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Una Vista de Wilhelm Meister
Una Vista de Wilhelm Meister
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By Irvin Stock
rouses him from his "half-dream" (Bk. n, Ch. iv).1 Her name is Mi-
gnon, and she belongs to a company of acrobats staying in Wilhelm's
hotel. Later, seeing the child mistreated by her master, he buys her free?
dom and she soon becomes his loving servant, never ceasing to move
him, by her presence and also by her melancholy songs, intimately and
intensely.
He knows he should go on about his father's business, but Philina and
the child, each seductive in her own way, hold him fast. He gives himself
up to the pleasant pursuits of his new friends, whose number is increased
by the arrival of several other itinerant actors. Now, at the time of his
love affair with Mariana, he had met in the street one night a mysterious
stranger, a man who had known him and his family and who, in a brief
but profound conversation, had opposed Wilhelm's tendency to rely on
fate as certain to bring about the fulfillment of his dreams. Such a stran?
ger crosses his path again while he is on a picnic with his theatrical
friends. This one joins amiably enough in their games, but his identity is
never disclosed and he departs with odd abruptness. Before leaving, how?
ever, he argues with Wilhelm in a way that recalls that earlier talk. In?
stead of relying on a fate which operates through chance and can lead
us astray, he prefers the guidance of a human teacher. As an example of
fate's dangerous workings, he speaks of the bad effects which puppet
shows can have on a child. Our hero is startled, and, after the man's
disappearance, imagines his face was familiar.
One more infiuence is soon added to those which keep Wilhelm drift-
ing with his new companions. After an uproarious evening with the ac?
tors?they begin by reading aloud a play, which gives them a sweet feel?
ing of virtue, and end in the most degrading drunkenness?Wilhelm is
vexed to find in the morning that his horse has been hurt beyond re-
covery by his new friends. Circumstances thus take the matter of his
immediate departure out of his own hands. He stays, buying presents
for Philina, and that day they are joined while dining by an old bearded
man who carries a harp. The man sings to them for a glass of wine, and
does so with such feeling and such art that though the others would have
liked something more gay, Wilhelm, captivated, promises the man his
patronage.
Meanwhile, at least one member of the group is making practical
plans, a certain Melina. To this shrewd man the theatre, in which Wil?
helm hoped to find a means both to employ his own highest powers and
to benefit society, is simply a way of earning a living, and he has been
11 have used Thomas Carlyle's translation, which is accurate if a bit old-fashioned, ex?
cept in several places where R. D. Boylan's is superior. Since editions differ, I am indicating
the book and chapter from which quotations are made, rather than the page.
* Andr6 Gide's debt to Goethe, which is also an affinity with him, will be touched on
below. It is therefore worth mentioning here that this state of Wilhelm's is exactly the
state dramatized by the labyrinth in Gide's Theseus, a place where seminarcotic vapors
put the will to sleep. "induce a delicious intoxication, rich in flattering delusions, and
provoke the mind, filled as this is with voluptuous mirages, to a certain pointless activity;
'pointless'. .. because it has merely an imaginary outcome, in visions and speculations
without order, logic or substance" (Ch. vii). Both heroes, in short, face at the outset of
their careers the trap of undisciplined self-indulgence.
single conflict to which all the separate episodes are clearly connected
and which they all help to bring to its resolution. It seems to contain
rather an incoherent multiplicity of conflicts, of problem-raising develop?
ments and relationships. The hero appears to wander and drift as if this
were a picaresque novel, in which he alone holds together episodes in?
tended to be entertaining and meaningful in themselves; or as if this
were mere fictionalized autobiography in which there is no particular
reason for the next event except that it fell out so in the life of the au?
thor. Now Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship does resemble both genres
and, as it were, makes use of them. It does hold the reader?if it holds
him at all?by the urgency, convincingness, and charm of each adventure
by itself; and the unity that binds them together is at least partly a
mystery whose solution we must?and can?do without for much of the
time. And Goethe, who called Wilhelm his "beloved likeness,"3 does seem
to have put into it, either directly or by way of symbolic characters and
events, many of his own experiences. Strictly speaking, however, the
novel belongs to neither genre. Its confusing multiplicity of events and re?
lationships is, in fact, a necessary element in a work which is shaped with
quite as much forethought as is required in such matters to dramatize a
subject and embody a theme. The misleading air of innocence with which
characters and adventures succeed each other, innocence of any author's
intention to make us think and feel in some one visibly necessary direc-
tion, is wholly deliberate. And the problem of grasping what all that
variety "adds up to," far from having been shirked by an author ill-
educated in the responsibilities of serious fiction (as hasty readers have
supposed), is the main problem to which this novel addresses itself.
For if our hero is capable of seeing himself as wandering astray and of
feeling wretched about it, it is precisely because he is not a heedless ad-
venturer, undergoing experiences neither he nor his author cares to
"add up." It is because he is one in whom the hunger to understand his
life and himself, in order to cease being blown profitlessly about by illu-
sions and temptations, is peculiarly acute. This is that "insatiable want"
which is the "law" of his existence. As he writes to a friend who begs him
to return to the life of business: "What would it stead me to put proper-
ties of land in order, while I am at variance with myself? To explain my?
self in a word: the cultivation of my individual self . . . has from my
youth upwards been constantly, though dimly, my wish and purpose"
(Bk. v, Ch. iii). Such cultivation, as will grow even clearer below, is to
be understood in no narrow sense: it is education for living. And if this
8 Quoted by Thomas Mann in "Goethe and Tolstoy,?? Essays of Three Decades (New
York. 1947), p. 159.
Power. And Goethe would not entirely deny this. "Alas," says the Abbe,
a character in the novel who plays Goethe's own role of teacher of men
and who utters many of his author's central ideas, "the man who
thoroughly understands the endless operations of nature and of art which
are required to form a cultivated human being, or who takes a deep in?
terest in the education of his fellow men, may well despair when he sees
how madly people pursue their own ruin, or expose themselves thought-
lessly or intentionally to danger. [Note again that for Goethe "cultiva-
tion" or "education" means that which teaches us how to avoid danger
and ruin, how to live.] When I reflect on this, life appears to me a gift
of such uncertain value that I could almost praise a man who holds it in
but small esteem" (Bk. vn, Ch. ii).4
But here we come at last to what is so alien to us in the author's
attitude to his material?to life?and to what produces the book's un
familiar qualities. In spite of a grasp of life's terrible difficulty that wou
seem to lead inevitably to the so-called "tragic view," Goethe refus
to be tragic. As a man he regards life?and as an artist he pictures i
not as an unalterable state to be realized, and to be savored or endure
but as a problem to be solved. His bent is?of all things!?practic
and constructive?I almost said optimistic. He believes in the possibili
of progress. Now it is true that we are not unfamiliar with the tendency
to take life as a problem to be solved. But on the whole this has been the
attitude of those who have seen the problem of life as too easy to sol
and who have presented as the problem and its solution such gross sim
plifications that the very faith that life can be lived satisfactorily h
fallen into disrepute among the sophisticated. At any sign of such
faith these latter are nowadays apt to smile ironically, as though abo
to hear the voice of Lewis' Babbitt or of a "radical" of the thirties, o
the like. The dominant alternative has been the opposite, the "trag
view, which is that the problem of life is too hard to solve, that irrecon-
cilable conflict, loss, and defeat are life's ultimate realities. Religion
course, though itself affirmative, has always been intimately related
this tragic view, presupposing as it does man's inability to live righ
either at all while on earth, or at least without supernatural assistan
and it is surely the current weakening of our faith in man that has r
vived our interest in religion, reminding us of the profound sense in its
skepticism of man's powers and earthly possibilities.
Goethe, then, is that oddity, a great writer, a mind learned in life
endless dangers and difficulties, who affirms that it is man's prope
theatre, who seems to the youthful Wilhelm worthy to stand at his side
in the glorious future toward which his talents are surely leading him,
just as the theatre seems to him a worthy medium for those talents and
certain to bring both glory to himself and blessings to the nation. But
we understand from the start that it is he with his passionate dreams
who creates the nobility of Mariana. The truth is she is an entirely
ordinary woman, who falls asleep at his lofty talk, loves presents, yields
easily to pressures and temptations?a reality which the self-obsession
of youth prevents him from noticing. And the course of events teaches
Wilhelm that those ardent dreams of his had led him into exactly the
same error with regard to the theatre, which so resists his efforts to im-
pose on it his high purposes that he gives it up at last in disgust.
If Mariana represents his youthful folly, Felix ushers in his maturity.
Felix is a little boy who turns out to be Wilhelm's son, and what he
means in our hero's life is made explicit in the climactic scene at Lo-
thario's castle. In this scene, which follows Wilhelm's abandonment of
the stage along with many of the illusions that had been bound up with
it, the strangers who had been haunting him reappear to hint at his life's
meaning and direction. (They are a small group, headed by the Abb6,
whose "hobby" is the education of promising youth, and whose half-
playful?yet ultimately significant?fancy it is to shroud their activities
in mystery and romance.) And when Wilhelm demands to know whether
Felix is really his son, demands it with an excitement which shows the
birth of a genuine paternal emotion, he hears the joyful exclamation:
"Your Apprenticeship is done: Nature has pronounced you free!" Later
we are told: "Everything that he proposed commencing was to be com-
pleted for his boy: everything that he erected was to last for several
generations. In this sense his apprenticeship was ended; with the feelings
of a father, he had acquired all the virtues of a citizen" (Bk. vrii, Ch. i).
And it is like a good "citizen" that he turns his attention to the manage-
ment of his property. A pattern thus discloses itself, though I need
hardly say that the rich narrative does not present it quite so simply.
(It must be added, indeed, that Wilhelm does not remain, any more than
the rest of us, in perfect possession of his virtues.) Wilhelm has left be?
hind the youthful state?romantic is the familiar word for it?in which
he was sure that his private dream made him superior to the world
around him (his father's world, the world of commerce); sure that pas?
sionate feeling and high aspiring thought were their own justification, so
that he was always following the lead of feeling into a fresh tangle, or
the lead of thought into a realm where he lost contact with people and
things as they are. He has shifted his attention outward?to his son?
and has by that son been drawn into the life of common humanity, and
not have found a kingdom. And though the brother refers to Philina,
there is a proof of this point which even more dramatically and mean-
ingfully joins the end of the novel to its beginning. The child Felix who,
by leading Wilhelm to turn his gifts to account in the world of reality,
becomes his salvation, this child is the child of Mariana! And Mariana?
do we not know her as precisely the embodiment of that world of the
theatre in which Wilhelm "wasted" his youth? The implication is clear
that neither of his youthful passions had been a waste. For as his love
for the woman produced the child who made him a man, so his love for
the theatre spurred him to exertions that drew forth and developed all
his powers. This is why, though he finds in his maturity that he was
wrong to despise his father's world of commerce, an old commercial
friend is nevertheless amazed at the vast improvements which Wilhelm's
theatrical experiences had wrought in him. By comparison the friend
feels that his own exclusively practical life has left him withered and
shrunk. So in youth the lucky ones, by the ardor of commitments which
grow out of love (and however "wrong" they may later appear to have
been), plow the ground and plant the seeds that will, for their maturity,
bear fruit. Incapable of passionate error, they would give birth to far
less in themselves and their world. "Dim-sightedness and innocence"
like those of the youthful Wilhelm are compared by one bitterly wise
character to "the beautiful hull upon the young bud. Woe to us," she
continues, "if we are forced too soon to burst it" (Bk. iv, Ch. xvi).
But the richest expression of the novel's meanings is to be found in
Mignon. Mignon is a strange creation, who seems different in kind from
all the other characters, less realistic, more a lyric extravagance unre-
lated to theme, and mysterious because entirely arbitrary. In fact, how?
ever, her lovely peculiarities end by being sufficiently accounted for,
sufficiently at least for all but the most pedantic of realists, and what is
more interesting, we learn at last that it was her wealth of meaning rather
than her lack of it that made her mysterious.
Wilhelm meets her, remember, at about the same time as he meets
Philina, that charming invitation to life's easiest pleasures; both appear,
that is, on the threshold of the world of his apprenticeship. And we see
at once that she is a kind of opposite of Philina, her first dramatic role
being to pull him away from all that the other pulls him towards. Where
the merry woman is pre-eminently a sexual attraction, Mignon is so
sexless that she puzzles him at first as to whether she is a boy or a girl.
Indeed, physical passion is death to her: her fatal nervous illness begins
when she accidentally witnesses the physical union of Wilhelm and
Philina, which the woman had tricked him into. Philina wants him to
be an actor, adding sensuality and vanity to the deeper forces in him
5 In Bk. ii, Ch. viii, Mignon moves Wilhelm deeply with a strange dance. She places a
small carpet on the floor and 4 candles in each of its corners. In a pattern on the carpet she
places a number of eggs. Then, blindfolding herself, she dances to a violin, never leaving
the carpet and never touching an egg. Her movements, "continuous as the motion of a
clock," are "exact, precise and reserved, but vehement, and in situations where tenderness
was to be displayed, more formal than attractive," yet Wilhelm saw with surprise "how
remarkably the dance tended to unfold her character." All he had ever felt for her rose up
in him. "He longed to take this forsaken child to his heart, to hold her in his embrace, and
with the fulness of a father's love to awaken within her bosom all the joys of existence"
(Boylan). Is not this dance the "dance" of classical art, where the personal expresses itself
through the formal, rather than in defiance of it? And does not the last sentence quoted
express Goethe's own desire to give existence to an art of such a kind?
amid the vulgarities of the theatrical world, that which lifts him above
them. But his progress must finally be a descent out of the clouds of
thought?the "half-dream"?where she would keep him, to the earth
where man's real work and lasting satisfactions are to be found, and so
she must die.
And even that is not all we learn from Mignon. This ennobling ideal
out of Italy is not only above the vulgarities of the theatre and above
the realm of practical activity; she is also "above" the world of Judeo-
Christian morality on which the family and society in the West are
founded?and this too is why she must die as Wilhelm takes his place
in that world. She was born, we learn at the end, of an incestuous union:
her parents were brother and sister. Her father is none other than the old
Harper, her fellow-singer of sad and beautiful songs. And this father
had put quite plainly the significance of his "criminal" behavior: in
his passion for his sister he condemned the moral order altogether and
declared that passion justifies itself, that nature is indifferent to morality,
which is imposed on it by society cruelly and arbitrarily. He is right
about the cruelty. The bliss of the lovers and their potential bliss as
parents were converted by the Church into guilt and madness. The
mother died and the father, obsessed with the vague memory of some
terrible crime and with fear, went wandering about as a singer of life's
pain. But Goethe, though he grants the sense in the Harper's pagan
amorality, though he shows that it can produce unearthly loveliness?
can produce Mignon?sees too that it is at war with the essential condi?
tions of fruitful living. It belongs, for instance, to the Harper's madness
that he fears he must always bring trouble to those who befriend him.
Is it not true that the life of freely indulged passion must lead to con-
tinual trouble? He fears too that a little boy will cause his death?and
in fact, his death does come about because of Felix. Does this not tell us
that the life of unregulated passion must end when the family and family
feeling begin? For Goethe, as we have seen, it is best that it should end
at last, for where such passion tends to the self-indulgent dissipation of
energies, it is in building for the family that our energies are set properly
to work and are most likely to bear fruit.
It must be added at once, however, that Goethe's tribute to the teach-
ings of religion?at least, of Christianity?is a qualified one. It is pre?
cisely in order to make this clear?that is, in order not to leave un-
examined the great other idea of how life should be lived?that he
interrupts the adventures of Wilhelm with a long story of an aunt of
Natalia's, a story called "The Confessions of a Beautiful Soul." (This
chapter also serves the purpose of showing the relationships among the
apparently separate characters of the novel, of clearing away mystery
The virtues of the citizen, then, are for Goethe a means and not an end:
they are the means whereby the freedom to realize the possibilities of
the unique self is prevented from degenerating into the license by which
the self's energies are wasted. Goethe is, in fact, as little respectable as
his modern disciple Andre Gide, whose insight is Goethean through and
through?as little respectable as Gide, but also as little merely rebellious.7
It may be objected of Goethe, as it has been of Gide, that his teaching
is really no teaching at all. (Natalia herself speaks so of the Abbe's
methods: she prefers that the young be more firmly guided.) And it can
be pointed out as proof of this that the mysterious strangers who, under
the Abbe, are the educators of the novel and who sometimes give the
impression of being responsible for Wilhelm's development, actually left
him more or less to his own impulses, merely uttering aloud now and then
the lessons he himself was learning or would soon be forced to learn. There
is a certain plausibility in this charge. I would suggest, however, that if
7 Well may Gide have said that Goethe's was the one infiuence he had really undergone.
Are not all Gide's major themes to be found in this book: his criticism of Christian self-
denial, as in Strait Is the Gate, and of self-indulgence, as in The Immoralist, and finally the
rich compromise between them of The Counterfeiters? I have come to suspect, indeed, that
this last novel represents a deliberate attempt to write a Wilhelm Meister1 s Apprenticeship
for the 20th century. In Gide's great novel too the young hero seeks to learn how to live,
and seeks amid interpretations of experience which perpetually vary in validity. Gide's
novel too, in short, dramatizes its author's own struggle to understand his material, which
is the course of life. But the German novel is the greater, both in quantity and quality.
narrative as, in another kind of thriller, we would read the long lost will
that restored our beggared hero to his dukedom.
In fact, the novel's resemblance to the tale of romantic adventure is
most marked, though here the effects involved are shown as belonging to
life rather than merely to "stories" which help us "escape" life. There
is, for example, the effect already mentioned, that of mystery. It is in-
teresting to note, indeed, how much of darkness this apostle of light has
deliberately brushed into his canvas. But it should not be surprising;
Goethe does not, as I have suggested, think we can understand every?
thing, and who is more likely than the man of deep and active mind to
grow aware of the limits of human understanding? In Wilhelm Meister
this awareness is dramatized in two ways. The first is by an almost Gothic
mystification, the sort that comes with Mignon, the Harper, the in-
habitants of the castle. (And though all our common sense questions are
finally answered, it cannot be denied that once or twice, as in those stories
devoted most shamelessly to our "entertainment," we feel a bit cheated:
the answers seem incommensurate with the portentousness of the original
effect.) The second kind of mystery is less theatrical. It comes from that
refusal of our author, mentioned above, to make prematurely clear the
full meaning of his episodes. Goethe will interpose generalizations, but
he will only guardedly reveal essential secrets; and since these secrets,
that is, the insights which his developments embody, are complex, they
do not fall into familiar, easily grasped meaning-patterns. We read him
as we live. We may be interested, and even fascinated, all the time, but
complete understanding of how things go together and of what is truly
right and helpful, or the reverse, is the prize only of a flexible insight
working on a complicated experience?it is not handed us on any silver
platter. It is our narrow view of life's possibilities that the novel mysti-
fies?and then enlarges.
And here too is a source of interest for some readers?I mean the
quantity and depth of insight into the way life goes and how it should
be lived, which the novel presents to us. This is to be seen not only in
the large organizing ideas traced out above but also in every episode
along the way, however innocent of meaning it may appear on a first
reading. There is not one of Wilhelm's adventures that does not turn out
on reflection to have put in terms of his life and character some common
pattern of human difficulty or development. And the work is full of
general remarks, coming not from the author alone but from characters
who are painfully learning sense or have already thus learned it, which
have an electrifying pertinence to our own lives, and would surely help
us if we could be helped by others at all.
One final point. It is true that this novel appeals chiefly to the reader
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