impossible book of all I ever before tried,‘—an unconscious ‘Grecism’ which numbers the book among its own predecessors, but which has the august countenance of Milton, in the well-known passage wherein he includes Adam among ‘his sons since born,‘ and calls Eve the ‘fairest of her daughters.‘ Even in looking back upon the completed work, Carlyle could find no less despairing terms in which to speak of it than these: ‘Cromwell I must have written in 1844, but for four years previous it had been a continual toil and misery to me; four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling and misery, I used to count it had cost me.‘
Happily for himself and for the world, we can trace much other and far more fruitful employment of the period of preparation than he here acknowledges. In 1842, he visited the field of Naseby, in company with Dr. Arnold, and in the following year, he inspected the scene of the ‘crowning mercy’ at Worcester, and also that of the decisive victory of Dunbar, on the very anniversary of the fight: journeys which, in their inspiring effect upon his wonderfully vivid descriptions of those memorable battles, count for a good deal more in the success of the Cromwell than all the ‘abstruse toil, obscure speculation and futile wrestlings’ of which he speaks.
In the course, however, of his four years of preparatory labour, his plan, as we all know, underwent a still further modification. Commenced as a History, and transformed into a Biography, it was now to become virtually an Autobiography with copious editorial annotations. Having originally proposed to compose a narrative of the Civil War, and next to write in place thereof a Life of Oliver Cromwell, Carlyle’s final idea was to let his hero relate the story of his own career, in the words of his own written and spoken deliverances, as explained, illustrated and amplified by their Editor. And so at last the book took the definitive form of its description on the title-page as Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations.
