Grilled Herrings.
So dies Sansculottism, the _body_ of Sansculottism, or is
changed. Its ragged Pythian Carmagnole-dance has transformed
itself into a Pyrrhic, into a dance of Cabarus Balls.
Sansculottism is dead; extinguished by new _isms_ of that kind,
which were its own natural progeny; and is buried, we may say,
with such deafening jubilation and disharmony of funeral-knell on
their part, that only after some half century or so does one
begin to learn clearly why it ever was alive.
And yet a meaning lay in it: Sansculottism verily was alive, a
New-Birth of TIME; nay it still lives, and is not dead, but
changed. The _soul_ of it still lives; still works far and wide,
through one bodily shape into another less amorphous, as is the
way of cunning Time with his New-Births:—till, in some perfected
shape, it embrace the whole circuit of the world! For the wise
man may now everywhere discern that he must found on his manhood,
not on the garnitures of his manhood. He who, in these Epochs of
our Europe, founds on garnitures, formulas, culottisms of what
sort soever, is founding on old cloth and sheep-skin, and cannot
endure. But as for the body of Sansculottism, that is dead and
buried,—and, one hopes, need not reappear, in primary amorphous
shape, for another thousand years!
It was the frightfullest thing ever borne of Time? One of the
frightfullest. This Convention, now grown Anti-Jacobin, did, with
an eye to justify and fortify itself, publish Lists of what the
Reign of Terror had perpetrated: Lists of Persons Guillotined.
The Lists, cries splenetic Abbé Montgaillard, were not complete.
They contain the names of, How many persons thinks the
reader?—Two Thousand all but a few. There were above Four
Thousand, cries Montgaillard: so many were guillotined,
fusilladed, noyaded, done to dire death; of whom Nine Hundred
were women.[778] It is a horrible sum of human lives, M.
l’Abbé:—some ten times as many shot rightly on a field of battle,
and one might have had his Glorious-Victory with _Te-Deum_. It is
not far from the two-hundredth part of what perished in the
entire Seven Years War. By which Seven Years War, did not the
great Fritz wrench Silesia from the great Theresa; and a
Pompadour, stung by epigrams, satisfy herself that she could not
be an Agnes Sorel? The head of man is a strange vacant
sounding-shell, M. l’Abbé; and studies Cocker to small purpose.
But what if History, somewhere on this Planet, were to hear of a
Nation, the third soul of whom had not for thirty weeks each year
as many third-rate potatoes as would sustain him?[779] History,
in that case, feels bound to consider that starvation is
starvation; that starvation from age to age presupposes much:
History ventures to assert that the French Sansculotte of
Ninety-three, who, roused from long death-sleep, could rush at
once to the frontiers, and die fighting for an immortal Hope and
Faith of Deliverance for him and his, was but the
_second_-miserablest of men! The Irish Sans-potato, had he not
senses then, nay a soul? In his frozen darkness, it was bitter
for him to die famishing; bitter to see his children famish. It
was bitter for him to be a beggar, a liar and a knave. Nay, if
that dreary Greenland-wind of benighted Want, perennial from sire
to son, had frozen him into a kind of torpor and numb callosity,
so that he saw not, felt not, was this, for a creature with a
soul in it, some assuagement; or the cruellest wretchedness of
all?
Such things were, such things are; and they go on in silence
peaceably: and Sansculottisms follow them. History, looking back
over this France through long times, back to Turgot’s time for
instance, when dumb Drudgery staggered up to its King’s Palace,
and in wide expanse of sallow faces, squalor and winged
raggedness, presented hieroglyphically its Petition of
Grievances; and for answer got hanged on a “new gallows forty
feet high,”—confesses mournfully that there is no period to be
met with, in which the general Twenty-five Millions of France
suffered _less_ than in this period which they name Reign of
Terror! But it was not the Dumb Millions that suffered here; it
was the Speaking Thousands, and Hundreds, and Units; who shrieked
and published, and made the world ring with their wail, as they
could and should: that is the grand peculiarity. The
frightfullest Births of Time are never the loud-speaking ones,
for these soon die; they are the silent ones, which can live from
century to century! Anarchy, hateful as Death, is abhorrent to
the whole nature of man; and must itself soon die.
Wherefore let all men know what of depth and of height is still
revealed in man; and, with fear and wonder, with just sympathy
and just antipathy, with clear eye and open heart, contemplate it
and appropriate it; and draw innumerable inferences from it. This
inference, for example, among the first: “That if the gods of
this lower world will sit on their glittering thrones, indolent
as Epicurus’ gods, with the living Chaos of Ignorance and Hunger
weltering uncared for at their feet, and smooth Parasites
preaching, Peace, peace, when there is no peace,” then the dark
Chaos, it would seem, will rise; has risen, and O Heavens! has it
not tanned their skins into breeches for itself? That there be no
second Sansculottism in our Earth for a thousand years, let us
understand well what the first was; and let Rich and Poor of us
go and do _otherwise_.—But to our tale.
The Muscadin Sections greatly rejoice; Cabarus Balls gyrate: the
well-nigh insoluble problem _Republic without Anarchy_, have we
not solved it?—Law of Fraternity or Death is gone: chimerical
_Obtain-who-need_ has become practical _Hold-who-have_. To
anarchic Republic of the Poverties there has succeeded orderly
Republic of the Luxuries; which will continue as long as it can.
On the Pont au Change, on the Place de Grève, in long sheds,
Mercier, in these summer evenings, saw working men at their
repast. One’s allotment of daily bread has sunk to an ounce and a
half. “Plates containing each three grilled herrings, sprinkled
with shorn onions, wetted with a little vinegar; to this add some
morsel of boiled prunes, and lentils swimming in a clear sauce:
at these frugal tables, the cook’s gridiron hissing near by, and
the pot simmering on a fire between two stones, I have seen them
ranged by the hundred; consuming, without bread, their scant
messes, far too moderate for the keenness of their appetite, and
the extent of their stomach.”[780] Seine water, rushing plenteous
by, will supply the deficiency.
O man of Toil, thy struggling and thy daring, these six long
years of insurrection and tribulation, thou hast profited nothing
by it, then? Thou consumest thy herring and water, in the blessed
gold-red evening. O why was the Earth so beautiful, becrimsoned
with dawn and twilight, if man’s dealings with man were to make
it a vale of scarcity, of tears, not even soft tears? Destroying
of Bastilles, discomfiting of Brunswicks, fronting of
Principalities and Powers, of Earth and Tophet, all that thou
hast dared and endured,—it was for a Republic of the Cabarus
Saloons? Patience; thou must have patience: the end is not yet.