'mechanical', for the world of everyday experience whose denizens
remain deaf to the inner harmony in terms of which alone anythingand everything-is 'truly' to be understood.
The romantic critics in some cases supposed themselves not merely
to be revealing the nature of types of knowledge or thought or feeling
hitherto unrecognised or inadequately analysed, but to be building
new cosmological systems, new faiths, new forms of life, and indeed
to be direct instruments of the process of the spiritual redemption,
or 'self-realisation', of the universe. Their metaphysical fantasies arefortunately, I may add-all but dead today; but the incidental light which they shed on art, history, and religion transformed the outlook
of the west. By paying a great deal of attention to, the unconscious
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R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
activity o f the imagination, to the role of irrational factors, to the part
played in the mind by symbols and myths, to awareness of unanalysable
affinities and contrasts, to fundamental but impalpable connections
and differences which cut across the conventional lines of rational
classification, they often succeeded in giving an altogether novel
account of such phenomena as poetical inspiration, religious experience,
political genius, of the relationship of art to social development, or of
the individual to the masses, or of moral ideals to aesthetic or biological
facts. This account was more convincing than any that had been
given before; at any rate than the doctrines of the eighteenth century,
which had not treated such topics systematically, and largely left them
to the isolated utterances of mystically inclined poets and essayists.
So too Hegel, despite all the philosophical obfuscation for which
he was responsible, set in motion ideas which have become so universal
and familiar that we think in terms of them without being aware of
their relative novelty. This is true, for example, of the idea of the
history of thought as a continuous process, capable of independent
study. There existed, of course, accounts- usually mere catalogues
raisonnls-of particular philosophical systems in the ancient world or
in the Middle Ages, or monographs devoted to particular thinkers.
But it was Hegel who developed the notion of a specific cluster of
ideas as permeating an age or a society, of the effect of those ideas
upon other ideas, of the many invisible links whereby the feelings,
the sentiments, the thoughts, the religions, the laws and the general
outlook-what is nowadays called ideology-of one generation are
connected with the ideology of other times or places. Unlike his
predecessors Vico and Herder, Hegel tried to present this as a coherent,
continuous, rationally analysable development-the first in the fatal
line of cosmic historians which stretches through Comte and Marx
to Spengler and Toynbee and all those who find spiritual comfort in
the discovery of vast imaginary symmetries in the irregular stream of
human history.
Although much of this programme is a tantasy, or at any rate a
form of highly subjective poetry in prose, yet the notion that the
many activities of the human spirit are interrelated, that the artistic
or scientific thought of an age is best understood i'n its interplay with
the social, economic, theological, legal activities pursued in the society
in which artists and scientists live and work-the very notion of
cultural history as a source oflight-is itself a cardinal step in the history
of thought. And again Schelling (following Herder) is largely respons-
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G E R M AN R O M AN T I C I S M
ible for the characteristically romantic notion that poets or painters
may understand the spirit of their age more profoundly and express
it in a more vivid and lasting manner than academic historians; this
is so because artists tend to have a greater degree of sensibility to the
contours of their own age (or of other ages and cultures) than either
trained antiquaries or professional journalists, inasmuch as they are
irritable organisms; more responsive to, and conscious of, inchoate,
half-understood factors which operate beneath the surface in a given
milieu, factors which may only come to full maturity at a later period.
This was the sense in which, for �xample, Karl Marx used to maintain that Balzac in his novels had depicted the life and character not so much of his own time, as of the men of the 6os and 70s of the nineteenth century, whose lineaments, while they were still in embryo, impinged upon the sensibilities of artists long before they emerged
into the full light of day. The romantic philosophers vastly exaggerated
the power and reliability of this kind of intuitive or poetical insight;
but their fervid vision, which remained mystical and irrationalist no
matter how heavily disguised in quasi-scientific or quasi-lyrical
terminology, captivated the imagination of the young Russian intellectuals of the 30s and 405, and seemed to open a door to a nobler and calmer world from the sordid reality of the Empire ruled by Tsar
Nicholas I.
The man who, more persuasively than anyone else in Russia,
taught the educated young men of the t 8Jos to soar above empirical
facts into a realm of pure light where all was harmonious and eternally
true, was a student of Moscow University called Nicholas Stankevich,
who, while still in his early twenties, gathered round him a circle of
devoted admirers. Stankevich was an aristocratic young man of great
distinction of mind and appearance, a gentle and idealistic personality,
and exceptional sweetness of character, with a passion for metaphysics
and a gift for lucid exposition. He was born in t 8 I J, and in the course
of his short life (he died at twenty-seven) exercised a remarkable moral
and intellectual ascendancy over his friends. They idolised him in his
lifetime, and after his death worshipped his memory. Even Turgenev,
who was not addicted to uncritical admiration, painted a portrait of
him in his novel Rudin under the name of Pokorsky in which there
is not a trace of irony. Stankevich had read widely in German romantic
literature, and preached a secular, metaphysical religion which for him
had taken the place of the doctrines of the Orthodox Church in which
neither he nor his friends any longer believed.
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H e taught that a proper understanding of Kant and Schelling (and
later Hegel) led one to realise that beneath the apparent disorder and
the cruelty, the injustice and the ugliness of daily life, it was possible
to discern eternal beauty, peace and hannony. Artists and scientists
were travelling their different roads to the selfsame goal (a very
Schellingian idea) of communion with this inner hannony. Art (and
this included philosophical and scientific truth) alone was immortal,
stood up unscathed against the chaos of the empirical world, against
the unintelligible and shapeless ftow of political, social, economic
events which would soon vanish and be forgotteil. The masterpieces
of art and thought were pennanent memorials to the creative power