The Germanisation of England, its transition and turning-point, was well typified by the genius of Carlyle.  The original charm of Germany had been the charm of the child.  The Teutons were never so great as when they were childish; in their religious art and popular imagery the Christ-Child is really a child, though the Christ is hardly a man.  The self-conscious fuss of their pedagogy is half-redeemed by the unconscious grace which called a school not a seed-plot of citizens, but merely a garden of children.  All the first and best forest-spirit is 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, with their castles, which are almost literally castles in the air, and their river which is walled with vineyards and rhymes so naturally to wine.  But as Carlyle’s was rootedly a romance of conquest, he had to prove that the thing which conquered in Germany was really more poetical than anything else in Germany.  Now the thing that conquered in Germany was about the most prosaic thing of which the world