efinable prerogative
to a man, even among the children of the century of Voltaire. Condorcet,
the youngest of the intimates and disciples of Voltaire, of D'Alembert,
of Turgot, was the first to sound bitter warning that Robespierre was at
heart a priest. The suggestion was more than a gibe. Robespierre had the
typic sacerdotal temperament, its sense of personal importance, its thin
unction, its private leanings to the stake and the cord; and he had one
of those deplorable natures that seem as if they had never in their
lives known the careless joys of a springtime. By and by, from mere
priest he developed into the deadlier carnivore, the Inquisitor.

The absence of advantages of bodily presence has never been fatal to the
pretensions of the pontiff. Robespierre was only a couple of inches
above five feet in height, but the Grand Monarch himself was hardly
more. His eyes were small and weak, and he usually wore spectacles; his
face was pitted by the marks of small-pox; his complexion was dull and
sometimes livid; the tones of his voice were dry and shrill; and he
spoke with the vulgar accent of his province. Such is the accepted
tradition, and there is no reason to dissent from it. It is fair,
however, to remember that Robespierre's enemies had command of his
historic reputation at its source, and this is always a great advantage
for faction, if not for truth. So Robespierre's voice and person may
have been maligned, just as Aristophanes may have been a calumniator
when he accused Cleon of having an intolerably loud voice and smelling
of the tanyard. What is certain is that Robespierre was a master of
effective oratory adapted for a violent popular audience, to impress, to
persuade, and to command. The Convention would have yawned, if it had
not trembled under him, but the Jacobin Club never found him tedious.
Robespierre's style had no richness either of feeling or of phrase; no
fervid originality, no happy violences. If we turn from a page of
Rousseau to a page of Robespierre, we feel that the disciple has none of
the thrilling sonorousness of the master; the glow and the ardour have
become metallic; the long-drawn plangency is parodied by shrill notes of
splenetic complaint. The rhythm has no broad wings; the phrases have no
quality of radiance; the oratorical glimpses never lift the spirit into
new worlds. We are never conscious of those great pulses of strong
emotion that shake and vibrate through the nobly-measured