Orthodoxy, as in the weakness of Russia in general, Herzen discovers a great negative advantage, and this is that the Russian church has acquired no influence on life, whereas the life of Europe has been permeated by Catholicism. For Herzen, therefore, Catholicism is Christianity par excellence, whilst Orthodoxy is no more than "an evil possibility." Orthodoxy and its lack of inﬂuence have so far been good for Russia in that Russia as yet has done nothing, and therefore must and can do all the more in the coming time.
As regards Orthodoxy, Herzen makes an honourable exception in the case of the old believers. He regards them as constituting the most energetic and healthiest element of the nation. We owe to them the preservation of the national ideal, of the folk-spirit, of national tradition, national manners and customs.
When Herzen refers to Čaadaev and his Catholicising tendency, he tells us that Catholicism, when contrasted with Russian Orthodoxy, possesses many excellent qualities which impress the Russian mind favourably, and which therefore have led many others besides Čaadaev towards Catholicism. In Herzen's view, the positive definiteness of Catholicism gives it the advantage over the comparatively negative Orthodoxy.
It is obvious that Herzen must himself be numbered among ​those who are impressed by Catholicism, and that this is why he adopted the Catholic view concerning the negativity of Protestantism, a view expressed by Comte and also by de Maistre. Herzen is too ready to identify Protestantism with German science and philosophy and with liberalism. Like Comte, he makes no distinction between theology and religion.
§ 80.
IN boyhood Herzen was already a Voltairian, but Voltaire did not preserve him from romanticism and mysticism. Nevertheless Herzen moved on speedily and with comparative ease from mysticism to Hegelianism and the Hegelian left. After he had become intimately acquainted with French and English positivism it was his persistent endeavour to follow the positivist trail, but he found more difficulty in doing so than he was himself perhaps aware.
Herzen's own characterisation of his transition from romanticism and mysticism to positive science is that from the first, as mystic, he was a mystic of science, meaning to imply that, whilst the object of his belief had been transformed, there had been no change in the belief itself—no such change as that with which he reproaches the revolutionaries and the bourgeoisie. He assigns to this phase the entire period of his "mystical" belief in the revolution. Herzen then believed in mankind, in socialist utopias, and so on. But, he asked himself, Is not such a belief ridiculous and stupid, if it be ridiculous and stupid to believe in God and in the kingdom of heaven?
To Herzen, positivism, scientific sobriety, seem always to have come as the "bitter" fruits of philosophical struggle, to have been felt as "a heavy cross." In the first years of his Feuerbachian period (1843), he writes of the "dreadful vampire," of the "coldness" of positive science, and uses many similar expressions which are employed also by German and French romanticists, and indeed by the founder of positivism himself. Herzen knew that positivism must be gained through struggle; he knew that the vigorous thinker must, as Jesus phrased it, lose his soul in order to find it; he must fight through the stages of scepticism ("moral suicide") and of dull, purely negative atheism. Amid all his strivings for positivism the wish frequently recurs, If I could only pray! ​And he had actual experience of yielding to this desire. In the year 1839 he, his wife, and his friend Ogarev prayed together from joy and thankfulness on account of the friendship between the two families. Ogarev, in his religious ecstasy, then craved for martyrdom.
The reaction following 1848 brought disillusionment to Herzen. He desired at length to be a consistent positivist, but the unpositivist moods recurred none the less, they were a "curse" with which he was frequently afflicted. I have quoted the strongly-worded passage concerning the stultifying idea of immortality, this dating from the year 1852; but in no long time thereafter milder utterances were to be found in Herzen's writings. In 1855, for example, he refers to the death of a friend, Worzel, the Polish refugee. To the last Worzel remained the "old idealist"; he continued to believe in the realisation of his utopias. Herzen never found courage to expound to Worzel his own convictions in all their nakedness. Mazzini closed Worzel's eyes: "Worzel needed prayers for the dying, not truth."
It is true that Herzen formulates rules at times to effect the pitiless awakening from mysticism, but in 1855 he confesses that in his despair he has been saved by his children, by some of his friends, and by his work (the writing a description of his personal development). Herzen declares that, speaking generally, despite all disillusionment, he has continued to cling to "the religion of individuality, to the belief in two or three human beings, to confidence in himself and in the human will."
Above all, however, he soon finds a faith in Russia. "Belief in Russia saved me on the brink of moral destruction," he writes in 1854; "for this faith, for this recovery of health, I have to thank my country. I do not know if I shall ever see Russia again, but my love for Russia will endure until I die." In 1857 he formulates his programme of future work as follows: "Work, active work, on behalf of the Russian people, which has laboured enough on our behalf!"
Is that the mental atmosphere of positivism; is that the critical intelligence of positivism?
If Herzen thus fails to attain to Vogt's scientific positivism, he recognises the failure, he realises that this sobriety of disillusionment is beyond his powers; he is too fond, he tells us, of "the poesy of tragical thrills, and of morbid emotions, ​which we love as we love all that quickens and stings us." Herzen frequently declares that the Russian is melancholy, sceptical, and ironical; he leaves the question undecided whether these qualities are congenital or acquired. In his view the antithesis of faith is not knowledge but doubt, and he admits that he recurs ever to the mood of doubt, Byronic doubt, for Byron was "the poet of doubt and discontent." He is aware that he is here treading in the footsteps of Hume instead of in those of Comte, for the definite aim of the latter's positivism was to effect the overthrow of Hume's scepticism. For Herzen the pain of disillusionment is keen, the pain of the disenchantment that follows the cure of his "religious mania"; it is therefore impossible for him to be a consistent and tranquil positivist.
Herzen, like Bělinskii, is constrained to believe; his scepticism is not chronic, and the mood of the Byronic Lucifer is not persistent. Herzen has an intense craving for love and friendship, and his experiences in this domain temper with gentle melancholy his moods of contemptuous pride and biting irony. More than once during the tragic happenings of a life rich in personal experience, Herzen found relief in tears. At such times positive science seemed inadequate. Yet he had faith in science, and found consolation in the acquirements of science. He sent his friends a newspaper cutting containing a report of the despatch of the first cablegram from New York to London as proof that science alone has absolute values in life; but this, after all, was but a passing mood, and other sentiments were usually predominant.
From the outlook thus sketched it was inevitable that Herzen should come to terms with the nihilist movement now maturing in Russia. Like Herzen, and taught by Herzen, the nihilists consistently opposed materialism to romanticism and mysticism. This coming to terms was promoted, not merely by the literary activities of Černyševskii and his followers, but also by the direct polemic against Herzen, ​and by the discussion which followed Turgenev's analysis of nihilism in Fathers and Children, a novel published in 1861.
In 1867 A. A. Serno-Solov'evič, belonging to that young generation which had already turned away from Herzen, brother of N. A. Serno-Solov'evič who was banished to Siberia and killed on the way to the place of exile, published a caustic pamphlet against Herzen. The pamphlet was sent by Herzen to his friend Bakunin as corpus delicti for an attack upon nihilism. Bakunin rejoined with a defence. Thereupon, in 1869, Herzen finally accommodated himself to the Bazarov type.
Herzen sees in nihilism "a sublime manifestation of Russian development"; he interprets nihilism in the sense of his positivist "disillusionment"; but he attains in the end to very different conclusions, for he modifies the idea of disillusionment.
"Nihilism," he writes, "is logic without restriction, science without dogmas, the unconditional acceptance of experience, the unresisting acceptance of consequences, whatever their kind, if these are the fruit of observation and are dictated by the reason. Nihilism does not reduce something to nothing, but discerns that nothing was taken for something under the influence of an optical illusion, and that every certainty, however much it be opposed by fantastic imaginings, is healthier than these imaginings, and must be accepted in their place." Nihilism, protests Herzen, does not transform facts and ideas into nothing; it is not barren scepticism, nor yet arrogant and despairing passivity (for in this sense Turgenev and his favourite Schopenhauer might be regarded as "the greatest of nihilists"); it is the realistic criticism of Old Russia, such as we find in Gogol's Dead Souls and in the works of Bělinskii. "But nihilism has not brought new foundations or new principles."
Herzen refuses to accept Pisarev's interpretation of Bazarov. He complains that Bazarov leaves nothing in repose, and contemplates everything in Russia from above, complaining in especial that Bazarov failed to understand the decabrists and their significance.
"Science would bring salvation to Bazarov; he would ​cease to look down upon people from above in profound and unconcealed contempt. Science, even more than the New Testament, teaches us humility. Science cannot look down on anything from above, for to science this expression "from above" has no meaning. Science knows nothing of contempt, does not lie to secure an end, nor conceal anything through caprice. Science faces facts, as investigator and often as physician, but never as executioner, never with hostility and irony. Science (there is no reason why I should hide words in the depths of my soul), science is love, as Spinoza says of thought and knowledge.
Byron's Lucifer and irony are definitively dethroned; their place is taken by love, by that humanity which Herzen adduces as characteristic of Bělinskii and his Russian friends and opponents. Despite all the "fanaticism of conviction," this Russian humanity is on occasions gentle and yielding. At any rate Herzen finds peculiar "hesitations" in himself. In 1863, for example, he made concessions to Bakunin, in defiance of his own convictions.
In the same year in which he makes a confession of faith in the nihilism of love, he comes to terms with Bakunin, and declares: "To say, Do not believe! is no less dictatorial and in truth no less foolish than to say, Believe!"
Herzen attains to the idea of duty as well as to the idea of love.
In his first philosophical essays Herzen expresses his hostility to Buddhism and to dilettantism in science. Pure philosophical theory without bearings on life has for him neither value nor meaning. "Man," he says, "does not live by logic alone; man has his work to do in the social—historical morally free and positively active world. Man does not merely possess capacity to formulate ideas of renunciation, but he possesses also will, which may be termed the positive, the creative understanding."
This formulation, derived from German idealism, and published in 1843, frequently recurs in Herzen's writings. (Homjakov's identification of will and understanding dates from 1859, and is derived from the same source.)
The problem of duty, the question why the individual ought to act in one way rather than in another, why he decides ​in this way or in that and feels himself morally bound so to decide, Herzen attempts to solve by saying that "the development of science, its present state, compels us to accept certain truths, regardless of our desires." This solution was furnished by Herzen in 1845 in the discussion with Granovskii to which reference has previously been made. To the objection that this duty is relative merely, and appears in the end to be not a duty at all but a historical problem, Herzen makes answer that such truths cease to be a historical problem, and become "simple and irrefutable facts of consciousness." When Herzen goes on to compare these "facts" with the theorems of Euclid we must admit that from the epistemological outlook the comparison is unfortunate, but the important point to note is his insistence upon the obligatory character of certain truths. He continually recurs to this view. We have seen that in his essay on Turgenev's Bazarov he maintains the universally obligatory character of those truths which come as an absolute demand of the rigidly scientific understanding. "Barren scepticism," irony, the mood of the Byronic Lucifer, are thus decisively rejected.
§ 81.
IN the Byronic mood following the experiences of 1848 Herzen abandoned himself to contempt for his fellows, to the pride of Lucifer in Cain. His mood, indeed, was not one of contempt merely, but positively criminal, nay murderous. Herzen, like Bělinskii and Bakunin before him, was led to the problem of crime by way of idealism.
Faced like Bakunin and Bělinskii with the problem of subjectivism versus objectivism, he decided in favour of a harmonious combination of the two. The evolution of German philosophy, of whose principles he gave an account, strengthened his inclination towards this solution. The work in which it was presented, entitled Letters Concerning the. Study of Nature, was the most detailed of Herzen's philosophical writings, and exercised a formative influence upon the development of Russian philosophy. It was completed in 1865. With Feuerbach, Herzen decided on metaphysical grounds in favour of positivism and materialism, and advocated the bridging over of the crude contrast between subjectivism and objectivism. In Hegel (not in Schelling, not even in Fichte, not in Kant) ​Herzen discovered the last word in German philosophy, and for him this was the last word of philosophy in general, for Herzen prized German philosophy as the non plus ultra of the new thought. Herzen could not conceive of any progress to be made by philosophy beyond Hegel, and he declared that the Hegelian left, including Feuerbach. had produced nothing really new, but had merely brought to light what existed already in Hegel in an undeveloped state.
The history of German philosophy from Kant by way of Fichte to Schelling was compared by Herzen (who in this followed Edgar Quinet) with the political development which is typified in the corresponding names of Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Napoleon. Hegel, he said, was the first to discover the true standpoint, with his abolition of the dualism of objectivism and subjectivism. Herzen passed the same judgment as Bělinskii and Bakunin upon extremist, one-sidedly epistemological and metaphysical subjectivism (Robespierre). It contained an element of intolerable impudence; it was arrogant and ruthless in its criticism; owing to its one-sidedness it could just as little attain to truth as the opposed doctrine, one-sided objectivism (Napoleon)—or as Herzen, following the terminology of the German schools, preferred to call it, one-sided empiricism. Herzen's formula was that empiricism must combine with rationalism.
From the ethical outlook, too, Herzen rejected extreme subjectivism and individualism as egoism. When he first passed under the influence of Feuerbach, he employed the latter's terminology, contrasting mankind with the tu, contrasting the heart as individual with the general, contrasting the individual with the species, and allotting equal rights to both. In Who is to Blame? the individual was contrasted with the family. After Herzen became acquainted with the work of Stirner, individualism was more definitely conceived by him as egoism. Man, he said, is endowed both with natural egoism or individualism and with sociability or the social instinct—this is the best translation of the term employed somewhat vaguely by Herzen, obščestvennost'. Not infrequently he uses the word altruism, which he takes from the French. Often enough these two natural qualities of mankind are referred to; it is recognised that both have their place; and sometimes egoism is expressly defended. "The Slav," he says, "is less egoist than any others." Why, asks Herzen, should ​egoism, self-will (svoevolie) be subordinated to "others-will" (čyževolie)? The individual, the personality, is "the climax of the historic world," is "the living and conscious instrument of his age"—at least this is true of the man of genius. Herzen agrees with Bělinskii that such persons are the instruments of the nation and of mankind. Revolutions, in so far as Herzen approves them, have not been begun and carried through by a class, and least of all by the bourgeoisie; they have been the work of free men, of such men as Ulrich von Hutten, the knight; Voltaire the aristocrat; Rousseau, the watchmaker's son; Schiller, the regimental surgeon; Goethe, the descendant of craftsmen—these were free men belonging to no class in particular, and the bourgeoisie as a class merely reaped the harvest of their labours.
But side by side with this extreme individualism we continually encounter Feuerbachian formulas. In From the Other Shore, for example, we read that there is no antagonism between ego and tu; and Herzen warns us that despite the sacrosanctity of individuality we must not shiver society into atoms. From this standpoint there is no logical place for Byronic crime, either metaphysically or ethically.
What did he understand by Byronic crime and murder at the time when he was invoking curses on revolution? Bělinskii makes his Kalinin commit murder, but the murderer kills himself too; it is certain that Herzen had no desire for such a solution, while Bělinskii got the better of his own hero. The Byronic mood and a deliberate decision to murder are something different from the murder done by Kalinin, who was driven by circumstances to unpremeditated deeds.
Herzen was faced by the problem of revolution and was forced into a decision. Europe set Russia an example in revolutions; the thought of the decabrists was sacred to Herzen, and this is why, in his revolutionary enthusiasm, he hastened so hopefully to Paris. As a Russian, as a foreigner, it was obvious that he could take no part in the revolution. As a Frenchman he would have been under no obligation to participate actively. But was he right in his condemnation of the revolution?
Moreover, what has become of his decision in favour of murder after the example of Byron's Cain? Why does he despise mankind on account of 1848, despise men who like Herzen himself had decided in favour of murder—and had ​carried out their decision? To one who thinks clearly and pursues his thoughts to their logical conclusion, revolution, the revolution of 1848, signifies crime and murder among other things. Must we then choose between crime and crime, between murder and murder?
In 1848, as an actual fact, Herzen expressed his opposition to the revolution; and his Byronic mood of that epoch, his decision in favour of murder, was but moral window-dressing. This is obvious from Herzen's reconsideration of his views on the revolution.
As early as 1840 Herzen was a Feuerbachian, and in 1845 he reconciled objectivism with subjectivism. He was by this time a positivist, and yet in 1848 he was still capable of revolutionary fervour. Not until after 1848, when he had witnessed the reaction in Austria, Hungary, Germany, France, and elsewhere, did he turn against revolution. Most of Feuerbach's disciples in Germany were enthusiasts for the revolution, and many of them were makers of revolution, but Feuerbach himself, like Herzen, was an opponent, and on the same grounds. Decision for or against revolution in general, and in particular for or against personal participation in revolutionary struggles, were questions which could be variously solved from the Feuerbachian outlook.
It is hardly necessary to show in detail that Herzen was somewhat premature in his execrations of 1848. How could he fail to see that the revolution, despite its failures, produced much of political and cultural value? Why could he not grasp that evolution moves step by step, that it is a gradual process? Even if we agree that his censure of the errors of the revolution of 1848 was justified, is the real problem solved by this censure?
Moreover, Herzen's estimate of the republic or of the various attempts at establishing the republic, was too hastily formed. He was right in holding that the republic of 1848 was not in essentials very different from the monarchy, but was there in fact no difference at all? He himself demands a socialist republic; but is not the political republic, the bourgeois republic, a step towards his ideal? Many political thinkers were concerned about these questions after 1848. Herzen's friend Bakunin, and Carl Marx who opposed both Herzen and Bakunin, attained to sounder views on this matter.
It is obvious that the unqualified rejection of constitutionalism and parliamentarism is wrong-headed. Had Herzen ​recalled how Tsar Nicholas condemned constitutional monarchy as a lie while expressing an "understanding" of the republic, his thoughts concerning this matter might have been more statesmanlike. Herzen appeals to Paine and to the American example generally, but did not America gain her liberties and her republic by revolution?
The appeal is to Paine? But in Paine, whose healthy understanding Herzen prizes so greatly, the Russian think might have discovered an important signpost. Paine expressly points out that for political freedom, religious and philosophical freedom are indispensable; he tells us that in case of need it is our duty to work politically in order to pave the way for religious freedom, and conversely. Paine, though an Englishman, participated personally in the French revolution.
Herzen could not avoid returning again and again to the problem of revolution. His friends in Europe among the political refugees believed in the possibility of a speedy renewal of the revolution. Russian believers in the revolution those alike who remained in Russia and those who had fled to Europe, Ogarev and above all Bakunin, forced the problem on his attention. When compelled to give a direct answer, Herzen declared himself opposed to revolution, and specifically opposed to personal participation in revolution.
From the age of thirteen (he wrote thus to Mazzini in 1851) he had been devoted to a single idea, to waging war against every oppressive power in the name of the absolute independence of the individuality. He would therefore carry on his own little partisan struggle. He would be a genuine Cossack, acting "on his own initiative." He was indeed attached to the great revolutionary army, but he would not enroll himself in its regular cadres until the character of these had been completely transformed. These words clearly demonstrate that, in Herzen's view the definitive revolution would not be necessary for a long time to come. For the time being he puts his trust in men rather than in institutions, and he therefore considers the spreading of enlightenment by philosophic, literary, and journalistic labours more important, and in truth more revolutionary.
Despite his intimate associations with notable political leaders in France, Italy, and Germany, Herzen took no personal part in political agitation. He was opposed on principle to secret societies, and never became a member of any of the Russian ​revolutionary parties which were now coming into existence. As Bělinskii had done in 1837, Herzen condemned secret propaganda as an obsolete method, however radical its aim. In 1853 he expressed his contempt for the propaganda. So decisively did he condemn Karakozov's attempt upon the tsar (1866), so adverse was he to political assassination in general, that the leaders of the revolutionary groups were moved to protest.
At length, in 1869, Herzen comes to grips with the revolution in his Letters to an Old Comrade (Bakunin).
Herzen agrees with Bakunin as to the goal, which is the transformation of the bourgeois state into a folk-state, but he considers that the revolutionaries are mistaken in their tactics. The folk, the entire people, the masses, cannot be educated for the folk-state by a coup d'état or by a coup de tête. Property, the family, the church, and the state have been and still are means for the education of mankind towards freedom—freedom in rationality.
Society evolves, moves gradually forward. The state is doubtless a transitional form, but its function is not yet superseded.
Herzen does not now believe that history advances by leaps; he desires to move step by step; he has no faith in the old, the obsolete, revolutionary method; above all, he expects nothing from force or from terrorism. Nor does he believe in the vigorous agitation advocated by Bakunin. He holds that men can be outwardly enfranchised only in so far as they are inwardly free.
Herzen does not dread the objection that he is a mere progressive, that he is an advocate of compromise. He who is unwilling that civilisation should be founded on the knout must not endeavour to secure liberty through the instrumentality of the guillotine. No honourable man can desire to play the role of Attila. "Let every conscientious person ask himself whether he is ready. Let him ask himself whether the new organisation towards which we are advancing presents itself as clearly to his mind as do the generalised ideals of collective property and of solidarity. Has he conceived the process (apart from simple destruction) by which the transformation of the old forms into the new is to be effected? If he be personally content with himself, let him tell us whether the environment is ready, that environment upon which, ​circumstances being what they are, depends the possibility for action."
We must therefore wait and work. The strength of the old order lies not so much in political power as in the fact that it is generally approved. We must influence men so that this approval may cease, and we must therefore preach to them and go on preaching. Impatient opponents will say that the time for words is passed, that the time for action has come. "As if words were not actions! As if the time for words could ever pass! Our enemies have never made this distinction between word and deed; for words they have exacted punishment as severe as for deeds, and more severe in many cases." Herzen refuses to be a blind instrument of destiny; he will not be the scourge of God, God's executioner. Not for him the simple faith, the uncomplicated ignorance, the wild fanaticism, the immaculate childishness, of revolutionary thought. He does not believe that history, that the course of events, can make men involuntary instruments for the destruction of the old regime. The knower and thinker decides freely for himself, and his decision must be: "Preaching is necessary for mankind, incessant preaching, provided it be rational, preaching directed alike to worker and employer, to burgher and to tiller of the soil. We have more need of apostles than of officers of the advance guard or sappers of destruction. We need apostles who will preach to opponents as well as to sympathisers. Preaching to the enemy is a great deed of love. Our enemies are not to blame because they are enabled, with the aid of a kind of persistent variant of the morality of earlier days, to maintain an existence outside the current of the time. They arouse my pity like the victims of illness or accident, these persons who stand on the edge of the abyss burdened with a load of riches which will drag them down into the depths. We must open their eyes for them; we must not simply sweep them out of our way; we must give them a chance of saving themselves if they will." For himself and his fellows Herzen recognises only one power, "the power of reason and understanding. If we reject this power we become outlaws from science and renegades from civilisation."
After 1848 Herzen had invoked curses on the revolution, abandoning the bourgeoisie to the contempt of Byron's Cain and threatening it with the weapon of crime. But towards the close of his career, a few months before his death, we fiind ​him expressing sympathy for the bourgeois. "I am sorry not only for men but for things, and I am oftener sorrier for things than for men." At this time, writing to his friend Ogarev, who shared the ideas of Bakunin, Herzen urges him to renounce the thought of an abortive liberation in accordance with the plans of Nečaev. "It is possible in history to make a rapid move, but if you want anything of the kind you must steel yourself against sympathy with those who will perish on the occasion, sympathy with individuals. In truth such sympathy was known neither to Pugačev nor to Marat."
Once before, Herzen had proclaimed the victory of the Galilean, when Tsar Alexander II had decided in favour of the liberation of the serfs. After twenty years' experience as a refugee among refugees he once again and definitively expressed his confidence in the Galilean, saying that sympathy and love of our enemies, not contempt or crime, would bring about equality, brain equality. We must follow Christ not Byron. "Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations."
The younger generation could not follow Herzen here. They followed the Herzen who had preached Byron's Cain, who had despised the bourgeoisie, who had taught that the religion of Christ must be overcome as the religion of death.
Thus Herzen ended his days as a Christian, a Christian in the sphere of practice, for he frankly accepted the gospel of humility—an unbelieving Christian! He had represented the revolutionaries of 1848 as believing Christians, and this position is very different from that of the unbelieving Christian. But may we say that for practical purposes Herzen moved on to the acceptance of bourgeois tactics and policy?
Not entirely, for had he done this he must have ended by giving his approval to the bourgeois revolution.
We need no longer be alarmed because we were threatened with Byron's Cain. Cain has been transformed into Faust, the Faust whom Herzen had so strongly condemned. Nay more, Cain has been degraded, and placed among the "superfluous persons."
§ 82.
IN 1850, when Herzen first achieved a comparatively connected formulation of his philosophy of religion and of history, he had already long passed beyond the stage of philo​sophical studentship and philosophical errantry. He was then eight-and-thirty years of age, and his work at this period may serve as the starting-point for an analysis of his sociological ideas. All the more is this the case seeing that when he was a student of Hegel he had made a methodical attempt to secure a precise outlook upon history and the natural sciences and upon knowledge in its widest sense.
His diary dealing with the years 1842 to 1845 tells us how he busied himself with the problem of the nature of knowledge and of science, building mainly upon Hegelian and Feuerbachian foundations. To the same period belong certain essays, Dilettantism in Science and Letters Concerning the Study of Nature, wherein he attempted to formulate his views. He did not in these essays arrive at satisfactory results, and we note in them that no reconciliation is achieved between Hegel and positivist materialism. According to Hegel, in history as in the world at large reason is supreme. Herzen does not yet deny this, but he contrasts logic with history, pointing to the logical characteristics of the former and to the essentially human characteristics of the latter. Herzen distinguishes historical thought as an activity of the species from the logical thought of the individual, which is, he says, thought properly speaking. In the positivist sense, Herzen lays especial stress upon the exact thought of natural science, and we already find him voicing complaints concerning "the heavy cross of disillusioned knowledge." From the outlook of this disillusioned knowledge, which he opposes to all forms and degrees of religious illusion, Herzen fights against dilettantism. Man is at variance with nature and himself, and his only resource therefore is exact knowledge; in his disintegration it is essential that he should attain a clear outlook. Herzen proceeds to attempt a history of philosophy which shall convey a more detailed formulation of this view but he does not give us a clearer statement of principles, and the contrast between Feuerbach and Hegel is not transcended.
In this stage Hegel has still so much influence that Herzen recogniies a progressive movement in history, and admits the possibility of a foreknowledge of the future, writing: "We are the premisses out of which the syllogism of the future is constructed, and we can therefore cognise the future in advance."
Such is the language of Herzen in 1843; but by 1850 all this has been forgotten, and Hegel with it.
​Positivist disillusionment has now destroyed for Herzen, not religion alone, but likewise faith in the meaning of history. Abandoning theology, Herzen abandons also teleology, and in especial the teleology of historical development. He does not believe that progress occurs, even though he admits that man can grow better, accepting this as a simple fact of observation. The reasons why man grows better may doubtless be analysed, but no ultimate aim towards which human improvement tends is discernible. History is a record of the brute understanding of the masses, sanctified irrationality, religious mania. The power and the glory of history are not found in reason, not yet in happiness (as the old song says), but in irrationality. As late as 1867 Herzen reiterates in this fashion his views of 1850, putting them into the mouth of an anatomist named Leviathanskii. The name, of course, derives from Leviathan, for Herzen finds in Hobbes the climax of materialism. The name is likewise intended to suggest that history, the social organism in general, must be looked upon as a monster. In 1864 he refers to history as a disorderly improvisation, and this is his enduring conviction: For Herzen there exist only individual moments weighty with meaning, but no history. He does not admit historical evolution as a whole. His style, his characteristic dazzling aphoristic style, is itself an expression of this conviction.
We trace in Herzen two distinct thought sequences. Sometimes individuality and its "sacredness" (1847) are so vigorously stressed, that society and its development recede into the background, or even disappear from our ken. Individuality must not be made into a means for a remote end; it is an end in itself; it does not subserve any "Moloch," any historico-philosophical artifact. Like Bělinskii he discerns in the misery and in the death of a single human being, no less irrationality and disharmony than in the misery and destruction of the entire human race by some cosmic catastrophe. He admits that the future holds out numerous possibilities, but he declines to accept the theory that there is a predestined path, discoverable in advance, for this would infringe the freedom of individuality. Again and again he expresses his dissent from fatalism.
Herzen adduces an additional argument, rejecting the distant goal in the name of the present. "The present is the true sphere of existence," he wrote as early as 1842, and he ​presented life in general, or life in the present, as man's one and only true goal He seemed to overlook the fact that the present, too, is history, even though it be history in its most recent manifestation.
Herzen, like Bělinskii, is an adversary of historism; he refuses, like Bělinskii, to be the slave of time and events.
Subsequently, as we have seen, Herzen admits that there is progress, but even then his materialist outlook distinguishes him from Hegel. In materialism Herzen finds support for his vigorous individualism. Definite and thoroughly individual brains will, he says, have nothing to do with pantheism or with any organisation of these brains which makes them no more than parts of a whole. Brain monads, but no pre-established harmony—thus we may summarise Herzen's metaphysics.
When I thus emphasise Herzen's materialism, I must not be taken as implying that he failed to recognise thought as the motive force for individual men and the motive force of history. But Herzen explains thought materialistically as brain activity. From this outlook he sometimes hopes that progress will be secured by an improvement in brains. Reforms, social and historical reforms, are the outcome of changes in "cerebrin." He is doubtless speaking ironically here, as also when he compares human progress with the progress of the cattle which man himself has tamed; and yet this very irony is the sequel of the positivist and materialist process of disillusionment, of the struggle of knowledge against religious mania and sanctified irrationality.
§ 83.
THE developments subsequent to 1850 led Herzen away from his historical nihilism.
The Crimean war gave a powerful stimulus to political interest in Russia. Sevastopol and its consequences, the new regime and its preparations for reform (in especial for the liberation of the peasantry), attracted much attention from Herzen; the consideration of practical political possibilities compelled him to take up a position in relation to precisely defined aims and to co-operate for their attainment. Hence, although a refugee, Herzen came to live with and in Russia, and he discovered that for this Russia which he had been so glad to leave he felt a strong and saving love. The importance ​of history and of the people as a whole was recognised by him, his unruly individualism was moderated, subjectivism was subordinated to objectivism.
An observation will be here in place concerning Herzen's despair of the revolution. It must not be supposed that this despair was solely the outcome of political experience. The curse uttered in 1850 has so personal a ring that we cannot but regard Herzen's change of front in that year as to a large extent the objectivisation of intimate spiritual experiences. Through becoming a refugee he was cut off from old associations and his family life was disturbed; these circumstances dictated the curse. Many of Herzen's letters and reminiscences relating to his more intimate experiences remain unpublished. I believe that these documents would give us a better understanding of his mental struggles and a clearer view of his positivist and materialist development.
His analysis of Europe and of the revolution convinced Herzen that the socialistic folk-state he desired to see brought into being would be likely to remain long unrealised were it not for the existence of a people competent to undertake the great task of bringing about the true social revolution in contradistinction to the bourgeois revolution. Such, he said, was the mission of the Russian people.
Herzen tells us how he became aware of the distinction between the St. Petersburg government and the Russian people, and how his faith in his fatherland was thereby restored. Acquaintanceship with Europe taught him that the Russian westernisers had an utterly false conception of Europe. He censured his friends for being able to see nothing but cultured Europe, and for knowing only the Europe of the past. Experience of contemporary Europe and of Europe as a whole afforded a pitiless demonstration that the Europe of their ideals was non-existent.
It may be noted that Herzen's very first impressions in 1847 led him to take an unfavourable view of Europe.
The Russian people, on the other hand, seemed to him capable of realising aspirations for genuine political and social freedom. It was true that the Russian government and tsarism were little if at all better than the European governments. Even the Russian people was full of faults, and it appeared to Herzen that Gogol's Dead Souls furnished a true and universally valid indictment of contemporary Russia. ​Nevertheless there was no reason to despair. Regarding Peter the Great as a strange combination of the genius and the tiger Herzen could only accept Peter's reforms with reservations; like the slavophils, he contrasted Moscow with St. Petersburg, the people with the bureaucracy.
Herzen reiterated what Čaadaev and the Rousseauist slavophils had said about the lack of civilisation in Russia. It was an enormous advantage for the Russian people to be free from the restricting traditions of Europe. Russia had not suffered from the three great scourges, Catholicism, Roman law, and the bourgeoisie. Feudalism, Protestantism and liberalism were merely developments of these three principles; feudalism derived from Catholicism and Roman law; Protestantism and liberalism were the ultimate phases of Catholicism; hence Russia knew nothing of feudalism, Protestantism, and liberalism. In the letter to Michelet (1851), in which Henzen, with ardent affection, defended the Russian people and the Russian character against westernist misunderstandings, he summarised his comparison between Russia and Europe in the following propositions: Russia will never be Protestant; Russia will never be juste-milieu; Russia will not make a revolution simply in order to get rid of Tsar Nicholas and to replace him by tsar-deputies, tsar-judges, and tsar-policemen.
Herzen now found himself able to explain certain undesirable historical facts quite in the slavophil manner.
Take tsarism, for example. Tsarism is not monarchy. European monarchy developed out of feudalism and Catholicism, and is animated by a peculiar social and religious ideal. The tsar is tsar for tsardom's sake. He is nothing more than an unlimited dictator. When the time comes and when the people is ready, the tsar will make way for the socialist republic and will become its president. In contrast with old and moribund Europe, young and vigorous Russia can offer two notable guarantees, the younger generation of the landowning aristocracy and the peasantry.
The aristocracy showed and tested its vigour in the decabrist revolt. Philosophically these Russian aristocrats have gone much further than Europeans in the negation of the old world. Above all, the successors of the decabrists no longer believe in their right to own land.
The Russian peasant on the other hand, believes in right to do so; he has a religious faith in his right to the ​soil, and a religious faith in the mir; for Herzen the foundation of new Russia is to be the mir.
There are, says Herzen, three elements of exceptional value in the Russian mir: the right of every individual to land; the common ownership of land; the self-government of the village community. These elements, considers Herzen, are worth more than the political and social development of Europe. It is true that in the middle forties, before he left Russia, Herzen had recognised that the mir is not an exclusively Russian or Slav institution, and he knew that it exists in India and various other countries. At that time, too, Herzen believed that the Russian village community was the outcome of defective development, the issue of primitive patriarchalism and uncivilisation. If, at a later date, he came to esteem the mir so highly it was because in 1848 Europe had displayed her utter incapacity for socialism.
Herzen recognised that the mir had one great defect, the absorption of individuality into the mir. But the artel, he said, and the Cossacks, would suffice to save for Russia a not inconsiderable measure of individualism. Moreover, the defect could be cured, the freedom of the individual and that of the mir could be harmonised, and the liberation of the peasantry would bring this about. "The freeing of Russia will begin either with a revolt of the serfs or else with their liberation," said Herzen in 1854. When in 1857 Alexander II had declared his intention to liberate the peasants, Herzen and Ogarev enthusiastically exclaimed, "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!"
Herzen could not fail to consider the counter-argument, could not fail to ask himself whether Russia would not have to pass through the same stages of development as Europe. Could Russia realise the folk-state and socialism by one step from her present primitive condition; could she dispense with traversing the phase of European civilisation and with passing through the economic evolution of capitalism? Herzen set his mind at rest with the consideration that if Russia, because in fact essentially akin to the European peoples, had to follow the same course of development, this development might none the less take a special form, since for liberty many historical possibilities are open. Herzen does not recognise the validity of any historical law in accordance with which Russia must follow exactly the same path as the European nations. Without a bourgeoisie and without Catholicism, but upon the foundation ​of the mir, Russia can advance straightway to a higher level of development.
Herzen could invoke the authority of European socialists in support of this assumption that Russia might overleap the capitalist epoch. The matter will be discussed later in detail when we come to consider the identical view of the narodniki.
Of late much emphasis has been laid upon Herzen's "westernist socialism," and Herzen has been praised as founder of the narodničestvo. It is true that Herzen's socialism pave the way for the narodničestvo movement; that he uttered the watchword, Land and Liberty; and that he directed the intelligentsia towards the mužik. Herzen, however, was distinguished from the narodniki by the way in which he stressed the philosophic aspects of socialism, and tended to leave the economic-side of the question out of account. The narodniki developed their views in opposition to Marxism, and their economic and social outlook approximates far more closely than did Herzen's to that of Marx.
Herzen frequently endeavoured to ascertain which among the Russian characteristics would prove especially advantageous to the progress of Russian evolution. He considered that the Russian character exhibited remarkable plasticity, that it was endowed with great capacity for the acceptance and elaboration of the acquirements made by the foreign world. To him this seemed the most human side of the Russian disposition. The Russians, too, precisely because they were so accessible to the universally human, were better able than the French, the Germans, and the English to harmonise theory and practice. Herzen also extolled Russian realism. Finally he regarded the work of Puškin as a titanic manifestation full of glorious promise, the fruit of the vigorous Russian understanding and its capacity for culture.
Nor did Herzen forget to attach due importance to the size of the Russian state. Sixty million people; in less than half a century the number of Russian soldiers would be imposing, of soldiers who had already shown Europe their mettle. The Russians, too, had quite remarkable powers of resistance, for they had been able to maintain their peculiarities under the Tatar yoke and under the regime of German bureaucrats.
When he analysed the defects of the mir, Herzen was also aware of the defects in the Russian and Slav character. Passivity, humility, effeminacy, lack of individuality, char​acterised the Slav, and therefore, despite the mir, he remained a slave. Contrasted with the Russian, the Teuton was a vigorous individualist, and in European political history the Teuton realised the individualistic ideal.
Russian critics have disputed whether Herzen became a slavophil. Herzen himself threw light on this accusation and rejected it, saying that his metaphysical and religious outlook on fundamentals differed from that of the slavophils, and that the distinction was essential. The assertion would have been perfectly correct had not Herzen modified or at least toned down his fundamental outlook under the influence of slavophil political views. Turgenev reminded his friend on one occasion (November 8, 1862) of the earlier phase: "A foe to mysticism and absolutism, you kneel mystically before the Russian sheepskin, discerning therein all the blessings, all the novelty and originality, of coming social forms—discerning, in a word, the absolute, that absolute over which you make merry in the philosophical field. All your idols have been shattered, and yet, since man cannot live without an idol, you suggest that we should erect an altar to this sheepskin, to this unknown god. Happily we know nothing about him, and we can therefore once again pray, believe, and hope."
Turgenev is right. Herzen appraised the Russian people and the mužik from the standpoint to which Homjakov gave the name of talismanism. In Moscow, Herzen had frequent talks with the slavophils concerning such matters, and Homjakov would have nothing to do with Herzen's antiteleological philosophy of history. In Europe. however, in 1859, Herzen came to recognise that he had a much closer kinship with the slavophils than with the "westernist old believers" (the liberals)
After 1848, in fact, the Herzenian solus ipse felt distinctly out of sorts, and the disorder was not metaphysical merely, but political and social as well; the Byronic intoxication was succeeded by the customary fit of headache and depression. "We are at once the corpses and the assassins, the diseases and the pathological anatomists of the old world. I have long considered that it is at least possible to begin a new personal life, to retire into oneself. to get away from the old-clothe market. It remains impossible, however, as long as there is any one about you with whom you have not broken off all ties, for the old world will return to you through him." But now Herzen does not fear contact with the Old Russian world. ​With true Russian fatalism he consoles himself with the example of Karazin, who, after the death of Tsar Paul, communicated political advice to Alexander I in epistolary form. When we recall Karazin's subsequent antisocial activities, the chosen instance seems unfortunate!
Now that Herzen was far away from St. Petersburg and Moscow, now that he led the solitary life of a refugee, he came to look upon Russia as an enchanted land and upon the mužik as a saviour. At first, indeed, he imagined that America was the land of promise, and at times his thoughts turned towards Australia, but in the end his faith became centred in Russia. He forgot the tragical and debasing experiences of his patern home and became reconciled with the Russian aristocrat. At one time he had looked upon aristocracy as a more or less cultured form of anthropophagy: the landowner, the man who would strike his serfs, was simply one variety of cannibal; and he hoped that this cannibal system would be brought to a close by the labourer's refusal to work for another's ends. But now the aristocrat has taken Herzen's sermon to heart, is about to renounce his rights in the soil, and is going to recognise the mužik as a brother!
In matters of foreign policy (with which, were he consistent, he would have nothing to do) Herzen is likewise in accord with the slavophils. During the Crimean war (1854) he wishes to give Constantinople to the Russians. After the war he opposes France and Napoleon and advocates an alliance with England (1858).
Thus Herzen, once more like the later slavophils, takes a leap towards panslavism.
The historical rôIe Herzen assigns to the Russians is now generalised by him, and assigned to the Slavs at large. The socialist republic is not indeed to be replaced by the Slav federation, but the federation will modify the republic or will pave the way to it. The national movement has become more important than the social. Herzen has forgotten that the Poles and the Czechs have no mir, and he has forgotten the southern Slavs (though as far as these last are concerned the zadruga may be accepted in place of or as a supplement to the mir). At one time he had been extremely reserved in his attitude towards panslavism, especially in the Czech form. But under the influence of Proudhon's federative doctrines he first thought of the federative solution of the Polish question, ​and then went on to advocate a federation of all the Slavs. Beyond question, too, in this matter the ideas of Bakunin modified those of Herzen.
Thus did Herzen draw near to the slavophils, even though great differences continued to exist upon matters of principle, and in the social and political fields as well as in the sphere of metaphysics. For example, his explanation of tsarism as a dictatorship was anything but legitimist, but neither his foes nor his friends took these differences adequately into account, their estimate of Herzen's conversion being determined by its political consequences. Formerly he had declared that Europe was essential to Russia, as ideal, as example, and as reproach; and he had maintained that if Europe had not existed, it would have been necessary for Russia's sake to create it imaginatively. But now Russia had become the ideal for Europe.
It is hardly necessary for me to defend myself against the accusation that I disapprove of Herzen's love for his homeland. I have done no more than reproduce his utterances regarding natural affection for the native soil, and for the life which despite all its defects custom has made congenial to a man's mind. Well do I know how experience of the foreign and the unaccustomed is apt to awaken home-sickness. I am aware that after his arrival in Europe Herzen found it necessary to defend progressive Russia against the false views and erroneous judgments that were prevalent in Europe. It was inevitable that such opinions on Russia as were uttered by Michelet should produce a feeling of irritation. But for Herzen to preach Russian messianism was a very different matter.
§ 84.
HERZEN, though he passed through a mystical period, grew up amid the liberal traditions of the eighteenth-century philosophy of enlightenment and humanitarianism; he soon became a radical, an admirer of the decabrists, and above all of Pestel; in the middle of the forties, as we have learned, he separated from the liberals and adopted socialist views.
Herzen became acquainted with the writings of the French socialists and with those of Weitling and Owen before he had studied the works of Hegel, but it was the influence ​of Hegel and Feuerbach which revolutionised his outlook and made him a socialist. He wrote a brief sketch of socialism in Russia, representing the Petraševcy and Černyševskii as precursors of socialism. After 1848 he discarded French and European socialism as futile, but he continued to term himself a socialist and to look forward to the true social revolution. In "Kolokol," especially in the later issues, the socialist note is extremely prominent, being stressed in polemic against the younger revolutionists who were dissatisfied with Herzen.
Herzen speaks of his socialism as "Russian." It is agrarian socialism, the socialism of the mužik and of the artel. But he advocated in addition municipal socialism, political socialism, and district socialism. Thus was Herzenism distinguished from Marxism, which looks chiefly to workers and proletarians for its fulfilment. Herzen's "Russian" socialism often spoken of as "Russian" communism, is further distinguished from Marxism by this, that Herzen, though a materialist, did not teach economic materialism. His own account of Marx in London shows, moreover, that Marx and the Marxists were to him personally uncongenial. He sided with Bakunin against Marx, and when the first edition of Marx's magnum opus was published in 1867, Herzen paid scant attention to it.
His primary demand, as has been recorded above, was for brain equality. He knew that civilisation is impossible to the hungry, and he knew that the civilisation of the minority depends on the physical toil of the majority. From Louis Blanc and others he learned of the class struggle in Europe, and he himself levelled accusations against the "Manicheism of society," but he was defiinitely opposed to the class struggle. He insisted that the function of socialism was not merely to put an end "to anthropophagy" and especially to capitalism, but above all to annihilate everything monarchical and religious. Herzen looked to socialism for a new philosophy, and it seemed to him that Saint-Simon and Fourier had uttered no more than the first lispings of the future philosophy.
His socialism was based upon a positivist and materialist outlook. Shortly before his death, in The Physician, the Dying, and the Dead, he censured the socialism of his contemporaries as being still a religion, that is to say illusion, and from socialism of this texture he expected nothing but a new blood-letting, and not the true act of liberation.
In his demand for brain equality Herzen is no communist ​extremist. He does not suggest the complete abolition of private property, and would content himself with its investment by society in a manner analogous with that of the Russian mir. But it is plain that Herzen detests the capitalists more than the great landlords, and his views concerning the Russian aristocracy are recorded above. Throughout, Herzen's socialism remained essentially philosophic. He was little concerned about economic questions, and in this domain Proudhon was his leading authority. Proudhon likewise influenced Herzen greatly in his political views, and confirmed his individualism and individualistic federalism. I have previously referred to Herzen's great esteem for Proudhon, and I may mention that Herzen supplied Proudhon with funds for the latter's journal "Voix du Peuple" (1849–1850).
If Christianity as monotheism be regarded as embodying the essence of monarchism, Herzen's socialism, as materialistic atheism, may be regarded as predominantly antimonarchism.
This antimonarchism has the folk-state as its ideal. Herzen has an especial loathing for political centralisation, returning to this again and again, and declaring from time to time that the Slav is by nature opposed to centralisation, to the state. The language resembles that of Konstantin Aksakov. Herzen was afraid of the cultured and hypercultured absolutist state; he dreaded "Genghis Khan with telegraphs, steamships, and railways, with Carnot and Monge on the staff, his soldiers armed with Minié rifles and Congreve rockets, and led by Batu Khan."
In the Letters to an Old Comrade the abolition of the state is presented as an ideal. and we are told that the majority must attain to its full mental stature, since this is an essential preliminary to the abolition of the state. Proudhon's federalism and anarchism likewise find reiterated expression.
After his spiritual return to the Russia of the slavophils Herzen contented himself with the liberation of the peasantry in 1861, in place of the great and definitive social revolution which in 1848 he had contrasted with all previous revolutions. Either despotism or social revolution, had been Herzen's cry in the forties. The events of 1848 were to him a proof that Europe was incompetent for the social revolution. But in 1861 Russia taught him that she was capable of carrying through this revolution successfully, and of doing so without bloodshed. We must not forget that Herzen himself worked energetically ​on behalf of the liberation of the peasantry, and that he endeavoured to win over the aristocratic landowners to the idea of liberation. Truthfully and in moving terms he showed them how the free lords were themselves degraded by the institution of serfdom, writing: "We are slaves because we are masters. We are servants because we are landowners. We are ourselves serfs because we keep our brothers in servitude, those brothers whose origin, whose blood, and whose language we share."
The Russian mir has become for him the "lightning conductor" of revolution; and the supreme value of the mir consists for him in this, that the mir is not an abstract theory of cultured socialists, but a practical institution prevailing among a huge population—a population of illiterates.
The contrast between Herzen's views after 1861 and the socialism of his earlier phase will now be plain. The goal for Russia is no longer a social revolution but a political revolution, and the social revolution has become merely means to an end. Herzen now demands for Russia all that Europe possesses, the things which to Europe (according to his previous view) had been valueless. He demands civilisation, culture, and a parliament. In 1864 he insists upon the need for a zemskii sobor or a duma, elected by universal suffrage. In Europe, he has told us, the suffrage is a contemptible "arithmetical pantheism" which has given the vote to undeveloped orang-utans (of French men four-fifths are orang-utans, of Europeans nineteen-twentieths). But in Russia the suffrage, above all thanks to the existence of the old believers, will secure the genuine representation of the Russian people. The intelligentsia will introduce "the idea of modern science." Do we discern here the brain equality of his earlier days?
As we have already learned, Herzen further tells Bakunin that he accepts the Russian state. "If the sunrise takes place without blood-tinged clouds" it really does not matter whether the sunrise wears Monomach's crown or the Phrygian cap.
It is by no means easy to say what Herzen really meant by his "sunrise." In the letter to Bakunin he says the time has come to ascertain whether we are all ready for the definitive deed of liberation. Herzen often speaks of this readiness. ​In 1862 he tells us that the Russian revolution must be a return to the folk and to the mir, and writes: "Preach to the people, not Feuerbach or Babeuf, but a religion the people will understand, the people of the soil. . . . Make ready, for the day of destiny is at hand." Then follows his tirade about the rising sun, accompanied or not with "blood-tinged clouds."
We must now see whether Herzen furnishes clear suggestions as to what is to be the relationship between Europe and Russia when Russia comes to fulfil her messianic mission vis-à-vis Europe. In his answer to Michelet's scepticism about Russia (1855), Herzen tells us that revolutionary Europe will as a matter of course join forces organically with Russia. "In Russia the man of the future is the mužik, just as in France the operative. Tsarism will disappear, and so will the Russian intelligentsia, for the latter's sole function is to mediate between the Russian people and revolutionary Europe.
Nevertheless Herzen was ever somewhat inclined to regard the masses from the outlook of a superior person. In 1850, when he demanded a socialist folk-state, the realisation of this ideal was deferred to a remote future. After 1861, however, he talks of immediate-realisation, speaks favourably of the masses, not of the mužiks alone, but also of European operatives; and he even gives the intelligentsia its congé. How and why is the intelligentsia to disappear? Is it because Rousseau passed sentence upon civilisation—or does Herzen foresee the immediate organisation of brain equality?
According to the plan of 1862 the tsar in his Monomach crown is not to vanish, provided only that the sun rises unaccompanied by blood-tinged clouds, and it is plain that Herzen could readily contemplate the retention of the tsar, seeing that he did not consider the tsar to be a monarch in the strict sense of the term.
But what is the drift of this criticism? It is that Herzen did not whole-heartedly believe in the Russian saviour, and was never able completely to overcome his own seepticism. The task he assigned to Russia was far too great for him to hope that the Russian mir would ever be able to achieve it in its entirety.
The kernel of his philosophy of history is as follows. The old world was perishing beyond hope of rescue. Christianity, which had renovated the Roman world, was in process of decomposition. . . . The reformation and the great revolution ​had been no more than temporary expedients. Just as the aging Rome had rejected Christianity, so now did the aging Christian world reject socialism.
No doubt Herzen was quite in earnest when to the decrepit and dying Europe he represented Russia as the saving new world. He endeavoured to show that Russia and socialism were one and the same, and he desired to communicate the belief to Europe. Such was the chief aim of the letters he wrote in 1854, The Old World and Russia. But Herzen would not have been Herzen had he failed to recognise that the historico-philosophical analogy between socialism and Christianity was not convincing, and was the less convincing since, generally speaking, socialism was for him above all a new outlook. Were the Russian mir and the Orthodox mužik to constitute the new world, to embody the new doctrine? As early as the beginning of the thirties Herzen had made acquaintance with the works of Saint-Simon and with the attempts of the Saint-Simonian school to secure a new socialistic outlook; somewhat later Owen and the "new Christianity" came under his notice, and he now looked to this source for the doctrine of salvation. The study of Hegel and still more the study of Feuerbach strengthened these yearnings, and Feuerbach showed Herzen how the human being must develop out of the Christian. Is it possible to think that Herzen could without scepticism regard the mužik as the desired saviour? This is why he placed the operative beside the mužik, and this is why he became reconciled with the bourgeois. The approximation effected by Herzen was of Russia to Europe, not of Europe to Russia.
§ 85.
HERZEN'S career recalls the fate of Goethe's Euphorion. Radiating light he rises, on high he shines, but he is dashed to pieces on the earth. In the fifties and in the early sixties Herzen was the spokesman of progressive Russia; after the liberation of the peasantry and after the Polish rising he became more and more isolated, increasingly lonely.
His criticism of Russia contributed much towards the realisation of the reforms before and after 1861; his influence upon all circles and strata of cultured Russia, not excepting the bureaucracy and the court, was powerful. The stimulating and directing effect of Herzen's personality and writings upon ​his friends in Moscow and in St. Petersburg has often been pointed out, and I have referred to the continued influence he exercised from Europe. "Vivos voco!" was the motto of "Kolokol," a motto taken from the favourite poet of his boyhood. And Herzen's "Bell" was heard throughout Russia. Ševčenko devoutly kissed the first numbers of the periodical to reach him.
Herzen was an awakener, his was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Recognition is due to his character as well as to his literary activities. He said of himself that hypocrisy and duplicity were the two errors most alien to his disposition. Herzen could not be better portrayed.
Herzen helped the leaders of liberalism, such men as Čičerin, Kavelin, etc., to clarify their principles; the slavophils had to come to terms with Herzen; and even the reactionaries had to try conclusions with him.
His influence declined after the Polish rising of 1863. The decline has been ascribed to Herzen's sarmatiophil policy, and also to Bakunin's undesirable influence in "Kolokol." The number of subscribers to the periodical fell from three thousand to five hundred.
When we consider Herzen's Polish policy it is necessary to discriminate. He did good service by his protests against the brutal subjugation of the Poles, but in his approval of the revolution of that day he went too far, further than his own principles justified. Herzen himself admitted this. Katkov, who had at one time recognised "Kolokol" to be a power, came in 1863, as leader of official nationalism, into an attitude of opposition to Herzen.
I do not believe that the waning of Herzen's influence was solely due to his views upon the Polish rising. After 1861 his opinions and his policy forced him into a difficult position. Herzen's philosophy remained practically unchanged throughout life. Having become a Feuerbachian, a Feuerbachian he remained, as we learn from all his utterances down to the very last. Doubtless he mitigated his positivist disillusionment, and abandoned the Byronic Cain, but he held fast to his positivist materialism. It was natural that this philosophy should seem odious to conservatives and reactionaries, but some even of the liberals were repelled by it (Granovskii, Čičerin, etc.). Moreover, some of the liberals were antaagonised by Herzen's socialism.
On the other hand, young men of socialistic and radical ​views considered Herzen too vague, and found his policy unduly conservative. The first proclamation issued by Young Russia reproaches Herzen for misunderstanding the situation and for conservatism. At this epoch, too, political endeavours were in the ascendant in Russia, where the leaders of the movement resided; publicist and political interests were concentrated in Russia; the powerful influence exercised by Černyševskii during the early sixties, if not the direct cause of the coolness felt towardsHerzen, at least paved the way for its onset.
The reaction and repression which began in 1863, led to an increase in radicalism, and sent a new stream of refugees to Europe, refugees already unfriendly to Herzen. His removal from London to Geneva, the new refugee centre, availed nothing; an understanding was impossible. Not merely did Herzen remain estranged from the younger revolutionaries, but he was never able to harmonise his outlook with that of Černyševskii, though the two writers built on the same philosophical foundations.
Herzen knew and admitted that he had changed, but he had changed, he said, because the entire situation had altered. Modification of views is natural to a vigorously aspiring man, but the important question is, in what direction the modification occurs and by what it is determined. Much as I admire Herzen as author and as man, my liking for him has its reserves. His change of views disturbs me, though not for quite the same reasons that made his friends uneasy.
It was not in early youth, but in the maturity of manhood that Herzen declared himself a disciple of the Byronic Cain, and it therefore seems to me that his subsequent change was hardly natural—unless we explain the anathema uttered in 1850 as the expletive of a young man in a hurry. But the remove from Byron to N. Turgenev is a very great one, and between the two writers there is a chasm hardly to be spanned! It was natural that N. Turgenev should exercise an attraction on Herzen, for Turgenev had thought out his constitutionalist plans with some care, and the decabrist tradition was likewise on his side.
For the very reason that Herzen appeals to us because of his many brilliant qualities we must endeavour to come to an understanding about his defects.
In philosophical matters Herzen's inadequacy was due to this, that he failed to criticise and recriticise the foundations ​of his philosophy, and that he uncritically continued to cling to Feuerbach and positivism. Marx and Engels advanced beyond Feuerbach, and even Stirner attempted to do so. At the outset Herzen passes on from Feuerbach upon the line of Marx towards revolution; he advances to crime in Byronic fashion; but after remaining long content with breathing threatenings and slaughter, after prolonged "hesitation," he turns away to liberalism.
Now I, too, believe that Feuerbach's philosophy is defective. The identification of religion with myth is fallacious, and Feuerbach's materialism is of as little avail as materialism in general. Marx prudently transmuted it into economic materialism. Herzen deduced the political consequences of the Feuerbachian doctrine "homo homini deus"; but he remained too much on the abstract plane; he failed to undertake a precise analysis of the real relationships between religion and politics, between church and state; and he failed to secure any profounder insight into the nature of theocracy and into its development and forms.
To the last, Herzen remained an opponent of Orthodoxy, and yet he concluded a peace with the believing mužik and the old believers, to find the positively Russian in his folk-duma.
It was a grave defect. too, that Herzen failed to secure a better understanding of socialism, its true signifiance and its internal and external development. I am aware that it is by no means easy to arrive at clear views from a study of the writings of the French socialists. I admit, moreover, that the practical demands of these socialists were not such as most of us would consider practical (the Saint-Simonians, for example, wished to have all their clothing to button behind, so that it would be impossible for the individual to dress himself unaided, and his neighbour would be compelled to exercise the faculty of altruism!). But it was a weakness in Herzen that he failed to study Marx, that he did not observe the labour movement and the economic and social developments of his day, and that he did not grasp the influence that these changes were exercising in the political field.
Nor were Herzen's views of the mužik and the mir based upon close investigation of economic and social relationships. He says with justice of the slavophils that their holy-picture ideals and the fumes of incense made it impossible for them to ​understand the true condition of the people. But may we not say almost the same of Herzen's adoration of the mužik?
His knowledge of history was defective. Though he had a keen and profitable interest in the living present, he erred gravely through failing to undertake a thorough historical analysis of contemporary events. Unduly one-sided is the manner in which history is reduced to the biography of Herzen. In fact all Herzen's writings are extraordinarily subjective, far too subjective for a philosopher who desired to transcend German idealism and to escape its subjectivist pitfalls.
In the political field Herzen's subjectivism takes the form of anarchism, socialistic anarchism or anarchistic socialism—it does not matter which name we use. Herzen's anarchism derives from the defects of his subjectivism, and this is itself dependent upon Herzen's social position.
He was a refugee, stranger among strangers, economically and socially independent, living upon income drawn from Russia, an opponent of capitalism, but not necessarily an opponent of Rothschild, of whom he could make an adroit literary use in opposition to the fiscalism of the Russian government and the tsar (James Rothschild the Emperor, and Romanov the Banker). In a word, this economic and social isolation made Herzen unpractical. Helplessness in practical matters, becoming objective in the philosophic and literary fields, took the form of anarchism.
In course of time, lack of practical experience is apt to lead to contempt for practical experience. Herzen was inclined to share Plato's aristocratic disdain of politics and politicians, and the reason was the same in his case as in Plato's. To the philosopher, one who studies the ultimate principles of all being and life, and writes about these abysmal matters, the details of everyday politics seem petty; to him, officials, ministers, even the tsar, are no more than unimportant wage-earners appointed by the people. They can therefore be tolerated readily enough; it matters little whether we have to do with tsar or president, with one who wears Monomach's crown or a Phrygian cap. Thus abstract and theoretical anarchism becomes in practice legitimism, but it is natural that the real practitioners should look askance at this practical legitimism.
Herzen, moreover, has in his composition a considerable element of the anarchism peculiar to authors, and a brilliant ​and well-informed article seems to him more valuable and more important than all the tsars!
Herzen's futility in practical matters was the evil heritage of Russian absolutism. Tsarism, especially under Nicholas I, condemned to inactivity the best and the most energetic of the Russians, and for the refugee this inactivity was perpetuated and accentuated.
If, finally, we take into account the aristocratic factor in Herzen's mentality and his associations from childhood upwards, we have a sufficient explanation of his anarchism. Though at first he despised the bourgeois, he became reconciled later with "collective mediocrity" (he quotes Mill's phrase) and its "Chinesedom." He is sorry for the unfortunate bourgeois, and becomes reconciled with him after the manner of an aristocratic superior. In 1848 no less a man than Bělinskii thought it necessary to protect the bourgeoisie against Herzen's onslaughts. After a time, however, Herzen came to admit (1863) that Russia would perhaps traverse the bourgeois stage. Later still, he practically accepted this as inevitable. It was natural that Herzen should look upon the "autocratic masses" rather from the outlook of the aristocrat than from that of the historian or politician. He makes fun of the bourgeois because he buys his clothes ready-made, and because he replaces parks with orchards and palaces with hotels. As a romanticist Herzen detested the bourgeois; "accuracy and moderation" irritated him; he could see nothing in the bourgeois but indifferentism and stagnation; he despised "chameleopardism" devoid of strong racial and individual qualities, for all that was individual was typified for him in "the restless and the eccentric."
He achieved little with his conception of Byron's Cain as nothing more than the antibourgeois. Herzen did not adequately appraise the revolutionary defiance of Byron's Cain and Lucifer, and this is why his Cain capitulated to the bourgeoisie. Physical-force-anarchism was transmuted by Herzen into sermonising. In addition he adopted a positivistic categorical imperative, tincturing this with Schopenhauer's compassion. .
Herzen was never able to transcend a paralysing scepticism; hence arose the "hesitation" which he so justly diagnosed in himself; and this is why Herzen did not become a permanent leader either in the theoretical or in the practical field. Louis ​Blane was once branded by Herzen as a bourgeois in the following terms: "His intellectualist religiousness and his lack of scepticism surrounded him as with a Chinese wall, so that it was impossible to throw within the enclosure a single new idea or a single doubt."
Herzen himself was one who threw thoughts broadcast. It is undeniable that he made many apt observations concerning both Russia and Europe. He is often commended for having in 1867 foreseen the fall of Napoleonic France and the victory of Bismarck and Prussia.
At the outset of his literary career Herzen devoted much consideration to the relationship between scientific specialists and philosophers. He dreaded specialisation as unindividual; he was afraid of becoming such a man as Wagner in Goethe's Faust; and he therefore turned towards generalities, towards philosophy, although conversely he sufficiently recognised the dangers of dilettantism. He never attained to the goal of desire, the perfect synthesis of these two extremes. Rather was it his privilege "to live a many-sided life," to embody both philosophically and politically the proverbial breadth of the Russian nature.
We involuntarily recall Beltov in Who is to Blame? where this "superfluous man" is ably and unsparingly analysed by Herzen. The Russian, who has received a thoroughly European education at the hands of Genevese Frenchmen, astonishes the Gemian specialists by his versatility and astonishes the French by his profundity; but whereas the Germans and the Frenchmen achieve much, he achieves nothing. He has a positively morbid love of work, but he is unable to secure a practical position in relation to life, incompetent to make contact with an environment wholly, foreign to him. He lives only in thoughts and passions, a frigid dreamer, eternally child. Half his life is spent upon the choice of a profession, and again and again he begins a new career, for he has inherited neither culture nor traditions from his father, nothing but property which he does not know how to manage. Thus Beltov's life is the Russian active inactivity, and Beltov is only a generalised human being, a moral Caspar Hauser as it were.
Herzen here gives a masterly portrait of his friend Ogarev. Beltov desired to reveal the secret of the world, of its development and history, which was to be disclosed to astonished ​humanity in one of the most thorough and most profound philosophical works ever written; but he never got beyond the preface, and even this was not completed. Others of Herzen's friends besides Ogarev are figured in Beltov. Herzen considered that Stankevič, for example, was one of those who had achieved nothing In a sense and to a degree Herzen limns himself, too, in Beltov. It is true that Beltov is only a caricature of Herzen, but the best portraits are really caricatures.
These considerations must not discredit the true and living interest which Herzen took in all the questions that stirred his time, the interest he took in all that was human. Herzen's many-sided interests converged in a single direction, upon a single object—Russia.
* ↑ Aleksandr lvanovič Herzen was born in Moscow on March 15, 1812. His father, Jakovlev, was a wealthy member of the old aristocracy. Herzen was an illegitimate child, the mother being a German girl who had accompanied Jakovlev on his return from Stuttgart in 1811. Jakovlev and his brothers, men of high standing, lived in a way characteristic of the half-cultured Russians who were survivals from the days of Catherine. Herzen's father is said to have had as tutor a relative of Voltaire, but despite his French culture his domestic ways were thoroughly Asiatic. It is true that he gave his love child the name of "Herzen," but frequently enough he would make the boy's illegitimacy the occasion for displaying inhuman contempt towards mother and child. In early youth Herzen learned the open secret of his origin, and this was a source of coolness and even bitterness in his relations with his father. His experience of the way in which the serfs were treated, served further to alienate him, and induced a hostile mood towards the aristocracy. He had a number of French teachers whose work of tuition was very ill performed, and in his father's library he made early acquaintance with the writings of Voltaire and other French authors (Beaumarchais, le Mariage de Figaro!). The French revolution and the republic became the boy's ideals. At the age of thirteen he entered into a life-and-death alliance with Ogarev, whilst the decabrists and above all Pestel were canonized by the boys. It is true that the decabrist program as they conceived it smacked rather of Schiller's Don Carlos than of historical reality. Throughout life Schiller was one of Herzen's favourite authors. His religious education exercised a notable influence on Herzen. His mother brought him up in the spirit of her own Lutheran faith, but simultaneously the lad practised the ritual of the Orthodox church; to the grown man the gospels remained a holy book. French and German influences were reinforced by those of Russian literature, by the reading at Puškin, Rylěev, etc. A cousin somewhat older than himself, the legitimate son of one of his uncles, led him to conceive profound and enduring respect for chemistry and the natural sciences. At the university Herzen studied physics and mathematics, and on graduating in 1833 presented a thesis on Copernicus. Pavlov initiated the university student into the mysteries of Schelling and Oken; but more important to Herzen than the university was the circle of friends among whom his philosophical and political development proceeded during the thirties and forties. in 1834 he was imprisoned in connection with the doings of this circle, and in 1835 was sent to Viatka. While in prison and at Viatka, Herzen became affected with an intense religious and artistic mysticism, reading Eckartshausen, Swedenborg, and the work of occultist writers like Eschenmayer; a few years earlier he had studied the writings of Čaadaev with whom he was personally acquainted. In 1838 he was transferred from Viatka to Vladimir on the river Klyazma, where he was in military service, contracting here a romantic marriage with Natalia Aleksandrovna Zahar'ina, whom he had loved for several years. In 1839 he returned to Moscow, and in 1840 removed to St. Petersburg. At this time for a brief period he was estranged from Bělinskii. The years 1841 and 1842 were spent in Novgorod, and from thence till 1847 he lived in Moscow. To this epoch belong his study of Hegel and Feuerbach, his friendship with the slavophils, his subsequent detachment from them (1845), and his breach with the liberals (with Granovskii in 1846). He turned to German materialism (Vogt), and to French and English positivism (Comte, Littré and Mill). Herzen was now much occupied with the ideas of the French socialists, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Louis Blanc, Considérant, and Proudhon; he was interested, too, in the philosophers of history, Vico, Herder, Michelet, etc.; and it need hardly be said that he studied such political writers as Montesquieu and Bentham. Leopardi and Byron became his favourite poets. His father died in 1846, leaving him a considerable fortune, amounting to half a million roubles. He quitted Russia in January 1847. After spending some time in Paris, Italy, and elsewhere, he settled in London in 1852, remaining there till 1867. His last years were spent in Paris, Geneva, Nice, and elsewhere. He died in Paris on January 21, 1870. In Europe he made the personal acquaintance of a large number of influential persons, and while in London was an associate of such refugees as Mazzini and Garibaldi. His first notable literary work, which succeeded a few casual essays, was the novel, Who is to Blame? which appeared in 1847. From 1850 onwards there issued his characteristic essays (From the Other Shore, 1850, etc.). By this time his pseudonym Iskander was well known in Russia. The review "Poljarnaja Zvězda" (1855–1862) and the periodical "Kolokol" (1857–1867, and in French from 1868) gained world-wide renown. In addition to his contributions to periodical literature, Herzen issued a number of vigorous and widely read works (Memoirs of Catherine II, The Writings of the Raskolniki, etc.). In 1853 he founded The Free Russian Press in London. A few additional details regarding his life may be given. His need for friendship was characteristic. His boy friendship with Ogarev was a refuge from the cold and gloomy life of his home, and in manhood he gained many friends in Russia and in Europe. The calf love of the thirteen-year-old lad for the woman who afterwards married Herzen's friend Vadim Pasek can in part be accounted for by this general need for friendship; and his love for Natalia is to some extent assignable to the same cause. This love notwithstanding, while in Viatka he had with the wile of an official a liaison of which he speedily wearied; in Novgorod his relations with his wife were disturbed by a passion be conceived for a servant girl. Later (1850) his wife's intimacy with Herwegh was a terrible blow to him. Natalia left husband and children, but returned to Herzen a year later. A few months alter this, his mother and two of his children perished in a shipwreck. Natalia died on May 2, 1852. The following are Herzen's principal writings: From the Other Shore, 1850; Letters from Italy and France, 1850; Social Conditions in Russia, 1854; A Russian's Memoirs, 4 vols., 1855–6; Who is to Blame? 1851; Duty above All, 1857. In French: De l'autre rive, 1851; Du développement des idées révolutionnaires, en Russie, 1851; La conspiration russe de 1825, suivie d'une lettre sur l'émancipation des paysans en Russie, 1858; La France ou l'Angleterre? Variations russe sur le thème de l'attentat du 14 janvier 1858, 1858; Le peuple russe et le socialisme. Lettre à M. Michelet, 1858; Les mémoires, three volumes, 1860–62; Camicia rossa, Garibaldi à Londres, 1865; Lettre addressée à l'empereur de Russie, 1866; La Mazourka, un article du Kolokol, dédié avec profonde sympathie et respect à Edgar Quinet, 1869; Lettres sur la France et l'ltalie, 1871; Nouvelle phase de la littérature russe, 1868. German: K. Kavelins und l. Turgenev's sozial-politsche Briefwechsel mit Herzen. Mit Beilagen und Erläuterungen von Professor M. Dragomanov, 1894 (Schiemann's Bibliothek russischer Denkwürdigkeiten, iv.).
* ↑ A closer comparison between Herzen and Feuerbach is desirable, at least as concerns the attitude of the two thinkers towards the revolution of 1848. Feuerhach analysed the personalities of the leading actors of this year, and considered that they failed to rise to the level of his philosophical demands. "In thought he deferred the revolution to later times, abandoning it as far as his own was concerned." (Grün, Feuerbach, vol i. p. 331). Feuerbach himself says (Grün, vol. ii. p. 329), that whereas emotionally he is an unconditional republican, intellectually his republican views are subject to limitations; he is for the republic only when time and place are favourable, when men in general have attained a standpoint suitable to this form of political constitution. Herzen's estimate of America is to be found in Feuerbach and so is his valuation of monarchy. Herzen's rejection of atheism as negation, shortly to be discussed in the text, is pure Feuerbach.
* ↑ I append examples of his confusion of religion with myth. Herzen employs the most diversiﬁed words to express this view. Frequently he speaks of "religious mania." In his Aphorismata, compiled in 1867 for the circle of his philosophic friends (Schiff, Vogt. etc.), we are told that history is "historical nationalism"; religion is variously jumbled together with the ideas of fantasy, mythical fables, faith, falsehood, the Bible, the Apocalypse, mysticism, and illusion; history, as "consecrated irrationalism," is presented as a pathological or phantasmagorial religious condition. Logic and mathematics are contrasted, as anti-social, with this socially unifying condition—and so on.
* ↑ For Herzen there was, speaking generally, no scepticism in the eighteenth century, but conversely intense faith; the proclamation of scepticism came with the proclamation of the republic. Diderot and England constitute exceptions. England had long been the home of scepticism. Byron walked consistently along the path trodden by Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Hume.
* ↑ The Russian term for disillusionment, razočarovanie, signifies literally disenchantment, for čarovat' is to charm, to bewitch.
* ↑ Russian Affairs, a Reply to Herzen's article, Order Reigns, in No. 233 of "Kolokol." A German translation of this pamphlet was issued by L. Borkheim in 1871.
* ↑ In the essay of 1866, Superfluous Persons and Spiteful Persons, the superfluous persons (Oněgin, Pečorin) are defended against the realists. The essay is by some regarded as a polemic against Černyševskii.
* ↑ In the "Poljarnaja Zvězda," from 1862 onwards, Herzen published the before-mentioned collection of documents relating to the raskolniki.