the moralist to the humorist, to give a loose rein to his 'sympathy with the seamy side of human nature', it is a different story. And it may well be that, if challenged on some of the portraits and anecdotes of Frederick, he would have fallen back, and not altogether by way of jest, upon the imposing authority of Goethe. The true source of these things was, of course, entirely different. It lay in his inborn genius, and was never completely harmonized with the other elements of his strangely blended nature; the humour in him was never wholly tamed to run in harness with the severer instincts of the prophet and the moralist. The latter were moulded by Goethe and Fichte. For the former, so far as it owed anything to outward influences, we must look to Swift, Sterne, and, above all, to Richter. Yet here too, as has been said, the name of Goethe also might, doubtless with a difference, have been invoked.
We return to the more serious side of the matter; the side on which the influence of Goethe is beyond dispute. If Goethe looked out with a wide tolerance upon life, it was because he was too wise to quarrel with the conditions which surrounded him; because, in small things as well as great, he was prepared to make the best of the raw material, human and otherwise, which was put into his hands. In this there was a touch of religious submission. And that was the aspect of his teaching which came home most closely to his disciple. Rebel as he was, Carlyle too knew the duty, as well as the necessity, of bowing to the inevitable; and he accepted the tolerance of Meister because he saw it in the light of the maxim, already suggested by his own experience: Do the duty which lies nearest thee. The idea, which may justly be said to form the turning-point of Sartor Resartus, lies at the heart also of the Lehrjahre; and the words themselves are an echo of Goethe's.[1] They occur, as all will
- ↑ Just before the words 'Hier oder nirgend ist Amerika' occur these: 'Wie ist mir das Nächste so werth, so theuer geworden!' (Lehrjahre, vii. 3).
