real power became obvious beyond all cavil on the publication of
the 'French Revolution' (1837). Not for a hundred years, he declared,
had the public received any book that "came more direct and flamingly
from the heart of a living man." That expresses, as I think, the
truth. The book is not to be "read for information." The facts would
now require much restatement; and moreover, the narrative is too apt
to overleap prosaic but necessary facts in order to fasten upon the
picturesque passages. But considered as what it is, a "prose epic," a
moving panorama, drawn with astonishing force and perception of the
tremendous tragi-comedy involved, it is unequaled in English
literature. The doctrine inculcated is significant. Carlyle's
sympathies were in one sense with the Revolution. He felt, he says,
that the Radicals were "guild-brothers," while the Whigs were mere
"amateurs." He was even more thoroughly convinced than the Radicals
that a thoroughgoing demolition of the old order was essential. The
Revolution was but the first volcanic outburst of the great forces
still active below the surface. Europe, he says ('Chartism'), lay
"hag-ridden" and "quack-ridden." The quack is the most hideous of
hags; he is a "falsehood incarnate." To blow him and his to the four
winds was the first necessity. The French Revolution was "the
inevitable stern end of much: the fearful but also wonderful,
indispensable, and sternly beneficent beginning of much." So far,
Carlyle was far more in agreement with Paine than with Burke. But what
was to follow when the ground was cleared? When you have cut off your
king's head and confiscated the estates of the nobility and the
church, you have only begun. A new period is to be born with
death-throes and birth-throes, and there are, he guesses ('French
Revolution,' Book iv., chapter 4), some two centuries of fighting
before "Democracy go through its dire, most baleful stage of
'Quackocracy.'" The radicals represent this coming "Quackocracy."
What was their root error? Briefly (I try to expound, not to enlarge),
that they were materialists. Their aim was low. They desired simply a
multiplication of physical comforts, or as he puts it, a boundless
supply of "pigs-wash." Their means too were futile. Society, on their
showing, was a selfish herd hungering for an equal distribution
of pigs-wash. They put unlimited faith in the mere mechanism of
constitution-mongering; in ballot-boxes and manipulation of votes a