Carlyle was not the only writer of this period who gave thought to such problems, nor the only one who appreciated their complexity, but it was he who first adequately expressed them; and it is _Sartor Resartus_, written in solitude on the Dumfriesshire moors, that summons the crowds of modern cities to face and solve them. If the voice is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, it is addressed to the multitudes of human society wherever they are gathered together.
The principle at the root of all Carlyle's other works is the same. It has been already pointed out how his own character forms, as it were, a background even to his histories. As that character had been built up in the struggle with, and continued to be absorbed in the contemplation of, those problems, it follows that the histories are just the presentation of the same problems under the wider and more varied conditions of national existence. There was artistic gain to Carlyle in the new conditions. A longer dwelling in the regions of _Sartor_ would have fed the morbid blood in him. History, without smothering his own personality, took him sufficiently out of it to check this tendency. The _History of the French Revolution_ is much purer as an artistic conception than _Sartor_. It is more orderly in development, it has more artistic unity. Indeed, with the exception of one or two of Carlyle's smaller works, like the _Life of Sterling_, it is in this respect the best he ever wrote. Among histories it is quite singular for its coherence. Few histories have the unity of works of imaginative art. Among early works we may find one or two, like the history of Herodotus, which simulate the character and rival the proportions of a national epic. Among later works we may find one or two, like Gibbon's, which derive an impressive unity from the stately march of events to a great far-off catastrophe. But probably nowhere is there a history which in every chapter, and almost in every sentence, breathes the artistic purpose as Carlyle's _History of the French Revolution_ does. It has been frequently called the 'epic' of the Revolution. In point of fact, as Froude justly says, the conception is rather dramatic, and the best comparison is to Æschylus.