BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

writings. 92 But the attraction exerted by Carlyle over his fellow Victorians partook more of a
search for religion, which he found in an eclectic conception of “German Idealism,” rather than
in any deep understanding of his mentors: Goethe, Kant, Fichte and Novalis. 93 Carlyle’s hero
worship and his glorification of the Christian-feudal past appealed to the Victorian desire for
salvation from atheism, loneliness and isolation, the by-products of a modern, democratic-
industrial society. 94 The fact that Carlyle had never met Goethe, his “messiah,” and only at the
age of sixty visited Germany, where he complained about the beds, noisy hotels and food, reveals
Carlyle’s Germany to have been largely a product of his imagination. 95 The decline of his
influence, which began long before his death in 1881, indicates not only that a Victorian appetite
for eccentric, and often bombastic, soul-searching had abated, but also possibly that the real
Germany was not living up to the ideal he had created.
Later nineteenth-century commentary on the German language and literature repeated
many of the earlier criticisms, although with less vehemence. Literary reviews and even general
articles on Germany harped on the “awful” German language with its “unreadable,” “crabbed
letters,” “plumping phrases” and “cyclopean sentences,” or its “clumsy” and “antediluvian”
92 L. H. C. Thomas, “Germany, German Literature and Mid-Nineteenth-Century British
Novelists,” chap. 3, in L. H. C. Thomas, ed., Affinities (London: Wolff, n.d.), 36.
93 Mander, Our German Cousins, 93, 100-101.
94 Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 77, 311.
95 Thomas, “German Literature and Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Novelists,” 38. See
also Mander, Our German Cousins, 104-6, on how Carlyle’s Calvinist orientation distorted his
interpretation of Goethe, in particular his translation of Entsagen, or moderation, as
“renunciation.”
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