Among philosophers proper, Fichte, in his assertion of the Will as a
greater factor of human life and a nearer indication of personality than
pure Thought, was Carlyle's nearest tutor. The _Vocation of the Scholar_
and _The Way to a Blessed Life_ anticipated and probably suggested much
of the more speculative part of _Sartor_. But to show their relation
would involve a course of Metaphysics.
We accept Carlyle's statement that he learnt most of the secret of life
and its aims from his master Goethe: but the closest of his kin, the man
with whom he shook hands more nearly as an equal, was Richter--_Jean Paul
der einzige_, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly planted
on German earth, a colossus of reading and industry, the quaintest of
humorists, not excepting either Sir Thomas Browne or Laurence Sterne, a
lover and painter of Nature unsurpassed in prose. He first seems to have
influenced his translator's style, and set to him the mode of queer
titles and contortions, fantastic imaginary incidents, and endless
digressions. His Ezekiel visions as the dream in the first _Flower Piece_
from the life of Siebenkaes, and that on _New Year's Eve_, are like
pre-visions of _Sartor_, and we find in the fantasies of both authors
much of the same machinery. It has been asserted that whole pages of
_Schmelzle's Journey to Flaetz_ might pass current for Carlyle's own; and
it is evident that the latter was saturated with _Quintus Fixlein_.
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