Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/343

Rh deliberate reversion to prerevolutionary social institutions and whenever possible to those of the middle ages. The most momentous and thorough expression of the tendency is found in romanticist Catholisation, as witnessed by the fact that not governments alone, but poets, philosophers, and statesmen, above all that many Protestants in Germany and England, adopted Catholicism. It was not only de Maistre and the other French conservative philosophers who sang the praises of Catholicism, but the same sentiments were voiced by Protestants and converts, by such men as Stolberg, Schlegel, Novalis (who was never actually received into the church though he accepted its tenets), Gentz, Haller, Müller, and Overbeck the painter. In England the number of converts was very large. From the Roman side there were already being made energetic efforts in favour of union, directed mainly towards the Orthodox churches.

Rousseau had attempted to prove that civilisation was decadent. Even in Rousseau's own day, the Rousseauist movement, the longing for more primitive, elemental, nay barbaric energies had already secured wide support, whilst after the revolution its spread was yet more extensive. The horrors of the French revolution were regarded as confirmation of the theory, many persons considering the revolution to be the outcome of philosophy and of its secondary eftects. The reader may recall in this connection the Indian children of nature depicted by Chateaubriand, and the numerous successors of these in the different national literatures; he may recall Faust and the renunciation of the wisdom of the schools; he may recall Byron's revolt against society; and he may recall Musset's analysis of the malady of the century.

The historians and the philosophers of history continued Rousseau's thesis. Evolution appeared to them as a succession of leading nations and states: One folk thrust another from the pre-eminent position; one nation after another attained to the leadership, only in its turn to decay. Antiquity presented a succession of declining peoples and perishing civilisations, conquered and swept away by fresh and uncorrupted barbarians. Passing.to the later middle ages, the fall of Byzantium was an example of the same process. Such were the ideas of Herder and of many of his successors; such, in especial, were the ideas of the romanticists.

The socialist movement, which was soon to undertake the