Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

spit sincere venom, crawl amid general consideration too ?-But we suspect, that over Carlyle's imagination the quality of greatness exerts more power than that of earnestness. Α great regal-seeming ruffian fascinates him, while the petty scoundrel is trampled on. His soul rises to mate with the tiger in his power, but his foot kicks the toad before it, as it is lazily dragging its loathsomeness through the wet gardenbeds. The devils, much admired as they stood on the burning marl, lose caste with him when, entering the palace of Pandemonium, they shrink into miniatures of their former selves. Mirabeau, with Carlyle, is a cracked angel; Marat, a lame and limping fiend.

Some one has remarked, how singular it is that all the heroes of the French Revolution were ugly. It seems as curious to us, that they were either very large or very little persons. Danton was a Titan; Mirabeau, though not so tall, was large, and carried a huge head on his shoulders; whereas Marat and Napoleon were both small men. But the French found their characteristic love of extremes gratified in all of them. Even vice and cruelty they will not admire, unless sauced by some piquant oddity, and served up in some extraordinary dish. A little, lean corporal like Napolean, conquering the Brobdignagian marshals and emperors of Europe, and issuing from his nut-like fist the laws of nations; a grinning death's-head like Voltaire, frightening Christendom from its propriety, were stimulating to intoxication. But their talent was gigantic, though their persons were not; whereas, Marat's mind was as mean, and his habits as low, as his stature was small, and his looks disgustful. Here, then, was the requisite French ragout in all its putrid perfection. A scarecrow suddenly fleshed, but with no heart added-his rags fluttering, and his arms vibrating in a furious wind--became, for a season, the idol of the most refined and enlightened capital in Europe.

Had we traced, as with a lover's eye, the path of some beautiful flash of lightning, passing, in its terrible loveliness, over the still landscape, and seen it omitting the church spire, which seemed proudly pointing to it as it passed-sparing the old oak, which was bending its sacrificial head before its coming-touching not the tall pine into a column of torch-like flame, but darting its arrow of wrath upon the scarecrow, in

the midst of a bean-field, and by the one glare of grandeur revealing, ere it consumed, its "looped and ragged" similitude to a man, its aspiring beggary, and contorted weakness-it would have presented us with a fit though faint image of the beautiful avenger, the holy homicide, the daughter of Nemesis by Apollo-Charlotte Corday-smiting the miserable Marat. Shaft from heaven's inmost quiver, why wert thou spent upon such a work! Why not have ranged over Europe, in search of more potent and pernicious tyrants, or, at least, have darted into the dark heart of Robespierre? Such questions are vain; for not by chance, but by decree, it came about that a death from a hand by which a demi-god would have desired to die, befell a demi-man, and that now this strange birth of nature shines on us for ever, in the light of Charlotte Corday's dagger and last triumphant smile.

Yet, even to Marat, let us be merciful, if we must also be just. A monster he was not, nor even a madman; but a mannikin of some energy and acuteness, soured and crazed to a preternatural degree, and whose fury was aggravated by pure fright. He was such a man as the apothecary in "Romeo and Juliet" would have become in a revolution; but Marat, instead of dealing out small doses of death to love-sick tailors and world-wearied seamstresses, rose by the force of desper.. tion to the summit of revolutionary power, cried out for eighty thousand heads, and died of the assault of a lovely patriotic maiden, as of a sun-stroke. And yet Shakspere has a decided penchant for the caitiff wretch he so graphically paints, and has advertised his shop to the ends of the earth. So, to vary the figure, let us pity the poor vial of prussic acid, dashed down so suddenly, and by so noble a hand, whom mortals call Marat. Nature refuses not to appropriate to her bosom her spilt poisons, any more than her shed blooms-appropriates, however, only to mix them with kindlier elements, and to turn them to nobler account. And let us, in humble imitation, collect, and use medicinally, the scattered drops of poor acrid Marat.

Marat was essentially of the canaille-a bad and exaggerated specimen of the class, whom his imperfect education only contributed to harden and spoil. Robespierre and Danton belong, by birth and training, by feelings and habits, to the mid

66

dle rank-Robespierre sinking, in the end, below it, through his fanaticism, and Danton rising above it, through his genius and power. Both were limbs of the law," though the one might be called a great toe, and the other a huge arm; and, without specifying other resemblances, while Marat lost his temper and almost his reason in the mélée of the Revolution, both Robespierre and Danton preserved to the last their selfpossession, their courage, and the full command of their intellectual faculties.

Robespierre reminds us much of the worst species of the old Covenanter a picture of whom is faithfully drawn by Sir Walter in Burley, and in our illustrious clansman-the "gifted Gilfillan." Such beings there did exist, and probably exist still, who united a firm belief in certain religious dogmas to the most woful want of moral principle and human feeling, and were ready to fight what they deemed God's cause with the weapons of the devil. Their cruelties were cool and systematic; they asked a blessing on their assassinations, as though savages were to begin and end their cannible meals with prayer. Such men were hopelessly steeled against every sentiment of humanity. Mercy to their enemies seemed to them treason against God. No adversary could escape from them. A tiger may feed to repletion, or be disarmed by drowsiness; but who could hope to appease the ghost of a tiger, did such walk? Ghosts of tigers, never slumbering, never sleeping, cold in their eternal hunger, pursuing their relentlessly devouring way, were the religious fanatics-the Dalziels and Claverhouses, as well as the Burleys and Mucklewraths, of the seventeenth century.

To the same order of men belonged Robespierre, modified, of course, in character and belief, by the influences of his period. The miscalled creed of the philosophers of France in the eighteenth century, which, with many of themselves, was a mere divertisement to their intellects, or a painted screen for their vices, sunk deep into the heart of Robespierre, and became a conviction and a reality with him. So far it was well; but, alas! the creed was heartless and immoral, as well as false. Laying down a wide object, it permitted every license of vice or cruelty in the paths through which it was to be gained. Robespierre became, accordingly, the worst of all

sinners a sinner upon system-a political Antinomian, glorying in his shame, to whom blood itself became at last an abstraction and a shadow; the guillotine only a tremendous shuttle, weaving a well-ordered political web; and the tidings of the fall of a thousand heads agreeably indifferent, as to the farmer the news of a cleared hay or harvest field.

It

That Robespierre had at the first any appetite for blood, is not now asserted by his bitterest foe. That he ever even acquired such a monstrous thirst, seems to us very unlikely. His only thought would be, at the tidings of another death, "Another sacrifice to my idea; another obstacle lifted out of its way." Nero's wish that his enemies had but "one neck," was, we think, comparatively a humane wish. showed that he had no delight in the disgusting details, but only in the secure result of their destruction. He is the unnatural monster who protracts the fierce luxury, and sips his deep cup of blood lingeringly, that he may know the separate flavor of every separate drop. Robespierre, no more than Nero, was up to such delicately infernal cruelty.

Carlyle frequently admits Robespierre's sincerity, and yet rates him as little other than a sham. We account for this as we did in the case of Marat. He is regarded as a SMALL sincerity; and the sincerity of a small man contracts, to Carlyle's eye, something of the ludicrous air in which a Lilliputian warrior, shouldering his straw-sized musket, and firing his lead-drop bullets, seemed to Gulliver. "Bravo, my little hero!" shouts the historian, with a loud laugh, as he sees him, with "sky-blue breeches," patronising the houseless idea of a Divine being, "prop away at the tottering heavens, with that now nine-pin of thine; but why is there not rather a little nice doll of an image in those showy inexpressibles, to draw out, and complete the conversion of thy people? and why not say, 'These be thy Gods, O toy and toad-worshipping France?"" To bring him to respect, while he admits, the sincerity, we would need to disprove the smallness, of our Arras advocate. Now, compared to truly great men, such as Cromwell-or to extraordinary men, such as Napoleon, Mirabeau, and Danton -Robespierre was small enough. But surely it was no pigmy whose voice-calm, dispassioned, and articulate-ruled lunatic France; who preserved an icy coldness amid a land of

lava; who mastered, though it was only for a moment, a power like the Revolution; and who threw from his pedestal, though it was by assailing in an unguarded hour, a statue so colossal as Danton's. Rigid, Roman-like purpose-keen, if uninspired, vision-the thousand eyes of an Argus, if not the head of a Jove, or the fist of a Hercules-perseverance, honesty, and first-rate business qualities-we must allow to Robespierre, unless we account for his influence by Satanic possession, and say "Either no dunce aut Diabolus.”— Carlyle attributes his defeat and downfall to his pertinacious pursuit of a shallow logic to its utmost consequences. Probably he thus expresses, in his own way, the view we have already sought to indicate. Robespierre was the sincere, consistent, unclean apostle of an unclean system-a system of deism in theology-of libertinism in morals-of mobocracy in politics of a "gospel," according to Jean Jacques,-a gospel of "liberty, equality, fraternity"-a liberty ending in general bondage, an equality terminating in the despotism of unprincipled talent, a fraternity dipping its ties in blood. With faithful, unfaltering footstep, through good report and bad report, he followed the genius of revolution in all her devious, dark, dangerous, or triumphant paths, till she at last turned round in anger, like a dogged fiend, and rent him in pieces.

In dealing with Robespierre, we feel, more than with Marat, that we are in contact with an intelligent human being, not an oddity, and mere splinter of a man. His idea led, and at last dragged him, but did not devour nor possess him. His cruelty was more a policy, and less a raging passion; and his great moral error lay in permitting a theory, opposed to his original nature, to overbear his moral sense, to drain him of humanity, and to precipitate him to his doom. If he had resisted the devil, he would have fled from him.

In rising from Robespierre to Danton, we feel like one coming up from the lower plains of Sicily into its western coastthe country of the Cyclopses, with their one eye and gigantic stature; their courage, toil, ferocity, impiety, and power.Danton did tower Titanically above his fellows, and, with little of the divine, was the strongest of the earth-born. He had an "Eye," like a shield of sight, broad, piercing, and looking

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »