Good morning. What does Thomas Carlyle’s account of the French Revolution teach us today? Among other things, that “Rousseau is the leading spirit of the cultural Left, in our time as in his,” John D. Hagen writes, and that his view of human nature remains poisonous.

The most famous fiasco in literary history occurred when Thomas Carlyle gave John Stuart Mill the first part of his great work The French Revolution to critique. Mill’s maid thought the manuscript was wastepaper and threw it into the fire. The loss was total. Carlyle had no copy.

Carlyle and his formidable wife, Jane, were newly arrived in London from Scotland, with scant savings in their purse. The loss of the book, and its anticipated revenue, threatened them with ruin. Carlyle (who had just been introduced to high society, and was keeping company with grandees such as Mill and Wordsworth) manfully resolved to work as a laborer.

Mill commendably insisted upon paying for the loss. After fierce entreaties, Carlyle accepted half the sum that Mill had proposed. He set himself to rewrite the manuscript, imagining God as a stern Scots schoolmaster tearing up an assignment and saying, ‘No, boy! You must do better!’

The task of recomposition was staggering. It was far more difficult than rewriting a conventional history. The power of the book is in its imagery. Carlyle’s work is Dantesque in its sheer range of allusion: mythological, biblical, literary, historical — a compendium of Western culture . . . The book is a gallery of portraiture. Lafayette, commanding the National Guard, is compared to Poseidon (‘In all tempests, Lafayette, like some divine Sea-ruler, raises his serene head’). King Louis, well-meaning, indecisive, ineffectual, ‘sits there, as he has ever done, like clay on the potter’s wheel; perhaps the absurdest of all pitiable and pardonable clay-figures that now circle under the Moon.’ Marie Antoinette ‘delights to succor the poor — such poor as come picturesquely into her way,’ and fatally postpones escape from Paris, since ‘no Queen can stir without new clothes.’

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Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, master storytellers, used to carry The French Revolution around with them for the sheer delight of reading it. Mordant humor abounds in its pages, but it is a deadly serious book. It merits close attention today, in the smoldering aftermath of riots and the toppling of statues. It illuminates our own political and cultural crisis.

In other news: A. E. Stallings writes in praise of letters and the U.S. Postal Service: “I still write letters sometimes, and, living in Greece, I often mail things back to the United States—cards, gifts, checks, books. The Greek postal system can be a bureaucratic nightmare, but I have always trusted that once things reach American soil, they will arrive safely and with dispatch. Our era’s relentless barrage of electronic communications makes it seem magical, miraculous even, that you can put a physical envelope in a box on one side of the world and have it appear in a box on the other side of the world. There is something wonderful too in recognizing someone’s ‘hand,’ the charm of the canceled stamp, the heft that suggests the weightiness (or not) of its contents. The miniature roadside-billboard candor of the postcard. The enfolded intimacy of the love letter.”

When theory wasn’t political: “Back in 1984 or so, Jacques Derrida came to UCLA to deliver a lecture to the English and Comparative Literature departments. He was the top figure in the humanities at that time, more prominent than Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Richard Rorty, or Paul de Man, each of whom had their votaries. (Foucault overtook Derrida in the late ’80s, especially as gender theory spread.) I can’t remember the topic of the talk; being not long out of undergraduate school I didn’t know enough about the influences on deconstruction to follow Derrida’s allusive style. Derrida was famous, too, for two-hour presentations spoken in plodding cadences (his English wasn’t that great) that pleased only the votaries in the room, of whom there were usually very many. But at some point in the Q&A discussion following the lecture, he made a clear and simple point that couldn’t be misunderstood.”

Wesley Hill revisits Chaim Potok’s 1985 novel Davita’s Harp: “At the heart of Chaim Potok’s 1985 novel Davita’s Harp is a child who is searching for faith. The parents of Ilana Davita Chandal offer little help. Her father was raised Christian in New England but has abandoned his earlier Evangelical fervor. Her mother, a Polish Jewish immigrant, has given up observance of the mitzvot and joined the Communist Party; she is now committed to fighting the fascism she hears is on the verge of consuming Western Europe. Through much of the book, Davita seems unsettled by the snatches of religious language and observance she is able to pick up. When her aunt urges her to have faith in Jesus, Davita raises the classic Jewish objection: ‘Why is there a war in Spain if Jesus is the Prince of Peace?’ Later, when Davita finds her mother’s King James Bible and takes it to synagogue, she horrifies her peers: ‘They all backed away a step or two as if I were holding in my hand a specimen of forbidden vermin.’ ‘That’s a goyische Bible,’ her friend tells her, making her blush with shame. ‘I did not go back to that synagogue for a long time,’ Davita says. Yet in 1937, she does return, after learning of her father’s death in the bombing of Guernica, where he had been working as a journalist. It is one of the novel’s pivotal scenes. Davita goes back to a synagogue and, finding herself in a kind of daze, says softly aloud the Kaddish.”

The real Wyatt Earp: “It’s doubtful that any American has had more of his legend turned into ‘fact’ than Wyatt Earp, who had a brief career as a frontier peace officer and scarcely wore a badge over the last 48 years of his life. Before and after “lawing,” as it was called in the 19th century, Earp was a teamster, boxing referee, prospector, buffalo hunter, racehorse owner, croupier, stagecoach guard, bouncer, saloon keeper, bodyguard, Hollywood movie advisor, and, for a while before he became a noted lawman in Kansas, a pimp.”

Dominic Green on a history of freemasonry: “The history of rubbish can be scholarship, but the history of scholarship is often rubbish. The condescension of hindsight diminishes earlier habits of thought and behavior, especially when, as with freemasonry, they involve rolled-up trouser legs, coded handshakes and a curious blend of mysticism and matiness. Yet freemasonry was once a radical, even revolutionary, rite: to its adherents a harbinger of egalitarian, middle-class democracy, to its detractors a conspiracy of Jews, Satanists and sex addicts. The Craft is a shadow history of modernity. Though it is more sober than most lodge meetings, it is, like its subject, ingenious and frequently bizarre.”

Photos: North Carolina

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