Russian Thinkers

Herzen rightly held Bakunin guilty of it, and behind the ardent phrases, the lion-hearted courage, the broad Russian nature, the gaiety, the charm and the imagination of his friend - to whom he remained personally devoted to the end - he dicerned a cynical indifference to the fate of individual human lives for the sake of social experiment, a lust for revolution for revolution's sake, which went ill with his professed horror before the spectacle of arbitrary violence or the humiliation of innocent persons. He detected a certain genuine inhumanity in Bakunin (of which Belinsky and Tuegenev were not unaware), a hatred of slavery, oppression, hypocrisy, poverty, in the abstract, without actual revulsion against their manifestations in concrete instances - a genuine Hegelianism of outlook - the feeling that it is useless to blame the instruments of history, when one can rise to a loftier height and survey the struture of history itself. Bakunin hated tsardom, but displayed too little specific loathing of Nicholas; he would never have given sixpences to little boys in Twickenham to cry, on the day of the Emperor's death, 'Zarnicoll is dead!' or left the emancipation of the peasants as a personal happiness. The fate of individuals did not greatly concern him; his units were too vague and too large; 'First destroy, and then we shall see.' Temperament, vision, generosity, courage, revolutionary fire, elemental force of nature, these Bakunin had to overflowing. The rights and liberties of individuals play no great part in his apocalyptic vision.