SOURCE: “Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: An Apprenticeship toward the Mastery of Exactly What?” in Colloquia Germanica, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1997, pp. 99-119.

Some 200 years after the publication of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the high regard for Goethe's most influential novel as well as the arguments over its central meaning are thriving unabated.¹ The majority of knowledgeable authors and critics, from Schiller to James Joyce and Thomas Mann, from Friedrich Schlegel to Dilthey and Lukács, are united in their praise of this work. As the artistic pinnacle of Goethe's classical period and as the best known embodiment of the ambiguous prose genre, Bildungsroman, this novel according to Hermann Hesse “ist … Vorbild und Ideal geblieben, hundertmal nachgeahmt, studiert, umgefühlt [worden], nie wieder erreicht …”²

Beyond such unison of acclamation, however, uncertainty abounds.³ Even the most common denominators defining later Bildungsromane⁴ seem inadequate criteria when judging Wilhelm's own development. Initial subjectivity and self preoccupation? Yes, but why also an unlimited Faustian Ganzheitsstreben in Wilhelm's quest? Maturation through conflict and insight? Perhaps, but why primarily in the realms of appearance such as in several types of theater and via two classes of aristocracy? What has aristocratic representation to do with artistic beauty and theatrical illusion with truth? Finally, an active participation in and integration into society? No convincing evidence, unless one finds it where it is hidden, namely in the intricate symbolism and allegory of Wilhelm's relation to the Tower Society. If we disregard these constellations in their figurative importance and take Wilhelm's mood swings, indecisiveness and self-reproaches literally, he cannot but strike us as a vacillating, undefined, even immature character. We have to penetrate the apparently confusing phenomena of life purposefully depicted by Goethe on the Realebene to get to the “reality,” of the novel which is reached on the Bedeutungsebene, the level of meaning, of signification.

To help us out of the labyrinth where we as readers find ourselves no less than the novel's hero, the following questions may be worth pursuing. Why do the members of the Tower Society, secret and elitist as they seem, specifically select the merchant's son, Wilhelm, for their tutelage and guidance?⁵ What particular gift worth cultivating does he and only he have in this work? Does Goethe himself feel the need to explore such an asset of his own during the twenty years of writing, thinking and rewriting the novel?

Goethe endows Wilhelm with many endearing traits. So gifted and intelligent that it was for him a “Leichtigkeit, fast in allen lebendigen Sprachen Korrespondenz zu führen” (86),⁶ Wilhelm is also shown to be generous, amiable and sociable, warm-hearted, compassionate and moral by nature. But there is one attribute which dominates his life to such an extent that, more often than not, it explains his actions or the lack thereof. It is so predominant that we can symbolically identify Wilhelm with it. This ability is his POWER OF IMAGINATION. Its repercussions pervade the Lehrjahre as much as they do the Theatralische Sendung, the fragmentary first version of Wilhelm Meister.⁷ In his revision Goethe dropped his original plan of making Wilhelm an actor and the founder of a German national theater. Instead, he explores fundamental features of the process of “Bildung,” “Heilung,” and he pursues his specific inquiry into an artist's concern: namely the possibility of transforming the power of imagination from a given incalculable aptitude to a maturing, more manageable capability approaching mastery.

The Bildungsroman now features the author's elaborate analysis of and poetological metatext on creative imagination as a human faculty requiring cultivation, direction and integration just as our other faculties do. On an epistemological and ethical level, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre represents nothing less than a Künstlerroman, the Bildungsroman or “inner biography” of the thinking imaginative artist. Goethe decided early on that if he as an artist desired to take his responsibilities toward the arts and to society seriously and to employ his talents effectively for the enhancement of both, he had better become a master in his craft. Goethe's hero, Wilhelm Meister, whom he once called his “geliebte[s] dramatische[s] Ebenbild[.],” is thus not coincidentally surnamed “Meister” (as omen and goal).⁸ And it is likewise no coincidence that this fictional younger brother of his, to whom he assumes such a distancing yet loving ironic stance, is christened “Wilhelm” after Shakespeare. Goethe regarded Shakespeare as the paragon among modern poets, as a “groβer undeinziger Meister,” because he could do both, replicate “das innerste Leben” of nature in his art as well as center his poetic world around an idea or concept.⁹

In the first part of this paper I shall briefly analyze and categorize the various narrative embodiments of Wilhelm's power of “productive imagination” which Goethe intensified rather than reduced in his revision of the novel. In the second part, I shall deal with Goethe's own epistemology as found in his letters and theoretical writings and examine how it explains the necessity of Wilhelm's integration into the Society of the Tower.

I

The following four levels of evidence for “creative imagination” are found in the novel's text: 1. Literal or metaphorical references to Wilhelm's talent. 2. The author's calling attention to Wilhelm's specific productions of a poem, a prologue, a drama or other works. 3. Wilhelm's semi-conscious process of artistic projection and ultimately fully conscious insight into his poetic Doppelgänger, especially Mignon and the Harpist, who mirror, diverge from or supplement the title hero's inner world and development. 4. Wilhelm's intuition, creation, translation or distancing “objectification” of Mignon's and the Harpist's songs.

Level 1: As the author literally points out in the third chapter of Book I, it is “auf den Flügeln der Einbildungskraft” (14) that Wilhelm “elevates” himself to his first love, an actress whose beauty is enhanced by the limelights of the theater, thus captivating both his heart and his fancy. When Wilhelm tells Mariane one evening about the permanent impact the puppet shows had on him beginning at age ten, his narration emphasizes the metamorphosizing effect of his own creativity: “Meine Einbildungskraft brütete über der kleinen Welt, die gar bald eine andere Gestalt gewann” (23). Symbolically this sentence points forward to the marionette-like figure of Mignon who through her “master,” Wilhelm, will also take on different shapes and forms. About his youthful manipulation of the marionettes and his play-acting Wilhelm says to Mariane: “Die gröβte Freude lag bei mir in der Erfindung und in der Beschäftigung der Einbildungskraft” (24).

Wilhelm's friend Werner likewise observes and speaks to him about his principal impetus, his “dichterische Einbildungskraft” (39). To illustrate Wilhelm's penetrating understanding of Shakespeare in contrast to his as yet inadequate attention to the surrounding reality, his friend Aurelie, the actress of tragedy, metaphorically places him among the gods when they deliberated about creating human beings (257). This literary motif of a human being present during divine creation is used by both Goethe and Schiller as a telling characterization of the poet's gift of abiding in higher realms of visual ecstasy and creativity while neglecting earthly and practical concerns.¹⁰

Equal emphasis is given in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre to the potential dangers of unrestrained fantasizing. The omniscient author, using critical directness and ironic understatement as well as creating a network of interdigitating symbolic figures and actions in the novel, points to the consequences of Wilhelm's “losgebundene[.] Einbildungskraft” (106). Although directed toward a noble goal, good will and fantasy alone lack the means and skills to be ultimately effective. Two diametrically opposite ventures of Wilhelm's imagination illustrate this. In Book II, the memory of Mariane and inspiration lead Wilhelm impulsively to the liberation and “purchase,” i.e., “visual acquisition,” of Mignon from the acrobats to become the child of his sick heart and the anchor for his imagination. However, five books later, Wilhelm, disappointed with the theater and rightfully criticized by Jarno on his dilettantic attempts as an actor on the stage, veers to the other extreme. He makes a clandestine marriage proposal to the ultra-practical Theresa who has no imagination at all. Jarno deftly points to Wilhelm's compensatory excesses with the maxim that unaided phantasy can seduce people not only in the realm of thought and images, but push them toward “falsche Tatigkeit” (554).

Level 2: Direct references to Wilhelm's productive imagination resulting in a piece of literature occur predominantly before his personal and then critical involvement with Shakespeare's Hamlet. One of Wilhelm's earliest works is the dramatic poem, “Jüngling am Scheidewege” (37). It is so important for the novel that the poetic paraphernalia Wilhelm assigns to the “muse of tragedy” assume the function of leitmotifs later in Lehrjahre.¹¹ Recommended as a potential dramatist, the hero in Book III is commissioned by the Count to write the prologue in praise of the Prince. After Wilhelm's jolly river journey with Melina's troupe, the narrator explicitly states: “er komponierte aus dem Reichtum seines lebendigen Bildervorrats sogleich ein ganzes Schauspiel mit allen seinen Akten, Szenen, Charakteren und Verwicklungen” (123f.). This reminds us of what the author records in his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, in respect to his own incessant productivity, especially of dramas, during his youth (HA X: 71).

Level 3: Goethe achieves the most intriguing and structurally complex demonstration of Wilhelm's power of imagination with the creation of Wilhelm's two so-called Schutzgeister, Mignon, the genius child of poetry, and the Harpist, the mythic bard and poetic incarnation of guilt, loneliness and fatalism. They can be called Wilhelm's “Hamlet figures” because, just like Hamlet, the sick prince, Mignon and the Harpist present the dark and tragic foil to Wilhelm's eventual transcendence of what he believes to be his own tragic fate. Just as Hamlet is changed into the brooding prince by the revelations of the ghost, so Wilhelm is changed into a potential Harpist by the traumatic loss of Mariane. She was his first and therefore, according to Goethe, his “absolute” love, whom Wilhelm not only saw as his future wife and partner in a professional acting career, but whom he idealized as his poetic muse.

Wilhelm's analysis in Book IV of Hamlet's pretragic character (and fate, i.e., before Claudius killed Hamlet's father) provides one of the keys for understanding Wilhelm's involvement with Mignon and the Harpist. By reconnecting the travel adventures of the second book of Lehrjahre to the happy occurrences of the first book, we can see how Wilhelm imaginatively composes the exotic and androgynous figure Mignon from the elements of his pretragic past. In Mignon Wilhelm's love for the marionettes and Mariane crystallizes into a living image in which he finds solace and stability as well as a voice for his longing, for the hope of finding his lost love again. The refuge which a poetically powerful image provides for the suffering heart is a frequent theme in Goethe's works. This theme also applies to the figure of the Harpist, Wilhelm's second so-called Schutzgeist. In him Wilhelm creatively encounters a pictorially powerful externalization of his own feeling of tragic loss supposedly inflicted upon him by fate and resulting in extreme inner loneliness. He “adopts” the Harpist into his new family, a constant reminder of his guilt over the abandonment of his love, Mariane. Wilhelm had hastily, and without allowing any explanations, condemned his pregnant fiancee. He had falsely connected phenomena of circumstance apparently supporting suspicions of her disloyalty; he had rushed to judgment based on his worst fears rather than weighing the evidence and looking for the truth.¹²

Tragic or self-inflicted loss can turn creative in an imaginative mind. Goethe, for example, after his own loss of Gretchen, as reported in Dichtung und Wahrheit, of Käthchen Schönkopf and Friederike Brion, produced a number of fictional disloyal men in his dramas Götz, Stella, Clavigo and Faust. But while we find in these works the poetic embodiment of the author's self-reproach, among many other themes, in Wilhelm's case we see the process itself at work, the process of dealing with it not only on an emotional and moral, but also on an imaginative and artistic plane.

Level 4: Goethe's Lehrjahre is unique in that it does not merely contain some of the most heart-rending poetic verse in the songs of Mignon and the Harpist. But Goethe also symbolically depicts these poems' genesses by tracing their diverse elements in Wilhelm's life. Cultural history and the riches of mythology and literature furthermore provide features to which the creative imagination lends depth and evocative power. It is no coincidence that the word beleben is a key word throughout the novel. Indeed, we find it emphasized right from the start. In the novel's first book we learn about Wilhelm's double relationship to his marionettes; as a child, he sees them as “alive” and he makes them come alive in his performances. After the terrible loss of Mariane, Wilhelm does the same imaginatively with his past, more unconsciously than consciously creating a living presence out of its elements. Little does it help him that he has sworn to give up all poetic endeavors, just as he has sworn to shun any future embrace by a woman. In the Theatralische Sendung we still find the seminal sentence which in the Lehrjahre is conceptually concealed but transformed into symbolic poetry and prose fiction: “so wird der Dichter, um der Dichtung zu entgehen, erst recht zum Dichter” (TS 90).¹³

A comparison of the first with the second version of the novel reveals most convincingly the origin and transformation of Mignon's and the Harpist's lyrical songs. We can distinguish among four tiers (again!) of Wilhelm's association with these songs. On the first tier we have an explicit reference to the fact that the poem was conceived and written by Wilhelm himself. Mignon's initial song in the Sendung is a recitation from Wilhelm's heroic pastoral idyll, the “Königliche[.] Einsiedlerin,” in which the young poet lets an overwhelming fate demand sworn secrecy of the innermost grievance of his heart, this even to be hidden from the closest of friends: “Heiβ’ mich nicht reden, heiβ’ mich schweigen” (TS 191). In Lehrjahre this poem becomes Mignon's next to last song after Wilhelm has left the theater, severed his inner identification with Hamlet's tragic fate, and starts to comprehend the divergent future paths of Mignon and himself. The enormous distance Wilhelm now feels toward this song which expresses absolute resistance to communication, contact and healing can be inferred from the fact that the narrator adds it to the very end of the fifth book, almost as an afterthought. His limp editorial excuse is intentionally transparent: that the novel's events had prevented him from scripting it earlier! The content of this song is then turned upside down in Book VIII, in which Mignon's secret and her past do come to light.

On the second tier of creative association with poetry, Wilhelm is shown as a translator of Mignon's pure expression of poesy, which stands for an intuitive mixture of feelings, sounds and images, of native and foreign words. It is characterized by originality, innocence, melody and mood which Wilhelm transforms into communicable poetry, i.e. into a coherent, identifiable language. The most famous song of Lehrjahre, inspired by Mignon, but written by Wilhelm (and later set to music by a host of composers), expresses longing for love and warmth and the return to Paradise in the mythologically evocative landscape of Italian nature and art: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen blühn” (TS 207).

In his revised and sophisticated “Bildungsroman” plus “artist novel” Goethe again places this poem differently than in the fragment. Now it appears after Wilhelm has liberated Mignon and incorporated her into his heart, after he has transformed her in three consecutive stages from an acrobat and marionette to become the living image of his inner longing, his genius child and the personification of his creative imagination. Instead of being called Gebieter three times as in the Theatralische Sendung, Wilhelm in the revised poem is addressed as what he has become for Mignon, what he should be for Mariane and their son Felix: “Geliebter,” “Beschützer,” “Vater” (145).

A third echelon of association with his doubles via poetry can be seen in the synchronicity of Wilhelm's emotions and the corresponding songs of the Harpist and Mignon. When in the second book Wilhelm's jealousy and recollection of an analogous situation in the first book are reawakened by Philine's seductive yet frivolous behavior, he looks for emotional refuge in the Harpist's reclusive domicile, the cheapest room of the cheap inn where they both find tears and songs for their shared deepest grievances. Wilhelm's emotional sufferings are poetically compressed and metaphysically “absolutized” in the Harpist's two songs. One, accusing the heavenly powers of injustice, gives a voice to desperate determinism: “Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aβ, / … / Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte” (136). The other, an inverted love song, depicts the consequences of total loneliness. The Harpist's so-called lover now is personified as pain and suffering; there is nothing to long for but the grave as an escape from the inner turmoil: “Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt, / Ach! der ist bald allein; …” (137).

Ultimately these songs are Wilhelm's songs that are given a mouthpiece and visual embodiment in the figure of the tragic old bard and balled singer. Less explicit than Theatralische Sendung in respect to the poetological origin of the Harpist, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre nevertheless provides ample proof of Wilhelm's “offenbares Geheimnis,” e.g. in the following sentence: “Auf alles, was der Jüngling zu ihm sagte, antwortete der Alte mit der reinsten Übereinstimmung durch Anklänge, die alle verwandten Empfindungen rege machten und der Einbildungskraft ein weites Feld eröffneten” (138—emphasis added).

Both poetic figures, Mignon and the Harpist, respond in a similar way to an intense emotion of Wilhelm's in the fourth book. Wilhelm has been severely wounded by bandits on the forest meadow and, in the form of an epiphany, receives his first vision of the beautiful Amazon whose appearance initiates the cure of Wilhelm, “our” sick Hamilton prince. During the ensuing convalescence, his longing for her increases to the point where only song can express the deep intensity of his desire for this visualized ideal of wholesomeness. This occasions the only moment in the novel that both of his poetic Doppelgänger unite in singing a song of literally “gut-wrenching” and unbounded yearning, “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, / Weiβ, was ich leide!” (240).

Wilhelm's fourth mode of association with poetry, the greatest individuation, i.e., objectification of the lyrical voice and its song, is shown in the novel when the paths of the protagonist and his doubles diverge, separate, and no longer reflect each other. I had alluded to such an instance above in Wilhelm's song on the sworn secrecy of the heart sung by Mignon (“Heiβ mich nicht reden”). As Wilhelm is slowly learning to give a life-affirming direction to his imagination, his poetic Doppelgänger and their songs reach the greatest identity with each other and the greatest distance from Wilhelm, their fictitious creator. This is, as a rule, found near the end of Mignon's and the Harpist's association with Wilhelm.¹⁴

In the fifth book, after Wilhelm's recuperative role playing of Hamlet—neither Mignon nor the Harpist ever play roles, whereas Philine constantly does!—the emotional bond with the Harpist is severed. Wilhelm's healthy rejection of the oath of eternal abstinence from sensual love occurs when he does not thwart Philine's love embrace. With it he acknowledges the pleasures of the present moment regenerating his life and giving impetus to an optimistic outlook. He is no longer dominated by the past. After this turning point in Wilhelm's life and during the purging fire, however, the Harpist still threatens the hero's future, symbolically represented in Wilhelm's son, by trying to kill Felix. Failing in this attempt through Mignon's and Wilhelm's intervention, the Harpist goes insane. His song about himself as the pitiful and deranged beggar marks Wilhelm's poetic separation from him. Now and only now is Wilhelm capable of leaving his double by sending the Harpist away to be cured.¹⁵

Mignon's transformation, however, is harder to achieve. It takes Natalie, the goal and guide of Wilhelm's maturer form of imagination, and her influence. In Natalie's presence Mignon sheds her androgynous nature and literally appears in the shape of an earthly angel. The fact that Wilhelm is initiated into the Tower Society at approximately the same time while this, Mignon's penultimate metamorphosis, occurs certainly can not be regarded as a coincidence. When the pragmatic Theresa arrives at Natalie's castle to fulfil Wilhelm's erroneous wish to marry her, this signifies the death stroke for Mignon. But within the symbolic network of the novel it is a necessary death. For Mignon, who has lived as Wilhelm's artist child primarily on the inner stage of her Pygmalion-Father's imagination, now becomes alive in the externalized form of a work of art. Mignon's song, “So laβt mich scheinen, bis ich werde” (515—emphasis added), precisely expresses this last stage of her appearance in the hero's world of the imagination before she ceases to exist in his mind and heart and is transformed by Wilhelm and his helpers from the Tower Society into a so-called “incorruptible corpse,” Goethe's symbol of art.

On a literal level Mignon is interred in a marble casket during an elaborate ceremony; symbolically she is given the form of life-like art in Natalie's castle. Preservation through life-like Kunst, art and skill, is mentioned six times in this context! And it occurs in the very same castle which the uncle, founder of the Tower Society, had had built by Italian architects as a model of supreme beauty, of complexity within unity. It epitomizes Goethe's classicism, the consequence of the author's epoch-making two years of “apprenticeship” and “rebirth” in Italy. The youths surrounding Mignon's marble casket in the castle's “Saal der Vergangenheit” sing about Mignon as the “Schatz, das schöne Gebild der Vergangenheit” (578). Whose past? Wilhelm's, of course, but one now “living” on for evermore also in the second realm of art: in the minds and hearts of the novel's readers.¹⁶

As such a child of poetry and longing living on in the hearts of readers after the publication of the novel, Mignon is known to the Painter who meets Wilhelm in Italy. This occurs in Wanderjahre, the second of the completed Wilhelm Meister novels, published some thirty years later. The Painter incorporates Mignon's figure and ambiance into his paintings. Now he and his companions sing Mignon's songs. Here Goethe poetologically preempts 20th-century reception theory, showing how the imaginative poet's work is perceived, assimilated and reproduced by another artist and in a different medium. Thus, according to Goethe's principle of “repeated mirrorings” we encounter yet another dimension of distancing and “objectification” by which the work of art transcends its creator, enters life again and through a new life reflects back on its originator.

In Lehrjahre, this spiral movement in the relationship of life to art and art to life is aphoristically summarized in the first part of the Lehrbrief. Wilhelm receives this certificate as a sign of having completed his apprenticeship upon his initiation into the Tower Society. The Lehrbrief begins with the well-known maxim “die Kunst ist lang, das Leben kurz” (496) and, as Jarno confirms, continues to encapsulate insights into the “Ausbildung des Kunstsinnes” (548). As the issues of understanding art, the artist and creative imagination turn out to be major themes of the novel, this document is truly appropriate for an artist's Bildungsroman such as Wilhelm's. Interestingly enough, the Lehrbrief ends with the word Meister, “master”, Wilhelm's last name and, we might add, the ultimate goal of his striving.

II

In addition to healing his heart through his engendering, empathizing and formative relationship to Mignon and the Harpist, Wilhelm moves toward “mastering” his “creative imagination” by replacing the theater, the stage where nature and art, truth and illusions are mixed, with the Society of the Tower. Literally and symbolically the “tower”—Lothario's castle has one—is solidly founded, protective of its valuable content, reaches high and possibly far. The Tower Society's leaders attempt to provide those they initiate with a lasting basis, greater overview and orientation, as Wilhelm's increasingly open-eyed approach to his surroundings as well as the Tower Society's consciously drafted collection of life stories demonstrate. Symbolically the enduring and well-founded tower stands as the opposite of the theater's world of make-belief and illusion. The Abbé's insights enable him to confirm Wilhelm's fatherhood of Felix and to identify Theresa's birth mother. The “tower” remains a distrusted secretive realm to outsiders. It is surely not coincidental that none of the actors in the novel, neither Mignon nor the Harpist, neither the Count nor the Beautiful Countess, nor Lydia, Lothario's passionate lover, can be or has been admitted into the self-aware and world-cognizant circle of the Tower members. Their very nature prevents it.

This leaves us with a puzzling question: Why then is Wilhelm deemed worthy of an elaborate initiation ceremony, even though he wavers until the very end of the novel? Not only does he fluctuate between emotional opposites—despair and elation, fear and hope—but he also vacillates in deciding what direction his life should take in the event that Natalie should prove out of reach. Three examples taken from the fifth, seventh and final chapter of the novel's last book will be used to illustrate Wilhelm's indecisiveness. Following that, an excursion into Goethe's epistemology, as found in his theoretical writings and letters, will provide the key for an answer to this question.

After Mignon's death and the expected loss of Theresa to Lothario, Wilhelm is understandably upset. He does not yet grasp the higher significance of these events. Even Jarno's patient revelations about the so-called “secrets” of the Tower Society and its principal members leave him doubtful. He sees nothing but shrewd manipulations by antagonistic forces. Jarno tries to assure Wilhelm that it takes him—because of his great potential—longer to be enlightened about the world and himself, that he is more likely than others to be confused in the course of his development. Wilhelm bears this out when he declares in exasperation that since his initiation into the Tower Society he feels least sure about “was ich kann, will oder soll” (550). No wonder certain critics have pinpointed such behavior as being more typical of the picaresque or adventure novel, claiming that there is no evidence of Wilhelm's maturation.¹⁷

An even greater despondency overwhelms “our hero” when during certain situations he regards his quest to attain Natalie as hopeless. By the seventh book she has acquired the significance of a Gestalt aller Gestalten (445) for him,—an epithet, by the way, which is reserved for only one other person in Goethe's opus, namely the paragon of beauty and art, the second Helena in Faust II (HA III, 1. 8907). As Wilhelm realizes how much he loves and needs Natalie, the prospect of losing her makes him turn into a pitiful anti-hero. He seems to be regressing to the fatalism of the Harpist. Indeed, just moments before the final happy resolution of the novel, in which the love and support of Natalie, her brother Lothario and the other Tower members are bestowed upon him, Wilhelm breaks out into a grand complaint about what he fancies to be the common lot of humans: misery and perdition. Even now—consistent with his character—Wilhelm considers it irrelevant to question more deeply the possible causes for his pessimistic outlook and his images of doom (cf. 607). Here as everywhere else in the novel, Goethe provides hints but leaves it to the reader to discover the solution at his or her level of understanding.

When the author's baffled contemporaries inquired about such weaknesses of his hero, Goethe gave a twofold answer the implications of which seemed to pose another riddle. “Meister,” Goethe told Chancellor von Müller, “müsse nothwending [sic] so gärend, schwankend und biegsam erscheinen, damit die anderen Charaktere sich an und um ihn entfalten könnten. … Er sei wie eine Stange, an der sich der zarte Epheu hinaufranke” (Gräf I, 2: 930—emphasis added). The last part of this statement pertaining to the structure of the work explains why Wilhelm's different environments and the characters he encounters and understands correspond so closely to the stages of his own inner development. The first part of this quote includes a key word synonymous with those verbs which are used in the novel to describe Wilhelm's character. This key term provides us with another venue leading to the epistemological, indeed ontological, explanation for Wilhelm's vacillation in the novel, even within the Tower Society. In Goethe's aesthetic writings we find the very same word as the culmination of verbal concepts describing the nature of the imagination.

While the novel's hero in the first three and a half books ambles, strolls and saunters through life—Goethe's preferred verb here is schlendern (141)—, Wilhelm aims for greater direction and purpose after meeting the Amazon, the later Natalie, in the middle of the novel (238). After many fruitful and necessary detours—Goethe uses the term ausschweifen (61, 570) to rove, to roam with an unbridled imagination,—Wilhelm is finally integrated into the Tower Society and makes a solemn resolution. He assures Theresa: “Ich überlasse mich ganz meinen Freunden und ihrer Führung … es ist vergebens, in dieser Welt nach eigenem Willen zu streben” (594). Why is it futile and even dangerous for Wilhelm, or rather for his particular talent, to roam about unbridled, unaided and according to his “own will”? Is he not a free individual like other human beings? Obviously not on the symbolic and poetological level of the novel. Goethe maintains in Lehrjahre and explicitly states in Wanderjahre: “die Einbildungskraft sei ohnehin ein vages, unstätes Vermögen” (HA VIII: 249). Although a “göttliches Geschenk” (HA VI: 79), as Werther acknowledges, “gefällt sich [die Einbildungskraft] in dem weiten geheimniβvollen [sic] Felde der Bilder herumzuschweifen …”¹⁸ It even “lauert als der mächtigste Feind, sie hat … einen unwiderstechlichen Trieb zum Absurden …,” as Goethe ascertains in 1805.¹⁹

The word schwanken to waver, the third significant verb, is used by Goethe to characterize Wilhelm's vacillating nature in his answer to Chancellor v. Müller, as quoted above. It connects with the very first line of Faust where the author in his “Zueignung” addresses the “schwankende Gestalten” evoked by his poetic imagination which are to be shaped into the final version of his drama. It also connects with a major excerpt from his theoretical writings on literature. This Goethean definition reads like a postscript, a conceptual summary of Wilhelm's roaming talent which needs support, guidance and direction and it hints at the reason why it is Natalie and the Tower Society in whom Wilhelm finds the masterly completion of his apprenticeship. Goethe's quote begins with a negative characterization: “Die Einbildungskraft in ihrer ausgedehnten Beweglichkeit scheint zwar kein Gesetz zu haben, vielmehr wie ein wacher Traum hin und her zu schwanken; …” Such a description would fit Wilhelm's strange behavior to the very end of the novel, as I have outlined in three examples. Goethe's quote continues with a positive supplement, “aber genau besehen wird sie auf mannigfaltige Weise geregelt: durch Gefühl, durch sittliche Forderungen, … am glücklichsten aber durch den Geschmack, wobei die Vernunft ihre edlen Gerechtsame leitend ausübt.”²⁰

In view of this reflection, is it any wonder that Wilhelm finds the “regulating” goal of his apprenticeship embodied in Natalie and the major personages of the Tower Society? He cannot help but praise the active, multifaceted Lothario and his circle. Only there, he says, has he found clarity, enrichment, and the stability for his own images and thoughts (cf. 443). Another leader in the Tower Society, on the level of Natalie's brother Lothario, is the Abbé whom the novel portrays to be the man of Vernunft, i.e., higher intuition and right reason. He emerges as the acknowledged pedagogue and educator of the novel, as the art expert and ultimately as the matchmaker for proper marriages. His “Liebhaberei, manchmal eine Heirat zu stiften” (554), signifies epistemologically, as it did in esoteric alchemy, a knowledgeable agent who finds and combines complementary human capabilities.

When Goethe revised his novel, he not only introduced the picture of the “sick prince” as a major leitmotif, but he also invented the attention-provoking chain of emissaries from the Tower Society marking Wilhelm's increasing critical awareness and foreshadowing his happy ending. These emissaries pop up briefly but remain largely opaque to Wilhelm as long as his wavering fancy directs his life exclusively or predominantly. It is especially the Abbé in different embodiments who appears at crucial junctures in Wilhelm's life. As the unknown art expert shortly before Wilhelm's loss of Mariane in Book I, he discusses decisive decision-making vis-à-vis blind belief in fate; as the stowaway country parson on the fancy-free water journey of Melina's troupe in Book II, he alludes to the influence of childhood impressions such as Wilhelm's marionettes on an artist's imagination; and as twin brother to the actor of Hamlet's father's ghost in Book V, he helps Wilhelm to stops identifying with an adopted role, namely that of a tragic hero. Only when Wilhelm has left the realm of the theater, when he has recognized the need to complement his principal asset to give it a lasting foundation and to make it life-enhancing, only then does he find himself a member of the Tower Society. And this not just spontaneously but permanently meaning that he is aware of the circle of higher, i.e. noble human faculties which are symbolically represented by the aristocratic or—regarding the Abbé—clerical members of the Tower. Goethe, the uomo universale, strove for such fully developed, cooperative faculties for his person. In the novel the spectrum of human faculties is unfolded into several characters and cooperation among them is advocated. Their tensions, antagonisms, and eventually their mutual assistance become one of the novel's major themes just as it is for Goethe's Märchen, written in 1795 during the composition of the last books of Lehrjahre.

The framework of this paper does not allow a detailed interpretation of the multilayered symbolism and specific allegory inherent in the Tower.²¹ Since I am interested in the philosophical ramifications of the Society, I want to go beyond its humanitarian, economic and political concerns which have received widespread critical attention. But the above references should suffice to answer the question which was posed at the very beginning: Why does the Tower Society, secret and elitist and aristocratic as it appears, specifically select Wilhelm, a mere denizen of the bourgeois “middle class,” for its tutelage and guidance? How does he, furthermore, deserve marriage to Natalie, the ideal in the novel, the ultimate aristocrat (Greek: “best” person)? Why is his creative imagination worth cultivating? How can he, who exclusively plays the roles of princes on the stage and is associated with a sick but recuperating prince, assume in the end a pivotal, a princely role within the Tower Society? Does he prove indispensable to the Abbé, Jarno, Lothario and his family? What can he give them that they do not have?

Among Goethe's theoretical statements which support the answer which is inherent in the novel itself, an attachment to a letter directed to Archduchess Maria Paulowna provides a most succinct overview of the interaction of the human faculties of perception, cognition and creativity. Referring to Reinhard's summary of Kant's Critiques, Goethe criticizes the philosopher's epistemology for failing to include “imagination” among the human powers of empirical and conscious apperception.²² Without imagination, the poet claims, an “incurable gap” arises. This short discourse, questionable in respect to Kant is, however, most valuable if we apply its theoretical statements to Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in general and to Philine, Natalie and the Tower Society in particular, all of whom would suffer an “incurable gap” without Wilhelm and his principal talent.

Let us briefly point to some of the amazing analogies between Goethe's practice and theory, between the novel and this short treatise.²³ If we reflect upon the implications of Goethe's conceptual discourse here, an additional pathway to understanding previously obscure relationships in the complex and multilayered, yet rationally structured ending of the novel becomes visible. In the last books of Lehrjahre, Goethe uses both symbolism and allegory to represent his insights into the psychology and epistemology of artistic creativity, as he does constantly in Acts I-III of Faust II, a work begun in 1800, just four years after the completion of Lehrjahre.

Along with sensation, analytical reason and Vernunft, Goethe calls “Phantasie … die vierte Hauptkraft unsers geistigen Wesens.” And then he summarizes what it does for these other faculties. Imagination “suppliert die Sinnlichkeit, … sie legt dem Verstand die Welt-Anschauung vor unter der Form der Erfahrung, sie bildet oder findet Gestalten zu den Vernunftideen. …” Would we have a novel without the poet Goethe's intriguing figures and images created by his imagination around Wilhelm the central “rod” and based on guiding ideas of higher intuition? Does not Jarno himself declare that the maxims of the Lehrbrief would only make sense to Wilhelm (and any reader) if related to his or her own life's experiences? Goethe concludes the paragraph with an astounding statement that shows only too clearly why Wilhelm's creative imagination is absolutely indispensable, epistemologically and psychologically, in the well-founded circle of developed and far-seeing human faculties symbolically embodied in the Tower Society: Imagination “belebt also die sämtliche Menscheneinheit, welche ohne sie in öde Untüchtigkeit versinken müβte” (HAB III: 385).

Seen from this perspective, Wilhelm reveals himself not as a passive, but rather as the most active figure in the novel. Why is this not readily apparent when we read the work? Because Goethe's “unablenkbare Richtung” has always been, as the friend of his youth, Merck, already noticed, “dem Wirklichen eine poetische Gestalt zu geben” and not, as so many other writers do, to try to make flights of fancy appear real. (HA X: 128). Hidden truths need to be discovered and discerned! In nature and culture, creativity always works well hidden in the center of protective enclosures, e.g. in the roots underground, in the flower bud, the mother's body, the artist's or inventor's head. Only slowly and in its effects does it become obvious. In reference to conceptualizing hidden creative qualities Goethe uses the following metaphor: “Die Quelle kann nur gedacht werden, insofern sie flieβt” (HA IX: 228). Thus Wilhelm's creativity is found in the flow of life in the novel. As Goethe had noted in an earlier quote, this abundant life winds itself like ivy around the rod of imagination and in maturing, it becomes cognizant of the creative process and of its needs.

In his autobiographical writings Goethe declared that “immer tätiger, nach innen und auβen fortwirkender poetischer Bildungstrieb … den Mittelpunkt und die Base seiner Existenz [macht].”²⁴ In a poem from 1780 he personifies “imagination” as “Meine Göttin” (HA I: 144). But he early on realized that imagination needed guidance by the other human faculties. Goethe's short treatise to Maria Paulowna gives equal emphasis to this insight in the following concepts and metaphors:

Wenn nun die Phantasie ihren drei Geschwisterkräften solche Dienste leistet, so wird sie dagegen durch diese lieben Verwandten erst ins Reich der Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit eingeführt. Die Sinnlichkeit reicht ihr rein umschriebene, gewisse Gestalten, der Verstand regelt ihre produktive Kraft und die Vernunft gibt ihr die völlige Sicherheit, daβ sie nicht mit Traumbildern spiele, sondern auf Ideen gegründet sei. (HAB III: 385)

Goethe located the ultimate “ideas,” understood not as Kantian modes of thinking, but as creative forces behind all manifestations which we conceptualize as laws and visualize as archetypes, in nature herself. “God-Nature” was and remained for Goethe the dynamic all-inclusive organism, the basis for human striving, for science and the arts. Natalie embodies not only human traits of perfection, reminiscences of Goethe's Spinoza studies, but also several of the morphological laws and principles, the very “ideas” according to which Nature operates and which Goethe believed to have discovered in Italy.²⁵ It should not surprise us that Wilhelm, after having seen, experienced and recognized Natalie for what she is, cannot live without her. Even before he overcomes his suspicion of the other members of the Tower Society, he finds in Natalie both the foundation and the goal for his creative imagination. He confesses to her: “Ich danke Gott und meinem guten Geist, daβ ich diesmal geleitet werde, und zwar von Ihnen” (537).

Likewise it makes sense that Wilhelm and his inheritance, the art collection of his grandfather, which had been sold and which he only now properly appreciates, are united in Natalie's castle. Here he experiences a rebirth, a complete integration into his proper realm of art based on life through the presence of Natalie. Her castle had been built by the Uncle, the founder of the Tower Society and the person in the novel who, as has often been noticed, resembles the mature Goethe the most. Just as Goethe the poet had experienced a rebirth through his studies of the people, the arts and sciences in Italy, he has the Uncle choose Italian architects to erect this “model” of a castle—“etwas Mustermäβiges” (410). It is the Uncle who insists on cultivating the senses as well as the mind in order not to fall for the “Lockungen einer regellosen Phantaise” (408). Goethe's letters from Italy had repeatedly notified his Weimar friends that he had “Gelegenheit gehabt, über mich selbst und andere, über Welt und Geschichte viel nachzudenken,” and he concludes: “Zuletzt wird alles im ‘Wilhelm’ gefaβt und geschlossen.” It is noteworthy that the latter applies in particular to the arts when he states: “Ich habe über allerlei Kunst so viel Gelegenheit zu denken, daβ mein ‘Wilhelm Meister’ recht anschwillt.”²⁶ In this respect the novel reveals itself as nothing less than the ironically distanced inner biography of the author's own development as a human being, as an “imaginative” artist and, last but not least, as a thinker.

By the time Goethe seriously got around to revise his novel in 1794, Kant had published his three Kritik[en]. With specific reference to Kant, Goethe found it necessary in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre to call for someone to write “eine Kritik der Sinne,” so that the arts in Germany would improve (HA VIII: 287). He did not do that, but he did write, what no one was more qualified to do than he himself: within the framework of one of the most influential and profound novels of world literature Goethe incorporated his self-reflexive ‘Critique of Creative Imagination.’ It appears as a symbolically encoded metatext in the “Bildungs-” and “Künstlerroman” of his Shakespearean namesake, “William” the potential “Master.” The conclusion is unavoidable, as I have tried to show in these all-too-brief references to the novel's cogently structured complexity and comprehensiveness, that Goethe's critique of poetic imagination makes the same demands on intellectual rigor and epistemological scope as are found in any of Kant's three critiques.²⁷

While finishing Lehrjahre, Goethe also wrote the elegy (“Idylle”), “Alexis und Dora,” in which Alexis juxtaposes his former passivity of merely seeing Dora's beauty with his present fascination and deep love for her. Surprisingly, he compares these two experiences with two ways of approaching a poetic work. One path is to enjoy its strangely appealing imagery, even though its meaning remains enigmatic. The other path is the search for the poem's not-so-mysterious solution, here pinpointed as the elusive “Wort, das die Bedeutung verwahrt.” “Ist es endlich gefunden,” Alexis’ reflection continues, “dann heitert sich jedes Gemüt auf / Und erblickt im Gedicht doppelt erfreulichen Sinn” (HA I: 185f.). Does this poetological statement, hidden in an elegiac love poem, not also apply to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre? And can we recognize in the very ending of the novel the Horen-Märchen's sequel which, as Goethe stated in a letter to Humboldt, “[er] im Sinne [habe]”? This sequel, Goethe explicitly claimed, “[soll] ganz allegorisch werden.” But any “Erinnerung an die [traditionelle?] Allegorie” in this allegorical “fairy tale” would have to be obliterated by “eine sehr lebhafte Darstellung.”²⁸ A vivid presentation is certainly not lacking in the many surprising events of the novel's conclusion. Finally, is it a coincidence that this letter to Humboldt was written in the same month, May of 1796, in which “Alexis und Dora” was composed, a copy of which was included in the letter?

Speaking of the relationship of discernment and integration, of “ideas” and “bodies” in the allegory of the Tower, an analogous ironic disguise, differentiation and marvelous complementarity characterize Goethe's and Schiller's correspondence in this regard. Goethe left Schiller's plea for a more explicit enunciation of the novel's—especially the Tower Society's—“main idea” unheeded, since for him poetic symbolism and allegory come closer to life and reality than abstract thought. He consolingly wrote to his philosophical friend who for five years had immersed himself in a study of Kant: “Ich habe zu Ihren Ideen Körper nach meiner Art gefunden; ob Sie jene geistigen Wesen in ihrer irdischen Gestalt wiedererkennen werden, weiβ ich nicht.”²⁹ Schiller, on the other hand, made his most touching remarks about Lehrjahre after his first readings. He called Goethe's novel a synthesis of beauty and truth imparting “ein Gefühl geistiger und leiblicher Gesundheit.” Its poet, having accomplished such a work, became, for Schiller “der einzige wahre Mensch” (Schiller's emphasis), the true representative of mankind.³⁰

Notes

1. This article is an expanded version of a paper read at the 1996 Annual Conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in a special session arranged by the Goethe Society of North America for the bicentennial commemoration of the publication of Goethe's novel.

2. Gesammelte Werke in 12 Bänden. Schriften zur Literatur 2 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970) 164.

3. For a recent overview of the range, richness and perplexity in the scholarly interpretations of the novel see Benedikt Jeβing, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995—Sammlung Metzler, vol. 288) 123-137, 235-240. Other scholars have claimed and traced the development of two major schools of thought regarding Lehrjahre, one going back to Schiller and Körner, the other to Novalis. I have addressed these approaches in previous studies and book reviews, e.g. “‘Poesy—Poetry—Poetology’: Wilhelm ‘Meister,’ Hamlet und die mittleren Metamorphosen Mignons,” Goethes Mignon und ihre Schwestern. Interpretationen und Rezeption, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister (New York: Lang, 1993) 1-25, esp. 1f., 20f. and endnotes 4, 8. To avoid reiteration, the present paper limits the discussion of scholarly positions to recent studies as they pertain to the issues at hand.

4. For a critical survey of the older research literature see Lothar Köhn, “Entwicklungs-und Bildungsroman. Ein Forschungsbericht,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift (DVLG) 42 (1968): 427ff. and 590ff. Recent compendia dealing with the history of the concept and the genre include: Jürgen Jacobs and Markus Krause, Der deutsche Bildungsroman: Gattungsgeschichte vom 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 1989), Todd Kontje, The German Bildungsroman. History of a National Genre (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993) and Rolf Selbmann, Der deutsche Bildungsroman, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994).

5. The significance of the Tower Society's addition and structural integration into the revised novel cannot be overestimated. It represents, next to the symbolic complexity of Natalie, the most thought-provoking group of educated, wise and therefore authoritative individuals in this work (see second part of this study for their relationship to Goethe's epistemology). Because of my symbolic reading of the novel and Wilhelm Meister's process of “vascillation cum maturation,” which necessitates the transformation, resp. death of Mignon and the Harpist within the Tower Society's purview, I cannot share its negative assessment by critics such as Rolf Grimmiger, Die Ordnung, das Chaos und die Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986) 209-230, esp. 222ff. and Günter Saβe, “Die Sozialisation des Fremden. Mignon oder: Das Kommensurable des Inkommensurablen in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren.” Akten des VIII. Internat. Germanisten-Kongresses Tokyo 1990 (München: Judicium, 1991) vol. 11: 103-112.

6. Parenthetical references in the text are to Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden (HA), ed. Erich Trunz (Hamburg: Wegner, 1948ff.) and to Goethes Briefe, Hamburger Ausgabe in 4 Bänden (HAB), ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow and Bodo Morawe (Hamburg: Wegner, 1962ff.). Citations in the text without indication of volume number are to HA, vol. VII: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, ed. Erich Trunz, 10th revised ed. (München: Beck, 1981).

7. The traditional view that the two versions differ markedly in the imaginative and artistic potential ascribed to Wilhelm is NOT borne out by the texts. The young Meister, like most artists, starts out by imitating models. The excerpts of Wilhelm's creative dramatic attempts cited in Book II of Theatralische Sendung testify to that. Compared to the extraordinary poetic quality of Wilhelm's song of the heart, “Heiβ' mich nicht reden …” and those in the later books of the novel, his dramatic versification of emotions and situations (Belsazar) are long-winded and unoriginal. Furthermore, in the retrospective of the 1790-s, the French Alexandrine in which “Welch schöner hoher Tag” (Chapter 5) is written had long been superseded. Thus the thought is not far-fetched that Goethe in the novel's revision dropped these samples of Wilhelm's artistic imitations precisely because of their redundancy and NOT because Wilhelm was to be deprived of the creative potential of his imagination. As Hans Reiss (and later critics) clearly recognized, Wilhelm's achievement with these early poetic products, as depicted in Theatralische Sendung, is “eindrucksvoll. Den Durchbruch zu einer neuen Dramatik oder Lyrik stellt sie nicht dar” (emphasis added). “Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung—Ernst oder Ironie?” in: Jb. d. Dt. Schillergesellschaft (JDSG) 11 (1967): 280.—Regarding the positive as well as negative aspects of dilettantism, see Goethe's und Schiller's “Dilettantismusschema”. Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche (GA), ed. Ernst Beutler (Zürich: Artemis, 1948ff.) 14: 729-754 and Hans Rudolf Vaget: Dilettantismus und Meisterschaft. Zum Problem des Dilettantismus bei Goethe (München 1971). Like Vaget, I consider Werther to be a dilettante, in contrast, however, not Wilhelm Meister. His developing form consciousness, his critical and dramaturgical treatment of Hamlet and finally, his acceptance for initiation into the Tower Society prove otherwise. Symbolically, Mignon's transformation into a work of art in the “Saal der Vergangenheit” is “kunstbewuβte und künstlerisch gekonnte Formgebung,” in which Wilhelm (symbolically part of a larger unit, the capabilities of the Tower—see later) participates directly. Also cf. my article, “Puppe-Tanzer-Dämon-Genius-Engel: Naturkind, Poesiekind und Kunstwerdung bei Goethe,” in: The German Quarterly 54 (1980): 19-32. Vaget, “Die Leiden des jungen Werthers,” Goethes Erzählwerk. Interpretationen, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler and James E. McLeod (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985) 59.

8. Letter to Charlotte von Stein, June 24, 1782. Hans Gerhard Gräf, Goethe über seine Dichtungen, Part I, vol. 2 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968) 712.

9. Cf. the early essay “Zum Shakespeares-Tag” in general and the late “Shakespeare und kein Ende” in particular, HA XII: 224ff. and 287ff., esp. 294, 296f.

10. Cf. Schiller's poem, “Die Teilung der Erde,” Werke und Briefe, vol. 1, ed. George Kurscheidt (Frankfurt/M: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992) 24.

11. Examples: the muse's “chains” reoccur in connection with Melina in Book I, her “mask” has an unintended but symbolically ominous function when the count in Book III sees himself in Wilhelm's disguise, her “dagger” wielded by Aurelie cuts the life line of Wilhelm's hand at the end of Book IV, and it is Natalie who governs the “kingdom” which Wilhelm finally obtains, together with her, at the end of Book VIII.

12. A detailed structural and thematic analysis of these multiple symbolic interrelationships is found in my early article, “Wilhelm Meisters Mignon—ein offenbares Rätsel. Name, Gestalt, Symbol, Wesen und Werden,” DVLG 42 (1968): 89-116.

13. References in the text marked TS are to Harry Maync's original edition of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1911).

14. For the Harpist this was also the case at his introduction. Since he enters Wilhelm's bohemian troupe of actors as a ballad singer, his first song, is, of course a ballad which corresponds to his social and poetic role, before he is appropriated more and more by Wilhelm as his tragic double. Yet, as Monika Fick has convincingly shown in her penetrating study of the Harpist, his ballad contains several motifs of Wilhelm's utopia of a bird-like poetic existence which Wilhelm depicts for Werner at the beginning of Book II. In spite of these analogies, Fick repeatedly denies that Wilhelm has creative or artistic abilities; for her he is merely “der Kaufmannssohn mit der korrespondierenden Phantasie.” “Destruktive Imagination. Die Tragödie der Dichterexistenz in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren,” JDSG 29 (1985): 207-247, esp. 212ff., 220, 239.

15. It is interesting to note that Goethe's Harpist, as a hitherto unrecognized forerunner of much more sinister doubles such as found in the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, R. L. Stevenson, Dostoyevski, Maupassant and others, does not overpower his fictitious creator, as most of the above authors' fictitious doubles do. The imagination of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister moves toward cognition and a lasting grasp of reality, while the Harpist only temporarily recovers with the help of his bottle of opium. Thus the positive outcome of the hero's struggle is ontologically inevitable for Goethe. After all, as a scientist and writer Goethe was aiming for and praised the “Phantasie für die Wahrheit des Realen.” Cf. Conversations with Eckermann, Dec. 25, 1825, GA 24: 165f. This “truth” for Goethe encompasses the tangible phenomena of experience as well as the recognizable laws of nature and the mind.

16. Goethe employs related symbols for the transformation of life into art also in his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften and in Faust II, as Wilhelm Emrich has convincingly shown. Die Symbolik von Faust II. Sinn und Vorformen, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1964) 355f.

17. Cf. e.g. Klaus-Dieter Sorg, Gebrochene Teleologie: Studien zum Bildungsroman von Goethe bis Thomas Mann (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1983) 79ff., 97ff.

18. Letter to Behrisch, Nov. 2, 1767. Der junge Goethe, ed. Hanna Fischer-Lamberg (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1963) 1: 148.

19. Tag- u. Jahreshefte, HA X: 490.

20. “Tausend und ein Tag,” Goethes Werke (WA), publ. under the auspices of Groβherzogin Sophie v. Sachsen, 4 parts in 143 vols. (Weimar, 1889-1919) I, 41, 2:354 (ed. M. Hecker).

21. Epistemological considerations are touched upon in Rosemarie Haas, Die Turmgesellschaft in “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren.” Zur Geschichte des Geheimbundromans und der Romantheorie im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/M: Lang, 1975) esp. 51ff. In respect to “Bildung als kognitiv-psychischer Vorgang” see Ivar Sagmo, Bildungsroman und Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine Studie zu Goethes Roman “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” (Bonn: Bouvier, 1982) esp. 59ff.

22. January 2, 1817. HAB III: 384ff. Scholarly research points to Franz Volkmar Reinhard's Kurze Vorstellung der Kantischen Philosophie as Goethe's reference here. Cf. discussion and bibliography in “Anmerkungen,” HAB III: 656. Recent research: Géza von Molnár, Goethes Kantstudien. Eine Zusammenstellung nach Eintragungen in seinen Handexemplaren der “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” und der “Kritik der Urteilskraft” (Weimar: Böhlau, 1994), esp. note 8 on p. 21. Far less revealing than Goethe's short treatise to Maria Paulowna, these markings and entries date from 1790-91, i.e. before the major revision of the novel took place. They indicate some common ground in Kant's and Goethe's view regarding the relationship of imagination to “Geist,” “Dichtkunst,” concepts and good taste (see esp. 116 and 316). For a more detailed analysis of Kant's concepts of “Einbildungskraft” and “Genie” see Hermann Mörchen, Die Einbildungskraft bei Kant, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970) and Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik 1750-1945, vol. 1 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftl. Buchgesellschaft, 1985) 354-80.

23. Some readers might question any probing of the epistemological metatext found in the constellations of the novel's principal characters. For them such a systematic analysis amounts to an “abstraction” of the novel's variegated tapestry of life, even though its results unveil a more coherent dimension of the text's richness. Goethe himself approved of a simple and straightforward reading of his work, but repeatedly pointed out that something “higher, something more general,” i.e., the laws of mind and nature symbolically depicted in the novel, make for its artistic merit and lasting value (cf. e.g. conversations with Kanzler v. Müller, Jan. 22, 1821; with Eckermann, Dec. 25, 1825).

24. “Selbstschilderung (1),” HA X: 529.

25. Hellmut Ammerlahn, “Goethe und Wilhelm Meister, Shakespeare und Natalie: Die klassische Heilung des kranken Königssohns,” Jb. d. Freien Deutschen Hochstifts 1978: 47-84, esp. 64-73. Hans-Jürgen Schings, “Natalie und die Lehre des †††. Zur Rezeption Spinozas in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren,” Jb. d. Wiener Goethe-Vereins 89/90/91 (1985/86/87):37-88.

26. Cf. Italienische Reise, HA XI: 411 and 366. Similarly the original correspondence to Duke Carl August (e.g. August 11, 1787 and January 25, 1788). See also letter to Ehepaar Herder dated Dec. 13, 1786, HAB III: 27.

27. Manfred Engel in his detailed study, Der Roman der Goethezeit, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), reaffirms the status of the Lehrjahre as a “symbolischer Bildungsroman.” Positioning the work as a transition to the genre of the “Transzendentalroman,” Engel finds the central theme of Goethe's classical opus to be “die Heilung eines Schwärmers” (317), a theme which he likewise traces in Werther, in Moritz' Anton Reiser and Tieck's William Lovell. Ehrhard Bahr had gone further. He pointed to what might be considered a thematic forerunner of Goethe's novel, Wieland's Don Sylvio von Rosalva, in which, according to Bahr, “es … nicht nur um die Heilung des schwärmerischen Helden [geht], sondern auch um ein poetologisches Problem, nämlich um die Rolle der echten und unechten Einbildungskraft in der Dichtung.” Erläuterungen und Dokumente. Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982) 149. Hans-Jürgen Schings acknowledges that the completed Wilhelm Meister novels present Goethe's “Gegenthema” to his modern mythological figures of absolute subjectivity, Werther and Faust. After an erudite and circumspect demonstration of the immense knowledge, discipline and artistry Goethe had invested into Lehrjahre, Schings conceives it also “zum nicht geringsten Teil, als ein Roman des Glücks.” Editor's “Einführung,” Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Ein Roman, Münchener Ausgabe, vol. 5 (München: Hanser, 1988) 642. For a discussion of Goethe's concept of “Glück” see Gerda Röder, Glück und glückliches Ende im deutschen Bildungsroman. Eine Studie zu Goethes “Wilhelm Meister.” (München: Hueber, 1968) 87-182, esp. 131, 176ff.; Hellmut Ammerlahn, Aufbau und Krise der Sinn-Gestalt: Tasso und die Prinzessin im Kontext der Goetheschen Werke (New York: Lang, 1990) 119ff. and note 93 on p. 120.

28. Letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt, May 27, 1796. Gräf I, 1: 350f. In regard to the utopian elements found in the Turmgesellschaft, Goethe's possible reference to it as an allegorical “fairy tale” is not as strange as it might seem on first glance.

29. Letter to Schiller, August 10, 1796. Gräf I, 2: 847. Earlier Goethe had stated that “durch einen mündlichen Kommentar des Abbés” he could easily have provided an explanation in order to give the Tower Society “einen ästhetischen Werth [sic] …, oder vielmehr ihren ästhetischen Werth in's Licht zu stellen” (emphasis added). Letter to Schiller, July 9, 1796. Gräf I, 2: 837. This is in response to and a correction of Schiller's request for an “ästhetischen Aufschluβ über den innern Geist … jener Anstalten” (Schiller's emphasis). Letter to Goethe, July 8, 1796. Gräf I, 2: 832f., line 41f.

30. Letter to Goethe, Jan. 7, 1795. HA VII: 622f. Cf. also Schiller's letter dated July 2, 1796.