by a riot or a massacre, instead of by a whisky and soda and a Marconi tip.
Novels are much more reliable than histories in such matters. For
though an English novel about France does not tell the truth about France,
it does tell the truth about England; and more than half the histories
never tell the truth about anything. And popular fiction, I think, bears
witness to the general English impression. The French Revolution is a
snap division with an unusual turnover of votes. On the one side stand a
king and queen who are good but weak, surrounded by nobles with rapiers
drawn; some of whom are good, many of whom are wicked, all of whom are
good-looking. Against these there is a formless mob of human beings,
wearing red caps and seemingly insane, who all blindly follow ruffians who
are also rhetoricians; some of whom die repentant and others unrepentant
towards the end of the fourth act. The leaders of this boiling mass of
all men melted into one are called Mirabeau, Robespierre, Danton, Marat,
and so on. And it is conceded that their united frenzy may have been
forced on them by the evils of the old regime.

That, I think, is the commonest English view of the French Revolution; and
it will not survive the reading of two pages of any real speech or letter
of the period. These human beings were human; varied, complex and
inconsistent. But the rich Englishman, ignorant of revolutions, would
hardly believe you if you told him some of the common human subtleties of
the case. Tell him that Robespierre threw the red cap in the dirt in
disgust, while the king had worn it with a broad grin, so to speak; tell
him that Danton, the fierce founder of the Republic of the Terror, said
quite sincerely to a noble, "I am more monarchist than you;" tell him that
the Terror really seems to have been brought to an end chiefly by the
efforts of people who particularly wanted to go on with it--and he will
not believe these things. He will not believe them because he has no
humility, and therefore no realism. He has never been inside himself; and