T is a brief and moving story, and it is over. Small comment is to be made at any time, on promise cut short, on the burning of Apollo’s laurel-bough. La Rochejaquelein of Poitou, with his goodness, genius, health, breeding, wealth, and beauty—who in his day would have measured for him the renown which seemed so nigh and so wide? And the first reward of that fine heart and brain was a wild grave in the grassy trenches with the assassin; no dues, no amends, no appeal, beyond that piteous ending. He was a boy, rash and romantic, as boys are, and so pyrotechnically French that some must smile at him. His chivalry went to the upholding of kings; all he did has a sole value of loyalty, and the application of it is open to dispute. But his spirit, disentangled from old circumstances of action, is that which helps humanity towards the dawn, and sets oppressions aside with bad by-gone dreams; a spirit infinitely suggestive and generative, then and now a durable sign of hope.
It is difficult to account for the halo which gathers about such heads, and stays, to make of a sometime aimless intelligence a vision of extreme force and charm to the youth of his own land. Nor ought we try to account for it. Henri de La Rochejacquelein is one with whom statistics and theories have distant dealings. He is a fond incongruity, a compliment to human nature almost as great as it can bear. He has precisely the look, language, and physical radiance of the demigods: we infer how, from his counterparts, the early myths grew. Wherever there is a liberal air, and discipline, behold, the demigods are again; and the senses no longer boggle at them. They rise often, and repeat one another, preaching affirmation, and inclining us to allow that what Greece and Japan have had, England has, Alaska and the Congo shall have. Stress must be laid upon heroes: they are the universal premise. Like Emerson’s stars, they “light the world with their admonishing smile;” they warn us, if we will not adore, at least not to deny that they shine forever.
Among Henri de La Rochejacquelein’s peers there were those who would have been men of weight and of mark in any career. But perhaps he, more sensitive and solitary, had no such adaptabilities to bear him out. He was not twenty-two when the dark curtain was rung down upon him. To regret it, is to show small appreciation of the masterly consistency which Fate sometimes allows herself. No spectator of the little drama enacted within the Revolution can forget how dominant, distinct, unrepeated, this artful image of Henri burns itself in upon the memory. To wish him age and a competency were superstition. Mark how, even in her hasty finishing touches, Nature did not bungle with him. She rounds out her white ideal. She leaves us convinced that living a span, and dying in the hurly-burly, he best fulfilled himself. He is placed in an allotted light perfectly kind to him, perfectly soft and clear to the looker-on.
Virtually, what did he amount to? What testimony of him is left? To the man of facts, who asks the questions, the answers are: Nothing and None. There is a laconic apology in the Spanish Gypsy:
“The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
Is to have been a hero.”
Such a one makes a jest of values; he has the freedom of every city; he need pay no taxes; he cripples criticism; he can do without a character; theology itself will not exact faith and good works from him. This Henri lived with his whole soul. His interest to us now is that he blazed with genuine fire, and played no tricks with his individuality. Among the serious war-worn leaders of the insurrection he stands, a fairy prince, with a bright absurd glamour. Never was anybody more like the fiction of an artist’s brain. He is all that children look for in a tale, and he has no moral. He is the embodiment of “l’inexplicable Vendée.”
He was made to despatch this world, like an errand or a game. He had no sovereign interests here of his own; rather was he his brother’s keeper. A sort of rich unreason shot him past the work, the musing, the sight-seeing for self, and the pleasant banquets over which men linger. Careless for the making of a name, for the gain of experience, even for the duty of prolonging his usefulness, he chose the first course which he believed honorable, and to which he could give his heart; and so stumbled on death. The war had a thousand sanctions in his eyes. His enlisting was honest and humble. If he flashed into the most unexampled comet-like activity before he had been long apprenticed, it was merely that he warmed with the motion, that he felt sure at last of himself, and so blazoned abroad his content and comprehension of life. He is less flesh and blood than a magnificent quibble for all the philosophies of the cold schools. He represents, in the economy of things, the waste which is thrift, the daring which is prudence, the folly which is wisdom ineffable.