Nothing, indeed, has tended to deceive and mystify the public mind more than the arbitrary conjunction of names. The yoking together of men in this manner has produced often a lamentable confusion as to their respective intellects and characteristics. Sometimes a mediocrist and a man of genius are thus coupled together; and what is lost by the one is gained by the other, while the credit of the whole firm is essentially impaired. Sometimes men of equal, though most dissimilar intellect, are, in defiance of criticism, clashed into as awkward a pair as ever stood up together on the floor of a country dancing-school. Sometimes, for purposes of moral or critical condemnation, two of quite different degrees of criminality are tied neck and heels together, as in the dread undistinguishing "marriages of the Loire." Sometimes the conjunction of unequal names is owing to the artifice of friends, who, by perpetually naming one favorite author along with another of established fame, hope to convince the unwary public that they are on a level. Sometimes they are produced by the pride or ambition, or by the carelessness or caprice, of the men or authors themselves. Sometimes they are the deliberate result of a shallow, though pretentious criticism, which sees and specifies resemblances, where, in reality, there are none. Sometimes they spring from the purest accidents of common circumstances, common cause, or common abode, as if a crow and a thrush must be kindred because seated on one hedge. From these, and similar causes, have arisen such combinations as Dryden and Pope, Voltaire and Rousseau, Cromwell and Napoleon, Southey and Coleridge, Rogers and Campbell, Hunt and Hazlitt, Hall and Foster, Paine and Cobbett, Byron and Shelley, or Robespierre and Danton.
In the first histories of the French Revolution, the names of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton occur continually together as a triumvirate of terror, and the impression is left that the three were of one order, each a curious compound of the maniac and the monster. They walk on, linked in chains, to common execution, although it were as fair to tie up John Ings, Judge Jeffreys, and Hercules Furens. A somewhat severer discrimination has of late unloosed Marat from the other two, and permitted Robespierre and Danton to walk in couples, simply for the purpose of pointing more strongly the contrast between the strait-laced demonism of the one, and the fierce and infuriated manhood of the other. At least, it is for this purpose that we have ranked their names together.
Of Marat, too, however, we are tempted to say a single word—"Marah," might he better have been called, for he was a water of bitterness. He reminds us of one of those small, narrow, inky pools we have seen in the wilderness, which seem fitted to the size of a suicide, and waiting in gloomy expectation of his advent. John Foster remarked, of some small "malignant" or other, that he had never seen so much of the "essence of devil in so little a compass." Marat was a still more compact concentration of that essence. He was the prussic acid among the family of poisons. His unclean face, his tiny figure, his gibbering form, his acute but narrow soul, were all possessed by an infernal unity and clearness of purpose. On the great clock of the Revolution—while Danton struck the reverberating hours—while Robespierre crept cautiously but surely, like the minute-hand, to his object—Marat was the everlasting "tick-tick" of the smaller hand, counting, like a death-watch, the quick seconds of murder. He never rested; he never slumbered, or walked through his part; he fed but to refresh himself for revolutionary action; he slept but to breathe himself for fresh displays of revolutionary fury. Milder mood, or lucid interval, there was none in him. The wild beast, when full, sleeps; but Marat was never full—the cry from the "worm that dieth not," within him being still, "Give, give," and the flame in his bosom coming from that fire which is "never to be quenched."
If, as Carlyle seems sometimes to insinuate, earnestness be in itself a divine quality, then should Marat have a high place in the gallery of heroes; for if an earnest angel be admirable, chiefly for his earnestness, should not an earnest imp be admirable, too? If a tiger be respectable from his unflinching oneness of object, should not a toad, whose sole purpose is to spit sincere venom, crawl amid general consideration, too? If a conflagration of infernal fire be on the whole a useful and splendid spectacle, why not honor one of its bluest and most lurid flames, licking, with peculiar pertinacity, at some proud city "sham?" But we suspect, that over Carlyle's imagination the quality of greatness exerts more power than that of earnestness. A great regal-seeming ruffian fascinates him, while the petty scoundrel is trampled on. His soul rises to mate with the tiger in his power, but his foot kicks the toad before it, as it is lazily dragging its loathsomeness through the wet garden-beds. The devils, much admired as they stood on the burning marl, lose caste with him when, entering the palace of Pandemonium, they shrink into miniatures of their former selves. Mirabeau, with Carlyle, is a cracked angel; Marat, a lame and limping fiend.
Some one has remarked how singular it is that all the heroes of the French Revolution were ugly. It seems as curious to us that they were either very large or very little persons. Danton was a Titan; Mirabeau, though not so tall, was large, and carried a huge head on his shoulders; whereas Marat and Napoleon were both small men. But the French found their characteristic love of extremes gratified in all of them. Even vice and cruelty they will not admire, unless sauced by some piquant oddity, and served up in some extraordinary dish. A little, lean corporal, like Napoleon, conquering the Brobdingnagian marshals and emperors of Europe, and issuing from his nut-like fist the laws of nations; a grinning death's head, like Voltaire, frightening Christendom from its propriety, were stimulating to intoxication. But their talent was gigantic, though their persons were not; whereas, Marat's mind was as mean, and his habits as low, as his stature was small, and his looks disgustful. Here, then, was the requisite French ragout in all its putrid perfection. A scarecrow, suddenly fleshed, but with the heart omitted—his rags fluttering, and his arms vibrating, in a furious wind, with inflamed noddle, and small, keen, bloodshot eyes—became, for a season, the idol of the most refined and enlightened capital in Europe.
Had we traced, as with a lover's eye, the path of some beautiful flash of lightning, passing, in its terrible loveliness, over the still landscape, and seen it omitting the church spire, which seemed proudly pointing to it as it passed—sparing the old oak, which was bending his sacrificial head before its coming—touching not the tall pine into a column of torch-like flame, but darting its arrow of wrath upon the scarecrow, in the midst of a bean-field, and, by the one glare of grandeur, revealing its "looped and ragged" similitude to a man, its aspiring beggary, and contorted weakness—it would have presented us with a fit though faint image of the beautiful avenger, the holy homicide, the daughter of Nemesis by Apollo—Charlotte Corday—smiting the miserable Marat. Shaft from heaven's inmost quiver, why wert thou spent upon such a work? Beautiful, broad-winged bird of Jove, why didst thou light on such a quarry? Why not have ranged over Europe, in search of more potent and pernicious tyrants, or, at least, have run thy beak into the dark heart of Robespierre? Why did a steel, as sharp and bright as that of Brutus, when he rose "refulgent from the stroke," pierce only a vile insect on the hem of a mantle, and not at once a mantle and a man? Such questions are vain; for not by chance, but by decree, it came about that a death from a hand by which a demi-god would have desired to die, befell a demi-man, and that now this strange birth of nature shines on us forever, in the light of Charlotte Corday's dagger and last triumphant smile.
Yet, even to Marat, let us be merciful, if we must also be just. A monster he was not, nor even a madman; but a mannikin, of some energy and acuteness, soured and crazed to a preternatural degree, and whose fury was aggravated by pure fright. He was such a man as the apothecary in "Romeo and Juliet" would have become in a revolution; but he, instead of dealing out small doses of death to love-sick tailors and world-wearied seamstresses, rose by the force of desperation to the summit of revolutionary power, cried out for 80,000 heads, and died of the assaults of a lovely patriotic maiden, as of a sun-stroke. And yet Shakspeare has a decided penchant for the caitiff wretch he so graphically paints, and has advertised his shop to the ends of the earth. So let us pity the poor vial of prussic acid dashed down so suddenly, and by so noble a hand, whom mortals call Marat. Nature refuses not to appropriate to her bosom her spilt poisons, any more than her shed blooms—appropriates, however, only to mix them with kindlier elements, and to turn them to nobler account. So let us, in humble imitation, collect, and use medicinally, the scattered drops of poor acrid Marat.
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.