The French Revolution has a quality which all men feel; and which may be
called a sudden antiquity. Its classicalism was not altogether a cant.
When it had happened it seemed to have happened thousands of years ago.
It spoke in parables; in the hammering of spears and the awful cap of
Phrygia. To some it seemed to pass like a vision; and yet it seemed
eternal as a group of statuary. One almost thought of its most strenuous
figures as naked. It is always with a shock of comicality that we
remember that its date was so recent that umbrellas were fashionable
and top-hats beginning to be tried. And it is a curious fact, giving a
kind of completeness to this sense of the thing as something that
happened outside the world, that its first great act of arms and also
its last were both primarily symbols; and but for this visionary
character, were in a manner vain. It began with the taking of the old
and almost empty prison called the Bastille; and we always think of it
as the beginning of the Revolution, though the real Revolution did not
come till some time after. And it ended when Wellington and Blucher met
in 1815; and we always think of it as the end of Napoleon; though
Napoleon had really fallen before. And the popular imagery is right, as
it generally is in such things: for the mob is an artist, though not a
man of science. The riot of the 14th of July did not specially deliver
prisoners inside the Bastille, but it did deliver the prisoners outside.
Napoleon when he returned was indeed a _revenant_, that is, a ghost. But
Waterloo was all the more final in that it was a spectral resurrection
and a second death. And in this second case there were other elements
that were yet more strangely symbolic. That doubtful and double battle
before Waterloo was like the dual personality in a dream. It
corresponded curiously to the double mind of the Englishman. We connect
Quatre Bras with things romantically English to the verge of
sentimentalism, with Byron and "The Black Brunswicker." We naturally