Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VII, December 1850, Vol. II

Marat was essentially of the canaille – a bad and exaggerated specimen of the class, whom his imperfect education only contributed to harden and spoil. Robespierre and Danton belong, by birth and training, by feelings and habits, to the middle rank – Robespierre sinking, in the end, below it, through his fanaticism, and Danton rising above it, through his genius and power. Both were "limbs of the law," though the one might be called a great toe, and the other a huge Briarean arm; and, without specifying other resemblances, while Marat lost his temper and almost his reason in the mêlée of the Revolution, both Robespierre and Danton preserved to the last their self-possession, their courage, and the full command of their intellectual faculties, amidst the reelings of the wildest of revolutionary earthquakes, and the thick darkness of the deepest canopy of revolutionary night.

Robespierre reminds us much of one of the old Covenanters. Let not our readers startle at this seemingly strange assertion. We mean the worst species of the old Covenanter – a specimen of whom is faithfully drawn by Sir Walter in Burley, and in our illustrious clansman – the "gifted Gilfillan." Such beings there did exist, and probably exist still, who united a firm belief in certain religious dogmas to the most woeful want of moral principle and human feeling, and were ready to fight what they deemed God's cause with the weapons of the devil. Their cruelties were cool and systematic; they asked a blessing on their assassinations, as though savages were to begin and end their cannibal meals with prayer. Such men were hopelessly steeled against every sentiment of humanity. Mercy to their enemies seemed to them treason against God. No adversary could escape from them. A tiger may feed to repletion, or be disarmed by drowsiness; but who could hope to appease the ghost of a tiger, did such walk? Ghosts of tigers, never slumbering, never sleeping, cold in their eternal hunger, pursuing relentlessly their devouring way, were the religious fanatics – the Dalziels and Claverhouses, as well as the Burleys and Mucklewraths, of the seventeenth century.

To the same order of men belonged Robespierre, modified, of course, in character and belief, by the influences of his period. The miscalled creed of the philosophers of France in the eighteenth century, which, with many of themselves, was a mere divertisement to their intellects, or a painted screen for their vices, sunk deep into the heart of Robespierre, and became a conviction and a reality with him. So far it was well; but, alas! the creed was heartless and immoral, as well as false. Laying down a wide object, it permitted every license of vice or cruelty in the paths through which it was to be gained. Robespierre became, accordingly, the worst of all sinners – a sinner upon system– a political Antinomian, glorying in his shame, to whom blood itself became at last an abstraction and a shadow; the guillotine only a tremendous shuttle, weaving a well-ordered political web; and the tidings of the fall of a thousand heads agreeably indifferent, as to the farmer the news of a cleared hay or harvest field.

That Robespierre had at the first any appetite for blood, is not now asserted by his bitterest foe. That he ever even acquired such a monstrous thirst, seems to us very unlikely. His only thought would be, at the tidings of another death, "Another sacrifice to my idea; another obstacle lifted out of its way." Nero's wish that his enemies had but "one neck" was, we think, comparatively a humane wish. It showed that he had no delight in the disgusting details, but only in the secure result of their destruction. He is the unnatural monster who protracts the fierce luxury – who sips his deep cup of blood lingeringly, that he may know the separate flavor of every separate drop, and who, like the Cyclops in the cave, leaves some select victim to the last, as a bonne bouche to his sated appetite – "Noman shall be the last to be devoured." Robespierre, no more than Nero, was up to such delicately infernal cruelty.

Carlyle frequently admits Robespierre's sincerity, and yet rates him as little other than a sham. We account for this as we did in the case of Marat. He is regarded as a small sincerity; and the sincerity of a small man contracts, to Carlyle's eye, something of the ludicrous air in which a Lilliputian warrior, shouldering his straw-sized musket, and firing his lead-drop bullets, seemed to Gulliver. "Bravo, my little hero!" shouts the Titan, with a loud laugh, as he sees him, with "sky-blue breeches," patronizing the houseless idea of a divine being, "prop away at the tottering heavens, with that new nine-pin of thine; but why is there not rather a little nice doll of an image in those showy inexpressibles, to draw out, and complete the conversion of thy people? and why not say, 'These be thy gods, O toy and toad-worshiping France!'" To bring him to respect, while he admits, the sincerity, we would need to disprove the smallness, of our Arras advocate. Now, compared to truly great men, such as Cromwell – or to extraordinary men, such as Napoleon, Mirabeau, and Danton – Robespierre was small enough. But surely it was no pigmy, whose voice – calm, dispassioned, and articulate – ruled lunatic France; who preserved an icy coolness amid a land of lava; who mastered, though it was only for a moment, a steed like the Revolution; and who threw from his pedestal, though it was by assailing in an unguarded hour, a statue so colossal as Danton's. Rigid, Roman-like purpose – keen, if uninspired, vision – the thousand eyes of an Argus, if not the head of a Jove, or the fist of a Hercules – perseverance, honesty, and first-rate business qualities – we must allow to Robespierre, unless we account for his influence by Satanic possession, and say – either no dunce aut Diabolus. Carlyle attributes his defeat and downfall to his pertinacious pursuit of a shallow logic to its utmost consequences. Probably he thus expresses, in his own way, the view we have already sought to indicate. Robespierre was the sincere, consistent, unclean apostle of an unclean system – a system of deism in theology – of libertinism in morals – of mobocracy in politics – of a "gospel according to Jean-Jacques" – a gospel of "liberty, equality, fraternity" – a liberty ending in general bondage, an equality terminating in the despotism of unprincipled talent, a fraternity dipping its ties in blood. With faithful, unfaltering footstep, through good report and bad report, he followed the genius of revolution in all her devious, dark, dangerous, or triumphant paths, till she at last turned round in anger, like a dogged fiend, and rent him in pieces.

In dealing with Robespierre, we feel, more than with Marat, that we are in contact with an intelligent human being, not an oddity, and mere splinter of a man. His idea led, and at last dragged him, but did not devour nor possess him. His cruelty was more a policy, and less a raging passion; and his great moral error lay in permitting a theory, opposed to his original nature, to overbear his moral sense, to drain him of humanity, and to precipitate him to his doom. If he had resisted the devil, he would have fled from him.

In rising from Robespierre to Danton, we feel like one coming up from the lower plains of Sicily into its western coast – the country of the Cyclopes, with their one eye and gigantic stature; their courage, toil, ferocity, impiety, and power. Danton did tower Titanically above his fellows, and, with little of the divine, was the strongest of the earth-born. He had an "eye," like a shield of sight, broad, piercing, and looking straight forward. His intellect was clear, intuitive, commanding, incapable of the theoretical, and abhorrent of the visionary. He was practical in mind, although passionate in temperament, and figurative in speech. His creed was atheism, not apparently wrought out by personal investigation, or even sought for as an opiate to conscience, but carelessly accepted, as the one he found fashionable at the time. His conduct, too, was merely the common licentiousness of his country, taking a larger shape from his larger constitution and stronger passions. His political faith was less definite and strict, but more progressive and practical, and more accommodated to circumstances than Robespierre's. His patriotism was as sincere as Robespierre's, but hung about him in more voluminous folds. It was a toga, not a tunic. A sort of lazy greatness, which seemed, at a distance, criminal indifference, characterized him when in repose. His cupidity was as Cyclopean as his capacity. Nothing less than a large bribe could fill such a hand. No common goblet could satisfy such a maw. Greedy of money, for money's sake, he was not. He merely wished to live, and all Paris knew what he meant by living. And with all the royal sops to Cerberus, he remained Cerberus still. Never had he made the pretensions of a Lord Russell, or Algernon Sidney, and we know how they were subsidized. His "poverty, but not his will consented." Had he lived in our days, a public subscription – a "Danton testimonial, all subscriptions to be handed in to the – office of Camille Desmoulins," would have saved this vast needy patriot – this "giant worm of fire," from the disgrace of taking supplies from Louis, and then laughing a wild laughter at his provider, as he gnawed on at the foundations of his throne.

In fact, careless greatness, without principle, was the key to Danton's merits and faults – his power and weakness. Well did Madame Roland call him "Sardanapalus." When he found a clover field, he rolled in it. When he had nothing to do, he did nothing; when he saw the necessity of doing something immediately, he could condense ages of action into a few hours. He was like some terrible tocsin, never rung till danger was imminent, but then arousing cities and nations as one man. And thus it was that he saved his country and lost himself, repulsed Brunswick, and sunk before Robespierre.

It had been otherwise, if his impulses had been under the watchful direction of high religious, or moral, or even political principle. This would have secured unity among his passions and powers, and led to steady and cumulative efforts. From this conscious greatness, and superiority to the men around him, there sprung a fatal security and a fatal contempt. He sat on the Mountain smiling, while his enemies were undermining his roots; and while he said, "He dares not imprison me," Robespierre was calmly muttering "I will."

It seemed as if even revolution were not a sufficient stimulus to, or a sufficient element for Danton's mighty powers. It was only when war had reached the neighborhood of Paris, and added its hoarse voice to the roar of panic from within, that he found a truly Titanic task waiting for him. And he did it manfully. His words became "half battles." His actions corresponded with, and exceeded his words. He was as calm, too, as if he had created the chaos around him. That the city was roused, yet concentrated – furious as Gehenna, but firm as fate, at that awful crisis, was all Danton's doing. Paris seemed at the time but a projectile in his massive hand, ready to be hurled at the invading foe. His alleged cruelty was the result, in a great measure, of this habitual carelessness. Too lazy to superintend with sufficient watchfulness the administration of justice, it grew into the Reign of Terror. He was, nevertheless, deeply to blame. He ought to have cried out to the mob, "The way to the prisoners in the Abbaye lies over Danton's dead body;" and not one of them had passed on. He repented, afterward, of his conduct, and was, in fact, the first martyr to a milder regime. Not one of his personal enemies perished in that massacre: hence the name "butcher" applied to him is not correct. He did not dabble in blood. He made but one fierce and rapid irruption into the neighborhood of the "red sea," and returned sick and shuddering therefrom.

His person and his eloquence were in keeping with his mind and character. We figure him always after the pattern of Bethlehem Gabor, as Godwin describes him: his stature gigantic, his hair a dead black, a face in which sagacity and fury struggle for the mastery – a voice of thunder. His mere figure might have saved the utterance of his watchword, "We must put our enemies in fear." His face was itself a "Reign of Terror." His eloquence was not of the intellectual, nor of the rhetorical cast. It was not labored with care, nor moulded by art. It was the full, gushing utterance of a mind seeing the real merits of the case in a glare of vision, and announcing them in a tone of absolute assurance. He did not indulge in long arguments or elaborate declamations. His speeches were Cyclopean cries, at the sight of the truth breaking, like the sun, on his mind. Each speech was a peroration. His imagination was fertile, rugged, and grand. Terrible truth was sheathed in terrible figure. Each thought was twin-born with poetry – poetry of a peculiar and most revolutionary stamp. It leaped into light, like Minerva, armed with bristling imagery. Danton was a true poet, and some of his sentences are the strangest and most characteristic utterances amid all the wild eloquence the Revolution produced. His curses are of the streets, not of Paris, but of Pandemonium; his blasphemies were sublime as those heard in the trance of Sicilian seer, belched up from fallen giants through the smoke of Etna, or like those which made the "burning marl" and the "fiery gulf" quake and recoil in fear.

Such an extraordinary being was Danton, resembling rather the Mammoths and Megatheriums of geology than modern productions of nature. There was no beauty about him why he should be desired, but there was the power and the terrible brilliance, the rapid rise and rapid subsidence of an Oriental tempest. Peace – the peace of a pyramid, calm-sitting and colossal, amid long desolations, and kindred forms of vast and coarse sublimity – be to his ashes!

It is lamentable to contemplate the fate of such a man. Newly married, sobered into strength and wisdom, in the prime of life, and with mildness settling down upon his character, like moonlight on the rugged features of the Sphinx, he was snatched away. "One feels," says Scott of him, "as if the eagle had been brought down by a 'mousing owl.'" More melancholy still to find him dying "game," as it is commonly called – that is, without hope and without God in the world – caracolling and exulting, as he plunged into the waters of what he deemed the bottomless and the endless night; as if a spirit so strong as his could die – as if a spirit so stained as his could escape the judgment – the judgment of a God as just as he is merciful; but also – blessed be his name! – as merciful as he is just.