This site poses the question directly but fails to answer it.
Does it have to do merely with green eyes, or a pale greenish complexion, or the 'greenish hue' of his veins as Mme de Stael described them?
This highlights the derivation from Homer:
If an epic represents the belief of a people as manifested in its actions, then the French Revolution, which manifested a nation's unbelief, provides problematic material for epic. Within his epic framework, Carlyle represents the actions of the French people as mockepic. The French need a deus ex machina (Carlyle's use of the English equivalent of this phrase, "god from the machine," already tends to deflate it) but get only an ineffectual "Mars de Broglie" and a royal usher "Mercury ... de Brézé" (I: 160). The epic machinery that motivates the action of the history becomes mere "preternatural suspicion" (1: 126-27). Homer's "wine-dark sea" gets adapted as the mockheroic epithet "sea-green" to describe Robespierre.
And then there's the color of his favorite coat:
On the face of it, Carlyle is doing no more than to manufacture a soubriquet out of the colour of Robespierre's favourite coat' "The Incorruptible" was the title given to him by his contemporaries. Most politicians would be proud to bear the name "Incorruptible" (though it would be tempting fate today)' but adding the epithet "sea-green" has, as Carlyle intended, a slyly subversive effect: it evokes something from the depths, something slimy, something reptilian.
Chistopher Prendergast offers this in the NLR:
But philology suggests another reading: 'seagreen' as derivative from Old English 'sengreen', the household leek; folk-etymologically deformed to 'seagreen', and thus evoking the notion of the 'evergreen', the moral sense of 'incorruptible' - Robespierre as the man who could never be bought - linked to the temporal sense of incorruptible, the everlasting status of the republic of virtue.
Sengreen? Houseleek?
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