It may be said that there is no comparison between that explosive
opening of the intellect in Paris and an antiquated madman leading a
knot of provincial Protestants. The Man of the Hill, says Victor Hugo
somewhere, fights for an idea; the Man of the Forest for a prejudice.
Nevertheless it remains true that the enemies of the red cap long
attempted to represent it as a sham decoration in the style of Sim
Tappertit. Long after the revolutionists had shown more than the
qualities of men, it was common among lords and lacqueys to attribute to
them the stagey and piratical pretentiousness of urchins. The kings
called Napoleon's pistol a toy pistol even while it was holding up their
coach and mastering their money or their lives; they called his sword a
stage sword even while they ran away from it. Something of the same
senile inconsistency can be found in an English and American habit
common until recently: that of painting the South Americans at once as
ruffians wading in carnage, and also as poltroons playing at war. They
blame them first for the cruelty of having a fight; and then for the
weakness of having a sham fight. Such, however, since the French
Revolution and before it, has been the fatuous attitude of certain
Anglo-Saxons towards the whole revolutionary tradition. Sim Tappertit
was a sort of answer to everything; and the young men were mocked as
'prentices long after they were masters. The rising fortune of the South
American republics to-day is symbolical and even menacing of many
things; and it may be that the romance of riot will not be so much
extinguished as extended; and nearer home we may have boys being boys
again, and in London the cry of "clubs."