Herzen was resolved to escape from both these familiar predicaments. He was determined that of him, at any rate, nobody would say that he had done nothing in the world, that he had offered no resistance and collapsed. When he finally emigrated from Russia in 1847 it was to devote himself to a life of activity. His education was that of a dilettante. Like most young men brought up in an aristocratic milieu, he had been taught to be too many things to too many men, to reflect too many aspects of life, and situations, to be able to concentrate sufficiently upon any one particular activity, any one fixed design.
Herzen was well aware of this. He talks wistfully about the good fortunes of those who enter peacefully upon some steady,
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fixed profession, untroubled by the many countless alternatives open to gifted and often idealistic young men who have been taught too much, are too rich, and are offered altogether too wide an opportunity of doing too many things, and who, consequently, begin, and are bored, and go back and start down a new path, and in the end lose their way and drift aimlessly and achieve nothing.
This was a very characteristic piece of self-analysis: filled with the idealism of his generation in Russia that both sprang from and fed the growing sense of guilt towards 'the people', Herzen was passionately anxious to do something memorable for himself and his country. This anxiety remained with him all his life. Driven by it he became, as everyone knows who has any acquaintance with the modem history of Russia, perhaps the greatest of European publicists of his day, and founded the first free - that is to say, anti-tsarist - Russian press in Europe, thereby laying the foundation of revolutionary agitation in his country.
In his most celebrated periodical, which he called The Bell (Kolokol), he dealt with anything that seemed to be of topical interest. He exposed, he denounced, he derided, he preached, he became a kind of Russian Voltaire of the mid-nineteenth century.
He was a journalist of genius, and his articles, written with brilliance, gaiety and passion. although, of course, officially forbidden, circulated in Russia and were read by radicals and conservatives alike. Indeed it was said that the Emperor himself read them; certainly some among his officials did so; during the heyday of his fame Herzen exercised a genuine influence within Russia itself -
an unheard of phenomenon for an emigre - by exposing abuses, naming names, but, above all, by appealing to liberal sentiment which had not completely died, even at the very heart of the tsarist bureaucracy, at any rate during the 185os and 186os.
3
Unlike many who find themselves only on paper, or on a public platform, Herzen was an entrancing talker. Probably the best description of him is to be found in an essay by his friend Annenkov entitled 'A Remarkable Decade'. It was written some twenty years after the events that it records.
I must own [Annenkov wrote] that I was puzzled and overwhelmed, when I first came to know Herzen - by this extraordinary mind
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which darted from one topic to another with unbelievable swiftness, with inexhaustible wit and brilliance; which could see in the tum of somebody's talk, in some simple incident, in some abstract idea, that vivid feature which gives expression and life. He had a most astonishing capacity for instantaneous, unexpected juxtaposition of quite dissimilar things, and this gift he had in a very high degree, fed as it was by the powers of the most subtle observation and a very solid fund of encyclopedic knowledge. He had it to such a degree that, in the end, his listeners were sometimes exhausted by the inextinguishable fireworks of his speech, the inexhaustible fantasy and invention, a kind of prodigal opulence of intellect which astonished his audience.
After the always ardent but remorselessly severe Belinsky, the glancing, gleaming, perpetually changing and often paradoxical and irritating, always wonderfully clever, talk of Herzen demanded of those who were with him not only intense concentration, but also perpetual alertness, because you had always to be prepared to respond instantly. On the other hand, nothing cheap or tawdry could stand even half an hour of contact with him. All pretentiousness, all pompousness, all pedantic self-importance, simply fled from him or melted like wax before a fire. I knew people, many of them what are called serious and practical men, who could not bear Herzen's presence. On the other hand, there were others ... who gave him the most blind and passionate adoration . . •
He had a natural gift for criticism - a capacity for exposing and denouncing the dark sides of life. And he showed this trait very early, during the Moscow period of his life of which I am speaking.
Even then Herzen's mind was in the highest degree rebellious and unmanageable, with a kind of innate, organic detestation of anything which seemed to him to be an accepted opinion sanctified by general silence about some unverified fact. In such cases the predatory powers of his intellect would rise up in force and come into the open, sharp, cunning, resourceful.
He lived in Moscow ... still unknown to the public, but in his own familiar circle he was already known as a witty and a dangerous observer of his friends. Of course, he could not altogether conceal the fact that he kept secret dossiers, secret protocols of his own, about his dearest friends and distant acquaintances within the privacy ofhis own thoughts. People who stood by his side, all innocence and trustfulness, were invariably amazed, and sometimes extremely annoyed, when they suddenly came on one or other side of this involuntary activity of his mind. Strangely enough, Herzen combined with this the tenderest, most loving relations with his chosen intimates, although even they could never escape his pungent analyses. This is explained
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b y another side o f his character. As i f to restore the equilibrium of his moral organism, nature took care to place in his soul one unshakeable belief, one unconquerable inclination. Herzen believed in the noble instincts of the human heart. His analysis grew silent and reverent before the instinctive impulses of the moral organism as the sole, indubitable truth of existence. He admired anything which he thought to be a noble or passionate impulse, however mistaken; and he never amused himself at its expense.
This ambivalent, contradictory play of his nature -suspicion and denial on the one hand and blind faith on the other -often led to perplexity and misunderstandings between him and his friends, and sometimes to quarrels and scenes. But it is precisely in this crucible of argument, in its flames, that up to the very day of his departure for Europe, people's devotion to him used to be tested and strengthened instead of disintegrating. And this is perfectly intelligible. In all that Herzen did and all that Herzen thought at this time there never was the slightest trace of anything false, no malignant feeling nourished in darkness, no calculation, no treachery. On the contrary, the whole of him was always there, in every one of his words and deeds. And there was another reason which made one sometimes forgive him even insults, a reason which may seem unplausible to people who did not know him.