in confusion; who, once thrown together, can readily fall into
that confusion of confusions which quarrel is, simply because their
confusions differ from one another; still more because they seem to
differ! Men's words are a poor exponent of their thought; nay their
thought itself is a poor exponent of the inward unnamed Mystery,
wherefrom both thought and action have their birth. No man can explain
himself, can get himself explained; men see not one another but
distorted phantasms which they call one another; which they hate and go
to battle with: for all battle is well said to be misunderstanding.

But indeed that similitude of the Fireship; of our poor French brethren,
so fiery themselves, working also in an element of fire, was not
insignificant. Consider it well, there is a shade of the truth in
it. For a man, once committed headlong to republican or any other
Transcendentalism, and fighting and fanaticising amid a Nation of
his like, becomes as it were enveloped in an ambient atmosphere of
Transcendentalism and Delirium: his individual self is lost in something
that is not himself, but foreign though inseparable from him. Strange to
think of, the man's cloak still seems to hold the same man: and yet the
man is not there, his volition is not there; nor the source of what he
will do and devise; instead of the man and his volition there is a
piece of Fanaticism and Fatalism incarnated in the shape of him. He, the
hapless incarnated Fanaticism, goes his road; no man can help him, he
himself least of all. It is a wonderful tragical predicament;--such as
human language, unused to deal with these things, being contrived for
the uses of common life, struggles to shadow out in figures. The ambient
element of material fire is not wilder than this of Fanaticism; nor,
though visible to the eye, is it more real. Volition bursts forth
involuntary; rapt along; the movement of free human minds becomes
a raging tornado of fatalism, blind as the winds; and Mountain and
Gironde, when they recover themselves, are alike astounded to see where
it has flung and dropt them. To such height of miracle can men work on
men; the Conscious and the Unconscious blended inscrutably in this our
inscrutable Life; endless Necessity environing Freewill!

The weapons of the Girondins are Political Philosophy, Respectability
and Eloquence. Eloquence, or call it rhetoric, really of a superior
order; Vergniaud, for instance, turns a period as sweetly as