Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/209

Rh guide himself belonged to the generation of those who had attained to intellectual maturity after the liberation of the serfs.

Reference should be made to Mihailovskii's literary and philosophical steadfastness. Whereas in their literary development most of the Russian thinkers have displayed crude transitions and profound internal revolutions, Mihailovskii remained the same from his debut-in youth to the end of his literary career; he developed, he matured, but there was no change in his fundamentally positivist outlook. As he himself puts it, he wore an overcoat throughout life. In one of his essays he compares Proudhon and Bělinskii, referring to the steadfastness of the Frenchman and to the vacillations and mutability of the Russian. He is inclined to regard this lack in Russian writers as due to the want of a cultural tradition, but he is aware that to Europeans tradition is a heavy ballast. The influence of Mihailovskii's steadfastness was necessarily all the greater seeing that his fundamental outlook and his leading doctrines were already formulated at the very outset of his career.

Literary criticism thus used to the exclusion of other methods was the implement of the philosophic and political opposition. Discussing the doctrine of the adaptation of individuals to the environment, Mihailovskii distinguishes between two types of adaptation. Some endeavour to raise the environment to their level; others adapt themselves to the environment. The fishes and the birds, he says, are the best adapted in the latter sense, and they therefore are the happiest of all animals. In human society, the birds and the fishes are represented by the men who delight in celebrating the days of their patron saints (the Russians have a special name for such festivals). In politics and history, the leading principle of these proposers of toasts is patriotism; in economics, it is perpetual harmony and wealth for wealth's sake; in science, it is science for science' sake; in philosophy, it is the teleology of nature; and so on.

In aesthetics, these adapters have the principle of art for art's sake, and against such a formula Mihailovskii protested from the very first. Art, in his view, had social significance. As early as 1574 he defined the poet as one endowed with the capacity of speaking for himself and for others. What applies to the poet applies to artists in general.