tinuous provocation; and he spent his life in frantic attempts to transform the world by force and to remould it in accordance with his own ideas. Without the beginnings of a clear conception as to the nature of the new constructions, and equally devoid of real knowledge of the world, Bakunin devoted himself to the career of a cosmopolitan agitator. At work now in England and now in France, then again in Belgium and Germany, and subsequently pursuing secret intrigues in Italy and Switzerland, he was never able to discover the fulcrum from which he might lever the world out of its bed. Thus revolutionary unrest and revolutionary fever mastered him. Mistaking his agitations for actions, he lost the sense of reality, and became unable to appraise at its true value the work done by his fellows. Not only did he reproach Herzen for thinking literature more important than practical activity, for preferring a man of letters to a "man of action," but he even declared Černyševskii to be no more than an arm-chair philosopher. Yet every revolutionary dreamer could lead him by the nose, and could fire him with enthusiasm for subversive designs, however preposterous.
Immediately after the failure of the Swedish enterprise on behalf of the Poles (1863), Herzen wrote to Bakunin: "Divorced from practical life, from earliest youth immersed over head and ears in that German idealism out of which the epoch constructed a realistic outlook 'as per schedule,' knowing nothing of Russia either before your imprisonment or after your Siberian exile, but animated by a grand and passionate desire for noble deeds, you have lived to the age of fifty in a world of illusions, student-like unrestraint, lofty plans, and petty defects. When, after ten years, you regained liberty, you showed yourself to be as of old a mere theorist, a man utterly without clear conceptions, a talker, unscrupulous in money matters, with an element of tacit but stubborn epicureanism, and with an itch for revolutionary activity—lacking only revolution itself."
The characterisation is just.[1] I would draw special attention to what Herzen says about Bakunin's unscrupulous-
- ↑ At a much earlier date Bělinskii described his friend Bakunin in the following terms: "Savage energy; restless, stimulating, and profound mobility of mind; incessant striving for remote ends without any gratification in the present; even hatred for the present and for himself in the present; ever leaping from the special to the general."
