"I saw a fine thing from the window to-day," Terry wrote, "a thing of
sheer delight, the complete transfiguration of a human being. An Italian
street labourer came into the yard and sprawled on the grass to eat his
own lunch. He was bandy-legged from being coaxed to stand alone too
soon. But he had a most wonderful face; all the mobility which toil had
banished from his form must have sought refuge in his eyes and his
caressing countenance. Catching sight of some children playing 'house,'
he jumped up and in a most charming way offered them all of his cakes
and went back to his luncheon. The children instinctively brought him
back some of the cakes, which he not only refused, but offered them the
rest of his food. They gathered in a semicircle while he spoke to them.
There came something in his face and attitude which I have seen many
'cultured' people vainly attempt. He absolutely was one of them; the
children stood spell-bound, dazed at the sudden transformation of a man
into a child. The imagination that can become one with its object is a
high form of unconscious art and rests upon the heart and the mass
feeling of the race. The ancient folk-lore and ballads must have arisen
from some such fusion as this. How unfair, at least unwise, it is to
judge the individual action of the proletaire, when he is made for
action in the mass."
This vague philosophy and transcendental ethics pass naturally enough,
at times, into the feeling of violent revolution, where bomb-throwing,
if not advocated, is emotionally sympathetic.
"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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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