Events happen to more than the hero alone; he is a member of society. It is necessary, therefore, to link the events of his life to the current of his times, to fit him into the background against which his life was played. How was he affected, what influence did he exert, what offices or positions of trust did he hold? Often, of course, estimate of the personality will be considerably determined by his relations with his contemporaries. You need to bear two cautions in mind: first, not to misjudge a man because moral or social standards have shifted since his times; and second, not to introduce so much matter about his relationships as to obscure the outlines of his personality or as to relegate him to less than the chief position. Imaginative sympathy will be sufficient to prevent the first. If you really look through your hero's eyes at the life that he saw, with his standards in mind, though you may have to condemn his attitude from a more modern point of view, you will be able to see that his deeds are quite comprehensible, that perhaps, had you been in his place, you would have acted likewise. We no longer decorate important bridges with the heads of criminals set on pikes, as our ancestors did, nor do we burn supposed witches. But though we condemn Edward the First of England for the one and the Salem Puritans for the other, we can still love both Edward and the Puritans--if we have imaginative sympathy. The second caution requires simply that you make your hero dominate the scene. Now this is not an easy task when you are reviewing, in many pages, the gorgeous pageant of an age. We can easily imagine that if Parr had written the Life of Johnson which he said would have been so much superior to that by Boswell, and had included the threatened "view of the literature of Europe," the poor old hero would have been roughly jostled away behind the furniture. Mr. Barrett Wendell paid Carlyle a tribute of the highest kind in writing of his _Frederick the Great_:
Such a mass of living facts--for somehow Carlyle never lets a fact lack life--I had never seen flung together before; and yet the one chief impression I brought away from the book was that to a degree rare in even small ones it possessed as a whole the great trait of unity. In one's memory, each fact by and by fell into its own place; the chief ones stood out; the lesser sank back into a confused but not inextricable mass of throbbing vitality. And from it all emerged more and more clearly the one central figure who gave his name to the whole--Frederick of Prussia. It was as they bore on him from all quarters of time and space, and as he reacted on them far and wide, that all these events and all these people were brought back out of their dusty graves to live again.[98]