which we love as we love all that quickens and stings us." Herzen frequently declares that the Russian is melancholy, sceptical, and ironical; he leaves the question undecided whether these qualities are congenital or acquired. In his view the antithesis of faith is not knowledge but doubt, and he admits that he recurs ever to the mood of doubt, Byronic doubt, for Byron was "the poet of doubt and discontent." He is aware that he is here treading in the footsteps of Hume instead of in those of Comte, for the definite aim of the latter's positivism was to effect the overthrow of Hume's scepticism.[1] For Herzen the pain of disillusionment is keen, the pain of the disenchantment that follows the cure of his "religious mania"; it is therefore impossible for him to be a consistent and tranquil positivist.[2]
Herzen, like Bělinskii, is constrained to believe; his scepticism is not chronic, and the mood of the Byronic Lucifer is not persistent. Herzen has an intense craving for love and friendship, and his experiences in this domain temper with gentle melancholy his moods of contemptuous pride and biting irony. More than once during the tragic happenings of a life rich in personal experience, Herzen found relief in tears. At such times positive science seemed inadequate. Yet he had faith in science, and found consolation in the acquirements of science. He sent his friends a newspaper cutting containing a report of the despatch of the first cablegram from New York to London as proof that science alone has absolute values in life; but this, after all, was but a passing mood, and other sentiments were usually predominant.
From the outlook thus sketched it was inevitable that Herzen should come to terms with the nihilist movement now maturing in Russia. Like Herzen, and taught by Herzen, the nihilists consistently opposed materialism to romanticism and mysticism. This coming to terms was promoted, not merely by the literary activities of Černyševskii and his followers, but also by the direct polemic against Herzen,
- ↑ For Herzen there was, speaking generally, no scepticism in the eighteenth century, but conversely intense faith; the proclamation of scepticism came with the proclamation of the republic. Diderot and England constitute exceptions. England had long been the home of scepticism. Byron walked consistently along the path trodden by Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Hume.
- ↑ The Russian term for disillusionment, razočarovanie, signifies literally disenchantment, for čarovat' is to charm, to bewitch.
