232 FRESH FIELDS 



like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be 

 hlown; the mastiff- mouth accurately closed: I have 

 not traced as much of silent Berserker rage^ that 

 I remember of, in any other man." In writing his 

 histories Carlyle valued, above almost anything 

 else, a good portrait of his hero, and searched far 

 and wide for such. He roamed through endless 

 picture-galleries in Germany searching for a gen- 

 uine portrait of Frederick the Great, and at last, 

 chiefly by good luck, hit upon the thing he was in 

 quest of. "If one would buy an indisputably au- 

 thentic old shoe of William Wallace for hundreds 

 of pounds, and run to look at it from all ends of 

 Scotland, what would one give for an authentic 

 visible shadow of his face, could such, by art natu- 

 ral or art magic, now be had!" "Often I have 

 found a Portrait superior in real instruction to half 

 a dozen written ' Biographies, ' as Biographies are 

 written; or, rather, let me say, I have found that 

 the Portrait was a small lighted candle by which 

 the Biographies could for the first time be read^ 

 and some human interpretation be made of them." 



II 



Carlyle stands at all times, at all places, for the 

 hero, for power of will, authority of character, ade- 

 quacy, and obligation of personal force. He offsets 

 completely, and with the emphasis of a clap of 

 thunder, the modern leveling impersonal tendencies, 

 the "manifest destinies," the blind mass move- 

 ments, the merging of the one in the many, the 



