triots of that era, the deliverers of France
from something like that process of partition which further east was
consummated in this very '93. We do not mean the handful of odious
miscreants who played fool and demon in turns in the insurrectionary
Commune and elsewhere: such men as Collot d'Herbois, or Carrier,
or Panis. The normal Jacobin was a remarkable type. He has been
excellently described by Louis Blanc as something powerful, original,
sombre; half agitator and half statesman; half puritan and half monk
half inquisitor and half tribune. These words of the historian are the
exact prose version of the figure of Cimourdain, the typical Jacobin
of the poet. "Cimourdain was a pure conscience, but sombre. He had in
him the absolute. He had been a priest and that is a serious thing.
Man, like the sky, may have a dark serenity; it is enough that
something should have brought night into his soul. Priesthood had
brought night into Cimourdain. He who has been a priest is one still.
What brings night upon us may leave the stars with us. Cimourdain
was full of virtues, full of truths, but they shone in the midst
of darkness" (i. 123). If the aristocrat had rigidity, so had the
Jacobin. "Cimourdain had the blind certitude of the arrow, which only
sees the mark and makes for it. In revolution, nothing so formidable
as the straight line. Cimourdain strode forward with fatality in his
step. He believed that in social genesis the very extreme point must
always be solid ground, an error peculiar to minds that for reason
substitute logic" (i. 127). And so forth, until the character of the
Jacobin lives for us with a precision, a fulness, a naturalness, such
as neither Carlyle nor Michelet nor Quinet has been able to clothe it
with, though these too have the sacred illumination of genius. Victor
Hugo's Jacobin is a poetic creation, yet the creation only lies in the
vivid completeness with which the imagination of a great master has
realised to itself the traits and life of an actual personality. It is
not that he has any special love for his Jacobin, but that he has the
poet's eye for types, politics apart. He sees how much the aristocrat,
slaying hip and thigh for the King, and the Jacobin, slaying hip and
thigh for the Republic, resembled one another. "Let us confess,"
he says, "these two men, the Marquis and the priest [Lantenac and
Cimourdain], were up to a certain point the self-same man. The bronze
mask of civil war has two pr