When he found a clover field, he rolled in it. When he had nothing to do, he did nothing; when he saw the necessity of doing something immediately, he could condense ages of action into a few hours. He was like some terrible tocsin, never rung till danger was imminent, but then arousing cities and nations as one man. And thus it was that he saved his country and lost himself, repulsed Brunswick, and sunk before Robespierre.
It had been otherwise, if his impulses had been under the watchful direction of high religious, or moral, or even political principle. This would have secured unity among his passions and powers, and led to steady and cumulative efforts. From this conscious greatness, and superiority to the men around him, there sprung a fatal security and a fatal contempt. He sat on the Mountain smiling, while his enemies were undermining his roots; and while he said, "He dares not imprison me," Robespierre was calmly muttering "I will."
It seemed as if even revolution were not a sufficient stimulus to, or a sufficient element for Danton's mighty powers. It was only when war had reached the neighborhood of Paris, and added its hoarse voice to the roar of panic from within, that he found a truly Titanic task waiting for him. And he did it manfully. His words became "half battles." His actions corresponded with, and exceeded his words. He was as calm, too, as if he had created the chaos around him. That the city was roused, yet concentrated – furious as Gehenna, but firm as fate, at that awful crisis, was all Danton's doing. Paris seemed at the time but a projectile in his massive hand, ready to be hurled at the invading foe. His alleged cruelty was the result, in a great measure, of this habitual carelessness. Too lazy to superintend with sufficient watchfulness the administration of justice, it grew into the Reign of Terror. He was, nevertheless, deeply to blame. He ought to have cried out to the mob, "The way to the prisoners in the Abbaye lies over Danton's dead body;" and not one of them had passed on. He repented, afterward, of his conduct, and was, in fact, the first martyr to a milder regime. Not one of his personal enemies perished in that massacre: hence the name "butcher" applied to him is not correct. He did not dabble in blood. He made but one fierce and rapid irruption into the neighborhood of the "red sea," and returned sick and shuddering therefrom.
His person and his eloquence were in keeping with his mind and character. We figure him always after the pattern of Bethlehem Gabor, as Godwin describes him: his stature gigantic, his hair a dead black, a face in which sagacity and fury struggle for the mastery – a voice of thunder. His mere figure might have saved the utterance of his watchword, "We must put our enemies in fear." His face was itself a "Reign of Terror." His eloquence was not of the intellectual, nor of the rhetorical cast. It was not labored with care, nor moulded by art. It was the full, gushing utterance of a mind seeing the real merits of the case in a glare of vision, and announcing them in a tone of absolute assurance. He did not indulge in long arguments or elaborate declamations. His speeches were Cyclopean cries, at the sight of the truth breaking, like the sun, on his mind. Each speech was a peroration. His imagination was fertile, rugged, and grand. Terrible truth was sheathed in terrible figure. Each thought was twin-born with poetry – poetry of a peculiar and most revolutionary stamp. It leaped into light, like Minerva, armed with bristling imagery. Danton was a true poet, and some of his sentences are the strangest and most characteristic utterances amid all the wild eloquence the Revolution produced. His curses are of the streets, not of Paris, but of Pandemonium; his blasphemies were sublime as those heard in the trance of Sicilian seer, belched up from fallen giants through the smoke of Etna, or like those which made the "burning marl" and the "fiery gulf" quake and recoil in fear.
Such an extraordinary being was Danton, resembling rather the Mammoths and Megatheriums of geology than modern productions of nature. There was no beauty about him why he should be desired, but there was the power and the terrible brilliance, the rapid rise and rapid subsidence of an Oriental tempest. Peace – the peace of a pyramid, calm-sitting and colossal, amid long desolations, and kindred forms of vast and coarse sublimity – be to his ashes!
It is lamentable to contemplate the fate of such a man. Newly married, sobered into strength and wisdom, in the prime of life, and with mildness settling down upon his character, like moonlight on the rugged features of the Sphinx, he was snatched away. "One feels," says Scott of him, "as if the eagle had been brought down by a 'mousing owl.'" More melancholy still to find him dying "game," as it is commonly called – that is, without hope and without God in the world – caracolling and exulting, as he plunged into the waters of what he deemed the bottomless and the endless night; as if a spirit so strong as his could die – as if a spirit so stained as his could escape the judgment – the judgment of a God as just as he is merciful; but also – blessed be his name! – as merciful as he is just.
RATTLIN THE REEFER'S DREAM. A TOUGH BUT TRUE YARN
It was about the middle of August, 18 – , that the Old Lucifer was cruising in the Monar Passage, a strait about forty miles wide, which separates the eastern end of St. Domingo from the island of Porto Rico. I was "middy" of the morning watch: it had been dead calm all night, but the gentle trade-wind was rising with the rising sun, and morning was glorious with the magic gilding of a tropical sky. Some time after eight bells,7 when Ned Rattlin, who was never very punctual or methodical in any of his movements, came on deck to relieve me, and I was about to hurry down to my breakfast of warm skilligalee, or, as our old French negro, who served as midshipmen's steward and maid-of-all-work, with true French tact for murdering the king's English, called it, "giggeragee," Ralph seized me by the collar of my jacket, crying,
"Avast! Careless, my boy; you really must not make sail for the cockpit till you have heard the horrid dream which I had last night or this morning, for I dreamt it twice over, and can not get it out of my head. I must tell it to some one, and you are the only one that I dare tell it to; I should be so confoundedly laughed at by the servum pocus of the cockpit; but you and I know each other, and have some pursuits and feelings in common. We have our day-dreams and our night-dreams, and we know that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of a midshipman's berth."
Now, had not Ralph seized hold of me by the lappel of my jacket, as before said, I should certainly have cut and run; for a reefer of sixteen, who is just relieved from the morning-watch, which he has kept for four hours, from four o'clock in the morning, and who has taken a cold bath in the wash-deck tub, is not likely to be in a humor to let his breakfast of cocoa or skilligalee grow cold. But, with the powerful grip of Ralph's shoulder-of-mutton fist on my collar, there was no chance of escape without tearing my jacket from clue to earring, which I felt that I could not afford to do; for, as I have before remarked, Ralph Rattlin was my senior by two years at least, and overtopped me in height by a foot, or something near it. I therefore made a virtue of necessity, and said,
"Well, Jemmy, if you'll promise not to keep me long, and allow me, first, to run down below and tell old Dom to keep my burgoo8 warm, I'll return and hear your wonderful dream, though I fancy it's all gammon, and only manufactured to try the capacity of my swallow; because you know that, like yourself, I have a bit of hankering after the marvelous, and, as the negro Methodist said of the prophet Jonah, am 'a tellible fellow for fish,' though I doubt whether, like him, I could quite swallow a whale."
"Well, then, make sail, you little flibbertigibbet, and make haste back, that's a good fellow."
The above elegant soubriquet he generally favored me with, when, in Yankee parlance, I had "riled" him and got his "dander up," as was always the case when he was called Jemmy Caster; he being but too conscious that his long loose figure and shambling gait bore, at that time, no small resemblance to those of a waister of that name, though he afterward became a remarkably fine, handsome man, bearing a striking resemblance, not without sufficient reason, to King George the Fourth.
In a few minutes I had made arrangements with old Dominique for the safe custody of my breakfast, and was again pacing the lee side of the quarter-deck, by the side of my gigantic
Time is regulated on board a king's ship by a half-hour glass, which is placed in the binnacle, in charge of the quarter-master of the watch on deck, and who when he turns the glass, passes the word forward to strike the bell, which, in a man-of-war, is hung to the main-bitts, just over the main-hatchway, and where it is consequently heard with facility all over the ship.
Burgoo, or skilligalee, is the sea-term for what in Scotland is called "parritch," and in Ireland "stirabout," namely, oatmeal boiled in water.
