Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/414

388 had been an enthusiast for the revolution and the republic, and his study of the French socialists had strengthened in the man the imaginative longings of the child. Animated by a positively mystical faith in the revolution and in human progress, he hastened to the promised land of revolutions. In France during 1848 he was in intimate spiritual sympathy with the forward movement, but his experience of this revolution and of the rapidly ensuing reaction and restoration taught him that the revolution is destroyed, not by the reaction, but by itself. As a result he lost faith in revolution.

The first of his works to be issued in Europe (From the Other Shore, 1850) is an analysis of this sobering from the mysticism of revolution. For the Russian edition of this work he wrote the Epilogue to 1849, which opens with the words: "A curse upon thee, year of blood and madness, year of victorious stupidity, brutality, and dullness. A curse upon thee!"

The old social order was based upon religious illusion. Since religion and the church are one with politics and the state, it seemed to Herzen that the first awakening of mankind from the religious dream of the Catholic and feudal (aristocratic) middle ages was effected in the revolution which introduced Protestantism and philosophy and which terminated for the time being in the great revolution of the eighteenth century. This revolution was led by a minority; the masses were unmoved by it. The minority repudiated its principles as soon as it attained to power; even Robespierre had Anacharsis Cloots guillotined for professing a religion different from his own. The revolution had fallen, and its fate was inevitable because its ideals were the ideals of a minority. All these ideals, all these enthusiasms and convictions, were unavailing, for faith in the justice of one's ideals did not suffice; brain equality was no less essential, and this did not exist. Hence the heroes of freedom and the leading revolutionaries were not the heirs of the revolution, and its fruits were harvested by the bourgeoisie. But the bourgeoisie contented itself with half-measures in religion and politics, with Protestantism and liberalism. Liberalism is the religion of the bourgeois, of the trader, of the man without individuality, of the intermediator between the possessor and the non-possessor. An instrument, a means to an end—such is the bourgeois.

The bourgeois fondness for half-measures is well suited by