This detachment from party and doctrine, and the tendency to utter independent and sometimes disconcerting judgements, brought violent criticism on both Herzen and Turgenev, and made their position difficult. When Turgenev wrote Fathers and Children, he was duly attacked both from the right and fro�¥ the left, because neither was clear which side he was supporting. This indeterminate quality particularly irritated the 'new' young men in Russia, who assailed him bitterly for being too liberal, too
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civilised, too ironical, too sceptical, for undermining noble idealism by the perpetual oscillation of political feelings, by excessive selfexamination, by not engaging himself and declaring war upon the enemy, and perpetrating instead what amounted to a succession of evasions and minor treacheries. Their hostility was directed at all the 'men of the 40s', and in particular at Herzen, who was rightly looked on as their most brilliant and most formidable representative. His answer to the stem, brutal young revolutionaries of the 186os is exceedingly characteristic. The new revolutionaries had attacked him for nostalgic love of an older style of life, for being a gentleman, for being rich, for living in comfort, for sitting in London and observing the Russian revolutionary struggle from afar, for being a member of a generation which had merely talked in the salons, and speculated and philosophised, when all round them was squalor and misery, bitterness and injustice; for not seeking salvation in some serious, manual labour - in cutting down a tree, or making a pair of boots, or doing something 'concrete' and real in order to identify hinlself with the suffering masses, instead of endless brave talk in the drawing-rooiUS of wealthy ladies with other well-educated, nobly-born, equally feckless young men - self-indulgence and escapism, deliberate blindness to the horrors and agonies of their world.
Herzen understood his opponents, and declined to compromise.
He admits that he cannot help preferring cleanliness to dirt; decency, elegance, beauty, comfort, to violence and austerity, good literature to bad, poetry to prose. Despite his alleged cynicism and
'aestheticism', he declines to admit that only scoundrels can achieve things, that in order to achieve a revolution that will liberate mankind and create a new and nobler form of life on earili one must be unkempt, dirty, brutal and violent, and trample with hob-nailed boots on civilisation and the rights of men. He does not believe this, and sees no reason why he should believe it.
As for the new generation of revolutionaries, they are not sprung from nothing : they are the fault of his generation, which begat them by its idle talk in the 184os. These are men who come to avenge the world against the men of the 40s - 'the syphilis of our revolutionary passions'. The new generation will say to the old : ' "you are hypocrites, we will be cynics ; you spoke like moralists, we shall speak like scoundrels ; you were civil to your superiors, rude to your inferiors; we shall be rude to all; you bow
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without feeling respect, we shall push and jostle and make no apologies . . . " • He says in effect : Organised hooliganism can solve nothing. Unless civilisation - the recognition of the difference of good and bad, noble and ignoble, worthy and unworthy - is pre
�erved, unless there are some people who are both fastidious and fearless, and are free to say what they want to say, and do not sacrifice their lives upon some large, nameless altar, and sink themselves into a vast, impersonal, grey mass of barbarians marching to destroy, what is the point of the revolution ? It may come whether we like it or not. But why should we welcome, still less work for, the victory of the barbarians who will sweep away the wicked old world only to leave ruins and misery on which nothing but a new despotism can be built ? The 'vast bill of indictment which Russian literature has been drafting against Russian life'
does not demand a new philistinism in place of the old. 'Sorrow, scepticism, irony . . . the three strings of the Russian lyre' are closer to reality than the crude and vulgar optimism of the new materialists.
1 1
Herzen's most constant goal is the preservation of individual liberty. That is the purpose of the guerrilla war which, as he once wrote to Mazzini, he had fought from his earliest youth. What made him unique in the nineteenth century is the complexity of his vision, the degree to which he understood the causes and nature of conflicting ideals simpler and more fundamental than his own. He understood what made - and what in a measure justified
- radicals and revolutionaries : ::nd at the same time he grasped the frightening consequences of their doctrines. He was in full sympathy with, and had a profound psychological understanding of, what it was that gave the Jacobins their severe and noble grandeur, and endowed them with a moral magnificence which raised them above the horizon of that older world which he found so attractive and which they had ruthlessly crushed. He understood only too well the misery, the oppression, the suffocation, the appalling inhumanity, the bitter cries for justice on the part of the crushed elements of the population under the ancien regime, and at the same time he knew that the new world which had risen to avenge these wrongs must, if it was given its head, create its own excesses and drive millions of human beings to useless mutual extermina-
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tion. Herzen's sense o f reality, in particular o f the need for, and the price of, revolution, is unique in his own, and perhaps in any age. His sense of the critical moral and political issues of his time is a good deal more specific and concrete than that of the majority of the professional philosophers of the nineteeth century, who tended to try to derive general principles from observation of their society, and to recommend solutions which are deduced by rational methods from premises formulated in terms of the tidy categories in which they sought to arrange opinions, principles and forms of conduct. Herzen was a publicist and an essayist whom his early Hegelian training had not ruined : he had acquired no taste for academic classifications : he had a unique insight into the 'inner feel' of social and political predicaments : and with it a remarkable power of analysis and exposition. Consequently he understood and stated the case, both emotional and intellectual, for violent revolution, for saying that a pair of boots were of more value than all the plays of Shakespeare (as the 'nihilistic' critic Pisarev once said in a rhetorical moment), for denouncing liberalism and parliamentarism, which offered the masses votes and slogans when what they needed was food, shelter, clothing ; and understood no less vividly and clearly the aesthetic and. even moral value of civilisations which rest upon slavery, where a minority produces divine masterpieces, and only a small number of persons have the freedom and the self<onfidence, the imagination and the gifts, to be able to produce forms of life that endure, works which can be shored up against the ruin of our time.