Critical Miscellanies | Page 2

in truth we know that the oceanic movement is the product of many
forces; the seeming uniformity covers the energy of a hundred currents
and counter-currents; the sea-floor is not even nor the same, but is
subject to untold conditions of elevation and subsidence; the sea is not
one mass, but many masses moving along definite lines of their own. It
is the same with the great tides of history. Wise men shrink from
summing them up in single propositions. That the French Revolution
led to an immense augmentation of happiness, both for the French and
for mankind, can only be denied by the Pope. That it secured its
beneficent results untempered by any mixture of evil, can only be

maintained by men as mad as Doctor Pangloss. The Greek poetess
Corinna said to the youthful Pindar, when he had interwoven all the
gods and goddesses in the Theban mythology into a single hymn, that
we should sow with the hand and not with the sack. Corinna's monition
to the singer is proper to the interpreter of historical truth: he should
cull with the hand, and not sweep in with the scythe. It is doubtless
mere pedantry to abstain from the widest conception of the sum of a
great movement. A clear, definite, and stable idea of the meaning in the
history of human progress of such vast groups of events as the
Reformation or the Revolution, is indispensable for any one to whom
history is a serious study of society. It is just as important, however, not
to forget that they were really groups of events, and not in either case a
single uniform movement. The World-Epos is after all only a file of the
morning paper in a state of glorification. A sensible man learns, in
everyday life, to abstain from praising and blaming character by
wholesale; he becomes content to say of this trait that it is good, and of
that act that it was bad. So in history, we become unwilling to join or to
admire those who insist upon transferring their sentiment upon the
whole to their judgment upon each part. We seek to be allowed to
retain a decided opinion as to the final value to mankind of a long
series of transactions, and yet not to commit ourselves to set the same
estimate on each transaction in particular, still less on each person
associated with it. Why shall we not prize the general results of the
Reformation, without being obliged to defend John of Leyden and the
Munster Anabaptists?
M. D'Héricault's volume naturally suggests such reflections as these. Of
all the men of the Revolution, Robespierre has suffered most from the
audacious idolatry of some writers, and the splenetic impatience of
others. M. Louis Blanc and M. Ernest Hamel talk of him as an angel or
a prophet, and the Ninth Thermidor is a red day indeed in their
martyrology. Michelet and M. D'Héricault treat him as a mixture of
Cagliostro and Caligula, both a charlatan and a miscreant. We are
reminded of the commencement of an address of the French Senate to
the first Bonaparte: 'Sire,' they began, 'the desire for perfection is one of
the worst maladies that can afflict the human mind.' This bold aphorism
touches one of the roots of the judgments we pass both upon men and

events. It is because people so irrationally think fit to insist upon
perfection, that Robespierre's admirers would fain deny that he ever
had a fault, and the tacit adoption of the same impracticable standard
makes it easier for Robespierre's wholesale detractors to deny that he
had a single virtue or performed a single service. The point of view is
essentially unfit for history. The real subject of history is the
improvement of social arrangements, and no conspicuous actor in
public affairs since the world began saw the true direction of
improvement with an absolutely unerring eye from the beginning of his
career to the end. It is folly for the historian, as it is for the statesman,
to strain after the imaginative unity of the dramatic creator. Social
progress is an affair of many small pieces and slow accretions, and the
interest of historic study lies in tracing, amid the immense turmoil of
events and through the confusion of voices, the devious course of the
sacred torch, as it shifts from bearer to bearer. And it is not the bearers
who are most interesting, but the torch.
* * * * *
In the old Flemish town of Arras, known in the diplomatic history of
the fifteenth century by a couple of important treaties, and famous in
the industrial history of the Middle Ages for its pre-eminence in the
manufacture of the most splendid kind of tapestry hangings,
Maximilian Robespierre was born in