[Footnote: A passage in Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life and Letters of Robert
Browning_, p. 173, is decisive on this point, and perhaps too emphatic for
general quotation.]
His doctrine of Renunciation (suggested by the Three Reverences in
_Wilhelm Meister's Travels_) is Carlyle's transmutation, if not
transfiguration, of Puritanism; but it took neither in him nor in Goethe
any very consistent form, save that it meant Temperance, keeping the
body well under the control of the head, the will strong, and striving,
through all the lures of sense, to attain to some ideal life.
Both write of Christianity as "a thing of beauty," a perennial power,
a spreading tree, a fountain of youth; but Goethe was too much of a
Greek--though, as has been said, "a very German Greek"--to be, in any
proper sense of the word, a Christian; Carlyle too much of a Goth. His
Mythology is Norse; his Ethics, despite his prejudice against the race,
are largely Jewish. He proclaimed his code with the thunders of Sinai,
not in the reconciling voice of the Beatitudes. He gives or forces on us
world-old truths splendidly set, with a leaning to strength and endurance
rather than to advancing thought. He did not, says a fine critic of
morals, recognise that "morality also has passed through the straits." He
did not really believe in Content, which has been called the Catholic,
nor in Progress, more questionably styled the Protestant virtue.
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