MARGARET OLIPHANT

C arlyle's first work in London was the "History of the French Revolution,"
. . . One of the first literary distinctions of Queen Victoria's reign was the publication
of this book, which took place in the year of Her Majesty's accession, 1837. The
perfection at once of that new grandiose yet rugged voice, which broke every law
of composition and triumphed over them all, which shocked and bewildered all
critics and authorities, yet excited and stirred the whole a slumbrous world of
literature, and rang into the air like a trumpet,--and of a new manner altogether of
regarding the events of history, a great pictorial representation, all illuminated by
the blaze, sometimes lurid, sometimes terrible, of the highest poetic genius and
imagination,--were fully displayed in this astonishing work. Histories enough of
the French Revolution had been given to the world, and have been since--personal
experiences, formal documents, fictitious narratives, all the collections of material
possible, showed forth in almost every setting that could be thought of,--but none
which conveyed the very sound and uproar of that wild orgie of the fates; none that
showed the unhappy confused workings of those blind guides and leaders, of those
still more blind opponents of the national frenzy, with such living force and power.
If they are all perhaps too much like wild shadows running thither and hither against
a background of flame and smoke and ever-blazing fire, that is the very bitterness
of the truth with which the genius of Carlyle seized the reality of the most
lamentable, the most awful, the most influential of recent epochs. It is no mere
record, but a great drama passing before our eyes. We are made spectators rather
than readers of the terrible developments, one after another, of each successive act.
A drama working blindly towards a dénouement of which its actors had neither
conception nor intention, through which they blindly stalk, stumble, fall, each in his
turn bringing numerous and unthought of complications, new turns and twists of
fate, as veritably happened, as happens continually, though to most generations
there is no Seer to perceive how these strange new openings and closings succeed
each other, and how the great thread of destiny rolls on. . . .

. . . There can be little doubt that it was his "French Revolution" which turned
the scale [in favor of his popularity]--a book more interesting than any romance,
which those who took it up could not lay down, and which was far too impressive
in its general character, too powerful and novel in its art, to be mistaken or
overlooked. . . .

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