Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 02.djvu/18

xii insistence on the second would disqualify the other. Macaulay was as industrious and as accurate a student as he was a brilliant writer, but what about his fairness? Froude collected his materials laboriously, and intended to use them fairly; but he was, without excessive exaggeration, credited with 'a constitutional inability to quote even the shortest and simplest document correctly.' And in sheer power of 'visualising' scenes and persons, the describer of the Fall of the Bastille, and the Insurrection of Women, the delineator of Mirabeau and Marat surpasses them both.

The French Revolution: A History. That is Carlyle's own name for his work, the name which he gives it on its title-page. The French Revolution : A Drama, would, some think, be a truer description of it, and one which, while accounting for its powerful impression on a reader, would at the same time indicate, and in a manner justify its limitations. For it is the privilege of the drama to present its own 'motive' from the outset, to postulate the past life and present disposition of each one of its personages, and to set in motion, as though from a previous state of inertia, those forces of human action, conditioned by external circumstance, which must inexorably determine the evolution of its plot. We do not—or we should not—'go behind' the argument of the drama, or seek for causes of those causes which the dramatist asks us to assume as operating. These being given, it is enough for him if we are unable to detect any incredibility in their represented action—enough for him if the persons of the drama behave in accordance with the characters assigned to them, and if event beget event according to a law of sequence which we recognise as inevitable. To have accomplished this is for the dramatist to have achieved complete success on the constructive side of his art: we have neither the right nor the desire to ask more of him. And it is thus, mutatis mutandis, that we must read Carlyle's French Revolution. It is true, of course, that since it is a historical and not an imaginative work, we have a right to insist that its data and motive must conform to the facts of history, or