Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)

J >> John Morley >> Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)

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When people write hymns of pity for the Queen, we always recall the poor
woman whom Arthur Young met, as he was walking up a hill to ease his
horse near Mars-le-Tour. Though the unfortunate creature was only
twenty-eight, she might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure
was so bent, her face so furrowed and hardened by toil. Her husband, she
said, had a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet he had
to pay forty-two pounds of wheat and three chickens to one Seigneur, and
one hundred and sixty pounds of oats, one chicken, and one franc to
another, besides very heavy tailles and other taxes; and they had seven
children. She had heard that 'something was to be done by some great
folks for such poor ones, but she did not know who nor how, but God send
us better, for the tailles and the dues grind us to the earth.' It was
such hapless drudges as this who replenished the Queen's gaming tables
at Versailles. Thousands of them dragged on the burden of their harassed
and desperate days, less like men and women than beasts of the field
wrung and tortured and mercilessly overladen, in order that the Queen
might gratify her childish passion for diamonds, or lavish money and
estates on worthless female Polignacs and Lamballes, or kill time at a
cost of five hundred louis a night at lansquenet and the faro bank. The
Queen, it is true, was in all this no worse than other dissipated women
then and since. She did not realise that it was the system to which she
had stubbornly committed herself, that drove the people of the fields to
cut their crops green to be baked in the oven, because their hunger
could not wait; or made them cower whole days in their beds, because
misery seemed to gnaw them there with a duller fang. That she was
unconscious of its effect, makes no difference in the real drift of her
policy; makes no difference in the judgment that we ought to pass upon
it, nor in the gratitude that is owed to the stern men who rose up to
consume her and her court with righteous flame. The Queen and the
courtiers, and the hard-faring woman of Mars-le-Tour, and that whole
generation, have long been dust and shadow; they have vanished from the
earth, as if they were no more than the fire-flies that the peasant of
the Italian poet saw dancing in the vineyard, as he took his evening
rest on the hillside. They have all fled back into the impenetrable
shade whence they came; our minds are free; and if social equity is not
a chimera, Marie Antoinette was the protagonist of the most barbarous
and execrable of causes.

* * * * *

Let us return to the shaping of the Constitution, not forgetting that
its stability was to depend upon the Queen. Robespierre left some
characteristic marks on the final arrangements. He imposed upon the
Assembly a motion prohibiting any member of it from accepting office
under the Crown for a period of four years after the dissolution.
Robespierre from this time forth constantly illustrated a very singular
truth; namely, that the most ostentatious faith in humanity in general
seems always to beget the sharpest distrust of all human beings in
particular. He proceeded further in the same direction. It was
Robespierre who persuaded the Chamber to pass a self-denying ordinance.
All its members were declared ineligible for a seat in the legislature
that was to replace them. The members of the Right on this occasion went
with their bitter foes of the Extreme Left, and to both parties have
been imputed sinister and Machiavellian motives. The Right, aware that
their own return to the new Assembly was impossible, were delighted to
reduce the men with whom they had been carrying on incensed battle for
two long years, to their own obscurity and impotence. Robespierre, on
the other hand, is accused of a jealous desire to exclude Barnave from
power. He is accused also of a deliberate intention to weaken the new
legislature, in order to secure the preponderance of the Parisian clubs.
There is no evidence that these malignant feelings were in Robespierre's
mind. The reasons he gave were exactly of the kind that we should have
expected to weigh with a man of his stamp. There is even a certain truth
in them, that is not inconsistent with the experience of a parliamentary
country like our own. To talk, he said, of the transmission of light and
experience from one assembly to another, was to distrust the public
spirit. The influence of opinion and the general good grows less, as the
influence of parliamentary orators grows greater. He had no taste, he
proceeded with one of his chilly sneers, for that new science which was
styled the tactics of great assemblies; it was too like intrigue.
Nothing but truth and reason ought to reign in a legislature. He did not
like the idea of clever men becoming dominant by skilful tactics, and
then perpetuating their empire from one assembly to another. He wound up
his discourse with some theatrical talk about disinterestedness. When he
sat down, he was greeted with enthusiastic acclamations, such as a few
months before used to greet the stormful Mirabeau, now wrapped in
eternal sleep amid the stillness of the new Pantheon. The folly of
Robespierre's inferences is obvious enough. If only truth and reason
ought to weigh in a legislature, then it is all the more important not
to exclude any body of men through whom truth and reason may possibly
enter. Robespierre had striven hard to remove all restrictions from
admission to the electoral franchise. He did not see that to limit the
choice of candidates was in itself the most grievous of all
restrictions.

The common view has been that the Constitution of 1791 perished because
its creators were thus disabled from defending the work of their hands.
This view led to a grave mistake four years later, after Robespierre had
gone to his grave. The Convention, framing the Constitution of the Year
III., decided that two-thirds of the existing assembly should keep their
places, and that only one-third should be popularly elected. This led to
the revolt of the Thirteenth Vendemiaire, and afterwards to the coup
d'etat of the Eighteenth Fructidor. In that sense, no doubt,
Robespierre's proposal was the indirect root of much mischief. But it is
childish to believe that if a hundred of the most prominent members of
the Constituent had found seats in the new assembly, they would have
saved the Constitution. Their experience, the loss of which it is the
fashion to deplore, could have had no application to the strange
combinations of untoward circumstance that were now rising up with such
deadly rapidity in every quarter of the horizon, like vast sombre banks
of impenetrable cloud. Prudence in new cases, as has been somewhere
said, can do nothing on grounds of retrospect. The work of the
Constituent was doomed by the very nature of things. Their assumption
that the Revolution was made, while all France was still torn by fierce
and unappeasable disputes as to seignorial rights, was one of the most
striking pieces of self-deception in history. It is told how in the
eleventh century, when the fervent hosts of the Crusaders tramped across
Europe on their way to deliver the Holy City from the hands of the
unbelievers, the wearied children, as they espied each new town that lay
in their interminable march, cried out with joyful expectation, 'Is not
this, then, Jerusalem?' So France had set out on a portentous journey,
little knowing how far off was the end; lightly taking each poor
halting-place for the deeply longed-for goal; and waxing more fiercely
disappointed, as each new height that they gained only disclosed yet
farther and more unattainable horizons. 'Alas,' said Burke, 'they little
know how many a weary step is to be taken, before they can form
themselves into a mass which has a true political personality.'

An immense revolution had been effected, but by what force were its
fruits to be guarded? Each step in the revolution had raised a host of
irreconcilable enemies. The rights of property, the old and jealous
associations of local independence, the traditions of personal dignity,
the relations of the civil to the spiritual power--these were the
momentous matters about which the lawmakers of the Constituent had
exercised themselves. The parties of the Chamber had for these two
years past been laying mine and countermine among the very deepest
foundations of society. One by one each great corporation of the old
order had been alienated from the new order. It was inevitable that it
should be so. Let us look at one or two examples of this. The monarchy
had imposed administrative centralisation upon France without securing
national unity. Thus the great provinces that had been slowly added one
after the other to the monarchy, while becoming members of the same
kingdom, still retained different institutions and isolated usages. The
time was now come when France should be France, and its inhabitants
Frenchmen, and no longer Bretons, Normans, Gascons, Provencals. The
Assembly by a single decree (1790) redivided the country into
eighty-three departments. It wiped out at a stroke the separate
administrations, the separate parlements, the peculiar privileges, and
even the historic names of the old provinces. We need not dwell on the
significance of this change here, but will only remark in passing that
the stubborn disputes from the time of the Regency downwards between the
Crown and the provincial parlements turned, under other names and in
other forms, upon this very issue of the unification of the law. The
Crown was with the progressive party, but it lacked the strength and
courage to set aside retrograde local sentiment as the Constituent
Assembly was able to set it aside.

Then this prodigious change in the distribution of government was
accompanied by no less prodigious a change in the source of power.
Popular election replaced the old system of territorial privilege and
aristocratic prerogative. The effect of this vital innovation, followed
as it was a few months later by a decree abolishing titles and armorial
bearings, was to complete the estrangement of the old privileged classes
from the revolutionary movement. All that they had meant to concede was
the payment of an equal land tax. What was life worth to the noble, if
common people were to be allowed to wear arms and to command a company
of foot or a troop of horse; if he was no longer to have thousands of
acres left waste for the chase; if he was compelled to sue for a vote
where he had only yesterday reigned as manorial lord; if, in short, he
was at a stroke to lose all those delights of insolence and vanity which
had made, not the decoration, but the very substance, of his days?

Nor were the nobles of the sword and the red-heeled slipper the only
outraged class. The magistracy of the provincial parliaments were
inflamed with resentment against changes that stripped them of the power
of exciting against the new government the same factious and
impracticable spirit with which they had on so many occasions
embarrassed the old. The clergy were thrown even still more violently
into opposition. The Assembly, sorely pressed for resources, declared
the property held by ecclesiastics, amounting to a revenue of not less
than eight million pounds sterling a year, or double that amount in
modern values, to be the property of the nation. Talleyrand carried a
measure decreeing the sale of the ecclesiastical domain. The clergy were
as intensely irritated as laymen would have been by a similar assertion
of sovereign right. And their irritation was made still more dangerous
by the next set of measures against them.

The Assembly withdrew all recognition of Catholicism as the religion of
the State; monastic vows were abolished, and orders and congregations
suppressed; the ecclesiastical divisions were made to coincide with the
civil divisions, a bishop being allotted to each department. What was a
more important revolution than all, bishops and incumbents were
henceforth to be appointed by popular election. The Assembly, who had
always the institutions of our own country before them, meant to
introduce into France the system of the Church of England, which was
even then an anachronism in the land of its birth; much worse was such a
system an anachronism, after belief had been sapped by a Voltaire and an
Encyclopaedia. The clergy both showed and excited a mutinous spirit. The
Assembly, by way of retort, decreed that all ecclesiastics should take
the oath of allegiance to the civil constitution of the clergy, on pain
of forfeiture of their benefices. Five-sixths of the clergy refused, and
the result was an outbreak of religious fury in the great towns of the
south and elsewhere, which recalled the violence of the sixteenth
century and the Reformation.

Thus when the Constituent Assembly ceased from its labours, the popular
party had to face the mocking and defiant privileged classes; the
magistracy, whose craft and calling were gone; and the clergy and as
many of the flocks as shared the holy vindictiveness of their pastors.
Immense material improvements had been made, but who was to guard them
against all these powerful and exasperated bands? No chamber could
execute so portentous an office, least of all a chamber that was bound
to work in accord with a King, who at the very moment when he was
swearing fidelity to the new order of things, was sending entreaties to
the King of Prussia and to the Emperor, his brother-in-law, to overthrow
the new order and bring back the old. If the Revolution had achieved
priceless gains for France, they could only be preserved on condition
that public action was directed by those who valued these gains for
themselves and for their children above all things else--above the
monarchy, above the constitution, above peace, above their own sorry
lives. There was only one party who showed this passionate devotion,
this fanatical resolution not to suffer the work that had been done to
be undone, and never to allow France to sink back from exalted national
life into the lethargy of national death. That party was the Jacobins,
and, above all, the austere and rigorous Jacobins of Paris. On their
ascendancy depended the triumph of the Revolution, and on the triumph of
the Revolution depended the salvation of France. Their ascendancy meant
a Jacobin dictatorship, and against this, as against dictatorship in all
its forms, many things have been said, and truly said. But the one most
important thing that can be said about Jacobin dictatorship is that, in
spite of all the dolorous mishaps and hateful misdeeds that marked its
course, it was still the only instrument capable of concentrating and
utilising the dispersed social energy of the French people. The crisis
was not a crisis of logic but of force, and the Jacobins alone
understood, as the old Covenanters had understood, that problems of
force are not solved by phrases, but by mastery and the sword.

The great popular club of Paris was the centre of all those who looked
at events in this spirit. The Legislative Assembly, the successor of the
Constituent, met in the month of October 1791. Like its predecessor, the
Legislative contained a host of excellent and patriotic men, and they at
once applied themselves to the all-important task, which the Constituent
had left so deplorably incomplete, of finally breaking down the old
feudal rights. The most important group in the new chamber were the
deputies from the Gironde. Events soon revealed violent dissents between
the Girondins and the Jacobins, but, for some months after the meeting
of the Legislative, Girondins and Jacobins represented together in
unbroken unity the great popular party. From this time until the fall of
the monarchy, the whole of this popular party in all its branches found
their rallying-place, not in the Assembly, but in the Jacobin Club; and
the ascendancy of the Jacobin Club embodied the dictatorship of Paris.
It was only from Paris that the whole circle of events could be
commanded. When the peasants had got what they wanted, that is to say
the emancipation of the land, they were ready to think that the
Revolution was in safety and at an end. They were in no position to see
the enmity of the exiles, the dangerous selfishness of Austria and
Prussia, the disloyal machinations of the court, the reactionary
sentiment of La Vendee, the absolute unworkableness of the new
constitution. Arthur Young, in the height of the agitations of the
Constituent Assembly, found himself at Moulins, the capital of the
Bourbonnais, and on the great post-road to Italy. He went to the best
coffee-house in the town, and found as many as twenty tables spread for
company, but as for a newspaper, he says he might as well have asked for
an elephant. In the capital of a great province, the seat of an
intendant, at a moment like that, with a National Assembly voting a
revolution, and not a newspaper to tell the people whether Fayette,
Mirabeau, or Lewis XVI. were on the throne! Could such a people as this,
he cries, ever have made a revolution or become free? 'Never in a
thousand centuries: the enlightened mob of Paris have done the whole.'
And that was the plain truth. What was involved in such a truth, we
shall see presently.

Robespierre had now risen to be one of the foremost men in France. To
borrow the figure of an older chief of French faction, from trifling
among the violins in the orchestra, he had ascended to the stage itself,
and had a right to perform leading parts. Disqualified for sitting in
the Assembly, he wielded greater power than ever in the Club. The
Constituent had been full of his enemies. 'Alone with my own soul,' he
once cried to the Jacobins, 'how could I have borne struggles that were
beyond any human strength, if I had not raised my spirit to God?' This
isolation marked him with a kind of theocratic distinction. These
communings with the unseen powers gave a certain indefinable prerogative
to a man, even among the children of the century of Voltaire. Condorcet,
the youngest of the intimates and disciples of Voltaire, of D'Alembert,
of Turgot, was the first to sound bitter warning that Robespierre was at
heart a priest. The suggestion was more than a gibe. Robespierre had the
typic sacerdotal temperament, its sense of personal importance, its thin
unction, its private leanings to the stake and the cord; and he had one
of those deplorable natures that seem as if they had never in their
lives known the careless joys of a springtime. By and by, from mere
priest he developed into the deadlier carnivore, the Inquisitor.

The absence of advantages of bodily presence has never been fatal to the
pretensions of the pontiff. Robespierre was only a couple of inches
above five feet in height, but the Grand Monarch himself was hardly
more. His eyes were small and weak, and he usually wore spectacles; his
face was pitted by the marks of small-pox; his complexion was dull and
sometimes livid; the tones of his voice were dry and shrill; and he
spoke with the vulgar accent of his province. Such is the accepted
tradition, and there is no reason to dissent from it. It is fair,
however, to remember that Robespierre's enemies had command of his
historic reputation at its source, and this is always a great advantage
for faction, if not for truth. So Robespierre's voice and person may
have been maligned, just as Aristophanes may have been a calumniator
when he accused Cleon of having an intolerably loud voice and smelling
of the tanyard. What is certain is that Robespierre was a master of
effective oratory adapted for a violent popular audience, to impress, to
persuade, and to command. The Convention would have yawned, if it had
not trembled under him, but the Jacobin Club never found him tedious.
Robespierre's style had no richness either of feeling or of phrase; no
fervid originality, no happy violences. If we turn from a page of
Rousseau to a page of Robespierre, we feel that the disciple has none of
the thrilling sonorousness of the master; the glow and the ardour have
become metallic; the long-drawn plangency is parodied by shrill notes of
splenetic complaint. The rhythm has no broad wings; the phrases have no
quality of radiance; the oratorical glimpses never lift the spirit into
new worlds. We are never conscious of those great pulses of strong
emotion that shake and vibrate through the nobly-measured periods of
Cicero or Bossuet or Burke. Robespierre could not rival the vivid and
highly-coloured declamation of Vergniaud; his speeches were never heated
with the ardent passion that poured like a torrent of fire through some
of the orations of Isnard; nor, above all, had he any mastery of that
dialect of the Titans, by which Danton convulsed an audience with fear,
with amazement, or with the spirit of defiant endeavour. The absence of
these intenser qualities did not make Robespierre's speeches less
effective for their own purpose. On the contrary, when the air has
become torrid, and passionate utterance is cheap, then severity in form
is very likely to pass for good sense in substance. That Robespierre had
decent fluency, copiousness, and finish, need hardly be said. The French
have an artistic sense; they have never accepted our own whimsical
doctrine, that a man's politics must be sagacious, if his speaking is
only clumsy enough. Robespierre more than once showed himself ready with
a forcible reply on critical occasions: this only makes him an
illustration the more of the good oratorical rule, that he is most
likely to come well out of the emergency of an improvisation, who is
usually most careful to prepare. Robespierre was as solicitous about the
correctness of his speech, as he was about the neatness of his clothes;
he no more grudged the pains given to the polishing of his discourses
than he grudged the time given every day to the powdering of his hair.

Nothing was more remarkable than his dexterity in presenting his case.
James Mill used to point out to his son among other skilful arts of
Demosthenes, these two: first, that he said everything important to his
purpose at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his hearers
into the state most fitted to receive it; second, that he insinuated
gradually and indirectly into their minds ideas which would have roused
opposition if they had been expressed more directly. Mr. Mill once
called the attention of the present writer to exactly the same kind of
rhetorical skill in the speeches of Robespierre. The reader may do well
to turn, for excellent specimens of this, to the speech of January 11,
1792, against the war, or that of May 1794 against atheism. The logic is
stringent, but the premises are arbitrary. Robespierre is as one who
should iterate indisputable propositions of abstract geometry and
mechanics, while men are craving an architect who shall bridge the gulf
of waters. Exuberance of high words no longer conceals the sterility of
his ideas and the shallowness of his method. We should say of his
speeches, as of so much of the speaking and writing of the time, that it
is transparent and smooth, but there is none of that quality which the
critics of painting call Texture.

His listeners, however, in the old refectory of the Convent of the
Jacobins took little heed of these things; the matter was too absorbing,
the issue too vital. A hundred years before, the hunted Covenanters of
the Western Lowlands, with Claverhouse's dragoons a few miles off,
exulted in the endless exhortations and expositions of their hill
preachers: they relished nothing so keenly as three hours of
Mucklewrath, followed by three hours more of Peter Poundtext. We now
find the jargon of the Mucklewraths and the Poundtexts of the Solemn
League and Covenant, dead as it is, still not devoid of the picturesque
and the impressive. If we cannot say the same of the great preacher of
the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the reason is partly that time has
not yet softened the tones, and partly that there is no one in all the
world with whom it is so difficult to sympathise, as with the narrower
fanatics of our own particular faith.

We have still to mark the trait that above everything else gave to
Robespierre the trust and confidence of Paris. As men listened to him,
they had full faith in the integrity of the speaker. And Robespierre in
one way deserved this confidence. He was eminently the possessor of a
conscience. When the strain of circumstance in the last few months of
his life pressed him towards wrong, at least before doing wrong he was
forced to lie to his own conscience. This is a kind of honesty, as the
world goes. In the Salon of 1791 an artist exhibited Robespierre's
portrait, simply inscribing it, _The Incorruptible_. Throngs passed
before it every day, and ratified the honourable designation by eager
murmurs of approval. The democratic journals were loud in panegyric on
the unsleeping sentinel of liberty. They loved to speak of him as the
modern Fabricius, and delighted to recall the words of Pyrrhus, that it
is easier to turn the sun from its course, than to turn Fabricius from
the path of honour. Patriotic parents eagerly besought him to be sponsor
for their children. Ladies of wealth, including at least one
countrywoman of our own, vainly entreated him to accept their purses,
for women are quick to recognise the temperament of the priest, and
recognising they adore. A rich widow of Nantes besought him with
pertinacious tenderness to accept not only her purse but her hand.
Mirabeau's sister hailed him as an eagle floating through the blue
heavens.

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