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WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP |
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Criticisms and Interpretations THERE is no name in the literary history of modern times which is even remotely comparable to that of Goethe; with every year that passes it gains a larger significance. In its suggestiveness it is as unlimited as life itself. It is only a shallow critic who imagines that he has exhausted, or can exhaust, its full meaning. Catholics and Protestants, basing their argument upon some detached passage in his writings, have claimed him as their own. Spinozists have pronounced him the most illustrious disciple of their master; and still others have seen in him the apostle of artistic paganism. None of these were either wholly right or wholly wrong. Goethe, with the sovereign right of the artist, could embrace all these tenets in his universal creed, without being in danger of contradicting himself. “For my part,” he writes to his friend Jacobi, “with the manifold directions in which my nature moves, I cannot be satisfied with a single mode of thought. As a poet and artist, I am a polytheist; on the other hand, as a student of nature, I am a pantheist—and both with equal positiveness. When I need a God for my personal nature, as a moral and spiritual man, He also exists for me. The heavenly and the earthly things are such an immense realm that it can only be grasped by the collective intelligence of all beings.” It is in this universality of Goethe’s mind, this elevation above all the narrow limits of sects and schools and special sciences, that one must seek the true key to his greatness. The study of his writings is a perpetual journey of discovery; it is as stimulating as mountain-climbing: every fresh effort rewards you with a larger view of the world about you. Your intellectual horizon is constantly widening.—From “Goethe and Schiller, Their Lives and Works” (1907). A WIDE, and every way most important, interval divides “Werther,” with its skeptical philosophy, and “hypochondriacal crotchets,” from Goethe’s next novel “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”, published some twenty years afterwards. This work belongs, in all senses, to the second and sounder period of Goethe’s life, and may indeed serve as the fullest, if perhaps not the purest, impress of it; being written with due forethought, at various times, during a period of no less than ten years. Considered as a piece of Art, there were much to be said on “Meister”; all which, however, lies beyond our present purpose. We are here looking at the work chiefly as a document for the writer’s history; and in this point of view, it certainly seems, as contrasted with its more popular precursor, to deserve our best attention: for the problem which had been stated in “Werther,” with despair of its solution, is here solved. The lofty enthusiasm, which, wandering wildly over the universe, found no resting place, has here reached its appointed home; and lives in harmony with what long appeared to threaten it with annihilation. Anarchy has now become Peace; the once gloomy and perturbed spirit is now serene, cheerfully vigorous, and rich in good fruits. Neither, which is most important of all, has this Peace been attained by a surrender to Necessity, or any compact with Delusion; a seeming blessing, such as years and dispiritment will of themselves bring to most men, and which is indeed no blessing, since even continued battle is better than destruction or captivity; and peace of this sort is like that of Galgacus’s Romans, who “called it peace when they had made a desert.” Here the ardent, high-aspiring youth has grown into the calmest man, yet with increase and not loss of ardor, and with aspirations higher as well as clearer. For he has conquered his unbelief; the Ideal has been built on the actual; no longer floats vaguely in darkness and regions of dreams, but rests in light, on the firm ground of human interest and business, as in its true scene, on its true basis. It is wonderful to see with what softness the skepticism of Jarno, the commercial spirit of Werner, the reposing, polished manhood of Lothario and the Uncle, the unearthly enthusiasm of the Harper, the gay, animal vivacity of Philina, the mystic, ethereal, almost spiritual nature of Mignon, are blended together in this work; how justice is done to each, how each lives freely in his proper element, in his proper form; and how, as Wilhelm himself, the mild-hearted, all-hoping, all-believing Wilhelm, struggles forward towards his world of Art through these curiously complected influences, all this unites itself into a multifarious, yet so harmonious Whole, as into a clear poetic mirror, where man’s life and business in this age, his passions and purposes, the highest equally with the lowest, are imaged back to us in beautiful significance. Poetry and Prose are no longer at variance, for the poet’s eyes are opened: he sees the changes of many-colored existence, and sees the loveliness and deep purport which lies hidden under the very meanest of them; hidden to the vulgar sight, but clear to the poet’s; because the “open secret” is no longer a secret to him, and he knows that the Universe is full of goodness; that whatever has being has beauty.—From “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays” (1828). IT is commonly said that “Wilhelm Meister” seems to make Art the one object of life; but this is not Goethe’s intention. He was himself an artist, and, as the work is in a great degree autobiographical, art naturally comes into the foreground, and the book becomes especially interesting to artists, but the real subject of it, as I hold, is vocations in general. In the later books, indeed, art drops into the background, and we have a view of feminine vocations. The “Beautiful Soul” represents the pietistic view of life; then Therese appears in contrast, representing the economic or utilitarian view; finally, Natalie hits the golden mean, being practical like Therese, but less utilitarian, and ideal like her aunt, the pietist, but less introspective. On the whole, then, the lesson of the book is that we should give unity to our lives by devoting them with hearty enthusiasm to some pursuit, and that the pursuit is assigned to us by Nature through the capacities she has given us. It is thus that Goethe substitutes for the idea of pleasure that of the satisfaction of special inborn aptitudes different in each individual. His system treats every man as a genius, for it regards every man as having his own unique individuality, for which it claims the same sort of tender consideration that is conceded to genius.… But we shall find much more unity in “Wilhelm Meister” if we regard it not as a theatrical novel, but as a novel of culture and education, and if we consider it in close connexion with Goethe’s Life. The story of Mignon, as we have remarked, expresses that yearning after the ancient world, which was perhaps the deepest of all his feelings. The devotion to Shakspeare was his strongest feeling at a particular period of his life, the period when he undertook “Wilhelm Meister.” That it should disappear at a particular point of the novel, answers to that change in his views on which we have enlarged and which is represented in his life by his Italian journey. The Confessions of a Beautiful Soul taken together with the philosophy of the Uncle and his Hall of the Past, represent the struggle which went on in Goethe’s mind through the greater part of his life between two forms of religion, between certain Christian ideas from which he would never consent to part, and a sort of Heathenism which at times he avowed with the utmost frankness. And all this various material he has united in “Wilhelm Meister” by means of his practical philosophy of culture, which taught him that a man should study to develop all that is in him, that a man should spare no pains to discover his true vocation, and that in doing so he will receive little help from the reigning system of education, which excites wishes instead of awakening aptitudes. Looked at then in this way, the book sets before us more fully than any other book of Goethe’s, and in a highly remarkable, if not a perfectly satisfactory way, what we may call the Goethian philosophy of culture.—From “Goethe Reviewed after Sixty Years” (1894). IT is a novel without a hero. When William first appears in this pseudo-epos, [1] we see him as a kind of tamer, less attractive Werther; less imaginative than Werther, less of a poet, but like Werther vague, unpractical, self-involved, indulging to excess a shallower sensibility and a poorer kind of passion. How he came by the name of Meister was unknown to Goethe, for his right name was Wilhelm Schüler. [2] William must start from low beginnings. He has small sense of his duties to others; he wastes himself in dreams of little profit; and it is out of such stuff as this that a worthy, useful, even admirable man is to be formed. It is enough at first if there lies within him the capacity of growth, the possibility of progress. But the way is long: delusions, snares, wanderings must be experienced; by error he must be delivered from error. In “Werther” Goethe had exhibited the ruin that comes upon an idealist who will not and cannot abandon his dreams and immoderate desire. In “Tasso” he had shown how a masculine prudence, an enlightened worldliness—presented in the person of Antonio—may come to the aid and deliverance of the idealist when he cannot deliver himself. [3] Here in “Wilhelm Meister” a foolish dreamer is to be formed into a true man; the vague and void of indefinite idealism is to be filled hereafter by a life of well-chosen, well-defined activity. He is to be educated not in the schools—it is now unhappily too late for that—but by the harder discipline of life; he is to be delivered from the splendid prison painted with idle visions into the liberty of modest well-doing.—From “New Studies in Literature” (1895). _______________ Notes: 1. So Goethe terms his novel in a letter to Schiller. 2. Goethe to Schiller, December 6th, 1794. 3. “Tasso” was
conceived at a later date than “Wilhelm Meister,” but it was completed
long before the completion of the novel. |