V. The Failure of the Moderates

To the kindly souls who for the most part wrote the history from which we get our notions of modern revolutions, this failure of the moderates was a great tragedy. The moderates appear as good men worsted by circumstances and unscrupulous opponents. They seem to be idealists crushed by a harsh world, but thereby sure of the resurrection history holds out to the just. The gentle Falkland and the scholarly Condorcet smile down upon us from the only heaven to which mere mortals hold the key; and if historians have not yet admitted Kerensky into their heaven, the reason may be no more than that the poor man is still inescapably here on earth.

Perhaps most of the moderates would be better or at least more normal men than their extremist opponents. Yet, leaders and led together, they make a motley lot, by no means easily catalogued by Marxist or by psychologist. And the traditional notion that they were idealists and that they failed because in the rough give-and-take the idealist must always fail is here peculiarly misleading. It is more accurate to risk the paradox: they failed because they were in so many respects what is usually called realists; that is, some of them were reasonably well adapted to a common-sense world.

Pym and Mirabeau, who died peacefully before the defeat of the moderates was evident, still enjoy reputations as skilled politicians, as sensible moderates. Over most of the others there hangs something of the kind of reputation most definite and clear with Kerensky. The eloquent compromisist leader seems to us a man of words, an orator who could move crowds but could not guide them, an impractical and incompetent person in the field of action. The Gironde seems much the same, as also the lesser Presbyterian leaders like Holles. It seems emptily paradoxical to list these people as realists. Yet realists of a kind they were. They used grand words and phrases grandly, as a consolation and a joy to their listeners and to themselves. But they did not believe in them as the radicals believed in them; they did not intend to try to pursue them to their logical conclusions in action. They were, in short, using words in the way most men in normal societies, including such realistic politicians as Gladstone, use them. They would not seem realists to a hard-headed horse-trader. But within the limits which tradition and ritual have set for the work of such people as they—part priest, part administrator, part actor, part teacher—they were good quiet practitioners.

But the times were turned topsy-turvy, and as the crisis of the revolution approached, only the man with a touch—or more—of fanatic idealism in him, or at least with the ability to act the part of such a fanatic, could attain to leadership. The normal social roles of realism and idealism are reversed in the acute phases of a revolution. We shall return to this topic in our next chapter. Here we need only note that the outward evidences of the approach of this kind of crisis appear as a heightened form of class antagonism. The moderates by definition are not great haters, are not endowed with the effective blindness which keeps men like Robespierre and Lenin undistracted in their rise to power. In normal times, ordinary men are not capable of feeling for groups of their fellow-men hatred as intense, continuous, and uncomfortable as that preached by the extremists in revolution. Hatred is a heroic emotion, and heroic emotions are exhausting. The poor may hate the rich, the Protestant the Catholic, the bourgeois the noble, the Southerner the Yankee, and so on endlessly. But this hate is normally in human beings a routine and consoling hate, a part of life, like food, drink, and loving, integrated with an existence as alien to the possibility of revolution as that of a vegetable.

The moderates, then, do not really believe in the big words they have to use. They do not really believe a heavenly perfection is suddenly coming to men on earth. They are all for compromise, common sense, toleration, comfort. In a normal society, these desires are part of their strength and give them their hold over their fellows, who share at least their desire for comfort. But in these three revolutions large numbers of men were for the moment lifted by desire and emotion to a point where they seemed to despise even comfort. The moderates could not deal politically with such men; they could not take the first steps which are necessary if such men are to be understood. The moderates were cut off from the immoderates by a gap neither philosophy nor common sense could fill. There is an adage that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. In one of his subtler short stories, The Kingdom of the Blind, Mr. H. G. Wells has exposed the weakness of this apothegm. In the heat of a violent revolution, its weakness is perhaps even more apparent than in the imaginary Andean valley of Mr. Wells’s tale. The moderates we have been dealing with were all very human and very fallible; but even had they been as wise as the heroes of Plutarch, as wise as Washington, it would seem that they must have failed. For we are here in a land fabulous, but real, where the wisdom and common sense of the moderate are not wisdom and common sense, but folly.