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. His philosophy largely remained a heavy Teutonic
idealism, absurdly unaware of the complexity of things; as when he
perpetually repeated (as with a kind of flat-footed stamping) that
people ought to tell the truth; apparently supposing, to quote
Stevenson's phrase, that telling the truth is as easy as blind hookey.
Yet, though his general honesty is unquestionable, he was by no means
one of those who will give up a fancy under the shock of a fact. If by
sheer genius he frequently guessed right, he was not the kind of man to
admit easily that he had guessed wrong. His version of Cromwell's filthy
cruelties in Ireland, or his impatient slurring over of the most
sinister riddle in the morality of Frederick the Great--these passages
are, one must frankly say, disingenuous. But it is, so to speak, a
generous disingenuousness; the heat and momentum of sincere admirations,
not the shuffling fear and flattery of the constitutional or patriotic
historian. It bears most resemblance to the incurable prejudices of a
woman.

For the rest there hovered behind all this transcendental haze a certain
presence of old northern paganism; he really had some sympathy with the
vast vague gods of that moody but not unmanly Nature-worship which seems
to have filled the darkness of the North before the coming of the Roman
Eagle or the Christian Cross. This he combined, allowing for certain