Assuredly that description is not, on the first blush of the matter, a very promising one. To this day, indeed, it must remain more or less of a marvel, and much more than less of a testimony to Carlyle’s remarkable gifts, that he succeeded in producing a masterpiece from such forbidding materials. A priori, one would have said that whatever merits such a book might possess, they could not possibly be those of a continuous and coherent narrative; whereas nothing is more noticeable about the Cromwell than the unity of the impression which it produces on the reader, and the completeness with which the fire of its author’s genius has fused it into an artistic whole. Of his battle-pieces, with their intense reality and dramatic vigour of narrative, mention has already been made; but these might well have been and probably would have been in most other hands mere ‘purple patches’ on a fabric of the dullest and plainest hodden-grey. But the inexhaustible animation which he has contrived to infuse into a story, the main thread of which is carried on through a series of what, with all respect to Carlyle’s hero, are some of the most undistinguished and ineffective letters ever written, it is this that makes the work a living thing. The mere editing of the letters, the emendations, ‘elucidations’ and explanatory scholia are full of critical ingenuity and insight; and it will be superfluous information to any one who has studied the text without their assistance, to remark that few letter-writers have ever demanded more of these qualities from an Editor than Oliver Cromwell.
From the historical point of view, the work displays much the same merits and the same defects as the French Revolution. Carlyle approaches both the English and the French revolutionary movement from the same standpoint of preconception; as indeed he frankly confesses in his Introduction. ‘To see God’s own law then universally acknowledged for complete as it stood in the holy Written Book, made good in this world.‘ This, according to Carlyle, is the whole, sole, and sufficient cause, beginning, and end of the Puritan-Democratic uprising; and he dismisses all political
