Part 9 (2/2)
”Just now,” wrote Terry, ”there is strong predisposition among the 'reds' to resort to Russian methods. It needs only the occasion, which must be waited for, and cannot be created. When the 'error' is great enough, the 'Terror' will surely rise to the occasion. Were it not for my faith in this, I should be glad to see Humanity lapse back to whence it came.”
In the idealist there is a growing impatience with the world; in his attempt to react even against Nature and some of the necessary qualities of men there is such inevitable failure that no moral revolutionist or anarchist can indefinitely endure the struggle. He is destroyed by his fundamental opposition to the world which he seeks to destroy.
Therefore, impatiently, weakly, he sometimes breaks out--with a bomb--even against his philosophy and his temperament.
He is led into contradictions. One of them touches upon his feeling of ”cla.s.s consciousness.” Terry at times, as a transcendental moralist, rises above this feeling, but his special instinct as a ”labour” man often a.s.serts itself against and in contradiction to his pa.s.sion for the oneness of the race. In my intimate a.s.sociation with him I sometimes saw that, much as he liked me, he felt that I was of another ”cla.s.s.” In the work which resulted in my book, _The Spirit of Labour_, I frequently came in discouraging contact with this ”cla.s.s” distrust of me--in him and in others. Marie alone seemed free of it, in her relation to me, and yet she wrote:
”I think we have a peculiar sympathy for each other, and yet I realise that in some subtle way there is not that perfect understanding there ought to be. Just think of what extremes we two come from--how different our social environment! I know you understand as nearly as is possible for one of your cla.s.s, and yet I doubt if you can really sympathise with the ideas of anarchism which springs naturally from only one cla.s.s--the labour cla.s.s. Do you not hesitate sometimes and doubt that all men are worthy of the better things of life, the coalheaver as well as the banker and artist? Even I hesitate sometimes, when I see the coa.r.s.eness and ignorance of these poor plodders of earth, and when I think of all the really great things that slavery has accomplished. But who knows how much greater things might be, if done freely by free men?
When I remember that these poor plodders have never had a chance, I relent and feel so sorry and so hopeless. How often Terry and I have walked along the boulevards, admiring the beautiful homes of the rich.
Oh, it used to make me wild! I felt that I belonged to humanity, and yet I could only enter these beautiful homes as a servant, an object of contempt--an object of contempt supposed, moreover, to have morals, and religion, too!”
Of ”cla.s.s consciousness,” Terry wrote: ”Cla.s.s feeling has always been a deep problem to me: it emanates from profound depths. This reflection concerns you. Many of your 'labour' friends here seem to regret that there were many things they could not tell you; not that they had any conscious lack of faith in you as an individual; indeed, they had great faith in you as a person. Their distrust of you was a cla.s.s distrust; they dreaded to betray the interests of their cla.s.s. They felt a fundamental antagonism, not to you as an individual, but to you as a member of your cla.s.s. From their Social Sinai they enunciate the eleventh commandment, 'Thou shalt not be a Scab!', and the other ten commandments do not seem to them so important. But you, they think, cannot feel this commandment as they do, so pa.s.sionately, so fully. To them, it is the keynote of solidarity; to you, partly at least, a principle of division, of separation.
”No wonder our cla.s.s--the thinkers among them--rejects the morality of your cla.s.s--property morality, and the rest meant only to make property morality as strong as a law of G.o.d. I made at one time the fatal mistake of the many simple labourers who are organically honest. I spent most of my best life in seeking a solution of our hard lot from those above me.
After a loss of many feathers and some brave plumage, but no down, I must in all humility beat my way back to the traditional lost ideals of our organically incorporated cla.s.s.... Perhaps the most conscienceless cla.s.s who seek to solve the insoluble is the 'cultured' cla.s.s. But most of them seem to me like artistic undertakers officiating at the 'wake'
of Life. With their plat.i.tudes, their prudery, and their chast.i.ty, they make for death. These languid ones desire to have life served up to them in many courses. Greed lies at the bottom of their being, and so they preach content to the ma.s.ses, though for the workers they have nothing in their shallow souls but contempt. This cultured leisure cla.s.s has had the time and cunning to perpetrate one great and tragic trick. They have made social falsehoods so complicated that they themselves neither understand nor wish to understand.... Why is it that in all the great authors I detect an air of condescension, marking their contempt for those who make and keep them what they are? With what fine contempt the 'rube' is surveyed by the faker who has plucked him! Must I put these cla.s.sic souls of art in the same category? The art for art's sake people--these make me sick. It is at best an argumentative confusion springing from the fact that in the perfect work of art there is such a fusion of form and substance as to resist dissociation and defy a.n.a.lysis. Perhaps this fact accounts for Tolstoi's contempt for some of the cla.s.sic art. It seems to me that most cla.s.sic art is one of two things: either it smacks of smug content and over-fed geniality or it is permeated with a profound pessimism. The philosophers are worse than the artists; they are the ringleaders of the betrayers of humanity. Art at least makes the atonement of beauty for its mistakes, but this cannot be said of philosophy.
”Herbert Spencer, for instance, who represents the high-water mark of a philosophy that will not hold water, pours out the vials of his bottled-up wrath on the poor unfortunates of London who are compelled 'to make a living' by tips in opening the carriage doors or holding the horses of the wealthy. He had nothing but loathing for the pregnant girl who tries to break her 'fall' by taking advantage of the 'poor laws.'
For the workingman, who sincerely tries, at least, to settle the 'affairs of State' in the pot-house over a mug of ale, Spencer had nothing but contempt; but to the parliamentary people who settle the same 'affairs' over champagne and prost.i.tutes, he played the lick-spittle.... The recantation of his 'Social Statics' is the worst case of intellectual cowardice on record.... He went down with final contempt for the workers who served him, gave him his daily bread, made his ink, pen, and paper and bound the twenty volumes of his philosophy of falsehood! May his 'works' rest in oblivion!...
”In dismissing Spencer, it is worthy of note that the very thing which made him pause in the righting of social wrongs is the thing which will cause the Revolution, namely, the complicated nature of social falsehoods. In recanting his published truth on the land question, he admitted that, although the legal t.i.tle to land was obtained by murder and dispossession of original occupants, the matter was now too complicated to be dealt with. If this be so, if justice cannot be done because of the difficulties in the way, then all hail to the simplicity and elemental justice of a Red Revolution!...
”Yes, sometimes I feel like the crudest of the revolutionists, although I call myself a philosophical anarchist. Sometimes the jails seem to yearn for my reception, and I question my right to be at large. Nothing but a decreasing cowardice leaves me at liberty. And if I could not do more for my soul behind the bars than I have done in front of them, then I am fit only for durance vile. I, who have out-fasted the very flies till they fled my room, dread but one thing in the life of a prison--that I should have no time for reflection and repose! but out of a born anarchist it would make of me a compulsory Socialist, condemned to work for the State--a veritable dungeon of disgrace.
”It is not so much that I love life, though as a rule the poor, who are so close to life, wors.h.i.+p it in a way that puts all other things to scorn. I know nothing that reaches farther up or deeper down than this.
It is only in the gutter that life is truly wors.h.i.+pped. And that is why I search for my last faith there--in the gutter, whence all faith really springs.
”And yet to have faith even in the gutter is an act of deep imagination.
In the rotting rooms beneath me lives a worker with a family of six girls and one boy. Capitalism has crucified his carca.s.s for fifty years and now 'laid him off.' He has been looking for work for the last month.
I watch the insanity in his restless, aimless movements, and I feel desperate enough to try to get him a job. Unfortunately, he does not drink; so his pipe, ever in his mouth, is the only obstacle between him and the mad-house, or the poor-house. Every morning at six o'clock, his sandwich dinner concealed in his pocket, he makes a brave show of walking away briskly in his hopeless search for work; for there are too many younger men. His a.s.sumed activity is only put on till he turns the first corner, for he tries to conceal his lameness and decrepitude, especially from his wife, who strains her gaze after him. Just before starting off he takes the superfluous precaution to put some shoe-blacking on his hair which shows white about the temples. He comes back after a six hours' search, about noon, his neglected dinner still in his pocket. He has tramped ten or twelve miles with no open shop for him. He does not blame anyone, but regards it all as an accident that has happened to him in some unfortunate way. He broods over this till I can see it in his eyes; but I don't dare say anything to him. He is too old, and I might only make his trouble worse. If I were a sculptor I would put him before the world in a material almost as hard and I hope more enduring than itself. His arms never hang down by his side, but seem to be set in the position required by his last job, shovelling. It reminds me of the time, thirty years ago, when I was laid off, and the madness first got in and crouched behind my eyes....
”Yes, I suppose I am mad. It is true that if I cannot have the intellectual red that heralds the approach of Dawn, then I want the red light of Terror that ushers in the Night. My feelings have been clamouring for many years against my cowardly better judgment. I believe some day they will break loose and throw me, as from a catapult, even up against the stone wall of atrocity we call Society.”
Thus the idealist becomes frenzied at times at the incredible difficulties in the way of a total revolt against society, even against nature. We shall see how the absolute nature of his anarchism led Terry further and further along the path of rejection, ”pa.s.sing up” one thing after another, even letting anarchism as a social enthusiasm go by the board and making his continued relation with a human being, even with Marie, a practical impossibility.
CHAPTER XI
_The End of the Salon_
Terry's love for Marie was partly due, as we have seen, to his pa.s.sion for social propaganda: that she represented the ”social limit” was a strong charm to him. She, woman-like, always insisted on the personal relation, and for a long time his interest in her personality as such, combined with his social enthusiasm, was strong enough to keep the bond intact. When, however, his social enthusiasm paled, and his merely individualistic anarchism became stronger, his interest in Marie weakened. The times grew more frequent with him when he doubted the social side of anarchism itself--when this social propaganda seemed as hollow and as unlovely as society itself; and when he saw the weaknesses and vanities of his a.s.sociates, how far they were from realising any ideal. Then, more and more, he was thrown back upon himself, for as his hope in the new society weakened, his hope in Marie as an embodiment of it weakened also.
Marie's s.e.x interests, always freely and boldly expressed, played, at first, no part in the growing irritability of their relations. Marie's occasional ”affairs” with other men, sometimes taking her away from the salon for a time, were taken by Terry in silence. Even when he came face to face with the fact of Marie's absence of restraint in this respect, lack of delicacy and feeling for him, he did not complain. To do so was against his principles of personal freedom; and the fling in the face of society envolved in Marie's conduct pleased him rather than otherwise; also there was in him a subtle feeling of superiority over other men, in the fact that he was without physiological jealousy, or if not, that he could at least control it.
Even Marie's jealousy of him, whenever he was in the society of another woman, he took with a patient shrug. Terry's interest in other women was not a pa.s.sionate one: in it was always an element of the pale cast of thought, and Marie had no real cause for jealousy. But Terry tolerantly took it as a feminine weakness and tried to s.h.i.+eld Marie from this unreasonable unhappiness. On her account he gave up many a desire to talk intimately with some female comrade. But Marie had no such tolerance for him. Not only was she quite free with other men and to the limit, but she often went into a real tantrum of jealousy. One day she followed Terry all over town, fearing that he had an appointment with a well-known radical woman. Marie often acknowledged to me her inconsistency. ”But, you know,” she would say, ”our principles and ideas do not count much when our fundamental emotions are concerned.”
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