The Wakeful.
Sleep who will, cradled in hope and short vision, like Lafayette,
“who always in the danger done sees the last danger that will
threaten him,”—Time is not sleeping, nor Time’s seedfield.
That sacred Herald’s-College of a _new_ Dynasty; we mean the
Sixty and odd Billstickers with their leaden badges, are not
sleeping. Daily they, with pastepot and cross-staff, new clothe
the walls of Paris in colours of the rainbow: authoritative
heraldic, as we say, or indeed almost magical thaumaturgic; for
no Placard-Journal that they paste but will convince some soul or
souls of man. The Hawkers bawl; and the Balladsingers: great
Journalism blows and blusters, through all its throats, forth
from Paris towards all corners of France, like an Aeolus’ Cave;
keeping alive all manner of fires.
Throats or Journals there are, as men count,[326] to the number
of some hundred and thirty-three. Of various calibre; from your
Chéniers, Gorsases, Camilles, down to your Marat, down now to
your incipient Hébert of the _Père Duchesne;_ these blow, with
fierce weight of argument or quick light banter, for the Rights
of man: Durosoys, Royous, Peltiers, Sulleaus, equally with mixed
tactics, inclusive, singular to say, of much profane Parody,[327]
are blowing for Altar and Throne. As for Marat the
People’s-Friend, his voice is as that of the bullfrog, or bittern
by the solitary pools; he, unseen of men, croaks harsh thunder,
and that alone continually,—of indignation, suspicion, incurable
sorrow. The People are sinking towards ruin, near starvation
itself: “My dear friends,” cries he, “your indigence is not the
fruit of vices nor of idleness, you have a right to life, as good
as Louis XVI., or the happiest of the century. What man can say
he has a right to dine, when you have no bread?”[328] The People
sinking on the one hand: on the other hand, nothing but wretched
Sieur Motiers, treasonous Riquetti Mirabeaus; traitors, or else
shadows, and simulacra of Quacks, to be seen in high places, look
where you will! Men that go mincing, grimacing, with plausible
speech and brushed raiment; hollow within: Quacks Political;
Quacks scientific, Academical; all with a fellow-feeling for each
other, and kind of Quack public-spirit! Not great Lavoisier
himself, or any of the Forty can escape this rough tongue; which
wants not fanatic sincerity, nor, strangest of all, a certain
rough caustic sense. And then the “three thousand gaming-houses”
that are in Paris; cesspools for the scoundrelism of the world;
sinks of iniquity and debauchery,—whereas without good morals
Liberty is impossible! There, in these Dens of Satan, which one
knows, and perseveringly denounces, do Sieur Motier’s mouchards
consort and colleague; battening vampyre-like on a People
next-door to starvation. “_O Peuple!_” cries he oftimes, with
heart-rending accent. Treason, delusion, vampyrism, scoundrelism,
from Dan to Beersheba! The soul of Marat is sick with the sight:
but what remedy? To erect “Eight Hundred gibbets,” in convenient
rows, and proceed to hoisting; “Riquetti on the first of them!”
Such is the brief recipe of Marat, Friend of the People.
So blow and bluster the Hundred and thirty-three: nor, as would
seem, are these sufficient; for there are benighted nooks in
France, to which Newspapers do not reach; and every where is
“such an appetite for news as was never seen in any country.” Let
an expeditious Dampmartin, on furlough, set out to return home
from Paris,[329] he cannot get along for “peasants stopping him
on the highway; overwhelming him with questions:” the _Maître de
Poste_ will not send out the horses till you have well nigh
quarrelled with him, but asks always, What news? At Autun, “in
spite of the rigorous frost” for it is now January, 1791, nothing
will serve but you must gather your wayworn limbs, and thoughts,
and “speak to the multitudes from a window opening into the
market-place.” It is the shortest method: _This_, good Christian
people, is verily what an August Assembly seemed to me to be
doing; this and no other is the news;
“Now my weary lips I close;
Leave me, leave me to repose.”
The good Dampmartin!—But, on the whole, are not Nations
astonishingly true to their National character; which indeed runs
in the blood? Nineteen hundred years ago, Julius Cæsar, with his
quick sure eye, took note how the Gauls waylaid men. “It is a
habit of theirs,” says he, “to stop travellers, were it even by
constraint, and inquire whatsoever each of them may have heard or
known about any sort of matter: in their towns, the common people
beset the passing trader; demanding to hear from what regions he
came, what things he got acquainted with there. Excited by which
rumours and hearsays they will decide about the weightiest
matters; and necessarily repent next moment that they did it, on
such guidance of uncertain reports, and many a traveller
answering with mere fictions to please them, and get off.”[330]
Nineteen hundred years; and good Dampmartin, wayworn, in winter
frost, probably with scant light of stars and fish-oil, still
perorates from the Inn-window! This People is no longer called
Gaulish; and it has _wholly_ become _braccatus_, has got
breeches, and suffered change enough: certain fierce German
_Franken_ came storming over; and, so to speak, vaulted on the
back of it; and always after, in their grim tenacious way, have
ridden it bridled; for German is, by his very name, _Guerre_-man,
or man that _wars_ and _gars_. And so the People, as we say, is
now called French or Frankish: nevertheless, does not the old
Gaulish and Gaelic Celthood, with its vehemence, effervescent
promptitude, and what good and ill it had, still vindicate itself
little adulterated?—
For the rest, that in such prurient confusion, Clubbism thrives
and spreads, need not be said. Already the Mother of Patriotism,
sitting in the Jacobins, shines supreme over all; and has paled
the poor lunar light of that Monarchic Club near to final
extinction. She, we say, shines supreme, girt with sun-light, not
yet with infernal lightning; reverenced, not without fear, by
Municipal Authorities; counting her Barnaves, Lameths, Pétions,
of a National Assembly; most gladly of all, her Robespierre.
Cordeliers, again, your Hébert, Vincent, Bibliopolist Momoro,
groan audibly that a tyrannous Mayor and Sieur Motier harrow them
with the sharp _tribula_ of Law, intent apparently to suppress
them by tribulation. How the Jacobin Mother-Society, as hinted
formerly, sheds forth Cordeliers on this hand, and then Feuillans
on that; the Cordeliers on this hand, and then Feuillans on that;
the Cordeliers “an elixir or double-distillation of Jacobin
Patriotism;” the other a wide-spread weak dilution thereof; how
she will re-absorb the former into her Mother-bosom, and
stormfully dissipate the latter into Nonentity: how she breeds
and brings forth Three Hundred Daughter-Societies; her rearing of
them, her correspondence, her endeavourings and continual
travail: how, under an old figure, Jacobinism shoots forth
organic filaments to the utmost corners of confused dissolved
France; organising it anew:—this properly is the grand fact of
the Time.
To passionate Constitutionalism, still more to Royalism, which
see all their own Clubs fail and die, Clubbism will naturally
grow to seem the root of all evil. Nevertheless Clubbism is not
death, but rather new organisation, and life out of death:
destructive, indeed, of the remnants of the Old; but to the New
important, indispensable. That man can co-operate and hold
communion with man, herein lies his miraculous strength. In hut
or hamlet, Patriotism mourns not now like voice in the desert: it
can walk to the nearest Town; and there, in the Daughter-Society,
make its ejaculation into an articulate oration, into an action,
guided forward by the Mother of Patriotism herself. All Clubs of
Constitutionalists, and such like, fail, one after another, as
shallow fountains: Jacobinism alone has gone down to the deep
subterranean lake of waters; and may, unless _filled in_, flow
there, copious, continual, like an Artesian well. Till the Great
Deep have drained itself up: and all be flooded and submerged,
and Noah’s Deluge out-deluged!
On the other hand, Claude Fauchet, preparing mankind for a Golden
Age now apparently just at hand, has opened his _Cercle Social_,
with clerks, corresponding boards, and so forth; in the precincts
of the Palais Royal. It is _Te-Deum_ Fauchet; the same who
preached on Franklin’s Death, in that huge Medicean rotunda of
the _Halle aux bleds_. He here, this winter, by Printing-press
and melodious Colloquy, spreads bruit of himself to the utmost
City-barriers. “Ten thousand persons” of respectability attend
there; and listen to this “_Procureur-Général de la Vérité_,
Attorney-General of Truth,” so has he dubbed himself; to his sage
Condorcet, or other eloquent coadjutor. Eloquent
Attorney-General! He blows out from him, better or worse, what
crude or ripe thing he holds: not without result to himself; for
it leads to a Bishoprick, though only a Constitutional one.
Fauchet approves himself a glib-tongued, strong-lunged,
whole-hearted human individual: much flowing matter there is, and
really of the better sort, about Right, Nature, Benevolence,
Progress; which flowing matter, whether “it is pantheistic,” or
is pot-theistic, only the greener mind, in these days, need read.
Busy Brissot was long ago of purpose to establish precisely some
such regenerative _Social Circle:_ nay he had tried it, in
“Newman-street Oxford-street,” of the Fog Babylon; and failed,—as
some say, surreptitiously pocketing the cash. Fauchet, not
Brissot, was fated to be the happy man; whereat, however,
generous Brissot will with sincere heart sing a timber-toned
_Nunc Domine_.[331] But “ten thousand persons of respectability:”
what a bulk have many things in proportion to their magnitude!
This _Cercle Social_, for which Brissot chants in sincere
timber-tones such _Nunc Domine_, what is it? Unfortunately wind
and shadow. The main reality one finds in it now, is perhaps
this: that an “Attorney-General of Truth” did once take shape of
a body, as Son of Adam, on our Earth, though but for months or
moments; and ten thousand persons of respectability attended, ere
yet Chaos and Nox had reabsorbed him.
Hundred and thirty-three Paris Journals; regenerative Social
Circle; oratory, in Mother and Daughter Societies, from the
balconies of Inns, by chimney-nook, at dinner-table,—polemical,
ending many times in duel! Add ever, like a constant growling
accompaniment of bass Discord: scarcity of work, scarcity of
food. The winter is hard and cold; ragged Bakers’-queues, like a
black tattered flag-of-distress, wave out ever and anon. It is
the third of our Hunger-years this new year of a glorious
Revolution. The rich man when invited to dinner, in such
distress-seasons, feels bound in politeness to carry his own
bread in his pocket: how the poor dine? And your glorious
Revolution has done it, cries one. And our glorious Revolution is
subtilety, by black traitors worthy of the Lamp-iron, _perverted_
to do it, cries another! Who will paint the huge whirlpool
wherein France, all shivered into wild incoherence, whirls? The
jarring that went on under every French roof, in every French
heart; the diseased things that were spoken, done, the sum-total
whereof is the French Revolution, tongue of man cannot tell. Nor
the laws of action that work unseen in the depths of that huge
blind Incoherence! With amazement, not with measurement, men look
on the Immeasurable; not knowing its laws; _seeing_, with all
different degrees of knowledge, what new phases, and results of
event, its laws bring forth. France is as a monstrous Galvanic
Mass, wherein all sorts of far stranger than chemical galvanic or
electric forces and substances are at work; electrifying one
another, positive and negative; filling with electricity your
Leyden-jars,—Twenty-five millions in number! As the jars get
full, there will, from time to time, be, on slight hint, an
explosion.