Freedom, Equality, Fraternity.

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happy. At intervals Mr. Carlyle recognises the nobleness of the aspirations by which the people were moved; but it cannot be said that his sympathy with the Patriots of the French Revolution is so profound as his sympathy with the Puritans of the seventeenth century. "Great," he once exclaims, "is the moment when tidings of freedom reach us; when the long-enthralled soul, from amid its chains and squalid stagnancy, arises, were it still only in blindness and bewilderment, and swears by Him that made it, that it will be free! Free? Understand that well; it is the deep commandment, dimmer or clearer, of our whole being, to be free. Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings, and sufferings in this earth." If we admit that the freedom and happiness which the French people desired for themselves were looked upon by them as a gospel of felicity for Europe and mankind, we can scarce fail to apprehend that, however sad or appalling might be the issues of the French Revolution, its main impulses were noble.

"The French nation," says Carlyle, treating of that intensely-agitating conjuncture when the Patriots thought that their Revolution was at last to be consummated, "The French nation has believed, for several years now, in the possibility, nay, certainty and near advent, of a universal millennium, or reign of freedom, equality, fraternity, wherein man should be the brother of man, and sorrow and sin flee away." Add that the attainability of all this was a matter of implicit faith. It was "enchantment," it was devilish legerdemain," it was an infamous conspiracy of kings, priests, aristocrats, it was at last the coalesced despots of the north, with Prussian bayonets and force of cannon balls, that prevented France from being free and happy, and making the world free and happy. Wild as was the hallucination of the French people, there may be a doubt whether it would not have been as well to leave them

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to attempt to realise it in their own way. At all events, if we would know in any measure what the Revolution meant, and if we would have any precision and clearness of understanding as to Carlyle's idea of the secret of its power, we must realise that the nation which had long sneered, and danced, and laughed, and taken things, at best or at worst, lightly-the nation which found its idol in Voltaire—was now intensely in earnest, intensely believing, intensely impressed with a sense of its mission to realise man's kingdom upon earth, and prove Rousseau a true prophet and apostle. "Yes, reader," says Carlyle once more, "here is the miracle. Out of that putrescent rubbish of scepticism, sensualism, sentimentalism, hollow Machiavelism, such a Faith has verily risen; flaming in the heart of a people. A whole people, awakening, as it were, to consciousness in deep misery, believes that it is within reach of a fraternal Heaven-on-earth. With longing arms it struggles to embrace the unspeakable; cannot embrace it, owing to certain causes. Seldom do we find that a whole people can be said to have any faith at all, except in things which it can eat and handle. Whensoever it gets any faith, its history becomes spirit-stirring, noteworthy. Now, behold,

once more this French nation believes! Herein, we say, in that astonishing faith of theirs, lies the miracle. It is a faith undoubtedly of the more prodigious sort, even among faiths; and will embody itself in prodigies. It is the soul of that world-prodigy named French Revolution; whereat the world still gazes and shudders."

The History of the French Revolution, as treated by Carlyle, is essentially a unity in three parts, each part occupying a volume, and each having a distinctive title. The subject of the first is the Bastille; of the second, the Constitution; of the third, the Guillotine. No single words could be found more expressive of the various phases through which the Revolution passed. The first volume is divided

Structure of the Book.

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into seven books, the second into six, the third into seven. These books may be looked upon as cantos in this Epic Poem. They consist of chapters generally brief, the number of chapters in each book varying from four to twelve. The amount of invention displayed in the work, as a whole, and the sustained intensity of the labour undergone in its composition, may be roughly conceived from the fact that every one of those chapters has a heading which assists to produce the general impression aimed at by the author. Look at the names of the chapters in one book-I take it at haphazard, and I do not consider the titles as either more characteristic or more felicitous than the average. It is the book in which the Third Estate, or, as we should say in England, the representative Commons, prevail over the two other Estates of nobility and clergy, and in which the Bastille is taken by the Patriots. "Inertia," "Mercury de Brézé," "Broglie the War-God," "To arms!" "Give us Arms!" "Storm and Victory," "Not a Revolt,' Conquering your King," "The Lanterne." It is not possible to devise titles enabling us to realise with more dramatic vividness the essential facts of the situation and the onward march of the revolution. There is nothing in Homer more stirring than the chapter on the fall of the Bastille. The episode descriptive of Marquis de Bouillé and the military revolt at Nanci has given me-if I may be permitted to supersede the vagueness of eulogistic adjective with a bit of personal experience—more expressly than any other piece of prose I ever read, the feeling of having been present among the events detailed, of having seen Bouillé and the infuriated mutineers face to face, and heard the rattle of the musketry in the streets of Nanci. The description of the flight and capture of the King has also been much and deservedly admired.

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In the chapter in which the members of the States General defile before the eyes of the reader, the personal

appearance and the most prominent characteristics of the leading men are presented with a graphic force with which there is nothing in Gibbon, in Clarendon, or in Macaulay that can be compared. Henceforward we know the personages described. We should recognise them in the highway, if earth were to refuse them shelter in her bosom and they rose from the dead. Let us take five of these likenesses. Sprawling up querulous to see the show, rises Marat, "the man forbid," "squalidest bleared mortal, redolent of soot and horse-drugs," his bleared soul looking through his "bleared, dull-acrid, woe-stricken face." Danton, huge and brawny, "through whose black brows and rude flattened face there looks a waste energy as of Hercules not yet furibund," rolls along. Camille Desmoulins, "with the long curling locks, with the face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with genius, as if a naptha-lamp burnt within it," is near Danton. Mirabeau, with thick black hair, "through whose shaggy beetlebrows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy, -and burning fire of genius, like comet fire glaring fuliginous through murkiest confusions," is "the typeFrenchman of this epoch." Robespierre," anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking, under thirty, in spectacles, his eyes (were the glasses off) troubled, careful, with upturned face, snuffing dimly the uncertain future time, complexion of a multiplex atrabiliar colour, the final shade of which may be the pale sea-green," creeps modestly onwards. Wordportraits like these are unique in literature; unique, I mean, in respect of the vividness with which the personal appearance is realised. Homer alone, so far as I am aware, can be put into competition with Carlyle in this particular field. Homer certainly liked to see his characters as well as to know about them, but I do not think we have so distinct vision of Achilles, Thersites, or

even Ulysses as Carlyle gives us of Mirabeau and Marat. Shakespeare does not throw his power into description of bodily appearance. In taking the whole measure of a man, his mind as well as his body, his moral worth and weight, Carlyle is by no means supreme among writers.

In his word-portraits, and in the History of the French Revolution generally, Mr. Carlyle exhibits to perfection his characteristic style. Critics of a certain order, the purist, the precisian, the grammatical pedant, are much exercised by what they are pleased to call his jargon. It affords amusement to our lively friend, M. Taine. These critics acknowledge his genius, but deplore what they call his irregularities, and wish he were classical and Addisonian. Really this is too absurd. Carlyle is an inventor, a poet, in style. He is a genius of so high an order—such are his powers of expression-that his advent marks a stage in the evolution of our language. In his hands words cease to be fossil; they bloom into life. The spectacle of such a man schooled by grammatical pedants suggests a galaxy of Oxford and Cambridge prize-poets drilling Homer in versification, or an academy of barn-door fowls instructing the eagle how to fly.

In point of fact, however, Carlyle takes no liberty with the English language for which he cannot plead the example of Shakespeare. When he wants to express a shade of meaning for which there is no word in the dictionary, he makes a term by tacking one or two words together. He speaks (in Sartor Resartus) of a "snow-and-rose-bloom maiden; а glance into the book before us discovers such adjectives as "rotatory-changeful," "narrow-faithful," "elegiac-applausive," "suppressed-explosive." Carlyle makes these words, as Turner mixed colours, to suit his own pictorial wants. Shakespeare did the same. "Senseless-obstinate," "bittersearching," "wilful-negligent," "cursed-blessed," and a multitude more of the like, may be culled from Shakespeare. Is it