l\1oreovPr, Tolstoy s!'ems to have f0lt n certain lnck of personal sympathy for Herzen and his public position-even a k ind of jealousy. "'h0n, in momPnts of a cute discourngement and irritation, Tolstoy spoke (perhaps not wry seriously) of leaving Russia forever, lw would say tha t whatev!'r he d id, hP would not join HPrzen or march und<'r h is bannPr: 'he go0s his way, I shnl l go mine.' HP sPriously unclPrrnted HPrzpn's rPvolutionnry tempPra
IJIPllt and instincts. I lo\VPVPr sceptical Herzen may have been of spPcific n•volutionnry doctrinPs or plans in Russia-nnd no-one wns morP so-he beliewd to the c•nd of his l i fe in the moral and socinl nPed and the inPvitahility, sooner or la ter, of a revolution in Russia-- a violPn t transformation follo\wd h:· a j ust, that is a socialist, onlPr. HP did not, it is true, closp his eyes to the possibil ity, pn•n tlw pmbahility, that tlw great rebellion would Pxtinguish values to which h<' \va s himsplf dedicnted-in particular. the frPPCloms without which he and others l ike him could not hrPnthc. 1\'"cvPrthf'lPss, he rf'rogniscd not only the im·vitnbility but thP historic j usticP of the coming catncclass="underline" ·sm. H i s mora l tast<•s. h is respPct for human va lues, h i s pntir<' style of !iff', d i v i<h·d him from tlw tough-mindPd ymmg0r radicals of the s i x t i Ps, hut he did not, dPspite n i l his distrust of pol itical fanaticism. wh< ·tlwr on thP right or on the ]pft, tnrn into a cnutious, n·forrn i st lilwral constitu tionalist. Evc•n in his grndunlist phase he n·maiiH·d an agitator, an <'gnlitarian and a socialist to the
Introduction
xli
end. I t is this in him that both the Russian populists and the Russian Marxists-Mikhaylovsky and Lenin-recognised and saluted.
It was not prudence or moderation that led him to his unwavering support of Poland in her insurrection against Russia in 1 863. The wave of passionate Russian nationalism which accompanied its suppression, robbed him of sympathy even among Russian liberals. The Bell declined in circulation.10 The new,
'hard' revolutionaries needed his money, but made it plain that they looked upon him as a liberal dinosaur, the preacher of antiquated humanistic views, useless in the violent social struggle to come. He left London in the late sixties and attempted to produce a French edition of The Bell in Geneva.
When that too failed, he visited his friends in Florence, returning to Paris early in 1 870, before the outbreak of the Franco
Prussian War. There he died of pleurisy, broken both morally and physically, but not disillusioned ; still writing with concentrated intelligence and force. His body was taken to Nice, where he is buried beside his wife. A life-size statue still marks his grave.
Herzen's ideas have long since entered into the general texture of Russian political thought-liberals and radicals, populists and anarchists, socialists and communists, have all claimed him as an ancestor. But what survives to-day of all that unceasing and feverish activity, even in his native country, is not a system or a doctrine but a handful of essays, some remarkable letters, and the extraordinary amalgam of �emory, observation, moral passion, psychological analysis and political description, wedded to a major literary talent, which has immortalised his name.
What remains is, above all, a passionate and inextinguishable temperament and a sense of the movement of nature and of its unpredictable possibilities, which he felt with an intensity which not even his uniquely rich and flexible prose could fully express. He believed that the ultimate goal of life was life itself; 10 Herzen's lifelong enemy, the reactionary Pan-Slavic journalist, M. N.
Katkov, came out strongly for "national unity " against the Polish rebels
-and against Herzen. Russian opinion was overwhelmingly on his side.
A publ ic subscription was raised for Katkov. "He has rendered us great service!" exclaimed a Moscow nobleman. "He has crushed the serpent's head! He has broken Herzen's authority! " \Vhen a rash of incendiary fires broke out (d. Dostoevsky's The Possessed) , Katkov charged they were the work of a vast conspiracy organized by the Polish rebels,
"Herzen and his scoundrels," and vari{'us persons in Paris. London, and Geneva including the Due d'Harcourt . . . . By the end of that year Kolokol's circulation had dropped from 2500 to 500. (D.M.)
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that the day and the hour were ends in themselves, not a means to another day or another experience. He believed that remote ends were a dream, that faith in them was a fatal illusion ; that to sacrifice the present, or the immediate and foreseeable future to these distant ends must always lead to cruel and futile forms of human sacrifice. He believed that values were not found in an impersonal, objective realm, but were created by human beings, changed with the generations of men, but were nonetheless binding upon those who lived in their light; that suffering was inescapable, and infallible knovvledge neither attainable nor needed. He believed in reason, scientific methods, individual action, empirically discovered truths; but he tended to suspect that faith in general formulae, laws, prescription in human affairs was an attempt, sometimes catastrophic, always irrational, to escape from the uncertainty and unpredictable variety of life to the false security of our own symmetrical fantasies. He was fully conscious of what he believed. He had obtained this knowledge at the cost of painful, and, at times, unintended, selfanalysis, and he described what he saw in language of exceptional vitality, precision and poetry. His purely personal credo remained unaltered from his earliest days: 'Art, and the summer lightning of individual happiness: these are the only real goods we have,' he declared in a self-revealing passage of the kind that so deeply shocked the stern young Russian revolutionaries in the sixties. Yet even thev and their descendants did not and do not reject his artistic and. intellectual achievement.
Herzen was not, and had no desire to be, an impartial observer. No less than the poets and the novelists of his nation, he created a style, an outlook, and, in the words of Gorky's tribute to him, 'an entire province, a country astonishingly rich in ideas,11 where everything is immediately recognisable as being his and his alone, a country into which he transplants all that he touches, in which things, sensations, feelings, persons, ideas, private and public events, institutions, entire cultures, are given shape and life by his pO\verful and coherent historical imagination, and have stood up against the forces of decay in the solid world which his memory, his intelligence and his artistic genius recovered and reconstructed. 111y Past and Thoughts is the Noah's ark in which he savPd himself, and not himself alone, from the destructive flood in which many idealistic radicals of the forties were drowned. Genuine art survives and transcends its immediate purpose. The structure that Herzen built in the 11 I storira Russkor Literaturr, p. Z06 (Moscow, 1 939) .