came from on high. There was in the Convention a will,
which was the will of all, and yet was the will of no one. It was
an idea, an idea resistless and without measure, which breathed in
the shadow from the high heavens. We call that the Revolution. As
this idea passed, it threw down one and raised up another; it bore
away this man in the foam, and broke that man to pieces upon the
rocks. The idea knew whither it went, and drove the gulf of waters
before it. To impute the Revolution to men is as one who should
impute the tide to the waves. The revolution is an action of the
Unknown.... It is a form of the abiding phenomenon that shuts us
in on every side and that we call Necessity.... In presence
of these climacteric catastrophes which waste and vivify
civilisation, one is slow to judge detail. To blame or praise men
on account of the result, is as if one should blame or praise the
figures on account of the total. That which must pass passes, the
storm that must rage rages. The eternal serenity does not suffer
from these boisterous winds. Above revolutions truth and justice
abide, as the starry heaven abides above the tempests" (i.
188-189).

As a lyric passage, full of the breath of inspiration; as history,
superficial and untrue; as morality, enervating and antinomian. The
author is assuredly far nearer the mark in another place when
he speaks of "_that immense improvisation_ which is the French
Revolution" (ii. 35)--an improvisation of which every step can be
rationally explained.

After all, this is no more than an interlude. Victor Hugo only surveys
the events of '93 as a field for the growth of types of character. His
instinct as an artist takes him away from the Paris of '93, where the
confusion, uproar, human frenzy, leave him no background of nature,
with nature's fixity, sternness, indifference, sublimity. This he
found in La Vendee, whose vast forests grow under the pencil of this
master of all the more terrible and majestic effects, into a picture
hardly less sombre and mighty in its impressiveness than the memorable
ocean pieces of the _Toilers of the Sea_. If the waves are appalling
in their agitation, their thunders, their sterility, the forest is
appalling in its silence, its dimness, its rest, and the invisibleness
of the thousand kinds of life to which it gives a shelter. If the
violence and calm and mercilessness of the sea pe