Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/189

 this case, however, there was a further reason why restatement should be necessary. Since the time of Locke, the drift both of speculation and of popular thought had persistently gone to explain away the very idea of duty. In speculation, the tide had been stayed by Kant. But it required a whole generation of poets and others, speaking not in terms of art but in the plain vernacular, before the abstractions of the philosopher could become the common property of the people. And among that band of poets and thinkers both Goethe and Carlyle did a memorable work. It remains true that the two men were in reality working upon different lines; that, while Carlyle wrote in the spirit of Christianity, and even asceticism, Goethe, with many modifications, of which the most significant is the worship of sorrow, reverted to the larger and more human creed which we associate with the Greeks.

In the field of moral ideas, therefore, the chief importance of Goethe, so far as Carlyle was concerned, lay in the wide tolerance of his outlook upon life; in his steady resolve to paint life, and the whole of life, as he saw it around him, touching even the shadiest sides of it into some measure of beauty, and never allowing the outward conditions of man's lot to blind him to their inward bearing and significance. To a less degree, it lay in the stress he placed upon duty and self-sacrifice. For these are principles which, whatever form they may have taken in the mind of the poet himself, were ultimately derived from Christianity; and, as we have seen, they appear under a far more Christian shape in Carlyle than in his master.

It remains to consider the religious ideas for which the younger writer was indebted to the elder. These may roughly be summed up under the one word, Pantheism. It is clear that before he came to the study of Goethe and other German writers, Carlyle had already thrown off all belief in the supernatural, and consequently in the historic creed of