It may be said that 'renunciation', at any rate, was understood by the master and the disciple in two different, if not opposite, senses: that to the former it meant the sacrifice of a lower end, or a baser element of his nature, to that which experience had taught him was in reality a higher, while to the latter it was hardly to be distinguished from the ascetic principle, the creed of repression for the sake of repression, which, with some modification of outward form, Puritanism had inherited from mediaeval Christianity; that to Goethe it meant the harmonious development of all the faculties, subject only to the necessary subordination of the less to the more important, while to Carlyle it meant, and as life wore on, came to mean more and more, the virtual elimination of one or more sides of human nature to the exclusive advantage of the rest. All this is probably true. It is true, at any rate, of Carlyle as he became in the later years of his life; from the time of Past and Present onward to the end. But it is also true that Carlyle himself seems to have been unaware of the difference, and persistently reads his own meaning into the words, and regards his own doctrine as the doctrine of Goethe. His own doctrine, it may be objected, is to be found in the Gospels; and, in a certain sense, might have been drawn just as well from the Gospels as from Goethe. This he would readily have admitted; but that, he would have added, is only one more proof of the fact that every truth needs to be discovered anew by each succeeding generation, to be restated in the dialect of that generation, and applied to its own particular circumstances and conditions; for it is only when so stated and applied that it is effectively grasped and truly comprehended.[1] In
- ↑ See the opening pages of The Hero as Priest (Lectures on Heroes, iv).
(Life, ii. 258-60), and a passage relating to the year 1825–6, describing his 'conversion', and ending, 'I then felt, and still feel endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business—his release from 'the soul-murdering mud-gods' of the time, 'Puseyisms, universal suffrages, nigger emancipations,' &c., an odd assortment (Reminiscences, i. 287-8).
