GOETHE died in 1832, and in writing his obituary Carlyle covertly announced his own mission “to live as he counseled and commanded, not commodiously in the Reputable, the Plausible, the Half, but resolutely in the Whole, the Good, the True”:—

  The essay “On the Death of Goethe” is notable among his best works because of the deep sincerity of the admiration it expresses and of the unforced simplicity of its style. This, its closing sentence, suggests what was to Carlyle the beginning of a new life,—a career of protracted struggle in which he was deliberately and resolutely to attempt to live “the whole distracted existence of man in an age of unbelief.”

  Carlyle was fully under Goethe’s influence when he wrote this, and not less imbued with German theories of the meaning of life than when he published “Heroes and Hero Worship” or “Past and Present.” In the introductory sketches of his “German Romances,” published in 1827, he is still writing the ordinary English prose of the time,—even apologizing (with “at the risk of a truism”) for venturing to insist on spiritual meaning at the expense of fact. But very soon he tramples down this feeling of shame; and, because of his consciousness of having felt it, begins to cry out the more loudly in the British market place and in front of all the trading booths of the world that there is actually a God; a God who is not only Real, but the only Reality; that men are supernatural ghosts clothed for the time being in concatenated atoms of miraculous dust, and that everything visible on and under and above the earth is a symbol of supernatural reality. “You are Immortal Souls!” he cried out to the astonished bankers and country squires; to the not less astonished critics and dons, and finally to all “logic choppers and treble-pipe scoffers and professed enemies to wonder”—Immortal Souls! “The thing visible, nay, the thing imagined, the things in any way conceived as visible—what is it but a Garment, a clothing of the higher Celestial Invisible?… Thy daily life is girt with wonder and based on wonder; thy very blankets and breeches are miracles.”

  This style in which as Herr Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle announced his mission as Goethe’s successor in comprehending and expressing the realities of “distracted existence,” he never afterwards lost; but, gaining fuller assurance in the use of it, he finally assumed it completely as his own and went beyond Teufelsdröckh’s utmost boldness in developing its possibilities. In the “Pig’s Catechism” of his “Latter-Day Pamphlets” it gives him at last an adequate means of expressing his indignant scorn of the common-place baseness of life, as in his “Captains of Industry” it enabled him to define his highest ideal of practical achievement,—“The Chivalry of Work”; “pity, nobleness, and manly valor,” instead of the code of the longest sword and the shortest yardstick.

  This was his message, but after it he left the world as he found it. “We have forgotten God,” he cries. “We quietly believe this universe to be intrinsically a great unintelligible Perhaps; extrinsically, clear enough it is a great, most extensive cattle-field and workhouse, with extensive kitchen ranges and dining-tables—whereat he is wise who can find a place! All the truth of this universe is uncertain; only the profit and loss of it, the pudding and praise of it, are and remain very visible to the practical man. There is no longer any God for us!”

  This is the conclusion of the whole matter with him—the inevitable end of his life work as a prophet that the world should soon cease to regard him and his message as novel and entertaining. In view of the purport of his prophecies, it could not have been otherwise, for the whole of his message was that behind all formalism of genuflection and all cant of repetition lies an Eternal Reality, mercifully tolerant of fools but everlastingly formidable to knaves and hypocrites. In the same spirit Dante made his great discovery at the gate of Hell—that Supreme Love would be a lie without Supreme Justice.

  In his political creed Carlyle was as simple as in his religion. He believed in a government by demi-gods and heroes, heaven sent, to save the world from becoming hopelessly a “Swine-trough.” As for rights, the only one of which he is sure is that it is everybody’s right to be governed by one of these vice-regents of heaven, as it is the highest duty of everybody to search for them with reverent expectation. The discovery of them he leaves wholly to supernatural agencies. As for the ballot box and “Anarchy plus the street constable” in America, he holds it an absurdity because “Democracy, we apprehend, is forever quite impossible,” and “it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise.” This being the conclusion of the whole matter, it is not worth while to do more than point out that in this at least Carlyle’s inspiration was accepted as authentic by those he was most anxious to scold out of the long-established habit of putting their feet as well as their mouths into “the general swine-trough.” They differed with him only as to the nature of wisdom and the identity of its possessors.

  The soul Taine finds in Carlyle is “violent,” “enthusiastic,” “savage,” “void of taste, order, and measure.” “In fact,” he says, “many of those who have had this temperament and were his genuine forefathers—the Norse Pirates, the Poets of the Sixteenth Century, the Puritans of the Seventeenth—were madmen, pernicious to others and to themselves, bent on devastating things and ideas, destroying the public security and their own hearts.” This is Carlyle, but it is Carlyle as Taine explains, only “when his blood is up.” There is another Carlyle, “directed and restrained by the sentiment of actuality which is the positive spirit and of the sublime which makes the religious spirit.” By the first “he is turned to real things,” and by the spirit of the sublime is made able to interpret them so that “instead of being sickly and visionary he has become a philosopher and a historian.”

  This is on the whole a just judgment of Carlyle as a man of lofty genius, but Taine’s final summing up is less favorable: “If enthusiasm is beautiful,” he says, “its results and its origins are sad. It is but a crisis, and a healthy state is better. In this respect Carlyle himself may serve for a proof. There is perhaps less genius in Macaulay than in Carlyle, but when we have fed for some time on this exaggerated and demoniac style, this marvelous and sickly philosophy, this contorted and prophetic history, these sinister and furious politics, we gladly return to the continuous eloquence, to the vigorous reasoning, to the moderate prognostications, to the demonstrated theories of the generous and solid mind which Europe has just lost (1850), who brought honor to England and whose place none can fill.”

  It is true that no one is likely to value Macaulay the less because of having read Carlyle the more, but it is not against Macaulay that Carlyle should be measured. He could no more have written like a highly cultivated and self-possessed gentleman than Macaulay could have written like an inspired prophet. Macaulay loved his clubs, his dinner, and his books. He believed that it was every man’s right to be better governed rather than to be governed by his betters. He believed too that the steam engine as an accomplished fact of soul and mind is better than the hero, the philosopher who has not yet been achieved except as an ideal. Thus far he was right. For every steam engine frees a thousand common men from involuntary servitude in its worst form,—if only because it is capable of direction and draught so much more reliable than theirs. But no matter how greatly the nineteenth century needed Macaulay, its highest accomplishment would seem almost impossible in retrospect without Carlyle and his heroic attempt “Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren resolut zu leben.” For the only real use of steam engines and all the whole machinery which manifests thought in achievement is to make nobler thought possible by making it more easily possible for an always increasing number of common, unphilosophical, and undistinguished men—