Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/191

 unseen which we 'dimly divine', that Carlyle was ready to hail him as not only the greatest poet, but also the greatest teacher, of his generation. The ideas which Goethe clothed in imaginative force were, at the same time, expounded in terms of reasoned argument by Kant and Fichte. To both of these, especially to Fichte, Carlyle was largely indebted. But, in the first instance, his obligation was not so much to the philosophers as to the poet.

II

The speculative foundation of all Carlyle's teaching—'the theory,' as Emerson said, 'of all his rhetoric'—is to be sought ultimately in the German philosophers of the previous generation. Few writers of imaginative prose have been more steeped in metaphysical thought than the author of Sartor. And wherever that thought has left its mark, there we may be very sure that, in the last resort, it is traceable either to Fichte or, in a less degree, to his master Kant.

In the first instance, no doubt, Carlyle is a great man of letters; a master of style, a poet working with the intellectual tools of the humorist and observer. In the eyes of the future—and to the younger generation that future has already become the present—this will probably be his chief title to fame. But to his own day, he was above all a thinker; a prophet charged with a direct message to the understanding and reason of his hearers. No one whose memory goes back to the sixties and seventies—still less any one who can recall the forties and fifties—of last century will be disposed to dispute that statement. And if we ask ourselves what precisely it was that Carlyle contributed to the thought and intellectual outlook of his time, the answer