It is
easy enough to be refined about things that do not matter; but men
kicked and plunged a little in that portentous wrestle in which swung to
and fro, alike dizzy with danger, the independence of England, the
independence of Ireland, the independence of France. If we wish for a
proof of this fact that the lack of refinement did not come from mere
brutality, the proof is easy. The proof is that in that struggle no
personalities were more brutal than the really refined personalities.
None were more violent and intolerant than those who were by nature
polished and sensitive. Nelson, for instance, had the nerves and good
manners of a woman: nobody in his senses, I suppose, would call Nelson
"brutal." But when he was touched upon the national matter, there sprang
out of him a spout of oaths, and he could only tell men to "Kill! kill!
kill the d----d Frenchmen." It would be as easy to take examples on the
other side. Camille Desmoulins was a man of much the same type, not only
elegant and sweet in temper, but almost tremulously tender and
humanitarian. But he was ready, he said, "to embrace Liberty upon a pile
of corpses." In Ireland there were even more instances. Robert Emmet was
only one famous example of a whole family of men at once sensitive and
savage.
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