Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/433

Rh him expressing sympathy for the bourgeois. "I am sorry not only for men but for things, and I am oftener sorrier for things than for men." At this time, writing to his friend Ogarev, who shared the ideas of Bakunin, Herzen urges him to renounce the thought of an abortive liberation in accordance with the plans of Nečaev. "It is possible in history to make a rapid move, but if you want anything of the kind you must steel yourself against sympathy with those who will perish on the occasion, sympathy with individuals. In truth such sympathy was known neither to Pugačev nor to Marat."

Once before, Herzen had proclaimed the victory of the Galilean, when Tsar Alexander II had decided in favour of the liberation of the serfs. After twenty years' experience as a refugee among refugees he once again and definitively expressed his confidence in the Galilean, saying that sympathy and love of our enemies, not contempt or crime, would bring about equality, brain equality. We must follow Christ not Byron. "Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations."

The younger generation could not follow Herzen here. They followed the Herzen who had preached Byron's Cain, who had despised the bourgeoisie, who had taught that the religion of Christ must be overcome as the religion of death.

Thus Herzen ended his days as a Christian, a Christian in the sphere of practice, for he frankly accepted the gospel of humility—an unbelieving Christian! He had represented the revolutionaries of 1848 as believing Christians, and this position is very different from that of the unbelieving Christian. But may we say that for practical purposes Herzen moved on to the acceptance of bourgeois tactics and policy?

Not entirely, for had he done this he must have ended by giving his approval to the bourgeois revolution.

We need no longer be alarmed because we were threatened with Byron's Cain. Cain has been transformed into Faust, the Faust whom Herzen had so strongly condemned. Nay more, Cain has been degraded, and placed among the "superfluous persons."

N 1850, when Herzen first achieved a comparatively connected formulation of his philosophy of religion and of history, he had already long passed beyond the stage of philo-