For ten years
he had been engaged in constant and severe
spiritual wrestlings; his soul, begirt by doubts,
was painfully struggling to be free.
he had been engaged in constant and severe
spiritual wrestlings; his soul, begirt by doubts,
was painfully struggling to be free.
Thomas Carlyle
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Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle; ed. by Charles Eliot
Norton.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832. London and New York, Macmillan and co. , 1887.
http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015030186517
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? Correspondence between Goethe and CarlyleThomas Carlyle
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? ARTES SCIENTIA VERITAS
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? ARTES SCIENTIA VERITAS
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? Cs
CORRESPONDENCE
HKTWKKN
GOETHE AND CARLYLE
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? CORRESPONDENCE
BETWKEN
GOETHE AND CARLYLE
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? CORRESPONDENCE
BETWEEN
GOETHE AND CARLYLE
EDITED BY
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1887
The rifht c/trtuulatien it rutrvtd
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? ? . ? *,.
COPYRIGHT
1887
Bv CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
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? C3
PREFACE
In the following Correspondence the letters of
Goethe have been printed from the originals
now in the possession of Mrs. Alexander
Carlyle. These letters had been done up in
a parcel, and packed away by Carlyle, some
thirty years before his death, in a box which
was afterwards used exclusively for papers
connected with Cromwell. Under these papers
they were buried; Carlyle forgot where he had
put them, and they were not found until the
contents of the box were sorted shortly after
his death.
The letters of Carlyle are printed from a
careful copy of the originals now preserved
in the Goethe Archives at Weimar. These
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? PREFACE
copies were furnished by the gracious per-
mission of H. R. H. the Grand Duchess of
Weimar, to whom for this favour the gratitude
of every reader of this volume is due.
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,
January 1887.
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? INTRODUCTION
Carlyle was in his twenty-ninth year when, in
June 1824, he first wrote to Goethe, sending
him his Translation, then just published, of
Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship. He had
not yet attained to any definite position in the
world of letters; his writing hitherto had been
tentative, much of it mere hackwork, and had
attracted little attention. His name was not
known outside a narrow circle; he had not yet
acquired full possession of his own powers, nor
was he at peace with himself.
For ten years
he had been engaged in constant and severe
spiritual wrestlings; his soul, begirt by doubts,
was painfully struggling to be free. The pre-
dominant tendencies of contemporary English
thought were hateful to him; Philosophy in its
true sense was all but extinct in England; the
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? INTRODUCTION
standard of ideal aims was hardly held high by
any one of the popular writers. Carlyle had
laid aside the creed of his fathers, and, depend-
ent for guidance only upon the strength of his
own moral principles, was adrift without other
chart or compass.
It was in this condition, perplexed and
baffled as to his true path, that Carlyle fell in
with Madame de StaeTs famous book on Ger-
many. His interest was aroused by it. From
her animated,. if somewhat shallow and imper-
fect accounts of the speculations of the living
German Poets and Philosophers, he learned to
look towards Germany for a spiritual light that
he had not found in the modern French and
English writers. 1 He became eager to study
German, that he might investigate for himself.
But German Books and German Masters were
alike scarce in Edinburgh. Edward Irving
1 "I still remember," says Carlyle in his Letter to Goethe
of 3d November 1829, "that it was the desire to read
Werner's Mineralogical Doctrines in the original, that first
set me on studying German; where truly I found a mine,
far different from any of the Freyberg ones! " But it was
Madame de Stael's book that kindled his enthusiasm.
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? INTRODUCTION ix
had given him a dictionary, but a grammar had
to be procured from London.
It happened fortunately that about this time
Carlyle met with a young man named Jar-
dine, who had been his schoolfellow at Annan,
and who was then, in 1819, settled in Edin-
burgh, having returned from Go? ttingen, where
he had resided for a short time as tutor to a
young Irishman. Jardine gave Carlyle some
German lessons in return for lessons in French. 1
Carlyle, writing in 1866, describes Jardine as
"a feeble enough, but pleasant and friendly
creature, with something of skin-deep geniality
even, which marked him for 'harmless master-
ship in the superficial. '" Carlyle made rapid
progress, and was soon able to read German
books. These were procured for him from Ger-
many, by his kind friend Mr. Swan, a merchant
of Kirkcaldy, who had dealings with Hamburg.
"I well remember," writes Carlyle in 1866,
"the arrival of the Schiller Werke sheets at
Mainhill (and my impatience till the Annan
1 See Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle (Macmillan and
Co. , 1886), i. 209, 227.
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? INTRODUCTION
Bookbinder had done with them): they had
come from Lu? beck I perceived. . . . This
Schiller and Archenholtzs Seven-Years War
were my first really German Books. "
Schiller's high, earnest, and yet simple
nature, the ideal purity and elevation of his
works, the free and generous feeling that per-
vades them, no less than the circumstances of
his life, attracted Carlyle. But Schiller's range
was limited, and the longed-for light on the
mystery of life was not to be obtained from
him.
Wilhelm Meister he procured soon afterwards
from the University Library at Edinburgh. In
Goethe he quickly recognised one who could
"reveal many highest things to him," and under
whose teaching his doubts were to melt away,
leaving clear convictions in their stead. In
Goethe's works there was as it were a mirror
which revealed to him the lineaments of his own
genius. Of all the influences that helped Carlyle
to an understanding and mastery of himself,
those exerted by Goethe were the most potent;
and he remained for the rest of Carlyle's life
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? INTRODUCTION
a teacher whom he reverenced. Writing long
afterwards of this period, especially of the year
1826, Carlyle says, "This year I found that I
had conquered all my scepticisms, agonising
doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and
vile and soul-murdering Mud-gods of my
Epoch; had escaped, as from a worse than
Tartarus, with all its Phlegethons and Stygian
quagmires; and was emerging, free in spirit,
into the eternal blue of ether,--where, blessed
be Heaven, I have, for the spiritual part, ever
since lived. . . . What my pious joy and grati-
tude then was, let the pious soul figure. In a
fine and veritable sense, I, poor, obscure, with-
out outlook, almost without worldly hope, had
become independent of the world;--what was
death itself, from the world, to what I had come
through? I understood well what the old
Christian people meant by their 'Conversion,' by
God's Infinite Mercy to them :--I had, in effect,
gained an immense victory; and, for a number
of years, had, in spite of nerves and chagrins,
a constant inward happiness that was quite
royal and supreme; in which all temporal evil
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? xii INTRODUCTION
was transient and insignificant; and which
essentially remains with me still, though far
oftener eclipsed, and lying deeper down, than
then. Once more, thank Heaven for its highest
gift. I then felt, and still feel, endlessly indebted
to Goethe in the business; he, in his fashion, I
perceived, had travelled the steep rocky road
before me,--the first of the moderns. "1
Carlyle, writing to Miss Welsh, 6th April
1823, says: Goethe's "feelings are various as
the hues of Earth and Sky, but his intellect is
the Sun which illuminates and overrules them
all. He does not yield himself to his emotions,
but uses them rather as things for his judgment
to scrutinise and apply to purpose. I think
Goethe the only living model of a great writer.
. . . It is one of my finest day-dreams to see
him ere I die. " And again, 15th April 1824:
"The English have begun to speak about him
of late years; but no light has yet been thrown
upon him, 'no light but only darkness visible. '
The syllables Goethe excite an idea as vague and
1 Carlyle's Reminiscences (Macmillan and Co. , 1887), ii.
179, 180.
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? INTRODUCTION xiii
monstrous as the word Gorgon or Chimcera. "
The needed light was soon to be thrown upon
the Poet and his works.
The first literary use to which Carlyle
turned his knowledge of German was in the
writing of his Life of Schiller} This, begun
in 1822, appeared in the London Magazine in
1823-24; and was printed, as a separate volume,
without Carlyle's name, in the spring of 1825.
In his Preface to the Second Edition (1845),
he speaks of it disparagingly, as a book he
would prefer to suppress; but it is an excellent
piece of work, written with sympathy, simplicity
and clear insight; the best Life of Schiller then
extant, and, in English at any rate, there has
been no better since. It was still only half
finished when he began the translation of
Meisters Apprenticeship,--a book by no means
wholly after his own heart, but which from its
large and genial view of life, from the variety
of observation of human nature recorded in it,
1 Carlyle had indeed written an article on Faust before
this date (New Edinburgh Review, April 1822), but it is a
comparatively crude production, and Carlyle did not consider it
worthy of a place in his Collected Works.
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? INTRODUCTION
and from the picture it afforded of the author's
mind, held him with strong attraction. In
his essay on "Goethe's Works" published just
after Goethe's death {Foreign Quarterly Review,
1832), he says: "Many years ago on finishing
our first perusal of Wilhelm Meister, with a
very mixed sentiment in other respects, we
could not but feel that here lay more insight
into the elements of human nature, and a more
poetically perfect combining of these, than in all
the other fictitious literature of our generation. "
Thirty-four years later, in his Reminiscences of
Edward Irving, he relates how, ''Schiller done. ,
I began [to translate] Wilhelm Meister, a task
I liked perhaps rather better, too scanty as my
knowledge of the element, and even of the
language still was. Two years before, I had
at length, after some repulsions, got into the
heart of Wilhelm Meister, and eagerly read it
through;--my sally out, after finishing, along
the vacant streets of Edinburgh (a windless
Scotch-misty Sunday night) is still vivid to me:
'Grand, surely, harmoniously built together,
far-seeing, wise and true: when, for many
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? INTRODUCTION
years, or almost in my life before, have I read
such a book? ' Which I was now, really in
part as a kind of duty, conscientiously translat-
ing for my countrymen, if they would read it,--
as a select few of them have ever since kept
doing. I finished it the next Spring, . . . "
In 1824, when this correspondence began,
Goethe was seventy-five years old; a hale and
vigorous man. His intellectual interests were
as wide as ever, his curiosity unabated, his
sympathies unchilled by age. His position
had long been unique, and he was now at
the height of his renown. Carlyle's letter
and his translation of Meisters Apprenticeship
gave Goethe pleasure, as the expression of
a genuine admiration coming from a region
from which he had hitherto received little
appreciation or even recognition. The letter
and book were the more welcome as they
seemed to fall in with a project which Goethe
had much at heart at this time, namely, the
bringing about of a better understanding
amongst nations by means of a universal
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? INTRODUCTION
World-Literature,--the establishing of an ex-
change between different countries of their
highest mental products; so that all might
at once share in whatever great intellectual
work any one nation might produce. Thus
would mutual understanding be substituted
for the traditional misconceptions of ignor-
ance; a sense of common obligation arise,
and universal tolerance lead to happier rela-
tions among the various families of men. In
this work, to which his first publications con-
tributed, Carlyle was soon to show himself the
chief agent between Germany and England,
and Goethe soon recognised in him the ablest
of his fellow-workers. 1
1 The influence of Carlyle's writings from 1823 to 1832 in
arousing in England an interest in German literature is hardly
to be over-estimated, whether in its immediate or remote
effects. The following is a list of his writings on German
subjects during these years :--Life of Schiller, 1823-24; Wil-
helm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1824; German Romance, Jean
Paul Friedrich Richter, State of German Literature, 1827;
Werner, Goethe's Helena, Goethe, Heyne, 1828; German
Playwrights, Novalis, 1829 ; Jean Paul's Review of Madame
de Stall's Allemagne, Jean Paul Fricdtich Richter Again,
1830; Luther's Psalm, Schiller, The Nibelungen Lied,
German Literature of the XIV. and XV. Centuries, Taylor's
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? INTRODUCTION xvii
Nearly forty years after Goethe's death,
Carlyle, recalling the events of his early life,
wrote as follows of this Correspondence :--" In
answer to German Romance there had latterly
come an actual long Letter from Weimar, from
the Great Goethe's self, who was evidently
taking interest in me. By and by there arrived,
at Leith, by Hamburg, a little Fir Box (which
still exists here in beautifully transfigured
shape) containing the daintiest collection of
pretty little gifts and memorials to both of us,--
the very arrangement and packing of which we
found to be poetic and a study. Something
of real romance and glory lay for us in this
fine Goethe item. That Leith Box (which I
instantly went down for in person, and tore,
as it were, almost by main force, through the
Custom-house and its formalities, in few hours,
instead of days, and came home with in triumph)
was the first of several such that followed at
due intervals, and of a Correspondence (not
Historic Survey of German Poetry, 1831; Goethe's Portrait,
Schiller, Goethe, and Madame de Stai'l, Death of Goethe, Goethe's
Works, The Tale (Das MiU1rchen), Novelle, 1832.
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? INTRODUCTION
in itself momentous at all, but to us then an
aethereal and quasi-celestial thing), which lasted
steadily till Goethe's death. His Letters, ten
or twelve, perhaps more, are all extant, care-
fully reposited among my pretiosa, but, for
many years past, I know not now where. 1
Pretty gifts of his,--that little steel brooch,
'never to be worn,' so She had vowed, 'except
when a man of genius was present,' etc. etc. " 2
The stimulus and encouragement of Goethe's
sympathy and regard, expressed as they were
in simple, cordial and delightful modes, were
invaluable to Carlyle. They came to him
when he had as yet received no real recogni-
tion from his own people, whose acknowledg-
ment of his worth was slowly and grudgingly
given. For this neglect Goethe's appreciation
and friendship made amends. They confirmed
the young writer's faith in himself. Goethe's
1 The parcel which contained these letters, all carefully
arranged, was labelled, in Carlyle's hand: "Goethe. Tied
up so, perhaps about 1834; shifted now, without opening (12th
January 1852), into another receptacle, with an additional
wrappage. 1'
2 From an unpublished manuscript, written in 1869.
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? INTRODUCTION xix
discriminating eye had discerned what no
other had discovered -- that here was a man
who rested on an original foundation, and had
the capacity to develop in himself the essentials
of what was good and beautiful.
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Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle; ed. by Charles Eliot
Norton.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832. London and New York, Macmillan and co. , 1887.
http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015030186517
Public Domain in the United States, Google-digitized http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us-google
We have determined this work to be in the public domain in the United States of America. It may not be in the public domain in other countries. Copies are provided as a preservation service. Particularly outside of the United States, persons receiving copies should make appropriate efforts to determine the copyright status of the work in their country and use the work accordingly. It is possible that current copyright holders, heirs or the estate of the authors of individual portions of the work, such as illustrations or photographs, assert copyrights over these portions. Depending on the nature of subsequent use that is made, additional rights may need to be obtained independently of anything we can address. The digital images and OCR of this work were produced by Google, Inc. (indicated by a watermark on each page in the PageTurner). Google requests that the images and OCR not be re-hosted, redistributed or used commercially. The images are provided for educational, scholarly, non-commercial purposes.
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? Correspondence between Goethe and CarlyleThomas Carlyle
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? ARTES SCIENTIA VERITAS
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? ARTES SCIENTIA VERITAS
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? Cs
CORRESPONDENCE
HKTWKKN
GOETHE AND CARLYLE
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? CORRESPONDENCE
BETWKEN
GOETHE AND CARLYLE
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? CORRESPONDENCE
BETWEEN
GOETHE AND CARLYLE
EDITED BY
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1887
The rifht c/trtuulatien it rutrvtd
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? ? . ? *,.
COPYRIGHT
1887
Bv CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
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? C3
PREFACE
In the following Correspondence the letters of
Goethe have been printed from the originals
now in the possession of Mrs. Alexander
Carlyle. These letters had been done up in
a parcel, and packed away by Carlyle, some
thirty years before his death, in a box which
was afterwards used exclusively for papers
connected with Cromwell. Under these papers
they were buried; Carlyle forgot where he had
put them, and they were not found until the
contents of the box were sorted shortly after
his death.
The letters of Carlyle are printed from a
careful copy of the originals now preserved
in the Goethe Archives at Weimar. These
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? PREFACE
copies were furnished by the gracious per-
mission of H. R. H. the Grand Duchess of
Weimar, to whom for this favour the gratitude
of every reader of this volume is due.
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,
January 1887.
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? INTRODUCTION
Carlyle was in his twenty-ninth year when, in
June 1824, he first wrote to Goethe, sending
him his Translation, then just published, of
Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship. He had
not yet attained to any definite position in the
world of letters; his writing hitherto had been
tentative, much of it mere hackwork, and had
attracted little attention. His name was not
known outside a narrow circle; he had not yet
acquired full possession of his own powers, nor
was he at peace with himself.
For ten years
he had been engaged in constant and severe
spiritual wrestlings; his soul, begirt by doubts,
was painfully struggling to be free. The pre-
dominant tendencies of contemporary English
thought were hateful to him; Philosophy in its
true sense was all but extinct in England; the
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? INTRODUCTION
standard of ideal aims was hardly held high by
any one of the popular writers. Carlyle had
laid aside the creed of his fathers, and, depend-
ent for guidance only upon the strength of his
own moral principles, was adrift without other
chart or compass.
It was in this condition, perplexed and
baffled as to his true path, that Carlyle fell in
with Madame de StaeTs famous book on Ger-
many. His interest was aroused by it. From
her animated,. if somewhat shallow and imper-
fect accounts of the speculations of the living
German Poets and Philosophers, he learned to
look towards Germany for a spiritual light that
he had not found in the modern French and
English writers. 1 He became eager to study
German, that he might investigate for himself.
But German Books and German Masters were
alike scarce in Edinburgh. Edward Irving
1 "I still remember," says Carlyle in his Letter to Goethe
of 3d November 1829, "that it was the desire to read
Werner's Mineralogical Doctrines in the original, that first
set me on studying German; where truly I found a mine,
far different from any of the Freyberg ones! " But it was
Madame de Stael's book that kindled his enthusiasm.
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? INTRODUCTION ix
had given him a dictionary, but a grammar had
to be procured from London.
It happened fortunately that about this time
Carlyle met with a young man named Jar-
dine, who had been his schoolfellow at Annan,
and who was then, in 1819, settled in Edin-
burgh, having returned from Go? ttingen, where
he had resided for a short time as tutor to a
young Irishman. Jardine gave Carlyle some
German lessons in return for lessons in French. 1
Carlyle, writing in 1866, describes Jardine as
"a feeble enough, but pleasant and friendly
creature, with something of skin-deep geniality
even, which marked him for 'harmless master-
ship in the superficial. '" Carlyle made rapid
progress, and was soon able to read German
books. These were procured for him from Ger-
many, by his kind friend Mr. Swan, a merchant
of Kirkcaldy, who had dealings with Hamburg.
"I well remember," writes Carlyle in 1866,
"the arrival of the Schiller Werke sheets at
Mainhill (and my impatience till the Annan
1 See Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle (Macmillan and
Co. , 1886), i. 209, 227.
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? INTRODUCTION
Bookbinder had done with them): they had
come from Lu? beck I perceived. . . . This
Schiller and Archenholtzs Seven-Years War
were my first really German Books. "
Schiller's high, earnest, and yet simple
nature, the ideal purity and elevation of his
works, the free and generous feeling that per-
vades them, no less than the circumstances of
his life, attracted Carlyle. But Schiller's range
was limited, and the longed-for light on the
mystery of life was not to be obtained from
him.
Wilhelm Meister he procured soon afterwards
from the University Library at Edinburgh. In
Goethe he quickly recognised one who could
"reveal many highest things to him," and under
whose teaching his doubts were to melt away,
leaving clear convictions in their stead. In
Goethe's works there was as it were a mirror
which revealed to him the lineaments of his own
genius. Of all the influences that helped Carlyle
to an understanding and mastery of himself,
those exerted by Goethe were the most potent;
and he remained for the rest of Carlyle's life
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? INTRODUCTION
a teacher whom he reverenced. Writing long
afterwards of this period, especially of the year
1826, Carlyle says, "This year I found that I
had conquered all my scepticisms, agonising
doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and
vile and soul-murdering Mud-gods of my
Epoch; had escaped, as from a worse than
Tartarus, with all its Phlegethons and Stygian
quagmires; and was emerging, free in spirit,
into the eternal blue of ether,--where, blessed
be Heaven, I have, for the spiritual part, ever
since lived. . . . What my pious joy and grati-
tude then was, let the pious soul figure. In a
fine and veritable sense, I, poor, obscure, with-
out outlook, almost without worldly hope, had
become independent of the world;--what was
death itself, from the world, to what I had come
through? I understood well what the old
Christian people meant by their 'Conversion,' by
God's Infinite Mercy to them :--I had, in effect,
gained an immense victory; and, for a number
of years, had, in spite of nerves and chagrins,
a constant inward happiness that was quite
royal and supreme; in which all temporal evil
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? xii INTRODUCTION
was transient and insignificant; and which
essentially remains with me still, though far
oftener eclipsed, and lying deeper down, than
then. Once more, thank Heaven for its highest
gift. I then felt, and still feel, endlessly indebted
to Goethe in the business; he, in his fashion, I
perceived, had travelled the steep rocky road
before me,--the first of the moderns. "1
Carlyle, writing to Miss Welsh, 6th April
1823, says: Goethe's "feelings are various as
the hues of Earth and Sky, but his intellect is
the Sun which illuminates and overrules them
all. He does not yield himself to his emotions,
but uses them rather as things for his judgment
to scrutinise and apply to purpose. I think
Goethe the only living model of a great writer.
. . . It is one of my finest day-dreams to see
him ere I die. " And again, 15th April 1824:
"The English have begun to speak about him
of late years; but no light has yet been thrown
upon him, 'no light but only darkness visible. '
The syllables Goethe excite an idea as vague and
1 Carlyle's Reminiscences (Macmillan and Co. , 1887), ii.
179, 180.
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? INTRODUCTION xiii
monstrous as the word Gorgon or Chimcera. "
The needed light was soon to be thrown upon
the Poet and his works.
The first literary use to which Carlyle
turned his knowledge of German was in the
writing of his Life of Schiller} This, begun
in 1822, appeared in the London Magazine in
1823-24; and was printed, as a separate volume,
without Carlyle's name, in the spring of 1825.
In his Preface to the Second Edition (1845),
he speaks of it disparagingly, as a book he
would prefer to suppress; but it is an excellent
piece of work, written with sympathy, simplicity
and clear insight; the best Life of Schiller then
extant, and, in English at any rate, there has
been no better since. It was still only half
finished when he began the translation of
Meisters Apprenticeship,--a book by no means
wholly after his own heart, but which from its
large and genial view of life, from the variety
of observation of human nature recorded in it,
1 Carlyle had indeed written an article on Faust before
this date (New Edinburgh Review, April 1822), but it is a
comparatively crude production, and Carlyle did not consider it
worthy of a place in his Collected Works.
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? INTRODUCTION
and from the picture it afforded of the author's
mind, held him with strong attraction. In
his essay on "Goethe's Works" published just
after Goethe's death {Foreign Quarterly Review,
1832), he says: "Many years ago on finishing
our first perusal of Wilhelm Meister, with a
very mixed sentiment in other respects, we
could not but feel that here lay more insight
into the elements of human nature, and a more
poetically perfect combining of these, than in all
the other fictitious literature of our generation. "
Thirty-four years later, in his Reminiscences of
Edward Irving, he relates how, ''Schiller done. ,
I began [to translate] Wilhelm Meister, a task
I liked perhaps rather better, too scanty as my
knowledge of the element, and even of the
language still was. Two years before, I had
at length, after some repulsions, got into the
heart of Wilhelm Meister, and eagerly read it
through;--my sally out, after finishing, along
the vacant streets of Edinburgh (a windless
Scotch-misty Sunday night) is still vivid to me:
'Grand, surely, harmoniously built together,
far-seeing, wise and true: when, for many
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? INTRODUCTION
years, or almost in my life before, have I read
such a book? ' Which I was now, really in
part as a kind of duty, conscientiously translat-
ing for my countrymen, if they would read it,--
as a select few of them have ever since kept
doing. I finished it the next Spring, . . . "
In 1824, when this correspondence began,
Goethe was seventy-five years old; a hale and
vigorous man. His intellectual interests were
as wide as ever, his curiosity unabated, his
sympathies unchilled by age. His position
had long been unique, and he was now at
the height of his renown. Carlyle's letter
and his translation of Meisters Apprenticeship
gave Goethe pleasure, as the expression of
a genuine admiration coming from a region
from which he had hitherto received little
appreciation or even recognition. The letter
and book were the more welcome as they
seemed to fall in with a project which Goethe
had much at heart at this time, namely, the
bringing about of a better understanding
amongst nations by means of a universal
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? INTRODUCTION
World-Literature,--the establishing of an ex-
change between different countries of their
highest mental products; so that all might
at once share in whatever great intellectual
work any one nation might produce. Thus
would mutual understanding be substituted
for the traditional misconceptions of ignor-
ance; a sense of common obligation arise,
and universal tolerance lead to happier rela-
tions among the various families of men. In
this work, to which his first publications con-
tributed, Carlyle was soon to show himself the
chief agent between Germany and England,
and Goethe soon recognised in him the ablest
of his fellow-workers. 1
1 The influence of Carlyle's writings from 1823 to 1832 in
arousing in England an interest in German literature is hardly
to be over-estimated, whether in its immediate or remote
effects. The following is a list of his writings on German
subjects during these years :--Life of Schiller, 1823-24; Wil-
helm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1824; German Romance, Jean
Paul Friedrich Richter, State of German Literature, 1827;
Werner, Goethe's Helena, Goethe, Heyne, 1828; German
Playwrights, Novalis, 1829 ; Jean Paul's Review of Madame
de Stall's Allemagne, Jean Paul Fricdtich Richter Again,
1830; Luther's Psalm, Schiller, The Nibelungen Lied,
German Literature of the XIV. and XV. Centuries, Taylor's
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? INTRODUCTION xvii
Nearly forty years after Goethe's death,
Carlyle, recalling the events of his early life,
wrote as follows of this Correspondence :--" In
answer to German Romance there had latterly
come an actual long Letter from Weimar, from
the Great Goethe's self, who was evidently
taking interest in me. By and by there arrived,
at Leith, by Hamburg, a little Fir Box (which
still exists here in beautifully transfigured
shape) containing the daintiest collection of
pretty little gifts and memorials to both of us,--
the very arrangement and packing of which we
found to be poetic and a study. Something
of real romance and glory lay for us in this
fine Goethe item. That Leith Box (which I
instantly went down for in person, and tore,
as it were, almost by main force, through the
Custom-house and its formalities, in few hours,
instead of days, and came home with in triumph)
was the first of several such that followed at
due intervals, and of a Correspondence (not
Historic Survey of German Poetry, 1831; Goethe's Portrait,
Schiller, Goethe, and Madame de Stai'l, Death of Goethe, Goethe's
Works, The Tale (Das MiU1rchen), Novelle, 1832.
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? INTRODUCTION
in itself momentous at all, but to us then an
aethereal and quasi-celestial thing), which lasted
steadily till Goethe's death. His Letters, ten
or twelve, perhaps more, are all extant, care-
fully reposited among my pretiosa, but, for
many years past, I know not now where. 1
Pretty gifts of his,--that little steel brooch,
'never to be worn,' so She had vowed, 'except
when a man of genius was present,' etc. etc. " 2
The stimulus and encouragement of Goethe's
sympathy and regard, expressed as they were
in simple, cordial and delightful modes, were
invaluable to Carlyle. They came to him
when he had as yet received no real recogni-
tion from his own people, whose acknowledg-
ment of his worth was slowly and grudgingly
given. For this neglect Goethe's appreciation
and friendship made amends. They confirmed
the young writer's faith in himself. Goethe's
1 The parcel which contained these letters, all carefully
arranged, was labelled, in Carlyle's hand: "Goethe. Tied
up so, perhaps about 1834; shifted now, without opening (12th
January 1852), into another receptacle, with an additional
wrappage. 1'
2 From an unpublished manuscript, written in 1869.
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? INTRODUCTION xix
discriminating eye had discerned what no
other had discovered -- that here was a man
who rested on an original foundation, and had
the capacity to develop in himself the essentials
of what was good and beautiful.
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