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grad or Moscow. The mushik proved apathetic and did not respond
to
their appeal; but the crusading intelligentsia was not discouraged
because they had no rivals; they changed their tactics from mass–
appeal to terrorism, from terrorism to work among the industrial
proletariat, the landless peasants, among the soldiers. They quarrelled,
they split, they ramified; but all the time they could work in the
untouched raw material of History, could project their spiritual plight,
their desire to destroy and rebuild on to a gigantic historical plane.
Their faith moved rocks because there still were unhewn rocks to
move.
In contrast to them, the Western intelligentsia found no virgin
fields to plough, no natural allies to realize their aspirations to inde–
pendent thought. According to Marxist theory the intelligentsia was
to join the ranks of the working class and to become their strategists
and tacticians. There is no evidence that the intelligentsia lacked the
courage or the ability to do so. In 1848 students and workel'3 fought
together on the barricades; in the French Commune and in the revo–
lutionary movements after the last war in Germany, Austria, Hun–
gary, Bulgaria, and even in the International Brigades of Spain, they
gave an excellent account of themselves. But from the middle of the
nineteenth century onward, the workers of Central and Western
Europe had rapidly developed their own organizations, parties, trade
unions, produced their own leaders and, above all, their own bureau–
cracy-men with iron wills and wooden heads. In an age of accel–
erated developments, the organized Fourth Estate had become stagnant
much quicker than the Third in its time, and without even ascending
to power. The crumbs of material improvements and the shadow of
political influence which various Sections of the Second International
had wrung from the rulers, were enough to paralyse their impetus.
Members of the Western Intelligentsia could become Labor mem–
bers of Parliaments, editors of Left papers, lecturers in dreary evening
classes; but there were no rocks to move with the lever of 'independent
thought.' Towards thel end of the century the Western intelli–
gentsia had only the choice to be either bourgeois decadents or prole–
tarian schoolmasters. Their groups and cliques developed according
to these alternative poles, with a spectrum ranging from the French
Symbolists through the 'George-Kreis' to the Fabians. Compare Shaw
with Voltaire, Leon Blum with St. Just, and you get the difference–
not so much
in
stature as in historical opportunity.
The shake-up of the First World War seemed to create a new
opportunity for a general debunking and rebuilding. The whole body
of ideas had undergone a radical transformation: Relativity and
