[[6]] References to the power over his mind of the French Revolutionary principles abound in Goethe's writings. The violence of the first impression, which began with the affair of the necklace, had reached a climax in '90 and '91, and this, along with the ineffaceable memories of the Werther and Goetz period, which his heart remembered when in his intellectual development he had left it far behind, accounts in a large measure for his yielding temporarily at least to the spell of Napoleon's genius, and for the studied but unaffected indifference to German politics and to the War of Liberation. Even of 1809, the year of Eckmühl, Essling, and Wagram, and the darkest hour of German freedom, Goethe can write: "This year, considering the beautiful returns it brought me, shall ever remain dear and precious to memory," and when the final uprising against the French was imminent, he sought quietude in oriental poetry—Firdusi, Hafiz, and Nisami.
[[7]] Of his Contes Taine said: "Depuis les Grecs aucun artiste n'a taillé un camée littéraire avec autant de relief, avec une aussi rigoureuse perfection de forme."
[[8]] It is remarkable that Carlyle and Schopenhauer should have lived through four decades together yet neither know in any complete way of the other's work. Carlyle nowhere mentions the name of Schopenhauer. Indeed Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, though read by a few, was practically an unknown book both in Germany and England until a date when Carlyle was growing old, solitary, and from the present ever more detached, and new books and new writers had become, as they were to Goethe in his age, distasteful or a weariness. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, already in the "thirties," had been attracted by Carlyle's essays on German literature in the Edinburgh, and though ignorant as yet of the writer's name he was all his life too diligent a reader of English newspapers and magazines to be unaware of Carlyle's later fame. But he has left no criticism, nor any distinct references to Carlyle's teaching, although in his later and miscellaneous writings the opportunity often presents itself. Wagner, it is known, was a student both of Schopenhauer and Carlyle. Schopenhauer's proud injunction, indeed, that he who would understand his writings should prepare himself by a preliminary study of Plato or Kant, or of the divine wisdom of the Upanishads, indicates also paths that lead to the higher teaching of Wagner, and—though in a less degree—of Carlyle.
[[9]] The friendship of Tourgenieff and Flaubert rested upon speculative rather than on artistic sympathy. The Russian indeed never quite understood Flaubert's "rage for the word." Yet the deep inner concord of the two natures reveals itself in their correspondence. It was the supreme friendship of Flaubert's later manhood as that with Bouilhet was the friendship of his earlier years. Yet they met seldom, and their meetings often resembled those of Thoreau and Emerson, as described by the former, or those of Carlyle and Tennyson, when after some three hours' smoking, interrupted by a word or two, the evening would end with Carlyle's good-night: "Weel, we hae had a grand nicht, Alfred." It is in one of Tourgenieff's own prose-poems that the dialogue of the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn across the centuries is darkly shadowed. The evening of the world falls upon spirits sensitive to its intimations as the diurnal twilight falls upon the hearts of travellers descending a broad stream near the Ocean and the haven of its unending rest.
[[10]] Cf. Philostratus, Life of Appollonius. I. 28.