Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 02.djvu/16

x will, to any one who through his references traces them to their sources, seem little else than the mere massed colours on a painter's palette. Every portrait, every incident, every scene and situation in the lurid drama has the air of having been dashed off 'at a heat' from a hand of marvellous swiftness, directed not only by an imagination on fire, but by a soul with every emotion responsive, and an intellect with every faculty alert. If Sartor Resartus shows Carlyle at his greatest in dealing with the deeper things of the individual consciousness, it is in The French Revolution that his outlook on the world of his fellow-men is the widest, and his mastery of the mighty and everlasting drama of their actions and passions the most assured. It is here, too, beyond doubt, that he displays more impressively than in any other of his writings, the astonishing wealth and variety of his powers. The book, to begin with, is a monument—second only in importance, if second, to his Frederick—of his untiring industry in the collection of his materials, and his unerring artistic instinct for their effective use. To the first of these qualities those only can do partial justice who have explored for themselves some small portion of that vast mass of authorities—good, bad, and indifferent, romantic and prosaic, Royalist, Republican, and neutral—among which Carlyle seems not to have left the obscurest document, or shred of a document, unexamined. Times out of number it must have happened to the student wading through one or other of the scores of volumes which make up the Histoire Parlementaire to light on some vivid touch of character, some momentary flash of picturesque description, some casual phrases of dramatic narrative, and to have turned straightway to The French Revolution in the full assurance, seldom if ever disappointed, that the touch, the flash, the phrase, has not escaped the master's eye. It may be the only memorable, the only notable or quotable thing in the writer under examination, the one gleam of light or breath of life in a dull and inanimate chronicle of events; but there, sure enough, it is, rescued for ever from the heaped-up rubbish of its surrounding pages, and the long, long