would be a fine subject for some Self-Improvement Circle of readers to
write examination papers upon questions as to the exact meaning of all
the inward musings of Teufelsdroeckh. The first class of successful
candidates, one fears, would be small. A book--not of science or of
pure philosophy, or any technical art whatever--but a book addressed to
the general reader, and designed for the education of the public, and
which can be intelligently digested and assimilated by so very few of
the public, can hardly be counted as an unqualified success. And the
adepts who have mastered the inwardness of _Sartor_ are rare and few.
The _French Revolution_, however, is far more distinctly a work of art
than _Cromwell_, and far more accessible to the great public than
_Sartor_. Indeed the _French Revolution_ is usually, and very
properly, spoken of and thought of, as a prose poem, if prose poem
there can be. It has the essential character of an epic, short of
rhythm and versification. Its "argument" and its "books"; its
contrasts and "episodes"; its grouping of characters and
_denoument_--are as carefully elaborated as the _Gerusalemme_ of Tasso,
or the _Aeneid_ of Virgil. And it produces on the mind the effect of a
poem with an epic or dramatic plot. It is only a reader thoroughly at
home in the history of the time, who can resist the poet's spell when,
at the end of Part III., Book VII., he is told that the Revolution is
"ended," and the curtain falls. As a matter of real history, this is
an arbitrary invention. For the street fight on the day named in the
Revolutionary Calendar--13 _Vendemiaire, An 4_ (5th October 1795), is
merely a casual point in a long movement, at which the poet finds it
artistic to stop. But the French Revolution does not stop there, nor
did the "Whiff of Grapeshot" end it in any but an arbitrary sense.
When the poet tells us that, upon Napoleon's defeating the sections
around the Convention, "the hour had come and the Man," and that the
thing called the French Revolution was thereby "blown into space,"
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