THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21022, 10 May 1930, Page 4

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

I “ The French Revolution: A History.” By ] Thomas Carlyle. With an Introduction by ! Hilaire Belloc. Fully Illustrated. In two i volumes. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd. i (Iss net complete. > ‘ More people will be prepared to dis- ; cuss Carlyle’s French Revolution ”, than have read it, and when ■ the reviewer is confronted with the ■ beautiful edition of this work which Messrs J. M. Dent and Sons have produced he is able once again to recall the zeal with which he began reading the book years ago, the. faltering of that zeal as page frillowed page in seeming endless procession, the sense of satisfaction—almost of’relief—with which he closed the second volume at last and awaited the examiner’s queries, i Every year more books are published, ; more good novelists and biographers are discovered, and a greater multitude of poets get into print; but historians are still few in number. The present-day student of history, of past, times and manners,'prefers to concentrate upon a' central figure in his period and, in portraying the life of that figure, subjectively or objectively according to his mode, to produce a picture dominated by an individual I How different was the task of 'Carlyle l True, he wrote of people—of Mirabeau, I a fiery fuliginous mass, which could not j be choked and srnothered, but would fill ■ all Prance with smoke,” but, he wrote also : of the mob, and it was the mob which | made the revolution possible. j ; ■ , A roaring sea of human heads, inundating both Courts, billowing against all passages: Menodic women; infuriated men, mad With revenge, with I love of mischief, love of plunder! Rascality has slipped its muzzle; and now bays, three-throated, like the Dog of Erebus. . . Transcendent things of all sorts, as in, the general outburst of multitudinous Passion, are huddled together; the ludicrous, nay the ridiculous. ■ with the horrible. Mr Hillnire Belloc, in a critical introduction to this new edition of the “ French Revolution,” does not spare Carlyle for his inaccuracies, his inacquaintance with.