C. E. Vaughan

“ The praise is the more honourable because, from Carlyle, it was so rare. In one sense, it is the praise of the disciple. In another and a truer sense, it is the praise that can be offered only by equal to equal. And it is well that, in closing, we should remind ourselves that this is so. Carlyle may have learned from Fichte, he may have learned from Goethe. But, in the last resort, he is the man who has seen the vision with his own eyes; who has drawn the water not from the pitchers of other men, but direct from the source. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To the mass of men this Divine Idea of the world lies hidden: yet to discern it, to seize it, and live wholly in it, is the condition of all genuine virtue, knowledge, freedom; and the end, therefore, of all spiritual effort in every age. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What concerns us here, however, is the feeling which prompted this demand upon the poet; the craving in the mind of Carlyle which was answered, confirmed—perhaps even first called into clear consciousness of itself—by the creations of Goethe. What is the use, he seems to have thought, of going for our poetry to the past? and what is the worth of a poetry which makes us not less, but more, discontented with the world that lies around us? Is not such poetry an admission that we find no beauty or significance in the conditions which encircle us and which, when all is said, constitute our being ”

“ He found the laws of natural science presented no longer as isolated and independent facts, but as the revelation of a divine power working in and through them, and as discoverable by man only in so far as he himself is a higher and more complete revelation of that power, at once a part of the natural order and, in a greater or less degree, exalted above it. ”

“ Outward Right must be established by force. But the freedom of the inner will must be trained and disciplined to recognize the truth. The will to accept the Right must be built up in the conscience of every individual. ”

“ In case of need, one single man has the right and duty to compel the whole of mankind; for to that which is contrary to Right they have, as against him, no right and no freedom.
'He may compel them to Right. For Right is an idea, absolute, definite, of universal validity; an idea which they all ought to have, and which they all will have, so soon as they are raised to his level. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is also true that, at least in the field of political philosophy and the region of ethics which borders on political philosophy, he had, to a large extent, been anticipated by Burke. But Burke had damaged his cause by placing his genius at the service of political reaction. And the song of a poet, however deep its foundation may be laid in thought, can never have the same effect on the multitude as the direct argument of the thinker. It is, therefore, not unfair to say that Carlyle was the first man in this country to throw down a direct challenge to the dominant materialism of his time ”

“ In one word, it was the highest task of the artist to idealize. And when we think of Carlyle as the champion of ideal art, as against that which is content merely to reproduce or reflect, it is in this sense that we must do so. With the art which rejects the actual conditions of life and creates, or strives to create, a fantastic world of its own he had no patience. Hence perhaps, at least in part, his undisguised contempt for Coleridge ”

“ 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 ”

“ To him the true art, the only art which is worth having, is at the same time ideal and real; ideal, in that it is not content with the mere reproduction of that which lies around us; real, in that, while reflecting, so far as may be, the outward conditions of the age, it is yet more concerned to read their inner meaning, to force its way behind the confused mass of detail to the ideas and conflicts which constitute the true life of the time, its abiding significance in the history of mankind. ”

“ Art still has truth, take refuge there.'
Could any contrast well be greater than that between the master and his disciple? What is the secret of the spell which the one man cast over the other? How can we account for the hold which the poet and artist gained over the Puritan and the prophet?
The answer to this question is not altogether easy. But, in the first place, it must be remembered that, side by side with a Puritan temper, there was in Carlyle an intellect of extraordinary keenness. ”

“ And never did imaginative writer make more magnificent use of a metaphysical idea. [20] The same probability meets us when we ask for the origin of Carlyle's theory of duty. It would be strange indeed if this owed nothing to the moral theory of Kant. The noble sternness of the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, and the deep religious feeling which lies behind it, must have been as the music of the spheres to such a man as Carlyle: a light from heaven to the Puritan who, from first to last, was the ruling spirit within him. ”

“ Literary men are the appointed interpreters of this Divine Idea; a perpetual priesthood, we might say, standing forth, generation after generation, as the dispensers and living types of God's everlasting wisdom, to show it in their writings and actions, in such particular form as their own particular times require it in. For each age, by the law of its nature, is different from every other age, and demands a different representation of the Divine Idea, the essence of which is the same in all ”

“ 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. ”

“ In another, and far more offensive, form they have come to life again in our own day. And the doctrine of the Uebermensch, the superior person, has not even the merit of originality. But it would be the grossest injustice to hold either Carlyle, or his master, responsible for the sophistries of Nietzsche.
Carlyle was not slow to acknowledge the debt he owed to Fichte. Of no man, with the possible exception of Goethe, has he spoken with such warmth, or with a glow of sincerity so unmistakable. ”

“ 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. [13] They occur, as all will 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 ”

“ But in every century, every man who labours, be it in what province he may, to teach others, must first have possessed himself of the Divine Idea, or, at least, be with his whole heart and his whole soul striving after it.' [21]
The date of this passage enables us to carry back Carlyle's acquaintance with Fichte to the very beginning of his literary career; to the years immediately following his first venture in authorship, the Life of Schiller, and immediately preceding the composition of his earlier Essays and that of Sartor Resartus. ”

“ Let it be assumed, he urges, that compulsion is indispensable to the establishment of the law of Right. Such compulsion may be, and is, contrary to the instinctive will, the 'natural freedom', of the isolated individual. ”

“ Carlyle was no trained philosopher. And it is not from the technical writings of Fichte's earlier days, but from the popular expositions of his later years, that he drew the materials of his speculative creed. It is not to the Wissenschaftslehre, but to Das Wesen des Gelehrten and other similar writings, that in the main he is indebted. In the case of his political theories—in particular, the doctrine of Hero-worship—it is probable that this statement requires some qualification. The work of Fichte in which that doctrine is stated most clearly and fully is the Staatslehre ”

“ It follows that any foreign influence must work in a more indirect manner, that its effects cannot be expected to show themselves so openly, in the one case as in the other, his being understood, the strange thing is not that the influence of Fichte should be so hard, but that it should be so easy, to trace in the political writings of Carlyle. In fact, to any one who is in the secret, the voice of Fichte may be heard in them from beginning to end. We confine ourselves to the two cardinal principles indicated above. ”

“ There are two passages of his published works in which Carlyle makes explicit reference to these doctrines. One of these occurs in the Lectures on Heroes (v) . The other, which is the earlier and therefore for our purposes the more significant of the two, is to be found in the essay on The State of German Literature (1827) , to which allusion has been made so often:—
'According to Fichte, there is a "Divine Idea" pervading the visible Universe, which visible Universe is indeed but its symbol and sensible manifestation, having in itself no meaning, or even true existence independent of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not until the reign of order is established and established it can never be save by compulsion that the rational will finds the conditions which are necessary to its growth. In applying compulsion, therefore, we are replacing the false freedom by the true. We are not thwarting, but fostering, the rational will ”

“ Of these the most important are the Essays contained in the first volume of the Miscellanies, and, on a more imposing scale, Sartor Resartus.
Firstly, then, Goethe appeared to him, rightly or wrongly, to be the one modern poet who had seriously set himself to render the outward life of his own day. Again and again he recurs to this thought; and it is manifest that, in doing so, he has in mind the prose writings rather than the dramas or lyrics; Werther and the Lehrjahre, perhaps even Dichtung und Wahrheit, sooner than Faust, Iphigenie, or Erlkonig. ”

“ It may be doubted, moreover whether so masterful a spirit could ever have heartily recognized such merits as the individualist theory can fairly claim. Both by temper and by social sympathy, therefore it is probable that, even apart from external influences Carlyle would ultimately have been driven from the camp of the individualist reformers. ”

“ The second, that, whatever may be the place finally allotted 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. ”