CRITICAL REVIEWS

S

CARLYLE'S FRENCH REVOLUTION*

[1837]

INCE the appearance of this work, within the last two months, it has raised among the critics and the reading public a strange storm of applause and discontent. To hear one party you would fancy the author was but a dull madman, indulging in wild vagaries of language and dispensing with common sense and reason, while, according to another, his opinions are little short of inspiration, and his eloquence unbounded as his genius. We confess, that in reading the first few pages, we were not a little inclined to adopt the former opinion, and yet, after perusing the whole of this extraordinary work, we can allow, almost to their fullest extent, the high qualities with which Mr. Carlyle's idolaters endow him.

But never did a book sin so grievously from outward appearance, or a man's style so mar his subject and dim his genius. It is stiff, short, and rugged, it abounds with Germanisms and Latinisms, strange epithets, and choking double words, astonishing to the admirers of simple Addisonian English, to those who love history as it gracefully runs in Hume, or struts pompously in Gibbon-no such style is Mr. Carlyle's. A man, at the first onset, must take breath at the end of a sentence, or, worse still, go to sleep in the midst of it. But these hardships become lighter as the traveller grows accustomed to the road, and he speedily learns to admire and sympathise; just as he would admire a Gothic cathedral in spite of the quaint carvings and hideous images on door and buttress.

There are, however, a happy few of Mr. Carlyle's critics and readers to whom these very obscurities and mysticisms of style are

"The French Revolution: A History." In three volumes. By Thomas Carlyle. London: James Fraser, 1837.

welcome and almost intelligible; the initiated in metaphysics, the sages who have passed the veil of Kantian philosophy, and discovered that the "critique of pure reason is really that which it purports to be, and not the critique of pure nonsense, as it seems to worldly men to these the present book has charms unknown to us, who can merely receive it as a history of a stirring time, and a skilful record of men's worldly thoughts and doings. Even through these dim spectacles a man may read and profit much from Mr. Carlyle's volumes.

He is not a party historian like Scott, who could not, in his benevolent respect for rank and royalty, see duly the faults of either he is as impartial as Thiers, but with a far loftier and nobler impartiality.

No man can have read the admirable history of the French ex-Minister who has not been struck with this equal justice which he bestows on all the parties or heroes of his book. He has completely mastered the active part of the history: he has no more partiality for court than for regicide-scarcely a movement of intriguing king or republican which is unknown to him or undescribed. He sees with equal eyes Madame Roland or Marie Antoinette-bullying Brunswick on the frontier, or Marat at his butcher's work or in his cellar-he metes to each of them justice, and no more, finding good even in butcher Marat or bullying Brunswick, and recording what he finds. What a pity that one gains such a complete contempt for the author of all this cleverness! Only a rogue could be so impartial, for Thiers but views this awful series of circumstances in their very meanest and basest light, like a petty, clever statesman as he is, watching with wonderful accuracy all the moves of the great game, but looking for no more, never drawing a single moral from it, or seeking to tell aught beyond it.

Mr. Carlyle, as we have said, is as impartial as the illustrious Academician and Minister; but with what different eyes he looks upon the men and the doings of this strange time! To the one the whole story is but a hustling for places-a list of battles and intrigues—of kings and governments rising and falling; to the other, the little actors of this great drama are striving but towards a great end and moral. It is better to view it loftily from afar, like our mystic poetic Mr. Carlyle, than too nearly with sharpsighted and prosaic Thiers. Thiers is the valet de chambre of this history, he is too familiar with its dishabille and off-scourings: it can never be a hero to him.

It is difficult to convey to the reader a fair notion of Mr. Carlyle's powers or his philosophy, for the reader has not grown familiar with the strange style of this book, and may laugh perhaps

at the grotesqueness of his teacher in this some honest critics of the present day have preceded him, who have formed their awful judgments after scanning half-a-dozen lines, and damned poor Mr. Carlyle's because they chanced to be lazy. Here, at hazard, however, we fall upon the story of the Bastille capture; the people are thundering at the gates, but Delaunay will receive no terms, raises his drawbridge and gives fire. Now, cries Mr. Carlyle with

an uncouth Orson-like shout :—

"Bursts forth Insurrection, at sight of its own blood, into endless explosion of musketry, distraction, execration;-and overhead, from the Fortress, let one great gun go booming, to show what we could do. The Bastille is besieged!

“On, then, all Frenchmen that have hearts in their bodies! Roar with all your throats, of cartilage and metal, ye Sons of Liberty; stir spasmodically whatsoever of utmost faculty is in you, soul, body, or spirit; for it is the hour! Smite, thou Louis Tournay, cartwright of the Marais, old-soldier of the Regiment Dauphiné; smite at that Outer Drawbridge-chain, though the fiery hail whistles round thee! Never, over nave or felloe, did thy axe strike such a stroke. Down with it, man; down with it to Orcus : let the whole accursed Edifice sink thither, and Tyranny be swallowed up for ever! Mounted, some say, on the roof of the guard-room, Louis Tournay smites, brave Aubin Bonnemère (also an old soldier) seconding him the chain yields, breaks; the huge Drawbridge slams down, thundering. Glorious and yet, alas, it is still but the outworks. The eight grim Towers, with their Invalides, musketry, their paving stones and cannon-mouths, still soar aloft intact;-Ditch yawning impassable, stone-faced; the inner Drawbridge with its back towards us: the Bastille is still to take!"

Did "Savage Rosa" ever "dash" a more spirited battle sketch? The two principal figures of the pieces, placed in skilful relief, the raging multitude and sombre fortress admirably laid down! In the midst of this writhing and wrestling, "the line too labours (Mr. Carlyle's line labours perhaps too often), and the words move slow." The whole story of the fall of the fortress and its defenders is told in a style similarly picturesque and real.

"The poor Invalides have sunk under their battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets: they have made a white flag of napkins; go beating the chamade, or seeming to beat, for one can hear nothing. The very Swiss at the Portcullis look weary of firing; disheartened in the fire-deluge; a porthole at the drawbridge is opened, as by one that would speak. See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man! On his plank, swinging over the abyss of that stone-Ditch; plank resting on parapet, balanced by weight

of Patriots, he hovers perilous: such a Dove towards such an Ark! Deftly, thou shifty Usher: one man already fell; and lies smashed, far down there against the masonry! Usher Maillard falls not deftly, unerring he walks, with outspread palm. The Swiss holds a paper through his porthole; the shifty Usher snatches it, and returns. Terms of surrender: Pardon, immunity to all ! Are they accepted? Foi d'officier, on the word of an officer answers half-pay Hulin, or half-pay Elie, for men do not agrée on it, they are.' Sinks the drawbridge,-Usher Maillard bolting it when down; rushes in the living deluge: the Bastille is fallen ! Victoire! La Bastille est prise!"

This is prose run mad-no doubt of it-according to our notions of the sober gait and avocations of homely prose; but is there not method in it, and could sober prose have described the incident in briefer words, more emphatically, or more sensibly? And this passage, which succeeds the picture of storm and slaughter, opens (grotesque though it be), not in prose, but in noble poetry; the author describes the rest of France during the acting of this Paris tragedy and by this peaceful image admirably heightens the gloom and storm of his first description:

'O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on Balls at the Orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged Dames are even now dancing with double-jacketted Hussar-Officers, and also on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hôtel-de-Ville! One forest of distracted steelbristles, in front of an Electoral Committee; points itself, in horrid radii, against this and the other accused breast. It was the Titans warring with Olympus; and they, scarcely crediting it, have conquered." The reader will smile at the double-jackets and rouge, which never would be allowed entrance into a polite modern epic, but, familiar though they be, they complete the picture, and give it reality, that gloomy rough Rembrandt-kind of reality which is Mr. Carlyle's style of historic painting.

In this same style Mr. Carlyle dashes off the portraits of his various characters as they rise in the course of the history. Take, for instance, this grotesque portrait of vapouring Tonneau Mirabeau, his life and death; it follows a solemn, almost awful picture of the demise of his great brother:

"Here, then, the wild Gabriel Honoré drops from the tissue of our History; not without a tragic farewell. He is gone the flower of the wild Riquetti kindred; which seems as if in him it had done its best, and then expired, or sunk down to the undistinguished level. Crabbed old Marquis Mirabeau, the Friend of

Men, sleeps sound. Barrel Mirabeau gone across the Rhine; his Regiment of Emigrants will drive nigh desperate. Barrel Mirabeau,' says a biographer of his, 'went indignantly across the Rhine, and drilled Emigrant Regiments. But as he sat one morning in his tent, sour of stomach doubtless and of heart, meditating in Tartarean humour on the turn things took, a certain Captain or Jubaltern demanded admittance on business. Such Captain is refused; he again demands, with refusal; and then again, till Colonel Viscount Barrel-Mirabeau, blazing up into a mere brandy barrel, clutches his sword and tumbles out on this canaille of an intruder,―alas, on the canaille of an intruder's sword's point, who had drawn with swift dexterity; and dies, and the Newspapers name it apoplexy and alarming accident. So die the Mirabeaus."

Mr. Carlyle gives this passage to "a biographer," but he himself must be the author of this History of a Tub; the grim humour and style belong only to him. In a graver strain he speaks of Gabriel:

"New Mirabeaus one hears not of: the wild kindred, as we said, is gone out with this its greatest. As families and kindreds sometimes do; producing, after long ages of unnoted notability, some living quintessence of all they had, to flame forth as a man world-noted; after whom they rest, as if exhausted; the sceptre passing to others. The chosen Last of the Mirabeaus is gone; the chosen man of France is gone. It was he who shook old France from its basis; and, as if with his single hand, has held it toppling there, still unfallen. What things depended on that one man! He is as a ship suddenly shivered on sunk rocks: much swims on the waste waters, far from help.”

Here is a picture of the heroine of the Revolution :-"Radiant with enthusiasm are those dark eyes, is that strong Minerva-face, looking dignity and earnest joy; joyfullest she where all are joyful. Reader, mark that queen-like burgher-woman: beautiful, Amazoniangraceful to the eye; more so to the mind. Unconscious of her worth (as all worth is), of her greatness, of her crystal clearness ; genuine, the creature of Sincerity and Nature in an age of Artificiality, Pollution, and Cant; there, in her still completeness, in her still invincibility, she, if thou knew it, is the noblest of all living Frenchwomen,--and will be seen, one day."

The reader, we think, will not fail to observe the real beauty which lurks among all these odd words and twisted sentences, living, as it were, in spite of the weeds; but we repeat, that no mere extracts can do justice to the book; it requires time and study. A first acquaintance with it is very unprepossessing; only familiarity knows its great merits, and values it accordingly.