affected Wordsworth through Coleridge; and that Henry Sidgwick said of him, 'Of this [self-development], according to Spinoza, the highest form consists in a clear comprehension of all things in their necessary order as modifications of the one Divine Being, and that willing acceptance of all which springs from this comprehension.'* But they will pass these praises by, on the ground that Spinoza, as a thinker, was cut off from communion with Judaism. Thus, the thoughts of the Jew Spinoza,' to which Count de Soissons ascribes so authoritative a part in the causation of modern revolutionary thought, are found to be akin to the thoughts of Hegel and other begetters, and not to proceed from 'the Jew,' as such. It may be urged that this view is academic, dialectical, sophistic, or the like, and that Spinoza was not less a Jew, in a common acceptance of the term, because the Synagogue at Amsterdam cast him out. We shall not elaborate the argument, but we submit that, if Jews themselves have seen fit to take the extreme step of denying spiritual communion with a member of their race, whose influence on posterity is of the spirit, it is not unjust to refer his 'thoughts' to some other part of him than the Jew.' It is a difference which must be felt, not expressed; but if Goethe, as the Count says, was a Spinoza in poetry,' the thoughts of the Jew Spinoza would seem not to have been specifically Jewish.

We stand, we think, on even firmer ground when we come to Alexander Herzen. For Herzen (1812-1870), unlike Spinoza, was not entirely a Jew by race. The name of Herzen is not mentioned in Graetz' 'History of the Jews.'† We have no record that he ever entered a synagogue, that he was acquainted with any rites of Judaism, or that he was even aware of his partly Jewish origin. His real name,' we learn, was Yakovlev; his father, a wealthy nobleman, married in Germany, but did not legalise his marriage in Russia, so his children took their mother's name '‡; and the son of a wealthy Russian nobleman, educated at a Russian university, is hardly to be regarded as the final type of Judaism through the

*The Methods of Ethics,' p. 90.

† At least not in the index (104 columns) of the English translation. We have not read all five volumes for verification.

Outline of Russian Literature,' by the Hon. Maurice Baring, p. 150.

ages. In all the circumstances of birth and upbringing, Herzen would seem the very anti-type of a Jew, and the least suitable of all men to be included in that list of 'Jewish revolutionary writers,' whose principles and blood are the inheritance of such unscrupulous and bloodthirsty monsters as the leaders of Russian upheaval.'

Perhaps we may inquire more nearly who precisely Herzen was, and what place he occupied in Russian thought in the first half of the 19th century, before we admit, with Count de Soissons, that 'he was a foe not only of the ideals which produced contemporary culture, but also of all negatives of the ideals approved by the Revolution' (p. 182), or that he dreamed, like Heine, of an absolutely new order to be reached by revolutionary destructive madness' (ib.), or that, hating and dreaming these things, he 'followed' and 'in turn inspired' 'able and active Jews' (p. 172), and that among those whom he inspired is Trotsky (p. 187).

Mr Maurice Baring, a trustworthy authority, writes more accurately of Herzen, 'that he lived to see his ideas bearing fruit in the one way of all others he would have sought to avoid, namely, in "militancy and terrorism." When an attempt was made to assassinate Alexander II in 1886, and Herzen wrote an article repudiating all political assassination as barbarous, the revolutionary parties solemnly denounced him and his newspapers.' And an outlaw of 'revolutionary parties' should not unreservedly be included among direct agents of anarchism and revolution.

Our exception of Herzen from this category of 'Jewish revolutionary writers,' in the sense of a writer who derived his incitement to revolution from his Jewish race and blood, may be stated even more positively. Far from following active Jews, or inspiring them in turn, Herzen, it is legitimate to submit, was very typically Russian, in the true line of succession of Russian literature, and a very son of his own generation. In this connexion, Count de Soissons may have overlooked the life and works of Peter Chaadaev (1793-1856), whose letters on The Philosophy of History' in the Moscow Telescope,' 1836, were the direct forerunner of Herzen's letters in the press. Chaadaev in Russia, like Ibsen in Norway, aimed at a spiritual revolution. 'Solitary in

the world,' he called his country, as Herzen was to write in the same vein: A thinking Russian is the most independent being in the world'; and Chaadaev, who was solemnly found insane, though the pretence was abandoned after a month, became the prophet of Herzen and a true founder of Westernism' in Russia. We miss, too, any reference to Biélinsky (1816-1848), the great radical critic and philosopher, who, though not even half a Jew, was the chief force in the encouragement of the ideals, which, happier than Herzen, his disciple, he did not live to see exploited and traduced. We are not told of the oath of Turgenev (1818-1883): 'I swore never to make peace. This was my oath of Hannibal, and I was not the only one to take it in those days. I went to the West in order the better to carry out my oath.' We are not told of the likeness of these 'revolutionaries' to the hero-type of Russian fiction, in Herzen's Who is to blame?', in Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev himself.* The essential qualities of the type are displayed in Goncharov's delineation of Oblomov, and in Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons'; and it was invented, as Brückner tells us, to express a philosophy of life by a circle of earnest seekers, who 'followed no definite revolutionary, political, or social programme, but were active in the field of religious philosophy.' †

We confess to being no more content with Count de Soissons' evidence from Heine. To our thinking, very little of Heine is accounted for by recalling his Jewish origin. The Jews have never before or since produced the like of the lyric poet, who, jesting with all comers, jested at the last with Death himself :

'Ah! not little, when pain
Is most quelling, and man
Easily quell'd, and the fine
Temper of genius so soon

Thrills at each smart, is the praise
Not to have yielded to pain!

No small boast, for a weak

Son of mankind, to the earth
Pinn'd by the thunder, to rear

His bolt-scathed front to the stars;

* See Voguë, 'Le Roman Russe,' particularly p. 193.
† 'Geschichte der russischen Litteratur,' p. 298.

And, undaunted, retort
'Gainst thick-crashing, insane,
Tyrannous tempests of hate,

Arrowy lightnings of soul.'

If Arnold's tribute be true, and many hearts have accepted it, can it also be true to say of Heine, that his 'most striking characteristic is his sensualism' (p. 173),? Somehow, we think of the tradition that the enemies of Rabelais strewed hams and sausages on his grave.

Heine, certainly, hated tyranny-the tyranny of the Synagogue, among other kinds-and he may well have seen, as the Count records (p. 187), a prophetic vision of the present storm in Russia, during which waves of destruction would rush threateningly towards the West.' But we cannot agree that it is Heine's wish that is fulfilled, when 'in Russia Christian blood is being spilt in abundance,' or that Trotsky is, therefore, a follower of Heine. Surely, Heine, who 'ruthlessly satirised and ridiculed, fairly and unfairly, any person, party or political tendency which he thought gave him a chance of attack,' was not alone in denouncing the reign of autocracy in Russia. So recently as 1892, Herbert Spencer wrote to a correspondent:

'My hope is that the intensified despotism of late years, displayed by these measures against the Jews, as in other ways, leading as it does to the accumulation of various explosive forces, will end in a catastrophe which will break up into half a dozen kingdoms this great barbarian Empire,'

Spencer wrote more deliberately than Heine, but he is not therefore to be included among the makers of revolutions, whether Jewish, half-Jewish, or non-Jewish, whose intellectual descent is traced here from Hegel to Trotsky.

If we have succeeded at any point in proving or suggesting a weakness in the stretched line of Jewish revolutionary writers,' we should like, in conclusion, to say a word about Count de Soissons' more general argument. This, we saw, was, briefly, to the effect that the Jews, 'persecuted and slighted during so many centuries,' 'can have no feeling but hatred towards

* 'Cambridge Modern History,' xi, 413.

Europe,' and 'direct their hatred above all against the religion of Christ.' We shall not pause to ask if loving the Jews might not turn their alleged hatred to reciprocal love, and if a majority which persecutes and slights is less blameworthy than a minority which fails to turn the other cheek after many centuries. We hesitate even to ask if all liberal thought is really so destructive as Count de Soissons might lead us to suppose. Are we altogether to forget Körner, Kossuth, Mazzini? To side with Sir Timothy Shelley against his son, and to let the laurels fade at Missolonghi? Leaving these questions aside, we perceive, not without approval, that Count de Soissons would probably reverse Matthew Arnold's warning in 1865, and would remind us now that an epoch of concentration, at the end of a long war, seems to be opening in this country. Thrift and its kindred virtues, and the charity which begins at home, are so appropriate at the present time, that we must not quarrel with a counsellor who would bid us beware of disturbers of social order, whether practical or theoretic. But we are not prepared to go so far as to identify members of the Jewish race with the factors of disorder. Jews have a religion as well as a race; and, though some of them are still seeking a new country as a refuge from 'persecution and slights,' the vast majority of those whom we know have approved for themselves, and seek always for their co-religionists whom we do not know, a national status in the countries where they dwell. Their distant hope of the reign of a Messiah, as Macaulay said in 1833, does not shake their loyalty to the King of England.

We have tried to reconsider the Count's conclusion in the light of the actual facts about Spinoza, Herzen, and Heine, on whom he chiefly relies. We would add now, in respect to the general charge, that, though greathearted Jews, like other men, have hated, hate, and will hate oppression, tyranny, and ignorance, and all forms of obscurantism, no adherent to Judaism, as such, no Jew representative of Jewish teaching, has ever hated any form of Christianity which true Christians do not also condemn. Count de Soissons accounts for that 'hatred' (or at least he admits it as a cause) by the experience of slights and persecution, to which we have