blindly, rashly, confusedly; confounding too often the innocent with the
guilty, till they have seemed only to punish crime by crime, and replace
old sins by new. But, however insoluble, however saddening that puzzle
be, I must believe--as long as I believe in any God at all--that such men
as Robespierre were His instruments, even in their crimes.

In the case of the French Revolution, indeed, the wickedness of certain
of its leaders was part of the retribution itself. For the noblesse
existed surely to make men better. It did, by certain classes, the very
opposite. Therefore it was destroyed by wicked men, whom it itself had
made wicked. For over and above all political, economic, social wrongs,
there were wrongs personal, human, dramatic; which stirred not merely the
springs of covetousness or envy, or even of a just demand for the freedom
of labour and enterprise: but the very deepest springs of rage, contempt,
and hate; wrongs which caused, as I believe, the horrors of the
Revolution.

It is notorious how many of the men most deeply implicated in those
horrors were of the artist class--by which I signify not merely painters
and sculptors--as the word artist has now got, somewhat strangely, to
signify, at least in England--but what the French meant by
_artistes_--producers of luxuries and amusements, play-actors, musicians,
and suchlike, down to that "distracted peruke-maker with two fiery
torches," who, at the storm of the Bastile, "was for burning the
saltpetres of the Arsenal, had not a woman run screaming; had not a
patriot, with some tincture of natural philosophy, instantly struck the
wind out of him, with butt of musket on pit of stomach, overturned the
barrels, and stayed the devouring element." The distracted peruke-maker
may have had his wrongs--perhaps such a one as that of poor Triboulet the
fool, in "Le Roi s'amuse"--and his own sound reasons for blowing down the