is
intimidation? It is wrong to do ill in order to do good. You do
not pull down the throne to leave the scaffold standing. Let us
hurl away crowns, let us spare heads. The revolution is concord,
not affright. Mild ideas are ill-served by men who do not know
pity. Amnesty is for me the noblest word in human speech. I will
shed no blood save at hazard of my own.... In the fight let us be
the enemies of our foes, and after the victory their brothers"
(ii. 67).

These two together, Cimourdain and Gauvain, make an ideal pair of the
revolutionists of '93. Strip each of them of the beauty of character
with which the poet's imagination has endowed them, add instead
passion, violence, envy, egoism, malice; then you understand how in
the very face of the foreign enemy Girondins sharpened the knife
for the men of the Mountain, Hebertists screamed for the lives
of Robespierrists, Robespierre struck off the head of Danton,
Thermidorians crushed Robespierre.

Victor Hugo has given to this typic historical struggle of '93 the
qualities of nobleness and beauty which art requires in dealing with
real themes. Lantenac falls into the hands of the Blues, headed by
Cimourdain and Gauvain, but he does so in consequence of yielding to a
heroic and self-devoting impulse of humanity. Cimourdain, true to his
temperament, insists on his instant execution. Gauvain, true also to
his temperament, is seized with a thousand misgivings, and there is
no more ample, original, and masterly presentation of a case of
conscience, that in civil war is always common enough, than the
struggle through which Gauvain passes before he can resolve to deliver
Lantenac. This pathetic debate--"the stone of Sisyphus, which is only
the quarrel of man with himself"--turns on the loftiest, broadest,
most generous motives, touching the very bases of character, and
reaching far beyond the issue of '93. The political question is seen
to be no more than a superficial aspect of the deeper moral question.
Lantenac, the representative of the old order, had performed an
exploit of signal devotion. Was it not well that one who had faith in
the new order should show himself equally willing to cast away his
life to save one whom self-sacrifice had transformed from the infernal
Satan into the heavenly Lucifer?

"Gauvain saw in the shade the sinister smile of the sphinx. The
situation was a sort of dread crossway where the conflicting
t