Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 02.djvu/19

Rh to a reasonable conception of those facts; but this condition it fully satisfies. 'Given' (we may suppose its author saying), 'a political system rotten to the core, and a social organism so dangerously diseased and weakened in one or more of its vital parts as to be powerless to resist the malady of its institutions; given a bankrupt treasury, a corrupt fisc, a system of taxation cruel in its burdens and shamefully unequal in its incidence, a starving peasantry, a non-resident noblesse, an army officered by rigidly exclusive privilege, and a middle-class honeycombed with discontent—given such things and such men, and you have the plot of a tragedy which must necessarily, and which did in fact, evolve itself thus and thus.' Agree to start from these data, which, as every student of the period will acknowledge are in substantial accord with the state of things existing at the date of Louis .'s death, and you will not be able to deny to The French Revolution the merit of strict historic accuracy in addition to its more generally recognised claims as a work of unrivalled dramatic force. You will have, in short, to admit that the drama which Carlyle calls 'a history' does within these limits deserve the title he gave it, and that, if we consent to look no further back than 1774, and no further forward than 1793, the drama is in fact a history in the fullest sense of the word.

It is only when one 'goes behind the argument' of the monstrous tragi-comedy—only when one turns to Carlyle for that sort of recherche sur les causes which has become so dear to the historian of a later day—that one begins to find inadequacy. Not that even here it is inadequacy of the kind which is due to defective handiwork. Dangerous indeed would it be to impute to so sternly conscientious an inquirer that he had insufficiently investigated the more remote historic causes of the great upheaval. For aught I know, he may have studied the last hundred years of the ancien régime—or, say, the political and social condition of France from Richelieu onward—as industriously as he shows himself to have studied the twenty years immediately preceding its fall; but if so, his habit of the preacher and the moralist was too strong for his