iumphant."[14] Our study of Merezhkovsky's literary character
would be incomplete if the ideas of this book were not set forth.

[14] In Russia, the name of the biblical Ham has become synonymous
with servility and moral baseness. Merezhkovsky employs this
scornful term to designate those people who are strangers to the
higher tendencies of the mind and are entirely taken up with
material interests. His "Ham Triumphant" is the Antichrist, whose
reign, as predicted by the Apocalypse, will begin with the final
victory of the bourgeoisie. In one chapter of this book,
Merezhkovsky proves that the writers of western Europe and Russia
(Byron and Lermontov) err in crowning this Antichrist with an
aureole of proud revolutionary majesty, for, since he is the enemy
of all that is divine in man, he can only be a character of shabby
mediocrity and human banality, that is to say, a veritable "Ham."

According to Merezhkovsky, the present evil in the world consists
entirely in the moral void which results from the disappearance of
the Christian ideal from the soul. The loss of this ideal was
inevitable, and even productive of good, because it had been so
mutilated and deformed by the Church, that Christian religion became
a symbol of the reaction, and its God synonymous with executioner.
Humanity will rid itself of Christianity. But nothing will replace
it, unless it be the philosophy of positivism, a sort of material
religion of the appetites and the senses, which gives no answer to
our anguish and our mystical instincts. This philosophy presided at
the formation of a miserable society, an egotistical and mediocre
bourgeoisie, who have no spiritual tendencies, and are incapable of
sacrificing themselves to any ideal other than that of money.

John Stuart Mill said that the bourgeoisie would transform Europe
into a China; the Russian publicist Hertzen, frightened by the
victories of socialism, in 1848, foresaw the end of European
civilization, drowned in a wave of blood. Merezhkovsky affirms that
the Chinese and the Japanese, being the most complete and the most
persevering representatives of this "terrestrial" religion, will
without fail conquer Europe, where positivism still bears some
traces of Christian romanticism. "The Chinese," he says, "are
perfect positivists, while the Europeans are not yet perfect
Chinese, and, in this respect, the Americans are perfect Europeans."
Where is one to look for safety against thi