The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

play of its own activity. The French Revolution took a political, practical character. The movement, which went on in France under the old regime, from 1700 to 1789, was far more really akin than that of the Revolution itself to the movement of the Renascence; the France of Voltaire and Rousseau9 told far more powerfully upon the mind of Europe than the France of the Revolution. Goethe reproached this last expressly with having "thrown quiet culture back."1 Nay, and the true key to how much in our Byron, even in our Words- worth, is this!�that they had their source in a great movement of feeling, not in a great movement of mind. The French Revolution, however�that object of so much blind love and so much blind hatred�found undoubtedly its motive power in the intelligence of men, and not in their practical sense; this is what distinguishes it from the English Revolution of Charles the First's time.2 This is what makes it a more spiritual event than our Revolution, an event of much more powerful and worldwide interest, though practically less successful; it appeals to an order of ideas which are universal, certain, permanent. 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational? 1642 asked of a thing, Is it legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it according to conscience? This is the English fashion, a fashion to be treated, within its own sphere, with the highest respect; for its success, within its own sphere, has been prodigious. But what is law in one place is not law in another; what is law here today is not law even here tomorrow; and as for conscience, what is binding on one man's conscience is not binding on another's. The old woman who threw her stool at the head of the surpliced minister in St. Giles's Church at Edinburgh3 obeyed an impulse to which millions of the human race may be permitted to remain strangers. But the prescriptions of reason are absolute, unchanging, of universal validity; to count by tens is the easiest way of counting�that is a proposition of which everyone, from here to the Antipodes, feels the force; at least I should say so if we did not live in a country where it is not impossible that any morning we may find a letter in the Times declaring that a decimal coinage is an absurdity.4 That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure reason, and with an ardent zeal for making its prescriptions triumph, is a very remarkable thing, when we consider how little of mind, or anything so worthy and quickening as mind, comes into the motives which alone, in general, impel great masses of men. In spite of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in spite of the crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution derives from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it took for its law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a multitude for these ideas, a unique and still living power; it is�it will probably long remain�the greatest, the most animating event in history. And as no sincere passion for the things of the mind, even though it turn out in many respects an unfortunate passion, is ever quite thrown away and quite barren of good, France has reaped from hers one fruit�the natural and legit

9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Swiss-3. In 1637 rioting broke out in Scotland against a bom French philosopher and political theorist. new kind of church service prescribed by Charles Voltaire (1694�1778), pen name of the French I. The riot was started by an old woman hurling a writer Francois Marie Arouet. stool at a clergyman, whom she accused of saying 1. See "Vier Jahreszeiten Herbst" (1796) in his Mass. Werke (1887) 1.354. 4. In 1863 a proposal in Parliament to introduce 2. Disputes between Charles I (1600-1649; the French decimal system for weights and meareigned 1625�49) and Parliament led in 1642 to sures had provoked articles in the London Times civil war and ultimately to the king's beheading. defending the English system (of ounces and (Eleven years later his son, Charles II, was recalled pounds or inches and feet) as more practical. Decfrom exile and proclaimed king.) imal coinage was finally instituted in 1971.

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imate fruit though not precisely the grand fruit she expected: she is the country