Alexander Herzen's Lament

I was glad to leave Paris, but in Geneva we found ourselves in the same society, though persons in it were different and its dimensions were narrower. In Switzerland at that time everything had been hurled into politics; everything –table d’hote and coffee-houses, watchmakers and women- all were divided into parties. An exclusive preoccupation with politics, particularly in the oppressive lull that always follows unsuccessful revolutions, is extremely wearisome with it’s barren aridity and monotonous censorship of the past. It is like summer-time in big cities where everything is dusty and hot, airless, where through pale trees the glistening walls and the hot paving stones reflect the glaring sun. A living man craves for air which has not yet been breathed a thousand times over, which does not smell of the pickled bones of life, or ring with discordant jangling, where there is no greasy, putrid stench and incessant noise.

Sometimes we did tear ourselves away from Geneva, visit the shores of Lake Leman and go to the foot of Mont Blanc; and the somber shadows screened the vanity of vanities, refreshing soul and body with the cold breath of its eternal glaciers.

I do not know whether I should like to stay for ever in Switzerland. To us dwellers in the valleys and meadows, the mountains after a time get in the way; they are too huge and too near, they press upon us and confine us; but sometimes its good to stay in their shadow. Moreover a pure, good-hearted race lives in the mountains, a race of people poor but not unhappy, with few wants, accustomed to a life of sturdy independence. The scum of civilization, its verdigris, has not settled on these people; historical changes pass like clouds beneath their feet and scarcely affect them. The Roman world still endures in Graubunden: anywhere in Appenzell the time of the peasant wars has scarcely passed. Perhaps in the Pyrenees, in the Tyrol or other mountains such a healthy stock of populations is to be found, but it has ceased to exist in Europe as a whole.

After the June days (1849) I saw that the revolution was vanquished, but I still believed in the vanquished, in the fallen; I believed in the wonder-working power of the relics, in their moral strength. At Geneva I began to understand more and more clearly that the revolution not only had been vanquished, but had been bound to be vanquished.

My head was dizzy with my discoveries, an abyss was opening before my eyes and I felt the ground was giving away under my feet.

It was not the reaction that vanquished the revolution. The reaction showed itself everywhere densely stupid, cowardly, in its dotage; everywhere it retreated ignominiously round the corner before the shock of the popular tide, furtively biding its time in Paris, and at Naples, Vienna and Berlin. The revolution fell like Agrippina, under the blows of its own children, and, what was worse than anything, without their being conscious of it; there was more heroism, more youthful self-sacrifice, than good judgement; and the pure, noble victims fell, not knowing for what. The fate of the survivors was almost more grievous. Absorbed in wrangling among themselves, in personal disputes, in melancholy self-deception, and consumed by unbridled vanity, they kept dwelling on their unexpected days of triumph, and were unwilling to take off their faded laurels or wedding garments, though it was not the bride who had deceived them.

Misfortunes, idleness and need induced intolerance, obstinacy and exasperation ,. .  the emigres broke up into little groups, which rallied not to principles but to names and hatreds. The fact that their thoughts continually  turned to the past, and that they lived in an exclusive, closed circle, began to find expression in speech and thought, in manners and dress; a new class was formed, the class of refugees, and ossified along with the others. And just as once Basil the Great* wrote to Gregory Nazianzen that he ‘wallowed in fasting and delighted in privations,’ so now there appeared voluntary martyrs, sufferers by vocation, wretches by profession, among whom were some very conscientious people; indeed Basil the Great was sincere when he wrote to his friend of orgies of mortification of the flesh and of the voluptuous ecstasy of persecution. With all this, consciousness did not move a step forward and thought slumbered . . . If these people had been summoned by the sound of a new trumpet and a new tocsin they would, like the nine sleeping maidens, have gone on with the day on which they fell sleep.

My heart almost broke on these painful truths; I had to live through a difficult page of my education.

I was sitting mournfully on day in my mother’s dining room at gloomy, disagreeable Zurich: this was at the end of December 1849. I was going the next day to Paris. It was cold, a snowy day; two or three logs, smoking and crackling, were unwillingly burning on the hearth. Everyone was busy packing; I was sitting quite alone. My life in Geneva floated before my mind’s eye; everything ahead looked dark; I was afraid of something, and it was so unbearable that if I could have, I would have fallen on my knees and wept and prayed; but I could not and instead of a prayer I wrote my curse – my Epilogue to 1849.


‘Disillusionment, fatigue, Blasiertheit!” The democratic critics said of those lines I vomited up. Disillusionment, yes! Fatigue, yes! . . .Disillusionment is a vulgar, hackneyed word, a veil under which lie hidden the sloth of the heart, egoism poising as love, the noisy emptiness of vanity with pretensions to everything and strength for nothing. All these exalted, unrecognized characters, wizened with envy and wretched from pretentiousness, have long wearied us in life and in novels. All that is perfectly true; but is there not something real, peculiarly characteristic of our times, at the bottom of these frightful spiritual sufferings which degenerate into absurd parodies and and vulgar masquerades?

The poet who found words and voice for this malady was too proud to pose and to suffer for the sake of applause; on the contrary, he often uttered his bitter thought with so much humor that his kind-hearted readers almost died laughing. Byron’s disillusionment was more than caprice, more than a personal mood; Byron was shattered because life deceived him. And life deceived him not because his demands were unreal, but because England a Byron were of two different ages, of two different educations, and met just at the epoch when the fog was disappearing.

This rupture existed in the past, too, but in our age it has come to consciousness; in our age the impossibility of the intervention of any beliefs is becoming more and more manifest. After the break-up of Rome came Christianity; after Christianity, the belief in civilization, in humanity. Liberalism is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this,. Its theology is political theory; it stands upon the earth and has no mystical concilliations, for it must have conciliation in fact. Triumphant and then defeated liberalism has revealed the rift in all its nakedness; the painful consciousness of this is expressed in the irony of modern man, in the skepticism with which he sweeps away the fragments of his shattered idols.

Irony gives expression to the vexation aroused by the fact that logical truth is not the same as the truth of history, that as well as dialectical development it has its own development through chance and passion, that as well as reason it has its romance.

Disillusionment in our sense of the word was not known before the Revolution; the eighteenth century was one of the most religious periods of history. I am not longer speaking of the great Martyr Saint-Just or of the apostle Jean Jacques; but was not Pope Voltaire, blessing Franklin’s grandson in the name of God and Freedom, a fanatic of his religion of humanity?

Skepticism was proclaimed together with the Republic of the 22^nd of September, 1792.

The Jacobins and revolutionaries in general belonged to a minority, separated from the life of the people by their culture: they constituted a sort of secular clergy ready to shepherd their human flocks. They represented the highest thoughts of their time, its highest but not its general consciousness, not the thought of all.

This new clergy had no means of coercion, either physical or fancied: from the moment that authority fell from their hands, they had only one weapon- conviction; but for conviction to be right is not enough; their whole mistake lay in supposing so; something more was necessary – mental equality.

So long as the desperate conflict lasted, to the strains of the hymn of the Huguenots and the hymn of the Marseillaise, so long as the faggots flamed and the blood flowed, this inequality was not noticed; but at last the oppressive edifice of feudal monarchy crumbled, and slowly the walls shattered, the locks struck off . . one more blow struck, one more wall breached, the brave men advanced, gates are opened and the crowd rushes in . . .but it was not the crowd that was expected. Who were these men; to what age do they belong? They are not Spartans, not the great populous Romanus. An irresistible wave of filth flooded everywhere. The inner horror of the Jacobins was expressed in the Terror of 1793 and 1794; they saw their fearful mistake, and tried to correct it with the guillotine; but, however many heads they cut off, they still had to bow their own before the might of the rising stratum of society. Everything gave way before it; it over-powered the Revolution and the reaction,  it submerged the old forms and filled them up with itself because it constituted the one effective majority of its day. Sieyes was more right than he thought when he said that the petite bourgeoisie was everything.

The petits bourgeois were not produced by the Revolution; they were ready with their traditions and customs, which were alien, in a different mode, to the revolutionary idea. They had been held back by the aristocracy and kept in the background; set free they walked over the corpses of their liberators and established their own regime. The  minority were either crushed or dissolved in the petite bourgeoisie.

A few men of each generation remained, in spite of events, as tenacious preservers of the idea; these Levites, or perhaps ascetics, are unjustly punished for their monopoly of an exclusive culture, for the mental superiority of the well-fed castes, the leisured castes that had time to work not only with their muscles.

We were angered, moved to fury, by the absurdity, by the injustice of this fact. AS though someone (not ourselves) had promised that everything in the world should be just and elegant and should go like clockwork. We have marveled enough at the abstract wisdom of nature and of historical development; it is time to perceive tat in nature as in history there is a great deal that is fortuitous, stupid, unsuccessful and confused. Reason, fully developed thought, comes last. Everything begins with the dullness of a new born child; potentiality and aspiration are innate in him, but before he reaches development and consciousness he is exposed to a series of external and internal influences, deflections and checks. One has water on the brain; another falls and flattens it; both remain idiots. A third does not fall nor die of scarlet fever – and becomes a poet, a military leader, a bandit or a judge. On the whole we know best, in nature, in history and in life, the advances and successes: we are only now beginning to feel that all the cards are not so well pre-arranged as we had thought, because we are ourselves a failure, a losing card.

It mortifies us to realize that the idea is impotent, that truth has no binding power over the world of actuality. A new sort of Manichaeism takes possession of us, and we are ready, par depit, to believe in rational (that is purposive) evil, as we believe in rational good – that is the last tribute we pay to idealism.

The anguish will pass will pass with time; its tragic and passionate character will calm down: it scarcely exists in the New World of the United States. This young people, enterprising and more practical than intelligent, is so busy building its own dwelling-place that it knows nothing of our agonies. Moreover, there are not two cultures there. The persons who constitute the classes in society of that country are constantly changing, they rise and fall with the bank balance of each. The sturdy breed of English colonists is multiplying fearfully; if it the upper hand people will not be more fortunate for it, but they will be better contented. This contentment will be duller, poorer, more arid than that which hovered in the ideals of romantic Europe; but with it there will be neither tsars nor centralization, and perhaps there will be no hunger either. Anyone who can put off from himself the old Adam of Europe and be born again a new Jonathan had better take the first steamer to some place in Wisconsin or Kansas: there he will certainly be better off than in decaying Europe.

Those who cannot will stay to live out their lives, as patterns of the beautiful dream dreamt by humanity. They have lived too much by fantasy and ideals to fit into the age of American good sense.

There is no great misfortune in this: we are not many, and we shall soon be extinct.

But how is it men grow so out of harmony with their environment?

Imagine a hothouse-reared youth, the one, perhaps, who has described himself in Byron’s The Dream; imagine him face to face with the most boring, with the most tedious society, face to face with the monstrous Minatour of English life, clumsily welded together of two beasts- the one decrepit, the other knee-deep in a miry bog, weighed down like a Caryatid whose muscles, under constant strain, cannot spare one drop of blood for the brain. If he could have adapted himself to this life he would, instead of dying in Greece at thirty, now have been Lord Palmerston  or  Lord John Russell. But since he could not it is no wonder thatm\, with his own Childe Harold, he says to his ship:

Nor care what land thou bearest me to,
But not again to mine.

But what awaited him in the distance? Spain cut up by Napoleon, Greece sunk back into barbarism, the general resurrection after 1814 of all the stinking Lazaruses; there was no getting away from them at Ravenna or at Diodati. Byron could not be satisfied like a German with theories sub specie aeternitatis, nor like the Frenchman with political chatter; he was broken, but broken like a menacing Titan, flinging his scorn in men’s faces and not troubling to gild the pill.

The rupture of which Byron, as a poet and a genius, was conscious forty years ago, now after a succession of new experiences, after the filthy transition from 1830 to 1848, and the abominable one from 1848 to the present, shocks many of us. And we, like Byron, do not know what to do with ourselves, where to lay our heads.

The realist Goethe, like the romantic Schiller, knew nothing of this rending spirit,. The one was too religious, the other too philosophical. Both could find peace in abstract spheres. When the ‘spirit of negation’ appears as such a jester as Mephistopheles, then the swift disharmony is not a fearful one; his mocking and forever contradictory nature is still blended in a higher harmony, and in his on time will ring out with everything – sie ist gerettet. Lucifer in Cain is very different; he is the rueful angel of darkness and on his brow shines with dim luster the star of bitter thought; he is full of inner disintegration which  can never be put together again. He does not make a jest of denial, he does not seek to amuse with the imprudence of his disbelief, he does not allure by sensuality, he does not procure artless girls, wine or diamonds; but he quietly prompts to murder, draws toward himself, towards crime – by that incomprehensible power with which at certain moments a man is enticed by still, moonlit water, that promises nothing in its comfortless cold, shimmering embracers, nothing but death.

Neither Cain, nor Manfred, neither Don Juan nor Byron, makes any inference, draws any conclusion, any ‘moral’. Perhaps from the point of view of dramatic art this is a defect, but it gives a stamp of sincerity and indicates a depth of the gulf. Byron’s epilogue, his last word, if you like, is The Darkness; here is the finish of a life that began with The Dream. Complete the picture for yourselves.

Two enemies, hideously disfigured by hunger, are dead, they are devoured by some crab-like animals . . .their ship is rotting away – a tarred rope swings in the darkness of dim waters; there is fearful cold, the beasts are dying out, history has died already and space is being cleared for new life: our epoch will be reckoned as belonging to the fourth geological formation –that is, if the new world gets as far as being able to count up to four.

Our historical vocation, our work, consists in this: that by our disillusionment, by or sufferings, we reach resignation and humility in the face of truth, and spare following generations from these afflictions. By means of us humanity is regaining sobriety; we are its head-ache next morning, we are its birth-pangs; but we must not forget that the child or mother, or perhaps both, may die by the way, and then –well, then history, like the Mormon it is, will start a new history .  .  . E semper bene, gentlemen!

We know how nature disposes of individuals: later, sooner, with no victims or on heaps of corpses, she cares not; she goes her way, or goes any way that chances. Tens of thousands of years she spends building a coral reef, every spring abandoning to death the ranks that have run ahead too far. The polyps die without suspecting that they have served the progress of the reef.

We, too, shall serve something. To enter into the future as an element in it does not mean that the future will fulfill our ideals. Rome did not carry out Plato’s idea of a republic nor the Greek idea in general. The Middle Ages were not the development of Rome. Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of  sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what’s to be done about it?

Now I am accustomed to these thoughts, they no longer frightened me. But at the end of 1849 I was stunned by them; and in spite of the fact of every event, every meeting, every contact, every person vied with each other to tear away the last green leaves, I still frantically and obstinately sought a way out.

That is why I now prize so highly the courageous thought of Byron. He saw that there was no way out, and proudly said so.

I was unhappy and perplexed when these thoughts began to haunt me; I tried by every means to run away from them .  .  .like a lost traveler, like a beggar, I knocked at every door, stopped people I met and asked the way, but every meeting and every event led to the same result –to meekness before the truth, to self-sacrificing acceptance of it . . .

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_of_Caesarea

My Past and Thoughts; The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, abridged by Dwight Macdonald, Univerity of California Press, 1973; pages 383-391