always seems to me
a kind of colossus of a man stalking across the dark, way out in The
Past, using men as search-lights. He could not help doing his thinking
in persons, and everything he touches is terribly and beautifully alive.
It was because he saw things in persons, that is, in great, rapid,
organised sum-totals of experience and feeling, that he was able to make
so much of so little as a historian, and what is quite as important (at
least in history), so little of so much.

The true criticism of Carlyle as a historian is not a criticism of his
method, that he went about in events and eras doing his seeing and
thinking with persons, but that there were certain sorts of persons that
Carlyle, with his mere lighted-up-brute imagination, could never see
with. They were opaque to him. Every time he lifted one of them up to
see ten years with, or a bevy of events or whatever it might be, he
merely made blots or sputters with them, on his page. But it was his
method that made it a great page, wider and deeper and more splendid
than any of the others, and the blots were always obvious blots, did no
harm there--no historical harm--almost any one could see them, and if
they could not, were there not always plenty of little chilled-through
historians, pattering around after him, tracking them out? But the great
point of Carlyle's method was that he kept his perspective with it.
Never flattened out like other historians, by tables of statistics,
unbewildered by the blur of nobodies, he was able to have a live,
glorious giant's way of writing, a godlike method of handling great
handfuls of events in one hand, of unrolling great stretches of history
with a look, of seeing things and making things seen, in huge, broad,
focussed, vivid human wholes. It was a historical method of treating
great masses, which Thomas Carlyle and Shakespeare and Homer and the Old
Testament all have in common.

The fact that it fails in the letter and with hordes of literal persons,
that it has great gaps of temperament left over in it, is of lesser
weight. The letter passes by (thank Heaven!) in the great girths of time
and space. In all lasting or real history, only the spirit has a right
to live. Temperaments in histories even at the worst are easily allowed
for, filled out with temperaments of other historians--that is, they
ought to be and are going to be if we ever have real historians any
more, historians great enough and alive enough to have