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We may illustrate
its literature from its history, or its history from its literature.
It is on the necessity of the former study that Carlyle dwells in the
above. And in the light of later exaggerations, notably those of Taine,
it is well to remember, what Carlyle himself would have been the last
man to forget, that no man of genius is the creature of his time or
his surroundings; and, consequently, that when we have mastered all
the circumstances, in Carlyle's phrase the whole "situation", of the
poet, we are still only at the beginning of our task. We have still
to learn what his genius made out of its surroundings, and what the
eye of the poet discovered in the world of traditional belief; in other
words, what it was that made him a poet, what it was that he saw and
to which all the rest were blind. We have studied the soil; we have
yet to study the tree that grew from it and overshadows it. [Footnote:
Perhaps the most striking instances of this kind of criticism, both
on its strong and its weak side, are to be found in the writings of
Mazzini.


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