Carlyle, says Mr. Harold .Nicolson, in his preface to Miss
Margaret Goldsmith's new book, Frederick the Great (Gollancz, 12s. 6d.), has rather spoilt the market for such subjects as the French Revolution and Frederick the Great, Carlyle was, of course, one of the first historians to realize "that a narrative of events is not so, interesting as a narrative of people." His egoism, however, spoiled his realism. According to Mi. Nicolson, Carlyle's portrait of Frederick is really a portrait of the artist. Certainly Miss Goldsmith presents us with a, very much Smaller, a very much inferior personality,
To a reader who knew nothing of the subject but What is to be learnt frOm this book, the epithet " great " would 'seem to be bestowed in satire. Yet Goethe saw " the sharp profile of Frederick's originality," and Voltaire declared in a moment of enthusiasm that the King of Prussia had more imagination than he. It is not easy to say whether it is in a man's leisure or in his work that one sees most of his true self. Miss Goldsmith, while she tells of her hero, even at some length, as a successful administrator and soldier, keeps him before the reader's mind as a man of leisure, one whose miserable childhood and tragic youth were starved of all natural happi- ness, and who never lost the insatiable greed for intellectual and physical dissipation which his early miseries had engen- dered. He was a man of two faces, and she has turned the more contemptible one to her public.
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