Page:The Slavs among the nations by T G Masaryk.djvu/30

 life of stagnation, and interpreted them with all the enthusiasm that the new birth of national energy inspired in them. Some, supported by certain philosophers, went so far as to glorify a kind of Messianism. They envisaged the redemption and salvation of mankind by means of their race, but at the same time they recognised their nation’s own need for redemption. Their ideal never included the glorification of isolation, hegemony, or conquest.

Mácha, Puchkin, Mickiewicz, and Krasinski, Turgeniev, Dostoievsky, and Tolstoi, the greatest of the Slav poets, resolutely reject the theory of the super-man. Such a conception of mankind is absolutely foreign to them. Goethe first gave birth to this idea in “Faust.” The English and the French have always rejected this theory. Byron, in his “Manfred” and his “Cain,” has visions of a strong and energetic man, but he never made him a dominator. In his “Confessions of a Child of the Age,” Musset, the favourite poet of French youth, portrays something quite different from a super-man.

The type of the super-man who unites in him-