I don’t intend a live blog of Garrett’s book Harangue (1926)—about half finished—but I did want to share these observations on the socialist movement of the 1920s, in the words of one of the characters who treats the whole movement with some distance. Elsewhere, Garrett treats the problem of how and why the wealthy “buy” socialist ideology as a means of distinguishing themselves from the bourgeoisie. Here we have the anatomy of the movement as this one character understands it:
Youth in its radical, self-conscious phase, and not very vital, else it would not have time to invent for itself a symbol of flame to worship. Much of that. Ego stuff. Innocuous...
Then those making it a point of difference with society to live romantically in obsolete tenements under some fanciful sign of protest. A good deal of that. Boredom, mostly, increasing with wealth.
Artists pretending to be scornful of Puritanical opinion, to which they were not indifferent, since they spent all their strength to shock it.
Writers, too, bulging their eyes at the key hole, reporting life as a peep-show. Not that they were dirty. The great ancients were dirty, only they did not know it...
Free unions wearing the soiled garment of revolt because otherwise they should be naked; they must pay respectability the homage to keep feud with it. Silly stuff...
Others, however, such as ego-mad communists; self-chosen saviours of the proletariat, avoiding work; anarchists, jealous of the law’s protection; pacifists, dreaming of a war to exterminate militarists; idealists, living grossly; Jack Cades, thinking themselves Cromwells; political refugees from Europe, thinking themselves Lenines and liberators.
Economic perverts, living by what they denounced, trading on the evil eye, setting their incantations adrift on woodpulp paper, pretending in their ideas to possess the sorcery to plow a rich man’s field with toads and reap barley from his thistles.
Imagine them overcome by faith in their ideas, as the witches were by their belief in the power of the blood-suckled creatures they kept in their imp pots. Then the parallel [with witches]. On a night like this their ideas take possession and carry them off to a Devil’s Sabbath where anything you will is true. ...
How infantile, how circular, this human intelligence! What was it the old witches bargained with Satan for? Power—the power to redistribute good and evil in the world. This had turned out to be a power of evil only, because, first, it was an impotent power, except as it might act upon human fear, and because, secondly, its possessors, unable to do good, became wholly intent upon doing evil to others, in envy, malice and disappointment. And so still in this day of artificial light.
What was the faith of old witches? Faith in the power of a phrase to change realities. “Thout, tout, throughout and about.” Merely that, and anything might happen as you wished it. True still in the age of applied science.
What was then as now the greatest common delusion? That you could overcome the disagreeable facts by the simple rite of denying their existence.
And the greatest of all human passions? The passion for martyrdom.
