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Thomas Carlyle, who combines the pre- and post-Romantic intonations of the paradigm, exemplifies yet another option available to the nineteenth-century writer. Moving between two perspectives, he is able to convey both the meaning and the experience of an event, something he conceives essential to his self-appointed task as secular prophet.

In the opening pages of The French Revolution we thus come upon poor Louis XV, the do-nothing king, "swimming passively . . . towards issues which he partly saw." Without vision, without conviction, he finds himself trying to make "incoherence into coherence," and he cannot. "Blindest fortune has cast him on the top of it: he swims there; can as little sway it as the drift-log sways the wind-tossed moon-stirred Atlantic" (pt 1, bk 1, ch. 4). Then there is D'Orleans, who, defending the prerogatives of the Convention against his brother Louis XVI, "has cut his Court-moorings, shall we say? And now will sail and drift, fast enough, towards chaos?" (pt 1, bk III, ch. 6). Unlike D'Orleans, Lomenie-Brienne, the finance minister who replaced Necker, clearly perceives his danger. Desperately seeking a plan, any plan, to keep [191/192] the national finances from going under, he asks the intellectuals of France to furnish him with one.

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