can manage to bring about some specific and practical reforms,
but that they never fulfill their visions or satisfy their souls
It is always said that great reformers or masters of events
can manage to bring about some specific and practical reforms,
but that they never fulfill their visions or satisfy their souls.
I believe there is a real sense in which this apparent platitude
is quite untrue. By a strange inversion the political idealist
often does not get what he asks for, but does get what he wants.
The silent pressure of his ideal lasts much longer and reshapes the world
much more than the actualities by which he attempted to suggest it.
What perishes is the letter, which he thought so practical.
What endures is the spirit, which he felt to be unattainable
and even unutterable. It is exactly his schemes that are
not fulfilled; it is exactly his vision that is fulfilled.
Thus the ten or twelve paper constitutions of the French Revolution,
which seemed so business-like to the framers of them, seem to
us to have flown away on the wind as the wildest fancies.
What has not flown away, what is a fixed fact in Europe,
is the ideal and vision. The Republic, the idea of a land
full of mere citizens all with some minimum of manners
and minimum of wealth, the vision of the eighteenth century,
the reality of the twentieth. So I think it will generally
be with the creator of social things, desirable or undesirable.
All his schemes will fail, all his tools break in his hands.
His compromises will collapse, his concessions will be useless.
He must brace himself to bear his fate; he shall have nothing
but his heart"s desire.
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