But he
was not an ordinary peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in his village
till death, he would have been yet locally a marked man; a man with a
wild eye, a man with an air of silent anger; perhaps a man at whom
stones were sometimes thrown. A strain of disease and suffering ran
athwart both his body and his soul. In spite of his praise of silence,
it was only through his gift of utterance that he escaped madness. But
while his fellow-peasants would have seen this in him and perhaps mocked
it, they would also have seen something which they always expect in such
men, and they would have got it: vision, a power in the mind akin to
second sight. Like many ungainly or otherwise unattractive Scotchmen, he
was a seer. By which I do not mean to refer so much to his
transcendental rhapsodies about the World-soul or the Nature-garment or
the Mysteries and Eternities generally, these seem to me to belong more
to his German side and to be less sincere and vital. I mean a real power
of seeing things suddenly, not apparently reached by any process; a
grand power of guessing. He _saw_ the crowd of the new States General,
Danton with his "rude flattened face," Robespierre peering mistily
through his spectacles.
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