Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/443

Rh and then went on to advocate a federation of all the Slavs. Beyond question, too, in this matter the ideas of Bakunin modified those of Herzen.

Thus did Herzen draw near to the slavophils, even though great differences continued to exist upon matters of principle, and in the social and political fields as well as in the sphere of metaphysics. For example, his explanation of tsarism as a dictatorship was anything but legitimist, but neither his foes nor his friends took these differences adequately into account, their estimate of Herzen's conversion being determined by its political consequences. Formerly he had declared that Europe was essential to Russia, as ideal, as example, and as reproach; and he had maintained that if Europe had not existed, it would have been necessary for Russia's sake to create it imaginatively. But now Russia had become the ideal for Europe.

It is hardly necessary for me to defend myself against the accusation that I disapprove of Herzen's love for his homeland. I have done no more than reproduce his utterances regarding natural affection for the native soil, and for the life which despite all its defects custom has made congenial to a man's mind. Well do I know how experience of the foreign and the unaccustomed is apt to awaken home-sickness. I am aware that after his arrival in Europe Herzen found it necessary to defend progressive Russia against the false views and erroneous judgments that were prevalent in Europe. It was inevitable that such opinions on Russia as were uttered by Michelet should produce a feeling of irritation. But for Herzen to preach Russian messianism was a very different matter.

ERZEN, though he passed through a mystical period, grew up amid the liberal traditions of the eighteenth-century philosophy of enlightenment and humanitarianism; he soon became a radical, an admirer of the decabrists, and above all of Pestel; in the middle of the forties, as we have learned, he separated from the liberals and adopted socialist views.

Herzen became acquainted with the writings of the French socialists and with those of Weitling and Owen before he had studied the works of Hegel, but it was the influence Rh