And because of all this there is something in the make-up of a historical novelist’s mind, something in his temperament and outlook which finds its peculiar home in various corners of the world of the past. There is something in various ages of history, various phases of life and experience, various types of thinking, to which his mind naturally turns, and in which he finds his element. There is something in his own life which answers to its counterpart in history, and finds its own world there. A man like Jokai can catch the atmosphere of some revolutionary movement--as in _The Green Book_--and can thrill a novel with the feelings and the subtle workings of a secret yearning for freedom, because in real life he lived this, and finding it in history found something of himself. Carlyle’s Cromwell, Carlyle’s Mirabeau have passed through Carlyle’s mind and come out crooked; but there was in their way of thinking and in their wrestles with life a thing which Carlyle had in common with them, and which drew his thoughts to them and made their experience a thing he could enter into. That was why he could assimilate them so powerfully to himself. That also was why his interpretations of them were contributions to history, and not mere wild distortions. And so, for the resurrection of the past and the true re-telling of the life of the past the novelist’s peculiar art has something to contribute. The virtue and power of the novelist’s depiction of men, is not that he observes perpetually and arranges data, but that he enters into the experiences of others, he runs his life into the mould of their lives, he puts himself under the conditioning circumstances of their thinking. He can feel with people unlike himself and look at the world with their eyes and grapple with the issues of life that meet them, because he can put himself in their place, that is to say, because his experience is not entirely and merely his own. It is precisely because personality is not cut off from personality, and a man is not entirely locked up within himself, with the depths of him completely hidden away from everybody else, that the novelist can so to speak transpose himself and catch life into a person other than himself. It is precisely because in the last resort a distant age of history is not its own secret, curled up in its own world, and cut off from the present day--because the men of the past had red blood in their veins and were a phase of a life that is universal and eternal--that History can recapture something of their struggles and yearnings and their particular experiences. The history of history-books gives us a glimpse of the men of the past, a chart of the facts that governed their world, an idea of the conditioning circumstances of their lives; but it withholds the closest human things, the touches of direct experience. And because life is all one, and essential experience ultimately the same, these are the very