eously photographed on his
memory never faded. No one had a keener eye for country. When he
visited Germany he brought back pictures of the scenes of Frederick's
battles, which enabled him to reproduce them with such startling
veracity that after reading you seem to remember the reality, not the
book. In history he seeks to place before us a series of visions as
distinct as actual eyesight: to show us Cromwell watching the descent
of the Scottish army at Dunbar, or the human whirlpool raging round
the walls of the Bastille. We--the commonplace spectators--should not,
it is true, even at present see what was visible to Carlyle, any more
than we see a landscape as Turner saw it. We may wish that we could.
At any rate, we have the conviction of absolute truthfulness to the
impression made on a powerful idiosyncrasy. We perceive, as by the
help of a Rembrandt, vast chaotic breadths of gloomy confusion, with
central figures thrown out by a light of extraordinary brilliancy.
Carlyle, indeed, always has it in mind that what we call reality is
but a film on the surface of mysterious depths. We are such stuff, to
repeat his favorite quotation, as dreams are made of. Past history is
a series of dreams; the magic of memory may restore them for an
instant to our present consciousness. But the most vivid picture of
whatever is not irrecoverably lost always brings, too, the pathetic
sense that we are after all but ephemeral appearances in the midst of
the eternities and infinities. Overwhelmed by this sense of the
unsubstantiality even of the most real objects, Carlyle clutches, as
it were with the energy of despair, every fading image; and tries to
invest it with something of its old brightness. Carlyle was so
desirous to gain this distinctness of vision that he could not be
happy in personal descriptions till, if possible, he had examined the
portrait of his hero and satisfied himself that he could reproduce the
actual bodily appearance. The face, he holds, shows the soul. And then
his shrewd Scottish sagacity never deserts him. If the hero sometimes
becomes, like most heroes, a little too free from human infirmities,
the actors in his dramas never become mere walking gentlemen. In
Dryasdust he gives us lay figures, bedizened at times with shallow
paradoxes; but Carlyle always deals in genuine human nature. His
judgment may not be impartial, but at least it is not nugatory. He
sees the man from within and makes him a credible indivi