With all this proud, strong, energetic intellect, Herzen had a wholly gentle, amiable, almost feminine character. Beneath the stem outward aspect of the sceptic, the satirist, under the cover of a most unceremonious, and exceedingly umeticent humour, there dwelt the heart of a child. He had a curious, angular kind of charm, an angular kind of delicacy • • . [but it was given] particularly to those who were beginning, who were seeking after something, people who were trying out their powers. They found a source of strength and confidence in his advice. He took them into the most intimate communion with himself and with his ideas - which, nevertheless, did not stop him, at times, from using his full destructive, analytic powers, from performing exceedingly painful, psychological experiments on these very same people at the very same time.
This vivid and sympathetic vignette tallies with the descriptions left to us by Turgenev, Belinsky and others of Herzen's friends.
It is borne out, above all, by the impression which the reader gains if he reads his own prose, his essays or the autobiographical memoirs collected under the title My Past and Thoughts. The impression that it leaves is not conveyed even by Annenkov's devoted words.
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4
The chief influence on Herzen as a young man in Moscow University, as upon all the young Russian intellectuals of his time, was of course that of Hegel. But although he was a fairly orthodox Hegelian in his early years, he turned his Hegelianism into something peculiar, personal to himself, very dissimilar from the theoretical conclusions which the more serious-minded and pedantic of his contemporaries deduced from that celebrated doctrine.
The chief effect upon him of Hegelianism seems to have been the belief that no specific theory or single doctrine, no one interpretation of life, above all, no simple, coherent, well-constructed schema - neither the great French mechanistic models of the eighteenth century, nor the romantic German edifices of the nineteenth, nor the visions of the great Utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, nor the socialist programmes of Cabet or Leroux or Louis Blanc - could conceivably be true solutions to real problems, at least not in the form in which they were preached.
He was sceptical if only because he believed (whether or not he derived this view from Hegel) that there could not in principle be any simple or final answer to any genuine human problem; that if a question was serious and indeed agonising, the answer could never be clear-cut and neat. Above all, it could never consist in some symmetrical set of conclusions, drawn by deductive means from a collection of self-evident axioms.
This disbelief begins in Herzen's early, forgotten essays which he wrote at the beginning of the 184os, on what he called dilettantism and Buddhism in science; where he distinguishes two kinds of intellectual personality, against both of which he inveighs. One is that of the casual amateur who never sees the trees for the wood; who is terrified, Herzen tells us, of losing his own precious individuality in too much pedantic preoccupation with actual, detailed facts, and therefore always skims over the surface without developing a capacity for real knowledge; who looks at the facts, as it were, through a kind of telescope, with the result that nothing ever gets articulated save enormous, sonorous generalisations floating at random like so many balloons.
The other kind of student - the Buddhist - is the person who escapes from the wood by frantic absorption in the trees; who becomes an intense student of some tiny set of isolated facts, which
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he views through more and more powerful misroscopes. Although such a man might be deeply learned in some particular branch of knowledge, almost invariably - and particularly if he is a German (and almost all Herzen's gibes and insults are directed against the hated Germans, and that despite the fact that he was half German himself) - he becomes intolerably tedious, pompous and blindly philistine; above all, always repellent as a human being.
Between these poles it is necessary to find some compromise, and Herzen believed that if one studied life in a sober, detached, and objective manner, one might perhaps be able to create some kind of tension, a sort of dialectical compromise, between these opposite ideals; for if neither of them can be realised fully and equally, neither of them should be altogether deserted; only thus could human beings be made capable of understanding life in some profounder fashion than if they committed themselves recklessly to one or the other of the two extremes.
This ideal of detachment, moderation, compromise, dispassionate objectivity which Herzen at this early period of his life was preaching, was something deeply incompatible with his temperament. And indeed, not long after, he bursts forth with a great paean to partiality. He declares that he knows that this will not be well received. There are certain concepts which simply are not received in good society - rather like people who have disgraced themselves in some appalling way. Partiality is not something which is well thought of in comparison, for example, with abstract justice. Nevertheless, nobody has ever said anything worth saying unless he was deeply and passionately partial.
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There follows a long and typically Russian diatribe against the chilliness, meanness, impossibility and undesirability of remaining objective, of being detached, of not committing oneself, of not plunging into the stream of life. The passionate voice of his friend Belinsky is suddenly audible in Herzen's writings in this phase of his development.
s
The fundamental thesis which emerges at this time, and is then developed throughout his later life with marvellous poetry and imagination, is the terrible power over human lives of ideological abstractions (I say poetry advisedly; for as Dostoevsky in later
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years very truly said, whatever else might be said about Herzen, he was certainly a Russian poet; which saved him in the eyes of this jaundiced but, at times, uncannily penetrating critic: Herzen's views or mode of life naturally found little favour in his eyes).
Herzen declares that any attempt to explain human conduct in terms of, or to dedicate human being to the service of, any abstraction, be it never so noble - justice, progress, nationality - even if preached by impeccable altruists like Mazzini or Louis Blanc or Mill, always leads in the end to victimisation and human sacrifice.
Men are not simple enough, human lives and relationships are too complex for standard formulas and neat solutions, and attempts to adapt individuals and fit them into a rational schema, conceived in terms of a theoretical ideal, be the motives for doing it never so lofty, always lead in the end to a terrible maiming of human beings, to political vivisection on an ever increasing scale. The process culminates in the liberation of some only at the price of enslavement of others, and the replacing of an old tyranny with a new and sometimes far more hideous one - by the imposition of the slavery of universal socialism, for example, as a remedy for the slavery of the universal Roman Church.