Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works (Volume 10) - neues Buch

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.1 [1837.] It appears to be, if not stated in words, yet tacitly felt and understood everywhere, that the event of these modern ages is the French Revolution. A huge explosion, bursting through all formulas and customs; confounding into wreck and chaos the ordered arrangements of earthly life; blotting-out, one may say, the very firmament and skyey loadstars,though only for a season. Once in the fifteen- hundred years such a thing was ordained to come. To those who stood present in the actual midst of that smoke and thunder, the effect might well be too violent: blinding and deafening, into confused exasperation, almost into madness. These onlookers have played their part, were it with theprinting-press or with the battle-cannon, and are departed; their work, such as it was, remaining behind them;where the French Revolution also remains. And now, for us who have receded to the distance of some half-century, the explosion becomes a thing visible, surveyable: we see its flame and sulphur-smoke blend with the clear air (far under the stars); and hear its uproar as part of the sick noise of life, loud, indeed, yet embosomed too, as all noise is, in the infinite of silence. It is an event which 'can be looked on; which may still be execrated, still be celebrated and psalm- odied; but which it were better now to begin understanding. Really there are innumerable reasons why we ought to know this same French Revolution as it was: of which reasons (apart altogether from that of ' Philosophy teaching by Experience,' and so forth), is there not the best summary in this one reason, that we so wish to know it ? Considering the qualities of the matter, one may perhaps reasonably feel that since the time of the Crusades, or earlier, the...