Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

 “SARTOR RESARTUS” by Thomas Carlyle (Written 1831; first published in serial form in Fraser’s Magazine 1833-34; published in book form 1836)

            What strange places my reading often takes me!

As you know from an earlier posting, I have a nodding acquaintance with Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), not only because he hailed from the same Lowland Scots town as did some of my ancestors; but because I’ve read his tub-thumping lectures On Heroes and Hero-Worship, and have read and dissected his The French Revolution . So I had a clear impression of the dogmatic Scot whose high-flown rhetoric often ran ahead of his rather dodgy social and political ideas.

Some months ago, friends invited us to “high tea” at a restaurant in Devonport. After we had enjoyed this experience, we left our friends and went our separate way. We found ourselves in the second-hand bookstall that now sits on Devonport wharf. A little fossicking revealed to me a book I had long meant to read – a broken-backed volume, printed in 1871, of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, cheap and apparently once part of a collected set of Carlyle’s works. (As yet unread by me, two others from the same set already sat on my shelves – Carlyle’s Past and Present and his Life of Schiller.) I handed over my $15. And then, of course, my conscience being what it is, I thought I should justify the expense of buying it by actually reading it.

So I did.

Have I, dear reader, annoyed you by my circumlocutory and prolix way of introducing this notice? If so, then you are clearly not the person to read Sartor Resartus, wherein Carlyle’s style is so circumlocutory and prolix that, in the immortal words of Al Jolson “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet! ”

 Carlyle lived long enough to be regarded as a “sage” in the Victorian Age (86-years-old was then a very ripe age to die). So long, in fact, that we are apt to forget he began his literary career before Victoria was on the throne and before that Dickens chap had yet been heard of. Sartor Resartus (trans. The Tailor Re-tailored) was written in 1831, when Carlyle was 36 (and in the reign of William IV, if you must know). It is a work of literary dandyism, a sport, a freak, an exposition of a cloudy philosophy wherein the young author is often (in the words of a later Victorian statesman) inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity. How much verbal rodomontade one has to endure for the small kernel of philosophy. And yet, forsooth, how enjoyable many of the descriptive passages are, and the ones where a metaphor sets Carlyle galloping off at a tangent.

To give you the essentials, this eccentric book is sometimes described as a “novel”. It is no such thing, even though its characters are fictitious. Sartor Resartus, subtitled The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh, is a sustained dialogue between a (fictitious) German philosopher and a (fictitious) editor who is going through the philosopher’s papers and commenting upon them. The philosopher is one Diogenes Teufelsdrockh (trans. “Devil’s crap”) who resides in the city of Weissnichtwo (trans. “I don’t know where”) and who apparently has a certain Hofrath Heuschrecke (trans. “Councillor Grasshopper”) as his literary executor. So the very names tell you that this is not for real and is something of a game.

Across three books the editor interrogates, mocks and sometimes endorses what Teufelsdrockh has to say, often in a querulous and chivvying way.

Book One promises to set out for us Herr Professor Teufelsdrockh’s book on the “Spirit and Influence of Clothes”. Once the “editor” clears his throat (it takes him about four chapters to do so) we are given Teufelsdrockh’s belief that:

“Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere Accident, but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious operations of the mind. In all his Modes, and habilatory endeavours, an Architectural Idea will be found lurking; his Body and the Cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautiful edifice, of a person, is to be built.” (Book 1, Chapter 5)

This could lead us to think that we are about to enter a treatise on how clothes reflect social norms; how they are the physical manifestation of ideas that have dominated various societies at different times in history. And there is indeed a little of this. One passage propounds that the decoration of the body (painting; tattoos), among primitive peoples, preceded the invention of clothing - meaning that clothing is a development of decoration and that therefore the prime purpose of clothing is to declare rank and status. Allied to this, there are passages on clothing as the creator of shame, and a lively tongue-in-cheek discussion about whether Herr Teufelsdrockh is an “Adamite” – that is, one who thinks we would be better off naked. Great ranting passages speak of clothes as “a botched mass of tailors’ and cobbler’s threads”, strange to our bodies (Book 1, Chapter 8) and discuss the clothes of different ages.

Yet an undercurrent warns us that, despite its declared theme, clothes per se are not really the motive of this volume.

At the end of Book One the “editor” receives six paper bags, filled with documents of Herr Teufelsdrockh’s life. These he now proceeds to sift and discuss.

So Book Two (far the easiest to read, because it has something like a narrative thread) proceeds to give us the biography of Herr Teufelsdrockh, as seen in Teufelsdrockh’s own jottings.

The “editor” often rebukes Teufelsdrockh for considering his commonplace youthful observations as the signs of a superior mind. He speculates that Teufelsdrockh did not do well at Law because he was too shy and not gregarious enough. Indeed the editor surmises that Teufelsdrockh’s whole “philosophy” of clothes comes from Teufelsdrockh’s shyness and his need for covering and protection. Teufelsdrockh, who was searching for some guiding principle in life, found the university he was attending mean, materialistic and sceptical. Says the editor, Teufelsdrockh “expectorated his antipedagogical spleen” (Book 2, Chapter 3) when writing of his university. Teufelsdrockh describes his university thus:

 “Had you…walled in a square enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen Library; and then turned loose into it eleven-hundred Christian striplings, to tumble about as they listed, from three to seven years: certain persons, under the title of Professors, being stationed at the gates, to declare aloud that it was a University, and exact considerable admission-fees, - you had, not indeed in mechanical structure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect resemblance of our High Seminary.” (Book 2, Chapter 3)

Teufelsdrockh seemed saved when he fell in love. There is over-the-top Romantic rhetoric about this. But his idealistic Romantic love is betrayed when the young woman elopes with an English friend. (Book 2, Chapter 6 is called “The Sorrows of Teufelsdrockh”, and clearly both references and parodies Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther”).  Off, therefore, Teufelsdrockh tramps on one of those wild adventures designed to drown great sorrows. Byron was familiar with writing this sort of thing, and Byron is specifically referenced in the text:

“Through all the quarters of the world he wanders, and apparently through all circles of society. If in any scene, perhaps difficult to fix geographically, he settles for a time and forms connexions, be sure he will snap them abruptly asunder.” (Book 2 Chapter 6)

Really, according to the “editor”, Teufelsdrockh’s youthful angst arises simply from his lack of Belief. He has yet to find his spiritual essence by the sort of ur-existentialism that will enable him to make a bold choice, look with a cold eye on his own emotional upheavals, and exercise his Will constructively. Teufelsdrockh comes to the conclusion that the maxim “Know thyself” should be replaced with “Know what thou canst work at” (Book 2, Chapter 7).

And what does Teufelsdrockh come to work at? A new philosophy of Transcendentalism, of course, which will enable society to have real and binding values, and which occupies most of Book Three. Teufelsdrockh asks “Call ye that a Society where there is no longer any Social Idea extant?” (Book 3, Chapter 5) and the “editor” shortly thereafter speaks of “the monster UTILITARIA”. Neither Liberalism nor Romanticism, both of which speak to the detached and self-interested ego, can provide a satisfying philosophy for a society to live by. But a chapter called “Symbols” (Book 3, Chapter 4 – probably the most lucid chapter in the book) suggests the way out. It argues that physical things – such as flags, crowns and battle standards – take on a greater meaning than their mere materiality, and thus embody the great ideas for which any society stands. So too with clothes. So, in this third book of Sartor Resartus, the argument ceases to be about literal clothing (as it was in Book One) and treats clothing as a metaphor for a new philosophy or “vesture” for humankind, arising out of the “cloth-webs” and “cob-webs” of dead philosophies that have ceased to give life to societies. The “editor” proclaims “Here, therefore, properly it is that the Philosophy of Clothes attains to Transcendentalism.” (Book 3, Chapter 8) and elaborates:

“art thou not too perhaps by this time made aware that all Symbols are properly Clothes; that all Forms whereby Spirit manifests itself to sense, whether outwardly or in the imagination, are Clothes; and thus not only the parchment Magna Charta…. But the Pomp and Authority of Law, the sacredness of Majesty, and all inferior Worships… are properly a Vesture and Raiment..?” (Book 3, Chapter 9)

Ostensibly about clothes, then, the whole aim of this book has really been to proclaim new guiding principles for society in the form of Transcendentalism. We must cast off the “vesture” of old Forms and put on the “vesture” of this new philosophy.

Have you understood my crude summary of Sartor Resartus?

Of course you haven’t, because it is complicated, illogical and filled with non-sequiturs. But I beg you to understand that I have made it far clearer than Carlyle ever does, one major point being that the philosophy of Transcendentalism is never clearly defined (if it ever could be). The reality is that Sartor Resartus, with its digressions and rhetoric and side-issues, is very hard to construct as a coherent argument. Note, for example, that I have not even mentioned the chapters in which Teufelsdrockh, abandoning his central theme, dissects the impact of church clothes, and waxes satirical over the clothes worn by Dandies in Britain.

Through the fog I can, however, discern some consistent ideas of Carlyle’s – ideas to which he returned in his other books. There is, for example, his awareness of the stratified nature of society, which allows him to express genuine sympathy for the most wretched of the Earth. [Apparently such sympathy, also expressed in passages of Carlyle’s The French Revolution, is most pronounced in his polemic Past and Present, which I have not read]. Thus:

“The proud Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into truckle beds, or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair of straw: in obscure cellars the Rouge-et-Noir languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard hungry Villains; while Councillors of State sit plotting and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are men”. ((Book 1, Chapter 3)

There is Carlyle’s tendency to enthrone the human Will as the major force in social transformation. Thus: “Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force” (Book 2 Chapter 9). Or  “The true inexplicable God-revealing miracle lies in this, that I can stretch forth my hand… that I have free Force to clutch aught…” (Book 3, Chapter 8)

There is also Carlyle’s strong tendency to see unique and extraordinary individuals, charismatic and God-appointed, as the natural leaders of society – a tendency which would lead later commentators to regard Carlyle as a proto-Fascist.

Thus “Had we not known with what ‘little wisdom’ the world is governed; and how, in Germany as elsewhere, the ninety-and-nine Public Men can for the most part be but mute train-bearers to the hundredth?” ((Book 1, Chapter 3) Thus the invocation of “Hero-Worship” (so named) in Book 3, Chapter 7. Thus the assertion that “Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus, but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.” (Book 3, Chapter 8).

            And there is Carlyle’s early fear of, and contempt for, the mass media, which he sees as corrupting the tastes and desires of the masses. Teufelsdrockh says “The Journalists are now the true Kings and Clergy: henceforth Historians, unless they are fools, must write not of Bourbon dynasties and Tudors and Hapsburgs; but of Stamped Broad-Sheet Dynasties, and quite new successive Names, according as this or the other Able Editor, or Combination of Able Editors, gains the world’s ear.” (Book 1, Chapter 6)

This theme taken up again later in Sartor Resartus, when newspaper editors are described even more emphatically as the new priests.

I hope I have given you the taste of Sartor Resartus, even if I have botched the meaning somewhat. As I said near the beginning of this notice, this book is a “sport”, self-referential, playing with the narrative genre, crammed with in-jokes and literary-jokes, what with all those references to Goethe and Byron and other literary worthies (I haven’t even mentioned the pages where Carlyle takes apart Bulwer Lytton’s dandyish novel Pelham). Most obviously, it functions in the shadow of Tristram Shandy (there is a specific reference to Walter Shandy’s insistence on the importance of names at Book 2, Chapter 1). Tristram Shandy takes three volumes to reach its hero’s birth. Sartor Resartus takes three books to reach anything like a clear declaration of its main point. In this sense, they are both elaborate shaggy-dog stories. Both books are, of course, now a rebuke to those nitwits who think that self-referential, game-playing literature was invented by postmodernists.

One major game Carlyle plays is with his British readers. To begin with, Sartor Resartus seems pure mockery of Hegelian idealism and the high-flown German philosophy that would not appeal to a British reader. The “editor” is a solid British chap who appeals in a commonsensical way to other solid British chaps. But we are less than halfway through when we realize that this is a sophisticated form of seduction. Carlyle’s mask – his “editor” - is in fact weaning British readers off their insularity and introducing them to those very ideas he appears to reject. As he often synopsises “Teufelsdrockh’s” words rather than quoting them verbatim, he is presenting Hegelian idealism in a very British way. Which is exactly what Carlyle spent much of his literary career doing. The British reader is meant to laugh at the funny foreigner while taking the foreigner’s ideas on board.

At which point, weary of my own exposition, I am forced to ask myself how I rate Carlyle’s philosophy, when all the (often delightful) rhetoric is set to one side. It is easy to agree with him that (post-French Revolution) liberalism and romanticism privileged the individual ego and took away any sense of unified social purpose. Again, it is easy to agree that, in some sense, “religion” – a unifying bond, a core of essential agreed values – is necessary for the healthy functioning of any society. So his call for a new, renovating philosophy has a genuine appeal. So do the passages in which (like the Victorian he was to become) he speaks of the dignity of labour as practised by craftsmen. (Small wonder that years later Carlyle featured in that iconic Victorian painting on the dignity of labour, Ford Madox Brown’s Work). But much of what young Carlyle proposes seems the evasions of the middle class. The aristocracy and church no longer exercise the shaping power that they once had. But we can’t let these masses take over, can we? What we need are heroes for the masses to worship. So roll on the hero-worship of high-minded philosophers, educated in Hegel and with a cloudy philosophy to guide them. Roll on those great figures who will sort out all society’s problems without having to go through the messy process of democracy. Roll on… oh dear! Not only did the Fuhrerprinzip evolve from this lazy, evasive mode of thinking, but so did Marxism develop from Hegelianism. What a serpent’s egg.

            With regard to the style of Sartor Resartus, it is part of its self-referential freakishness that Carlyle often attempts to forestall exactly our criticism, when the editor says of Teufelsdrockh:

            “Or is the whole business one other of those whimsicalities and perverse inexplicabilities, whereby Herr Teufelsdrockh, meaning much or nothing, is pleased so often to play fast-and-loose with us?” (Book 2, Chapter10)

Or

            “Can it be hidden from the Editor that many a British Reader sits reading quite bewildered in head, and afflicted rather than instructed by the present work?” (Book 3, Chapter 9)

            Or

“How could a man, occasionally of keen insight, not without keen sense of propriety, who had real Thoughts to communicate, resolve to emit them in a shape bordering on the absurd?” (Book 3, Chapter 12)

But the fact that Carlyle attempts to anticipate obvious criticism does not make that criticism any less valid. And thoughts vaguely expressed are probably thoughts half-baked. I say this in full awareness that much of Sartor Resartus is great, self-indulgent fun, and in further awareness that it became the Bible to a whole generation of American Transcendentalists and to other literary connoisseurs as well. Poor dears.

Self-indulgent and perfectly maddening footnote: This is the sort of thing that I notice when I read such a literary-allusion-crammed book as Sartor Resartus. I note that Carlyle quotes the same phrase, from the young German Romantic who wrote under the pseudonym “Novalis”, that Joseph Conrad uses as epigraph to Lord Jim:

“It is certain, my Belief gains quite infinitely the moment I can convince another mind thereof.” (quoted Book 3, Chapter 2).

This is rendered in the epigraph of Lord Jim as “It is certain any conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe it.”

Then, in Book 3 of Sartor Resartus, there are Carlyle’s reflections on the necessity for silence as a precondition for real creation:

“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are henceforth to rule.” (Book 3, Chapter 3)

I couldn’t help wondering if Yeats had been reading this before he wrote his “Long-Legged Fly” on a similar theme. I don’t know much about Yeats’ reading, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he appreciated Carlyle, who had a similar haughty, pseudo-“aristocratic” attitude to the lower orders, and a tendency to admire heroes, as Yeats himself had.

Good Lord! See how reading such a self-referential, in-joke-making “sport” of a book has corrupted me into making quite unnecessary literary comparisons.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

 “THE FRENCH REVOLUTION” by Thomas Carlyle (first published 1837; revised 1857)

            About twenty years ago I was an infrequent attender of “Slightly Foxed”, a pseudo-literary-cum-antiquarian club in Auckland, composed mainly of bibliophiles who wanted to talk about old books. Prior to one of our club meetings a topic was set – name your ten favourite books and explain why you like each. I sat down over a week and diligently produced a list of ten books, with a long explanatory note on each. I won’t annoy you by naming all the books I chose, for the simple reason that I no longer agree with all the choices I made, so much are one’s tastes modified by the years. Some that I chose (such as Don Quixote) I would still include if I were asked to make a similar list now. Others I regard almost with embarrassment. I am not embarrassed by having included Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution on my 20-year-old list, but it would no longer figure among my ten favourites. Re-reading passages from it before writing this article, I find Carlyle’s present-tense narration vigorous and dramatic up to a point, but quickly tiring, as if the man were incapable of writing in a more reflective, analytical, style. And while I could once have forgiven his views on the revolution as the product of Romanticism, I now find many of them unsympathetic, not to say sinister.

I can claim the feeblest and most notional of family connections with Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). As it happens, he was born in Ecclefechan, the same Scots Lowland town from which my mother’s family the Burnets had come to New Zealand in the late nineteenth century. As a child, I visited this unco dour Presbyterian town when my mother was in search of her ancestral connections, and saw the statue of Carlyle in the main street. Obviously that was the first I’d ever heard of the man. As an adult, I read The French Revolution in the old illustrated two-volume Collins Clear Type edition, running to a bit over 1,000 pages, which still sits on my shelf.

The story of the gestation of this book is well known. John Stuart Mill was commissioned to write a history of the French Revolution. He didn’t have time, so he passed the project on to Thomas Carlyle, who was then about forty. Carlyle worked away at it for about four years, eventually producing a three-volume work. But when he sent the only copy of the manuscript of the first volume to Mill for Mill’s comment, one of Mill’s servants accidentally burnt it. Carlyle re-wrote the volume from memory. This is one of the heroic stories of Eng Lit. Equally egregious, however, is that the type of “grand narrative” Carlyle produced is exactly the sort of thing that is now regarded with suspicion by academic historians. While teaching a paper on historiography five years back, I quickly found that Carlyle’s work, and his contemporary the American William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and Peru, are now seen almost with contempt as Victorian bestsellers which tell vigorous stories but which are not to be trusted as history. And certainly The French Revolution has none of the scholarly apparatus that would now be essential in an academic work of history – no footnotes, endnotes, bibliography, naming and evaluation of sources etc. Just the sweeping narrative, where we have to trust that the author is not making it up.

Though first published in 1837, two years before Queen Victoria’s reign began, The French Revolution was indeed a Victorian bestseller and made Carlyle’s name with the public. Carlyle revised it in 1857 and it had a big impact on imaginative writers, most notably Charles Dickens, whose slant on the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities is very much indebted to Carlyle (as Dickens acknowledged). Also worth bearing in mind is how recent the French revolution was when Carlyle was writing. 1837 was a mere 42 years after the date (1795) where Carlyle chooses to end his history. It is as if we were to write about the 1970s.

As I now clearly see it, Carlyle was writing to a thesis. He was a big one for Capitalising Abstract Concepts, so his thesis about the French Revolution, as I understand it, goes like this:

Carlyle’s enemy was “Analysis”, meaning the querulous and endless chattering of intellectuals, to which he opposed “Belief”, meaning a core of unquestioned values, which he saw as necessary for a nation’s survival. But if Belief becomes routine or ritual, then it is a mere “Form” or Formula. To this Carlyle opposes Reality or Fact, the hard physical events of history. Thus his thousand-page history of the French Revolution reads as the Age of Analysis (philosophes, Voltaire, Montesquieu etc.) being swept away, the old Formulas (Catholic belief, absolute monarchy) crumbling, the terrible Facts marching through bloodily, leading to a new Belief, vital and real, which regenerates the nation.

 Carlyle despises the political bases of pre-revolutionary radicalism, and often refers scathingly to the “Evangel of Jean-Jacques [Rousseau]”, which he sees merely as a new Formula. He hates particularism, mammon, self-interest. The nation can’t be federal, can’t be money-mad and must have a common purpose. What he lauds is a sense of national purpose under strong leadership. This leads him to admire “men of destiny” (although he never actually uses that term) – those strong men who overrode what he sees as mere parliamentary squabbles and who took bold decisions at crucial points. King Louis XVI lacked decision before the new “Facts” of the Third Estate. In turn the Girondins, although the best and the brightest of France, failed because they continued to analyse and debate instead of recognising the “Fact” of Sansculottism and the force of radical Jacobinism (much as Carlyle hates Robespierre, the most prominent Jacobin). Carlyle hates Anarchy (also always capitalised), which he tends to equate with popular democracy. He laments eloquently the endless horrors and murders of the revolution. At his worst, he seems to admire most simple power and well-organised brute force.

Who emerges most sympathetically in his account? The general Dumouriez (for his decisiveness in battle); Danton (for his sense of Reality in rallying the nation against invasion), and, of course, Bonaparte. Carlyle’s history begins with the death of Louis XV in 1774 and ends with Bonaparte’s “whiff of grapeshot” in Vendemiaire, 1795. In effect, the whole revolution becomes a prologue to the emergence of the enlightened despot Napoleon.

This 19^th century British “myth” of the revolution is quite different from the received 19^th century French “myth” of the revolution as articulated by the republican democrat historian Jules Michelin. Michelin divided the revolution into an “heroic” early period of idealism and necessary reform (“l’epoque sainte”) and a “sombre” later period of violence and terror (“l’epoque sombre”) when the masses were forced to excesses by external dangers. This has tended to remain the standard French view (no matter how much it has been modified by Marxists, postmodernists and others). Recently, on the indispensible Youtube, I watched the two state-sponsored movies (each nearly three hours long), which French television broadcast in 1989 to mark the 200^th anniversary of the revolution. They are divided into “Years of Hope” and “Years of Sorrow” in true Michelin style. Jean Renoir’s famous 1938 movie La Marseillaise, made in time for the 150^th anniversary of the revolution, deals only with the early years of the revolution, and therefore sticks with the “years of hope” (one hostile reviewer said it made the revolution look like some sort of cheerful outdoors public demonstration). It too was a distant child of Michelin. On the other hand, there is also the persistent myth of Napoleon in France. Abel Gance’s epic silent film Napoleon, made in the 1920s, has scenes that could almost have been cribbed from Carlyle. One shows the young revolutionary general in his study, watching from his window a bloody riot in the street, looking at the copy of The Rights of Man and the Citizen hanging upon his wall, reflecting that this is what has led to such anarchy, and resolving to save the nation. Like Carlyle’s book, it is undiluted “Great Man” theory of history.

All of which has led to the most persistent criticism of Carlyle. By his “Great Man” theory and his contempt for popular democracy and his desire for a unified, ordered state, he is in effect a precursor of the Fascism of Right and Left. Flash forward a century and his satire on “Analysis” translates into Mussolini’s tirades against rotten liberal democracy; his man of destiny recognizing brute Facts and saving the nation is simply Hitler’s Fuhrerprinzip; his despotism of innate genius is Stalinists and Maoists seeing their Great Leader or Great Helmsman as the incarnation of the popular will. Add to this his lectures on Hero Worship and his admiring double-decker biography of Frederick the Great (read enthusiastically in Germany) and, much as it simplifies things a bit, the criticism seems to me a valid one

And did I mention the racial element of Carlyle’s The French Revolution? Racial assumptions run as an undertone through this long book, perhaps connected with Carlyle’s North European Protestant and Calvinist background. The impulsive “Gaelic” (i.e. Gallic or Gaulish) temperament is contrasted unfavourably with the “Frankish” and Germanic sense of stoicism, firmness, resolve and duty. In a way, Carlyle’s French revolution is the history of a disorderly and potentially anarchic “Gaelic” rabble awaiting “Frankish” discipline and leadership. Germanic courage is of course what he emphasises when he describes the massacre of the Swiss Guard.

            There are other blind spots in Carlyle’s vision. For all his stated theory, Carlyle’s sympathies are large and his feeling for common suffering is genuine (see particularly the chapter “Grilled Herrings” in the last Book). But when he considers pre-revolutionary France, what moves him most is not the misery of the people, but the “Sham”, the “Quacks”, the Formulas and the Analysis – in other words the lack of Belief and a vital force to unify the nation. His understanding of Catholicism is minimal – he sees and accounts for only the decadent aspects of the pre-revolutionary church, largely misses the regeneration of faith during [and after] the revolution, and seems convinced that the revolution has destroyed Catholicism. He pays little attention to rural France, or France outside Paris, except when giving evidence of the “Terror” there, and he does not really have the patience to analyse the political doctrines of the various parties. Debate in times of crisis is to him absurd. He also, especially in the earlier chapters, assumes the reader knows certain facts. For example, while he frequently refers to Cardinal Rohan as “Necklace-Rohan”, he never gives an account of the pre-revolutionary “Queen’s Necklace” scandal that might justify this sobriquet.

As the origin and foundation of the major “myth” of the French Revolution among English-speaking peoples, especially as reflected in popular novels, Carlyle’s book created durable, if highly questionable, portraits of the leading personalities. King Louis XVI is likeable but slow-witted – a devoted father but lacking resolve (this is one portrait that seems to square with later and more detailed historical research). Mirabeau is the great chimera and aristocratic factotum, mainly quack and charlatan, but at least recognising the great Fact of leadership. Danton is the “big” man, the true incarnation of the soul of Sansculottism and Patriotism. By contrast, Robespierre is spiteful, “small” and “sea-green” (Carlyle hammers both epithets to death). Incidentally, Carlyle accepts implicitly the idea that Robespierre attempted suicide just before his arrest, an idea which is now strongly contested by the evidence that his shattered jaw (at the time he was taken to the guillotine) was more likely inflicted by a shot fired by one of the arresting soldiers. Curiously, while his detestation of them is plain, Marat and Hebert are shadowy figures who play little part on Carlyle’s account – at least until the virginal heroine Charlotte Corday kills Marat.

            When he comes to the heroines of his story, Carlyle has that ecstatic worship of virgin purity and sacrifice characteristic of his age. In this manner, he treats the deaths of Marie-Antoinette, Charlotte Corday and Madame Roland almost as martyrdoms.

            How do I now assess this maddening and fascinating book? Much of it is airy, windy, repetitious, epithet-laden rhetoric. Certainly it can no longer be read as a serious history of classes and causes and economics and ideals. It is a panorama, a pageant, a series of dramatic scenes. Ralph Waldo Emerson was right to refer to it as a “poem”. Yet it does have a sense of vitality, of movement en masse. There is deep involvement in events rather than the detachment of a scholarly historian. At one and the same time we can say that this is and is not the way it happened, and yet it is the way it must have seemed to thousands of those who took part. Thus, paradoxically, it is a ‘true history’ – a history of feelings rather than of accurate facts.

What lingers in the mind are the individual dramatic episodes. When I first read the book, I listed the ones that most impressed me thus:

* The march of Parisian women to Versailles (Part I, Book VII)

* The “Feast of Pikes”, or first celebration of Bastille Day on the Champs de Mars, 1790, with its ludicrous portrait of Talleyrand having his mitre filled with rainwater (Part II, Book III)

* The royal family’s flight and capture at Varennes in 1791 (Part II, Book IV)

* The meeting and jibber-jabber of the inexperienced new Legislative Assembly in 1791-92 (Part II, Book V)

* The massacre of the Swiss Guard (Part II, Book VI)

* The sufferings and death in jails during the September Massacres of 1792 (Part III, Book I)

* The excesses of blasphemous “de-Christianisers”, especially in the chapter “Carmagnole Complete” (Part III, Book V)

* Danton’s execution (Part III, Book VI).

Carlyle’s account of the taking of the Bastille (Part I, Book V, Chapters 3-7) may be the most oft-quoted passage in the book, and is filled with phrases and allusions showing clearly where Dickens gained his inspiration for the parallel passage in A Tale of Two Cities. Oddly enough, though, this passage struck me as confused and over-written, lacking the narrative power of the other passages I have listed here.

I conclude by quoting the passage which I believe shows the best and the worst of Carlyle. It comes from Part II, Book III, Chapter 1 and concerns that first anniversary celebration of Bastille Day:

“Alas, what offences must come. The sublime Feast of Pikes, with its effulgence of brotherly love, unknown since the Age of Gold, has changed nothing. That prurient heat in twenty-five millions of hearts is not cooled thereby; but is still hot, nay hotter. Lift off the pressure of command from so many millions; all pressure or binding rule except such melodramatic Federation Oath as they have bound themselves with! For Thou shalt was from of old the condition of man’s being, and his weal and blessedness was in obeying that. Woe for him when, were it on the heat of the clearest necessity, rebellion, disloyal isolation and mere I will becomes his rule!”

Yes, Carlyle was quite right to see that good intentions and displays did not of themselves solve anything. Yes, his satire on talkers and planners is apt and funny. Yes, he perceived accurately that once a revolution had begun it could not be stopped by fine words. Yes, he noted correctly that a society needs binding values and there has to be more to it than atomised individual self-interest. But his craving for “command” led to an admiration of a new sort of tyranny, and in time it proved to be more terrible than the one the revolution had overthrown.