With much of what Goethe really
stood for he was not really in sympathy; but in his own obstinate way,
he tried to knock his idol into shape instead of choosing another. He
pushed further and further the extravagances of a vivid but very
unbalanced and barbaric style, in the praise of a poet who really
represented the calmest classicism and the attempt to restore a Hellenic
equilibrium in the mind. It is like watching a shaggy Scandinavian
decorating a Greek statue washed up by chance on his shores. And while
the strength of Goethe was a strength of completion and serenity, which
Carlyle not only never found but never even sought, the weaknesses of
Goethe were of a sort that did not draw the best out of Carlyle. The one
civilised element that the German classicists forgot to put into their
beautiful balance was a sense of humour. And great poet as Goethe was,
there is to the last something faintly fatuous about his half
sceptical, half sentimental self-importance; a Lord Chamberlain of
teacup politics; an earnest and elderly flirt; a German of the Germans.
Now Carlyle had humour; he had it in his very style, but it never got
into his philosophy.
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