The contrasts between the teacher and pupil
remain, but they have been exaggerated by those who only knew Goethe as
one who had attained, and ignored the struggle of his hot youth on the
way to attainment. Carlyle justly commends him, not for his artistic
mastery alone, but for his sense of the reality and earnestness of life,
which lifts him to a higher grade among the rulers of human thought
than such more perfect artists and more passionate lyrists as Heine. He
admires above all his conquest over the world, without concession to it,
saying:--
With him Anarchy has now become Peace ... the once
perturbed spirit is serene and rich in good fruits....
Neither, which is most important of all, has this Peace been
attained by a surrender to Necessity, or any compact with
Delusion--a seeming blessing, such as years and dispiritment
will of themselves bring to most men, and which is indeed no
blessing, since ever-continued battle is better than
captivity. Many gird on the harness, few bear it
warrior-like, still fewer put it off with triumph. Euphorion
still asserts, "To die in strife is the end of life."
Goethe ceased to fight only when he had won; his want of sympathy with
the so-called Apostles of Freedom, the stump orators of his day, was
genuine and shared by
Carlyle. In the apologue of the _Three Reverences_ in _Meister_ the
master indulges in humanitarian rhapsody and, unlike his pupil, verges
on sentimental paradox, declaring through the lips of the Chief in that
imaginary pedagogic province--which here and there closely recalls the
_New Atlantis_--that we must recognise "humility and poverty, mockery and
despite, disgrace and suffering, as divine--nay, even on sin and crime to
look not as hindrances, but to honour them, as furtherances of what is
holy.
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