GILBERT CANNAN: INQUISITOR
BY EVELYN SCOTT
RADICALISM is first of all a challenge to the accepted order which it provokes from inertia to justify a hitherto unperturbed existence, but a radical epithet self-applied is also in effect a challenge to him who claims it for title. If a man allow himself to be dubbed a radical, he should be ready to explain as well as to justify his emotional disagreement: with the existing order. Cannan, his friends, and his enemies have alike defied us with assertions which distinguish Mr. Cannan from the complacent mass. Though it be far from the conscious concern of the man himself to recognize inferred alliances, it is very much the business of those artists or critics of life whom the future may entangle in the net of inference to know in what Mr. Cannan's radicalism consists. If his work has in it any persistent element, they will sooner or later be called upon, in self-defence, to champion him or urge on his defeat. In what sense then may he be truly called a revolutionist?
The revolutionist returns, as within etymological limits he must, to something that existed before. If his reversion is to an idea, he goes back across the intervals of time to a thing as calmly permanent as the contemporary ideal which he opposes. The disturbing features which accompany an attempt to assert one conclusion over another give revolutions initiated by the logic of ideas or events a factitious appearance of incalculableness. A purposed progression of incidents presupposes unalterable values, so that in reality this newness which is arrived at by the mathematics of argument can never be anything but a rearrangement of the old. It is true that social revolutions create values by the emotional emphasis of the individuals who participate in them, yet all this is by the way and quite extraneous to the accident which has precipitated the movement, and but for art the unique values of all revolutions would escape in achievement. There is no essential difference in the type of mind which begins a theory of social benefits with the slogan of the republic, and with this text shapes a reasonable defence of its faith, and the mind which operates similarly from a hypothetical point in reality called communism. The interests of these two persons are di-
