Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/45



was natural that the Socialism of the men who brought about the Revolution of 1848 in France, and of Marx himself, should have suffered from the disadvantages which beset the work of pioneers. Those who came later owed them a great debt. Jaurès heartily acknowledged this debt, while his free and living spirit encouraged him to move beyond the stage which they had reached. He came into the movement years after it had established itself even in England, and a generation after Marx had done his work. He was at first much under the influence of Socialists whose point of view appears to have been similar to that held in England by the early members of the Social Democratic Federation. The Socialist of this type was distinguished by an immense fervour, an unbending idealism, and a curious remoteness from human life and the way men actually think and act. Jaurès was not that type of man. He was very mobile, very unconventional, and he had little of that rigidity in rebellion which sometimes seems like the reverse side