It is as poet and thinker that he was drawn to Goethe. In Goethe he found a man who had reflected deeply on the intricacies of modern life, and read its meaning with clear insight. He found also, as it was impossible that he should not find, the greatest poet of his day. Even the more formal side of Goethe's poetic genius appealed irresistibly to the disciple; much more, the width of his thought and his humanity. He saw in him 'one to whom Experience had given true wisdom, and the Melodies Eternal a perfect utterance for his wisdom'.[1] He was alive to the music of his utterance. He was still more keenly alive to the power which he alone, among all the poets of his age seemed to possess of 'seeing life steadily and whole', of drawing harmony from all its discords, of facing the seen world, which to other men spoke of nothing but doubt and disillusionment, without ever losing his faith in the unseen and eternal.[2]
From this it is easy to see the temper in which Carlyle approached the poetry of Goethe. Much as he admired it as poetry, he admired it still more for the thought diffused throughout it, and the general outlook on life which it embodies. To him Goethe was not so much the sweetest singer as the greatest teacher of his time; the man who had studied the conditions of modern life and modern knowledge the most fully and interpreted them the most clearly; the man, therefore, who could offer the surest guidance to those who were confronted with the same difficulties, and whose first duty it was to solve the same riddle, to understand the world, not as it was to their fathers or their grandfathers, but as new thought and new experience had made it for themselves.
We must not be surprised, therefore, to find that Carlyle dwells more upon the prose of Goethe than his poetry; and that, when he does touch upon the poetry, it is the directly moral parts of it, rather than the more imaginative and
- ↑ Essay on Goethe, Miscellanies, i. p. 287.
- ↑ State of German Literature, ib. pp. 76-8.
