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Even the purely artistic purpose, that of applying an ironic method to a subject of that kind, was formulated with deliberation and in the earnest belief that ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as in pity.
howl of execration.’
For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions – art, philosophy, love, virtue – truth itself!
Without emotion there is no action.’
The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly. There are natures, too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics. The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.
The practical value of success depends not a little on the way you look at it. But Fate looks at nothing. It has no discretion.
They understand each other, which is advantageous to both, and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations. Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same. The
And the heroic old woman resolved on going away from her children as an act of devotion and as a move of deep policy.
The tenderness of his universal charity had two phases as indissolubly joined and connected as the reverse and obverse sides of a medal.
And she could not see him otherwise, for he was connected with what there was of the salt of passion in her tasteless life – the passion of indignation, of courage, of pity, and even of self-sacrifice.
wife. Their accord was perfect, but it was not precise. It was a tacit accord, congenial to Mrs Verloc’s incuriosity and to Mr Verloc’s habits of mind, which were indolent and secret. They refrained from going to the bottom of facts and motives. This reserve, expressing, in a way, their profound confidence in each other, introduced
She was a master in that domestic art. Mr Verloc flung himself heavily upon the sofa, disregarding as usual the fate of his hat, which, as if accustomed to take care of itself, made for a safe shelter under the table.
mother’s. I sat up nights and nights with him on my lap, all alone upstairs, when I wasn’t more than eight years old myself. And then – He was mine, I tell you… You can’t understand that. No man can understand it. What was I to do?
Night, the inevitable reward of men’s faithful labours on this earth, night had fallen on Mr Verloc, the tried revolutionist – ‘one of the old lot’ -the humble guardian of society; the invaluable secret agent Δ of Baron Stott-Wartenheim’s dispatches; a servant of law and order, faithful, trusted, accurate, admirable, with perhaps one single amiable weakness: the idealistic belief in being loved for himself.
