with ease and elegance, and deeply imbued with that Western culture which they were commonly supposed to despise.  And this first impression was amply confirmed by subsequent experience during several years of friendly intercourse.  They always showed themselves men of earnest character and strong convictions, but they never said or did anything that could justify the appellation of fanatics.  Like all philosophical theorists, they often allowed their logic to blind them to facts, but their reasonings were very plausible—­so plausible, indeed, that, had I been a Russian they would have almost persuaded me to be a Slavophil, at least during the time they were talking to me.

To understand their doctrine we must know something of its origin and development.

The origin of the Slavophil sentiment, which must not be confounded with the Slavophil doctrine, is to be sought in the latter half of the seventeenth century, when the Tsars of Muscovy were introducing innovations in Church and State.  These innovations were profoundly displeasing to the people.  A large portion of the lower classes, as I have related in a previous chapter, sought refuge in Old Ritualism or sectarianism, and imagined that Tsar Peter, who called himself by the heretical title of “Imperator,” was an emanation of the Evil Principle.  The nobles did not go quite so far.  They remained members of the official Church, and restricted themselves to hinting that Peter was the son, not of Satan, but of a German surgeon—­a lineage which, according to the conceptions of the time, was a little less objectionable; but most of them were very hostile to the changes, and complained bitterly of the new burdens which these changes entailed.  Under Peter’s immediate successors, when not only the principles of administration but also many of the administrators were German, this hostility greatly increased.

So long as the innovations appeared only in the official activity of the Government, the patriotic, conservative spirit was obliged to keep silence; but when the foreign influence spread to the social life of the Court aristocracy, the opposition began to find a literary expression.  In the time of Catherine II., when Gallomania was at its height in Court circles, comedies and satirical journals ridiculed those who, “blinded by some externally brilliant gifts of foreigners, not only prefer foreign countries to their native land, but even despise their fellow-countrymen, and think that a Russian ought to borrow all—­even personal character.  As if nature arranging all things with such wisdom, and bestowing on all regions the gifts and customs which are appropriate to the climate, had been so unjust as to refuse to the Russians a character of their own!  As if she condemned them to wander over all regions, and to adopt by bits the various customs of various nations, in order to compose out of the mixture a new character appropriate to no nation whatever!” Numerous passages of this kind might be quoted, attacking the “monkeyism” and “parrotism” of those who indiscriminately adopted foreign manners and customs—­those who