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Service, fresh from Brest, ply the King of Siam's cannon. Singular (if we were not used to the like): Georget lay, last night, taking his ease at his inn; the King of Siam's cannon also lay, knowing nothing of him, for a hundred years. Yet, now, at the right instant, they have got together, and discourse eloquent music., For, hearing what was toward, Georget sprang from the Brest Diligence, and ran. Gardes Françaises also will be here, with real artillery: were not the walls so thick!-Upwards from the Esplanade, horizontally from all the neighboring roofs and windows, flashes one irregular deluge of musketry, without effect. The Invalides lie flat, firing comparatively at their ease from behind stone; hardly through portholes, show the tip of a nose. We fall, shot; and make no impression.

Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible! Guard-rooms are burnt, Invalides mess-rooms. A distracted "Perukemaker with two fiery torches" is for burning the "saltpetres of the Arsenal";-had not a woman run screaming; had not a Patriot, with some tincture of Natural Philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of him (butt of musket on pit of stomach), overturned barrels and stayed the devouring element. A young beautiful lady, seized escaping in these Outer Courts, and thought falsely to be De Launay's daughter, shall be burnt in De Launay's sight; she lies swooned on a paillasse: but again a Patriot, it is brave Aubin Bonnemère the old soldier, dashes in, and rescues her. Straw is burnt; three cartloads of it, hauled thither, go up in white smoke: almost to the choking of Patriotism itself; so that Elie had, with singed brows, to drag back one cart; and Réole the "gigantic haberdasher" another. Smoke as of Tophet; confusion as of Babel; noise as of the Crack of Doom!

Blood flows; the aliment of new madness. The wounded are carried into the houses of the Rue Cerisaie; the dying leave their last mandate not to yield till the accursed Stronghold fall. And yet, alas, how fall? The walls are so thick. Deputations, three in number, arrive from the Hôtel-de-Ville; Abbé Fauchet (who was of one) can say with what almost superhuman courage of benevolence. These wave their Town-flag in the arched Gateway; and stand, rolling their drum; but to no purpose. In such Crack of Doom, De Launay cannot hear them, dare

not believe them: they return, with justified rage, the whew of lead still singing in their ears. What to do? The Firemen are here, squirting with their fire-pumps on the Invalides cannon, to wet the touchholes; they unfortunately cannot squirt so high; but produce only clouds of spray. Individuals of classical knowledge propose catapults. Santerre, the sonorous Brewer of the Suburb Saint-Antoine, advises rather that the place be fired, by a "mixture of phosphorus and oil-of-turpentine spouted up through forcing pumps": O SpinolaSanterre, hast thou the mixture ready? Every man his own engineer! And still the fire-deluge abates not even women are firing, and Turks; at least one woman (with her sweetheart), and one Turk; Gardes Françaises have come; real cannon; real cannoneers. Usher Maillard is busy; halfpay Elie, half-pay Hulin rage in the midst of the thousands.

How the great Bastille Clock ticks (inaudible) in its Inner Court there, at its ease, hour after hour; as if nothing special, for it or the world, were passing! It tolled One when the firing began; and is now pointing towards Five, and still the firing slakes not.-Far down, in their vaults, the seven prisoners hear muffled din as of earthquakes; their Turnkeys answer vaguely.

Woe to thee, De Launay, with the poor hundred Invalides! Broglie is distant, and his ears heavy: Besenval hears, but can send no help. One poor troop of the Hussars has crept, reconnoitering, cautiously along the Quais, as far as the Pont Neuf. “We are come to join you," said the Captain; for the crowd seems shoreless. A large-headed dwarfish individual, of smoke-bleared aspect, shambles forward, opening his blue lips, for there is sense in him; and croaks: "Alight then, and give up your arms!" The HussarCaptain is too happy to be escorted to the Barriers, and dismissed on parole. Who the squat individual was? Men answer, It is M. Marat, author of the excellent pacific Avis au Peuple! Great truly, O thou remarkable Dogleech, is this thy day of emergence and new-birth: and yet this same day come four years-!-But let the curtains of the future hang.

What shall De Launay do? One thing only De Launay could have done: what he said he would do. Fancy him sitting, from the first, with lighted taper, within arm'slength of the Powder-Magazine, motionless,

like old Roman Senator, or Bronze Lampholder; coldly apprising Thuriot, and all men, by a slight motion of his eye, what his resolution was:-Harmless he sat there, while unharmed; but the King's Fortress, meanwhile, could, might, would or should, in nowise be surrendered, save to the King's Messenger: one old man's life is worthless, so it be lost with honor; but think, ye brawling canaille, how will it be when a whole Bastille springs skyward!-In such statuesque, taper-holding attitude, one fancies De Launay might have left Thuriot, the red Clerks of the Basoche, Curé of Saint Stephen and all the tagrag-and-bobtail of the world, to work their will.

And yet, withal, he could not do it. Hast thou considered how each man's heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts of all men; hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound of many men? How their shriek of indignation palsies the strong soul; their howl of contumely withers with unfelt pangs? The Ritter Gluck confessed that the ground-tone of the noblest passage, in one of his noblest Operas, was the voice of the Populace he had heard at Vienna, erying to their Kaiser: Bread! Bread! Great is the combined voice of men; the utterance of their instincts which are truer than their thoughts: It is the greatest a man encounters, among the sounds and shadows which make up this World of Time. He who can resist that, has his footing somewhere beyond Time. De Launay could not do it. Distracted, he hovers between two; hopes in the middle of despair; surrenders not his Fortress; declares that he will blow it up, seizes torches to blow it up, and does not blow it up. Unhappy old De Launay, it is the death-agony of the Bastille and thee! Jail, Jailering, and Jailer, all three, such as they may have been, must finish.

For four hours now has the WorldBedlam roared: call it the World-Chimæra, blowing fire! The poor Invalides have sunk under their battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets: they have made a white flag of napkins; go beating the chamade, or seeming to beat, for one can hear nothing. The very Swiss at the Portcullis look weary of firing; disheartened in the fire-deluge; a porthole at the drawbridge is opened, as by one that would speak. See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man! On his plank, swinging over the abyss of that stone Ditch; plank

resting on Parapet, balanced by weight of Patriots, he hovers perilous: such a Dove towards such an Ark! Deftly, thou shifty Usher: one man already fell; and lies smashed, far down there, against the masonry! Usher Maillard falls not: deftly, unerring he walks, with outspread palm. The Swiss holds a paper through the porthole; the shifty Usher snatches it, and returns. Terms of surrender: Pardon, immunity to all! Are they accepted?-"Foi d'officier, on the word of an officer," answers half-pay Hulin,- -or half-pay Elie, for men do not agree on it, "they are!" Sinks the drawbridge, Usher Maillard bolting it when down; rushes in the living deluge: the Bastille is fallen! Victoire! La Bastille est prise!...

Why dwell on what follows? Hulin's foi d'officier should have been kept, but could not. The Swiss stand drawn up, disguised in white canvas smocks; the Invalides without disguise; their arms all piled against the wall. The first rush of victors, in ecstasy that the death-peril is passed, "leaps joyfully on their necks;" but new victors rush, and ever new, also in ecstasy not wholly of joy. As we said, it was a living deluge plunging headlong: had not the Gardes Françaises, in their cool military way, "wheeled round with arms levelled," it would have plunged suicidally, by the hundred or the thousand, into the Bastille-ditch.

And so it goes plunging through court and corridor; billowing uncontrollable, firing from windows-on itself; in hot frenzy of triumph, of grief and vengeance for its slain. The poor Invalides will fare ill; one Swiss, running off in his white smock, is driven back with a death-thrust. Let all Prisoners be marched to the Townhall to be judged!-Alas, already one poor Invalide has his right hand slashed off; his maimed body dragged to the Place de Greve, and hanged there. This same right hand, it is said, turned back De Launay from the Powder-Magazine, and saved Paris. . . .

...

In the Court all is mystery, not without whisperings of terror; though ye dream of lemonade and epaulettes, ye foolish women! His Majesty, kept in happy ignorance, perhaps dreams of double-barrels and the Woods of Meudon. Late at night, the Duke de Liancourt, having official right of entrance, gains access to the Royal Apartments; unfolds with earnest clearness, in his

constitutional way, the Job's news. "Mais," said Poor Louis, "c'est une révolte," Why, that is a revolt!-"Sire," answered Liancourt, "it is not a revolt,-it is a revolution."

THE DEATH-BIRTH OF A WORLD

THOMAS CARLYLE

[From The French Revolution] Here perhaps is the place to fix, a little more precisely, what these two words, French Revolution, shall mean; for, strictly considered, they may have as many meanings as there are speakers of them. All things are in revolution; in change from moment to moment, which becomes sensible from epoch to epoch; in this Time-World of ours there is properly nothing else but revolution and mutation, and even nothing else conceivable. Revolution, you answer, means speedier change. Whereupon one has still to ask: How speedily? At what degree of speed; in what particular points of this variable course, which varies in velocity, but can never stop till Time itself stops, does Revolution begin and end; cease to be ordinary mutation, and again become such? It is a thing that will depend on definition more or less arbitrary.

For ourselves, we answer that French Revolution means here the open violent Rebellion, and Victory, of disemprisoned Anarchy against corrupt worn-out Authority: how Anarchy breaks prison; bursts up from the infinite Deep, and rages uncontrollable, immeasurable, enveloping a world; in phasis after phasis of fever-frenzy;-till the frenzy burning itself out, and what elements of new Order it held (since all Force holds such developing themselves), the Uncontrollable be got, if not reimprisoned, yet harnessed, and its mad forces made to work toward their object as sane regulated ones. For as Hierarchies and Dynasties of all kinds, Theocracies, Autocracies, Strumpetocracies, have ruled over the world; so it was appointed, in the decrees of Providence, that this same Victorious Anarchy, Jacobinism, Sansculottism, French Revolution, Horrors of French Revolution, or what else mortals name it, should have its turn. The "destructive wrath" of Sanscullotism: this is what we speak, having unhappily no voice for singing.

Surely a great Phenomenon: nay it is a transcendental one, overstepping all rules

and experience; the crowning Phenomenon. of our Modern Time. For here again, most unexpectedly, comes antique Fanaticism in new and newest vesture; miraculous, as all Fanaticism is. Call it the Fanaticism of "making away with formulas, de humer les formules." The world of formulas, the formed, regulated world, which all habitable world is, must needs hate such Fanaticism like death; and be at deadly variance with it. The world of formulas must conquer it; or, failing that, must die execrating it, anathematizing it;-can nevertheless in no wise prevent its being and its having been. The Anathemas are there, and the miraculous thing is there.

Whence it cometh? Whither it goeth? These are questions! When the age of Miracles lay faded into the distance as an incredible tradition, and even the age of Conventionalities was now old; and Man's Existence had for long generations rested on mere formulas which were grown hollow by course of time; and it seemed as if no Reality any longer existed, but only Phantasms of realities, and God's Universe were the work of the Tailor and Upholsterer mainly, and men were buckram masks that went about becking and grimacing there,on a sudden, the Earth yawns asunder, and amid Tartarean smoke, and glare of fierce brightness, rises SANSCULOTTISM, manyheaded, fire-breathing, and asks: What think ye of me? Well may the buckram masks start together, terror-struck; "into expressive well concerted groups!" It is indeed, Friends, a most singular, most fatal thing. Let whosoever is but buckram and a phantasm look to it: ill verily may it fare with him; here methinks he cannot much longer be. Woe also to many a one who is not altogether buckram, but partly real and human! The age of Miracles has come back! "Behold the World-Phoenix, in fireconsummation and fire-creation: wide are her fanning wings; loud is her death-melody, of battle-thunders and falling towns; skyward lashes the funeral flame, enveloping all things: it is the Death-Birth of a World!"

THE STORM

MATTHEW ARNOLD

[From Obermann Once More, 1867] But slow that tide of common thought, Which bathed our life, retired;

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Beginning to mistrust their boastful guides, And wise men, willing to grow wiser, caught, Rapt auditors! from thy most eloquent tongue

Now mute, for ever mute in the cold grave.
I see him,-old, but vigorous in age,-
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches
start

Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove. But

some

While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,

Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by Custom; and with high dis-
dain,

Exploding upstart Theory, insists

Upon the allegiance to which men are bornSome say at once a froward multitudeMurmur (for truth is hated, where not loved)

As the winds fret within the Eolian cave, Galled by their monarch's chain. The times were big

With ominous change, which, night by night, provoked

Keen struggles, and black clouds of passion raised;

But memorable moments intervened, When Wisdom, like the Goddess from Jove's brain,

Broke forth in armor of resplendent words, Startling the Synod. Could a youth, and

one

In ancient story versed, whose breast had heaved

Under the weight of classic eloquence,
Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?

THE CHARACTER OF BURKE

JOHN MORLEY

In every man there is a certain inevitable connection of opinion. We hold our views by sets and series. If we espouse one, we have unconsciously let in along with this a little, or it may be a long, train of others. A man comes to a certain conclusion upon some greatly controverted point of science. His eye has possibly never turned aside from the straitened bounds of scientific matter, and yet his single conclusion here leads him insensibly to a whole parcel of conclusions in religious matter or in ethical matter. We ought to remember this in the case of Burke. Few men's opinions hang together so closely and compactly as his did. The fiery glow of his nature fused all his ideas into a tenacious and homogeneous mass. What in more commonplace minds is effected by a process of bad logic, or by what seems to be hazard and caprice, in him was wrought by an inborn ardor of character. His passionate enthusiasm for Order

-and this is not a jot more strong in the "Reflections," in 1790 than it was in the "Thoughts on the Present Discontents" twenty years before-subjugated him as profoundly in one field as in another, in theology as in philosophy, in speculation as in practical politics. In that restlessness to which the world is so deeply indebted in some respects, by which it has been so much injured in others, Burke could recognize but scanty merit, wherever it was exhibited. Himself the most industrious, the most active-minded of men, he was ever sober in fixing the limits, in cutting the channels of his activity, and he would fain have had others equally moderate. Abstract illimitable speculation had no attraction for him in any of its departments. Perceiving that plain and righteous conduct is the end of life in this world, he prayed men not to be over-curious in searching for, and handling, and again handling, the theoretic base on which the prerogatives of virtue repose. Perceiving that the happiness of a people is the end of its government he abhorred equally the royal clique who took the end of government to be the gratification of the royal will, the old Whig clique who took it to be the enrichment of old Whigs, and the revolutionists, who, as Burke thought, supposed that the happiness of a people could never be secure save where there is no government, but only anarchy. Perceiving that the belief in a future life with changed conditions adds dignity to mortals in their hours of happiness, and brings comfort in their hours of anguish, and that the belief in a divine mediator may be in the same way a source of elevation and solace, he burned with a holy rage against men who seemed to him as thieves wantonly robbing humanity of its most precious treasures. Provided that there was peace, that is to say, general happiness and content, Burke felt that a too great inquisitiveness as to its foundations was not only idle, but mischievous and cruel.

We have already seen how he considered the comparative strength of the claims upon us of truth and peace to be an open question. "As we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one as we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace." In another place, he exclaims in precisely the same spirit, "The bulk of mankind, on their part, are not ex

ceedingly curious concerning any theories, whilst they are really happy; and one sure symptom of an ill-conducted state is the propensity of the people to resort to them.” And Burke thought the bulk of mankind in the right. Even in a state of things which the most eager of optimists would have hesitated to look on as a state of peace, Burke was always careful to approach the ailing organ, whether ecclesiastical or political, with that awe and reverence, as he expressed it, with which a young physician approaches to the cure of the disorders of his aged parent. Every institution or idea under which any mass of men found shelter or comfort, he regarded with this filial awe and affectionate reverence. I feel an insuperable reluctance, he said in one place, in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of Government upon a theory, however plausible it may be. Rightly conceiving that a stable equilibrium in society, or peace, as he always called it, is the aim and standard of all things, he was willing to believe in some mysterious finality of Nature, whom he supposed to have established once for all in 1688 the entire conditions of our national health. He habitually confounded existing usage and traditions, to be gently modified and tenderly repaired, if unfortunate occasion should require, with a moral and just equilibrium. The philosophic partisan of Order, who entreats men to be sure they get the best out of the systems under which the time constrains them to live, before casting recklessly about for new things, commonly receives something less than justice from the anxious and ardent partisans of Progress. And this has perhaps been Burke's lot. Men constitutionally, or by habit, unable to realize the pleasures conferred by a reverent love of political, social, and moral order, have dealt little sympathy to one who threw himself so consistently and vehemently as Burke did athwart the revolutionary or critical movement of his time. But those of us who are not estopped by vain shibboleths from protesting that living, after all, must be the end of life, and that stable peace must be the end of society, may see that Burke's horror of the critical spirit in all its various manifestations, was the intelligible pain of one in the ghastly presence of dissolution, not knowing that the angel of a new life is already at his side. . . .

He was always a lover of order in his

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