Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VII, December 1850, Vol. II. Various
visitor is touched, and endeavors to lull his sense of duty to sleep by a sophistry.
"I was told, indeed, to have you stuffed," he reasons, "and got ready for the Empress; but nothing was said about time; so I don't mind giving you half an hour if you can satisfy these gentlemen" – and he turns to his associates.
It is briefly done. The banker pays like a man whose life depends on his liberality – we suppose several millions – for the Executioner remarks that he can not forget that a groom in England frequently receives several thousands sterling a year; this is a very prevalent idea among the Frankish and Teutonic nations of the Continent. We once heard a Spanish general assert, in a large assembly, that the usual pay of an English ensign was five hundred pounds a month, an idea doubtless derived from some Iberian dramatist; and therefore a public functionary like the Executioner must be remunerated proportionably higher. The enormous pecuniary sacrifice gets for Sutherland some half-hour's respite; which he wisely uses by flying to the British embassador, Sir Bifstik, and awaits the result with great anguish.
Sir Bifstik goes to the Empress. He is admitted. He asks if Her Majesty be aware of the position of a British subject named Sutherland?
"Excellent man," says Her Majesty, "No! What is it?"
Sir Bifstik bows low at the tones of the Imperial voice, and now begins to explain himself with something more than diplomatic haste; thinking, perhaps, that already the fatal straw may be filling the banker's members.
Imperial Catherine does not, of course, consider the putting to death of a mere Scotch banker, and making him in reality what some of his brethren are sometimes called figuratively – a man of straw – worth this fuss; and sets the embassador down in her mind as a person of wild republican ideas, who ought to be recalled as soon as possible by his government, and placed under proper surveillance; but, nevertheless, she causes some inquiries to be made, and learns that it is in consequence of her having ordered "Sutherland" to be stuffed that he is probably then undergoing that operation.
Sir Bifstik expresses such horror and consternation at this intelligence, that the Empress believes his mind to be disordered.
"What possible consequence can the accidental stuffing of a Scotch banker be to you, milor?" she saith.
"The ac-ci-den-t-al stuff-ings of a Scotcher Bankers!" in a German idiom not generally used by our nobility, gasps Sir Bifstik, mechanically, with pale lips and bristling hair.
"Take him away! He is mad!" screams the Empress, thinking that no sane person could be concerned about such a trifling affair, and in another moment the most sacred of international laws would have been violated (on the stage), and Great Britain insulted by profane hands being laid on the person of her embassador, when all at once a light breaks over the mind of Her Majesty – the recalling of something forgotten. She exclaims, with a Russian nonchalance quite cheering to behold, "Oh, I remember; now it is easily explained. My poor little dog (I had forgotten him too) died yesterday, and I wished his body to be preserved. Cher chien! His name was the same as that of the banker, I think. Alas that cruel Death should take my dog!"
"But Mr. Sutherland has, perhaps, already been murdered!" gasps the embassador. "I pray that your Majesty will lose no time in having him released, should he be still alive!"
"Ah, true! I never thought of that," returns the Empress.
The order is finally issued, and Sutherland rescued, just as the Executioner, grown angry at his unreasonable remonstrances, resolves to delay no longer in executing the Imperial commands. To put the coup-de-grace on the comic agony of the poor banker, his immense red crop of hair has, in that half hour of frightful uncertainty, turned white as snow!
THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS, MARAT, ROBESPIERRE, AND DANTON
One obvious effect of the upheavings of a revolution is to develop latent power, and to deliver into light and influence cast down and crushed giants, such as Danton. But another result is the undue prominence given by convulsion and anarchy to essentially small and meagre spirits, who, like little men lifted up from their feet, in the pressure of a crowd, are surprised into sudden exaltation, to be trodden down whenever their precarious propping gives way. Revolution is a genuine leveler: "small and great" meet on equal terms in its wide grave; and persons, whose names would otherwise have never met in any other document than a directory, are coupled together continually, divide influence, have their respective partisans, and require the stern alembic of death to separate them, and to settle their true positions in the general history of the nation and the world.
Nothing, indeed, has tended to deceive and mystify the public mind more than the arbitrary conjunction of names. The yoking together of men in this manner has produced often a lamentable confusion as to their respective intellects and characteristics. Sometimes a mediocrist and a man of genius are thus coupled together; and what is lost by the one is gained by the other, while the credit of the whole firm is essentially impaired. Sometimes men of equal, though most dissimilar intellect, are, in defiance of criticism, clashed into as awkward a pair as ever stood up together on the floor of a country dancing-school. Sometimes, for purposes of moral or critical condemnation, two of quite different degrees of criminality are tied neck and heels together, as in the dread undistinguishing "marriages of the Loire." Sometimes the conjunction of unequal names is owing to the artifice of friends, who, by perpetually naming one favorite author along with another of established fame, hope to convince the unwary public that they are on a level. Sometimes they are produced by the pride or ambition, or by the carelessness or caprice, of the men or authors themselves. Sometimes they are the deliberate result of a shallow, though pretentious criticism, which sees and specifies resemblances, where, in reality, there are none. Sometimes they spring from the purest accidents of common circumstances, common cause, or common abode, as if a crow and a thrush must be kindred because seated on one hedge. From these, and similar causes, have arisen such combinations as Dryden and Pope, Voltaire and Rousseau, Cromwell and Napoleon, Southey and Coleridge, Rogers and Campbell, Hunt and Hazlitt, Hall and Foster, Paine and Cobbett, Byron and Shelley, or Robespierre and Danton.
In the first histories of the French Revolution, the names of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton occur continually together as a triumvirate of terror, and the impression is left that the three were of one order, each a curious compound of the maniac and the monster. They walk on, linked in chains, to common execution, although it were as fair to tie up John Ings, Judge Jeffreys, and Hercules Furens. A somewhat severer discrimination has of late unloosed Marat from the other two, and permitted Robespierre and Danton to walk in couples, simply for the purpose of pointing more strongly the contrast between the strait-laced demonism of the one, and the fierce and infuriated manhood of the other. At least, it is for this purpose that we have ranked their names together.
Of Marat, too, however, we are tempted to say a single word – "Marah," might he better have been called, for he was a water of bitterness. He reminds us of one of those small, narrow, inky pools we have seen in the wilderness, which seem fitted to the size of a suicide, and waiting in gloomy expectation of his advent. John Foster remarked, of some small "malignant" or other, that he had never seen so much of the "essence of devil in so little a compass." Marat was a still more compact concentration of that essence. He was the prussic acid among the family of poisons. His unclean face, his tiny figure, his gibbering form, his acute but narrow soul, were all possessed by an infernal unity and clearness of purpose. On the great clock of the Revolution – while Danton struck the reverberating hours – while Robespierre crept cautiously but surely, like the minute-hand, to his object – Marat was the everlasting "tick-tick" of the smaller hand, counting, like a death-watch, the quick seconds of murder. He never rested; he never slumbered, or walked through his part; he fed but to refresh himself for revolutionary action; he slept but to breathe himself for fresh displays of revolutionary fury. Milder mood, or lucid interval, there was none in him. The wild beast, when full, sleeps; but Marat was never full – the cry from the "worm that dieth not," within him being still, "Give, give," and the flame in his bosom coming from that fire which is "never to be quenched."
If, as Carlyle seems sometimes to insinuate, earnestness be in itself a divine quality, then should Marat have a high place in the gallery of heroes; for