The wish to break with the past, and adventure themselves in unknown regions was not lacking to these young men. They would rather have preferred to go ahead without stopping, and they had scarcely left the Old World when they expected to take possession of the New.—No hesitation, no middle course; they wanted absolute solutions, either the docile servitude of the past, or revolution.
These were Moreau’s views; he looked upon Clerambault’s hope of social revolution as a certainty, and in the exhortation to win truth patiently step by step he heard an appeal to violent action which would conquer it at once.
He introduced Clerambault to two or three groups of young intellectuals with revolutionary tendencies. They were not very numerous, for here and there you would see the same faces, but they gained an importance which they would not otherwise have had, from the watch which was kept on them by the authorities. Silly people in power, armed to the teeth with millions of bayonets, police and courts of justice at their command, yet uneasy and afraid to let a dozen freethinkers meet to discuss them!
These circles had not the air of conspiracies, and though they rather invited persecution, their activities were confined to words. What else was there for them to do but talk? They were separated from the mass of their fellow thinkers, who had been drawn into the army or the war-machine, which would only give them up when they were past service. What of the youth of Europe remained behind the lines? There were the slackers, who often descended to the lowest depths of meanness to make others fight, so that it should be forgotten that they did not fight themselves. Setting these aside, the representatives—rari nantes—of the younger generation in civil life were those discharged from the army for physical incapacity, and a few broken-down wrecks of the war, like Moreau. In these mutilated or diseased bodies the spirit was like a candle lighted behind broken windows. Twisted and smoky, it seemed as if a breath would extinguish it. But it was all the more ardent for knowing what to expect from life.
Sudden changes from extreme pessimism to an equally extreme optimism would occur, and these violent oscillations of the barometer did not always correspond with the course of events. Pessimism was easily explained, but its contrary was more remarkable, and it would have been difficult to account for it. They were just a handful of people without means of action, and every day seemed to give the lie to their ideas, but they appeared more contented as things grew worse. Their hope was in the worst, that mad belief proper to fanatical and oppressed minorities; Antichrist was to bring back Christ; the new order would rise when the crimes of the old had brought it to ruin; and it did not disturb them that they and their dreams might be swept away also. These young irreconcilables wished above all to prevent the partial realisation of their dreams in the old order of things. All or nothing! How foolish to try to make the world better; let it be perfect, or go to pieces. It was a mysticism of the Great Overturning, of the Revolution, and it affected the minds of those least religious; they even went farther than the churches. Foolish race of man! Always this faith in the absolute, which leads ever to the same intoxication, but the same disasters. Always mad for the war between nations, for the war of classes, for universal peace. It seems as if when humanity stuck its nose out of the boiling mud of the Creation, it had a sunstroke from which it has never recovered, and which, at intervals, subjects it to a recurrence of delirium.
Perhaps these mystical revolutionaries are forerunners of mutations that are brooding in the race—which may brood for centuries and perhaps never burst forth. For there are millions of latent possibilities in nature, for one realised in the time allotted to our humanity. And it is perhaps this obscure sentiment of what might be, but will not come to pass, which sometimes gives to this sort of mysticism another form, rarer, more tragical—an exalted pessimism, the dangerous attraction of sacrifice. How many of these revolutionists have we seen secretly convinced of the overwhelming force of evil, and the certain defeat of their cause, and yet transported with love for a lost cause “… sed victa Catoni” … and filled with the hope of dying for her, destroying or being destroyed. The crushed Commune gave rise to many aspirations, not for its victory, but for a similar annihilation!—In the hearts of the most materialistic there burns forever a spark of that eternal fire, that hope so often buffeted and denied, but still maintained, of an imperishable refuge for all the oppressed in some better Hereafter.