The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  Shortly after his arrival in Paris, before the revolution, he contributed a series of impassioned articles to a Moscow periodical controlled by his friends, in which he gave an eloquent and violently critical account of the conditions of life and culture in Paris, and, in particular, a devastating analysis of the degradation of the French bourgeoisie, an indictment not surpassed even in the works of his contemporaries Marx and Heine. His Moscow friends for the most part received this with disfavour: they regarded his analyses as characteristic flights of a highly rhetorical fancy, irresponsible extremism, ill suited to the needs of a misgoverned and backward country compared to which the progress of the middle classes in the West, whatever its shortcomings, was a notable step forward towards universal enlightenment. These early works – the Letters from Avenue Marigny and the Italian sketches that followed – possess qualities which became characteristic of all his writings: a rapid torrent of descriptive sentences, fresh, lucid, direct, interspersed with vivid and never irrelevant digressions, variations on the same theme in many keys, puns, neologisms, quotations real and imaginary, verbal inventions, gallicisms which irritated his nationalistic Russian friends, mordant personal observations and cascades of vivid images and incomparable epigrams, which, so far from either tiring or distracting the reader by their virtuosity, add to the force and swiftness of the narrative. The effect is one of spontaneous improvisation: exhilarating conversation by an intellectually gay and exceptionally clever and honest man endowed with singular powers of observation and expression. The mood is one of ardent political radicalism imbued with a typically aristocratic (and even more typically Muscovite) contempt for everything narrow, calculating, self-satisfied, commercial, anything cautious, petty or tending towards compromise and the juste milieu, of which Louis-Philippe and Guizot are held up to view as particularly repulsive incarnations.

  Herzen’s outlook in these essays is a combination of optimistic idealism – a vision of a socially, intellectually and morally free society, the beginnings of which, like Proudhon, Marx and Louis Blanc, he saw in the French working class; faith in the radical revolution which alone could create the conditions for their liberation; but, with this, a deep distrust (something that most of his allies did not share) of all general formulae as such, of the programmes and battle-cries of all the political parties, of the great, official historical goals – progress, liberty, equality, national unity, historic rights, human solidarity – principles and slogans in the name of which men had been, and doubtless would soon again be, violated and slaughtered, and their forms of life condemned and destroyed.

  Like the more extreme of the left-wing disciples of Hegel, in particular like the anarchist Max Stirner, Herzen saw danger in the great magnificent abstractions the mere sound of which precipitated men into violent and meaningless slaughter – new idols, it seemed to him, on whose altars human blood was to be shed tomorrow as irrationally and uselessly as the blood of the victims of yesterday or the day before, sacrificed in honour of older divinities – Church or monarchy or the feudal order or the sacred customs of the tribe, that were now discredited as obstacles to the progress of mankind.

  Together with this scepticism about the meaning and value of abstract ideals as such, in contrast with the concrete, short-term, immediate goals of identifiable living individuals – specific freedoms, reward for the day’s work – Herzen spoke of something even more disquieting, a haunting sense of the ever widening and unbridgeable gulf between the humane values of the relatively free and civilised élites (to which he knew himself to belong) and the actual needs, desires and tastes of the vast voiceless masses of mankind, barbarous enough in the West, wilder still in Russia or the plains of Asia beyond. The old world was crumbling visibly, and it deserved to fall. It would be destroyed by its victims – the slaves who cared nothing for the art and the science of their masters; and indeed, Herzen asks, why should they care? Was it not erected on their suffering and degradation? Young and vigorous, filled with a just hatred of the old world built on their fathers’ bones, the new barbarians will raze to the ground the edifices of their oppressors, and with them all that is most sublime and beautiful in Western civilisation; such a cataclysm might be not only inevitable but justified, since this civilisation, noble and valuable in the eyes of its beneficiaries, has offered nothing but suffering, a life without meaning, to the vast majority of mankind. Yet he does not pretend that this makes the prospect, to those who, like him, have tasted the riper fruits of civilisation, any less dreadful.

  It has often been asserted by both Russian and Western critics that Herzen arrived in Paris a passionate, even Utopian idealist, and that it was the failure of the revolution of 1848 which brought about his disillusionment and a new, more pessimistic realism. This is not sufficiently borne out by the evidence.8 Even in 1847, the sceptical note, in particular pessimism about the degree to which human beings can be transformed, and the still deeper scepticism about whether such changes, even if they were achieved by fearless and intelligent revolutionaries or reformers, ideal images of whom floated before the eyes of his Westernising friends in Russia, would in fact lead to a juster and freer order, or on the contrary to the rule of new master over new slaves – that ominous note is sounded before the great débâcle. Yet, despite this, he remained a convinced, ultimately optimistic revolutionary. The spectacle of the workers’ revolt and its brutal suppression in Italy and in France haunted Herzen all his life. His first-hand description of the events of 1848–9, in particular of the drowning in blood of the July revolt in Paris, is a masterpiece of ‘committed’ historical and sociological writing. So, too, are his sketches of the personalities involved in these upheavals, and his reflections upon them. Most of these essays and letters remain untranslated.

  Herzen could not and would not return to Russia. He became a Swiss citizen, and to the disasters of the revolution was added a personal tragedy – the seduction of his adored wife by the most intimate of his new friends, the radical German poet Georg Herwegh, a friend of Marx and Wagner, the ‘iron lark’ of the German revolution, as Heine half ironically called him.9 Herzen’s progressive, somewhat Shelleyan, views on love, friendship, equality of the sexes, and the irrationality of bourgeois morality were tested by this crisis and broken by it. He went almost mad with grief and jealousy: his love, his vanity, his deeper assumptions about the basis of all human relationships suffered a traumatic shock from which he was never fully to recover. He did what few others have ever done: described every detail of his own agony, every step of his altering relationship with his wife, with Herwegh and Herwegh’s wife, as they seemed to him in retrospect; he noted every communication that occurred between them, every moment of anger, despair, affection, love, hope, hatred, contempt and agonised, suicidal self-contempt. Every tone and nuance in his own moral and psychological condition is raised to high relief against the background of his public life in the world of exiles and conspirators, French, Italian, German, Russian, Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, who move on and off the stage on which he himself is always the central, self-absorbed, tragic hero. The account is not unbalanced – there is no obvious distortion – but it is wholly egocentric.

  All his life Herzen perceived the external world clearly, and in proportion, but through the medium of his own self-romanticising personality, with his own impressionable, ill-organised self at the centre of his universe. No matter how violent his torment, he retains full artistic control of the tragedy which he is living through, but also writing. It is, perhaps, this artistic egotism, which all his work exhibits, that was in part responsible both for Natalie’s suffocation and for the lack of reticence in his description of what took place: Herzen takes wholly for granted the reader’s understanding and, still more, his undivided interest in every detail of his own, the writer’s, mental and emotional life. Natalie’s letters and desperate flight to Herwegh show the measure of the increasingly destructive effect of Herzen’s self-absorbed blindness upon her frail and exalté temperament. We
know comparatively little of Natalie’s relationship with Herwegh: she may well have been physically in love with him, and he with her: the inflated literary language of the letters conceals more than it reveals; what is clear is that she felt unhappy, trapped and irresistibly attracted to her lover. If Herzen sensed this, he perceived it very dimly.

  He appropriated the feelings of those nearest him as he did the ideas of Hegel or George Sand: that is, he took what he needed, and poured it into the vehement torrent of his own experience. He gave generously, if fitfully, to others; he put his own life into them, but for all his deep and lifelong belief in individual liberty and the absolute value of personal life and personal relationships, scarcely understood or tolerated wholly independent lives by the side of his own; his description of his agony is scrupulously and bitterly detailed and accurate, never self-sparing, eloquent but not sentimental, and remorselessly self-absorbed. It is a harrowing document. He did not publish the story in full during his lifetime, but now it forms part of his memoirs.

  Self-expression – the need to say his own word – and perhaps the craving for recognition by others, by Russia, by Europe, were primary needs of Herzen’s nature. Consequently, even during this, the darkest period of his life, he continued to pour out a stream of letters and articles in various languages on political and social topics; he helped to keep Proudhon going, kept up a correspondence with Swiss radicals and Russian émigrés, read widely, made notes, conceived ideas, argued, worked unremittingly both as a publicist and as an active supporter of left-wing and revolutionary causes. After a short while Natalie returned to him in Nice, only to die in his arms. Shortly before her death a ship on which his mother and one of his children, a deaf-mute, were travelling from Marseilles sank in a storm. Their bodies were not found. Herzen’s life had reached its lowest ebb. He left Nice and the circle of Italian, French and Polish revolutionaries to many of whom he was bound by ties of warm friendship, and with his three surviving children went to England. America was too far away and, besides, seemed to him too dull. England was no less remote from the scene of his defeats, political and personal, and yet still a part of Europe. It was then the country most hospitable to political refugees, civilised, tolerant of eccentricities or indifferent to them, proud of its civil liberties and its sympathy with the victims of foreign oppression. He arrived in London in 1851.

  He and his children wandered from home to home in London and its suburbs, and there, after the death of Nicholas I had made it possible for him to leave Russia, his most intimate friend, Nikolay Ogarev, joined them. Together they set up a printing press, and began to publish a periodical in Russian called The Pole Star – the first organ wholly dedicated to uncompromising agitation against the imperial Russian regime. The earliest chapters of My Past and Thoughts appeared in its pages. The memory of the terrible years 1848–51 obsessed Herzen’s thoughts and poisoned his bloodstream: it became an inescapable psychological necessity for him to seek relief by setting down this bitter history. This was the first section of his memoirs to be written. It was an opiate against the appalling loneliness of a life lived among uninterested strangers10 while political reaction seemed to envelop the entire world, leaving no room for hope. Insensibly he was drawn into the past. He moved further and further into it and found it a source of liberty and strength.

  This is how the book which he conceived on the analogy of David Copperfield came to be composed.11 He began to write it in the last months of 1852. He wrote by fits and starts. The first three parts were probably finished by the end of 1853. In 1854 a selection which he called Prison and Exile – a title perhaps inspired by Silvio Pellico’s celebrated Le mie prigioni – was published in English. It was an immediate success; encouraged by this, he continued. By the spring of 1855 the first four parts of the work were completed; they were all published by 1857. He revised Part IV, added new chapters to it and composed Part V; he completed the bulk of Part VI by 1858. The sections dealing with his intimate life – his love and the early years of his marriage – were composed in 1857: he could not bring himself to touch upon them until then. This was followed by an interval of seven years. Independent essays such as those on Robert Owen, the actor Shchepkin, the painter Ivanov, Garibaldi (Camicia rossa), were published in London between 1860 and 1864; but these, although usually included in the memoirs, were not intended for them. The first complete edition of the first four parts appeared in 1861. The final sections – Part VIII and almost the whole of Part VII – were written, in that order, in 1865–7.

  Herzen deliberately left some sections unpublished: the most intimate details of his personal tragedy appeared posthumously – only a part of the chapter entitled ‘Oceano nox’ was printed in his lifetime. He omitted also the story of his affairs with Medvedeva in Vyatka and with the serf girl Katerina in Moscow – his confession of them to Natalie cast the first shadow over their relationship, a shadow that never lifted; he could not bear to see it in print while he lived. He suppressed, too, a chapter on ‘The German Emigrants’ which contains his unflattering comments on Marx and his followers, and some characteristically entertaining and ironical sketches of some of his old friends among the Russian radicals. He genuinely detested the practice of washing the revolutionaries’ dirty linen in public, and made it clear that he did not intend to make fun of allies for the entertainment of the common enemy. The first authoritative edition of the memoirs was compiled by Mikhail Lemke in the first complete edition of Herzen’s works, which was begun before, and completed some years after, the Russian Revolution of 1917. It has since been revised in successive Soviet editions. The fullest version is that published in the exhaustive edition of Herzen’s works, a handsome monument of Soviet scholarship.12

  The memoirs formed a vivid and broken background accompaniment to Herzen’s central activity: revolutionary journalism, to which he dedicated his life. The bulk of it is contained in the most celebrated of all Russian periodicals published abroad – The Bell (Kolokol) – edited by Herzen and Ogarev in London and then in Geneva from 1857 until 1867, with the motto (taken from Schiller) ‘Vivos voco’.13 The Bell had an immense success. It was the first systematic instrument of revolutionary propaganda directed against the Russian autocracy, written with knowledge, sincerity and mordant eloquence; it gathered round itself all that was uncowed not only in Russia and the Russian colonies abroad, but also among Poles and other oppressed nationalities. It began to penetrate into Russia by secret routes and was regularly read by high officials of State, including, it was rumoured, the Emperor himself. Herzen used the copious information that reached him in clandestine letters and personal messages, describing various misdeeds of the Russian bureaucracy, to expose specific scandals – cases of bribery, miscarriage of justice, tyranny and dishonesty by officials and influential persons. The Bell named names, offered documentary evidence, asked awkward questions and exposed hideous aspects of Russian life.

  Russian travellers visited London in order to meet the mysterious leader of the mounting opposition to the Tsar. Generals, high officials and other loyal subjects of the Empire were among the many visitors who thronged to see him, some out of curiosity, others to shake his hand, to express sympathy or admiration. He reached the peak of his fame, both political and literary, after the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War and the death of Nicholas I. The open appeal by Herzen to the new Emperor14 to free the serfs and initiate bold and radical reforms ‘from above’, and, after the first concrete steps towards this had been taken in 1858, his paean of praise to Alexander II,15 ending ‘Thou hast conquered, O Galilean’, created the illusion on both sides of the Russian frontier that a new liberal era was at last dawning, in which a degree of understanding – perhaps of actual co-operation – could be achieved between tsardom and its opponents. This state of mind did not last long. But Herzen’s credit stood very high – higher than that of any other Russian in the West: in the late 1850s and early 1860s he was the acknowledged leader of all that was generous, enlightened, c
ivilised, humane in Russia.

  More than Bakunin and even Turgenev, whose novels formed a central source of knowledge about Russia in the West, Herzen counteracted the legend, ingrained in the minds of progressive Europeans (of whom Michelet was perhaps the most representative), that Russia consisted of nothing save only the government jackboot on the one hand, and the dark, 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 own 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, ‘truly democratic’ Italians, whom he believed to possess a deep affinity with 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 hostile 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 1848, 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, Félix Pyat.