Latter-Day Pamphlets | Page 5

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evidences, than the system of repression and corruption, of shameless
dishonesty and unbelief in anything but human baseness, that we now
live under. The Italians, the very Pope, have become apostles of liberty,
and France is--what is France!"--We know what France suddenly
became in the end of February next; and by a clear enough genealogy,
we can trace a considerable share in that event to the good simple Pope
with the New Testament in his hand. An outbreak, or at least a radical
change and even inversion of affairs hardly to be achieved without an
outbreak, everybody felt was inevitable in France: but it had been
universally expected that France would as usual take the initiative in
that matter; and had there been no reforming Pope, no insurrectionary
Sicily, France had certainly not broken out then and so, but only
afterwards and otherwise. The French explosion, not anticipated by the
cunningest men there on the spot scrutinizing it, burst up unlimited,
complete, defying computation or control.
Close following which, as if by sympathetic subterranean electricities,
all Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable; and we had the year
1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole,
humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption
of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere
immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as
the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was
scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:--Enter, all the world,
see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning
persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world
bellowing in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not
heroes! Off with you, off!" and, what was peculiar and notable in this
year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming,
"We are poor histrios, we sure enough;--did you want heroes? Don't
kill us; we couldn't help it!" Not one of them turned round, and stood
upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk
his skin upon; by no manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming
peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings
conscious that they are but Play-actors. The miserable mortals, enacting
their High Life Below Stairs, with faith only that this Universe may
perhaps be all a phantasm and hypocrisis,--the truculent Constable of
the Destinies suddenly enters: "Scandalous Phantasms, what do you

here? Are 'solemnly constituted Impostors' the proper Kings of men?
Did you think the Life of Man was a grimacing dance of apes? To be
led always by the squeak of your paltry fiddle? Ye miserable, this
Universe is not an upholstery Puppet-play, but a terrible God's Fact;
and you, I think,--had not you better begone!" They fled precipitately,
some of them with what we may call an exquisite ignominy,--in terror
of the treadmill or worse. And everywhere the people, or the populace,
take their own government upon themselves; and open "kinglessness,"
what we call anarchy,--how happy if it be anarchy plus a
street-constable!--is everywhere the order of the day. Such was the
history, from Baltic to Mediterranean, in Italy, France, Prussia, Austria,
from end to end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. Since the
destruction of the old Roman Empire by inroad of the Northern
Barbarians, I have known nothing similar.
And so, then, there remained no King in Europe; no King except the
Public Haranguer, haranguing on barrel-head, in leading article; or
getting himself aggregated into a National Parliament to harangue. And
for about four months all France, and to a great degree all Europe,
rough-ridden by every species of delirium, except happily the
murderous for most part, was a weltering mob, presided over by M. de
Lamartine, at the Hotel-de-Ville; a most eloquent fair-spoken literary
gentleman, whom thoughtless persons took for a prophet, priest and
heaven-sent evangelist, and whom a wise Yankee friend of mine
discerned to be properly "the first stump-orator in the world, standing
too on the highest stump,--for the time." A sorrowful spectacle to men
of reflection, during the time he lasted, that poor M. de Lamartine; with
nothing in him but melodious wind and soft sawder, which he and
others took for something divine and not diabolic! Sad enough; the
eloquent latest impersonation of Chaos-come-again; able to talk for
itself, and declare persuasively that it is Cosmos! However, you have
but to wait a little, in such cases; all balloons do and must give up their
gas in the pressure of things, and are collapsed in a sufficiently
wretched manner before long.
And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and truculent,
more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace after populace
rises, King after King capitulates or