France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Causes
Mirabeau was essentially an artist, with the powers and the frailties
which we properly associate with that term: that is, strong emotion
appealed to him both internally and externally. He loved to enjoy it
himself, he loved to create it in others. He studied, therefore, and was
a master of, the material by which such emotion may be created; he
himself yielded to strong emotion and sought it where it might be found.
It is foolish alike to belittle and to exaggerate this type of
temperament. Upon it or upon its admixture with other qualities is based
the music, the plastic art, and in a large measure the permanent
literature of the world. This aptitude for the enjoyment and for the
creation in others of emotion clothes intellectual work in a manner
which makes it permanent. This is what we mean when we say that _style_
is necessary to a book; that a great civilisation may partly be judged
by its architecture; that, as Plato says, music may be moral or immoral,
and so forth. The artist, though he is not at the root of human affairs,
is a necessary and proper ally in their development.
When I say that Mirabeau was an artist I mean that wherever his energies
might have found play he would there have desired to enjoy and to create
enjoyment through some definite medium. This medium was in part
literary, but much more largely oral expression. To be a _tribune_, that
is the voice of great numbers, to persuade, nay, to please by his very
accents and the very rhythm of his sentences, these things occupied the
man; but he also brought into his art that without which no great art
can exist: mere intellect.
He believed in the main principles at least which underlay the
revolutionary movement, he understood them and he was prepared to
propagate them; but his power over men was not due to this conviction:
his power over men was wholly that of the artist, and had he by some
accident been engaged in maintaining the attack against democracy, he
would have been nearly as famous as he became under the title of its
defender. We must then always consider Mirabeau as an orator, though an
orator endowed with a fine and clear intelligence and with no small
measure of reasoned faith.
Much else remains to be said of him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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