Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/453

Rh and well-informed article seems to him more valuable and more important than all the tsars!

Herzen's futility in practical matters was the evil heritage of Russian absolutism. Tsarism, especially under Nicholas I, condemned to inactivity the best and the most energetic of the Russians, and for the refugee this inactivity was perpetuated and accentuated.

If, finally, we take into account the aristocratic factor in Herzen's mentality and his associations from childhood upwards, we have a sufficient explanation of his anarchism. Though at first he despised the bourgeois, he became reconciled later with "collective mediocrity" (he quotes Mill's phrase) and its "Chinesedom." He is sorry for the unfortunate bourgeois, and becomes reconciled with him after the manner of an aristocratic superior. In 1848 no less a man than Bělinskii thought it necessary to protect the bourgeoisie against Herzen's onslaughts. After a time, however, Herzen came to admit (1863) that Russia would perhaps traverse the bourgeois stage. Later still, he practically accepted this as inevitable. It was natural that Herzen should look upon the "autocratic masses" rather from the outlook of the aristocrat than from that of the historian or politician. He makes fun of the bourgeois because he buys his clothes ready-made, and because he replaces parks with orchards and palaces with hotels. As a romanticist Herzen detested the bourgeois; "accuracy and moderation" irritated him; he could see nothing in the bourgeois but indifferentism and stagnation; he despised "chameleopardism" devoid of strong racial and individual qualities, for all that was individual was typified for him in "the restless and the eccentric."

He achieved little with his conception of Byron's Cain as nothing more than the antibourgeois. Herzen did not adequately appraise the revolutionary defiance of Byron's Cain and Lucifer, and this is why his Cain capitulated to the bourgeoisie. Physical-force-anarchism was transmuted by Herzen into sermonising. In addition he adopted a positivistic categorical imperative, tincturing this with Schopenhauer's compassion. .

Herzen was never able to transcend a paralysing scepticism; hence arose the "hesitation" which he so justly diagnosed in himself; and this is why Herzen did not become a permanent leader either in the theoretical or in the practical field. Louis