Blane was once branded by Herzen as a bourgeois in the following terms: "His intellectualist religiousness and his lack of scepticism surrounded him as with a Chinese wall, so that it was impossible to throw within the enclosure a single new idea or a single doubt."
Herzen himself was one who threw thoughts broadcast. It is undeniable that he made many apt observations concerning both Russia and Europe. He is often commended for having in 1867 foreseen the fall of Napoleonic France and the victory of Bismarck and Prussia.
At the outset of his literary career Herzen devoted much consideration to the relationship between scientific specialists and philosophers. He dreaded specialisation as unindividual; he was afraid of becoming such a man as Wagner in Goethe's Faust; and he therefore turned towards generalities, towards philosophy, although conversely he sufficiently recognised the dangers of dilettantism. He never attained to the goal of desire, the perfect synthesis of these two extremes. Rather was it his privilege "to live a many-sided life," to embody both philosophically and politically the proverbial breadth of the Russian nature.
We involuntarily recall Beltov in Who is to Blame? where this "superfluous man" is ably and unsparingly analysed by Herzen. The Russian, who has received a thoroughly European education at the hands of Genevese Frenchmen, astonishes the Gemian specialists by his versatility and astonishes the French by his profundity; but whereas the Germans and the Frenchmen achieve much, he achieves nothing. He has a positively morbid love of work, but he is unable to secure a practical position in relation to life, incompetent to make contact with an environment wholly, foreign to him. He lives only in thoughts and passions, a frigid dreamer, eternally child. Half his life is spent upon the choice of a profession, and again and again he begins a new career, for he has inherited neither culture nor traditions from his father, nothing but property which he does not know how to manage. Thus Beltov's life is the Russian active inactivity, and Beltov is only a generalised human being, a moral Caspar Hauser as it were.
Herzen here gives a masterly portrait of his friend Ogarev. Beltov desired to reveal the secret of the world, of its development and history, which was to be disclosed to astonished
