Chapter XVI: Part 16

With some men the passion for gambling is an irresistible moral monomania, the single morbid taint in a nature otherwise faultless and pure. With Fox it was but one of many forms of an insatiable appetite for vicious excitement, which continued with little abatement during many years of his public career. In 1777, during a long visit to Paris, he lived much in the society of Madame du Deffand, and that very acute judge of character formed an opinion of him which was, on the whole, very unfavorable. He has much talent, she said, much goodness of heart and natural truthfulness, but he is absolutely without principle, he has a contempt for every one who has principle, he lives in a perpetual intoxication of excitement, he never gives a thought to the morrow, he is a man eminently fitted to corrupt youth. In 1779, when he was already one of the foremost politicians in England, he was one night drinking at Almack’s with Lord Derby, Major Stanley, and a few other young men of rank, when they determined at three in the morning to make a tour through the streets, and amused themselves by instigating a mob to break the windows of the chief members of the Government.

His profligacy with women during a great part of his life was notorious, though he appears at last to have confined himself to his connection with Mrs. Armistead, whom he secretly married in September, 1795. He was the soul of a group of brilliant and profligate spendthrifts, who did much to dazzle and corrupt the fashionable youth of the time; and in judging the intense animosity with which George III always regarded him, it must not be forgotten that his example and his friendship had probably a considerable influence in encouraging the Prince of Wales in those vicious habits and in that undutiful course of conduct which produced so much misery in the palace and so much evil in the nation. One of the friends of Charles Fox summed up his whole career in a few significant sentences. “He had three passions--women, play, and politics. Yet he never formed a creditable connection with a woman. He squandered all his means at the gaming-table, and, except for eleven months, he was invariably in opposition.”

That a man of whom all this can be truly said should have taken a high and honorable place in English history, and should have won for himself the perennial love and loyalty of some of the best Englishmen of his time, is not a little surprising, for a life such as I have described would with most men have destroyed every fiber of intellectual energy and of moral worth. But in truth there are some characters which nature has so happily compounded that even vice is unable wholly to degrade them, and there is a charm of manner and of temper which sometimes accompanies the excesses of a strong animal nature that wins more popularity in the world than the purest and the most self-denying virtue. Of this truth Fox was an eminent example. With a herculean frame, with iron nerves, with that happy vividness and buoyancy of temperament that can ever throw itself passionately into the pursuits and the impressions of the hour, and can then cast them aside without an effort, he combined one of the sweetest of human tempers, one of the warmest of human hearts.

Nothing in his career is more remarkable than the spell which he cast over men who in character and principles were as unlike as possible to himself. “He is a man,” said Burke, “made to be loved, of the most artless, candid, open, and benevolent disposition; disinterested in the extreme, of a temper mild and placable to a fault, without one drop of gall in his whole constitution.” “The power of a superior man,” said Gibbon, “was blended in his attractive character with the softness and simplicity of a child. Perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood.” “He possessed,” said Erskine, “above all men I ever knew, the most gentle, and yet the most ardent spirit.” He retained amid all his vices a capacity for warm and steady friendship, a capacity for struggling passionately and persistently in opposition, for an unpopular cause; a purity of taste and a love of literature which made him, with the exception of Burke, the foremost scholar among the leading members of the House of Commons; an earnestness, disinterestedness, and simplicity of character which was admitted and admired even by his political opponents.

He resembled Bolingbroke in his power of passing at once from scenes of dissipation into the House of Commons, and in retaining in public affairs during the most disorderly periods of his private life all his soundness of judgment and all his force of eloquence and of decision. Gibbon described how he “prepared himself” for one important debate by spending twenty-two previous hours at the hazard table and losing eleven thousand pounds. Walpole extols the extraordinary brilliancy of the speech which he made on another occasion, when he had but just arrived from Newmarket and had been sitting up drinking the whole of the preceding night, and he states that in the early period of his brilliant opposition to the American policy of North he was rarely in bed before five in the morning, or out of it before two in the afternoon. Yet, like Bolingbroke, he never lost the taste and passion for study even at the time when he was most immersed in a life of pleasure.

At Eton and Oxford he had been a very earnest student, and few of his contemporaries can have had a wider knowledge of the imaginative literatures of Greece, Italy, or France. He was passionately fond of poetry, and a singularly delicate and discriminating critic; but he always looked upon literature chiefly from its ornamental and imaginative side. Incomparably the most important book relating to the art of government which appeared during his lifetime was the “Wealth of Nations,” but Fox once owned that he had never read it; and the history which was his one serious composition added nothing to his reputation. In books, however, he found an unfailing solace in trouble and disappointment. One morning, when one of his friends having heard that Fox on the previous night had been completely ruined at the gaming-table, went to visit and console him, he found him tranquilly reading Herodotus in the original. “What,” he said, “would you have a man do who has lost his last shilling?”

His merits as a politician can only he allowed with great deductions and qualifications. But little stress should indeed be laid on the sudden and violent change in his political principles, which was faintly foreshadowed in 1772 and fully accomplished in 1774, though that change did undoubtedly synchronize with his personal quarrel with Lord North. Changes of principle and policy, which at forty or fifty would indicate great instability of character, are very venial at twenty-four or twenty-five, and from the time when Fox joined the Whig party his career through long years of adversity and of trial was singularly consistent. I can not, however, regard a politician either as a great statesman or a great party leader who left so very little of permanent value behind him, who offended so frequently and so bitterly the national feelings of his countrymen, who on two memorable occasions reduced his party to the lowest stage of depression, and who failed so signally during a long public life in winning the confidence of the nation.

His failure is the more remarkable as one of the features most conspicuous both in his speeches and his letters is the general soundness of his judgment, and his opinions during the greater part of his life were singularly free from every kind of violence, exaggeration, and eccentricity. Much of it was due to his private life, much to his divergence from popular opinion on the American question and on the question of the French Revolution, and much also to an extraordinary deficiency in the art of party management, and to the frequent employment of language which, though eminently adapted to the immediate purposes of debate, was certain from its injudicious energy to be afterward quoted against him. Like more than one great master of words, he was trammeled and injured at every stage of his career by his own speeches. The extreme shock which the disastrous coalition of 1784 gave to the public opinion of England was largely, if not mainly, due to the outrageous violence of the language with which Fox had in the preceding years denounced Lord North, and a similar violence made his breach with the court irrevocable, and greatly aggravated his difference with the nation on the question of the French Revolution.

But if his rank as a statesman and as a party leader is by no means of the highest order, he stood, by the concurrent testimony of all his contemporaries, in the very first line, if not in the very first place, among English parliamentary debaters. He threw the whole energy of his character into his career, and he practiced it continually till he attained a dexterity in debate which to his contemporaries appeared little less than miraculous. “During five whole sessions,” he once said, “I spoke every night but one, and I regret only that I did not speak on that night.” With a delivery that in the beginning of his speeches was somewhat slow and hesitating, with little method, with great repetition, with no grace of gesture, with an utter indifference to the mere oratory of display, thinking of nothing but how to convince and persuade the audience who were immediately before him, never for a moment forgetting the vital issue, never employing an argument which was not completely level with the apprehensions of his audience, he possessed to the very highest degree the debating qualities which an educated political assembly of Englishmen most highly value.

The masculine vigor and strong common sense of his arguments, his unfailing lucidity, his power of grasping in a moment the essential issue of a debate, his skill in hitting blots and throwing the arguments on his own side into the most vivid and various lights, his marvelous memory in catching up the scattered threads of a debate, the rare combination in his speeches of the most glowing vehemence of style with the closest and most transparent reasoning, and the air of intense conviction which he threw into every discussion, had never been surpassed. He was one of the fairest of debaters, and it was said that the arguments of his opponents were very rarely stated with such masterly power as by Fox himself before he proceeded to grapple with, and to overthrow them.

He possessed to the highest degree what Walpole called the power of “declaiming argument,” and that combination of rapidity and soundness of judgment which is the first quality of a debater. “Others,” said Sir George Savile, “may have had more stock, but Fox had more ready money about him than any of his party.” “I believe,” said Lord Carlisle, “there never was a person yet created who had the faculty of reasoning like him.” “Nature,” said Horace Walpole, “had made him the most wonderful reasoner of the age.” “He possessed beyond all moderns,” wrote Mackintosh, “that union of reason, simplicity, and vehemence which formed the prince of orators.” “Had he been bred to the bar,” wrote Philip Francis, “he would in my judgment have made himself in a shorter time, and with much less application than any other man, the most powerful litigant that ever appeared there.” “He rose by slow degrees,” said Burke, “to be the most brilliant and accomplished debater the world ever saw.” His finest speeches were wholly unpremeditated, and the complete subordination in them of all rhetorical and philosophical ambition to the immediate purpose of the debate has greatly impaired their permanent value; but, even in the imperfect fragments that remain, the essential qualities of his eloquence may be plainly seen.

JEAN PAUL MARAT.

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.

[A leader of the revolutionary Reign of Terror in France, born in
1744, assassinated by Charlotte Corday in 1793. His energy and
ferocity made him a power, which he never could have become by his
talents. He was the right hand of Robespierre, and the principal
agent in the destruction of the Girondist party in 1793. With
Danton and Robespierre he formed the triumvirate which turned
France into a vast human shambles.]

Three men among the Jacobins--Marat, Danton, and Robespierre--merited distinction and possessed authority. Owing to a malformation, or distortion, of head and heart, they fulfilled the requisite conditions. Of the three, Marat is the most monstrous; he borders on the lunatic, of which he displays the chief characteristics--furious exaltation, constant overexcitement, feverish restlessness, an inexhaustible propensity for scribbling, that mental automatism and tetanus of the will under the constraint and rule of a fixed idea, and, in addition to this, the usual physical symptoms, such as sleeplessness, a livid tint, bad blood, foulness of dress and person, with, during the last five months of his life, irritations and eruptions over his whole body. Issuing from incongruous races, born of a mixed blood, and tainted with serious moral commotions, he harbors within him a singular germ; physically he is an abortion, morally a pretender, and one who covets all places of distinction.

His father, who was a physician, intended from his early childhood that he should be a _savant_; his mother, an idealist, meant that he should be a philanthropist, while he himself always steered his course toward both summits. “At five years of age,” he says, “it would have pleased me to be a schoolmaster, at fifteen a professor, at eighteen an author, and a creative genius at twenty,” and afterward, up to the last, an apostle and martyr to humanity. “From my earliest infancy I had an intense love of fame, which changed its object at various stages of my life, but which never left me for a moment.” He rambled over Europe or vegetated in Paris for thirty years, living a nomadic life in subordinate positions; hissed as an author, distrusted as a man of science, and ignored as a philosopher; a third rate political writer, aspiring to every sort of celebrity and to every honor, constantly presenting himself as a candidate and as constantly rejected--too great a disproportion between his faculties and ambition.

Talentless, possessing no critical acumen, and of mediocre intelligence, he was fitted only to teach some branch of the sciences, or to practice some one of the arts, either as professor or doctor, more or less bold and lucky, or to follow, with occasional slips on one side or the other, some path clearly marked out for him. Never did man with such diversified culture possess such an incurably perverted intellect. Never did man, after so many abortive speculations and such repeated malpractices, conceive and maintain so high an opinion of himself. Each of these two sources in him augments the other; through his faculty of not seeing things as they are, he attributes to himself virtue and genius; satisfied that he possesses genius and virtue, he regards his misdeeds as merits and his crotchets as truths.

Thenceforth, and spontaneously, his malady runs its own course and becomes complex; next to the ambitious delirium comes the _mania for persecution_. In effect, the evident or demonstrated truths which he supplies should strike the public at once; if they burn slowly or miss fire, it is owing to their being stamped out by enemies or the envious; manifestly, they have conspired against him, and against him plots have never ceased. First came the philosophers’ plot; when his treatise on “Man” reached Paris from Amsterdam, “they felt the blow I struck at their principles and had the book stopped at the custom-house.” Next came the plot of the doctors, who “ruefully estimated my enormous gains. Were it necessary, I could prove that they often met together to consider the best way to destroy my reputation.” Finally, came the plot of the academicians; “the disgraceful persecution I had to undergo from the Academy of Sciences for two years, after being satisfied that my discoveries on light upset all that it had done for a century, and that I was quite indifferent about becoming a member of its body.... Would it be believed that these scientific charlatans succeeded in underrating my discoveries throughout Europe, in exciting every society of _savants_ against me, and in closing against me all the newspapers!” Naturally, the would-be-persecuted man defends himself--that is to say, he attacks. Naturally, as he is the aggressor, he is repulsed and put down, and, after creating imaginary enemies, he creates real ones, especially in politics, where, on principle, he daily preaches insurrection and murder.

Naturally, in fine, he is prosecuted, convicted at the Chatelet Court, tracked by the police, obliged to fly and wander from one hiding-place to another; to live like a bat “in a cellar, underground, in a dark dungeon”; once, says his friend Panis, he passed “six weeks on one of his buttocks,” like a madman in his cell, face to face with his reveries. It is not surprising that, with such a system, the reverie should become more intense, more and more gloomy, and at last settle down into a _confirmed nightmare_; that, in his distorted brain, objects should appear distorted; that, even in full daylight, men and things should seem awry, as in a magnifying, dislocating mirror; that frequently, on the numbers (of his journal) appearing too blood-thirsty, and his chronic disease too acute, his physician should bleed him to arrest these attacks and prevent their return. When a madman sees everywhere around him--on the floors, on the walls, on the ceiling--toads, scorpions, spiders, swarms of crawling, loathsome vermin, he thinks only of crushing them, and the disease enters on its last stage; after the ambitious delirium, the mania for persecution, and the settled nightmare, comes the homicidal mania. At the outset a few lives would have sufficed: “Five hundred heads ought to have fallen when the Bastile was taken, and all would then have gone on well.” But, through lack of foresight and timidity, the evil was allowed to spread, and the more it spread the larger the amputation should have been. With the sure, keen eye of the surgeon, Marat gives its dimensions; he has made his calculation beforehand. In September, 1792, in the Council at the Commune, he estimates approximatively forty thousand as the number of heads that should be laid low. Six weeks later, the social abscess having enormously increased, the figures swell in proportion; he now demands two hundred and seventy thousand heads, always on the score of humanity, “to insure public tranquillity,” on condition that the operation be intrusted to him, as the summary, temporary justiciary. Save this last point the rest is granted to him; it is unfortunate that he could not see with his own eyes the complete fulfillment of his programme, the batches condemned by the revolutionary tribunal, the massacres of Lyons and Toulon, the drownings of Nantes. From first to last he was in the right line of the revolution; lucid on account of his blindness, thanks to his crazy logic, thanks to the concordance of his personal malady with the public malady, to the precocity of his complete madness alongside of the incomplete or tardy madness of the rest, he alone steadfast, remorseless, triumphant, perched aloft, at the first bound, on the sharp pinnacle, which his rivals dared not climb, or only stumbled up.

PRINCE TALLEYRAND.

BY ARCHIBALD ALISON.

[Charles Maurice Prince de Talleyrand-Perigord, one of the most
distinguished of modern French statesmen and diplomatists, born in
1754, died in 1838. Originally a churchman, he became Bishop of
Autun in 1788, though notorious for loose and licentious living.
During the period of the revolution Talleyrand was in England and
America. He returned to France in 1797, and under the Directory was
called to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He was of great
assistance to Napoleon in accomplishing his _coup d’état_, and
thenceforward was the French ruler’s trusted adviser in all matters
of state till 1807, when a coldness grew on Napoleon’s part.
Talleyrand’s bitter and pungent criticisms on Napoleon’s policy so
enraged the emperor that he finally deprived him of his lucrative
offices. In 1812 he foretold the coming downfall of Napoleon, and
the accomplishment of the prediction achieved for him the
admiration of Europe. While the allies were advancing on Paris in
1814, Talleyrand was in secret communication with them. After the
restoration of the Bourbons, Talleyrand took but little part in
public affairs till 1830, when, as ambassador to England, he
negotiated an important treaty settling the status of the peninsula
kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.]

Never was character more opposite to that of the Russian autocrat than that of his great coadjutor in the pacification and settlement of Europe, Prince Talleyrand. This most remarkable man was born at Paris in 1754, so that in 1814 he was already sixty years of age. He was descended of an old family, and had for his maternal aunt the celebrated Princess of Ursius, who played so important a part in the war of the succession at the court of Philippe V.[29] Being destined for the Church, he early entered the seminary of St. Sulpice, and even there was remarkable for the delicate vein of sarcasm, nice discrimination, and keen penetration, for which he afterward became so distinguished in life. At the age of twenty-six he was appointed agent-general for the clergy, and in that capacity his administrative talents were so remarkable that they procured for him the situation of Bishop of Autun, which he held in 1789, when the revolution broke out. So remarkable had his talents become at this period that Mirabeau, in his secret correspondence with Berlin, pointed him out as one of the most eminent men of the age.

He was elected representative of the clergy of his diocese for the Constitute Assembly, and was one of the first of that rank in the Church who voted on the 29th of May for the junction of the ecclesiastical body with the _Tiers État_. He also took the lead in all the measures, then so popular, which had for their object to spoliate the Church, and apply its possessions to the service of the state; accordingly, he himself proposed the suppression of tithes and the application of the property of the Church to the public treasury. In all these measures he was deaf to the remonstrances of the clergy whom he represented, and already he had severed all the cords which bound him to the Church.

His ruling principle was not any peculiar enmity to religion, but a fixed determination to adhere to the dominant party, whatever it was, whether in Church or state; to watch closely the signs of the times, and throw in his lot with that section of the community which appeared likely to gain the superiority. In February, 1790, he was appointed President of the Assembly, and from that time forward, down to its dissolution, he took a leading part in all its measures. He was not, however, an orator; knowledge of men and prophetic sagacity were his great qualifications. Generally silent in the hall of debate, he soon gained the lead in the council of deliberation or committee of management. He officiated as constitutional bishop to the great scandal of the more orthodox clergy in the great _fête_ on the 14th of July, 1790, in the Champ de Mars; but he had already become fearful of the excesses of the popular party, and was, perhaps, the only person to whom Mirabeau on his deathbed communicated his secret views and designs for the restoration of the French monarchy.

Early in 1792 he set out on a secret mission to London, where he remained till the breaking out of the war in February, 1793, and enjoyed much of the confidence of Mr. Pitt. He naturally enough became an object of jealousy to both parties, being denounced by the Jacobins as an emissary of the court, and by the Royalists as an agent of the Jacobins; and, in consequence, he was accused and condemned in his absence, and only escaped by withdrawing to America, where he remained till 1795 engaged in commercial pursuits. It was not the least proof of his address and sagacity that he thus avoided equally the crimes and the dangers of the Reign of Terror, and returned to Paris at the close of that year with his head on his shoulders, and without deadly hostility to any party in his heart.

His influence and abilities soon caused themselves to be felt; the sentence of death, which had been recorded against him in his absence, was soon recalled; he became a leading member of the Club of Salm, which in 1797 was established to counterbalance the efforts of the Royalists in the Club of Clichy; and on the triumph of the revolutionists by the violence of Augereau in July, 1797, he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Nevertheless, aware of the imbecility of the directorial government, he entered warmly into the views of Napoleon, upon his return from Egypt, for its overthrow. He was again made Minister of Foreign Affairs by that youthful conqueror after the 18th Brumaire, and continued, with some few interruptions, to be the soul of all foreign negotiations and the chief director of foreign policy, down to the measures directed against Spain in 1807. On that occasion, however, his wonted sagacity did not desert him; he openly disapproved of the attack on the peninsula, and was, in consequence, dismissed from office, which he did not again hold till he was appointed chief of the provisional government on the 1st of April, 1814. He had thus the singular address, though a leading character under both _régimes_, to extricate himself both from the crimes of the revolution and the misfortunes of the Empire.

He was no ordinary man who could accomplish so great a prodigy and yet retain such influence as to step, as it were, by common consent into the principal direction of affairs on the overthrow of Napoleon. His power of doing so depended not merely on his great talents; they alone, if unaccompanied by other qualifications, would inevitably have brought him to the guillotine under the first government or the prisons of state under the last. It was his extraordinary versatility and flexibility of disposition, and the readiness with which he accommodated himself to every change of government and dynasty which he thought likely to be permanent, that mainly contributed to this extraordinary result. Such was his address that, though the most changeable character in the whole revolution, he contrived never to lose either influence or reputation by all his tergiversations; but, on the contrary, went on constantly rising to the close of his career, when above eighty years of age, in weight, fortune, and consideration.

The very fact of his having survived, both in person and influence, so many changes of government, which had proved fatal to almost all his contemporaries, of itself constituted a colossal reputation; and when he said, with a sarcastic smile, on taking the oath of fidelity to Louis Philippe in 1830, “_C’est le treisiéme_,” the expression, repeated from one end of Europe to the other, produced a greater admiration for his address than indignation at his perfidy.

He has been well described as the person in existence who had the least hand in producing, and the greatest power of profiting, by revolutions. He was not destitute of original thought, but wholly without the generous feeling, the self-forgetfulness, which prompt the great in character as well as talent to bring forth their conceptions in word or action, at whatever hazard to themselves or their fortunes. His object always was not to direct, but to observe and guide the current; he never opposed it when he saw it was irresistible, nor braved its dangers where it threatened to be perilous, but quietly withdrew until an opportunity occurred, by the destruction alike of its supporters and its opponents, to obtain its direction. In this respect his talents very closely resembled those of Metternich, of whom a character has already been drawn; but he was less consistent than the wary Austrian diplomatist, and, though equaled by him in dissimulation, he was far his superior in perfidy.

It cost him nothing to contradict and violate his oaths whenever it suited his interest to do so, and the extraordinary and almost unbroken success of his career affords, as well as that of Napoleon, the most striking confirmation of the profound saying of Johnson--that no man ever raised himself from private life to the supreme direction of affairs, in whom great abilities were not combined with certain meannesses, which would have proved altogether fatal to him in ordinary life.

Yet was he without any of the great vices of the revolution; his selfishness was constant, his cupidity unbounded, his hands often sullied by gold, but he was not cruel or unforgiving in his disposition, and few, if any, deeds of blood stain his memory. His witticisms and _bon mots_ were admirable, and repeated from one end of Europe to the other; yet was his reputation in this respect, perhaps, greater than the reality, for, by common consent, every good saying at Paris during his life-time was ascribed to the ex-Bishop of Autun. But none perhaps more clearly reveals his character and explains his success in life than the celebrated one, “That the principal object of language is to conceal the thought.”

GEORGE JACQUES DANTON.

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.

[A principal leader in French revolutionary times, born 1759,
executed 1794. He was one of the first to advocate violent
measures, organized the attack on the Tuileries in 1792, and was
principally instrumental in bringing on the dreadful September
massacres of the same year, when all those confined in the Paris
prisons were slaughtered. On being elected to the convention, he
was foremost in forcing on the trial of the king, and afterward, as
a member of the Committee of Public Safety, in breaking the power
of the Girondists, though he would have spared their lives. He
incurred the hate of Robespierre by those inclinations to mercy and
moderation which would have put an end to the Reign of Terror, and
was sent to the scaffold by the plots of his cunning and implacable
adversary.]

Between the demagogue and the highwayman the resemblance is close; both are leaders of bands, and each requires an opportunity to organize his band. Danton, to organize his band, required the revolution. “Of low birth, without a patron,” penniless, every office being filled, and “the Paris bar unattainable,” admitted a lawyer after “a struggle,” he for a long time strolled about the streets without a brief, or frequented the coffee-houses, the same as similar men nowadays frequent the beer-shops. At the Café de l’École, the proprietor, a good-natured old fellow “in a small round perruque, gray coat, and a napkin on his arm,” circulated among his tables smiling blandly, while his daughter sat in the rear as cashier. Danton chatted with her, and demanded her hand in marriage. To obtain her he had to mend his ways, purchase an attorneyship in the Court of the Royal Council, and find bondsmen and indorsers in his small native town.

Wedded and lodged in the gloomy Passage du Commerce, “more burdened with debts than with causes,” tied down to a sedentary profession which demands vigorous application, accuracy, a moderate tone, a respectable style, and blameless deportment; obliged to keep house on so small a scale that, without the help of a _louis_ regularly advanced to him each week by his coffee-house father-in-law, he could not make both ends meet; his free-and-easy tastes, his alternately impetuous and indolent disposition, his love of enjoyment and of having his own way, his rude, violent instincts, his expansiveness, creativeness, and activity, all rebel; he is ill-calculated for the quiet routine of our civil careers; it is not the steady discipline of an old society that suits him, but the tumultuous brutality of a society going to pieces, or one in a state of formation. In temperament and character he is a _barbarian_, and a barbarian born to command his fellow-creatures, like this or that vassal of the sixth century or baron of the tenth century.

A colossus with the head of a “Tartar,” pitted with the small-pox, tragically and terribly ugly, with a mask convulsed like that of a growling “bull-dog,” with small, cavernous, restless eyes buried under the huge wrinkles of a threatening brow, with a thundering voice, and moving and acting like a combatant, full-blooded, boiling over with passion and energy, his strength in its outbursts seeming illimitable, like the forces of Nature, roaring like a bull when speaking, and heard through closed windows fifty yards off in the street, employing immoderate imagery, intensely in earnest, trembling with indignation, revenge, and patriotic sentiments, able to arouse savage instincts in the most tranquil breast and generous instincts in the most brutal, profane, using emphatic terms, cynical, not monotonously so, and affectedly like Hébert, but spontaneously and to the point, full of crude jests worthy of Rabelais, possessing a stock of jovial sensuality and good-humor, cordial and familiar in his ways, frank, friendly in tone; in short, outwardly and inwardly the best-fitted for winning the confidence and sympathy of a Gallic-Parisian populace, and all contributing to the formation of “his inborn, practical popularity,” and to make of him “a grand seignior of _sans-culotterie_.”

Thus endowed for playing a part, there is a strong temptation to act it the moment the theatre is ready, whether this be a mean one, got up for the occasion, and the actors rogues, scamps, and prostitutes, or the part an ignoble one, murderous, and finally fatal to him who undertakes it. He comprehended from the first the ultimate object and definite result of the revolution, that is to say, the dictatorship of the violent minority. Immediately after the “14th of July,” 1789, he organized in his quarter of the city a small independent republic, aggressive and predominant, the center of the faction, a refuge for the riff-raff and a rendezvous for fanatics, a pandemonium composed of every available madcap, every rogue, visionary, shoulder-hitter, newspaper scribbler, and stump-speaker, either a secret or avowed plotter of murder, Camille Desmoulins, Fréron, Hébert, Chaumette, Clootz, Théroigne, Marat--while, in this more than Jacobin state, the model in anticipation of that he is to establish later, he reigns, as he will afterward reign, the permanent president of the district, commander of the battalion, orator of the club, and the concocter of bold undertakings. In order to set the machine up, he cleared the ground, fused the metal, hammered out the principal pieces, filed off the blisterings, designed the action, adjusted the minor wheels, set it a-going and indicated what it had to do, and, at the same time, he forged the plating which guarded it from the foreigner and against all outward violence. The machine being his, why, after constructing it, did he not serve as its engineer?

Because, if competent to construct it, he was not qualified to manage it. In a crisis he may take hold of the wheel himself, excite an assembly or a mob in his favor, carry things with a high hand, and direct an executive committee for a few weeks. But he dislikes regular, persistent labor; he is not made for studying documents, for poring over papers, and confining himself to administrative routine. Never, like Robespierre and Billaud, can he attend to both official and police duties at the same time, carefully reading minute daily reports, annotating mortuary lists, extemporizing ornate abstractions, coolly enunciating falsehoods, and acting out the patient, satisfied inquisitor; and, especially, he can never become the systematic executioner.

On the one hand, his eyes are not obscured by the gray veil of theory; he does not regard men through the “Contrat-Social” as a sum of arithmetical units, but as they really are, living, suffering, shedding their blood, especially those he knows, each with his peculiar physiognomy and demeanor. Compassion is excited by all this when one has any feeling, and he had. Danton had a heart; he had the quick sensibilities of a man of flesh and blood stirred by the primitive instincts, the good ones along with the bad ones, instincts which culture had neither impaired nor deadened, which allowed him to plan and permit the September massacre, but which did not allow him to practice, daily and blindly, systematic and wholesale murder. Already in September, “cloaking his pity under his bellowing,” he had shielded or saved many eminent men from the butchers. When the ax is about to fall on the Girondists, he is “ill with grief” and despair. “I am unable to save them,” he exclaimed, “and big tears streamed down his cheeks.”

On the other hand, his eyes are not covered by the bandage of incapacity or lack of forethought. He detected the innate vice of the system, the inevitable and approaching suicide of the revolution. “The Girondists forced us to throw ourselves upon the _sans-culotterie_ which has devoured them, which will devour us, and which will eat itself up.” “Let Robespierre and Saint-Just alone, and there will soon be nothing left in France but a Thebaid of political Trappists.” At the end he sees more clearly still. “On a day like this I organized the revolutionary tribunal.... I ask pardon for it of God and man.... In revolutions, authority remains with the greatest scoundrels.... It is better to be a poor fisherman than govern men.”

Nevertheless, he professed to govern them; he constructed a new machine for the purpose, and, deaf to its creaking, it worked in conformity with its structure and the impulse he gave to it. It towers before him, this sinister machine, with its vast wheel and iron cogs grinding all France, their multiplied teeth pressing out each individual life, its steel blade constantly rising and falling, and, as it plays faster and faster, daily exacting a larger and larger supply of human material, while those who furnish this supply are held to be as insensible and as senseless as itself. Danton can not, or will not, be so. He gets out of the way, diverts himself, gambles, forgets; he supposes that the titular decapitators will probably consent to take no notice of him; in any case, they do not pursue him; “they would not dare do it.... No one must lay hands on me; I am the ark.” At the worst he prefers “to be guillotined rather than guillotine.” Having said or thought this, he is ripe for the scaffold.

ROBESPIERRE.

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.

[Maximilian Marie Isadore de Robespierre, the most powerful figure
among the French revolutionists, born 1758, guillotined 1794. By
profession an attorney, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly,
the States General, in 1789, from Arras. Profoundly imbued with the
theories of Rousseau, he was from the beginning a fierce assailant
of the monarchy, and after Mirabeau’s death rapidly acquired a
commanding position in public affairs. In the National Convention,
which succeeded the dissolution of the States General and the
abdication and imprisonment of Louis XVI, Robespierre was a
prominent leader, and identified himself with the extreme party,
the Jacobins, called the “Mountain,” from the elevated seats on
which they sat. During this earlier part of his political career he
affected opposition to capital punishment, and remonstrated with
Danton against the September massacres. He led the Jacobins,
however, in demanding the trial and death of the king, and proposed
the decree organizing the Committee of Public Safety, which was
clothed with omnipotent sway. When he became a member of this
terrible body he speedily instituted what is known as “the Reign of
Terror,” beginning with the destruction of the Girondists, against
whom he formulated the deadly epigram: “There are periods in
revolutions when to live is a crime.” Danton was sacrificed to his
envy and fears as a dangerous rival. Robespierre’s overthrow, after
about a year of practical dictatorship, was owing to two causes,
which inspired the wavering courage of his opponents in the
convention. The mistress of Tallien, a prominent revolutionist, lay
in prison expecting a daily call to the guillotine. Carnot (the
grandfather of the present chief of the French republic) attended a
dinner-party at which Robespierre was present. The heat of the day
had caused the guests to throw off their coats, and Carnot in
looking for a paper took Robespierre’s coat by mistake, in the
pocket of which he saw the memorandum containing the names of those
prescribed for the guillotine, among them his own and those of
other guests. On the 9th Thermidor, July 27, 1794, occurred the
outbreak in the convention which broke Roberspierre’s power, and on
the following day sent him to the guillotine, thus ending the Reign
of Terror.]

Marat and Danton finally become effaced, or efface themselves, and the stage is left to Robespierre who absorbs attention. If we would comprehend him we must look at him as he stands in the midst of his surroundings. At the last stage of an intellectual vegetation passing away, he remains on the last branch of the eighteenth century, the most abortive and driest offshoot of the classical spirit. He has retained nothing of a worn-out system of philosophy but its lifeless dregs and well-conned formulæ, the formulæ of Rousseau, Mably, and Raynal, concerning “the people, nature, reason, liberty, tyrants, factions, virtue, morality,” a ready-made vocabulary, expressions too ample, the meaning of which, ill-defined by the masters, evaporates in the hands of the disciple. He never tries to get at this; his writings and speeches are merely long strings of vague abstract periods; there is no telling fact in them, no distinct, characteristic detail, no appeal to the eye evoking a living image, no personal, special observation, no clear, frank, original impression.

It might be said of him that he never saw anything with his own eyes, that he neither could nor would see, that false conceptions have intervened and fixed themselves between him and the object; he combines these in logical sequence, and simulates the absent thought by an affected jargon, and this is all. The other Jacobins alongside of him likewise use the same scholastic jargon; but none of them expatiate on it so lengthily. For hours, we grope after him in the vague shadows of political speculation, in the cold and perplexing mist of didactic generalities, trying in vain to make something out of his colorless tirades, and we grasp nothing. We then, astonished, ask what all this talk amounts to, and why he talks at all; the answer is, that he has said nothing and that he talks only for the sake of talking, the same as a sectary preaching to his congregation, neither the preacher nor his audience ever wearying, the one of turning the dogmatic crank, and the other of listening. So much the better if the hopper is empty; the emptier it is the easier and faster the crank turns. And better still, if the empty term he selects is used in a contrary sense; the sonorous words justice, humanity, mean to him piles of human heads, the same as a text from the gospels means to a grand inquisitor the burning of heretics.

Now, his first passion, his principal passion, is literary vanity. Never was the chief of a party, sect, or government, even at critical moments, such an incurable, insignificant rhetorician, so formal, so pompous, and so vapid. On the eve of the 9th of Thermidor, when it was necessary to conquer or die, he enters the tribune with a set speech, written and rewritten, polished and repolished, overloaded with studied ornaments and bits for effect, coated by dint of time and labor, with the academic varnish, the glitter of symmetrical antitheses, rounded periods, exclamations, preteritions, apostrophes, and other tricks of the pen. There is no sign of true inspiration in his elaborate eloquence, nothing but recipes, and those of a worn-out art--Greek and Roman commonplaces, Socrates and the hemlock, Brutus and his dagger, classic metaphors like “the flambeaux of discord,” and “the vessel of state,” words coupled together and beauties of style which a pupil in rhetoric aims at on the college bench; sometimes a grand bravura air, so essential for parade in public; oftentimes a delicate strain of the flute, for, in those days, one must have a tender heart; in short, Marmontel’s method in “Belisarius,” or that of Thomas in his “Eloges,” all borrowed from Rousseau, but of inferior quality, like a sharp, thin voice strained to imitate a rich, powerful voice; a sort of involuntary parody, and the more repulsive because a word ends in a blow, because a sentimental, declamatory Trissotin poses as statesman, because the studied elegances of the closet become pistol shots aimed at living breasts, because an epithet skillfully directed sends a man to the guillotine.

Robespierre, unlike Danton, has no cravings. He is sober; he is not tormented by his senses; if he gives way to them, it is only no further than he can help, and with a bad grace; in the Rue Saintonge in Paris, “for seven months,” says his secretary, “I knew of but one woman that he kept company with, and he did not treat her very well.... Very often he would not let her enter his room”; when busy, he must not be disturbed; he is naturally steady, hard-working, studious and fond of seclusion, at college a model pupil, at home in his province an attentive advocate, a punctual deputy in the Assembly, everywhere free of temptation and incapable of going astray. “Irreproachable” is the word which, from early youth, an inward voice constantly repeats to him in low tones to console him for obscurity and patience. Thus has he ever been, is now, and ever will be; he says this to himself, tells others so, and on this foundation, all of a piece, he builds up his character. He is not, like Desmoulins, to be seduced by dinners; like Barnave, by flattery; like Mirabeau and Danton, by money; like the Girondists, by the insinuating charm of ancient politeness and select society; like the Dantonists, by the bait of joviality and unbounded license--he is the incorruptible.

“Alone, or nearly alone, I do not allow myself to be corrupted; alone, or nearly alone, I do not compromise the right; which two merits I possess in the highest degree. A few others may live correctly, but they oppose or betray principles; a few others profess to have principles, but they do not live correctly. No one else leads so pure a life or is so loyal to principles; no one else joins to so fervent a worship of truth so strict a practice of virtue; I am the unique.” What can be more agreeable than this mute soliloquy? It is gently heard the first day in Robespierre’s address to the Third Estate of Arras; it is uttered aloud the last day in his great speech in the convention; during the interval, it crops out and shines through all his compositions, harangues, or reports, in exordiums, parentheses, and perorations, permeating every sentence like the drone of a bagpipe. In three years a chorus of a thousand voices, which he formed and led indefatigably, rehearses to him in unison his own litany, his most sacred creed, the hymn of three stanzas composed by him in his own honor, and which he daily recites to himself in a low tone of voice, and often in a loud one: “Robespierre alone has discovered the ideal citizen! Robespierre alone attains to it without exaggeration or shortcomings! Robespierre alone is worthy of and able to lead the revolution!” Cool infatuation carried thus far is equivalent to a raging fever, and Robespierre almost attains to the ideas and the ravings of Marat.

First, in his own eyes, he, like Marat, is a persecuted man, and, like Marat, he poses himself as a “martyr,” but more skillfully and keeping within bounds, affecting the resigned and tender air of an innocent victim, who, offering himself as a sacrifice, ascends to heaven, bequeathing to mankind the imperishable souvenir of his virtues. “I excite against me the self-love of everybody; I sharpen against me a thousand daggers. I am a sacrifice to every species of hatred.... To the enemies of my country, to whom my existence seems an obstacle to their heinous plots, I am ready to sacrifice it, if their odious empire is to endure; ... let their road to the scaffold be the pathway of crime, ours shall be that of virtue; ... let the hemlock be got ready for me, I await it on this hallowed spot. I shall at least bequeath to my country an example of constant affection for it, and to the enemies of humanity the disgrace of my death.”

Naturally, as always with Marat, he sees around him only “evil-doers,” “intriguers,” and “traitors.” Naturally, as with Marat, common sense with him is perverted, and, like Marat again, he thinks at random. “I am not obliged to reflect,” said he to Garat, “I always rely on first impressions.” “For him,” says the same authority, “the best reasons are suspicions,” and nought makes headway against suspicions, not even the most positive evidence.

Such assurance, equal to that of Marat, is terrible and worse in its effect, for Robespierre’s list of conspirators is longer than that of Marat. Political and social, in Marat’s mind, the list comprehends only aristocrats and the rich; theological and moral in Robespierre’s mind, it comprehends all atheists and dishonest persons--that is to say, nearly the whole of his party. In this narrow mind, given up to abstractions and habitually classifying men under two opposite headings, whoever is not with him on the good side is against him on the bad side, and, on the bad side, the common understanding between the factious of every flag and the rogues of every degree is natural. Add all this vermin to that which Marat seeks to crush out; it is no longer by hundreds of thousands, but by millions, exclaim Baudot, Jean Bon St. André, and Guffroy, that the guilty must be counted and heads laid low! And all these heads, Robespierre, according to his maxims, must strike off. He is well aware of this; hostile as his intellect may be to precise ideas, he, when alone in his closet, face to face with himself, sees clearly, as clearly as Marat. Marat’s chimera, on first spreading out its wings, bore its frenzied rider swiftly onward to the charnel house; that of Robespierre, fluttering and hobbling along, reaches the goal in its turn; in its turn, it demands something to feed on, and the rhetorician, the professor of principles, begins to calculate the voracity of the monstrous brute on which he is mounted. Slower than the other, this one is still more ravenous, for, with similar claws and teeth, it has a vaster appetite. At the end of three years Robespierre has overtaken Marat, at the extreme point reached by Marat at the outset, and the theorist adopts the policy, the aim, the means, the work, and almost the vocabulary of the maniac; armed dictatorship of the urban mob, systematic maddening of the subsidized populace, war against the bourgeoisie, extermination of the rich, proscription of opposition writers, administrators, and deputies.