to Schiller in the literature of Europe—and it is hard for a foreigner to take him quite as seriously as his own countrymen are wont to do—there can be little doubt that, on Carlyle, at any rate, his influence was comparatively slight.
I
The first place must inevitably be given to Goethe. His was the greatest mind before which the rebellious spirit of Carlyle ever bowed with the reverence of a disciple; and his influence upon that spirit was far deeper and more searching than any other. It was a strange stroke of irony that brought the Scot under the wand of the German. In temper and character they were about as different as it is possible for two men to be. We might as well compare a volcano in eruption to a star. 'In Goethe's mind,' writes Carlyle himself, 'the first aspect that strikes us is its calmness, then its beauty; a deeper inspection reveals to us its vastness and unmeasured strength.'[1] The latter statement could have been made of Carlyle only with a hundred qualifications; the former could never have been made at all. And when from temperament we turn to matters of character and conviction, the difference seems only to grow deeper. Calvinist by training, Carlyle, in his general outlook upon life, remained largely Puritan to the end. As a Puritan, he never ceased to think intellect of small worth in comparison with character and action. As a Puritan, he upheld a stern, not to say an ascetic, standard of outward conduct. As a Puritan, he always looked with uneasy suspicion upon Art. Goethe, on the other hand, taught both by precept and example that the true end of man lies in the even development of all his faculties, intellectual and imaginative, as well as moral. He held the outward life to be far less important than the inward, the actual deeds of a man than the spirit which prompted and lies behind them. And it is not
- ↑ Essay on Goethe: Miscellanies, i. p. 287 (Library edition).
