infancy, its wonder, its wilfulness, even its still innocent fear.
Carlyle marks exactly the moment when the German child becomes the
spoilt child. The wonder turns to mere mysticism; and mere mysticism
always turns to mere immoralism. The wilfulness is no longer liked, but
is actually obeyed. The fear becomes a philosophy. Panic hardens into
pessimism; or else, what is often equally depressing, optimism.

Carlyle, the most influential English writer of that time, marks all
this by the mental interval between his "French Revolution" and his
"Frederick the Great." In both he was Germanic. Carlyle was really as
sentimental as Goethe; and Goethe was really as sentimental as Werther.
Carlyle understood everything about the French Revolution, except that
it was a French revolution. He could not conceive that cold anger that
comes from a love of insulted truth. It seemed to him absurd that a man
should die, or do murder, for the First Proposition of Euclid; should
relish an egalitarian state like an equilateral triangle; or should
defend the Pons Asinorum as Codes defended the Tiber bridge. But anyone
who does not understand that does not understand the French
Revolution--nor, for that matter, the American Revolution. "We hold
these truths to be self-evident": it was the fanaticism of truism. But
though Carlyle had no real respect for liberty, he had a real reverence
for anarchy. He admired elemental energy. The violence which repelled
most men from the Revolution was the one thing that attracted him to it.
While a Whig like Macaulay respected the Girondists but deplored the
Mountain, a Tory like Carlyle rather liked the Mountain and quite unduly
despised the Girondists. This appetite for formless force belongs, of
course, to the forests, to Germany. But when Carlyle got there, there
fell upon him a sort of spell which is his tragedy and the English
tragedy, and, in no small degree, the German tragedy too. The real
romance of the Teutons was largely a romance of the Southern Teutons,