ALEXANDER HERZEN.
PERSONAL memoirs, like vers libres, are intolerable unless they are well done. We have suffered as much from the scrappy memoranda of loquacious ladies and garrulous old gentlemen as from the synoptic notes of the poems their juniors would write had they but tithe. The memoir is a form which by its very formlessness, if one may put it so, attracts the incompetent and incontinent amateur. The argument cuts both ways ; for, whereas any moderately talented person can write a passable sonnet, it takes some- thing like genius to produce a piece of valuable free verse ; and only a potential novelist possessing a rich store of memories can hope to write acceptable memoirs. The book under notice is more than acceptable ; it is distinguished, both in substance and style. It possesses considerable historical interest, and it abounds in tales well told and portraits deftly executed. Its author wrote several novels, and had they possessed half the vividness of these Moses cues, they would, one imagines, have been accorded no mean place in Russian literature. The memoirs are not, indeed, faultless. They are sometimes a little too discursive for the comfort of the reader, the chronology of events being not always as clear as it might be ; but this is a blemish one finds it easy to forgive, in gratitude for the delights of a clear, unmannered style, picturesque characterization, and a wit so unobtrusive that it might easily be missed by a hurried reader. To those who are not compatriots or contemporaries of Herzen's, the Memoirs, says their translator, "are certainly the most interesting part of his production. They paint for us an astonishing picture of Russian life under the grim rule of • Memoirs of Alexander Herren. Parts I and II. Translated from the Russian 11, J. 4) butt ”iv..atity Puss. In London: Oxford University Press. Lids
Nicholas, the life of a rich man in Moscow, and the life of the exile near the Ural Mountains ; and they are crowded with figures and incidents which would be incredible, if one were not convinced of the narrator's veracity." If accuracy may be taken for granted, the translator has done his work admirably.
Alexander Herzen was born in Moscow, in 1812, six months before Napoleon reached the gates of that city with all that was left of his Grande Armee. He was the elder son of a Russian noble, Ivan Yakovlev, and Luise Haag, a German girl from Stuttgart. He was illegitimate, his parents having eloped and married each other according to the rites of the Lutheran Church. which had no legal validity in Russia ; and the name, Herzen, by which he is now known, was invented for him. He was brought up in luxury, an aristo- crat by blood and tradition, with hordes of menials to minister to his self-importance ; but he very early became infected with the liberalism that animated the most generous spirits of his day, and, as a necessary consequence, he spent many years of his later life under police supervision and in exile. After nine months in a Moscow prison, followed by twelve years under supervision, he was permitted to leave Russia with his wife and children and widowed mother. The remaining twenty-three years of his life he spent partly in France, in Italy, and in Switzerland, but mostly in the suburbs of London. His father's death had left him a wealthy man. Jane Carlyle, in one of her letters, remarks that among all the Russian exiles in England he alone possessed money.
The present volume, which is to be followed by another, deals with -his early life. We are shown full-length portraits, drawn mercilessly but without anger, of his father, his uncles, his German tutor, and some of the servants. Between his parents existed scant sympathy. His mother, "an exceed- ingly kind-hearted woman, but not strong willed," was utterly crushed by her husband. Yakovlev was a precise and a self-centred man, unsparing in reproof ; his wife was easy-going and good-natured. Without open warfare the household was divided into two camps, of which the master, a host in himself, constituted one. Young Alexander cleaved to his mother, but of intimate home-life he appears to have known but little after his tenth year.' In one of his uncles he was fortunate, if the possession of a sensational relative can be accounted good fortune. "He collected a large library and a whole harem of country girls," writes Herzer of this uncle, "and kept both these departments under loct and key." This passage, which recalls Gibbon's remart about one of his dissipated Roman Emperors, becomes more than a little piquant when we remember that the author writing of the early nineteenth century.
Herzen's narrative is interrupted, but in no degree marred, by digressions and disquisitions. One particularly interesting chapter, full of wise discourse and moving anecdotes, is largely devoted to the subject of domestic servants. Like most rich children, out of touch with their parents, he himself sought and found congenial friendships in the servants' hall and the maids' room ; and, writing in his maturity, he defends those comrades of his childhood with much sense and spirit. "Children resent the indulgent superiority of grown-up people ; they are clever enough to understand that servants treat them with more respect and take them seriously. . . . Servants have a very strong attachment to children ; and this is not senility at all—it is a mutual alliance, with weakness and simplicity on both sides." Speaking more generally, he avows that "the difference between the class of nobles and the class of servantt is not great: I hate, especially since the calamity of the yea] 1848, democrats who flatter the mob, but I hate still more aristocrat: who slander the people. By representing those who serve them as profligate animals, slave-owners throw dust in the eyes of others and stifle the protests of their own consciences. In few cases are we better than the common people . . . our desires are not so coarse or so obvious, owing to the easiness of satisfying them and the habitual absence of self-restraint ; we are merely richer, better fed, and therefore more difficult to please."
This, from a born aristocrat, cannot have been palatable doctrine to the oligarchs of nineteenth-century Russia. Small wonder they exiled the fellow.
- GERALD- BULLETT,
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