Wilhelm Meister (Book 1&2): Enriched edition. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship & Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen and Erica Lancaster

In 'Wilhelm Meister (Book 1&2),' Johann Wolfgang von Goethe crafts a rich narrative that weaves the themes of self-discovery, artistic ambition, and social responsibility through the lens of a young protagonist's journey. This bildungsroman explores Wilhelm's transition from a superficial desire for theatrical fame to a profound understanding of life's complexities. Goethe employs a blend of prose and verse, reflecting the Romantic literary style of his time, while addressing broader cultural and philosophical discourses, notably the burgeoning ideas of individualism and the role of the artist in society. The novel's intricate character development and symbolic motifs highlight the tensions inherent in the human experience, solidifying its place in the canon of German literature. Goethe, renowned for his contributions to literature and philosophy, drew upon his own life experiences when writing 'Wilhelm Meister.' His engagement with the theater, coupled with his friendships with influential thinkers and artists of the era, informed the novel's exploration of creative aspiration and identity. The autobiographical undertones reflect his struggles and aspirations, illustrating his keen understanding of the complexities that shape one's path in life. Readers seeking a profound exploration of personal growth and artistic integrity will find 'Wilhelm Meister (Book 1&2)' to be an enriching experience. Goethe's masterful prose invites introspection while engaging with timeless questions of purpose and fulfillment. This seminal work not only captivates with its narrative depth but also encourages readers to contemplate their own journeys toward self-realization.

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience:
- A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes.
- The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists.
- A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing.
- An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text.
- A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings.
- Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life.
- Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance.
- Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 9, 2023
• ISBN: 8596547772378

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) va néixer a Frankfurt am Main. Va començar els seus estudis de Dret a Leipzig, però els va haver d'abandonar a causa d'una malaltia durant la qual, establert a Frankfurt, es va interessar per camps tan dispars com la filosofia ocultista, l'astrologia i l'alquímia. L'any 1770 es va traslladar a Estrasburg per continuar estudiant Dret, i va ser allà on va conèixer Friederike Brion, model pels personatges femenins de les seves obres, al filòsof i crític literari Johann Gottfried Herder, responsable directe de l'abandonament per part de Goethe dels preceptes de classicisme francès per l'expressió directa de les emocions, que desembocaria en la col·laboració en Sobre l'estil i l'art alemany (1773), manifest del moviment Sturm und Drang, germen del romanticisme alemany. L'any següent va publicar Els sofriments del jove Werther, considerada com la primera novel·la representativa de la literatura moderna. El 1775 Carles August de Saxònia-Weimar-Eisenach, el va convidar a viure i treballar a la capital, un dels centres literaris i intel·lectuals d'Alemanya, el que va suposar una época crucial per al desenvolupament i la maduresa tant literària com intel·lectual de Goethe, que va viure a Weimar fins al dia de la seva mort. Allà va començar a treballar en algunes de les seves obres més famoses, com Ifigènia a Tàurida (1786) i Faust, poema dramàtic que sotmetria a canvis després de la seva estància a Itàlia entre el 1786 i el 1788 i la primera part del qual va publicar l'any 1808 (i que continuaria revisant periódicament fins poc abans de morir). També va acabar les obres dramàtiques que fundarien el classicisme alemany: Egmont (1775) i Torquato Tasso (1789). En tornar a Weimar va escriure, entre d'altres obres capitals, els poemes de Elegies romanes (1795) i Divan occidental-oriental (1819), el poema èpicHerman i Dorothea (1797), les novel·les Anys d'aprenentatge de Wilhelm Meister (1796), Les afinitats electives (1809), El anys itinerants de Wilhelm Meister (1821), el llibre Viatge a Itàlia (1816), la seva autobiografia Poesia i veritat (1811-1833), i la segona part del seu poema dramàtic Faust, publicada pòstumament l'ant 1832.

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Wilhelm Meister (Book 1&2)

Enriched edition. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship & Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience.

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Erica Lancaster

Edited and published by Good Press, 2023

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EAN 8596547772378

Table of Contents

Introduction

Synopsis

Historical Context

Author Biography

Wilhelm Meister (Book 1&2)

Analysis

Reflection

Memorable Quotes

Notes

Introduction

Table of Contents

The footlights tempt a young merchant’s son to trade certainty for the risky art of becoming himself. This tension between settled duty and the lure of self-fashioning propels the opening movement of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, where the stage becomes both setting and symbol. In Books I and II, the novel initiates a journey not by map but by vocation, asking what it means to live truthfully in a world of roles. The theater’s make-believe invites Wilhelm to test identities, yet demands discipline and courage. Goethe’s narrative begins in this charged space, where youthful longing for experience confronts the weight of family, commerce, and convention.

Wilhelm Meister is widely regarded as a cornerstone of the Bildungsroman, the classic novel of formation that shaped modern ideas of character development. Its enduring status arises from the audacious claim that personal growth is not a straight line but a lived experiment through art, work, and society. Goethe’s exploration of education—intellectual, moral, emotional—set a template for later European fiction, influencing how writers depict maturation amid conflicting ideals. Critics and thinkers have returned to the book for its supple psychology and its subtle interplay of irony and sincerity. As a classic, it continues to spark debate about autonomy, social responsibility, and the craft of living.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the towering figure of German letters, composed Wilhelm Meister during the late eighteenth century, developing it across the 1780s and early 1790s, with publication in 1795–1796. He wrote in the milieu of Weimar Classicism, balancing Enlightenment clarity with a growing sensitivity to art’s transformative power. Books I and II introduce the protagonist’s first decisive steps from a bourgeois mercantile world toward the theater. Without disclosing later turns, it suffices to note that Goethe frames this transition as an education of heart and mind. The author’s intention is not merely to entertain, but to examine how a life acquires form.

Books I and II chart Wilhelm’s early enthusiasms and dilemmas as he confronts family expectations and the intoxicating promise of the stage. Born into a comfortable household that values commerce, he feels an inward tug toward performance, imagination, and a freer social horizon. The narrative follows his initial contact with actors, his fascination with dramatic practice, and his first attempts to reconcile aesthetic ambition with practical necessity. Rather than offering a linear ascent, Goethe presents a series of trials that refine aspiration into purpose. These opening books establish the central problem: how to reconcile the desire for artistic authenticity with the demands of social reality.

Goethe’s purpose in this phase is diagnostic and formative. He studies how a vocation emerges through attraction and resistance, how a youthful passion hardens or ripens into a sustainable path. The theater serves as a laboratory where questions of truth, illusion, and discipline become concrete tasks—learning lines, managing troupes, negotiating patrons. Books I and II reveal the pressures under which ideals either fail or find structure, emphasizing that Bildung is not mere self-indulgence but a strenuous ordering of impulses. By showing the magnetism of art alongside its costs, Goethe equips readers to weigh the legitimacy of a life chosen against one inherited.

Formally, the narrative moves with an agile, scene-driven rhythm: conversations, letters, rehearsals, and sudden encounters build a mosaic of experience. Goethe avoids rigid didacticism; instead, he lets circumstances educate both Wilhelm and the reader. The style balances lucid description with suggestive understatement, inviting inference rather than commanding assent. Theatricality infuses the prose—roles are tested, masks are tried on, stages are improvised in rooms and inns. Yet the book consistently probes beyond surface spectacle toward the ethics of performance: what does it mean to act well in life? Books I and II thus model an education through situation, not sermon.

Several themes emerge with particular clarity at the outset. Vocation contrasts with duty, as the claims of family and trade confront an inner summons. Authenticity contends with role-playing, raising the problem of whether sincerity can survive the costumes of social life. Education is reframed as self-formation through error and correction, not as the mere acquisition of facts. The arts appear as both refuge and trial, capable of ennobling character yet prone to vanity. Friendship and mentorship—often provisional in the touring world of actors—become crucibles for judgment. Underneath these concerns lies the perennial question: by what standards should a life be measured?

The late eighteenth-century German setting matters. Without a unified national theater or robust institutional support, traveling companies depend on capricious patronage, local tastes, and improvisation. This precarious ecology intersects with a rising bourgeois ethos that values reliability, thrift, and predictable advancement. Books I and II situate Wilhelm at the crossroads of these worlds. The theater promises community and expressive freedom but demands flexibility and exposure to risk. Commerce offers stability but threatens to constrict imagination. Goethe uses this social landscape to test ideals in conditions that are recognizably ordinary: family dinners, ledgers, rehearsal rooms, roadside inns—spaces where character quietly declares itself.

Wilhelm himself is portrayed as earnest, impressionable, and morally ambitious, drawn to noble feelings yet learning to distinguish posture from practice. The people around him—actors, friends, elders—serve as mirrors and foils, offering competing models of prudence, enthusiasm, or compromise. Goethe’s characterization avoids caricature; even minor figures are given motives, pressures, and partial insights. This plurality of perspectives encourages readers to withhold swift judgment and to see growth as contested terrain. In Books I and II, no single voice or doctrine dominates. The emphasis falls instead on recognition: learning to read situations, to appraise counsel, and to accept the discipline of consequences.

As a classic, Wilhelm Meister altered expectations of what a novel could accomplish. It joined psychological nuance to social observation, placing artistic calling at the center of modern narrative. Its method—development through scenes, encounters, and the testing of ideals—has echoed through subsequent European fiction, especially in works that trace a protagonist’s coming-of-age. The book’s critical fortune has been rich and varied, inspiring admiration, rebuttal, and reinterpretation across generations. That persistent dialogue signals its strength: it invites rather than closes inquiry. Readers and writers have mined its early books to think about art’s power, the risks of ambition, and the making of a responsible self.

For contemporary audiences, the questions raised in Books I and II remain urgent. How do we choose a path amid competing definitions of success? What is the relation between work that sustains us materially and work that expresses our deepest aims? In an age attentive to performance—in public profiles, workplaces, and creative scenes—Goethe’s theater motif helps illuminate the line between role and reality. The novel’s patience with trial and error models a humane approach to growth that resists instant resolution. It endorses neither reckless escape nor resigned conformity, but a disciplined pursuit of a fitting life tested in the world.

Wilhelm Meister endures because it captures the drama of becoming: a young person stands before the stage of life, uncertain yet summoned to act. In Books I and II, Goethe frames that summons within a vivid social and artistic world, balancing longing with labor, ideal with institution. The result is an introduction to Bildung that is searching rather than prescriptive, intimate yet public in consequence. Its themes—vocation, authenticity, responsibility—speak across centuries precisely because they arise from ordinary choices rendered with uncommon clarity. As you enter these opening books, expect not a map but a rehearsal: a crafted preparation for the living of a life.

Synopsis

Table of Contents

Wilhelm Meister (Books 1 and 2) introduces a young man from a prosperous merchant family who is drawn to the theater despite expectations that he will continue in trade. The narrative presents his formative years, his fascination with performance, and the tension between practical duty and artistic longing. These opening books trace how his early experiences shape his sense of vocation. They move from family rooms and private theatricals to roads and provincial playhouses, charting a gradual expansion of his world. Throughout, letters, conversations, and small decisions accumulate, defining the central question: whether Wilhelm’s life will follow commerce or the stage.

The story begins by outlining Wilhelm’s childhood pleasures: a puppet theater, memorized scenes, and a circle of companions who encourage his taste for drama. His father, a disciplined merchant, provides him with training suited to business, while his friend Werner consistently urges prudence and industry. Amid ledgers and lessons, Wilhelm reads, writes, and imagines plays, treating the theater as a moral and aesthetic school. The household’s routines frame his early experiments in performance, and these experiments become the means by which he measures himself. The result is a growing conviction that the dramatic art offers a path to self-understanding and purposeful activity.

Wilhelm’s attraction to the stage intensifies when he encounters Mariane, a talented actress whose artistry and charm reinforce his idealistic view of theater. Their relationship connects artistic aspiration with personal affection, binding private hope to public performance. He supports her career, participates in rehearsals and readings, and refines his own ambitions through their shared work. The romance draws him out of family expectations and into the practical concerns of theatrical life. He begins to imagine a future aligned with performance, even as business prospects press on him. This attachment brings joy and momentum, but it also exposes the fragility of artistic livelihoods.

As Wilhelm moves between family obligations and theatrical projects, pressures from home intensify. Werner warns him about financial risks and social consequences, while his father offers structured opportunities in trade. Wilhelm experiments with minor productions, tests his administrative abilities, and stages private entertainments. These activities reveal both enthusiasm and inexperience. Meanwhile, Mariane’s professional entanglements complicate plans, drawing attention to contracts, patrons, and reputations that govern the stage. The more Wilhelm invests emotionally, the more he must evaluate the terms by which actors live and work. The closing chapters of Book 1 gather these tensions, preparing a decisive shift in his course.

A disquieting discovery unsettles Wilhelm’s hopes and tests his attachment to Mariane. Faced with uncertainty, he withdraws from immediate theatrical plans and resolves to demonstrate steadiness by accepting a commercial journey. This decision allows him to honor family expectations while giving space to reevaluate his aims. The journey also marks a narrative pivot, moving the story from intimate urban scenes to encounters on the road. Book 1 concludes with Wilhelm bruised in spirit yet determined to act responsibly. The stage is neither rejected nor embraced outright; instead, it remains a question to be answered through experience.

Book 2 opens with travel, accounts, and appointments typical of a merchant’s circuit. On the road, Wilhelm meets a traveling troupe in distress and, moved by sympathy and curiosity, helps them resolve immediate difficulties. This chance encounter returns theater to the center of the narrative. He becomes an adviser and benefactor, navigating permits, lodgings, and negotiations. New figures emerge: Melina and his wife, who manage precarious resources; Philine, lively and self-assured; and Laertes, a capable actor. Through them Wilhelm observes the practical foundations of stage life. His assistance draws him closer, testing whether his ideals can serve real needs.

During these travels, Wilhelm encounters a mistreated child performer with a troupe of acrobats. He secures the child’s release, offering protection and a place among his companions. The child, known as Mignon, forms a quiet, steadfast bond with him that deepens his sense of responsibility. Soon after, a wandering Harper appears, whose music and reserve add a solemn counterpoint to the troupe’s bustle. These two figures broaden the novel’s emotional register and underscore the human ties that theater can gather around it. Wilhelm’s engagement with them turns inclination into obligation, linking artistic pursuit with care for vulnerable lives.

Settled temporarily in a provincial town, Wilhelm tries to professionalize the company. He drafts prologues and scenes, arranges roles, and mediates disputes. Rehearsals reveal gaps in training, competing egos, and the constant need for permits and patrons. Letters from Werner remind him of business duties and prospects awaiting his return. Philine’s social nimbleness contrasts with Wilhelm’s earnestness, while Melina’s caution highlights the troupe’s financial fragility. Through everyday tasks—casting, copying parts, scheduling, negotiating fees—Wilhelm learns how ideals meet constraints. The shaping of a repertory, though modest, becomes a testing ground for his leadership and his vision of theater’s value.

By the close of Book 2, the troupe has secured prospects for performance, and Wilhelm stands poised between commerce and art, more informed than when he began. The narrative emphasizes apprenticeship: learning through mistakes, managing resources, and understanding people. The key events—his first love, the decision to travel, aid to actors, the arrival of Mignon and the Harper, and the effort to organize a company—mark stages in self-discovery without resolving his future. The overall message is one of formation through experience. Books 1 and 2 establish the question of vocation, setting the course for further trials and choices to come.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Books 1 and 2 of Wilhelm Meister unfold within the fragmented political geography of the Holy Roman Empire in the later eighteenth century, approximately the 1760s–1780s. The setting evokes prosperous free imperial cities such as Frankfurt am Main or Leipzig, surrounded by duchies and principalities whose courts regulate culture and morals. Urban life is governed by guilds, citizenship rights, and family firms, while coinage diversity, internal customs barriers, and tolls complicate trade. Confessional plurality—mainly Lutheran and Reformed—shapes civic norms. This milieu grounds Wilhelm’s initial placement in a respectable merchant household and clarifies the social distance between fixed, regulated bourgeois life and the precarious, mobile world of actors and theater impresarios.

The novel’s early action moves through market towns and courts linked by postal roads, fairs, and way stations. The Reichspost, administered by the Thurn und Taxis family, and new chaussées in Prussia and other territories facilitated faster travel for merchants and entertainers alike. Provincial stages competed with court theaters in Weimar, Mannheim, and Vienna, and local police ordinances licensed performances, monitored inns, and regulated festivals. As Wilhelm gravitates from the countinghouse to the stage, the reader encounters inns, rehearsal rooms, and makeshift playhouses—spaces formed by eighteenth‑century urban regulation and commerce. The texture of these places reflects the jurisdictional patchwork, moral surveillance, and economic calculation that shape decisions in Books 1 and 2.

The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) ravaged many German territories, with battles such as Rossbach (1757) and Leuthen (1757) and repeated occupations devastating Saxony and Silesia. The conflict disrupted trade routes, raised war taxes, and left a legacy of debt, refugees, and demobilized soldiers in the 1760s. In the war’s aftermath, rulers sought stability and fiscal recovery, encouraging administrative order and economic prudence in towns. The novel mirrors this postwar caution in its portrayal of a merchant family determined to preserve capital and reputation. Wilhelm’s elders, shaped by a decade of uncertainty, defend the safe routines of commerce, while his theatrical aspirations appear reckless amid lingering memories of systemic volatility.

Postwar reconstruction revitalized major German fairs and transport. The long‑standing Frankfurt Messe and the Leipzig Michaelmas and Easter fairs drew dealers from the Baltic to the Alps, moving textiles, books, and colonial goods. The Thurn und Taxis Reichspost standardized mail schedules, while several states improved chaussées connecting Berlin, Hanover, and the Rhine. These developments accelerated news and theater announcements and allowed traveling troupes to plan seasons across principalities. In the novel’s early books, the ease and hazards of such travel—conveyances, timetables, and inn economies—frame Wilhelm’s entrance into theatrical life. His family’s trading horizon and the actors’ circuits both depend on these commercial arteries and the information they carry.

The international credit crisis of 1772–1773, triggered by the collapse of the London firm of Alexander Fordyce and spreading through Amsterdam to Hamburg, Baltic ports, and Berlin, curtailed loans and closed merchant houses. German trading cities with strong ties to British and Dutch finance experienced sudden contractions, bankruptcies, and curtailed inventories. This climate heightened bourgeois anxiety about risk and speculation. The novel reflects a similar tension between secure, ledger‑bound prudence and venture. Wilhelm’s temptation to redirect his life into the theater can be read against the period’s fear of financial overreach: his father’s insistence on measured capital management echoes merchants’ defensive strategies in the wake of the 1772 shock.

Actors in many German territories occupied a legally ambiguous and socially stigmatized status. Traveling comedians were often classed with vagrants; police ordinances required passports, patents of performance, and good‑conduct certificates. In Prussia and several Saxon and Bavarian lands, authorities could expel troupes or restrict repertory deemed immoral. The profession was frequently labeled unehrlich (dishonorable), excluded from guild protections and many civic rights. Books 1 and 2 dramatize the weight of this stigma: Wilhelm’s choice confronts not only family interests but also a juridical and moral order that treats actors as unreliable dependents. The troupe’s negotiations with officials and patrons reflect the legal hurdles that structured their livelihood.

The rise of a German public theater between 1767 and 1786 formed the decisive cultural backdrop for Wilhelm’s debut on the stage. The Hamburg National Theatre (1767–1769) attempted to found a subscription‑based, bourgeois institution independent of aristocratic whim. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, engaged as dramaturg, published the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–1769), which analyzed repertoire, acting, and audience education while the theater struggled financially and closed. Court support then proved crucial. In Weimar, Duchess Anna Amalia fostered a German‑language stage from 1776; in Mannheim, the court theater gained renown under Elector Carl Theodor, culminating in the 13 January 1782 premiere of Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber at the Nationaltheater Mannheim. Berlin followed with the Königliches Nationaltheater (1786) on the Gendarmenmarkt, shifting prestige from imported French troupes to a German‑speaking repertoire and a semi‑public model financed by subscriptions, court subsidies, and municipal backing. Vienna’s Burgtheater, declared the K.K. Nationaltheater in 1776 by Joseph II, further signaled imperial endorsement of German drama alongside Italian opera. These institutions professionalized acting (through permanent ensembles, rehearsals, and wage hierarchies), standardized touring contracts, and provided auditors and censorship boards that could both protect and constrain companies. They also created a market for Shakespeare in translation—via C. M. Wieland (1762–1766) and J. J. Eschenburg’s complete edition (1775–1777)—which placed Hamlet at the center of ambitious provincial stages. Books 1 and 2 resonate with this infrastructural shift: Wilhelm’s reverence for theater, his Hamlet fixation, and the troupe’s search for patrons all presuppose a Germany in which the national stage was being built piecemeal across courts and cities, promising legitimacy while exposing artists to administrative oversight and financial precarity.

Joseph II’s state reforms (r. 1780–1790) in the Habsburg Monarchy rationalized administration, moderated confessional barriers with the Toleration Patent (1781), and reorganized cultural institutions. Declaring Vienna’s Burgtheater the German National Theatre in 1776, the court tied stage practice to civic education, while censorship offices vetted plays for moral and political content. The abolition of many feudal burdens (notably the 1781 edict limiting personal serfdom) reflected a utilitarian ideal of productive subjects. The novel’s linkage of theater with moral improvement and practical discipline echoes this policy climate. Wilhelm’s desire to form himself through drama corresponds to contemporaneous arguments for theater as a public school of manners.

Prussian cultural policy under Frederick II (r. 1740–1786) favored French troupes and opera at court, yet secondary cities cultivated German stages. After Frederick’s death in 1786, Berlin’s Königliches Nationaltheater expanded German‑language repertoire under changing patronage. Police regulation remained stringent, but municipal pride and bourgeois subscriptions grew. The shifting balance from French to German performances created new opportunities for actors outside courtly French circles. In Books 1 and 2, the troupe’s aspirations and anxieties reflect this transitional market: engagements depend on princely taste, municipal funding, and a repertory aligned with patriotic and moral fashions rather than purely aristocratic Francophile preferences.

Guilds and apprenticeship statutes structured urban work and citizenship in the eighteenth‑century Reich. To trade legally, one sought Bürgerrecht (citizenship) and guild admission; household firms trained sons under the father’s authority, while dowries and inheritance contracts preserved capital within kin networks. Primogeniture, entail, and merchant partnerships fixed social expectations for young men. The novel reproduces the texture of these institutions: Wilhelm is groomed for the countinghouse, bound by promissory obligations to family and associates. His defection to the theater contravenes the guild‑like respectabilities of the Kaufmannstand, dramatizing a clash between corporate notions of duty and a career outside the sanctioned hierarchies of work.

Censorship and police surveillance shaped theater content across the Empire. Many territories required submiting playtexts to officials; depictions of nobility, religion, and sedition faced restrictions, while moral offenses (suicide, adultery) demanded exemplary framing. Repertoires thus favored history, sentimental drama, and carefully domesticated Shakespeare. Christoph Martin Wieland (1762–1766) and Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1775–1777) made Shakespeare widely available, but productions were cut to satisfy censors and audience decorum. Books 1 and 2 reveal actors negotiating parts and texts under such constraints. Wilhelm’s Hamlet enthusiasm unfolds in a climate where Shakespeare symbolizes artistic ambition yet must pass through administrative filters and the didactic expectations of the day.

Urban poor relief and the growth of workhouses (Zucht‑ und Arbeitshäuser) in the 1750s–1780s aimed to discipline idleness and integrate marginal populations into productive routines. City councils, churches, and philanthropic societies funded hospices and orphanages, tightening supervision over servants and itinerants. Actors and stagehands, often living at subsistence levels between seasons, hovered near these regulatory systems and charitable boards. In the novel, the troupe’s precarious earnings, reliance on patrons, and vulnerability to municipal decrees capture this environment. The move from household security to the insecure economy of performances exposes Wilhelm to the same moralized, conditional assistance networks that governed many non‑guild workers.

Patriarchal legal norms channeled property and constrained women’s autonomy through guardianship and marriage contracts. In many German territories, wives required spousal consent for contracts; illegitimacy carried severe stigma; and actresses bore reputational burdens that complicated respectability and inheritance. Fathers and guardians negotiated matches to consolidate capital and status. The novel’s entanglements of intimacy, secrecy, and money reflect these conditions, especially in the treatment of actresses’ social vulnerability and the negotiation of dowries and promises. Wilhelm’s romantic commitments conflict with his family’s property logic, revealing how affection, reputation, and credit intertwined in eighteenth‑century bourgeois life.

Confessional landscapes influenced civic morality and leisure. Lutheran consistories in Saxony and Prussia and Reformed synods in the Rhineland issued admonitions on Sabbath observance, theatergoing, and sexual conduct. Pietist currents promoted discipline and introspection, affecting urban associations and charitable oversight. Preachers and magistrates sometimes decried theater as a site of temptation or frivolity while tolerating it as a vehicle for moral instruction. Books 1 and 2 situate the stage between suspicion and pedagogy. Wilhelm’s defense of drama as ethical education mirrors contemporary sermons and pamphlets that, even while mistrusting actors, conceded the usefulness of well‑regulated performances for civic virtue.

Fragmented markets under the Empire were burdened by internal customs (Zölle), staple rights (Stapelrechte), octroi taxes (Akzise), and diverse coinage systems. Merchants hedged exchange risk moving from thaler to gulden territories, and river tolls on the Rhine and Main raised transaction costs. While some rulers streamlined tariffs, comprehensive reform awaited the nineteenth century. The novel reflects this environment through a family business alert to fees, routes, and timing, contrasting with the troupe’s cash‑in‑hand, performance‑by‑performance economy. Wilhelm’s leap from ledgered trade to itinerant artistry dramatizes the transition from regulated, tariff‑sensitive commerce to a precarious market of tickets, patronage, and municipal permissions.

As social critique, the book exposes the rigidities of an estates society that assigned honor to professions and degraded others. By narrating a bourgeois heir’s move toward the stage, it interrogates the moral arithmetic by which credit, marriage, and work are valued. The pervasive presence of permits, censors, and police highlights how culture is administered for utility rather than cultivated for freedom. The contrast between household discipline and troupe camaraderie uncovers hidden dependencies in respectable commerce, where sentiment is tolerated only if it serves capital and reputation. The text thereby questions the criteria by which usefulness and respectability are measured.

Politically, the novel illuminates the microphysics of authority in the late Empire: city councils, princely theatres, and church bodies regulate mobility, speech, and leisure. By staging actors’ negotiations with officials, it reveals the conditional nature of public life for non‑corporate workers. The stigmatization of performers dramatizes class boundaries and the exclusionary logic of Bürgerrecht. Gendered constraints on actresses further expose inequities in guardianship and property. In depicting theater as both moral pedagogy and precarious labor, the book critiques a system that treats culture as ornament to power, suggesting the need for institutions that honor individual development beyond inherited rank and mercantile calculus.

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Introduction

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, and thinker whose work reshaped European literature from the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth century. Rising to fame with The Sorrows of Young Werther, he later produced the lifelong drama Faust, the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and classical plays such as Iphigenia in Tauris and Egmont. Beyond literature, he made notable contributions to science, especially in morphology and color theory, and served for decades in the administration of Weimar. Goethe’s blend of artistic mastery, scientific curiosity, and public service made him a central figure of Sturm und Drang and Weimar Classicism.

Education and Literary Influences

Goethe grew up in a milieu that valued learning and the arts, receiving a broad humanistic education before studying law in Leipzig in the mid-1760s. There he encountered contemporary poetics and aesthetics and developed skills in drawing and theater. Illness and recovery shaped his early reflections on self-cultivation. He completed his legal training at Strasbourg in the early 1770s, where the city’s cultural ferment, universities, and salons broadened his intellectual horizons. Although trained for a legal career, his interests already ranged widely, encompassing literature, natural observation, and questions about form, language, and the classical heritage.

Literary Career

Goethe’s first major successes emerged during the Sturm und Drang. The play Götz von Berlichingen, fashioned in a vigorous, historizing style, brought him early renown. The Sorrows of Young Werther quickly became a European sensation, sparking debate about sensibility, morality, and the power of literature to mirror inner life. The novella-like novel’s epistolary form and psychological immediacy were celebrated and criticized in equal measure. This breakthrough established Goethe as a leading voice of cultural rebellion against rigid neoclassical norms, even as he maintained a disciplined sense of craft. His sudden fame also set expectations he would spend a lifetime negotiating.

Beliefs and Advocacy

Goethe’s beliefs combined Enlightenment confidence in inquiry with a classicist search for measure and wholeness. He emphasized Bildung—lifelong self-cultivation through art, work, and experience—and resisted dogmatism in religion and politics. Influenced by Spinoza and attentive to lived phenomena, he treated nature as dynamic and internally purposive rather than merely mechanical. As a Weimar official, he supported practical improvements in administration, mining, and roads, and cultivated theater as an instrument of civic education. His concept of Weltliteratur, formulated in the 1820s, urged readers and writers to look beyond national borders toward a global republic of letters.

These convictions shape both subjects and forms in his oeuvre. Werther interrogates emotional excess and social constraint; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship models development within institutional life; Elective Affinities tests ethical limits under the pressure of desire. Theory of Colours exemplifies experiential investigation, privileging attentive seeing over abstract reduction. West–Eastern Divan embodies respectful exchange with Persian poetry, translating admiration into a new lyric idiom. Publicly, Goethe approached political upheaval with caution; he witnessed campaigns during the 1790s and later recorded his observations. Throughout, he advocated moderation, education, and the steady enlargement of understanding across disciplines and cultures.

Final Years & Legacy

After Schiller’s death in the early 1800s, Goethe sustained an impressive late career. He issued Faust Part One, published Theory of Colours, and released West–Eastern Divan, while continuing editorial work on his collected writings. In the 1820s he revisited autobiographical and scientific projects and brought Faust to completion in the early 1830s. He died in Weimar in the early 1830s, by then recognized across Europe as a preeminent writer. Contemporary responses emphasized the breadth of his achievements and the exemplary union of art, science, and public service that marked his decades at the center of Weimar’s cultural life.

Goethe’s legacy encompasses world literature, theater, lyric poetry, the novel, and intellectual history. Weimar Classicism—shaped with Schiller—remains a reference point for debates on aesthetics and ethics. Faust continues to inspire adaptations across stage, opera, and other media. His idea of Weltliteratur anticipated comparative and global literary studies; his scientific writings, though contested, influenced the history of science and color aesthetics. Generations of writers, critics, and philosophers have engaged his works, finding in them a repertoire of forms and problems suited to modern life. Today he stands as a formative figure in European culture and a touchstone of educated readership.

Wilhelm Meister (Book 1&2)

Main Table of Contents

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years; or, Wilhelm Meister's Travels

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

Table of Contents

Translated by Thomas Carlyle

Translator's Preface

List of Characters

Book I.

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Chapter X.

Chapter XI.

Chapter XII.

Chapter XIII.

Chapter XIV.

Chapter XV.

Chapter XVI.

Chapter XVII.

Book II.

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Chapter X.

Chapter XI.

Chapter XII.

Chapter XIII.

Chapter XIV.

Book III.

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Chapter X.

Chapter XI.

Chapter XII.

Book IV.

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Chapter X.

Chapter XI.

Chapter XII.

Chapter XIII.

Chapter XIV.

Chapter XV.

Chapter XVI.

Chapter XVII.

Chapter XVIII.

Chapter XIX.

Chapter XX.

Book V.

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Chapter X.

Chapter XI.

Chapter XII.

Chapter XIII.

Chapter XIV.

Chapter XV.

Chapter XVI.

Book VI.

Confessions of a Fair Saint

Book VII.

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Book VIII.

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Chapter X.

Translator's Preface

Table of Contents

TO THE

First Edition of Meister's Apprenticeship.

Whether it be that the quantity of genius among ourselves and the French, and the number of works more lasting than brass produced by it, have of late been so considerable as to make us independent of additional supplies; or that, in our ancient aristocracy of intellect, we disdain to be assisted by the Germans, whom, by a species of second sight, we have discovered, before knowing any thing about them, to be a tumid, dreaming, extravagant, insane race of mortals,—certain it is, that hitherto our literary intercourse with that nation has been very slight and precarious. After a brief period of not too judicious cordiality, the acquaintance on our part was altogether dropped: nor, in the few years since we partially resumed it, have our feelings of affection or esteem been materially increased. Our translators are unfortunate in their selection or execution, or the public is tasteless and absurd in its demands; for, with scarcely more than one or two exceptions, the best works of Germany have lain neglected, or worse than neglected: and the Germans are yet utterly unknown to us. Kotzebue[2] still lives in our minds as the representative of a nation that despises him; Schiller is chiefly known to us by the monstrous production of his boyhood; and Klopstock by a hacked and mangled image of his Messiah, in which a beautiful poem is distorted into a theosophic rhapsody, and the brother of Virgil and Racine ranks little higher than the author of Meditations among the Tombs.

But of all these people there is none that has been more unjustly dealt with than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For half a century the admiration—we might almost say the idol—of his countrymen, to us he is still a stranger. His name, long echoed and re-echoed through reviews and magazines, has become familiar to our ears; but it is a sound and nothing more: it excites no definite idea in almost any mind. To such as know him by the faint and garbled version of his "Werther[1], Goethe figures as a sort of poetic Heraclitus; some woe-begone hypochondriac, whose eyes are overflowing with perpetual tears, whose long life has been spent in melting into ecstasy at the sight of waterfalls and clouds, and the moral sublime, or dissolving into hysterical wailings over hapless love-stories, and the miseries of human life. They are not aware that Goethe smiles at this performance of his youth, or that the German Werther, with all his faults, is a very different person from his English namesake; that his Sorrows are in the original recorded in a tone of strength and sarcastic emphasis, of which the other offers no vestige, and intermingled with touches of powerful thought, glimpses of a philosophy deep as it is bitter, which our sagacious translator has seen proper wholly to omit. Others, again, who have fallen in with Retsch's Outlines and the extracts from Faust, consider Goethe as a wild mystic, a dealer in demonology and osteology, who draws attention by the aid of skeletons and evil spirits, whose excellence it is to be extravagant, whose chief aim it is to do what no one but himself has tried. The tyro in German may tell us that the charm of Faust is altogether unconnected with its preternatural import; that the work delineates the fate of human enthusiasm struggling against doubts and errors from within, against scepticism, contempt, and selfishness from without; and that the witch-craft and magic, intended merely as a shadowy frame for so complex and mysterious a picture of the moral world and the human soul, are introduced for the purpose, not so much of being trembled at as laughed at. The voice of the tyro is not listened to; our indolence takes part with our ignorance; Faust continues to be called a monster; and Goethe is regarded as a man of some genius," which he has perverted to produce all manner of misfashioned prodigies,—things false, abortive, formless, Gorgons and hydras, and chimeras dire.

Now, it must no doubt be granted, that, so long as our invaluable constitution is preserved in its pristine purity, the British nation may exist in a state of comparative prosperity with very inadequate ideas of Goethe; but, at the same time, the present arrangement is an evil in its kind,—slight, it is true, and easy to be borne, yet still more easy to be remedied, and which, therefore, ought to have been remedied ere now. Minds like Goethe's are the common property of all nations; and, for many reasons, all should have correct impressions of them.

It is partly with the view of doing something to supply this want, that Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre is now presented to the English public. Written in its author's forty-fifth year, embracing hints or disquisitions on almost every leading point in life and literature, it affords us a more distinct view of his matured genius, his manner of thought, and favorite subjects, than any of his other works. Nor is it Goethe alone whom it portrays: the prevailing taste of Germany is likewise indicated by it. Since the year 1795, when it first appeared at Berlin, numerous editions of Meister have been printed: critics of all ranks, and some of them dissenting widely from its doctrines, have loaded it with encomiums; its songs and poems are familiar to every German ear; the people read it, and speak of it, with an admiration approaching in many cases to enthusiasm.

That it will be equally successful in England, I am far indeed from anticipating. Apart from the above considerations,—from the curiosity, intelligent or idle, which it may awaken,—the number of admiring, or even approving, judges it will find can scarcely fail of being very limited. To the great mass of readers, who read to drive away the tedium of mental vacancy, employing the crude phantasmagoria of a modern novel, as their grandfathers employed tobacco and diluted brandy, Wilhelm Meister will appear beyond endurance weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable. Those, in particular, who take delight in King Cambyses' vein, and open Meister with the thought of Werther in their minds, will soon pause in utter dismay; and their paroxysm of dismay will pass by degrees into unspeakable contempt. Of romance interest there is next to none in Meister; the characters are samples to judge of, rather than persons to love or hate; the incidents are contrived for other objects than moving or affrighting us; the hero is a milksop, whom, with all his gifts, it takes an effort to avoid despising. The author himself, far from doing it in a passion, wears a face of the most still indifference throughout the whole affair; often it is even wrinkled by a slight sardonic grin. For the friends of the sublime, then,—for those who cannot do without heroical sentiments, and moving accidents by flood and field,—there is nothing here that can be of any service.

Nor among readers of a far higher character, can it be expected that many will take the praiseworthy pains of Germans, reverential of their favorite author, and anxious to hunt out his most elusive charms. Few among us will disturb themselves about the allegories and typical allusions of the work; will stop to inquire whether it includes a remote emblem of human culture, or includes no such matter; whether this is a light, airy sketch of the development of man in all his endowments and faculties, gradually proceeding from the first rude exhibitions of puppets and mountebanks, through the perfection of poetic and dramatic art, up to the unfolding of the principle of religion, and the greatest of all arts,—the art of life,—or is nothing more than a bungled piece of patchwork, presenting in the shape of a novel much that should have been suppressed entirely, or at least given out by way of lecture. Whether the characters do or do not represent distinct classes of men, including various stages of human nature, from the gay, material vivacity of Philina to the severe moral grandeur of the uncle and the splendid accomplishment of Lothario, will to most of us be of small importance; and the everlasting disquisitions about plays and players, and politeness and activity, and art and nature, will weary many a mind that knows not and heeds not whether they are true or false. Yet every man's judgment is, in this free country, a lamp to himself: whoever is displeased will censure; and many, it is to be feared, will insist on judging Meister by the common rule, and, what is worse, condemning it, let Schlegel bawl as loudly as he pleases. To judge, says he, of this book,—new and peculiar as it is, and only to be understood and learned from itself, by our common notion of the novel, a notion pieced together and produced out of custom and belief, out of accidental and arbitrary requisitions,—is as if a child should grasp at the moon and stars, and insist on packing them into its toy-box.¹ Unhappily the most of us have boxes, and some of them are very small.

Yet, independently of these its more recondite and dubious qualities, there are beauties in Meister which cannot but secure it some degree of favor at the hands of many. The philosophical discussions it contains; its keen glances into life and art; the minute and skilful delineation of men; the lively, genuine exhibition of the scenes they move in; the occasional touches of eloquence and tenderness, and even of poetry, the very essence of poetry; the quantity of thought and knowledge embodied in a style so rich in general felicities, of which, at least, the new and sometimes exquisitely happy metaphors have been preserved,—cannot wholly escape an observing reader, even on the most cursory perusal. To those who have formed for themselves a picture of the world, who have drawn out, from the thousand variable circumstances of their being, a philosophy of life, it will be interesting and instructive to see how man and his concerns are represented in the first of European minds: to those who have penetrated to the limits of their own conceptions, and wrestled with thoughts and feelings too high for them, it will be pleasing and profitable to see the horizon of their certainties widened, or at least separated with a firmer line from the impalpable obscure which surrounds it on every side. Such persons I can fearlessly invite to study Meister. Across the disfigurement of a translation, they will not fail to discern indubitable traces of the greatest genius in our times. And the longer they study, they are likely to discern them the more distinctly. New charms will successively arise to view; and of the many apparent blemishes, while a few superficial ones may be confirmed, the greater and more important part will vanish, or even change from dark to bright. For, if I mistake not, it is with Meister as with every work of real and abiding excellence,—the first glance is the least favorable. A picture of Raphael, a Greek statue, a play of Sophocles or Shakspeare, appears insignificant to the unpractised eye; and not till after long and patient and intense examination, do we begin to descry the earnest features of that beauty, which has its foundation in the deepest nature of man, and will continue to be pleasing through all ages.

If this appear excessive praise, as applied in any sense to Meister, the curious sceptic is desired to read and weigh the whole performance, with all its references, relations, purposes, and to pronounce his verdict after he has clearly seized and appreciated them all. Or, if a more faint conviction will suffice, let him turn to the picture of Wilhelm's states of mind in the end of the first book, and the beginning of the second; the eulogies of commerce and poesy, which follow; the description of Hamlet; the character of histrionic life in Serlo and Aurelia; that of sedate and lofty manhood in the uncle and Lothario. But, above all, let him turn to the history of Mignon. This mysterious child, at first neglected by the reader, gradually forced on his attention, at length overpowers him with an emotion more deep and thrilling than any poet since the days of Shakspeare has succeeded in producing. The daughter of enthusiasm, rapture, passion, and despair, she is of the earth, but not earthly. When she glides before us through the light mazes of her fairy dance, or twangs her cithern to the notes of her homesick verses, or whirls her tambourine and hurries round us like an antique Mænad, we could almost fancy her a spirit; so pure is she, so full of fervor, so disengaged from the clay of this world. And when all the fearful particulars of her story are at length laid together, and we behold in connected order the image of her hapless existence, there is, in those dim recollections,—those feelings so simple, so impassioned and unspeakable, consuming the closely shrouded, woe-struck, yet ethereal spirit of the poor creature,—something which searches into the inmost recesses of the soul. It is not tears which her fate calls forth, but a feeling far too deep for tears. The very fire of heaven seems miserably quenched among the obstructions of this earth. Her little heart, so noble and so helpless, perishes before the smallest of its many beauties is unfolded; and all its loves and thoughts and longings do but add another pang to death, and sink to silence utter and eternal. It is as if the gloomy porch of Dis, and his pale kingdoms, were realized and set before us, and we heard the ineffectual wail of infants reverberating from within their prison-walls forever.

"Continuò auditæ voces, vagitus et ingens,

Infantumque animæ flentes in limine primo:

Quos dulcis vitæ exsortes, et ab ubere raptos,

Abstulit atra dies, et funere mersit acerbo."

The history of Mignon runs like a thread of gold through the tissue of the narrative, connecting with the heart much that were else addressed only to the head. Philosophy and eloquence might have done the rest, but this is poetry in the highest meaning of the word. It must be for the power of producing such creations and emotions, that Goethe is by many of his countrymen ranked at the side of Homer and Shakspeare, as one of the only three men of genius, that have ever lived.

But my business here is not to judge of Meister or its author, it is only to prepare others for judging it; and for this purpose the most that I had room to say is said. All I ask in the name of this illustrious foreigner is, that the court which tries him be pure, and the jury instructed in the cause; that the work be not condemned for wanting what it was not meant to have, and by persons nowise called to pass sentence on it.

Respecting my own humble share in the adventure, it is scarcely necessary to say any thing. Fidelity is all the merit I have aimed at: to convey the author's sentiments, as he himself expressed them; to follow the original, in all the variations of its style,—has been my constant endeavor. In many points, both literary and moral, I could have wished devoutly that he had not written as he has done; but to alter any thing was not in my commission. The literary and moral persuasions of a man like Goethe are objects of a rational curiosity, and the duty of a translator is simple and distinct. Accordingly, except a few phrases and sentences, not in all amounting to a page, which I have dropped as evidently unfit for the English taste, I have studied to present the work exactly as it stands in German. That my success has been indifferent, I already know too well. In rendering the ideas of Goethe, often so subtle, so capriciously expressive, the meaning was not always easy to seize, or to convey with adequate effect. There were thin tints of style, shades of ridicule or tenderness or solemnity, resting over large spaces, and so slight as almost to be evanescent: some of these I may have failed to see; to many of them I could do no justice. Nor, even in plainer matters, can I pride myself in having always imitated his colloquial familiarity without falling into sentences bald and rugged, into idioms harsh or foreign; or in having copied the flowing oratory of other passages, without at times exaggerating or defacing the swelling cadences and phrases of my original. But what work, from the translating of a German novel to the writing of an epic, was ever as the workman wished and meant it? This version of Meister, with whatever faults it may have, I honestly present to my countrymen: if, while it makes any portion of them more familiar with the richest, most gifted of living minds, it increase their knowledge, or even afford them a transient amusement, they will excuse its errors, and I shall be far more than paid for all my labor.

List of Characters

Table of Contents

WILHELM MEISTER.

His father.

His mother.

His sister, later married to young Werner.

OLD WERNER, partner of Wilhelm’s father.

YOUNG WERNER, son of Old Werner.

MARIANA, an actress, Wilhelm’s first love.

FELIX, her son.

BARBARA, her servant and confidante.

NORBERG, in love with Mariana.

MELINA, an actor.

FRAU MELINA, his wife.

Her parents.

SERLO, a theatrical manager.

AURELIA, his sister.

A manufacturer of Hochdorf.

Head forester of Hochdorf.

DEMOISELLE LANDRINETTE & M. NARCISS, acrobats.

PICKLEHERRING.

MIGNON, a little dancer.

THE GREAT DEVIL, a showman, first master of Mignon

LAERTES, an actor.

PHILINA, an actress.

The pedant, an actor.

OLD BOISTEROUS, an actor.

ELMIRA, his daughter, later married to Serlo.

The Fair Saint.

NARCISS, her betrothed.

PHILO, her friend.

LOTHARIO, FREDERICK, The Countess & NATALIA, the Amazon, nephews and nieces of the Fair Saint.

Their uncle.

THERESA, later married to Lothario.

LYDIA, in love with Lothario.

The Count.

His stallmeister.

The prince von——

A baron.

A baroness.

The abbé, in various disguises, JARNO, A physician & A surgeon, attached to Lothario.

An Italian marchese.

AUGUSTIN, his brother, the old harper,

parents of Mignon.

SPERATA, their sister.

Book I.

Table of Contents

Chapter I.

Table of Contents

The play was late in breaking up: old Barbara went more than once to the window, and listened for the sound of carriages. She was waiting for Mariana, her pretty mistress, who had that night, in the afterpiece, been acting the part of a young officer, to the no small delight of the public. Barbara's impatience was greater than it used to be, when she had nothing but a frugal supper to present: on this occasion Mariana was to be surprised with a packet, which Norberg, a young and wealthy merchant, had sent by the post, to show that in absence he still thought of his love.

As an old servant, as confidant, counsellor, manager, and housekeeper, Barbara assumed the privilege of opening seals; and this evening she had the less been able to restrain her curiosity, as the favor of the open-handed gallant was more a matter of anxiety with herself than with her mistress. On breaking up the packet, she had found, with unfeigned satisfaction, that it held a piece of fine muslin and some ribbons of the newest fashion, for Mariana; with a quantity of calico, two or three neckerchiefs, and a moderate rouleau of money, for herself. Her esteem for the absent Norberg was of course unbounded: she meditated only how she might best present him to the mind of Mariana, best bring to her recollection what she owed him, and what he had a right to expect from her fidelity and thankfulness.

The muslin, with the ribbons half unrolled, to set it off by their colors, lay like a Christmas present on the small table; the position of the lights increased the glitter of the gilt; all was in order, when the old woman heard Mariana's step on the stairs, and hastened to meet her. But what was her disappointment, when the little female officer, without deigning to regard her caresses, rushed past her with unusual speed and agitation, threw her hat and sword upon the table, and walked hastily up and down, bestowing not a look on the lights, or any portion of the apparatus.

What ails thee, my darling? exclaimed the astonished Barbara. For Heaven's sake, what is the matter? Look here, my pretty child! See what a present! And who could have sent it but thy kindest of friends? Norberg has given thee the muslin to make a night-gown of; he will soon be here himself; he seems to be fonder and more generous than ever.

Barbara went to the table, that she might exhibit the memorials with which Norberg had likewise honored her, when Mariana, turning away from the presents, exclaimed with vehemence, "Off! off! Not a word of all this to-night. I have yielded to thee; thou hast willed it; be it so! When Norberg comes, I am his, am thine, am any one's; make of me what thou pleasest; but till then I will be my own; and, if thou hadst a thousand tongues, thou shouldst never talk me from my purpose. All, all that is my own will I give up to him who loves me, whom I love. No sour faces! I will abandon myself to this affection, as if it were to last forever."

The old damsel had abundance of objections and serious considerations to allege: in the progress of the dialogue, she was growing bitter and keen, when Mariana sprang at her, and seized her by the breast. The old damsel laughed aloud. I must have a care, she cried, that you don't get into pantaloons again, if I mean to be sure of my life. Come, doff you! The girl will beg my pardon for the foolish things the boy is doing to me. Off with the frock. Off with them all. The dress beseems you not; it is dangerous for you, I observe; the epaulets make you too bold.

Thus speaking, she laid hands upon her mistress: Mariana pushed her off, exclaiming, Not so fast! I expect a visit to-night.

Visit! rejoined Barbara: you surely do not look for Meister, the young, soft-hearted, callow merchant's son?

Just for him, replied Mariana.

Generosity appears to be growing your ruling passion, said the old woman with a grin: you connect yourself with minors and moneyless people, as if they were the chosen of the earth. Doubtless it is charming to be worshipped as a benefactress.

"Jeer as thou pleasest. I love him! I love him! With what rapture do I now, for the first time, speak the word! This is the passion I have mimicked so often, when I knew not what it meant. Yes! I will throw myself about his neck: I will clasp him as if I could hold him forever. I will show him all my love, will enjoy all his in its whole extent."

Moderate yourself, said the old dame coolly, moderate yourself. A single word will interrupt your rapture: Norberg is coming! Coming in a fortnight! Here is the letter that arrived with the packet.

And, though the morrow were to rob me of my friend, I would conceal it from myself and him. A fortnight! An age! Within a fortnight, what may not happen, what may not alter?

Here Wilhelm entered. We need not say how fast she flew to meet him, with what rapture he clasped the red uniform, and pressed the beautiful wearer of it to his bosom. It is not for us to describe the blessedness of two lovers. Old Barbara went grumbling away: we shall retire with her, and leave the happy two alone.

Chapter II.

Table of Contents

When Wilhelm saluted his mother next morning, she informed him that his father was very greatly discontented with him, and meant to forbid him these daily visits to the playhouse. Though I myself often go with pleasure to the theatre, she continued, I could almost detest it entirely, when I think that our fireside-peace is broken by your excessive passion for that amusement. Your father is ever repeating, 'What is the use of it? How can any one waste his time so?'

He has told me this already, said Wilhelm, and perhaps I answered him too hastily; but, for Heaven's sake, mother, is nothing, then, of use but what immediately puts money in our purse? but what procures us some property that we can lay our hands on? Had we not, for instance, room enough in the old house? and was it indispensable to build a new one? Does not my father every year expend a large part of his profit in ornamenting his chambers? Are these silk carpets, this English furniture, likewise of no use? Might we not content ourselves with worse? For my own part, I confess, these striped walls, these hundred times repeated flowers and knots and baskets and figures, produce a really disagreeable effect upon me. At best, they but remind me of the front curtain of our theatre. But what a different thing it is to sit and look at that! There, if you must wait for a while, you are always sure that it will rise at last, and disclose to you a thousand curious objects to entertain, to instruct, and to exalt you.

But you go to excess with it, said the mother. Your father wishes to be entertained in the evenings as well as you: besides, he thinks it diverts your attention; and, when he grows ill-humored on the subject, it is I that must bear the blame. How often have I been upbraided with that miserable puppet-show, which I was unlucky enough to provide for you at Christmas, twelve years ago! It was the first thing that put these plays into your head.

"Oh, do not blame the poor puppets! do not repent of your love and motherly care! It was the only happy hour I had enjoyed in the new empty house. I never can forget that hour; I see it still before me; I recollect how surprised I was, when, after we had got our customary presents, you made us seat ourselves before the door that leads to the other room. The door opened, but not, as formerly, to let us pass and repass: the entrance was occupied by an unexpected show. Within it rose a porch, concealed by a mysterious curtain. All of us were standing at a distance: our eagerness to see what glittering or jingling article lay hid behind the half-transparent veil was mounting higher and higher, when you bade us each sit down upon his stool, and wait with patience.

"At length all of us were seated and silent: a whistle gave the signal; the curtain rolled aloft, and showed us the interior of the temple, painted in deep-red colors. The high-priest Samuel[3] appeared with Jonathan, and their strange alternating voices seemed to me the most striking thing on earth. Shortly after entered Saul, overwhelmed with confusion at the impertinence of that heavy-limbed warrior, who had defied him and all his people. But how glad was I when the little dapper son of Jesse, with his crook and shepherd's pouch and sling, came hopping forth, and said, 'Dread king and sovereign lord, let no one's heart sink down because of this: if your Majesty will grant me leave, I will go out to battle with this blustering giant!' Here ended the first act, leaving the spectators more curious than ever to see what further would happen; each praying that the music might soon be done. At last the curtain rose again. David devoted the flesh of the monster to the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field: the Philistine scorned and bullied him, stamped mightily with both his feet, and at length fell like a mass of clay, affording a splendid termination to the piece. And then the virgins sang, 'Saul hath slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands!' The giant's head was borne before his little victor, who received the king's beautiful daughter to wife. Yet withal, I remember, I was vexed at the dwarfish stature of this lucky prince; for the great Goliath and the small David had both been formed, according to the common notion, with a due regard to their figures and proportions. I pray you, mother, tell me what has now become of those puppets? I promised to show them to a friend, whom I was lately entertaining with a history of all this child's work."

I can easily conceive, said the mother, "how these things should stick so firmly in your mind: I well remember what an interest you took in them,—how you stole the little book from me, and learned the whole piece by heart. I first noticed it one evening when you had made a Goliath and a David of wax: you set them both to declaim against each other, and at