Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

one to the Herculean frenzy of the other. Mirabeau most, perhaps, resembles the first Cæsar, if not in the cast of oratory, yet in private character, and in the commanding power he exerted. That power was, indeed, unparalleled; for here was a man, ruling not creation, but chaos; here was the old contest of Achilles with the rivers renewed; here was a single man grappling in turn with every subject and with every party, throwing all in succession himself, or dashing the one against the other-snatching from his enemies their own swords-hated and feared by all parties, himself hating all, but fearing none-knowing all, and himself as unknown in that stormy arena as a monarch in his inmost pavilion--dissecting all characters like a knife, himself like that knife remaining one and indivisible-and doing all this alone; for what followers, properly speaking, save a nation at a time, had Mirabeau? We hear of single men being separate "estates;" the language, as applied to him, has some meaning.

It has often been asked, What would have been his conduct, had he lived? Some say dogmatically, that because he was on terms with the king at the time of his death, he would have saved the monarchy; while a few suppose that he would have rode upon the popular wave to personal dominion. If it were not idle to speculate upon impossibilities, we might name it. as our impression, that Mirabeau would have been, as all his life before, guided by circumstances, or impelled by passions, or overpowered by. necessity, and become king's friend, or king, as fate or madness ruled the hour. Perhaps, too, the revolution was getting beyond even his guidance. He might have sought to ride erect in the stirrups, and been thrown; while Marat grasped the throat and mane of the desperate animal with a grasp which death only could sever. Perhaps the monarchy was not salvable; perhaps, while seeking to conserve this ripe corn, the sickle might have cropped the huge head of the defender; perhaps the revolution, which latterly "devoured its own children," would have devoured him, leaving him the melancholy comfort of Ulysses in the Cyclop's cave "Noman shall be the last to be devoured." But all such inquiries and peradventures are for ever vain. Mirabeau's death was invested with dramatic interest. He died in the midst of his career; he sank like an island; he

[ocr errors]

died while all eyes in Europe were fixed upon him; he died while many saw a crown hovering over his head; he died, undiscovered, concealing his future plans in the abyss of his bosom, and able to adjust his mantle ere he fell;" he died, reluctant less at dying, than at not being permitted to live. All his properties seemed to rise up around him as he was leaving the world. His voluptuousness must have one other full draught: "Crown me with flowers, sprinkle me with perfumes, that I may thus enter upon the eternal sleep." His levity must have one more ghastly smile: "What?" as he heard the cannon roaring, "have we the funeral ere the Achilles be dead?" His vanity must cry out, "they will miss me when I am gone. Ay, support that head; would I could leave thee it!" His wild unbelief must once more flash up like a volcano fading in the dawn: "If that sun be not God he is his cousin-german." His intellect had, perhaps, in the insight of approaching death, passed from previous uncertainty and vacillation to some great scheme of deliverance for his country; for he said, "I alone can save France from the calamities which on all sides are about to break upon her." And having thus gathered his powers and passions in full pomp around his dying couch, he bade them and the world farewell.

France had many tears to shed for him; we have not now one tear to spare. His death, indeed, was a tragedy, but not

of a noble kind. It reminds us of the death of one of the evil giants in the "Pilgrim's Progress," with their last grim looks, hard-drawn breathings, and bellowings of baffled pride and fury. It was the selfish death of one who had led an intensely selfish life. What grandeur it had, sprung from its melodramatic ac companiments, and from the mere size of the departing unclean spirit. A large rotten tree falls with a greater air than a small, whose core is equally unsound. Nor was the grief of France more admirable than the death it bewailed. It was the howl of weak dependency, not of warm love. They mourned him, not for himself, but for the shade and shelter he gave them. Such a man must have been admired and feared, but could not have been sincerely or generally believed. Mr. Fox, on the other hand, having what Mirabeau wanted—a heartfell amid the sincere sorrows of his very foes, and his country mourned not for itself, but for him, as one mourns for a first-born.

We were amused at Lamartine's declaration about Mira beau: "Of all the qualities of the great man of his age, he wanted only honesty"—a parlous want! Robin Hood was a very worthy fellow, if he had been but honest. A great man deficient in honesty, what is he but a great charlatan, a sublime scamp, a Jove-Judas-to apply, after Mirabeau's own fashion, a compound nick-name?

Such a Jove-Judas was Mirabeau. Without principle, without heart, without religion-with the fiercest of demoniac, and the foulest of human passions mingled in his bosom-with an utter contempt for man, and an utter disbelief of God, he possessed the clearest of understandings, the most potent of wills, the most iron of constitutions, the most eloquent of tongues-united the cool and calculating understanding of an arithmetician to the frenzied energies and gestures of a Monad-the heart and visage of a Pluto to something resembling the sun-glory and sun-shafts of a Phoebus. Long shall his memory be preserved in the list of "Extraordinary (human) Meteors," but a still and pure luminary he can never be counted. Nay, as the world advances in knowledge and virtue his name will probably deepen in ignominy. At present, his image stands on the plain of Dura with head of gold and feet of iron, mingled with miry clay, and surrounded by not a few prostrate admirers; but we are mistaken if, by and by, there be not millions to imitate the conduct of the undeceived revolutionists (who tore down his bust,) and push him, in wrath, off his pedestal. Carlyle attributes to him with justice eye," but, though strong, it was not single; and is it not written, "If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness ?"

an

[ocr errors]

NO. IL-MARAT, ROBESPIERRE, AND DANTON.

ONE obvious effect of the upheavings of a revolution is to develop latent power, and to deliver into light and influence cast-down and crushed giants, such as Danton. But another result is the undue prominence given by convulsion and anarchy to essentially small and meagre spirits, who like little

men lifted up from their feet, in the pressure of a crowd, are surprised into sudden exaltation, to be trodden down whenever their precarious propping gives way. Revolution is a genuine leveller; "small and great" meet on equal terms in its wide grave; and persons, whose names would otherwise have never met in any other document than a directory, are coupled together continually, divide influence, have their respective partisans, and require the stern crucible of death to separate them, and to settle their true position in the general history of the nation and the world.

Nothing, indeed, has tended to deceive and mystify the public mind more than the arbitrary conjunction of names. The yoking together of men in this manner has produced often a lamentable confusion as to their respective intellects and characteristics. Sometimes a mediocrist and a man of genius are thus coupled together; and what is lost by the one is gained by the other, while the credit of the whole firm is essentially impaired. Sometimes men of equal, though most dissimilar intellect, are, in defiance of criticism, clashed into as awkward a pair as ever stood up together on the floor of a country dancing school. Sometimes, for purposes of moral or critical condemnation, two of very different degrees of criminality are tied neck and heels together, as in the dreadful undistinguishing "marriages of the Loire." Sometimes the conjunction of unequal names is owing to the artifice of friends, who, by perpetually naming one favorite author along with another of estab lished fame, hope to convince the unwary public that they are on a level. Sometimes they are produced by the pride or ambition, or by the carelessness or caprice, of the men or authors themselves. Sometimes they are the deliberate result of a shallow, though pretentious criticism, which sees and specifies resemblances, where, in reality, there are none. Sometimes they spring from the purest accidents of common circumstances, common cause, or common abode, as if a crow and a thrush must be kindred because seated on one hedge. From these, and similar causes, have arisen such combinations as Dryden and Pope, Voltaire and Rousseau, Cromwell and Napoleon, Southey and Coleridge, Rogers and Campbell, Hunt and Hazlitt, Hall and Foster, Paine and Cobbett, Byron and Shelley, or Robespierre and Danton.

[ocr errors]

In the first histories of the French Revolution, the names of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton, occur continually together as a triumvirate of terror, and the impression is left that the three were of one order, each a curious compound of the maniac and the monster. They walk on, linked in chains, to common execution, although it were as fair to tie up John Ings, Judge Jeffreys, and Hercules Furens. A somewhat severer discrimination has of late unloosed Marat from the other two, and permitted Robespierre and Danton to walk in couples. Yet, of Marat, too, we must say a single word—" Marah," might he better have been called, for he was a water of bitterness. He reminds us of one of those small, narrow, inky pools we have seen in the wilderness, which seem fitted to the size of a suicide, and waiting in gloomy expectation of his advent. John Foster remarked, of some small "malignant" or other, that he had never seen so much of the essence of devil in so little a compass.' Marat was a still more compact concentration of that essence. He was the prussic acid among the family of poisons. His unclean face, his tiny figure, his gibbering form, his acute but narrow soul, were all possessed by an infernal unity and clearness of purpose. On the clock of the Revolution-while Danton struck the reverberating hours while Robespierre crept cautiously but surely, like the minute hand, to his object-Marat was the everlasting "tick-tick" of the smaller hand, counting, like a death-watch, the quick seconds of murder. He never rested; he never slumbered, or walked through his part; he fed but to refresh himself for revolutionary action; he slept but to breathe himself for fresh displays of revolutionary fury. Milder mood, or lucid interval, there was none in him. The wild beast, when full, sleeps; but Marat was never full-the cry from "the worm that dieth not," within him, being still "Give, give," and the flame in his bosom coming from that fire which 13 never to be quenched."

[ocr errors]

If, as Carlyle seems sometimes to insinuate, earnestness be in itself a divine quality, then should Marat have a high place in the gallery of heroes; for, if an earnest angel be admirable, chiefly for his earnestness, should not an earnest imp be admirable too? If a tiger be respectable from his unflinching oneness of object, should not a toad, whose sole purpose is to

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »