Marat is easily judged. The complete sincerity of the enthusiast is not
difficult to appreciate when his enthusiasm is devoted to a simple human
ideal which has been, as it were, fundamental and common to the human
race.
Equality within the State and the government of the State by its general
will: these primal dogmas, on the reversion to which the whole
Revolution turned, were Marat’s creed.
Those who would ridicule or condemn him because he held such a creed,
are manifestly incapable of discussing the matter at all. The ridicule
and condemnation under which Marat justly falls do not attach to the
patent moral truths he held, but to the manner in which he held them. He
did not only hold them isolated from other truths--it is the fault of
the fanatic so to hold any truth--but he held them as though no other
truths existed. And whenever he found his ideal to be in practice
working at a friction or stopped dead, his unnourished and acute
enthusiasms at once sought a scapegoat, discovered a responsible agent,
and suggested a violent outlet, for the delay.
He was often right when he denounced a political intriguer: he often
would have sacrificed a victim not unjustly condemned, he often
discovered an agent partially responsible, and even the violent
solutions that he suggested were not always impracticable. But it was
the prime error of his tortured mind that beyond victims, and sudden
violent clutches at the success of democracy, there was nothing else he
could conceive. He was incapable of allowing for imperfections, for
stupidities, for the misapprehension of mind by mind, for the mere
action of time, and for all that renders human life infinitely complex
and infinitely adjustable.
Humour, the reflection of such wisdom, he lacked;--“judgment” (as the
English idiom has it) he lacked still more--if a comparative term may be
attached to two such absolute vacuities.
It must not be forgotten that so complete an absence of certain
necessary qualities in the building up of a mind are equivalent to
madness. Marat was not sane. His insanity was often generous, the creed
to which it was attached was obvious enough, and in the eyes of most of
us it is a creed to be accepted. But he worked with it as a madman who
is mad on collectivism, let us say, or the rights of property, might
work in our society, thinking of his one thesis, shrieking it and
foaming at the mouth upon it, losing all control when its acceptance was
not even opposed but merely delayed. He was valueless for the
accomplishment of the ends of the Revolution. His doctrine and his
adherence to it were so conspicuously simple and sincere that it is no
wonder the populace made him (for a few months) a sort of symbol of
their demand.
For the rest, his face, like his character, was tortured; he carried
with him a disease of the skin that irritated perpetually his wholly
unbalanced temper.
Some say (but one must always beware of so-called “Science” in the
reading of history) that a mixture of racial types produced in him a
perpetual physical disturbance: his face was certainly distorted and
ill-balanced--but physical suggestions of that sort are very
untrustworthy.
Those who met him in the management of affairs thought him worthless
enough; a few who knew him intimately loved him dearly; more who came
across him continually were fatigued and irritated by his empty
violence. He was, among those young revolutionaries, almost an elderly
man; he was (this should never be forgotten) a distinguished scholar in
his own trade, that of medicine; and he effected less in the Revolution
than any man to whom a reputation of equal prominence happened to
attach. He must stand responsible for the massacres of September.[2]