Rushing down.
We are now, therefore, got to that black precipitous Abyss;
whither all things have long been tending; where, having now
arrived on the giddy verge, they hurl down, in confused ruin;
headlong, pellmell, down, down;—till Sansculottism have
consummated itself; and in this wondrous French Revolution, as in
a Doomsday, a World have been rapidly, if not born again, yet
destroyed and engulphed. Terror has long been terrible: but to
the actors themselves it has now become manifest that their
appointed course is one of Terror; and they say, Be it so. ‘_Que
la Terreur soit a l’ordre du jour_.’
So many centuries, say only from Hugh Capet downwards, had been
adding together, century transmitting it with increase to
century, the sum of Wickedness, of Falsehood, Oppression of man
by man. Kings were sinners, and Priests were, and People.
Open-Scoundrels rode triumphant, bediademed, becoronetted,
bemitred; or the still fataller species of Secret-Scoundrels, in
their fair-sounding formulas, speciosities, respectabilities,
hollow within: the race of Quacks was grown many as the sands of
the sea. Till at length such a sum of Quackery had accumulated
itself as, in brief, the Earth and the Heavens were weary of.
Slow seemed the Day of Settlement: coming on, all imperceptible,
across the bluster and fanfaronade of Courtierisms,
Conquering-Heroisms, Most-Christian _Grand Monarque_-isms.
Well-beloved Pompadourisms: yet behold it was always coming;
behold it has come, suddenly, unlooked for by any man! The
harvest of long centuries was ripening and whitening so rapidly
of late; and now it is grown _white_, and is reaped rapidly, as
it were, in one day. Reaped, in this Reign of Terror; and carried
home, to Hades and the Pit!—Unhappy Sons of Adam: it is ever so;
and never do they know it, nor will they know it. With cheerfully
smoothed countenances, day after day, and generation after
generation, they, calling cheerfully to one another,
‘Well-speed-ye,’ are at work, _sowing the wind_. And yet, as God
lives, they _shall reap the whirlwind:_ no other thing, we say,
is possible,—since God is a Truth and His World is a Truth.
History, however, in dealing with this Reign of Terror, has had
her own difficulties. While the Phenomenon continued in its
primary state, as mere “Horrors of the French Revolution,” there
was abundance to be said and shrieked. With and also without
profit. Heaven knows there were terrors and horrors enough: yet
that was not all the Phenomenon; nay, more properly, that was not
the Phenomenon at all, but rather was the _shadow_ of it, the
negative part of it. And now, in a new stage of the business,
when History, ceasing to shriek, would try rather to include
under her old Forms of speech or speculation this new amazing
Thing; that so some accredited scientific Law of Nature might
suffice for the unexpected Product of Nature, and History might
get to speak of it articulately, and draw inferences and profit
from it; in this new stage, History, we must say, babbles and
flounders perhaps in a still painfuller manner. Take, for
example, the latest Form of speech we have seen propounded on the
subject as adequate to it, almost in these months, by our worthy
M. Roux, in his _Histoire Parlementaire_. The latest and the
strangest: that the French Revolution was a dead-lift effort,
after eighteen hundred years of preparation, to realise—the
Christian Religion![691] _Unity, Indivisibility, Brotherhood or
Death_ did indeed stand printed on all Houses of the Living;
also, on Cemeteries, or Houses of the Dead, stood printed, by
order of Procureur Chaumette, Here is eternal Sleep:[692] but a
Christian Religion realised by the Guillotine and Death-Eternal,
“is suspect to me,” as Robespierre was wont to say, “_m’est
suspecte._”
Alas, no, M. Roux! A Gospel of Brotherhood, not according to any
of the Four old Evangelists, and calling on men to repent, and
amend _each his own_ wicked existence, that they might be saved;
but a Gospel rather, as we often hint, according to a new Fifth
Evangelist Jean-Jacques, calling on men to amend _each the whole
world’s_ wicked existence, and be saved by making the
Constitution. A thing different and distant _toto cœlo_, as they
say: the whole breadth of the sky, and further if possible!—It is
thus, however, that History, and indeed all human Speech and
Reason does yet, what Father Adam began life by doing: strive to
_name_ the new Things it sees of Nature’s producing,—often
helplessly enough.
But what if History were to admit, for once, that all the Names
and Theorems yet known to her fall short? That this grand Product
of Nature was even grand, and new, in that it came not to range
itself under old recorded Laws-of-Nature at all; but to disclose
new ones? In that case, History renouncing the pretention to
_name_ it at present, will _look_ honestly at it, and name what
she can of it! Any approximation to the right Name has value:
were the right name itself once here, the Thing is known
thenceforth; the Thing is then ours, and can be dealt with.
Now surely not realization, of Christianity, or of aught earthly,
do we discern in this Reign of Terror, in this French Revolution
of which it is the consummating. Destruction rather we discern—of
all that was destructible. It is as if Twenty-five millions,
risen at length into the Pythian mood, had stood up
simultaneously to say, with a sound which goes through far lands
and times, that this Untruth of an Existence had become
insupportable. O ye Hypocrisies and Speciosities, Royal mantles,
Cardinal plushcloaks, ye Credos, Formulas, Respectabilities,
fair-painted Sepulchres full of dead men’s bones,—behold, ye
appear to us to be altogether a Lie. Yet our Life is not a Lie;
yet our Hunger and Misery is not a Lie! Behold we lift up, one
and all, our Twenty-five million right-hands; and take the
Heavens, and the Earth and also the Pit of Tophet to witness,
that either ye shall be abolished, or else we shall be abolished!
No inconsiderable Oath, truly; forming, as has been often said,
the most remarkable transaction in these last thousand years.
Wherefrom likewise there follow, and will follow, results. The
fulfilment of this Oath; that is to say, the black desperate
battle of Men against their whole Condition and Environment,—a
battle, alas, withal, against the Sin and Darkness that was in
themselves as in others: this is the Reign of Terror.
Transcendental despair was the purport of it, though not
consciously so. False hopes, of Fraternity, Political Millennium,
and what not, we have always seen: but the unseen heart of the
whole, the transcendental despair, was not false; neither has it
been of no effect. Despair, pushed far enough, completes the
circle, so to speak; and becomes a kind of genuine productive
hope again.
Doctrine of Fraternity, out of old Catholicism, does, it is true,
very strangely in the vehicle of a Jean-Jacques Evangel, suddenly
plump down out of its cloud-firmament; and from a theorem
determine to make itself a practice. But just so do all creeds,
intentions, customs, knowledges, thoughts and things, which the
French have, suddenly plump down; Catholicism, Classicism,
Sentimentalism, Cannibalism: all _isms_ that make up Man in
France, are rushing and roaring in that gulf; and the theorem has
become a practice, and whatsoever cannot swim sinks. Not
Evangelist Jean-Jacques alone; there is not a Village
Schoolmaster but has contributed his quota: do we not _thou_ one
another, according to the Free Peoples of Antiquity? The French
Patriot, in red phrygian nightcap of Liberty, christens his poor
little red infant Cato,—Censor, or else of Utica. Gracchus has
become Baboeuf and edits Newspapers; Mutius Scaevola, Cordwainer
of that ilk, presides in the Section Mutius-Scaevola: and in
brief, there is a world wholly jumbling itself, to try what will
swim!
Wherefore we will, at all events, call this Reign of Terror a
very strange one. Dominant Sansculottism makes, as it were, free
arena; one of the strangest temporary states Humanity was ever
seen in. A nation of men, full of wants and void of habits! The
old habits are gone to wreck because they were old: men, driven
forward by Necessity and fierce Pythian Madness, have, on the
spur of the instant, to devise for the want the _way_ of
satisfying it. The wonted tumbles down; by imitation, by
invention, the Unwonted hastily builds itself up. What the French
National head has in it comes out: if not a great result, surely
one of the strangest.
Neither shall the reader fancy that it was all blank, this Reign
of Terror: far from it. How many hammermen and squaremen, bakers
and brewers, washers and wringers, over this France, must ply
their old daily work, let the Government be one of Terror or one
of Joy! In this Paris there are Twenty-three Theatres nightly;
some count as many as Sixty Places of Dancing.[693] The
Playwright manufactures: pieces of a strictly Republican
character. Ever fresh Novelgarbage, as of old, fodders the
Circulating Libraries.[694] The “Cesspool of _Agio_,” now in the
time of Paper Money, works with a vivacity unexampled,
unimagined; exhales from itself “sudden fortunes,” like
Alladin-Palaces: really a kind of miraculous Fata-Morganas, since
you _can_ live in them, for a time. Terror is as a sable ground,
on which the most variegated of scenes paints itself. In
startling transitions, in colours all intensated, the sublime,
the ludicrous, the horrible succeed one another; or rather, in
crowding tumult, accompany one another.
Here, accordingly, if anywhere, the “hundred tongues,” which the
old Poets often clamour for, were of supreme service! In defect
of any such organ on our part, let the Reader stir up his own
imaginative organ: let us snatch for him this or the other
significant glimpse of things, in the fittest sequence we can.