THE

II.

GOETHE AND CARLYLE

HE German Goethe-worship is usually regarded in Great Britain with alien and unsympathetic eyes. It suffices for most English critics that Goethe was not, according to their standard, a good man ; that he was not faithful in his relations with women, and that he was not, in the accepted sense, a patriot during his country's struggle to throw off the French yoke. We might as well concede that these charges contain a modicum of truth. As the defence which the Goethe-worshipper would set up would have no weight with the great public, because it would have to appeal to sentiments which belong only to a small minority, it is far better to admit that in his efforts at intellectual enfranchisement Goethe ignored all laws that seemed to interfere with his supreme aim of self-development. An elaborate apology for him, addressed to the English Philistine, has been published by the late George H. Lewes, under the title, "The Life of Goethe," which gives us valuable information as to what George H. Lewes would have done, if he had been Goethe, in the various relations of the latter's life. I know but one Englishman who

understood Goethe, and he (to use Hegel's phrase) misunderstood him; that is, he had vivid glimpses of him, saw him in part very clearly, but in other and very essential respects misapprehended him. That man was Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle, too, commenced in an apologetic tone, but stated more satisfactorily than Lewes the positive contents of his hero's life and the lessons which were to be derived from it. When Bayard Taylor called upon him, a few years before his death, and asked him his opinion of Goethe, he answered with his most rasping Scotch accent: "That man was my salvation." In none of his essays on Goethe has Carlyle so plainly shown what he meant by this strong expression as in the eleventh lecture, on "Periods of European Culture," a most interesting fragment of which is published in Professor Dowden's "Transcripts and Studies." He there gives his conception of the message-the intellectual gospel-which German literature brought him, and which for half a century he tried to explain and to impress upon the British public. But until this day no other prophet has arisen in Great Britain who has thought that gospel worth commenting upon in the same spirit which characterized Carlyle. The Chelsea sage was by nature a hero worshipper, but so ruthless and self-assertive in his intercourse with his idols that he often remodelled them to suit himself before deeming them worthy of his worship. And so, though he was scarcely aware of it, he made a Goethe of his own who, to be sure, had much in common with the original, but was yet es

sentially a different being.

Rarely was a critical observation wider of the mark than Carlyle's: that Goethe leaves no more trace of himself in his writings than does Shakespeare. Apart from the fact that Goethe has himself remarked that his writings are one continued confession, there is in every one of his novels and dramas a mass of that sort of material which no imagination invents, however ingenious and fertile. There is on every page inferential evidence that we are dealing with more or less thinly disguised autobiography. "Dichtung und Wahrheit" was, to be sure, not published (in its completed form) until after Goethe's death, and Carlyle had probably more excuse for his error than a man would have who should repeat it at the present day. But the fact is incontestable that Carlyle's essays contain as much of Carlyle as of Goethe. He was too gnarled and thorny a personality, too little pliable, too bristling with Scotch pugnacity to be a good interpreter of anybody. And from Goethe he was intellectually and spiritually more remote than he dreamed of. How could that modern prophet, full of humility, despair, and fiery denunciation, comprehend the calm and self-poised secularism of the German poet? How could his gloomy Scotch theology be brought into a sympathetic relation with the sunny and cheerful paganism of his hero? Their recently published correspondence, which was expected to furnish a clew to their relations, deals largely with externalities, exchanges of gifts and small courtesies, and comments on books and authors.

Goethe, indeed, is full of friendliness, sends greetings and, what is to me delightfully characteristic, asks for a drawing of Carlyle's house at Craigenputtock, because, he says, he does not like, when he visits his friends in thought, to let his fancy hover in vacuum. He is even particular to know whether the house lies on the right or the left bank of the river Nith. When Carlyle lived in Edinburgh, he writes, he never ventured to imagine his surroundings; for how could he hope "to find a quiet friend in that steeply towering city, which, in spite of frequent pictures, continued to perplex him?" Carlyle, who is visibly touched by this minute interest (which, I fancy, he scarcely attributed to its right. source), replies at considerable length and in a freer and more confidential tone than we find in any of his previous letters. Altogether he reveals himself here in a vivid light; and it is a frank, rugged soul of sterling stuff which he shows to the serene, clearsighted old Jupiter in Weimar. How fine is this, for instance, and what a ring of sincerity there is in it: "I came hither (to Craigenputtock) purely for this one reason: that I might not have to write for bread, might not be tempted to tell lies for money."

And still nobler this passage appears to me in conjunction with what precedes and what follows. The temptation must have presented itself to show the extent of his sacrifice in forsaking the brilliant literary society of Edinburgh and burying himself here on a bleak and melancholy moor fifteen miles from a town and "six miles from any individual

of the formally visiting class." But Carlyle scorns such weakness. He describes Craigenputtock with a desire to show its best side, and he makes the most of such poor attractions as the place affords. How different Craigenputtock appears in the letters of his wife to Miss Stodart, of Edinburgh. There it is described (in the writer's pleasant moods) as being "in the midst of a pretty extensive peat-moor;' and its attractions consist in occasional visits from wild hares and black-cocks; but in her gloomier moments, though she strives to keep a brave heart, she refers to it as 66 a desert" belonging to "the class of bog and hill scenery, and has little but heath and winstone and peat-pits to recommend it." The following passage in Mrs. Carlyle's letter to Miss Stodard of October 10, 1832, shows plainly what a price her husband paid for his exemption from the necessity of writing for bread and "the temptation to tell lies for money: "

"The grim prospect of another winter in this solitude is too frightful for my husband, who finds that it is absolutely essential, for carrying on not only his craft, but his existence, to hear from time to time a little human speech."

Under such circumstances the frequent letters and messages from Goethe must have been doubly grateful. In recalling, forty years later, the joy he experienced at the receipt of one of these Olympian missives (of June 25, 1829), he expresses himself in this wise: "Pure white the fine big sheet itself, still purer and nobler the meaning, all in it as if mutely