# Essays and studies: by members of the English Association/Carlyle and his German masters

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CARLYLE AND HIS GERMAN MASTERS
'The best thing Carlyle did was to let Englishmen know that there was such a thing as German literature.' So said a famous instructor of youth more than thirty years ago. He said it probably less because he believed it himself—so, at least, it is charitable to assume—than for the sake of giving a shock to the undergraduate of the moment. And, if so, his purpose was attained. Yet, even with this allowance, it was a rather perverse utterance. For, with all his debt to the Germans, Carlyle had more than enough to say on his own account; and, when the enemy has done his worst, he remains, as Professor Saintsbury has said, the greatest figure among the men of letters of his own day and country.
Yet the debt of Carlyle to the Germans cannot be denied. And it is the object of the following paper to show at least in part—what it was, and to what authors in particular it was due. No attempt will here be made to go beyond the two writers whose influence on him was, on the whole, the strongest and most fruitful. These are Goethe and Fichte. Much, no doubt, might be said of Richter; but it would require more space than it is here possible to give. Something might also be said about Schiller, the first of the Germans with whom Carlyle made acquaintance, and the first of whom he wrote. But there are two reasons for not entering here on this branch of the subject. The first is that it has been exhaustively discussed by Herr Küchler. 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.
I
The first place must inevitably be given to Goethe. His was the greatest mind before which the rebellious spirit of Carlyle ever bowed with the reverence of a disciple; and his influence upon that spirit was far deeper and more searching than any other. It was a strange stroke of irony that brought the Scot under the wand of the German. In temper and character they were about as different as it is possible for two men to be. We might as well compare a volcano in eruption to a star. 'In Goethe's mind,' writes Carlyle himself, 'the first aspect that strikes us is its calmness, then its beauty; a deeper inspection reveals to us its vastness and unmeasured strength.' The latter statement could have been made of Carlyle only with a hundred qualifications; the former could never have been made at all. And when from temperament we turn to matters of character and conviction, the difference seems only to grow deeper. 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. He held the outward life to be far less important than the inward, the actual deeds of a man than the spirit which prompted and lies behind them. And it is not ​altogether a misconstruction to sum up his creed in the familiar lines—
He said, 'The end is everywhere; 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 this is none the less true if, as has often been said, his intellect worked rather by intuition than by deliberate processes of reasoning, and if the results of his thought were embodied in imaginative, rather than in strictly logical, shape. No mistake could be greater than to confound reason with argument; and it was one of the main tasks of Carlyle, as of his German masters before him, to crusade against the confusion. And this brings us to the second consideration which, throughout our inquiry, must be carefully borne in mind. Not only had Carlyle an exceptionally keen intellect, but he had also, almost in spite of himself, much of the temper of a poet. He might suspect Art, as Plato suspected it, on moral, and even on intellectual, grounds. But, like Plato, he was, at any rate in his earlier days, peculiarly open to its charm. In the words of Plato—and it is difficult not to suppose that, when he wrote them, the philosopher was thinking, half remorsefully, of himself—he 'fell an easy prey' to its enchantments. This, of course, means that to describe Carlyle as a Puritan is only half, or less than half, the truth; that his nature, so far from being simple, was strangely blended; that he was not only prophet, but poet and thinker as well.
​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'. 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.
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 ​creative, to which he habitually turns. To this general rule one startling exception must be made. If there is one work of Goethe's which stands out of relation to the moral, and even the intellectual, problems of man's life, it is the Helena, the third Act of the second part of Faust. Yet this is just the work to which Carlyle has given a closer study than to any other. And his Essay—which includes a short account of the first part, all, in fact, that had hitherto been published—still remains one of the best things yet written upon this baffling subject. The reason for this departure from his general practice is clearly that Helena had but just appeared (1827), and that the Foreign Review was bound to take notice of it.
This, however, is the only exception. And in the Essay on Goethe—which belongs to the same year (1828) no reader can have failed to notice that the whole space is given to a survey of the novels—Werther, the Lehrjahre, and the Wanderjahre; that the dramas—Faust, Tasso, Iphigenie—are only mentioned incidentally; and that the lyrics, save the few included in the Lehrjahre, are altogether neglected. Of the few lyrics which seem to have printed themselves indelibly on Carlyle's spirit, one is Loge—'Des Maurer's Wesen gleicht dem Menschen'—and that, apart from its personal appeal to the mason's son, is among the most directly ethical poems which sprang from the genius of Goethe. Another is the song of the Earth-spirit in Faust; and, considering that nowhere else could Carlyle have found so exact an expression of his own religious creed, it would have been strange indeed had it been otherwise. There are other moral and religious lyrics for instance, Das Gottliche and Gott und Welt—of which one might have expected to find mention. But, save for a probable allusion to the opening lines of the latter, it is doubtful whether any reference to ​them is to be found in the published writings of Carlyle. There is, of course, no need to suppose that Carlyle was not keenly awake to the distinctively poetic side of Goethe's genius. We have seen that there is every reason to believe the contrary. But it is no accident that, in what professes to be a general estimate of the poet's powers, he should say so little about it. And it is clear that, on the whole, he was much less concerned with the form, than with the substance, of Goethe's writings; that he was much more interested to show what was the lesson which the poet had to teach to his generation than what were the springs, or even the noblest examples, of the imaginative delight to be drawn from his poetry. That Carlyle did a great work in literary criticism, as in other fields, is not to be denied. But never was there a critic whose standards of judgement were, in the ordinary sense, so little literary.
What, then, was it that Carlyle conceived Goethe to have taught his generation? What was the 'open secret' which he believed the German poet to have once more revealed to those who had eyes to see it? Here again, the answer is not free from difficulties. Carlyle himself, it will be remembered, expressly declines to give it. It is to be gathered, therefore, not from any explicit or formal statement, but from scattered hints, and by inferences that may fairly be ​drawn from those writings which were avowedly composed, to a great extent, under Goethe's influence. 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. That he never mentions Die Wahlverwandschaften in this connexion, may seem strange. For nowhere did Goethe paint contemporary life so vividly; and nowhere did he deal so trenchantly with the kind of problem which that life has let loose. The probable reason for this silence is that the critic himself was repelled by the relentless candour of the portraiture; or, if this be an unkind suspicion, that he thought it impolitic to arouse the hue and cry of British respectability.
Yet, in spite of this significant omission, it remains true that Carlyle believed it to be the first and most obvious task of the poet to represent, though in representing to idealize, the outward life and conditions of his own time; and that in the work of Goethe he saw a more resolute endeavour to fulfil this task than in that of any contemporary poet. That he was just to other poets, that he made any serious attempt to recognize the great work that Wordsworth, for instance, had accomplished in this matter, is not to be maintained. But that the task is high, that it is among the highest which the poet can set before him, is surely true. And it is true ​also that Goethe had not only undertaken it but performed it. Werther and the Lehrjahre on the one hand, Hermann und Dorothea upon the other, are instances which Carlyle might justly appeal to in proof of his assertion. 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; that all grace and charm has departed from our life; and that, in this as in other matters, our God is an 'absentee God', withdrawn from a world which he no longer recognizes to be good? Would it not be at once more noble and more 'practical' if the poet were to 'take his stand on the ground of universal humanity; and through all the complex, dispiriting, mean, yet tumultuous influences of these trivial, jeering, withered, unbelieving days to make his light shine before men, that it might beautify even our "rag-gathering age" with some beams of that mild, divine splendour, which had long left us, the very possibility of which was denied?' And is not this 'the state of the case with regard to Goethe?'
But, if Carlyle laid much stress on the poet's genius for painting the external conditions of modern life, he laid still more on his power of rendering its inward experience and struggles. Here it is plain that all for which the critic cared most deeply was at stake. In his view it was the chief function of the artist not merely to reproduce, but also to interpret, the experience of his own day; through its seeming triviality to make men realize its hidden worth, its ​inherent capacity for being touched to issues of truth, beauty, and nobility. 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; and it may be—though this was yet more flagrantly unjust—for Keats also. 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. And it is because he held Goethe to have achieved these two ends—in particular, the second—more completely than any poet since Shakespeare, that his admiration for him was so unbounded.
All this—at least, as applied by Carlyle—involves a wider departure from the former position than might, at first sight, seem to be the case. Carlyle no longer insists that the poet should start from the outward conditions of his own time. So long as the inward life and spiritual conflicts of the present be, in any sense, the real theme, he is content that the outward setting, the material framework, should be taken from the past. In this spirit, he is willing to accept Faust—he is even willing to accept Tasso or Iphigenie—as fulfilling the necessities of the case. So far as Faust is concerned, this may readily be admitted. The story may be mediaeval; but the spirit of the piece is manifestly modern. It is the world-weariness of Faust rather than his magic, his ​struggles for spiritual freedom rather than his compact with the devil, on which the imagination is throughout fastened. In the case of the other two plays, it might be harder to justify the critic, did not the poet, by subtle suggestion, make it clear that each in its several way is a reflection of his own actual experience, an imaginative symbol of the storm through which he, and others like him, had passed before entering into calm. Yet, even with this allowance, it remains doubtful whether Carlyle indeed saves his consistency; still more doubtful whether he does not make loopholes for Goethe which he denies to Coleridge or Keats.
But it is time to ask: What were the ideas which, in his view, inspired the imaginative creations of Goethe, and through the imagination struck home to the heart and spirit of the reader? They were, it would seem, partly moral and partly religious. In either case, they are ultimately involved in what has already been said about Goethe's attitude towards life and experience, as that attitude presented itself to the mind of his Scottish disciple.
The 'mild wisdom' with which Goethe accepts the facts of life, the tolerance with which he not only accepts but welcomes all forms of human character—the 'scepticism of Jarno' as well as the 'polished manhood of Lothario', the 'gay animal vivacity of Philine' no less than the 'mystic, ethereal, almost spiritual nature of Mignon'—this, in itself, implied a whole range of ideas which Carlyle, almost in spite of himself, had schooled himself to admire, and strove hard to make his own. To the human tolerance of Goethe, at least in his more serious moments, he doubtless never attained. Even in the first fervour of his homage, nature and early training were too strong for him. And in later years, when the spell of Goethe had largely lost its hold, he must be admitted to have abandoned the struggle altogether. But in his lighter vein and when he was willing to surrender ​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. 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; 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'.
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.
​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. In ​this case, however, there was a further reason why restatement should be necessary. Since the time of Locke, the drift both of speculation and of popular thought had persistently gone to explain away the very idea of duty. In speculation, the tide had been stayed by Kant. But it required a whole generation of poets and others, speaking not in terms of art but in the plain vernacular, before the abstractions of the philosopher could become the common property of the people. And among that band of poets and thinkers both Goethe and Carlyle did a memorable work. It remains true that the two men were in reality working upon different lines; that, while Carlyle wrote in the spirit of Christianity, and even asceticism, Goethe, with many modifications, of which the most significant is the worship of sorrow, reverted to the larger and more human creed which we associate with the Greeks.
In the field of moral ideas, therefore, the chief importance of Goethe, so far as Carlyle was concerned, lay in the wide tolerance of his outlook upon life; in his steady resolve to paint life, and the whole of life, as he saw it around him, touching even the shadiest sides of it into some measure of beauty, and never allowing the outward conditions of man's lot to blind him to their inward bearing and significance. To a less degree, it lay in the stress he placed upon duty and self-sacrifice. For these are principles which, whatever form they may have taken in the mind of the poet himself, were ultimately derived from Christianity; and, as we have seen, they appear under a far more Christian shape in Carlyle than in his master.
It remains to consider the religious ideas for which the younger writer was indebted to the elder. These may roughly be summed up under the one word, Pantheism. It is clear that before he came to the study of Goethe and other German writers, Carlyle had already thrown off all belief in the supernatural, and consequently in the historic creed of ​Christendom. One reading of Gibbon—for the ground was already prepared—had been enough to sweep away all effective belief in revealed religion; and the process then begun was completed by the influence of Hume, Voltaire, and the Encyclopaedists. This, however, was a merely negative result. And it was owing to the German writers—above all, to Goethe and Fichte—that he was able to work his way to a more spiritual creed; that he was able once more to find an intellectual basis for the religious instincts which were among the strongest and deepest things in his nature.
It was probably through the imagination, rather than by any purely intellectual process, that Carlyle first reached the ideas which, in this matter, were to remain with him to the end. And his imagination was first stirred by the poetry of Goethe. In such lyrics as the Song of the Earth-Spirit in Faust, or the opening hymn of Gott und Welt—in such imaginative prose as the passage about the three kinds of reverence in the Wanderjahre—he found the aptest and most pregnant expression for the thoughts which were dimly working in his own mind, but which, save for the imaginative appeal of Goethe's creations, might never have taken solid and definite shape. To conceive of God as working only in and through the world as we know it, to conceive of nature as the 'living garment of God', and of man as capable of becoming the highest revelation of His spirit, this was the 'natural supernaturalism' which seemed to satisfy both his intellect and his religious instincts, to reconcile his respect for the reasoned truths of science with his haunting fear that, if the world of sense were indeed all, the deepest cravings of man's nature—in the last resort, the very springs of his moral activity—would be dried up. And it was because Goethe appeared to hold the scales even between the world of sense and the world of spirit, between the seen world of which alone we have definite 'knowledge' and the ​unseen which we 'dimly divine', that Carlyle was ready to hail him as not only the greatest poet, but also the greatest teacher, of his generation. The ideas which Goethe clothed in imaginative force were, at the same time, expounded in terms of reasoned argument by Kant and Fichte. To both of these, especially to Fichte, Carlyle was largely indebted. But, in the first instance, his obligation was not so much to the philosophers as to the poet.
II
The speculative foundation of all Carlyle's teaching—'the theory,' as Emerson said, 'of all his rhetoric'—is to be sought ultimately in the German philosophers of the previous generation. Few writers of imaginative prose have been more steeped in metaphysical thought than the author of Sartor. And wherever that thought has left its mark, there we may be very sure that, in the last resort, it is traceable either to Fichte or, in a less degree, to his master Kant.
In the first instance, no doubt, Carlyle is a great man of letters; a master of style, a poet working with the intellectual tools of the humorist and observer. In the eyes of the future—and to the younger generation that future has already become the present—this will probably be his chief title to fame. But to his own day, he was above all a thinker; a prophet charged with a direct message to the understanding and reason of his hearers. No one whose memory goes back to the sixties and seventies—still less any one who can recall the forties and fifties—of last century will be disposed to dispute that statement. And if we ask ourselves what precisely it was that Carlyle contributed to the thought and intellectual outlook of his time, the answer ​is ready on the instant. He found a materialist and utilitarian philosophy in possession of the field. He threw himself single-handed against all its forces. He faced them with a raking fire of criticism and contempt. And when the smoke of battle had cleared off, it was evident that he had inflicted heavy loss upon the enemy; and, what is yet more important, that he had compelled his countrymen to reconsider their verdict, to recognize that materialism does not suffice to explain the tangled web of our experience, to own that the last word of wisdom was not with the living statue of Condillac, nor with the felicific calculus of Bentham.
It is of course true that a whole generation of poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley—had, in a sense, been before him on the path; and that no one who, thanks either to instinct or reflection, had comprehended the spirit of their work could possibly have rested content with the materialist creed. 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; or rather that no injustice may be done to men like Burke or Coleridge that he was the first to do so on grounds absolutely disinterested, entirely free from any ulterior ends, whether political or religious. And no one familiar with the facts will deny that the armoury from which he drew his weapons for the challenge was the 'transcendental philosophy', as remodelled and revolutionized by Fichte.
For Kant himself, Carlyle always professed, and ​manifestly felt, the greatest reverence. But it must be confessed that the sketch of the Kantian philosophy, attempted in the second of his Essays, is little better than a travesty of the original. And this, unfortunately, is the only passage in which he speaks any length of the man who stands at the fountain-head of modern philosophy. It is possible that he had learned far more from Kant than would be gathered from his exposition. It is certain that he apologizes for 'the loose and popular manner in which he must here speak of these things'; and he was plainly in mortal terror of casting his pearls before swine. Yet, when every allowance has been made, his account of Kant's doctrine remains extremely superficial and inaccurate. The one definite conception he seems to have carried away from it is the famous distinction between the 'understanding' and the 'reason'; and his version of that, it is certain, would have been vehemently repudiated by Kant. It is, in fact, little better than the 'Coleridgian moonshine' of which he was to make immortal scorn in the Life of Sterling.
Nevertheless, it is hardly to be believed that he was not deeply influenced by Kant; and that, both on metaphysical and on moral grounds. Of all speculative doctrines, there is none which appealed so strongly to the imagination of Carlyle as that of the ideality of Space and Time. And this, though common to all the great thinkers of Germany, was, in a special sense, the property—as it was the discovery—of Kant. In default of clear evidence to the contrary, it is therefore natural to suppose that it came to Carlyle not through any intermediate channel, but direct from the source. And never did imaginative writer make more magnificent use of a metaphysical idea. 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. And he can hardly have failed to see that he had here the reasoned justification of a faith which, without such justification, would have been little better than a blind instinct.
In turning from Kant to Fichte we pass at once from surmise to certainty. If there is one thing clear in the mental history of Carlyle, it is the vastness of his debt to Fichte. Whether in the speculative ideas which lay at the base of his whole outlook upon life, or in the political theories which, as time went on, came to bulk more and more largely in his published writings—whether in Sartor Resartus or in Heroes and Hero-worship, whether in the Miscellanies or in Frederick—he was always, freely indeed but none the less certainly, building upon Fichte.
Here, however, a distinction must be made. 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; and this, although it belongs to the close of his life, can hardly be described as a popular book. It must be remembered, however, on the one hand, that the Staatslehre is far less rigorous in its method than the earlier writings; and, on the other hand, that, though the doctrine of Heroes is more explicitly stated in the Staatslehre than in any other of Fichte's treatises, it is still found—as least in germ and by implication—in the ​popular lectures, Das Wesen des Gelehrten and others, which we know to have been the main source of Carlyle's inspiration.
On the whole, therefore, it may be said that it was the popular rather than the scientific writings of Fichte to which Carlyle turned for guidance; and that it was the later, rather than the earlier, developments of Fichte's system that appealed most strongly both to his reason and his imagination. This, indeed, was only to be expected. He had little turn, and still less care, for analysis. What he sought was a principle which should enable him to read the conflicting facts of experience in a new light, to believe that he had grasped the unity which lay behind them, above all to win a new faith in place of that which he had been driven to abandon, and, through that new faith, a new strength for action and endurance.
Now this is just what the earlier system of Fichte—in which everything centres, or appears to centre, round the individual—was little likely to supply. Its form is abstruse. In matter and substance, it is still hampered by the individualist preconceptions from which it is struggling to escape. On the other hand, the later and more popular treatises put into the hands of Carlyle exactly the weapons which he required. He found there a creed which, while setting the outward world and the facts of outward experience in a quite secondary place, at the same time gave them a dignity and a religious significance which they had never had for him before. 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. And in the double light of this creed—in the reflected light which it shed upon the outward world no ​less than in the direct light which it recognized in man himself—he found the new faith, and the new motive to action and patience, of which he was in search.
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. 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. 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; so that the literary man of one century is only by mediation and reinterpretation applicable to the wants of another. 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.'
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. And as well in the Essays as in Sartor the influence of Fichte is apparent. In the former, as Mazzini said, 'the standard of the Ideal is unfurled at least as boldly' as in the subsequent, and more ambitious, writings of the author; and to those who have any acquaintance with German philosophy, the standard under which Carlyle fights is manifestly that of Fichte. The same is true, still more obviously, of Sartor. The doctrine of 'the Everlasting Yea', of 'Natural Supernaturalism', of 'Organic Filaments', of the seen world as the 'time-vesture' of the unseen and eternal, all these are evidently Carlyle's version of the idealism of Fichte. And these are the doctrines which lie at the root of the whole 'Philosophy of Clothes'. And, however much they may have subsequently sunk beneath the surface, they are the doctrines which continued to lie at the root of Carlyle's teaching to the very end.
That they did sink beneath the surface, must at once be admitted. And that his conscience was not quite easy on the matter, that he reproached himself with the 'difficulty' he found 'in getting his poor message'—'things I imperatively need still to say'—'delivered to the world in this epoch,' is abundantly clear from an unfinished fragment, to which he gave the name of Spiritual Optics, written in 1852, and published in his Life.
'The effects of optics' he writes, 'in this strange camera obscura of our existence are most of all singular. The grand centre of the modern revolution of ideas is even this we begin to have a notion that all this' (i. e. the belief in miracles) 'is the effect of optics, and that the intrinsic fact is very different from our old conception of it. Not less "miraculous", not less divine, but with an altogether totally new (or hitherto unconceived) species of divineness; a divineness lying much nearer home than formerly; a divineness that does not come from Judaea, from Olympus, Asgard, Mount Meru, but is in man himself, in the heart of every one born of man.'
​The words may be little more than a faint echo of what he had said, a score of years earlier, in Sartor. But the faith that lies behind them is the same. And the words themselves, suggested as they are in all probability by a famous passage of Kant, are a significant reminder that, in the first instance, this faith was drawn from the teaching of Kant and the other writers, whether philosophers or poets, of Germany.
That Carlyle never succeeded in 'getting his poor message fully delivered to the world'—that he never explained, directly and unmistakably, all that, to his own mind, was involved in 'the Exodus from Houndsditch'—is deeply to be regretted. But the reason is plain. It is that, Sartor once completed, he was irresistibly drawn into the more pressing problems of practical affairs; that his mind came more and more to be fastened upon matters of action and of social or political reform. These are the problems with which he chiefly concerned himself after the first stage of his literary career. And on these he has left a mark perhaps even deeper than that which he stamped on the more speculative problems with which he started. Can we say that here too he was influenced by the Germans? Is it true that in his treatment of social, as of intellectual, questions he owed any serious debt to Fichte?
The importance of Carlyle in the history of political and social thought is, firstly, that he was among the earliest in this country to revolt against the individualist theory of society; and secondly, that incensed by what he regarded as the incompetence of democracy, he took refuge in the right of the strong man, the hero, to guide and control democracy for its good. The former principle is that which stands in the forefront of his earlier utterances on these ​matters, those which are to be found in Sartor, and, to some extent, in the French Revolution. The latter principle is that which underlies the whole of his later works, from the Lectures on Heroes (1840) to Frederick the Great. Round these two principles may be grouped all, or nearly all, of what Carlyle taught upon political and social matters; from his onslaught on individualist economics to his defence of negro slavery and his attack on parliamentary government for the extension of the franchise.
Now it is manifest that in these questions any writer—and Carlyle, with his strong passions and keen sense of picturesque detail, perhaps more than most—must of necessity be more closely bound by the accidents of local circumstance than he would be in dealing with purely speculative problems. 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.
The history of the two men in this matter offers a curious resemblance. Fichte, as will be manifest to any one who reads his early work in defence of the French Revolution (1793), had started from the most extreme form of individualism. But deeper thought, and the gradual widening of his speculative outlook, had brought him step by step to principles the very opposite of those with which he had begun. The stages by which this change was brought about may be traced in a succession of remarkable writings, of which the most crucial are the Grundlage des Naturrechts (1796) and the Staatslehre, published in 1813, after the author's death. The former marks the beginning of his ​emancipation from the individualist theory; the latter, its completion. And between them fall two treatises of a more popular nature: Die Grundlage des gegenwärtigen Zeitaltern (1804-6) and the famous Reden an die deutsche Nation (1807-8). It is in the two last and in the Staatslehre that Fichte works out the collectivist theory which replaced the individualism of his youth.
Much the same ground was traversed by Carlyle. It is clear that he too started as an individualist. And he too though more rapidly than Fichte, broke roughly with the tradition in which he had been reared. The original impulse to this change came, in all probability, less from any outward influence than from his own reflection and the condition of the time. He had the keenest eye for social wrongs; and the moment he began to think seriously on such subjects, it must have been abundantly clear to him that, great as were the services which it had rendered to men, the worst wrongs of all—the enslavement of labour to capital, for example—were just the wrongs which individualism was powerless to cure. 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. But the same argument would hold good of his metaphysical and religious convictions. Yet there we have seen that the change, to which he was doubtless impelled by temperament, was unquestionably both hastened and guided by the influence of the Germans. The probability, therefore, is that in political theory, as in other matters, external influence—and once again, the ​influence of the Germans—was an important factor. And considering that, of all the philosophers Fichte was the one who appealed most strongly to Carlyle, considering that political speculation bulks far more largely in his work than in that of any contemporary writer, considering finally that he is a shining instance of the change from individualism to the opposite theory which Carlyle himself was busily working out, we can hardly be wrong in inferring that the influence of Fichte was a vital element in the process.
More than an inference this can hardly be. For the collectivism of Carlyle in its earlier form—that which appears in Sartor—has little, or nothing, that is distinctive. And it would be hazardous to see in it any trace of the doctrines which are peculiar to Fichte. When, however, we turn to the more distinctive theory of his later years, the matter is beyond possibility of doubt. The doctrine of Heroes was drawn direct from Fichte. The proof of this will be clear to any one who reads between the lines of Das Wesen des Gelehrten. It is written large in the more systematic exposition of the Staatslehre.
A reference to the argument of the latter, enforced by the quotation of one passage from it, will set this beyond dispute. Having established the principle that the State exists only for the planting and growth of the 'empire of freedom', and having defined freedom as 'obedience to the law of Right' or the 'moral law', understood not as a law given from without but as a vital principle gradually unfolding itself from within, Fichte is led to ask: By what means is the law of Right to be established? is it possible that it should be founded without compulsion? and, if not, how is it to be reconciled with the 'empire of freedom'? 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. But this, so far from being contrary to his rational will, his true freedom, is in truth the very means of securing them; and it is the only means. 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; and that is the only will of which it is right to take account.
'Our opponents,' he continues, 'speak of the natural man, and the natural, instinctive will. But this will has absolutely no right to give itself outward expression. It must be suppressed wherever it shows itself; and every man who has the power has the right to carry out this suppression. 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.
'To compel men to a state of Right, to put them under the yoke of Right by force is not only the right, but the sacred duty, of every man who has the knowledge and the power. 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. This idea, in the meantime, he has in the name of them all, as their representative, in virtue of the grace of God which works in him. The truth of this idea he must take upon his own conscience. He is the Master, armed with compulsion and appointed by God.'
Here is the doctrine of the heaven-sent Hero with a vengeance. All that Carlyle had to do was to strip it of the qualifications with which it is only just to remember that Fichte surrounded it; to translate it from the language of ​the 'theatre' to that of the 'market-place' and the pulpit, to adorn it with a wealth of passionate imagery and to apply it to the conditions of his own time and his own country. To this task he devoted all the powers of his genius; and the result was to give the doctrine a popularity which Fichte himself could hardly have foreseen. No doubt, the work of Carlyle was aided by circumstances. But the circumstances also, no less than the doctrine which they were taken to illustrate, were furnished, appropriately enough, by Germany. And if, in a country where conditions were favourable, a man of 'blood and iron' had not arisen to put Carlyle's theories into action, it may be doubted whether they would ever have won the hearing which, for some years, they enjoyed. 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. Here are his words, as they stand in the first writing which gave any true notion of his powers: 'Above all, the "mysticism" of Fichte might astonish us. The cold, colossal, adamantine spirit, standing erect and clear, like a Cato Major among degenerate men; fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discoursed of Beauty and Virtue in the groves of Academe! Our reader has seen some words of Fichte: are those like words of a mystic? We state Fichte's character, as it is known and admitted by men of all parties among the Germans, when we say that so robust an intellect, a soul so calm, so lofty, so massive and immovable, has not mingled ​in philosophical discussion since the time of Luther. We figure his motionless look, had he heard this charge of mysticism. For the man rises before us, amid contradiction and debate, like a granite mountain amid clouds and wind. Ridicule of the best that could be commanded has been already tried against him; but it could not avail. What was the wit of a thousand wits to him? The cry of a thousand choughs assaulting that old cliff of granite: seen from the summit, these, as they winged the midway air, showed scarce so gross as beetles, and their cry was seldom even audible. Fichte's opinions may be true or false; but his character, as a thinker, can be slightly valued only by such as know it ill; and as a man approved both by action and suffering, in his life and in his death, he ranks with a class of men who were common only in better ages than ours.'
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.
C. E. Vaughan.
* ↑ See Froude, History of Carlyle's Life, i. p. 131.
* ↑ See Anglia, vol. xxvi.
* ↑ Essay on Goethe: Miscellanies, i. p. 287 (Library edition).
* ↑ Essay on Goethe, Miscellanies, i. p. 287.
* ↑ State of German Literature, ib. pp. 76-8.
* ↑ This is quoted in Sartor Resartus, III. ix. (Circumspective), and, in full, I. viii.
* ↑ The 'absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and seeing it go' (Sartor, II. vii, The Everlasting No) may be an echo of Was war' ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse! Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse! (Gott und Welt, Proœmion). It may be observed that a verse of Goethe's Künstlerlied—Wie Natur im Vielgebilde—is quoted in Miscellanies, i. p. 79 (State of German Literature). From other references—not so many as might have been expected—may be selected one to the well-known 'Im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen Resolut zu leben' (Generalbeichte) in the letter to John Carlyle of Feb. 16, 1832.
* ↑ 'My greatly most delightful reading is where some Goethe musically teaches me.' Extract from Journal, Life, i. 81.
* ↑ Miscellanies, i. p. 287 (Goethe).
* ↑ It is mentioned, but without a word of appraisement, or the smallest indication of its scope and purport, in Miscellanies, i. p. 373 (Preface to the translation of the Wanderjahre). It is, he remarks with secret thankfulness, the only one of Goethe's novels which had not yet been translated into English.
* ↑ Essay on Goethe, Miscellanies, i. p. 267; see also pp. 264, 293.
* ↑ See Preface to the Translation of Wilhelm Meister.
* ↑ Just before the words 'Hier oder nirgend ist Amerika' occur these: 'Wie ist mir das Nächste so werth, so theuer geworden!' (Lehrjahre, vii. 3). 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.
* ↑ 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 (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).
* ↑ See the opening pages of The Hero as Priest (Lectures on Heroes, iv).
* ↑ Reminiscences, i. 102.
* ↑ See Das Göttliche.
* ↑ A reserve must be made in favour of Schelling. But this is a subject too intricate for the space available.
* ↑ See, in particular, Natural Supernaturalism (Sartor Resartus, III. viii).
* ↑ Miscellanies, i. pp. 68-9. The reference, as Carlyle tells us in Heroes, is to Fichte's Das Wesen des Gelehrten.
* ↑ Life, ii. pp. 10, 11, 15, 16.
* ↑ Preface to the second edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, where Kant compares his own work to that of Copernicus.
* ↑ He may also have been deterred by reluctance to wound the faith of others.
* ↑ There is a translation of Fichte's Popular Works by W. Smith (Trübner). It contains The Nature of the Scholar, The Vocation of Man, and The Way to the Blessed Life.
* ↑ See Lecture viii: Vom Regenten.
* ↑ Staatslehre: Fichte's Werke, I. iv. p. 436.
* ↑ They are the words quoted on p. 188.
* ↑ State of German Literature: Miscellanies, i. pp. 89-90.