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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
An enthusiasm for this novel is not, nowadays, an easy thing to share. Unless one moves in circles professionally devoted to German literature, the mention of its title is likely to call up among literary people the following notions: that T. S. Eliot has not approved of Goethe, while nineteenth-century England did, both facts still, to many, rather discouraging; that the Bildungsroman, of which Goethe's novel is the great example, is a sloppy and self-indulgent genre—there is no form, since it just goes autobiographically on and on, nor any proper commitment to experience, which the self-obsessed hero only passes through; that this one might be full of “wisdom,” perhaps, but that here is precisely its greatest fault, for what can wisdom be but smug “Victorian” moralizing or analyzing or generalizing, mere simplifying abstraction at best, and the death of all actuality, complexity, and charm. Nor is it fashion alone which accounts for the novel's virtual disappearance from our intellectual landscape. No, even when it is read it tends to be disliked. Press it on the up-to-date intelligent reader, the reader who devours the Russians or Stendhal or Flaubert or Proust with joy, and more often than not—such has been my experience—he will find it repulsively cold-blooded, even frivolous, in its treatment of human affairs. It is sometimes admitted that what happens in the novel, at least after the rather long flash-back at the beginning, ought to be interesting enough. But, the complaint is, one is hurried through even the big scenes at a pace that is shockingly sprightly. There is no sign that the author feels anything or wants us to feel anything. One is hurried on, moreover, to no particular purpose. Instead of “adding up,” the story rambles in the most outmoded way. And so forth.
Note 1 in page 86 I have used Thomas Carlyle's translation, which is accurate if a bit old-fashioned, except in several places where R. D. Boy lan's is superior. Since editions differ, I am indicating the book and chapter from which quotations are made, rather than the page.
Note 2 in page 87 André 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.
Note 3 in page 88 Quoted by Thomas Mann in “Goethe and Tolstoy,” Essays of Three Decades (New York. 1947), p. 159.
Note 4 in page 90 Boylan's translation, but with his “expose themselves to thoughtless or intentional danger” corrected.
Note 5 in page 95 In Bk. il, 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?
Note 6 in page 97 Boylan's translation. Both he and Carlyle, however, call the aunt's nature “lovely,” whereas Goethe says lièbewlle loving.'
Note 7 in page 98 Well may Gide have said that Goethe's was the one influence 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 Gale, 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 Meister'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.
