THE ECLECTIC REVIEW FOR APRIL, 1845. Art. I. 1. Sartor Resartus. London. 1838. In 3 vols. 12mo. 1840. 2. The French Revolution. By Thomas Carlyle. 4. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. By T. Carlyle. In 5 vols. 12mo. London. 1840. 5. On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History By T. Carlyle. 1841. 6. Past and Present. By T. Carlyle. 1843. MR. CARLYLE is well known to the literary public of Germany as the author of a Life of Schiller, and as the English translator of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. SARTOR RESARTUS is a series of papers which appeared in Frazer's Magazine; and the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays are republished from Frazer, the London and Westminster, the Foreign, and the Edinburgh Reviews. In these, as indeed in all the volumes, there is a raciness of thought and language which cannot fail to stimulate attention; and the author is now very generally spoken of here, and still more, we believe, in America, as one of the leading writers of the day. We shall endeavour to present such a view of the characteristics of Mr. Carlyle's mind, of his opinions, of his apparent aims, and of the style of his compositions, as may serve to shew his true position as an English author, and to aid our readers in forming an idea of the effects which his writings may be expected to produce. 'Sartor Resartus' is one of the oddest books we have ever seen. It is introduced by a whimsical collection of real or fictitious opinions on the work, which professes to be a Treatise on the Philosophy of Clothes, by Professor Teufelsdröck of Weissnichtwo,' recommended in a letter from Herr Hofrath Heuschrecke: the said Teufelsdröck being-we almost suspect-a caricature of some old, pedantic German professor whom the author may have in his mind's eye. The style of the treatise is criticised in a vein of sly and mischievous humour; and the matter of the supposititious work is interspersed with observations of all kinds by the editor, at one time commending the wisdom and beauty of the professor's meditations, and at another holding him up to the reader's scorn. We suppose there is no book about clothes, in any age or language, overlooked; nor any conceivable way of playing with the words relating to human garments that has been forgotten. Beneath this laborious and intentional absurdity he unfolds one slight aspect of a philosophy growing up in Germany from the days of Kant to those of Schelling-ego philosophy'—of which little is known in England except among those who have either studied the theories of the German schools, or paid some attention to the numerous translations, abridgments, or expositions of them that have appeared in our language. The radical idea is, that the 'ich,' 'ego," I,' the mind-the self-of every man, in all those operations where pure reason is not at work, receives its notions, modes of thinking, and habits of expression from causes which are exterior to it, as clothing is to the body: that the philosophy of man, piercing through these mere coverings, deals with the essential, naked being; whilst, in general, philosophy regards the universe as the living, visible garment of God: poetry being the insight of the man of genius into the intellectual realities which are concealed beneath the show of things. The ideal is seen through the real. The method here chosen for exhibiting this philosophy is an imaginary autobiography of Herr-Teufelsdröck, detailing the circumstances of his being left in his infancy by a mysterious stranger with a childless couple at Entepfuhl, the history of his childhood, his school education, his university career, his love adventures, his wanderings, his sorrows, and his transitions through the various phases of the German theories; winding up with some roguish discoveries of the hoax which has been played on the editor. The effect of society on religion is treated as a chapter on church clothes; and the progress of the human race towards its perfection is singularly descanted on through several chapters, bearing the whimsical, yet not insignificant, titles of Symbols,- Helotage,-the Phoenix,-Old Clothes,Organic Filaments,- Dandiacal Body,-Tailors. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION' is published as a history: 'anything but a history,' most readers perhaps have said, not only at the beginning, but throughout, and at the end; yet, according to the author's conceptions of what history should be, it is a specimen of history. It differs from most histories so called, in avoiding the simple, straightforward manner of narrating. Indeed it is altogether a different kind of work. It is the revolution, in its material facts, as strongly imaged by the writer, after reading and meditating on the books in which the facts are recorded. Generally, it is descriptive; as though in the moment of action, the writer was uttering his thoughts and feelings to a spectator. Occasionally it is dramatic: the characters move before one as on a stage; we see their forms and complexions, and become familiar with their tones. Some passages sparkle with the brilliancy of poetry, others are darkened by the clouds of metaphysics; and not a few are as plain and prosy as the vulgarest daily talk: the whole seems to be written on the supposition that the reader is already acquainted with every spot and personage and fact, while allusions in all directions, and images of every class and hue, are scattered with lavish profusion; quotations from Goethe and Novalis, and the Bible-as if equally known, and of equal authority-lie mingled together in a strange and confounding medley: in the midst of all which, the reader is made to turn his thoughts upon himself by most searching apostrophes and earnest exhortations. We should be disposed to call it an epic without verse. The first volume opens with a description of Louis XV. taken from the Abrége Chronologique l'Histoire de France, by Henault, who accounts for that king's surname of The Beloved, from the tender interest shewn by all classes in Paris when he lay dangerously ill at Mentz; and this scene is contrasted with the last sickness of that monarch at Versailles-a loathsome tragedy painted with terrible force. The second book, entitled 'The Paper Age,' contains some just reflections on the misery necessarily involved in most of the events which history relates. These are followed by a satire on the philosophers that came into power on the accession of Louis XVI.; by a horrible description of the masses of the French nation; and by a series of sketches, in the author's peculiar manner, of the financial, social, and literary condition of France, which at length ripened into the revolution. The actors in the revolution pass before us in these pages like the pictures of a magic lantern. In the seventh book Mr. Carlyle expounds his views of the nature of the revolution he is describing. According to these views, it was the open, violent rebellion and victory of disimpri soned anarchy, against corrupt, worn-out authority, decreed by Providence to destroy shams and falsehoods; not to be accounted for, but deeply thought upon in silence; lying, not in those outward changes which figure in histories, but in the heart and head of every violent speaking, of every violent thinking Frenchman.' He then dwells on the necessity of some constitution for the revolutionised nation, and on the impossibility of such a constitution being made without belief, without time, and without force. On the Constituent Assembly he breathes a scorching blast of sarcasm, while he paints to the life its leading members, and their dull discordant doings. He then describes 'the general overturn' in language which we quote as offering a specimen of his usual manner. Of the king's court, for the present, there is almost nothing whatever to be said. Silent, deserted are these halls; royalty languishes forsaken of its war-god and all its hopes, till once the Eil de Bœuf rally again. The sceptre is departed from King Louis; is gone over to the Salle des Menus, to the Paris townhall, or one knows not whither. In the July days, while all ears were yet deafened by the crash of the Bastile, and ministers and princes were scattered to the four winds, it seemed as if the very valets had grown heavy of hearing. Besenval, also in flight towards infinite space, but hovering a little at Versailles, was addressing his majesty personally for an order about post-horses; when, lo, 'the valet in waiting places himself familiarly between his majesty and me, stretching out his rascal neck to learn what it was; his majesty, in sudden choler, whirled round, made a clutch at the tongs: I gently prevented him; he grasped my hand in thankfulness, and I noticed tears in his eyes' 'Poor king, for French kings also are men! Louis XIV. himself once clutched the tongs, and even smote with them; but then it was at Louvois, and Dame Maintenon ran up. The queen sits weeping in her inner apartments, surrounded by weak women: she is at the height of unpopularity; universally regarded as the evil genius of France. Her friends and familiar counsellors have all fled; and fled, surely, on the foolishest errand. The Château Polignac still frowns aloft, on its bold and enormous' cubical rock, amid the blooming champaigns, amid the blue girdling mountains of Auvergne but no duke and duchess Polignac look forth from it; they have fled, they have met Necker at Bâle;' they shall not return. That France should see her nobles resist the irresistible, inevitable, with the face of angry men, was unhappy, not unexpected; but with the face and sense of pettish children? This was her peculiarity. They understood nothing. Does not at this hour, a new Polignac, first-born of these two, sit reflective in the Castle of Ham, in an astonishment he will never recover from; the most confused of existing mortals? King Louis has his new ministry: mere popularitic old-president Pompignan; Necker, coming back in triumph; and other such. But what will it avail him? As was said, the sceptre, all but the wooden gilt sceptre, has departed elsewhither. Volition, determination is not in this man: only innocence, indolence; dependence on all persons but himself, on all circumstances but the circumstances he were lord of. So troublous internally is our Versailles and its work. Beautiful, if seen from afar, resplendent like a sun; seen near at hand, a mere sun's atmosphere, hiding darkness, confused ferment of ruin! 'But over France there goes on the indisputablest destruction of formulas;' transaction of realities that follow therefrom. So many millions of persons, all gyved and nigh strangled with formulas, whose life nevertheless, at least the digestion and hunger of it, was real enough! Heaven has at length sent an abundant harvest; but what profits it the poor man when earth with her formulas interposes? Industry, in these times of insurrection, must needs lie dormant ; capital, as usual, not circulating, but stagnating timorously in nooks. The poor man is short of work, is therefore short of money; nay, even had he money, bread is not to be bought for it. Were it plotting of aristocrats, plotting of D'Orleans; were it brigands, preternatural terror, and the clang of Phoebus Apollo's silver bow,enough, the markets are scarce of grain, plentiful only in tumult. Farmers seem lazy to thrash, being either bribed or needing no bribe, with prices ever rising, with perhaps rent itself no longer so pressing. Neither, what is singular, do municipal enactments, that along with so many measures of wheat you shall sell so many of rye,' and other the like, much mend the matter. Dragoons, with drawn swords, stand ranked among the corn sacks. Meal mobs abound, growing into mobs of a still darker quality.'-vol. i. PP. 311-313. Into the history of the Directory, Mr. Carlyle does not enter; but touches it as it were, and ends his work with the following prophecy, extracted from his own strange paper called 'The Diamond Necklace:' 'On the whole, therefore, has it not been fulfilled what was prophesied, ex-post facto indeed, by the arch quack Cagliostro, or another? He, as he looked in rapt vision and amazement into these things, thus spake :-Ha! What is this? Angels, Uriel, Anachiel, and the other five; Pentagon of Rejuvenescence; Power that destroyed Original Sin; Earth, Heaven, and thou outer limbo, which men name Hell! Does the EMPIRE OF IMPOSTURE waver? there, in starry sheen updarting, light rays from out its dark foundations; as it rocks and heaves, not in travail-throes, but in deaththroes? Yea, light-rays, piercing, clear, that salute the heavens,— lo, they kindle it; their starry clearness becomes as red hellfire! Burst IMPOSTURE is burnt up: one red-sea of fire, wild-billowing enwraps the world; with its fire-tongue licks at the very stars. Thrones are hurled into it, and dubois mitres, and prebendal stalls, that dross fatness, and-ha! what see I? all the gigs of creation; all, all! Woe is me! Never since Pharaoh's chariots, in the red-sea of water, was |