of all contrasts the most ironical and the most profound is the contrast between the tag and the truth of the tag. a couple of lines are chosen by humanity from the work of a great poet, and are usually so chosen not only because they are beautiful, but because they are true. when they have been repeated a certain number of times they become a tag. a proverb or a mere popular statement puts into the shortest possible form some extremely simple, and perhaps extremely obvious, at any rate (this is quite certain) some extremely important, truth. every one sees it is a truth, everybody repeats it, and it becomes a tag.
now note the next phase in the life of the said tag. it is criticised and it is ridiculed; it becomes a solid butt for the archery of human wit. that phase lasts, perhaps, the lifetime of a man.
now note the third phase, for it will teach you the most that can be learnt about mankind, and it is endless. it is the consummation of the tag and the test of humanity afforded by the tag. the tag is now taken for granted and is eternal, and the [pg 46]following things happen to it: children are taught it like the alphabet; they are compelled to learn it. hobbledehoys, great wits, and leaders of thought avoid it because it is commonplace. they can be seen waggling from one side of the road to the other in their grotesque efforts to avoid the tag. the whole world knows that the tag is there. lastly—most wonderful of all!—the tag ceases to bite: it ceases to affect men; men are saturated with it. men are acclimatised to it. they are vaccinated with it; and the tag has now arrived at the exercise of its eternal function, which is to wake in individuals, here in one man, there in another, an overwhelming sense of its truth (or beauty). it begins its career of converting individual men. let it be mentioned where three are gathered together, and it will be fled from as an out-used thing, but two can make confidences each to the other about it, and one can feel it like a thorn or like a gem in his heart.
"who goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing" has gone through all these phases; so has "waste not want not." so has "for who to dull forgetfulness a prey," etc. so has "felix qui potuit," etc. and so have the three or four thousand others that are the stock of a proper mind.
all these set me thinking of yet another tag, and as it is that which most sharply tests humility and, through humility, intelligence, and as, therefore, in this not very humble and not intelligent time it is grossly neglected, there is a pleasure in dwelling[pg 47] upon it. it is to this effect: "the future is veiled from man."
good lord! to read the press and to hear the speeches! why, one would think that the future had a map to it! one can hardly hear one's self think for prophecies; and, what is perhaps the most terrible thing of all, as a symptom of our modern state of mind, the prophecies have a dogmatic quality (using the word "dogmatic" as it is popularly used of transcendental affirmations), for men prophesy in great herds and all together, and to question their prophecies, simply to say that possibly "the future is veiled from man," creates something now-a-days of the astonishment, ridicule, or anger which the denial of a religious dogma does in a society with a fixed religion. thus, men in england to-day confidently regard the future of the earth for, let us say, the next hundred years in a certain light. certain countries (especially new countries) are to increase in a regular manner in value and population and property. certain other countries are to continue their decline. certain forms of mechanical perfection are to increase, certain speculations as to the nature of the soul are to decline in interest. but more than any particular set of opinions, there is a general colour stamped upon the future in the modern mind, and how securely it is stamped one can best prove by the amusement or surprise that is caused if one suggests (but does not affirm) that there may be (not that there must be) some totally[pg 48] new philosophy, new religion, or new development within three generations.
a book recently published suggests to me the permanent and ironical value of that old tag "the future is veiled from man." it is a study of two somewhat obscure individuals who were members of the revolutionary tribunal. it is a very detailed study in which one feels in every page the things that were taken for granted in that place and time—in the paris of the revolution. what of all that has come to pass? what of all the fixed certitudes as to the future—nay, the fixed certitudes upon the very nature of man from which, as of necessity, the future was deduced, has remained? the author has done all the better in his study of vilate and trinchard from the fact that his position in the archives has permitted him to look into the ultimate details of the period. but not so much the high historical value of the work as its permanent human lesson strikes me as i read.
vilate was twenty-four when the great war of the revolution against the kings was within a month of breaking out, and when he set out for paris from the lovely rocky pasturage of his province, up beyond limoges. and this was what he had in his mind: that the revolutionary movement, to use his own words, "must give to the whole world a spur of insurrection against the oppressors of men." this pathetic certitude was nothing peculiar to the very commonplace young fellow who was leaving his [pg 49]professorship in the indre for paris. to him they then seemed as much a commonplace as would seem to some young fellow in a similar position to-day in birmingham some phase about the development of the west of canada, or some certain prophecy that nations would enrich themselves in proportion to the amount of coal and iron discovered upon their territories.
when vilate hears a speech in the revolutionary parliament he says: "truth has now appeared and is fixed for ever. it can now call to its tribunal every abuse, every vice, and every crime." has truth done that in the last hundred years? yet to vilate the prophecy of what the revolution was about to do seemed—and not only to him, but to millions of his contemporaries—as simple as some prophecy of ours about the future of communications; and he was as easily persuaded that what he said was true as we are that the north temperate climate (and especially that part of europe which is insular and lies between parallels 50 and 60) is the natural climatic seat of human energy.
consider again this, which is not from vilate's own pen, but which occurs in the study before me and is of the first interest: vilate was in the jury on that day. it was the 9th of february, 1794. seven carmelite nuns had refused to take the civic oath to the republic. the judge made a very commonplace and, as it seemed then, a very sensible speech, pointing out that they were perfectly free to observe the[pg 50] vows they had taken, that nothing had disappeared in their lives except the particular convent with which they were associated; that none of their prejudices would be offended. and he pointed out that in the society in which he believed they would have the sense to live, all men would now be permanently free. the nuns refused; they refused because the oath would involve them in schism. how many men at that time surrounding vilate had the slightest conception of what the renascence of religion was to be in the city of paris? these women, members or servants of the little reactionary aristocratic clique into which the monastic institution had declined, seemed mere fanatics not only to vilate but to the whole of his society. could you suddenly have shown vilate how europe would still be raging upon those ultimate questions of religion more than three generations later; could you have presented him with the sight of a whole society divided upon so simple and, as it was then thought, so irrational a point—what would he have thought? i can tell you what he would have thought. no matter what your credentials as a prophet, he would have thought your prophecy mad. though you should have carried him into our very time and given every proof of the reality of his vision, he would have woken up to believe it an illusion and a silly dream.
the state of mind of trinchard is even more impressive, because trinchard was an even smaller,[pg 51] more commonplace, and therefore more typical, man. he sat side by side with vilate in the jury of the revolutionary tribunal. trinchard was a carpenter. he was somewhat over thirty years of age at the period of the revolution. his brother was a gunner, fighting against the vendéans, just at that moment when valenciennes had fallen, and when all seemed over with the republic; and his brother used to write from the armies, signing "your brother, a true republican." two months later he was judging marie antoinette. he wrote to his brother a letter immediately after the trial. m. dunoyer publishes in his book (deux jurés du tribunal révolutionnaire) a facsimile of that letter, and wonderful reading it makes. one might put its bad spelling and street language into modern english something like this: "i'm learning you, brother, that i was one of them jurymen as judged the wilbeast what was wolfing a gurt part of the empire." and so forth. but the man is doing nothing exceptional. he no more thinks of himself as exceptional than does any leader-writer to-day writing upon the virtues or vices of a contemporary politician in more moderate language. and note you, as a hundred years can make men more temperate, so they can make men more violent, and our modern absence of emphasis may astound our great-grandchildren quite as much as that revolutionary violence astounds us.
a friend writes to him in that spring of 1794 (when danton died, and when every man was[pg 52] occupied in the defence or in the destruction of the republic). he is a very ordinary friend, his name is ploton, a southerner, as trinchard was. he corresponds more or less in that society to, let us say, a young village shopkeeper in our own, full of a simple patriotism, and especially full of what the press tells him. and he heads his letter thus: "second of germinal, the second year of the republic—which is as imperishable as the world." what rhetoric! nay, to us reading such stuff to-day, what lunacy! but do not be too sure. go to the british museum when you can find an idle afternoon and look up your newspapers of september, 1899, and you will read some amusing phrases.
the truth is that men pass under strong influences of time that fill them more than with wine, rather with an entirety of life. the time in which a man lives may be an exalted time or a weary one, but it fills him altogether, whether it is on fire or drowned. he can conceive, as a rule, nothing in the future different from the temper of his time, though there is all the past to teach him his folly. if he makes a picture of the future, that picture is a mere extension of his own tiny and ephemeral experience, and the more confidently certain he is of that future the more rigidly is it seen by the critical onlooker to be a puppet dressed up in the clothes of the present.
all these things dunoyer's careful book upon two men of the revolutionary tribunal, a monograph characteristic of that ceaseless and immense research[pg 53] which dignifies the modern french school of history, has suggested to my mind.
now, whenever i read of the revolution, in general or in particular, while that lesson of the folly of prophecy perpetually returns to me, yet something else rises from the page. in a certain sense, almost in a mystical sense, the periods of profound faith in a particular future were right. not because the picture that they saw was true, but because those things outside time upon which they relied were and are true. and even to-day in the sheer anarchy and welter of the time we suffer there is a method of thought which has anchoring ground in the permanent fate of mankind. but what that method may be there is no space to discuss here.
