Perhaps Edward’s insight into this aspect of politics has been sharpened by the fact that, despite his immediate denial, he has been hit by just such a bullet himself. But the impact must have been so great that it sent him into a state of shock which made him unable to see that the novel had done just what he said it hadn’t. The muddle and confusion are there, and so are the men who rise above it as well as those who are sucked under and lost. =Motivation= It is hard to draw the line between individual and group political behavior. A man may be a mirror or conductor of political forces as well as a discrete individual. His motivation is perhaps the most individual aspect of his political experience. Most of the leading characters in these political novels are strongly motivated. In only a few cases, such as that of Willis Markham in _Revelry_, does the individual drift into politics. The ones who, in Wilcher’s words, “want to defend something, to get some reform,” are very common. The “something” that Robert Jordan wants to defend is liberty in Spain, so that “there should be no more danger and so that the country should be a good place to live in.” Lanny Budd feels exaltation that in his role of Presidential Agent he is helping to defend democracy. The reform that brings Millard Carroll to Washington is expressed in the aims of the New Deal, and a similar response on a more emotional level is made by Glenn Spotswood. Passing the shacks of the Mexican workers they have tried to help, he exclaims, “By God, Jed, we’ve got to do something to stop this kind of thing.” A powerful motivating force which operates on a less conscious level derives from a man’s being a bastard. Hamer Shawcross in _Fame Is the Spur_, like Hyacinth Robinson in _The Princess Casamassima_, is illegitimate. Both men are raised by people who try to give them the emotional security of which their birth deprives them, but their attempts to change the society into which they were born seem in part due to the feeling that they are among its second-class citizens. Razumov in _Under Western Eyes_ has been raised, as far as the reader knows, without any family life at all. Yet he is motivated in exactly the opposite direction from Shawcross and Robinson. His assumption of a counter-revolutionary role is a direct result of his feeling that his nation and its existing social fabric are all he has. He tells the well-born revolutionary Haldin: I have no domestic tradition. I have nothing to think against. My tradition is historical. What have I to look back to but that national past from which you gentlemen want to wrench away your future?... You come from your province, but all this land is mine--or I have nothing.