or his "Frederick the Great," I care not which, although it
is well worth one's while to read both. If your friends who maintain
that history is a science convince you that the "French Revolution" is
not history, as perhaps they may, read it as a narrative poem. Truly
Carlyle spoke rather like a poet than a historian when he wrote to his
wife (in his forty-first year): "A hundred pages more and this cursed
book is flung out of me. I mean to write with force of fire till that
consummation; above all with the speed of fire.... It all stands pretty
fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to
splash down what I know in large masses of colors, that it may look like
a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance, which it is."[20] It
was Carlyle's custom to work all of the morning and take a solitary walk
in Hyde Park in the afternoon, when looking upon the gay scene, the
display of wealth and fashion, "seeing," as he said, "all the carriages
dash hither and thither and so many human bipeds cheerily hurrying
along," he said to himself: "There you go, brothers, in your gilt
carriages and prosperities, better or worse, and make an extreme bother
and confusion, the devil very largely in it.... Not one of you could do
what I am doing, and it concerns you too, if you did but know it."[21]
When the book was done he wrote to his brother, "It is a wild, savage
book, itself a kind of French Revolution."[22] From its somewhat obscure
style it requires a slow perusal and careful study, but this serves all
the more to fix it in the memory causing it to remain an abiding
influence.

There are eight volumes of "Frederick the Great," containing, according
to Barrett Wendell's computation, over one million words; and this
eighteenth-century tale, with its large number of great and little
characters, its "mass of living facts" impressed Wendell chiefly with
its unity. "Whatever else Carlyle was," he wrote, "the unity of this
enormous book proves him, when he chose to be, a Titanic artist."[23]
Only those who have striven for unity in a narrative can appreciate the
tribute contained in these words. It was a struggle, too, for Carlyle.
Fifty-six years old when he conceived the idea of Frederick, his
nervousness and irritability were a constant torment to himself and his
devoted wife. Many entries in his journal tell of his "dismal continual
wrestle with Friedrich,"[24] perhaps the most characteristic of which is
t