There is a typical piece of dialogue between Herzen and Louis Blanc, the French socialist (whom he respected greatly), which Herzen quotes, and which shows the kind of levity with which Herzen sometimes expressed his deepest convictions. The conversation is described as having taken place in London somewhere in the early 5os. One day Louis Blanc observed to Herzen that human life was a great social duty, that man must always sacrifice himself to society.
'Why?' I asked suddenly.
'How do you mean "Why?" [said Louis Blanc] -but surely the whole purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?'
'But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices and nobody enjoys himseH.'
'You are playing with words.'
'The muddle-headedness of a barbarian,' I replied, laughing.
In this gay and apparently casual passage, Herzen embodies his central principle- that the goal of life is life itself, that to sacrifice the present to some vague and unpredictable future is a form of
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delusion which leads t o the destruction of all that alone i s valuable in rr.en and societies - to the gratuitous sacrifice of the flesh and blood of live human beings upon the altar of idealised abstractions.
Herzen is revolted by the central substance of what was being preached by some of the best and purest-hearted men of his time, particularly by socialists and utilitarians, namely, that vast suffering in the present must be undergone for the sake of an ineffable felicity in the future, that thousands of innocent men may be forced to die that millions might be happy- battle cries that were common even in those days, and of which a great deal more has been heard since. The notion that there is a splendid future in store for humanity, that it is guaranteed by history, and that it justifies the most appalling cruelties in the present - this familiar piece of political eschatology, based on belief in inevitable progress, seemed to him a fatal doctrine directed against human life.
The profoundest and most sustained - and the most brilliantly written - of all Herzen's statements on this topic is to be found in the volume of essays which he called From the Other Shore, and wrote as a memorial to his disillusionment with the European revolutions of 1848 and 1849. This great polemical masterpiece is Herzen's profession of faith and his political testament. Its tone and content are well conveyed in the characteristic (and celebrated) passage in which he declares that one generation must not be condemned to the role of beir.g a mere means to the welfare of its remote descendants, which is in any case none too certain. A distant goal is a cheat and a deception. Real goals must be closer than that - 'at the very least the labourer's wage or pleasure in work performed'. The end of each generation is itself- each life has its own unique experience; the fulfilment of its wants creates new needs, claims, new forms of life. Nature, he declares (perhaps under the influence of Schiller), is careless of human beings and their needs, and crushes them heedlessly. Has history a plan, a libretto? If it did 'it would lose all interest, become . • • boring, ludicrous'. There are no timetables, no cosmic patterns; there is only the 'flow of life', passion, will, improvisation; sometimes roads exist, sometimes not; where there is no road 'genius will blast a path'.
But what if someone were to ask, 'Supposing all this is suddenly brought to an end? Supposing a comet strikes us and brings to an end life on earth? Will history not be meaningless? Will all this
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talk suddenly end in nothing? Will it not be a cruel mockery of all our efforts, all our blood and sweat and tears, if it all ends in some sudden, unexplained brute fashion with some mysterious, totally unexplained event?' Herzen replies that to think in these terms is a great vulgarity, the vulgarity of mere numbers. The death of a single human being is no less absurd and unintelligible than the death of the entire human race; it is a mystery we accept; merely to multiply it enormously and ask 'Supposing millions of human beings die?' does not make it more mysterious or more frightening.
In nature, as in the souls of men, there slumber endless possibilities and forces, and in suitable conditions • • • they develop, and will develop furiously. They may fill a world, or they may fall by the roadside. They may take a new direction. They may stop. They may collapse . • • Nature is perfectly indifferent to what happens . • •
[But then, you may ask,] what is all this for? The life -of people becomes a pointless game . . • Men build something with pebbles and sand only to see it all collapse again; and human creatures crawl out from underneath the ruins and again start clearing spaces and build huts of moss and planks and broken capitals and, after centuries of endless labour, it all collapses again. Not in vain did Shakespeare say that history was a tedious tale told by an idiot . • •
. • . [To this I reply that] you are like ••. those very sensitive people who shed a tear whenever they recollect that 'man is born but to die'. To look at the end and not at the action itself is a cardinal error.
Of what use to the flower is its bright magnificent bloom? Or this intoxicating scent, since it will only pass away? • . . None at all. But nature is not so miserly. She does not disdain what is transient, what is only in the present. At every point she achieves all she can achieve
• . . Who will find fault with nature because flowers bloom in the morning and die at night, because she has not given the rose or the lily the hardness of flint? And this miserable pedestrian principle we wish to transfer to the world of history . . • Life has no obligation to realise the fantasies and ideas [of civilisation] • • • Life loves novelty . . •
. . . History seldom repeats itself, it uses every accident, simultaneously knocks at a thousand doors • • • doors which may open • • . who knows?
And again:
Human beings have an instinctive passion to preserve anything they like. Man is born and therefore wishes to live for ever. Man falls in
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love and wishes to be loved, and loved for ever a s in the very first moment of his avowal . . . but life . . . gives no guarantees. Life does not ensure existence, nor pleasure; she does not answer for their continuance . . . Every historical moment is full and is beautiful, is self-contained in its own fashion. Every year has its own spring and its own summer, its own winter and autumn, its own storms and fair weather. Every period is new, fresh, filled with its own hopes and carries within itself its own joys and sorrows. The present belongs to it. But human beings are not content with this, they must needs own the future too . . .
What is the purpose of the song the singer sings? . . . If you look beyond your pleasure in it for something else, for some other goal, the moment will come when the singer stops and then you will only have memories and vain regrets . . . because, instead of listening, you were waiting for something else . . . You are confused by categories that are not fitted to catch the flow of life. What is this goal for which you [he means Mazzini and the liberals and the socialists] are seeking -is it a programme? An order? Who conceived it? To ·whom was the order given? Is it something inevitable? or not? If it is, are we simply puppets? . . . Are we morally free or are we wheels within a machine? I would rather think of life, and therefore of history, as a goal attained, not as a means to something else.