The Romantic Exiles
LAVER.
* The Rothantic Exiles. A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery. By Edward Hallett Carr. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) BY JAMES MEREDITH, in The Tragic Comedians, made a novel out of the story of Lasalle, and it is typical of the revived interest in biography that Mr. Carr has not chosen to do the same with the story of Alexander Herzen. Instead, he has presented, us with a documented study* of a whole group of Russian exiles—men who left their country in the 'forties and 'fifties of the last century—all revolutionary in word if not in deed, and nearly all bound together by some kind of more or Iess intimate personal relationship. On the human side the story forms a series of " recurrent triangles," Natalie Herzen, after a romantic friendship with Natalie Tuchkov, becoming' the mistress of the German poet Hervegh ; Herzen himself, after the death of the first Natalie, becoming the lover of Natalie Tuchkov, now married to his friend Ogarev. Ogarev, true to his " advanced " opinions, continued to live with them both, only consoling himself with drink and a Leicester Square prostitute whom, with unquenchable—and justified —idealism he set up in a separate establishment.
Idealism, indeed, of the burning, passionate kind of which only Russians seem capable, is what distinguished the whole group from any merely loose society. If the men are the spiritual heirs of Rousseau, the women are the emotional children of George Sand. The " All for Freedom " of the one is balanced by the " All for Love " of the other, and not " All for Love " as Dryden envisaged it : something as exceptional in the history of the world as an Antony and a Cleopatra, but as a normal rule of everyday life. The result was something completely different from the cold-blooded sensuality of the eighteenth century or of the present time. It was George Sand who elevated passion to the height of a religious expe- rience, and how deeply all the members of Mr. Carr's group had imbibed her doctrines is shown by frequent. references and quotations and by their quaint habit of assuming the names of her characters. But these people, being Russians, brought to Rousseauism and to Sandism the single-minded fanaticism of their race, a tragic intensity which seems to be inseparable froth .the Russian character. The Russian knows nothing of water-tight compartments ; he cannot, like the Frenchman, keep his emotions separate from his intelligence, or, like the Englishman, from his principles. In a word, he refuses that base compromise with reality which is known as common sense.
It was in vain for Herzen, in temperament the least Russian of the group, to advise " Romanticism for the heart " and " Idealism for the head." Hearts and heads were indistin- guishable, and Idealism itself, professing to be founded on that of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, was indistinguishable from Romanticism. In consequence, the private lives of the exiles were passed in a maelstrom of emotional crises which would have driven an Occidental mad.
In domestic matters Herzen could not escape from his fellow-exiles,, hut in politics he grew steadily away from them, for the utter failure of revolution all over Europe in the fateful year 1848 made him a sceptic, even a cynic, and he looked upon the escapades of the incurably Romantic revolutionaries with contempt and hostility. But even he still dreamed of freedom and democracy, and it was a bitter disappointment to him when he found revolutionary doctrine, after the accession of Alexander II, moving away from Liberalism to Nihilism on the one hand and the " dictatorship of the Pro- letariat " on the other. None the less for a time he was the most influential of all the Russian exiles, and by his editorshiji of The Bell, a Rtissian periodical published in London, made himself the terror of the Riissian autherities. The Bolshevists still revere -name and -have- called a street in Leningrad
after him. ' - • ^ • '
It was in 1852 that Herten came to England, and for the English reader the story of his twelve years in this country has a peculiar interest, not for •ariy light it throwS on English life, but for the' picture which emerges of the exiles of all nations who found a 'refuge here in the days before Miens Restrictions Acts were thought of : " Among the Italians, Mazzini was the recognized and unrivalled master. The Hungarians acknowledged the leadership of-Kossuth, the Poles of Worcell -The French divided their allegiance between Louiti Blanc and _Lediu-Rollin, the protagonists of the revolution of- 1848, the former the author of the famous Histoin: des' Dix Airs the latter Of a painphlet, De la Decadence du l'Angleterre."
It is amusing to note that even in the 'fifties of the last century England was already decadent.
Herzen was the leader of the RuSsians, and in that capacity attended a number of public functions, Mr. Carr's account of which makes strange reading. In 1855 there was a " Com- memoration of the Great RevOlutionary Movement of 1848 " in St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, to which were invited all the leaders of the exiles, as well as Victor Hugo, Raspail, Eugene Sue, Kinkel, Marx and Mayne-Reid. Mark refused to attend, declaring to Engels that he would " nowhere and at no time appear on the same platform as Herzen, since I am not of the opinion that ' old Europe ' can be rejuvenated by Russian blood." And so the whirligig of Time brings in his revenges.
In the previous year Mr. Saunders, the American Consul, had given a dinner to the principal foreign refugeesin London, and there sat down to' table: Herzeri, Garibaldi; Mazzini, Orsini (who had not yet attempted to assassinate Napoleon III), Kossuth, Ledru-Rollin, "James Buchanan (then Ameri- can Ambassador and later President of the United States), and Sir Joshua Walnisley, M.P., who " graced the banquet in virtue of his _well-known radical sympathies." Such a gathering undoubtedly had its comic side, but Mr. Carr's irony is restrained : " The first business of the evening was to effect an introduction between Kossuth and Ledru,R011in ; for owing to the stubborn refusal of each to make a first call on the other, they. had never been able to meet... The combined tact of Mazzini and Buchanan brought them together with such perfect simultaneity that neither the haughty Hungarian aristocrat nor the touchy French bourgeois could be accused 'of having so far demeaned himself as to take the first advance."
In 1861 Herzen was joined in London by Bakunin, who had escaped from Siberia and was burning to start a revolution somewhere ; he did not mind particularly where. l'oor Bakunin, the lovable, toothless giant, did not realize that his methods and opinions were even more out of date than those of Herzen. He proved an embarrassing colleague and seemed for a while to throw Herzen in the shade.' But there is no place for him in the Communist Calendar of Saints, for lie came into conflict with Karl Marx and in 1872 Marx secured his expulsion from the International. With the advent of Marx even Revolution lost its romantic elements and became a matter of dogmatic materialism, and a theory of economics.
Mr. Carr is to be congratulated on having produced what is not only- a fascinating human story but a real contribution to the study of European .history, and of those subterranean forces which the ordinary cultivated man -is so apt to ignore until they blow his world- into pieces •about his ears.
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