remember, in a passage which begins and ends with a reference to Goethe. It was Goethe who taught him that the first step in the initiation of man is self-renunciation; from Goethe that he learned the sacredness of the 'worship of sorrow', as the road which all who would read the facts of life or attain to spiritual manhood are ordained to tread; and it is the language as well as the thought of Goethe, that 'here, in this poor, miserable, hampered Actual, wherein even now thou standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal—here or nowhere is thy America'.[1]
To other sides of Goethe's teaching he may, in later years, have become cold. But to this side of it, the side which was most akin to his own temperament and upbringing, he remained faithful to the end. The doctrine of duty—of an ideal which even the poorest and most 'hampered' conditions may enable us to realize—never lost its hold upon him; nor his reverence for the man who had first led him to grasp its full significance, to seize it not only with the abstracting power of the intellect, but also through the heart and the imagination, as a clue to guide him among the bewildering intricacies of life. And this applies with yet greater force to the conclusions which both he and Goethe drew from that central doctrine; to the creed of self-renunciation and the 'divine worship of sorrow', to which Goethe had trained himself by steady determination, and which Carlyle attained, so far as he ever attained it, through hard experience and the bitterness of remorse.[2]
- ↑ Compare Sartor Resartus, II. ix. (The Everlasting Yea) with Lehrjahre vii. 3.
- ↑ Among other references to Goethe in Carlyle's Letters and Journals two may be mentioned: the letter to John Carlyle of February 16, 1832
And again in the Sprüche in Prosa, at the beginning: 'Versuche deine Pflicht zu thun, und du weisst gleich was an dir ist. Was aber ist deine Pflicht? Die Forderung des Tages.' Carlyle himself says (letter to John Carlyle, Life, ii. p. 259) that the whole phrase is taken from Goethe. But, though I believe myself to have seen the phrase in Goethe, I cannot now lay my finger on it.
