Critical Miscellanies | Page 4

reforms was better than to ignore or to oppose political reform.
But the course of events afterwards owed their least desirable bias to
the fact that such compositions were the nearest approach to political
training that so many of the revolutionary leaders underwent. One is
inclined to apply to practical politics Arthur Young's sensible remark
about the endeavour of the French to improve the quality of their wool:
'A cultivator at the head of a sheep-farm of 3000 or 4000 acres, would
in a few years do more for their wools than all the academicians and
philosophers will effect in ten centuries.'
In his profession he distinguished himself in one or two causes of local
celebrity. An innovating citizen had been ordered by the authorities to
remove a lightning-conductor from his house within three days, as
being a mischievous practical paradox, as well as a danger and an
annoyance to his neighbours. Robespierre pleaded the innovator's case
on appeal, and won it. He defended a poor woman who had been

wrongfully accused by a monk belonging to the powerful corporation
of a great neighbouring abbey. The young advocate did not even shrink
from manfully arguing a case against the august Bishop of Arras
himself. His independence did him no harm. The Bishop afterwards
appointed him to the post of judge or legal assessor in the episcopal
court. This tribunal was a remnant of what had once been the sovereign
authority and jurisdiction of the Bishops of Arras. That a court with the
power of life and death should thus exist by the side of a proper
corporation of civil magistrates, is an illustration of the inextricable
labyrinth of the French law and its administration on the eve of the
Revolution. Robespierre did not hold his office long. Every one has
heard the striking story, how the young judge, whose name was within
half a dozen years to take a place in the popular mind of France and of
Europe with the bloodiest monsters of myth or history, resigned his
post in a fit of remorse after condemning a murderer to be executed.
'He is a criminal, no doubt,' Robespierre kept groaning in reply to the
consolations of his sister, for women are more positive creatures than
men: 'a criminal, no doubt; but to put a man to death!' Many a man thus
begins the great voyage with queasy sensibilities, and ends it a
cannibal.
Among Robespierre's associates in the festive mummeries of the Rosati
was a young officer of Engineers, who was destined to be his colleague
in the dread Committee of Public Safety, and to leave an important
name in French history. In the garrison of Arras, Carnot was
quartered,--that iron head, whose genius for the administrative
organisation of war achieved even greater things for the new republic
than the genius of Louvois had achieved for the old monarchy. Carnot
surpassed not only Louvois, but perhaps all other names save one in
modern military history, by uniting to the most powerful gifts for
organisation, both the strategic talent that planned the momentous
campaign of 1794, and the splendid personal energy and skill that
prolonged the defence of Antwerp against the allied army in 1814
Partisans dream of the unrivalled future of peace, glory, and freedom
that would have fallen to the lot of France, if only the gods had brought
about a hearty union between the military genius of Carnot and the
political genius of Robespierre. So, no doubt, after the restoration of

Charles II. in England, there were good men who thought that all would
have gone very differently, if only the genius of the great creator of the
Ironsides had taken counsel with the genius of Venner, the
Fifth-Monarchy Man, and Feak, the Anabaptist prophet.
The time was now come when such men as Robespierre were to be
tried with fire, when they were to drink the cup of fury and the dregs of
the cup of trembling. Sybils and prophets have already spoken their
inexorable decree, as Goethe has said, on the day that first gives the
man to the world; no time and no might can break the stamped mould
of his character; only as life wears on, do all its aforeshapen lines come
into light. He is launched into a sea of external conditions, that are as
independent of his own will as the temperament with which he
confronts them. It is action that tries, and variation of circumstance.
The leaden chains of use bind many an ugly unsuspected prisoner in the
soul; and when the habit of their lives has been sundered, the most
immaculate are capable of antics beyond prevision. A great crisis of the
world was prepared for Robespierre and those others, his allies or his
destroyers, who with him came like the