geoisie by violent revolution - and there was nothing he despised more than the bourgeoisie, and the mean, grasping, philistine financial bourgeoisie of Paris most of all - before its historical role has been played out, would merely mean that the bourgeois spirit and bourgeois forms would persist into the new social order. 'They want, without altering the walls [of the prison] , to give them a new function, as if a plan for a jail could be used for a free existence.' Houses for free men cannot be built by specialists in prison architecture. And who shall say that history has proved that Herzen was mistaken ?
7
His loathing of the bourgeoisie is frantic, yet he does not want a violent cataclysm. He thinks that it may be inevitable, that it may come, but he is frightened of it. The bourgeoisie seems to him like a collection of Figaros, but Figaros grow fat and prosperous. He declares that, in the eighteenth century, Figaro wore a livery, a mark of servitude to be sure, but still something different from, detach·
able from, his skin ; the skin, at least, was that of a palpitating, rebellious human being. But today Figaro has won. Figaro has become a millionaire. He is judge, oommander-in-chief, president
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of the republic. Figaro now dominates the world, and, alas, the livery is no longer a mere livery. It has become part of his skin.
It cannot be taken off; it has become part of his living flesh.
Everything that was repellent and degrading in the eighteenth century, against which the noble revolutionaries had protested, has grown into the intrinsic texture of the mean middle-class beings who now dominate us. And yet we must wait. Simply to cut off their heads, as Bakunin wanted, can only lead to a new tyranny and a new slavery, to the rule of the revolted minorities over majorities, or worse still, the rule of majorities - monolithic majorities - over minorities, the rule of what John Stuart Mill, in Herzen's view with justice, called conglomerated mediocrity.
Herzen's values are undisguised; he likes only the style of free beings, only what is large, generous, uncalculating. He admires pride, independence, resistance to tyrants ; he admires Pushkin because he was defiant ; he admires Lermontov because he dared to suffer and to hate; he even approves of the Slavophils, his reactionary opponents, because at least they detested authority, at least they would not let the Germans in. He admfres Belinsky because he was incorruptible, and 'told the truth in the face of the arrayed battalions of German academic or political authority. The dogmas of socialism seem to him no less stifling than those of capitalism or of the Middle Ages or of �he early Christians.
What he hated most of all was the despotism of formulas - the submission of human beings to arrangements arrived at by deduction from some kind of a priori principles which had no foundation in actual experience. That is why he feared the new liberators so deeply. 'If only people wanted,' he says, ' . . . instead of liberating humanity, to liberate themselves, they would do much for . . . the liberation of man.' He knew that his own perpetual plea for more individual freedom contained the seeds of social atomisation, that a compromise had to be found between the two great social needs
- for organisation and for individual freedom - some unstable equilibrium that would preserve a minimal area within which the individual could express himself and not be utterly pulverised, and he utters a great appeal for what he calls the value of egoism.
He declares that one of the great dangers to our society is that individuals will be tamed and suppressed disinterestedly by idealists in the name of altruism, in the name of measures designed to make the majority happy. The new liberators may well resemble
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the inquisitors of the past, who drove herds of innocent Spaniards, Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen, Italians to the autos-da-f€, and
'then went home peacefully with a quiet conscience, with the feeling that they had done their duty, with the smell of roasting flesh still in their nostrils', and slept - the sleep of the innocent after a day's work well done. Egoism is not to be condemned without qualification. Egoism is not a vice. Egoism gleams in the eye of an animal. Moralists bravely thunder against it, instead of building on it. What moralists try to deny is the great, inner citadel of human dignity. 'They want . . . to make men tearful, sentimental, insipid, kindly creatures, asking to be made slaves . . . But to tear egoism from a man's heart is to rob him of his living principles, of the yeast and salt of his personality.' Fortunately this is impossible.
Of course it is sometimes suicidal to try to assert oneself. One cannot try to go up a staircase down which an army is trying to march. That is done by tyrants, conservatives, fools and criminals.
'Destroy a man's altruism, and you get a savage orang-utan, but if you destroy his egoism you generate a tame monkey.'
Human problems are too complex to demand simple solutions.
Even the peasant commune in Russia, in which Herzen believed so deeply as a 'lightning conductor', because he believed that peasants in Russia at least had not been infected by the distorting, urban vices of the European proletariat and the European bourgeoisie even the peasant commune did not, after all, as he points out, preserve Russia from slavery. Liberty is not to the taste of the majority - only of the educated. There are no guaranteed methods, no sure paths to social welfare. We must try to do our best ; and it is always possible that we shall fail.
8
The heart of the thought is the notion that the basic problems are perhaps not soluble at all, that all one can do is to try to solve them, but that there is no guarantee, either in socialist nostrums or in any other human construction, no guarantee that happiness or a rational life can be attained, in private or in public life. This curious combination of idealism and scepticism - not unlike, for all his vehemence, the outlook of Erasmus, Montaigne, Montesquieu runs through all his writings.
Herzen wrote novels, but they are largely forgotten, because he was not a born novelist. His stories are greatly inferior to those of
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his friend, Turgenev, but they have something in common with them. For in Turgenev's novels, too, you will find that human problems are not treated as if they were soluble. Bazarov in Fathers and Children suffers and dies ; Lavretsky in A House of Gentlefolk is left in melancholy uncertainty at the end of the novel, not because something had not been done which could have been done, not because there is a solution round the comer which someone simply had not thought of, or had refused to apply, but because, as Kant once said, 'from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made'. Everything is partly the fault of circumstance, partly the fault of the individual character, partly in the nature of life itself. This must be faced, it must be stated, and it is a vulgarity and, at times, a crime to believe that permanent solutions are always possible.