SOURCE: "The Eighteenth Century as 'Decaying Organism' in Carlyle's The French Revolution," in Anglia, Vol. LXXXIX, No. 4, 1971, pp. 456-70.

In the following essay, Kusch examines the interplay between metaphor of the eighteenth century as a "decaying organism " and theme of decay advancing toward "spontaneous combustion " in Carlyle's The French Revolution.

If a poet is a man who sees in metaphor a primary way of knowing and uses language for evocation as well as description, then Carlyle was one of the great poets of the nineteenth century. Other scholars have said as much, and John Holloway, in The Victorian Sage, has classified some lines of metaphor as they appear in work after work.¹ We know that certain images recur in Carlyle's mind, and they may become so powerful, I believe, that the arc of his metaphoric flight defines the horizon of his awareness. Carlyle was aware that the energy...