But his anxiety redoubles, and his indignation bursts its bounds, when he sees the dangerous weapon of the new fanaticism in the hands of those who profess to be regenerating humanity. Every revolutionist saddens him when he resorts to violence. But the intellectual and theoretical revolutionary inspires him with horror: he is a pedantic murderer, an arrogant, sterile intelligence, who loves not men but ideas.[1]
Moreover, these ideas are of a low order.
“The object of Socialism is the satisfaction of the lowest needs of man: his material well-being. And it cannot attain even this end by the means it recommends.”[2]
At heart, he is without love. He feels only hatred for the oppressors and “a black envy for the assured and easy life of the rich: a greed like that of the flies that gather about ordure.”[3] When
- ↑ As a type, take Novodvorov, the revolutionary leader in Resurrection, whose excessive vanity and egoism have sterilised a fine intelligence. No imagination; “a total absence of the moral and aesthetic qualities which produce doubt.”
Following his footsteps like a shadow is Markel, the artisan who has become a revolutionist through humiliation and the desire for revenge; a passionate worshipper of science, which he cannot comprehend; a fanatical anti-clerical and an ascetic.
In Three More Dead or The Divine and the Human we shall find a few specimens of the new generation of revolutionaries: Romane and his friends, who despise the old Terrorists, and profess to attain their ends scientifically, by transforming an agricultural into an industrial people.
- ↑ Letters to the Japanese Izo-Abe, 1904. (Further Letters.)
- ↑ Conversations, reported by Teneromo (published in Revolutionaries, 1906)
