“It spreads like a sort of Dog-madness; till the whole World-kennel
  will be rabid.”

The majority of readers cared nothing for the symbolism of Sartor Resartus; but they responded to its effective presentation of the gospel of work and faced the duties of life with increased energy.  Carlyle seemed to stand before them saying:—­

“Do the Duty which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a Duty!  Thy second Duty will already have become clearer...  The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal was never yet occupied by man.  Yes here, in this poor miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal:  work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free.  Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself:  thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of ...”

The French Revolution.—­In 1837 when Carlyle finished the third volume of his historic masterpiece, The French Revolution, he handed the manuscript to his wife for her criticism, saying:  “This I could tell the world:  ’You have not had for a hundred years any book that comes more direct and flamingly from the heart of a living man.’” His Scotch blood boiled over the injustice to the French peasants.  His temperature begins to rise when he refers to the old law authorizing a French hunter, if a nobleman, “to kill not more than two serfs.”

Carlyle brings before us a vast stage where the actors in the French Revolution appear:  in the background, “five full-grown millions of gaunt figures with their hungry faces”; in the foreground, one young mother of seven children, “looking sixty years of age, although she is not yet twenty-eight,” and trying to respond to the call for seven different kinds of taxes; and, also in the foreground, “a perfumed Seigneur,” taking part of the children’s dinner.  The scene changes; the great individual actors in the Revolution enter:  the tocsin clangs; the stage is reddened with human blood and wreathed in flames.  We feel that we are actually witnessing that great historic tragedy.

Carlyle had something of Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination, which pierced to the heart of men and movements.  More detailed and scholarly histories of this time have been written; but no other historian has equaled Carlyle in presenting the French Revolution as a human tragedy that seems to be acted before our very eyes.

He did not attempt to write a complete history of the time.  He used the dramatist’s legitimate privilege of selection.  From a mass of material that would have bewildered a writer of less ability, he chose to present on the center of the stage the most significant actors and picturesque incidents.

Carlyle’s “Real Kings.”—­Carlyle believed that “universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.”  In accordance with this belief, he studied, not the slow growth of the people, but the lives of the world’s great geniuses.