Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 02.djvu/20

xiv instinct of the historian. He is too ready to lay all the sins and sufferings of the Revolution at that particular door at which he wishes to knock, too anxious to bring home its guilt and misery to those particular sinners whom he conceived it to be his main mission to indict. He cannot bring himself to assign their due weight to those already predetermined causes which are not directly traceable to individual wrongdoing. How many and how potent these causes were, and how defective are all those theories of the great catastrophe which seek to explain it solely by the action of human selfishness, frivolity, and falsehood in high places, has often been pointed out since Carlyle's time, and has been demonstrated once for all in the masterly study of M. Taine. Carlyle's inquiries yielded him a much simpler result. 'Nay, answer the courtiers,' he says, describing (Book . Chapter viii.) their superficial explanation of the 'general overturn,'

This, no doubt, is a more satisfying theory than that of the courtiers; but is it adequate? Are the conscienceless misdoings of men a more potent factor in the calamities of nations than their conscientious errors? Did the selfish sloth and profligacy of Louis. do more harm to France by hastening the advent of the Revolution, than the narrow and cruel, but perfectly honest, laborious, and disinterested fanaticism of Robespierre in driving it by the bloody ways of the Terror to the Napoleonic reaction, and in thereby arresting the political development of the nation for nearly a hundred years? It is a question not easily to be answered. It is easier to see that both conscienceless misdoers