\Vest: in the late fifties and early sixties, he \Vas the acknowledged leader of all that \Vas generous, enlightened, civilised, human!' in Russia. :\lore than Bnkunin and Pven Turgenev, whose nov<>ls for·med n central source of knovvledge about Russia in the "·est, l l!'rz!'n courlt!'ract<'d tlw l<'g<'nd, ingrained in the minds of progn·ssive Europ£>ans (of whom l\lichelet \vas perhaps the most repr<'sentntiw· ) , that Russia consisted of nothing save only tlw government jack-boot on the one hand, and the dark,
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silent, sullen mass of brutalised peasants on the other-an image that was the by-product of the widespread sympathy for the principal victim of Russian despotism, the martyred nation, Poland. Some among the Polish exiles spontaneously conceded this service to the truth on Herzen's part, if only because he was one of the rare Russians who genuinely liked and admired individual Poles, worked in close sympathy with them, and identified the cause of Russian liberation with that of all her oppressed subject nationalities. It was, indeed, this unswerving avoidance of chauvinism that was among the principal causes of the ultimate collapse of The Bell and of Herzen's O\VTI political undoing.
After Russia, Herzen's deepest love was for Italy and the Italians. The closest ties bound him to the Italian exiles, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Saffi and Orsini. Although he supported every liberal beginning in France, his attitude towards her was more ambiguous. For this there were many reasons. Like Tocqueville (whom he personally disliked) , he had a distaste for all that was centralised, bureaucratic, hierarchical, subject to rigid forms or rules; France was to him the incarnation of order, discipline, the worship of the state, of unity, and of despotic, abstract formulae that flattened all things to the same rule and pattern-something that had a family resemblance to the great slave states-Prussia, Austria, Russia ; with this he constantly contrasts the decentralised, uncrushed, untidy, 'tru�y democratic' Italians, whom he believed to possess a deep affinity 'vith the free Russian spirit embodied in the peasant commune with its sense of natural justice and human worth. To this ideal even England seemed to him to be far less hostil<' than legalistic, calculating France: in such moods he comes close to his romantic Slavophil opponents.
Moreover, he could not forget the betrayal of the revolution in Paris by the bourgeois parties in 1 848, the execution of the workers, the suppression of the Roman Revolution by the troops of the French Republic, the vanity, weakness and rhetoric of the French radical politicians-Lamartine, Marrast, Ledru-Rollin, Felix Pyat. His sketches of the lives and behaviour of leading French exiles in England are masterpieces of amused, halfsympathetic, half-contemptuous description of the grotesque and futile aspects of every political emigration condemned to sterility, intrigue and a constant flow of self-justifying eloquence before a foreign audience too remote or bored to listen. Yet he thought well of individual members of it: he had for a time been a close ally of Proudhon, and despite their differences, he continued to respect him ; he regarded Louis Blanc as an honest and
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fearless democrat, he was on good terms with Victor Hugo, he liked and admired Michelet. In later years he visited at least one Paris political salon-admittedly, it was that of a Pole--with evident enjoyment: the Goncourts met him there and left a vivid description in their journal of his appearance and his conversation.7 Although he was half German himself, or perhaps because of it, he felt, like his friend Bakunin, a strong aversion. from what he regarded as the incurable philistinism of the Germans, and what seemed to him a peculiarly unattractive combination of craving for blind authority with a tendency to squalid internecine recriminations in public, more pronounced than among other emigres. Perhaps his hatred of Herwegh, whom he knew to be a friend both of Marx and of Wagner, as well as Marx's onslaughts on Karl Vogt, the Swiss naturalist to whom Herzen was devotf•d, played some part in this. At least three of his most intimate friends were pure Germans. Goethe and Schiller meant more to him than any Russian writers. Yet there is something genuinely venomous in his account of the German exiles, quite different from the high-spirited sense of comedy with which he describes the idiosyncrasie>s of the other foreign colonies gathered in London in the fifties and sixties-a city, if we are to believe Herzen, equally unconcerned with their absurdities and 7 See entry in the Journal under 8th February 1 865-'Dinner at Charles Edmond's ( Chojecki) . . . A Socratic mask with the warm and transparent flesh of a Rubens portrait. a red mark between the eyebrows as from a branding- iron, greying beard and hair. As he talks there is a constant ironical chuckle which rises and falls in his throat. His voice is soft and slow, without any of the coarseness one might have expected from the huge neck; the ideas are fine, delicate, pungent, at times subtle, always definite, il luminated by words that take time to arrive, but which always possess the felicitous quality of French as it is spoken by a civilised and witty foreig-ner.
'He speaks of Bakunin, of his eleven months in prison, chained to a wall, of his escape from Siberia by the Amur River, of his return by way of Cal ifornia, of his arrival in London. where. after a stormy, moist embrace, his first words to Herzen were "Can one get oysters here?".'
Herze;. delig-hted the Goncourts with stories about the Emperor 1\:icholas walking in the night in his empty palace, after the fall of Eupatoria during- the Crimean 'Var, with the heavy, unearthly steps of the stone statui' of the Commander in 'Don Jwm.' This was followed by anecdotes about Eng-lish habits and manners-'a country which he loves as the land of libcrty'-to illustrate its absurd, class conscious, unyielding traditionalism, particularly noticeable in the relations of masters and servants.
The Goncourts quote a characteristic epig-ram made by Herzen to illustrate the difference between the French and English characters. They fai thfully rC>port the story of how James Rothschild managed to save Herzen's property in Russia.
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their martyrdoms. As for his hosts, the English, they seldom appear in his pages. Herzen had met Mill, Carlyle and Owen.
His first night in England was spent with English hosts. He was on reasonably good terms with one or two editors of radical papers (some of whom, like Linton and Cov.,·en, helped him to propagate his views, and to preserve contact with revolutionaries on the continent as well with clandestine traffic of propaganda to Russia) , and several radically inclined Members of Parliament, including minor ministers . . In general, however, he seems to have had even less contact with Englishmen than his contemporary and fellow exile, Karl Marx. He admired England. He admired her constitution; the wild and tangled wood of her unwritten la\vs and customs brought the full resources of his romantic imagination into play. The entertaining passages of Mr Past and Thoughts in which he compared the French and the English, or the English and the Germans, display acute and amused insight into the national characteristics of the English.