"But," said Katie, "it was not really jealousy, though that was part of it, that brought about the last break. They calmed down, but then began to read Nietzsche again, and I think went daffy over him. Terry tried the Overman theory on me and Marie. Americans cannot understand German philosophy."
Nietzsche's doctrine of the distinguished individual being "beyond good and evil," a man superior to the morality of society, his hatred of Christian civilisation and Christian ethics, his love of the big forcible blonde who takes his right by his strength only, all this was congenial to Terry's character, and especially so after the weakening of his social philosophy. The aloofness of the Overman, the individualistic teachings of Zarathustra, appealed to the anti-social Terry, to the man who more and more went back to his egotistic personality, to whom more and more the "communist" Christian anarchists made little appeal, who more and more became what is called an individualist anarchist, with whom there is little possibility of relationship, who is essentially anti-social, whose philosophy is really that of social destruction. This indeed is the anarchist who lives in the public mind—a destroyer. But what the public mind does not see is that this destructive anarchist is the result of a lost hope in anarchistic communism, a lost hope of radical extension of social love, in absolute solidarity.
CHAPTER XIV
Marie's Revolt
"The winners fall by the wayside," wrote Terry, "while the losers must ever on—hearkening to some high request, hastening toward a nameless goal. I am loser, for my motives are large and my actions small. In my desire to embrace the universe I may neglect a comrade. I can be as hard as my life and as cruel as its finish. I have only an ideal, and whenever anything or anybody gets in the way of it I am ruthless in feeling. I must not give up all that I have—what is in my imagination: I have nothing else."
Yes, Terry is hard. He "passes up" remorselessly not only the individual, but all society; but it is the hardness of the idealist, of the man who is still religious in the sense that he sees a beyond-world with which to compare this world and find it totally lacking. So, more and more he "passed up" Marie, found her more and more lacking, more and more human. The fact of her being a social outcast no longer had its strong appeal. He became hard and cruel to her through idealism, just as she had been hard and cruel to him through sensuality and false philosophy. But her hardness never equalled his fine scorn.
For a year or two preceding this point in the situation I had been living in Europe, and had met a good many men and women who had given a larger part of their lives to the making of a social experiment. Some of them, discouraged, had returned to a "bourgeois" manner of life, some even to a "bourgeois" philosophy. Almost all of the anarchists I have known lost their philosophy and enthusiasm with middle age, and experience with the actual constitution of things, combined with disillusion regarding the ideal. Most of them had been hurt or broken by their attempt, but they all retained a certain something, a certain remaining dignity of having struggled against the inevitable, and had acquired insight into some of the deeper things in life, though having lost some of the childlike simplicity which is a characteristic of the social rebel.
I saw a great deal of an old Frenchman, who had known Bakunin, and had been astute in the dangerous work of the "International" in England and Germany. An associate of William Morris and the other English anarchists who at that time called themselves socialists, my friend came in contact with much that was distinguished in mind and energy; he afterward carried the propaganda of revolutionary socialism to Germany, where he was arrested and imprisoned for five years. He is now a handsome, white-haired, well-preserved old man, with fine simple manners and joy in simple things, love of children and of long conversations with friends, good will and peace. He has retained a certain mild contempt for the "bourgeois," for people who prefer an easy time in this world to an attempt, even a foolish one, for radical improvement. But he knows the world now, and I fancy many of his illusions are gone.