Chapter 1.7.IV.

The Menads.

If Voltaire once, in splenetic humour, asked his countrymen:  “But you, Gualches, what have you invented?” they can now answer:  The Art of Insurrection.  It was an art needed in these last singular times:  an art, for which the French nature, so full of vehemence, so free from depth, was perhaps of all others the fittest.

Accordingly, to what a height, one may well say of perfection, has this branch of human industry been carried by France, within the last half-century!  Insurrection, which, Lafayette thought, might be ’the most sacred of duties,’ ranks now, for the French people, among the duties which they can perform.  Other mobs are dull masses; which roll onwards with a dull fierce tenacity, a dull fierce heat, but emit no light-flashes of genius as they go.  The French mob, again, is among the liveliest phenomena of our world.  So rapid, audacious; so clear-sighted, inventive, prompt to seize the moment; instinct with life to its finger-ends!  That talent, were there no other, of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes, as we said, the French People from all Peoples, ancient and modern.

Let the Reader confess too that, taking one thing with another, perhaps few terrestrial Appearances are better worth considering than mobs.  Your mob is a genuine outburst of Nature; issuing from, or communicating with, the deepest deep of Nature.  When so much goes grinning and grimacing as a lifeless Formality, and under the stiff buckram no heart can be felt beating, here once more, if nowhere else, is a Sincerity and Reality.  Shudder at it; or even shriek over it, if thou must; nevertheless consider it.  Such a Complex of human Forces and Individualities hurled forth, in their transcendental mood, to act and react, on circumstances and on one another; to work out what it is in them to work.  The thing they will do is known to no man; least of all to themselves.  It is the inflammablest immeasurable Fire-work, generating, consuming itself.  With what phases, to what extent, with what results it will burn off, Philosophy and Perspicacity conjecture in vain.

‘Man,’ as has been written, ’is for ever interesting to man; nay properly there is nothing else interesting.’  In which light also, may we not discern why most Battles have become so wearisome?  Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible developement of human individuality or spontaneity:  men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.  Battles ever since Homer’s time, when they were Fighting Mobs, have mostly ceased to be worth looking at, worth reading of, or remembering.  How many wearisome bloody Battles does History strive to represent; or even, in a husky way, to sing:—­and she would omit or carelessly slur-over this one Insurrection of Women?