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The poet who found words and voice for this malady was too proud to pose and to suffer for the sake of applause; on the contrary, he often uttered his bitter thought with so much humour that his kind-hearted readers almost died of laughing.
Byron's disillusionment was more than caprice, more than a personal mood ; Byron was shattered because life deceived him.
And life deceived him not because his demands were unreal, but because England and Byron ,..,.ere of two different ages, of two different educations, and met just at the epoch when the fog was dispersing.
This rupture existed in the past, too, but in our age it has come to consciousness; in our age the impossibility of the intervention of any beliefs is becoming more and more manifest.
After the break-up of Rome came Christianity; after Christianity, the belief in civilisation, in humanity. Liberalism is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this. Its theology is political theory; it stands upon the earth and has no mystical conciliations, for it must have conciliation in fact. Triumphant and then defeated liberalism has revealed the rift in all its nakedness; the painful consciousness of this is expressed in the irony of modern man, in the scepticism with
\vhich he sweeps a\vay the fragments of his shattered idols.
Irony gives expression to the vexation aroused by the fact that logical truth is not the same as the truth of history, that as well as dialectical development it has its own development through chance and passion, that as \vell as reason it has its romance.
Disillusionment1 in our sense of the word was not known before the Revolution; the Pighteenth cPntury was one of the most religious periods of history. I am no longer speaking of the gn•at martyr Saint-Just or of the apostle Jean-Jacques; but was not Pope Voltair�, blessing Franklin's grandson in the name of God and FrPedom, a fanatic of his rdigion of humanity?
Scepticism \vas proclaimed togethPr with the republic of the 22nd of September, 1 792.
The Jacobins and revolutionaries in general belonged to a minority, separatPd from the life of the people by their culture: tlwy constituted a sort of S('cular clergy ready to shepherd their human florks. They r('presented the highest thought of their 1 On the \\"hole 'our' srPptirism \\"aS not kno\\"n in the last century ; England and Diclerot alOJH' a rc tlw PXcPptions. In England scepticism has hcPn at homl' for long ages, a nd Byron follo\\"s nilturally on ShakespPMe, Hobbes. and HumP.
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time, its highest but not its general consciousness, not the thought of all.
This new clergy had no means of coercion, either physical or fancied: from the moment that authority fell from their hands, they had only one weapon-conviction; but for conviction to be right is not enough; their whole mistake lay in supposing so; something more was necessary-mental equality.
So long as the desperate conflict lasted, to the strains of the hymn of the Huguenots and the hymn of the Marseillaise, so long as the faggots flamed and blood flowed, this inequality was not noticed; but at last the oppressive edifice of feudal monarchy crumbled, and slowly the walls were shattered, the locks struck off . . . one more blow struck, one more wall breached, the brave men advanced, gates are opened and the crowd rushes in . . . but it is not the crowd that was expected. Who are these men; to what age do they belong? They are not Spartans, not the great populus Romanus. An irresistible wave of filth flooded everything. The inner horror of the Jacobins was expressed in the Terror of 1 793 and 1 794: they saw their fearful mistake, and tried to correct it with the guillotine ; but, however many heads they cut off, they still had to bow their own before the might of the rising stratum of society. Everything gave way before it; it overpowered the Revolution and the reaction, it submerged the old forms and filled them up with itself because it constituted the one effective majority of its day. Sieyes was more right than he thought when he said that the petite bourgeoisie was everything.
The petits bourgeois were not produced by the Revolution; they were ready with their traditions and their customs, which were alien, in a different mode, to the revolutionary idea. They had been held down by the aristocracy and kept in the background; set free, they walked over the corpses of their liberators and established their own regime. The minority were either crushed or dissolved in the petite bourgeoisie.
A few men of each generation remained, in spite of events, as the tenacious preservers of the idea ; these Levites, or perhaps ascetics, are unjustly punished for their monopoly of an exclusive culture, for the mental superiority of the well-fed castes, the leisured castes that had time to work not only with their muscles.
We were angered, moved to fury, by the absurdity, by the injustice of this fact. As though someone (not ourselves) had promised that everything in the world should be just and elegant and should go like clockwork. We have marvelled enough at the
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abstract wisdom of nature and of historical development; it is time to perceive that in nature as in history there is a great deal that is fortuitous, stupid, unsuccessful and confused. Reason, fully developed thought, comes last. Everything begins with the dullness of the new-born child ; potentiality and aspiration are innate in him, but before he reaches development and consciousness he is exposed to a series of external and internal influences, deflections and checks. One has water on the brain ; another falls and flattens it; both remain idiots. A third does not fall nor die of scarlet fever-and becomes a poet, a military leader, a bandit or a judge. On the whole we know best, in nature, in history anrl in life, the advances and successes: we are only now beginning to feel that all the cards are not so well pre-arranged as we had thought, because we are ourselves a failure, a losing card.
It mortifies us to realise that the idea is impotent, that truth has no binding power over the world of actuality. A new sort of
;\fanichaeism takes possession of us, and we are ready, par depit, to believe in rational (that is, purposive) evil, as we believed in rational good-that is the last tribute we pay to idealism.
Tlw anguish will pass \vith time; its tragic and passionate character will calm down: it scarcely exists in the New World of the Unitr·d States. This young people, enterprising and more practical than intelligent, is so busy building its own dwellingplace that it knows nothing at all of our agonies. Moreover, there a re not two cultures there. The persons who constitute the classes in the society af that country are constantly changing, they rise and fall with the bank balance of each. The sturdy breed of English colonists is multiplying fearfully; if it gets the upper hand people will not be more fortunate for it, but they will be better contented. This contentment will be duller, poorer, more arid than that which hovered in the ideals of romantic Europe ; but with it there will be neither tsars nor centralisation, and perhaps there will be no hunger either. Anyone who can put off from himself the old Adam of Europe and be born again a new Jonathan had better take thP first steamer to some place in