The Russian People and Socialism is a defence of the integrity of the submerged Russian masses against the charges of the great French historian, Jules Michelet: and as such has a new topical interest today.

Alexander Herzen is the greatest social thinker that Russia has ever produced and one of the most brilliant of all political journalists. From the Other Shore (here translated into English for the first time) is a collection of essays and dialogues written during the years 1847 to 1851, years of high promise and terrible disillusion. Herzen was an eye-witness of the 1848 Revolution in Paris, and this book is at once an analysis of the failure of the Revolution—equalled in brilliance only by those of Tocqueville and Marx—and Herzen’s own political testament. In it he rejects all appeals to history for infallible political guidance, all attempts to find universal social solutions, all efforts to suppress individual liberty for the sake of an abstract cause or idea. The pyrotechnic style, thought and wit make this one of the most remarkable and fascinating political books ever written.

My heart refuses to believe that that day will not come; it sinks at the thought of a parting for ever. Shall I really never see again those streets along which I used to walk so often, full of youthful dreams; those houses, so wrapped in memories; our Russian villages, our peasants, whom I used to think about with love in the very South of Italy? . . . It cannot be! . . . And yet, if it is—then I bequeath my toast to my children, and dying on alien soil, I shall preserve my faith in the future of the Russian people and bless it from the distant land of my voluntary exile.

And so farewell my friends for a long while . . . . Give me your hands, your support. For I need both. After that . . . who knows? What have we not seen of late! It may not be so far away as it may seem, that day when we shall all meet in Moscow as of old and shall fearlessly raise our glasses to the toast: ‘For Russia and sacred freedom’.

Until now we have been unpardonably modest and too conscious of our oppressive lack of rights, and have forgotten all that is good, full of hope and promise in our national life. We had to wait for a German 1 to recommend us to Europe! For shame! Will I succeed in achieving something? I do not know. I hope so.

Atlantic she has been through a state of siege, now that the prisons and the galleys are full of men persecuted for their beliefs . . . let her learn to know better a people whose youthful force she has tried in battle, in battle from which it emerged victorious; let us tell her about this mighty and still unfathomed people which in its unobtrusive way has managed to create a state of sixty millions, which has grown in such a vigorous, marvellous fashion without losing the principle of community, and which was the first to maintain this principle through the initial upheavals of national development; about a people which has somehow miraculously contrived to preserve itself under the yoke of Mongol hordes and German bureaucrats, under the barrack-room discipline of the corporal's baton, and the degrading Tartar knout; which has retained the noble features, the lively mind and the generous sweep of a rich nature beneath the yoke of serfdom, and which, in answer to the Tsar's order to educate itself, replied a hundred years later with the prodigious phenomenon of Pushkin. Let the Europeans get to know their neighbour: they only fear him, but they should know what it is that they fear.

Russians abroad have yet another task. It is really time to acquaint Europe with Russia. Europe does not know us, it knows our government, our façade—and nothing else. For this acquaintance circumstances are singularly favourable; haughty airs no longer suit Europe nor should she loftily wrap herself in the mantle of contemptuous ignorance. Das vornehme Ignorieren about Russia is out of date in Europe, now that she has experienced a bourgeois republic and the Cossacks from Algiers, now that from the Danube to the

All this seems new and strange only to us; actually there is nothing unusual about it. In every country, at the beginning of an upheaval, while thought is still feeble and material power unbridled, men of energy and devotion withdraw,' their free speech rings out from the distance and this very distance gives their words strength and authority because behind their words lie deeds and sacrifices. The mightiness of their words grows with the distance, just as the force of attraction increases in a stone dropped from a high tower. Emigration is the first symptom of approaching upheaval.

He who for more than twenty years has carried in his heart one single thought, who has suffered for it, and lived by it, and known many a prison and many a banishment, and owes it the best moments of his life, the brightest friendships, will not abandon it, will not subject it to the demands of expediency, to the geographical degree of latitude and longitude; quite the contrary: here I am more useful, here I am your uncensored voice, your free press, your chance representative.

I remain here not only because I should find it abhorrent after crossing the frontier to wear handcuffs again, but because I want to work. To sit with hands folded is possible anywhere; here I have no other task but ours .

Square. Now not only a public square, but the printed word, the professorial chair—everything has become impossible in Russia. All that remains is individual work in retirement or individual protest from afar.

We have seen, you and I, the most terrible development of imperial power. We grew up under the terror, under the black wings of the secret police, in its very claws; we were crippled by its merciless oppression; and just managed to survive. But is this enough? Is it not time to untie our hands and tongues for action, to set an example, is it not time to awaken the slumbering consciousness of the people? But can one do this if one speaks in whispers, in obscure hints, at a time when shouts and plain speech are barely heard? Brave, open acts are necessary. December the 14th 2 shook young Russia so strongly because it took place on St Isaac's

In the past the government at least felt shame before its neighbours, learnt from them. Now it feels called upon itself to act as an example to all oppressors: now it is itself the mentor.

one of the fourteen grades in the famous hierarchy. 1 Every act of power, every relation of superior to inferior, reveals a brazen shamelessness, an arrogant display of moral indifference, the insulting conviction that the individual will endure anything: triple recruitment, the law about foreign passports, flogging in the Institute of Engineers. Just as Little Russia submitted to serfdom in the eighteenth century, so in the end the whole of Russia came to believe that men could be sold and re-sold and no one, not even those who were being sold, ever asked on what legal basis this was done. With us authority feels freer, more self-confident than in Turkey or Persia, nothing restrains it, 'no past of any kind; it has repudiated its own past and is not concerned with that of Europe. It has no respect for national principles, it knows no universal culture, and it fights against the present.

Pampered authority, never meeting with any opposition, reached at times a degree of unbridled violence that has no equal in history. You can take its measure from the stories about that master of his trade, Tsar Paul. Take away the capricious, the fantastic element in Paul, and you will see that he is not original at all, that the principle that inspired him is not only the same as that of every tsar, but of every governor, every policeman, every landowner. The intoxication of arbitrary power has overcome every single

Were it not that Russia was so vast, that the alien system of power was so chaotically established, so incompetently administered, one might have said without exaggeration that no human being with any sense of his own dignity could live in Russia.

With us slavery increased with education; the State grew and improved but the individual reaped nothing from it; on the contrary, the stronger the State, the weaker the individual. European forms of administration and justice, of military and civil organization, developed with us into a kind of monstrous and inescapable despotism.

We have nothing similar. With us the individual has always been crushed, absorbed, he has never even tried to emerge. Free speech with us has always been considered insolence, independence, subversion; man was engulfed in the State, dissolved in the community. The revolution of Peter the Great replaced the obsolete squirearchy of Russia—with a European bureaucracy; everything that could be copied from the Swedish and German codes, everything that could be taken over from the free municipalities of Holland into our half-communal, half-absolutist country, was taken over; but the unwritten, the moral check on power, the instinctive recognition of the rights of man, of the rights of thought, of truth, could not be and were not imported.

Even in the worst periods of European history, we encounter some respect for the individual, some recognition of independence, some rights conceded to talent and genius. Vile as were the German rulers of that time, Spinoza was not sentenced to transportation, Lessing was not flogged or conscripted. This respect not merely for material but also for moral force, this unquestioning recognition of the individual—is one of the great human principles in European life.

I know all the answers that can be made from the point of view of romantic patriotism and formal civil responsibility, but I cannot allow these antiquated attitudes. I have outlived them, left them behind, and it is precisely against them that I am fighting. These réchauffé remnants of the Roman and Christian heritage are the greatest obstacles to the establishment of true ideas of freedom, ideas that are healthy, clear, mature. Fortunately, in Europe, custom and a long process of development partly counterbalance these absurd theories and absurd laws. The people who live here are living on a soil fertilized by two civilizations; the path traversed by their ancestors for the past two and a half thousand years was not in vain, many human virtues have developed independently of the external organization and the official order.

The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and on this alone that the true will of the people can develop. Man must respect liberty in himself, and he must esteem it in himself no less than in his neighbour, than in the entire nation. If you are convinced of that, then you will agree that to remain here is my right, my duty; it is the only protest that an individual can make amongst us; he must offer up this sacrifice to his human dignity. If you call my withdrawal an escape and will forgive me only out of your love, .this will mean that you yourselves are not wholly free.

To obey against one's convictions when there is a possibility of not obeying—is immoral. Passive obedience becomes almost impossible. I have witnessed two upheavals, I have lived too long as a free man to allow myself to be chained again; I have lived through popular disturbances, I have become accustomed to free speech and I cannot accept serfdom again, not even for the sake of suffering with you. If it had been necessary to restrain oneself for the common cause, perhaps one might have found the strength to do so; but where at this moment is our common cause? At home you have no soil on which a free man can stand. How after this can you summon us? . . . If it were to battle—yes, then we would come: but to obscure martyrdom, to sterile silence, to obedience—no, under no circumstances. Demand anything of me, but do not demand duplicity, do not force me again to play at being a loyal subject; respect the free man in me.

The consequences are no affair of mine; they are not in my power, they are rather in the power of some arbitrary whim which has gone so far as to draw a capricious circle not only round our words but round our very steps. It was in my power not to obey—and I did not obey.

This decision has cost me dear . . . you know me . . . and you will believe me. I have stifled the inner pain; I have lived through the painful struggle and I have made my decision, not like an angry youth, but like a man who has thought over what he is doing . . . how much he has to lose . . . for months I have been calculating and pondering and vacillating, and have finally sacrificed everything to:

my song and speech, and I stay among a people in whose life I am in deep sympathy only with the bitter tears of the proletariat and the desperate courage of its friends.

For the sake of this freedom of speech, I have broken, or, better still, suppressed for a while my ties of blood with the people in whom I found so much response both to the bright and to the dark side of my soul, whose song and speech are

I stay because the struggle is here , because despite the blood and tears it is here that social problems are being decided, because it is here that suffering is painful, sharp, but articulate . The struggle is open, no one hides. Woe to the vanquished, but they are not vanquished without a struggle, nor deprived of speech before they can utter a word; the violence inflicted is great, but the protest is loud; the fighters often march to the galleys, chained hand and foot, but with heads uplifted, with free speech. Where the word has not perished, neither has the deed. For the sake of this open struggle, for this free speech, this right to be heard—I stay here; for its sake I give up everything; I give up you for it, a portion of my heritage and perhaps shall give my life in the ranks of an energetic minority of ‘the persecuted but undefeated’.

You saw sadness expressed in every line of my letters; life here is very hard, venomous malignity mingles with love, bile with tears, feverish anxiety infects the whole organism, the time of former illusions and hopes has passed. I believe in nothing here, except in a handful of people, a few ideas, and the fact that one cannot arrest movement; I see the inevitable doom of old Europe and feel no pity for anything that now exists, neither the peaks of its culture nor its institutions . . . . I love nothing in this world except that which it persecutes, I respect nothing except that which it kills—and I stay . . . stay to suffer doubly, to suffer my own personal anguish and that of this world; which will perish, perhaps, to the sound of thunder and destruction towards which it is racing at full steam . . . . Why then do I stay?

Do not, I beg you, make a mistake: it is not happiness, not distraction, not rest, not even personal safety that I have found here; indeed, I do not know who could find in

An unconquerable revulsion and a strong inner voice of prophecy do not permit me to cross the frontier of Russia, especially now, when autocracy, infuriated and frightened by everything that is happening in Europe, strangles with redoubled severity every intellectual movement, and brutally cuts off sixty million souls from the rest of mankind which is gaining its freedom, deflecting the last light which falls feebly on a few of them with its black iron hand caked with the blood of Poland. No, my friends, I cannot cross the border of this kingdom of darkness, lawlessness, silent death, mysterious disappearances, gagged and tortured prisoners. I shall wait until that time when the weary rulers weakened by vain efforts and by the resistance that they have provoked, recognize something worthy of respect in the Russian man.

Our parting will last for a long time yet—perhaps for ever. At the present moment I do not wish to return—whether it will be possible later I do not know. You have been waiting for me, you are still waiting, so I must give you an explanation. If there is anyone to whom I am obliged to account for my absence, for my actions, it is certainly you, my friends.

The introduction to the Russian text consisted of a few words addressed to friends in Russia. I did not deem it necessary to repeat them in the German edition—here they are:

‘Eternal movement in the self-same circle. Eternal reiteration, eternal alternation of day and night, night and day, one drop of joy and a sea of bitter tears. My friend! What am I to live for? Or you? Or any of us? What did our forefathers live for? What will posterity live for?

‘Sometimes when unbearable sadness grips my heart, I fall on my knees and stretch out my hands to the Invisible.... No answer!—my head sinks to my breast.

‘Slowly the dense darkness was dispersed, slowly the light broke through the thick gloom. And at last the sun blazed forth; good and credulous humanitarians reasoning from triumph to triumph perceived the approaching goal of perfection and in joyful ecstasy exclaimed: “The shore!”, but suddenly the sky was overcast and the fate of mankind hidden in the storm clouds. Oh posterity! What destiny awaits thee!

Kingdoms, but some historical fragments seem to show that these people were not barbarians . . . . Kingdoms crumbled, peoples vanished, from their dust were born new tribes. They were born in twilight, in the trembling mist. They had a childhood, they learned, they grew famous. Perhaps aeons sank into eternity and more than once did the light of day break in the minds of men and more than once did night darken their souls before even the light of Egypt shone forth.

‘It seems to me now as though the ancient chronicles themselves prove the probability of this opinion. We barely know the names of the ancient Asiatic peoples and

‘Can it be that the human race in our time has attained the highest possible degree of enlightenment and must again sink back into barbarism, and again, little by little, rise therefrom, like the stone of Sisyphus, which, having been rolled up to the top of the hill, by its own weight rolls down and is again rolled up to the top by the hands of the everlasting toiler?—most melancholy prospect!

‘The downfall of learning seems to me not only possible but even inevitable, even imminent . . . . When it falls, when its magnificent edifice crumbles, when the beneficent sacred flame dies down—what then? I am appalled, my heart trembles. Suppose that a few sparks are preserved beneath the ashes; suppose that there are men who find them, and with them light their quiet solitary huts—but what will become of the world?

‘The misosophers triumph. “Here are the fruits of your enlightenment,” they say, “here the fruits of your learning; let philosophy perish.”—And the poor wretch deprived of his country, the poor wretch without home, father, son or friend, repeats: “Let it perish!” Bloodshed cannot last for ever; I am certain that the hand that wields the sword will grow weary; sulphur and saltpetre will run dry in the bowels of the earth, soon or late the thunder will cease, silence will reign—but what order of silence will it be?—And what if it be dead, cold, gloomy? . . .

‘Who could have thought of it, expected it, foreseen it? Where are the men we loved? Where is the fruit of learning and wisdom? Age of enlightenment—I know thee not; in blood and fire, amidst slaughter and destruction I know thee not.

‘It destroyed itself in the making; the eighteenth century is ending and the miserable philanthropist takes but two strides to measure his grave, to lay himself down in it with

‘Who, more than we, extolled the virtues of the eighteenth century, the light of philosophy, the softening of manners, the universal spread of public spirit, the close and friendly ties binding the peoples, the mildness of rulers? . . . Though a few black clouds still appeared on humanity's horizon, yet hope's bright ray gilded their tips . . . we considered the end of our century would mark the end of the chief ills of mankind, and thought to see in it the fusion of theory and practice, of thought and action . . . where now is this most comforting system?

In spite of this charming admission, the general consensus of opinion, the abiding impression went, if anything, against me. Does not this feeling of irritation indicate the imminence of danger, fear of the future, the desire to conceal one's weakness, a peevish, petrified old age ? . . . But where there is danger there is hope! It is the peculiar destiny of the Russians to see further than their neighbours, to see in darker colours and to express their opinions boldly—Russians, those ‘mutes’ as Michelet once called them.

In 1852 I met in London the most sharp-witted of my opponents, Solger 1 ; he was packing in order to leave for America straight away; in Europe, it seemed, there was nothing for him to do . ‘Circumstances seem to have convinced you,’ I remarked, ‘that I was not altogether mistaken?’ ‘I didn't need all that,’ replied Solger, laughing amiably, ‘to realize that I was writing sheer nonsense at the time.’

I was accused of preaching despondency, of having no knowledge of the people, of dépit amoureux towards the Revolution, of lack of respect for democracy, for the masses, for Europe . . . .

There is much in it that is no longer new. Five terrible years have taught something to the most stubborn, the most unrepentant sinners of our shore. In the early part of 1850 my book made a great stir in Germany; it was furiously praised and abused, and while there appeared more than flattering reviews by such men as Julius Froebel, 2 Jacoby, 3 Falmereier, 4 other talented and conscientious writers angrily attacked it.

Vom Andern Ufer is my first book published in the West; the articles that compose it were written in Russian in 1848 and 1849. I dictated them myself, in German, to a young writer, F. Kapp. 1

I have added three articles published in journals and intended for the second edition, which the German censorship banned; these three articles are Epilogue , Omnia mea mecum porto , and Donoso-Cortes . I have put them in place of a short article on Russia written for foreigners. A. I. H.

The religion of the coming revolution is the only one that I bequeath to you. It has no paradise to offer, no rewards, except your own awareness, except conscience . . . . When the time comes go and preach it amongst us at home ; my language was once loved there and perhaps they will remember me.

We do not build, we destroy; we do not proclaim a new revelation, we eliminate the old lie. Modern man, that melancholy Pontifex Maximus , only builds a bridge—it will be for the unknown man of the future to pass over it. You may be there to see him . . . . But do not, I beg, remain on this shore . . . . Better to perish with the revolution than to seek refuge in the almshouse of reaction.

Do not look for solutions in this book—there are none; in general modern man has no solutions. What is solved is finished, and the coming upheaval is only beginning.

In your life there will be other questions, other conflicts . . . there will be no lack of toil and suffering. You are only fifteen, and already have experienced some terrible shocks.

I do not wish to deceive you; you must know the truth as I know it; may you enter into this truth not through agonizing error and crushing disappointment, but simply as an inheritance.

I dedicate this book to you, because I have never written, and probably shall never write, anything better, because I love this book as a monument to a struggle in which I have sacrificed much, but not the courage of knowledge; and because, ultimately, I have no fear whatever of putting into your young hands this, at times insolent, protest of an independent individual against an obsolete, slavish and spurious set of ideas, against absurd idols, which belong to another age and which linger on meaninglessly among us, a nuisance to some, a terror to others.

Three articles, ‘The Romantic Exile’ by V. S. Pritchett ( The Listener , May 1946), ‘Alexander Herzen’ ( The Times Literary Supplement , August 2nd, 1947) and ‘Herzen's “Dantean” Period’ by F. Friedeberg-Seeley ( Slavonic & East European Review , London, Vol. 32, No. 79, 1954) are of interest. Of French studies, those by Benôit Hepner in Michel Bakounine et le Panslavisme Révolutionnaire (Paris 1950), and A. Koyré in La Pensée Philosophique Russe au Dix-neuvième Siècle (Paris 1950), and the two monographs of R. Labry, Alexandre Ivanovič Herzen (Paris 1928) and Herzen et Proudhon (Paris 1928) are much the best. There is material of interest also in E. Haumant, La Culture Française en Russie (1700-1900) (Paris 1910) and in M. Leroy, Les Précurseurs Français du Socialisme (Paris 1933). Studies of Herzen in German and Italian, e.g. those by 0. von Sperber in Die Sozialpolitischen Ideen Alexander Herzens (Leipzig 1894), von Schelting in Russland und Europa (Berne 1948), and Wolfgango Giusti in ‘A. I. Herzen e i suoi rapporti con Mazzini e l’Italia’ ( L’Europa Orientale , Rome 1935-6) and in Due Secoli di Pensiero Politico Russo (Florence 1943) may also be read with profit. There is much important original work on Herzen and his period in Franco Venturi's excellent Il Populismo Russo (Turin 1952) which is in course of translation. Unfortunately, none of these, save the last, gives any idea of the rich and interesting material, published and unpublished, which exists in Russia.

An ironical account of Herzen's personal life during the period to which the two essays in this volume belong, is provided in Mr E. H. Carr's learned and most readable biographical sketch, The Romantic Exiles (London 1933).

The monumental edition of the collected works and letters of Herzen produced by M. K. Lemke, Polnoye Sobraniye Sochineniy i Pisem (St Petersburg-Petrograd-Petersburg 1915-25), has not yet been superseded, although much unpublished manuscript and other material has since come to light, both within the Soviet Union and outside its borders. The Soviet Academy of Sciences is preparing a definitive edition in thirty volumes, of which five have so far appeared. For those who read Russian the most useful guide to Herzen is the full bibliography compiled by A. Shtraikh, which supersedes all previous catalogues. Herzen's greatest work, his autobiography, Byloye i Dumy (Past and Reflections) is available in English in the complete translation by Mrs Constance Garnett under the title My Past and Thoughts (London 1924), and its first part in the translation by J. D. Duff ( The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen , Pts. I and II, New Haven, U.S.A. 1923) which is among the best renderings of Russian prose into English to be found anywhere. Apart from The Russian People and Socialism , none of Herzen's other major works appear to have been translated into English. There exists a German translation of the autobiography under the title Erinnerungen von Alexander Herzen (trans. Dr 0. Buek, Berlin 1907); in French there is a poor rendering of its early portions ( Mèmoires de A. Herzen , 1822-40, trans. H. Delaveau, Paris 1860-2), and more recently the first volume has appeared of a ‘traduction et adaptation du russe’ entitled Memoirs d’un Proscrit , trans, Suzanne Engelson, introd. S. Karcewski (Geneva 1946).

Lemke had not seen the manuscript, and, as with From the Other Shore , restored the text from the printed editions.

had published his ‘Legendes democratiques’, and Herzen's essay is a reply to one of them, ‘Pologne et Russie. Légende de Kosciusko’ (August 28th-September 17th, 1851). The first full edition was printed at the Imprimerie Canis Frères, Nice, for A. Franck, Librarie Etrangère, Paris, in 1852, under the title Le Peuple russe et le Socialisme. Lettre à Monsieur J. Michelet, Professeur au Collège de France ; it was signed ‘Iscander (A. Herzen)’. It was republished, again in French, in Jersey in 1855. In that same year an English translation appeared in W. J. Linton's periodical The English Republic under the title ‘The Russian People and their Socialism, a Letter to J. Michelet’. Linton then reprinted this translation as a separate pamphlet at the private press he had established at Brantwood, Coniston, Windermere (later Ruskin's house). The first Russian edition appeared in London (Trübner, 1858); to it Herzen contributed an introduction explaining that the first (French) edition circulated only in Piedmont and Switzerland, because the French police seized the entire edition at Marseilles and ‘in a strange fit of absent-mindedness failed to return it’. From then onwards The Russian People and Socialism appears in all the collected editions of Herzen's works. It is also included in some versions of the memoirs (including Mrs Garnett's translation). As in the case of From the Other Shore , the best version is to be found in M. K. Lemke's standard edition (Vol. VI, Petersburg 1919) and, here again, all the Tsarist censor's excisions are added as a separate list at the end of the volume.

The Russian People and Socialism was published originally in a much shorter form, under the title ‘Le Peuple Russe’ in L’Avénement du Peuple (Paris, No. 63, November 19th, 1851), and was signed by Herzen. In this journal Michelet

There are some interesting articles relating to this book in the various numbers of Kolatschek's periodical Deutsche Monatschrift für Politik, Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben for 1850. It is to these that Herzen refers in the introduction. Research among Herzen's manuscripts has so far failed to reveal the original manuscript of the work, although a copy annotated in Herzen's own hand exists in Moscow.

( New Yorker Abend Zeitung , New York, 1850: Deutsche Monatschrift für Politik, Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben , Stuttgart, December 1850), ‘Omnia Mea Mecum Porto’ ( Deutsche Monatschrift , 1850), and ‘Donoso-Cortes’ ( Le Voix du Peuple , Paris, No. 167, March 18th, 1850, signed ‘Is.....r, Docteur en théologie’). Large parts of ‘After the Storm’ are incorporated in Volume IV of Herzen's memoirs. The most authoritative text to date is that contained in M. K. Lemke's standard edition of Herzen's works. It appears in Volume V (dated St Petersburg 1915). As the Tsarist censorship was in force at this period, Lemke added a list of excised passages after the February Revolution of 1917, when restrictions were lifted. The best Soviet edition 1 (an edition in two volumes of Herzen's philosophical works published under the imprint of Ogiz, Moscow, 1946) virtually reproduces Lemke's text with the excisions restored. There are minor variations between the standard (Lemke) edition and the various editions published outside Russia before the Revolution, and in the Soviet Union after it. The translator has, in the present volume, followed the Soviet 1946 edition.

The German edition contained ‘Before the Storm’, ‘Vixerunt’, ‘Consolatio’, ‘After the Storm’ and ‘57th Anniversary of the One, Indivisible Republic’, as well as two Open Letters, the first addressed to the German poet Georg Herwegh, the second to Mazzini, which did not reappear in Russian editions (they were later published separately) on the grounds that they were intended primarily for foreigners. Accordingly the first complete edition is the Russian edition of 1855, incorporating some articles previously printed elsewhere, i.e. ‘Epilogue 1849’

Front the Other Shore in its present form consists mainly of articles written by Alexander Herzen in Russian in 1848-9, in Paris, for the benefit of his friends in Moscow to whom he sent them in successive parts. The first edition appeared in German in 1850 under the title of Vom Anderen Ufer , published by Hoffman und Campe, Hamburg. No author's name is given, though on the title-page the book is said to be ‘aus dem Russischen Manuskript’; one of the letters it contains is signed ‘Barbaren’, the other ‘Ein Russe’. The second edition appeared in Russian under the title S Togo Berega , in London in 1855; it was published by Herzen himself under his well-known pseudonym ‘Iskander’ (the Arabic version of ‘Alexander’). The third edition, identical with the second, appeared also in London in Russian, in 1858. Apart from a lithographed version published clandestinely in Moscow in the ’50s, the next authoritative edition is the French translation, De l’Antre Rive , prepared by Herzen's son Alexander, and published in Geneva in 1870.

that Dostoevsky recognized him as a poet. 1 Essayist, agitator, publicist, revolutionary, philosopher, novelist, author of at least one work of genius, Herzen's position in the history not merely of Russian literature, but of Russia itself (as his friend, the critic Belinsky had prophesied when they were both still in their early thirties)—is to-day unique and secure. But he deserves to be read beyond the borders of Russia, if only for his moral and political ideas. Many of his predictions were falsified by events, and his practical remedies, since they were not applied, can easily be written off as utopian. But his ideas remain as fresh and arresting to-day as when they were first uttered by him a hundred years ago, and their relevance to our times seems even greater than to his own. Isaiah Berlin

Herzen never forgot, as some of his most inspired fellow revolutionaries often did, that actual human beings, and specific problems can be lost sight of in the midst of statistical generalizations. In his discussion of what men live by, there occurs the smallest proportion of abstraction and generalization, and the highest proportion of vivid, three-dimensional, ‘rounded’ perception of actual character, authentic human beings with real needs, seeking attainable human ends, set in circumstances which can be visualized. And in the course of his analyses he uses the Russian language with a virtuosity to which no translation is ever likely to do complete justice. It was not for nothing

without fanaticism, a man ready for violent change, never in the name of abstract principles, but only of actual misery and injustice, of concrete conditions so bad that men were morally not permitted—and knew that they were not permitted—to let them exist. Starting from this kind of clear-sighted empiricism, which was influenced by the imaginative sweep of Hegel and rejected his metaphysical dogmas, Herzen gave expression to theses original enough to be rediscovered only in our own time: that the great traditional problems which perennially agitate men's minds have no general solutions; that all genuine questions are of necessity specific, intelligible only in specific contexts; that general problems, such as ‘What is the end (or the meaning) of life?’, or ‘What makes all events in nature occur as they do?’ or ‘What is the pattern of human history?’ are not answerable in principle, not because they are too difficult for our poor finite intellects, but because the questions themselves are misconceived, because ends, patterns, meanings, causes, differ with the situation and the outlook and needs of the questioner, and can be correctly and clearly formulated only if these are understood. It is Herzen's grasp of this fact that made him the forerunner of much twentieth-century thought, and marks him as a man with a quality akin to philosophical genius.

him by Lenin, this enemy of authority, who was, perhaps, the most devastating, as he certainly was the most understanding, opponent of the many Communisms of his day—the enemy of all dogma, who declared that solus populi was as vicious a cry as lèse majesté , that no ideal at which one was forbidden to smile was worth anything at all—it is a great irony that Herzen, who detested Marx and the ‘Marxids’ (as he called them) both personally and politically, and was denounced most bitterly by them, should, of all men, find himself canonized in his native country to-day as one of the sacrosanct founders of the new way of life. The ‘nihilists’ of the sixties and the socialist writers of a later date who attack him for his liberal inclinations, are a good deal more honest and consistent. Their suspicions turned out to be valid enough. For Herzen does like the style and colour of free human beings ; best of all he likes fire, originality, aesthetic feeling, even when it is found in oligarchies and aristocracies. He has no love for the mass of the oppressed as such, only indignation and a desire for justice. The qualities that he loves best are those which they too seldom possess—imagination, spontaneity, humanity, civilized feelings, natural generosity, courage, wide horizons, instinctive knowledge of what individual freedom is, and hatred of all forms of slavery or arbitrary rule, or human humiliation and degradation. And he extols these virtues wherever he finds them, even in the camp of the oppressors; and rejects political formulae and generalizations however deeply sanctified by the martyrdom of fighters for a cause which he called his own. He declares over and over again that words and ideas offer no substitute for experience, that life teems with exceptions, and upsets the best made rules and systems. But in his case this attitude led not to detachment or quietism—to the tolerant conservatism of a Hume or a Bagehot—but was allied to an impatient, passionate, rebellious temperament, which made him the rarest of characters, a revolutionary

On the whole, it is Herzen's totalitarian opponents both of the Right and of the Left that have won. And it is a singular curiosity of history (of a kind which Herzen himself delighted to describe with incomparable malice and gaiety) that, on the strength of one or two pious references to

Herzen struck impartially in all directions, and so was duly condemned by both sides: by the right wing as a subverter of Church and State; by the left, particularly by the new young revolutionaries in Russia, as a self-indulgent sceptic, too rich, too civilized, too elegant, too much a gentleman, too comfortably established in the West to sympathize with the harsh realities of the Russian situation, and dangerous, too, because prone to sound a note of disillusion, even of cynicism, and so to weaken the sinews of the revolution—liable to become ironical and, worse still, entertaining, at a time when serious men must decide to commit themselves to one side or the other without so much fastidious regard to their private consciences and scruples. Herzen replied by saying that organized hooliganism and nihilism solved nothing; and in one of his last writings drew his own vignette of the ‘new men’: ‘The new generation will say to the old: “You were hypocrites, we are cynics; you spoke like moralists, we shall speak like scoundrels; you were civil to your superiors, rude to your inferiors; we shall be rude to everyone. You bowed without feeling respect, we shall push and jostle and make no apologies.” ’

world. True, the peasant commune had not been sufficient to save Russia from the nightmare of Byzantium, or the Tartar yoke, or the big stick of German officialdom, or the Czar's knout; but armed with Western scientific techniques, the unbroken Russian moujik will yet teach the world a great lesson in social organization. Russian populism, whether sentimental or realistic, owes more to the ungrounded optimism with which Herzen comforted himself than to any other single source.

The clearest exposition of Herzen's hopes and fears for his country is contained in the open letter, published in this volume, addressed to the celebrated French historian, Jules Michelet. A friend of the great poet Mickiewicz and of his fellow exiles from Poland, ‘the martyr of Europe’, the greatest of all the victims of Russian oppression, Michelet had written passionately denouncing the Russians as inhuman savages unfit to associate with European nations. Herzen replied temperately, with genuine sympathy for the Poles, and expounded, in answer to Michelet, some of those optimistic, and indeed utopian, notions on which as he grew progressively more pessimistic about the prospects of the Western world, he had fixed his hopes. He saw salvation in the communal organization of the Russian peasants, and wrote eloquent pages about the generous and spontaneous Russian character uncontaminated by the corroding doubts and moral squalor of the Western world in decline. He had somehow persuaded himself that the admirable Russian qualities would of themselves suffice to solve the ‘greatest problem of the century’—how to reconcile the claims of individual liberty with the demands of an inevitably more and more centralized authority, how to preserve personal life, without ‘atomizing’ society, the central dilemma which ‘the Western world had thus far failed to solve’. Collectivized production together with the preservation of the eights and freedom of individual persons—rights and freedoms for which neither Marx nor Cabet, nor Louis Blanc had shown the least sympathy—that is the answer with which the Russian peasant will astonish the

‘bloodstained sword’ of the ruling class, he does so not out of romantic despair, but with a positive purpose, because he thinks that knowledge, reason, will-power, courage, can avert the danger, and alter the course of mankind. It may, of course, be too late; Europe may well be going under; must Russia, too, be submerged in the tidal wave?

in the Western tradition (and, despite his paeans to the Russian peasant, Herzen's populism, like Tolstoy's, derives from Rousseau rather than native soil), he is enlightened and sceptical. He belongs to the tradition of Erasmus and Montaigne, Bayle and Fontenelle, Voltaire and Constant, Humboldt and the English philosophic radicals, of all those who protest against despotism wherever they find it, not merely in the oppression of priests or kings or dictators, but in the dehumanizing effect of those vast cosmologies which minimize the role of the individual, curb his freedom, repress his desire for self-expression, and order him to humble himself before the great laws and institutions of the universe, immovable, omnipotent and everlasting, in whose sight the sum of human endeavour is but a speck of dust. All such systems seemed to Herzen equally spurious. In From the Other Shore he attacks the meanness and enviousness of the bourgeoisie which crushes everything original, independent or open, as he attacks clerical or military reaction, or the hatred of freedom and barbarous brutality of the masses. He has a sense of impending doom no less vividly than Marx or Burckhardt, but, whereas in both Marx and other Hegelian visionaries there is an unmistakable note of sardonic joy in the very thought of vast and destructive powers unchained against the bad old world, Herzen is free from this desire to prostrate himself before the mere spectacle of power and vengeance; he is free from contempt for or hatred of weakness as such, and from the romantic pessimism which is at the heart of the nihilism and fascism that was to come. If communism—the revolt of the masses—is ever allowed to sweep across Europe, it will be ‘dreadful, bloody, unjust, swift’, and, in the name of the blood and tears of the oppressed, mow down all that civilized men hold dear. But, unlike the apocalyptic prophets of his time, Herzen thinks this cataclysm neither inevitable nor glorious. When he warns his friends against the ‘Phrygian cap’ or the red flag of the masses as being no less murderous than the

Inhabitants of the twentieth century scarcely need to be reminded of the tyranny of the great altruistic systems; of liberators who crush, of ‘the arithmetical pantheism of universal suffrage’ and ‘superstitious faith in republics’ on the one hand, or the brutal arrogance of minorities on the other. Herzen, however, was writing a century ago, in a time of mounting democratic eloquence, when the enemy was cold-hearted individualism, or clerical and dynastic despotism, and against them there rose the vast, visionary utopias of the socialists and the catholics and the Hegelians and the positivists and many another among the great metaphysical and religious system builders of the nineteenth century. This was the dominant current, and Herzen resisted it both intellectually and emotionally, because it seemed to him to threaten individual liberty. As a thinker

it is very independent. Herzen attacked with particular indignation those who appealed to general principles to justify savage cruelties and defended the slaughter of thousands to-day by the promise that millions would thereby be made happy in some invisible future, condoning unheard-of miseries and injustices in the name of some overwhelming but remote felicity. This attitude Herzen regards as nothing but a pernicious delusion, perhaps a deliberate deception; for the distant ends may never be realized, while the agonies and sufferings and crimes of the present remain only too real; and since we know so little of the future, and possess no means of accurate prediction, to affirm the opposite and seek to condone the effects of our brutal acts by holding out such hollow promises, is either lunacy or fraud. We cannot tell whether the millions will ever achieve the happy fate we have so confidently guaranteed to them; but what we do know is that thousands will perish, unheard, to-day. Distant ends are for Herzen not ends at all, but a monstrous delusion—ends must be closer at hand, ‘the labourer's daily wage, or pleasure in the work performed’.

Herzen rejected this as nothing but a sadistic mythology peculiar to the Germans, possessing no moral justification, founded on no empirical evidence. He believed that morality was not a fixed, objective, eternal code, a set of immutable commandments which human beings were merely required to discern and obey, whether they were ordained by a personal deity or were found in ‘nature’ or ‘the logic of history’. He maintained that man invents his own morality; that, animated by that egoism without which there is no vitality and no creative activity, man is responsible for his own choices, and cannot plead the alibi of either nature or history for failing even to try to bring about that which he considers, for whatever reason, to be good, or just, or delightful, or beautiful, or true. This denial on his part that it was, in principle, possible to formulate general and eternal moral rules, made without a trace of Byronic self-dramatization or Nietzschean hyperbole, is a doctrine that is not often encountered in the nineteenth century; indeed, in its full extent, not till well into our own, where it forms a bridge between positivists endowed with moral imagination and existentialists who have something genuinely intelligible to say. It hits both right and left: against romantic historians, against Hegel, and to some degree against Kant, against utilitarians and against supermen, against Tolstoy and against the religion of art, against ‘scientific’ and ‘evolutionary’ ethics, against all the churches. It is empirical and naturalistic, recognizes values that are absolute for those who hold them, as well as change, and is overawed neither by determinism nor by socialism. And

both as interpreted by the reactionary Right and by the revolutionary Left; and indeed has formed the content of much subsequent German thought and art, with its recurrent emphasis upon the supreme value of the death and transfiguration, if need be, of entire peoples and civilizations in wars and revolutions and other forms of terrible, but inevitable, and therefore sacred, cataclysm.

and historical reasons for them; to consider the manner and the causes of the betrayal of the revolution by its principal supporters; to expose the emptiness and the confusions of the social and political programmes themselves—and to trace this to specific fears, muddles and evasions on the part of those high-minded but craven liberals who ‘at the same time undermine the old order and cling to it, light the fuse and try to stop the explosion’. It is, in the main, a frontal attack upon the doctrine at that time preached by almost every left-wing orator in Europe (with the notable exception of Proudhon and a handful of anarchists to whom no one listened), about the sacred human duty of offering up oneself—or others—upon the altar of some great moral or political cause—some absolute principle or ‘collective noun’ capable of stirring strong emotion, like Nationality, or Democracy, or Equality, or Humanity, or Progress. For Herzen these are merely modern versions of ancient religions which demanded human sacrifice, faiths which spring from some irrational belief (rooted in theology or metaphysics) in the existence of vast and menacing powers, once the objects of blind religious worship, then, with the decay of primitive faith, degraded to becoming terms of political rhetoric. The dogmas of such religions declare that mere invocation of certain formulae, certain symbols, render what would normally be regarded as crimes or lunacies—murder, torture, the humiliation of defenceless human bodies—not only permissible, but often laudable. Against this Herzen advances his own positive beliefs: that man is, within narrow, but discernible, limits, free; that he is neither the impotent plaything of natural forces, nor a trivial unit in a uniform mass of historical raw material intended by some unknown deity for consumption by the great historical process—the Hegelian ‘slaughter-bench of history’—and consequently dedicated to self-immolation that thereby the march of reason might be rendered more glorious. This is the doctrine at the heart of German historical romanticism

From the Other Shore deals with the débâcle of 1848 neither in the detached and ironical mood of Tocqueville's celebrated memoir, nor as an application of a specific theory of history to contemporary events like the two essays on the same theme by Karl Marx. Herzen wrote neither to justify individuals and parties, nor to demonstrate a specific philosophy of history. But he resembled Marx and Tocqueville in that he, too, sought to describe the situation, to examine the views and ambitions and desires of the various parties and individuals and classes, and the social

More important than these historical sketches is the long essay which Herzen entitled From the Other Shore . 1 This is an attempt to assess the consequences and point the moral of the final failure of the European revolutions of 1848. As a piece of writing this essay exhibits, at any rate in the original, that combination of acuteness, irony, imagination, moral distinction, fiery, often poetical, eloquence, and penetrating intellectual force combined with an inner elegance of style and feeling, which forms the peculiar quality of Herzen's personality as a writer. It is designed as a post mortem on the liberal and democratic doctrines—and phraseology—which had suffered shipwreck in the failure of the revolution, and contains ethical and political ideas which are of interest not simply as scattered pensées , but as an expression of a moral and social philosophy of arresting originality, possessing affinities with views fully articulated only in our own time.

general analyses of the political and social scene of the West just before and during the revolution, anywhere to be found. He continued to observe, record and analyse public and private life in France, in England, in Russia, unsystematically, in articles and improvisations, all his life. At once brilliantly entertaining and permanently valuable, these fragments are scattered in the twenty-two volumes of his posthumously published works, and still form a unique account of the life of Europe in the middle years of the last century.

century. The book has no formal design but consists of a succession of episodes connected by a loose chronological sequence, in the course of which Herzen records private and public experiences, draws vignettes of personalities and predicaments, offers analyses of present and future social and political conditions both in Europe and Russia, together with scattered personal observations, fragments of a diary, epigrams, historical and psychological sketches, travel notes, accounts of the impact upon him, or of the role played by political, historical ideas, vivid and exact descriptions of his feelings, of incidents in his life, encounters, conversations, confessions, entertaining and memorable sketches of the characteristics, eccentricities, and episodes in the lives of various groups of émigrés in London and elsewhere, and of their reactions to one another and to their English hosts—all this vast and apparently heterogeneous amalgam held together by a gift for narrative and descriptive writing which, in its own kind, has never been excelled. Past and Reflections is an autobiography of the first order of genius, and remains pre-eminent even in the nineteenth century which was exceedingly rich in this genre . It has been translated into several languages, but it is only in the author's native land that it is recognized as a major work, comparable in quality and scope with War and Peace . Besides this great classic, Herzen, during twenty years of uninterrupted activity as a publicist — the voice of free Russia abroad, calling for revolution — poured out a mass of articles, letters, essays, proclamations, the best of which are original masterpieces both of journalism and of art. He was one of the most perspicacious observers of the European scene in the nineteenth century — in this respect only Marx and Tocqueville are comparable to him — and the Letters from France and Italy (he called an earlier version Letters from Avenue Marigny ) which he sent in instalments to his friends in Moscow, to be printed in the radical Russian Journal, The Contemporary , contain the best

Early in his London period he began his celebrated autobiography or biographical memoirs — The Past and Reflections , on which his fame as a writer ultimately rests. This work is a literary and political masterpiece, worthy to stand beside the great Russian novels of the nineteenth

English, he scarcely met them. He paid a visit to the aged and senile Owen; he corresponded with Carlyle; he respected Mill. But, on the whole, no attention was paid to him in England, and he responded with mingled admiration and dislike for his hosts. His warmest friendships remained those of his early years, with his Russian friends and contemporaries — first and foremost with the poet Ogaryov, with whom he set up house in the ’5os, and with Bakunin, who had escaped from his Siberian exile, and whom, in the ’6os, he viewed, as before, with a mixture of irritation and indulgence. He delighted in the stream of Russian visitors who came to see him — writers and journalists, liberal aristocrats with a taste for taking political risks, old Slavophil opponents, vehement young radicals who thought him a useless relic of a previous epoch, dissident Orthodox priests, university professors, old acquaintances of all sorts, whom his growing prestige drew towards what had in fact become the official centre of the opposition to the Russian government. Herzen became a European celebrity, and The Bell , which specialized in exposing specific abuses and in naming names, in the heyday of its fame — the late '5os and early '6os — exercised a unique influence even in official circles in St Petersburg. After the suppression of the Polish Revolution in 1863, its influence — it had supported the Poles in the face of almost united patriotic indignation in Russia — began to fall precipitately. After lingering in a desultory manner in London, where he lived intermittently and not too happily with Ogaryov's gifted and neurasthenic wife, Herzen travelled in Italy and Switzerland, and died in Paris on January 21st, 1870. He is buried in Nice and his statue stands above his tomb.

Herzen's house — or houses, for he moved from one to another constantly — became a place of pilgrimage for the radical exiles of many lands, particularly Poles, with whom he was one of the few Russians to remain on warm terms all his life, and Italians, to whom he early lost his heart. His attitude to Frenchmen was more reserved. The solemnity, the rhetoric, the monomania of the ci-devant tribunes of the people and their entourage offered too much material for his highly developed sense of the ridiculous. He found the mystical Hungarian worship of Kossuth more bizarre than awe-inspiring; the Germans, in particular Karl Marx and his friends, he found unbearable. As for the

stranger falls in love with the happily married wife of a man who trusts him, and duly destroys himself and his friends. Herzen perceived this analogy himself and rejected it with indignation. His ‘superfluous’ hero Bel’tov was at least capable of moral agony and heroic martyrdom, whereas Herwegh now seemed to him a contemptible philistine and scoundrel, married to an equally repulsive wife. Herzen set down the details of the entire episode with a self-revealing candour and painful precision, oddly unexpected in so proud and sensitive a man. Natalie, betrayed by her lover, returned to her husband, to die in his arms a year later. Blow followed blow. Herzen's mother and one of his sons were drowned in a tempest off Genoa. The revolution in Europe collapsed ignominiously in one country after another. In a state of acute personal and political misery, Herzen left France and settled in the free but, to him, bleak and chilly atmosphere of England. He lived in and near London intermittently until the middle ’6os. In London he established his own ‘free’ printing press, and in the ’5os began to publish two periodicals in Russian, The Polar Star (the first issue appeared in 1855) and The Bell (in 1857) which marked the birth of systematic revolutionary agitation — and conspiracy — by Russian exiles against the Czarist régime.

Germany and France the travellers reached the French capital. In Paris Herzen plunged headlong into the great ferment of ideas and emotions in which the political émigrés, gathered there from every European country, lived their agitated lives. The arresting quality of his mind and personality made an impression even in that extraordinary assembly of talent and genius; he was, with Bakunin, almost the first denizen of the barbarous and frightening Russian Empire to be recognized as an equal by the political thinkers of the fabled West — as an equal intellectually, and not, like other liberal travellers from Russia, as a gifted and agreeable intellectual tourist, or an indolent and curious passer-by. A new revolution was clearly gathering in Europe and Herzen was caught in its mounting tide. During 1848-9 he travelled in Switzerland, Savoy and Italy, and his description of the stirring events which he witnessed in Rome and Paris during the annus mirabilis are a masterpiece of acute observation and literary talent. He does not seek to conceal his sympathies: he detests kings and priests, soldiers and policemen, bankers, bourgeois politicians, authors of appeals to good sense and order; he idealizes the ‘blue blouses’ — the workers of Paris — and pays a glowing tribute to the noble and simple-hearted plebeian masses in Rome ; he is for republicans, for revolutionaries, for the triumvirs of Rome, for Garibaldi, for the leader of the Roman populace whom he calls Cicerovacchio, for Saffi and Mazzini. He speaks with affection and irony about his friend Bakunin, the greatest of Russian political agitators, invaluable on the first day of a revolution, disastrous on the second; he admires and likes Proudhon, Michelet, James Fazy; his most intimate friends are the revolutionary German poet, Wagner's friend, Georg Herwegh, and Herwegh's wife. By a bitter irony of circumstance the relationship between himself, his wife and first cousin Natalie, and Herwegh, began more and more to resemble the plot of his own Who is to Blame? , in which a fascinating

On his father's death in the spring of 1846, Herzen, now financially secure, asked himself what career he was to pursue. He was ambitious and knew this; he wished to make his mark in the world, to build himself a monument. His spectacular failure to be a model government official had shown him plainly that there was no room in Russia for a high-spirited, gifted, violently liberty-loving, romantically inclined aristocratic young man who wished to enter the field of public activity. In the winter of 1847, taking with him his wife, his mother and his entire household, he left for Paris. He never saw Russia again. After slowly crossing

As for Herzen's novels and stories, they are typical radical denunciations of conventional morality and social oppression, written under the influence of Schiller, the French romantics, George Sand, and the rest of the ‘literature of protest’ of the period. His best novel, Who is to Blame? , deals with a situation common enough at that time — of a rich and unhappy young Russian landowner — the ‘superfluous man’ — vainly struggling against his environment, a figure to become celebrated later in the novels of Herzen's contemporaries, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, but especially Turgenev — the prototype of many a Russian Hamlet, too idealistic and too honest to accept the squalor and the lies of conventional society, too weak and too civilized to work effectively for their destruction, and consequently displaced from his proper function and doomed to poison his own life and the lives of others by neurotic behaviour induced by the vices of a society which sins against the moral ideals which the author holds dear — either irremediably corrupt, or still capable of regeneration, according to the author's social or religious beliefs.

severer towards the amateurs who are terrified by the prospect of losing their own unique individuality in preoccupation with scholarly pursuits, than to the professionals who see nothing, and cling timorously to their own minute specialized field.

singular combination of generous moral idealism and a biting, intolerant, often highly destructive, ironical humour. He found himself politically suspect comparatively early in his university career, probably for discussing and supporting left-wing social views, and his subsequent career in government service was broken by two periods of exile, in each case for entertaining ‘dangerous’ ideas. Both in exile and in Moscow and St Petersburg he wrote, and occasionally published, essays, short stories and novels, imbued with that spirit of violent protest against the political and social environment of his time which in varying degrees characterized all the revolté young intellectuals in Russia during the reign of Nicholas I, and in particular his friends Turgenev, Bakunin, Stankevich, Granovsky, Belinsky, Ogaryov and other members of the remarkable group of young radicals who created the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. Herzen's early essays are very typical of the preoccupations of the time: they deal with historical and philosophical topics — the ‘new’ French sociological school of historians (he actually translated Augustin Thierry's Merovingian Stories ), the nationalism of the Slavophils, distinctions in subject and method between the various arts and sciences. There are semi-Hegelian disquisitions on the true vocation of man in the nineteenth century and on the relations of nature to history; fragments of autobiography; an elegant and amusing account of the difference between the spirit of Petersburg and that of Moscow; and finally a lengthy dissertation on the rival dangers of dilettantism and pedantry. The last of these essays is perhaps the acutest and best written. Herzen draws an entertaining and very telling contrast between easily excited but superficial amateurs who view facts through a telescope and do not see the trees for the wood, as against the microscopic pedantry of professional scholars, happy victims of the worst German academic models. He enjoys himself equally at the expense of both these failures of perspective, but, on the whole, is

Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen was born in his father's house in Moscow on April 6th, 1812, a few months before Napoleon occupied the city; he died in Paris on January 21st, 1870, during the last days of the Second Empire. His father, Ivan Alekseyevich Yakovlev, came of an ancient, wealthy and aristocratic Moscow family. During his travels abroad he met Luisa Haag, the daughter of a minor official in Württemberg, and returned to Moscow with her. He established her as mistress of his household, but, perhaps for reasons of social disparity, did not marry her. Her son Alexander, did not inherit his father's name, and was called Herzen almost as if to mark the circumstances of his birth. He seems to have been treated in every other respect as his father's true son and heir: he received the normal education of a well-born young Russian of those days, and after a succession of private tutors, among whom he remembered best a French émigré with crypto-Jacobin views, and a Russian student of mildly radical leanings, he entered Moscow University in 1829, and attended lectures on philosophy, literature and the natural sciences or what went under that name in Moscow at that time. Like other young men in Europe in the new dawn of radical thought, he admired the writings of French socialists and German Idealist philosophers, and defended their views with fervour and wit in the Moscow literary salons . His contemporaries liked (or disliked) him for his gaiety and charm, his passionate and uncompromising character, his overflowing imagination and wide culture, his sensitiveness, his rapid, darting, bold and, as one of his friends called it, ‘predatory’ intellect, his dialectical skill, above all his

There are many approaches to digitisation. This edition seeks to mimic the experience of the print edition as much as possible, preserving the page numbers and boundaries, typography, and numbering and location of footnotes. The only change to the text itself is the removal of hyphenation; consolidation of footnotes split across pages; and hypertext.

For a long time large drops of rain had been falling upon us. The hollow rumble of thunder came closer, the flashes of lightning became brighter. Now the rain fell in torrents. Everyone rushed back to his cabin ; the ship creaked and the tossing became unbearable—the conversation did not go on.

‘No, I merely wanted to remind you that our age has not the monopoly of suffering and that you hold too cheap the afflictions of the past. Even before now thought was impatient enough, it wants everything at once, it loathes waiting—but life is not satisfied with abstract ideas, does not hurry, takes each step slowly because its steps are difficult to correct. Therein lies the tragic position of thinkers. . . . But, not to digress again, let me ask you now why you think that our world is so solid and long-lived? . . .’

‘You seem to be starting to console me by showing me that things have always been as bad as they are now.’

‘Yet on the morrow of victory heresy showed itself ; the pagan world broke into the sacred stillness of their brotherhood, and the Christian turned back with tears to the times of persecution and blessed their memory as he read the Martyrology.’

‘The position of Christians was also very pitiful ; for four centuries they remained hidden in catacombs, success seemed impossible, there were martyrs everywhere.’

particularly frightening for the people who live through them. After all, the year had the same three hundred and sixty-five days, then as now there were people with ardent spirits who withered away, lost in the crash of crumbling walls. What sounds of grief must have been torn from the human breast ; even now the groans terrify the soul!’

‘Obvious to whom? Do you really, think that the Romans saw their age as we see it? Gibbon could never free himself from the fascination that ancient Rome exercises over every strong spirit. Remember how many centuries its agony lasted ; for us that time is foreshortened because it is poor in events, poor in characters, because of the dreary monotony. It is just such periods, dumb, grey, that are

‘A waste of time! We are conscious of life through dull pain, through regrets which gnaw the heart, through the monotonous ticking of clocks. . . . It is hard to enjoy life to the full, to get drunk, knowing that the whole world is crumbling around you, and may well crush you. And that is not the worst—the worst is to die in old age, seeing that the ancient, tottering walls have no thought of crumbling. I know of no such suffocating period in history ; there have been struggles, there has been suffering before now, but there was also some compensation ; one could at least die with faith. We have nothing to die for and nothing to live for. . . . Just the time for enjoying life to the full!’

‘About Alexander the Great I can reassure you—he will never know of it. Of course, it is not at all a matter of indifference to a man whether he is alive or not. From this one thing alone is clear ; that one should make use of life, of the present ; not in vain does Nature in all her utterances for ever beckon life onwards and whisper in every ear her vivere memento .’

‘Well, for human beings it is far from being a matter of indifference. I think that Alexander the Great would not be at all pleased to know that he has been used as glue, as Hamlet says.’

‘I am surprised that you have not yet become used to the ways of life. In nature, as in the souls of men, there slumber countless forces and possibilities ; under suitable conditions they develop—and develop furiously ; they may fill the whole world, or they may fall by the wayside, take a new direction, stop, collapse. The death of one man is no less absurd than the end of the whole human race. Who guaranteed the immortality of a planet? It will be as little able to survive a revolution in the solar system as the genius of Socrates could the hemlock—possibly it will not be offered hemlock. . . possibly. . . . Now I'm back where I began. On the whole, Nature is perfectly indifferent to the result. She cannot be diminished, she will never lose anything, nothing can be taken from her, everything is in her however it changes. And she, having buried the human race, will lovingly begin all over again, with monstrous ferns and reptiles half a league long, probably with certain

‘Pouf, what horrors! You frighten me, as one frightens small children, but I assure you that none of this will happen. Would it have been worth while to have had a development for three thousand years with the pleasant final prospect of suffocating from sulphuric fumes? How can you not see that this is an absurdity?’

activity, of occupation. Three-quarters of what we do is a repetition of what has been done by others. You can see from this that history could go on for millions of years. On the other hand, I have nothing against history ending tomorrow. Anything can happen! Encke's comet 1 hits the world, a geological cataclysm shakes the earth's surface and throws everything upside-down, gaseous fumes make breathing impossible for half an hour—and there you have history's finale.’

‘No doubt. People will not die of boredom if the human race remains alive too long, though probably people will encounter some limit concealed in the very nature of man, some physiological conditions that one cannot surmount and remain human, but really there will be no lack of

‘All this is very well, but it seems to me that with such indecision, such licence, history might go on for ever or come to an end tomorrow.’

‘Cortez will do it for him. Geniuses are almost always to be found when they are needed. Besides, there is no need for them. People will arrive eventually, they will arrive by another route—a more difficult one. Genius is the luxury of history, its poetry, its coup d’état, its flourish, the triumph of its creativeness.’

result, then there would be no history, only logic ; humanity would have come to rest, a finished article, in an absolute status quo , like animals. But all this is fortunately impossible, unnecessary, and worse than the existing situation. The organism of the animal gradually develops an instinct ; in man the development goes further. He develops reason and does so painfully, slowly ; it exists neither in nature nor outside nature ; one has to achieve it and come to terms with it as best one may, because there is no libretto . If there were a libretto , history would lose all interest, become unnecessary, boring, ludicrous ; the grief of Tacitus and the joy of Columbus would turn into a game, into buffoonery ; great men would be so many heroes strutting on a stage who, whether they acted well or badly, would inevitably move towards and reach a definite dénouement. In history, all is improvisation, all is will, all is ex tempore ; there are no frontiers, no itineraries. There exist conditions, sacred discontent ; the flame of life and the eternal challenge to the fighters to try their strength, to go where they will, where there is a road ; and where there is none, genius will blast a path.’

‘Yes, but the path is not determined. . . . Nature has hinted only vaguely, in the most general terms, at her intentions, and has left all the details to the will of man, circumstances, climate, and a thousand conflicts. The struggle, the reciprocal action of natural forces and the forces of will, the consequences of which one cannot know in advance, give an overwhelming interest to every historical epoch. If humanity marched straight towards some kind of

‘Instead of jeering, you have said something much more sensible than you think. Any one-sided development always leads to the stunting of the other neglected parts. Children who are over-developed psychologically do not grow up normally, are physically feeble ; through centuries of unnatural existence we have turned ourselves into idealists—we have created a form of artificial life, we have disturbed the equilibrium. We used to be great and strong, even happy in our detachment, in the bliss of our theories, but now we have gone beyond this stage and it has become intolerable to us. Meanwhile, the break with practical life has become terrifying ; no one is to blame for that, either on one side or the other. Nature strained every muscle to overcome the limitations of the beast in man—but he has so over-stepped them that with one leg he is quite outside nature ; this he has done because he is free. We talk so much about free will ; we are so proud of it and, at the same time, annoyed that nobody leads us by the hand and that we stumble and must take the consequences of our actions. I am ready to repeat your words that the brain has grown one-sidedly because of idealism ; people have begun to notice this and are now moving in another direction. They will be cured of idealism as they have been of other historical diseases—chivalry, Catholicism, Protestantism. . . .’

‘And the poor lady is unable to realize her vocation! . . . A bacchante on a diet, a bayadère in mourning! . . . In our age, I must say, she seems really rather more like a repentant

barge filled with some mysterious treasure and with the humble words “progress in the future” inscribed on its bows? Those who are exhausted fall in their tracks ; others, with fresh forces take up the ropes ; but there remains, as you said yourself, as much ahead as there was at the beginning, because progress is infinite. This alone should serve as a warning to people: an end that is infinitely remote is not an end, but, if you like, a trap ; an end must be nearer—it ought to be, at the very least, the labourer's wage, or pleasure in the work done. Each age, each generation, each life had and has its own fullness ; en route , new demands arise, new experiences, new methods ; some capacities improve at the expense of others ; finally, the cerebral tissue improves. . . . Why do you smile? . . . Yes, yes, indeed, the substance of the brain improves. How everything that is natural surprises and disconcerts you idealists, as once upon a time knights were astonished that the villeins could be seeking human rights! When Goethe was in Italy, he compared the skull of an ancient bull with that of one of our bulls, and found that the bones of our bull were finer and the pans of the large lobes of the brain broader ; the ancient bull was obviously stronger than ours, but ours in his meek submission to man had developed further so far as the brain was concerned. Why do you consider man less capable of development than a bull? This generic growth is not an aim, as you suppose, but the hereditary characteristic of a succession of generations. The aim of each generation—is itself. Nature not only never makes one generation the means for the attainment of some future end, she does not concern herself with the future at all. Like Cleopatra, she is ready to dissolve a pearl in wine, for a moment's pleasure. Nature has the heart of a bacchante, of a bayadère .’

‘Quite the opposite, I see here only a consequence. If progress is the end, for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, only recedes, and as a consolation to the exhausted, doomed multitudes crying “morituri te salutant”, can give back only the mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn all human beings alive to-day to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on. . . or of wretched galley slaves, up to their knees in mud, dragging a

‘You are quite right when you speak of nature, but it seems to me that you have forgotten that throughout all the changes and confusions of history there runs a single red thread binding it into one aim. This thread—is progress, or perhaps you do not acknowledge progress?’

‘Partly ; plus the present state of everything existing. Everything is included in this: the legacy of past efforts and the seeds of all that is to come ; the inspiration of the artist, the energy of the citizen, and the rapture of the youth who, at this very moment, somewhere or other, is stealing his way towards some secret arbour where his shy love awaits him—giving herself completely to the present, with no thought of the future or of an aim. . . and the joy of a fish splashing—there—in the moonlight. . . and the harmony of the entire solar system. . . in short, I could add “and so forth. . . and so forth. . . and so forth. . .” three times—as after some feudal title.’

machine? I prefer to think of life, and therefore of history, as an end attained than as a means to something else.’

‘And what, pray, is the end of the song that the singer sings?. . . The sounds that burst from her throat, the melody that dies as soon as it has resounded? If you look beyond your pleasure in them for something else, for some other end, you will find that the singer has stopped singing, and then you will have only memories, and regrets, and remorse because, instead of listening, you were waiting for something else. You are misled by categories not fitted to catch the flow of life. Think carefully: is this end that you seek— a programme, an order? Who conceived it, who declared it? Is it something inevitable or not? If it is, are we mere puppets? . . . Are we morally free beings, or wheels in a

‘It is painful for man that he cannot see even in the future the harbour towards which he is moving. With melancholy anxiety, he contemplates the infinite road ahead of him and sees that he is just as far from his end after all efforts as he was a thousand, two thousand years ago!’

in the first moment of avowal. He is angry with life when he notices that at fifty his feelings haven't the freshness or sharpness they had at twenty. But such a stagnant immobility is repugnant to the spirit of life ; life cares nothing for the survival of anything personal, individual ; she always pours the whole of herself into the present moment, and while endowing people with a capacity for the fullest possible pleasure, insures neither existence nor pleasure, and accepts no responsibility for their continuance. In this ceaseless movement of all living things, in this universal change, nature renews herself and lives on ; in them she is eternally young. That is why each historical moment is complete and self-contained, like each year with its spring and summer, its winter and autumn, its storms and fine weather. That is why each period is new, fresh, full of its own hopes, carrying within itself its own joys and sorrows. The present belongs to it. But human beings are not satisfied with this. They want the future to be theirs as well.’

‘Of course it is! Especially as it isn't you who pay for it. You're dismayed because not all games are played to the end, but if they were they would be intolerably tedious. Long, long ago, Goethe used to tell us that beauty is transient because only the transient can be beautiful ; this offends people. Man has an instinctive desire to preserve all that delights him ; he is born, ergo he wants to live for ever ; he falls in love, he wants to love and be loved all his life as

‘Here we are, after all our philosophising, like a squirrel in a wheel, back to the corsi e ricorsi of old Vico. 1 We have returned to Rhea, perpetually bearing children in terrible pain for Saturn's supper. Only Rhea has now grown conscientious and no longer tries to slip in stones in place of the new-born ; besides, it would not be worth the effort, for there is no Jupiter or Mars amongst them. . . . What is the purpose of all this? You move round and round the question, without solving it. Should children be born only to make a meal for their father? All in all, is the game worth the candle?’

‘I don't like prophesying. The future does not exist ; it is created by the combination of a thousand causes, some necessary, some accidental, plus human will, which adds unexpected dramatic dénouements and coups de théâtre . History improvises, she rarely repeats herself. . . she uses every chance, every coincidence, she knocks simultaneously at a thousand gates. . . Who knows which may open?’

‘That is just your melancholy view of things. You are like those monks who have nothing better to say to each other when they meet than a gloomy memento mori , or like those excessively sentimental souls who cannot recall that "man is born but to die" without shedding a tear. To look at the end and not at the action itself is the greatest of errors. Of what use to the plant is its bright, gorgeous flower, its intoxicating scent which will pass away? None at all. But nature is not so miserly, and does not disdain what is transient, what lives only in the moment. At every point she attains all that she can attain, she achieves the impossible—fragrance, delight, an idea . . . she goes on until she reaches the frontiers of development, reaches death itself, which cools her ardour, checks her poetic fantasy, her unbridled creative passion. Who will blame nature because flowers that bloom in the morning fade in the evening, because she has not bestowed on the rose or the lily the hardness of flint? And yet it is this mean and prosy attitude that we want to carry over into the world of history! Who has ventured to restrict civilization to the practical alone? What barrier does it know? It is boundless, like thought, like art ; it traces the ideals of life, it dreams the apotheosis of its own being, but life is under no obligation to realize such fantasies and ideas, the more so since this would be only an improved edition of what was there before, and life loves novelty. Roman civilization was far higher, far more humane than the barbarian world, but in the very confusion of barbarism were the seeds of things not to be found in the civilization of Rome, and so barbarism triumphed despite the Corpus Juris Civilis and the wisdom of Roman philosophers. Nature rejoices in what has been attained, and reaches out beyond it ; she has no desire to wrong what exists ; let it live as long as it can, while the new is still growing. That is why it is so difficult to fit the work of nature into a straight line ; nature hates regimentation, she casts herself in all directions and never marches forward in.

‘How is it that while everything in Nature is so purposive, civilization, its highest effort, the crown of the age, emerges from it as if by accident, drops out of life and finally fades away, leaving behind only a dim memory? Meanwhile mankind moves backward, leaves the high road, and then again begins to strain upwards, to end once more in the same gorgeous flower—magnificent, but without seed. . . . In your philosophy of history there is something that revolts the soul. Why all these efforts? The life of peoples becomes mere idle play, it piles grain on grain, pebble on pebble, until once again everything comes tumbling down to earth and men begin to crawl out from under the ruins, to clear a space and build huts for themselves out of moss, boards and fallen capitals, only to achieve, after centuries of long effort, destruction once more. It was not for nothing that Shakespeare said that history was a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.’

‘Neither a beautiful nor an ugly one. What is it that surprises you in the notion—the tritest of all platitudes—that everything in the world is transient? Moreover civilizations do not perish as long as the human race continues to live without a complete break, for mankind has a good memory. Is Roman civilization not alive for us? And it has stretched far beyond the frontiers of surrounding life, just as ours has done ; that is exactly why, on the one hand, it flowered so luxuriantly, so magnificently, and, on the other, it could not be realized in practice. It has brought much that was its own to the modern world, it gives us much, but the immediate future of Rome lay elsewhere—in catacombs, where persecuted Christians were hidden, in forests where bands of wild Germans wandered.’

‘And are you predicting that our civilization will suffer the same fate as that of Rome? A comforting thought and a beautiful prospect.’

‘Both are completely right. All this confusion arises from the fact that life has its own embryogenesis which does not coincide with the dialectic of pure reason. I spoke just now of the ancient world—well, that's an example for you: instead of realizing the Republic of Plato or the Politics of Aristotle, it created the Roman Republic and the politics of

‘But then, which is right in your opinion? Theoretical thought, whose development and historical formation are in no way peculiar save for being conscious—or the fact of the contemporary world, which rejects thought and yet, like it, is the inevitable result of the past?’

joy of the struggle. They were so sure that, when peace returned, their ideal would be realized—without them, but realized it would be. Well, at least peace did return. How fortunate it was that all these enthusiasts were long in their graves! They would have had to realize that their cause hadn't advanced an inch, that their ideals remained ideals, that it is not enough to demolish the Bastille stone by stone to make free men out of convicts. You compare us to them, quite forgetting that we know the events of the fifty years since their death, that we have seen all the hopes of the theorists derided, and the demonic pattern of history makes a mock of their learning, their thought, their theories, turns the republic into a Napoleon, the revolution of 1830 into a deal on the Bourse. Having seen so much, we cannot share the hopes of our predecessors. Having studied revolutionary questions more profoundly, our demands are larger and wider than theirs, while theirs have remained as impractical as ever. On one side you have the logical consistency of thought, its successes ; on the other its complete impotence before a world deaf, mute, powerless to grasp the idea of salvation in the form in which it is expressed—either because it is expressed badly or because its significance is purely theoretical, bookish, like for instance Roman philosophy, which never moved outside a small circle of educated men.’

‘Their age was altogether unlike ours. An infinity of hope stretched before them. Rousseau and his disciples imagined that if their ideas of fraternity weren't realized, this must be because of material obstacles—here speech was repressed, there action curtailed—and with great consistency they marched boldly against everything that stood in the way of their ideas ; it was a terrifying, a gigantic task, but they triumphed. Having triumphed, they thought: here we are at last. And there they were, indeed—on the guillotine ; and that was the very best that could have happened to them ; they died in the fullness of their faith, they were swept away by a vast wave, in the fury of the battle, in the full intoxicating

‘The idea of retreating into oneself, severing the umbilical cord which binds us to our country, to the present, has been preached for years now, but doesn't seem particularly practicable. It appeals to people after every failure, after every loss of faith ; mystics and freemasons, philosophers and illuminati have turned to it for refuge. They all pointed to the path of inner escape, but no one took it. Rousseau?—he, too, kept turning away from the world ; he loved it passionately, and tore himself away from it because he couldn't live without it. His disciples continued to live his life, within the Convention, fought, suffered, killed others, left their heads on the scaffold, but never once left France ; never left the boiling maelstrom of activity.’

‘For old buildings out of new bricks? William Penn took an old world with him to a new soil ; North America is merely a corrected edition of an old text—nothing more: whereas the Christians in Rome were Romans no longer ; that kind of internal emigration is more effective.’

‘That's not so easy—quite apart from being repulsive. And where would one run away to? Where is this new Pennsylvania, ready for. . .’

‘I ask for nothing better, but there is a difference between swimming to save oneself and drowning. The fate of the young men whom this song recalls is horrible ; doubly martyrs, martyrs without faith, let their death lie heavy on the terrible society in which they lived. Let it be branded upon it, stamped on it for ever. But who on earth told you there is no other way out, no other escape, from this world of senility and agony—save death? You insult life. Abandon a world to which you do not belong if you really feel that it is alien to you. It cannot be saved, but save yourself from the danger of the falling ruins ; in saving yourself you will save the future. What have you in common with that world? Its civilization? But by now that civilization belongs to you, not to it. It did indeed generate it—or, to be more correct, within it a civilization was generated ; it is not even guilty of comprehending this civilization ; its way of life is hateful to you and, indeed, it is not easy to like such an absurdity. Your sufferings? The world has not an inkling of them ; and it knows nothing of your joys. You are young, it is old. See how haggard it looks, in its shabby livery ; particularly since the 1830s, its face has acquired a dull, grey, muddy hue. This is the facies hippocratica , by which doctors tell that Death has lifted its scythe. It strives impotently to cling to life, to recapture it, to shake itself free of the disease, to taste pleasure, but it fails and falls back into a heavy, feverish slumber. All round it people are talking of phalanstères , of democracy, of socialism ; it listens but doesn't understand a word, sometimes it smiles at this talk, and nods its head and remembers the dreams that it too once believed in before it grew to reason but hasn't believed in for many years now. . . . That is why it looks on with an old man's indifferent eye at communists and Jesuits, parsons and Jacobins, the brothers Rothschild and starving men alike ; it looks on at all this as it rushes past, clutching in its fist a few francs, for the sake of which it is ready to die or murder. Leave the old man to end his days as

‘Oh, so according to you, our ideas have led us to unrealizable hopes, absurd expectations ; together with them—the last fruits of our efforts—we are caught by the waves sweeping over a sinking ship. The future is not ours: we have nothing to do with the present ; we have no means of escape. For we are tied to this ship in life and in death. All that is left is to wait with folded hands for the waters to flood over us ; anyone who is bored, or is braver than the rest, may jump into the sea.

‘No, one cannot give up progress. How can one not know what one does know? Our civilization is the finest flower of modern life. And who could want to sacrifice his chances of development? But what has this to do with the realization of our ideals? Where are the necessities in virtue of which the future must act the precise role that we have devised for it?’

‘And then they are torn up from their foundations by the spirit of negation and analysis. Your view of life is much gloomier than mine, and your words of comfort are designed to give an even more terrible description of our present plight. If even the future is not ours, then our whole civilization is a lie—the dream of a girl of fifteen, which she will smile at when she is twenty-five ; our labours are absurd, our efforts ludicrous, our hopes those of a Danubian peasant. But perhaps this is what you want to say: that we should abandon our civilization, give it up, and take our place once more among the backward peoples.’

ourselves. You are looking for a banner, I am trying to lose one. You want a book of rules, while I think that when one reaches a certain age one ought to be ashamed of having to use one. You have just said that we are putting up signposts to the new world. . . .’

‘In the way of what? What is this mission of ours, where is our banner? What do we, and what do we not, believe in?’

‘It would be wonderful if things were as you say, but, alas, the ruins and the rubble are everywhere in the way.’

‘We know your kind of liberation. You open the prison doors and want to drive the convict out into the open, assuring him that he is free. You demolish the Bastille, but build nothing in its place, leaving only an empty site.’

‘Yes, you are right. I think that is even better. The surgeon cuts away the sick part of the body without replacing it with a healthy part.’

‘You are doing to me,’ he said, after a silence, ‘what robbers do to travellers ; having stripped me completely you are still not satisfied ; you are after the last tatters which keep the cold from me, after the hair on my skin. You have forced me to doubt a great deal, but the future still remained for me ; now you are taking that away, stealing my hopes, murdering my dreams, like Macbeth.’

. . . The young man gave a discontented toss of the head, and for a moment glanced at the sea—the total calm continued, a heavy cloud imperceptibly moved over their heads. It was so low that the smoke of the ship, settling in the air, mingled with it ; the sea was black, there was no freshness in the air. . . .

‘Though of course there is no reason to believe that the new world will be built according to our plans. . . .’

of the foundations. Of all the hopes, of all the life that has slipped through our fingers (and how it has!) if there's anything left, it is faith in the future ; sometime, long after our death, the house for which we have cleared the site will be built and it will be comfortable and pleasant—for others.’

‘What a wonderful picture. You should add that, alongside these contented creatures whom the present regime fits like a glove, there are on the one hand, the poor, undeveloped common people, savage, backward, hungry, in a hopeless struggle against want, destroyed by drudgery which cannot support them ; on the other hand, we ourselves, we who have recklessly run ahead, the surveyors planting the stakes of a new world of which we shall never even see the rising

walk”, and everything would start moving. They were mistaken. The people knew them as little as they knew the people, and did not believe them. Without noticing that there was no one behind them, these men led on and marched forward. Then, suddenly realizing what had happened, they began to shout to the laggards—to wave, to call to them, to shower abuse on them ; but too late ; the others were too far behind. Their voices did not carry, and besides their language was not one familiar to the masses. We find it painful to admit that we live in a world that has outlived its emotions and its senses, that it is senile, exhausted, that it obviously has not enough strength or character to rise to the height of its own ideas. We are sorry for the old world. We have grown used to it as to our own home. In the very effort of destroying it, we support it, we try to adjust our own convictions to its unwieldy mass, and will not see that the first sign of them spells its death sentence. We wear clothes made to fit not us but our grandparents. Our brain has been formed under the influence of past conditions. There is much that it cannot grasp, or sees from the wrong angle. People have arrived at their present state with so much effort, it seems to them such a blessed haven after the madness of feudalism and the stupefying oppression that followed it, that they are afraid to change it ; they have become frozen in its forms, they are used to them ; habit has replaced affection, the horizon has narrowed, all generosity of mind has ebbed, the will is weak.’

‘To tell you the truth—all this is not worth worrying about. All these lessons and sermons are mostly wrong, impracticable, and more confusing than the simple facts of ordinary everyday life. The trouble is that thought always runs far ahead ; men cannot keep pace with their teachers. Take our own age: a few individuals almost brought about a revolution the results of which neither they themselves nor the people were able to consolidate. The more progressive thought that they had only to say: “Take up thy bed and

‘You seem to take me for a German poet, and one moreover of a past generation, the sort who revolted against having a body, against having to eat, and looked for ethereal maidens, “another nature, another sun”. I want neither magic nor mystery, only to escape from that state of mind which you have described ten times more acutely than I ; to escape from moral impotence, from opinions pitifully divorced from practice, from the chaos in which we ultimately cease to distinguish friend from foe ; I am disgusted to see, wherever I turn, only torturers or tortured. What magic does one need to convince people that they have only themselves to blame for the wretched way they live ; to make it clear to them, for instance, that one must not rob a beggar ; that it is disgusting to indulge in rich meals before a man dying of hunger ; that murder is equally horrible whether done by stealth at night on a highway, or openly by the light of day in the public square to the roll of drums ; that it is contemptible to say one thing and do another. . . . in a word, all those new truths that have been said, repeated, printed from the days of the Seven Sages—and must, I think, have been pretty old even then. Moralists and priests thunder forth from pulpits, preach morality, denounce sins, read the Gospel, expound Rousseau—no one contradicts what they say and no one acts on it