The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · a novel in eight books, each in chapters, the sixth an inset memoir · Johann Friedrich Unger, Berlin, four volumes, 1795 to 1796 · scored on Goethe’s German in the Lehrjahre as published, not the earlier Theatralische Sendung, read from knowledge; no text in hand, German quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English glosses
Mode
The novel of formation, told by a narrator who knows more than his hero; comic novel of the road, theatre novel, inset confession and novel of a secret society in one book
Mythos
The novice’s initiation into a guild of the wise; the child of the south who longs for a land she cannot return to; the old singer pursued by guilt; Saul, who went out for his father’s asses
Phase
A young man’s years from his love for Mariane and his flight from the merchant house, through the theatre, to his reception by the Tower and his care for his son
Presentation
Prose fiction in eight books; a third-person ironic narrator; the sixth book a first-person memoir by another hand; the songs of Mignon and the Harper set into the prose; an indenture handed to the hero inside the book
Register
Cool, ironic and urbane, moving from the comedy of the players’ quarrels to the solemnity of the exequies, and rising in the songs to lyric
Scale
One life across the classes of a German world: a burgher’s house, a nobleman’s castle, a theatre, an estate; the state, the Revolution and America as horizons
Governing Proposition
A merchant’s son leaves his father’s house for the theatre, wanders with a troupe of players, takes up a child of the south and an old singer, stages Hamlet as the height of his calling, and learns at the last that a society of educators has been watching him all along and counts his errors as his schooling. The wager of the novel is that a self is formed by its errors and not despite them, in a society whose classes allow formation unequally, and that the young man who goes out to seek his father’s asses may find a kingdom.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work is Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, a novel in eight books, each in chapters, published by Johann Friedrich Unger in Berlin in four volumes in 1795 and 1796. It was made out of an earlier book. Goethe began Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung in 1777 and had drafted six books of it by about 1785; he left it unfinished, and its manuscript was lost until a copy came to light in 1910. Between 1794 and 1796 he recast the material as the Lehrjahre, and Schiller read and answered the manuscript book by book in their correspondence. The earlier version is the history of this one and nothing more; the sequel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, is another work.
The recasting is the first fact about the book. The Sendung had taken the founding of a German national theatre seriously as a calling. The Lehrjahre keeps the theatre and turns it into a detour: the mission becomes an error, and the hero is right mainly about having been wrong. Goethe had made the suffering, self-consuming young man the type of his age in Werther. Here he refused his public that book again, and set aside ten years of his own work to do it.
Wilhelm is a merchant’s son. He loves Mariane, he flees the merchant house, and his friend Werner stays behind with the ledger and a speech in praise of double-entry bookkeeping. From the first pages a narrator stands at an ironic distance from the young man’s enthusiasms. He knows more than his hero, and he will let the reader see what Wilhelm cannot: that the young man is passive, a man to whom things happen, and that his errors are the plot.
Movement II
The middle of the book is the road. Wilhelm falls in with a troupe of players and wanders with them, and the chapters recall the English comic novel of the road, Fielding above all: the actors’ vanity, their quarrels, Philine’s charm and Philine’s slipper. They stay at the Count’s castle, where the burgher sees the nobility from below; there is a fire at an inn and an attack by robbers, and the Amazon appears to the wounded Wilhelm. The lessons repeat. The book is long here, and it knows its own leisure.
Into this comedy come two figures from another order. Mignon is a child of the south, androgynous, born of incest, longing for a land she cannot return to. The Harper is an old singer pursued by guilt. Their songs are set into the prose at points where the prose cannot go. The Harper sings “Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß”
“Who never ate his bread with tears”, and Mignon, at the opening of the third book: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn”
“Know you the land where the lemon trees bloom”. There is also “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt”, only one who knows longing. These songs left the book and lived without it, set and sung across the century that followed.
Mignon dances blindfold among eggs laid on the carpet. It is a strange and exact image: grace kept by an inner law, in a creature who has no words for the law. The troupe’s world and Mignon’s world sit side by side in these books, the comic and the lyric, and the narrator records both in the same even voice.
Movement III
Wilhelm reaches Serlo’s theatre, and with Serlo and Aurelie he talks about the stage at length, longer than the argument needs. At the centre of the talk is Hamlet. Wilhelm reads the prince as “eine große Tat auf eine Seele gelegt, die der Tat nicht gewachsen ist”
“a great deed laid on a soul that is not equal to the deed”. The dialogues are criticism done in fiction, and still among the best readings of the play. They are also Wilhelm reading himself: a young man who has taken on a calling too large for him.
In a letter to Werner, Wilhelm explains why he has gone on the stage. His wish since youth has been “mich selbst, ganz wie ich da bin, auszubilden”
“to form myself, just as I am”. In Germany, he writes, only the nobleman is permitted a general, personal cultivation, so that the burgher must go on the stage to be a public person at all. The book has put its social condition into words: the bourgeois self seeking through art a standing its class denies it.
The Hamlet production is the summit of Wilhelm’s theatrical life and the end of it. Everything the troupe’s wanderings led up to is staged, and once it is staged the error has been lived through to its height. The first five books are this growth, slow and repetitive, from the merchant house to the theatre; after them the book changes key.
Movement IV
The sixth book is another person’s writing. Headed “Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele”, the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, it is the first-person memoir of a pious canoness, set into the novel as a document. Its world is the inner life and Moravian piety.
Its place in the design is as a counter-image. Wilhelm is formed through the world, by going out into it and erring there. The canoness is a self formed inward alone, by introspection and devotion, and her book shows by contrast what such a self becomes. The novel needs the contrast, and it gives the contrast its own voice and its own book.
The tie to the rest is made after the fact. The canoness, the reader later learns, is Natalie’s aunt, and that is the whole of the link. The memoir sits as an inserted document, defensible and a little apart, and the book does not hide the seam.
Movement V
The last two books bring Wilhelm to Lothario’s estate and to the Society of the Tower, which has been watching him all along and keeps papers on everyone. Lothario, Therese, Jarno and the Abbé come in, more by exposition than by scene, and Lothario plans to give up his feudal privilege. Wilhelm is handed an indenture, a Lehrbrief, and the book’s pedagogy becomes an object he can hold: “Die Kunst ist lang, das Leben kurz”
“Art is long, life short”. He learns late that Felix, Mariane’s son, is his own, and the fear for Felix’s life turns him from cultivating himself to caring for another. The machinery is heavy: kinship revealed, histories disclosed, pairings arranged as at the end of a comedy.
Mignon dies. Her exequies in the Hall of the Past are the grandest scene in the book: a choir of boys, the embalmed body, an inscription to life. The Tower honours the poetry it cannot keep, and the prose world goes on. The Harper’s history and Mignon’s parentage arrive at last as disclosed files. Whether the two worlds obey one law here, or whether the poetic world is simply outlived, readers have asked since the book appeared.
On the last page stands the figure of Saul, who went out to seek his father’s asses and “ein Königreich fand”
“found a kingdom”. The book left that pattern behind it as the myth of modern self-formation. Its later readers named a genre after it, the Bildungsroman; Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, Dilthey and Lukács read it to different ends; Novalis wrote Heinrich von Ofterdingen against it, and Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale is its negation. Is the Tower wisdom or management, the ending a resolution or a convenience? The book leaves the question open, and it has stayed open.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine passes the subtractive test. Wilhelm’s error about the theatre must be lived through, the Hamlet production is the summit and the end of that error, and the Tower must be there to name it as error. A great deal else could go without the whole knowing less. The troupe’s wanderings, from the second book into the fourth, repeat the same lessons about actors’ vanity and Philine’s charm; the talk of the theatre with Serlo and Aurelie runs past what the argument needs; and the last two books, with their revelations of kinship and their secret society, are assembled more than compelled. That is what holds the axis at 7.6, the lowest of the twelve: the cap is cleared, not by much.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a self is formed by its errors, not despite them, and is formed in a society whose classes allow formation unequally. The second half is said outright in the letter to Werner, where Wilhelm writes that to form “mich selbst, ganz wie ich da bin”, myself, just as I am, has been his wish since youth, and that in Germany only the nobleman is permitted a general, personal cultivation, so that the burgher must go on the stage to be a public person at all. The reading of Hamlet in the fourth book is Wilhelm reading himself. Held below the top because the Tower’s answer, that error is pedagogy, is asserted by its own officers more than earned.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The habitual register is cool, ironic and urbane, and most of the book’s length does not seek elevation. Where it rises it rises to the height of German lyric: Mignon’s “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn”, at the opening of the third book, a song that became the type of longing itself, and the Harper’s “Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß”, guilt raised to a complaint against the heavens. Mignon’s egg dance, blindfold among eggs laid on the carpet, is an exact image of grace kept by an inner law. Her exequies in the Hall of the Past are the book’s grandest scene, solemn and cold at once. Height real, frequency moderate.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Myth built, in two ways. The apprenticeship itself is the novice’s initiation: the young man who leaves the father’s house, errs through art and love, and is received into a guild of the wise, made load-bearing through the Tower, the indenture and the closing figure of Saul, who went out for his father’s asses and found a kingdom. The book made that pattern the myth of modern self-formation. And Mignon and the Harper, the androgynous child of the south, born of incest, longing for a land she cannot reach, and the old singer pursued by guilt, are figures built into the book’s argument about poetry and formation. Held off the top because the Tower’s initiation is half a parody of the secret societies it borrows from, and the book does not decide how seriously to take it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance was the picaresque, the English comic novel of the road, which the troupe chapters recall in Fielding, the sentimental novel of feeling, and Goethe’s own Werther, which had made the suffering, self-consuming young man the type of the age. The book turns against all of them. The hero is passive, a man to whom things happen; the narrator stands at an ironic distance from his enthusiasms; the founding of a national theatre, which the Theatralische Sendung had taken as a mission, is revalued as a detour; and the end is integration into a working society, not death or marriage as reward. The cost was real: ten years of work set aside, and a public refused the Werther it wanted.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The form carries the knowledge in its main lines. A novel of apprenticeship told by a narrator who knows more than the apprentice, and who lets the reader see the Tower watching Wilhelm before Wilhelm knows it is there, makes error visible as error while it is being lived; a first-person confession could not, and the sixth book shows by contrast what a self formed by introspection alone becomes. The indenture handed to Wilhelm puts the book’s pedagogy in the book as an object. The inset songs give the figures of longing a form the prose cannot. Held in the middle eighties because the form slackens: the closing books trade the slow growth of the first five for revelations and pairings arranged like a comedy’s last act.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The evidence is two centuries of return without exhaustion. Friedrich Schlegel’s review opened a debate that has not closed: whether the book affirms harmonious cultivation or ironically exposes it; whether the Tower is wisdom or manipulation; whether Wilhelm is formed or merely managed; whether the ending is a resolution or a marriage of convenience. Hegel, Dilthey, Lukács and later critics each read it to a different end, and each found it there. The depth is formal as well as semantic: the relation of Mignon’s poetry to the Tower’s prose, and of the sixth book to the rest, yields more on return. Held below the top because some of the yield is that of a problem left open rather than of a meaning made deep.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Intrinsic force: the book reorganised what a novel could be about, the formation of a self in a society, told as process, with the hero’s errors as the plot. The field is the European novel of its century, and few works of the period moved it more. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the founding work of the Bildungsroman, a term coined in its wake by Morgenstern and fixed by Dilthey; the German line runs through Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, written against it, Stifter’s Der Nachsommer, Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich and Mann’s Der Zauberberg; Carlyle’s translation carried it into English, where it bears on Sartor Resartus and on the novels of formation to Joyce’s Portrait; Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale is its negation; and Mignon alone fed Schubert, Schumann, Wolf and Thomas’s opera.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The text survives whole, never lost, continuously in print in German since 1795 and continuously translated, over about 230 years. Presence is the question. In Germany it is read and taught as a classic, though far less than Faust or Werther; outside Germany it is read mainly by students of the novel and of German, and known widely by name and through the genre it founded more than in itself. Its songs have had a wider and freer life than the novel, set and sung without the book. The surface is in part fixed to its moment: the theatre of its decades, the estate reform and the Tower’s eighteenth-century pedagogy date it. The charge is for a text of centuries read mainly in the academy, and the figure stands at the top of that band.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Goethe’s German. The prose is a model of classical German narrative: lucid, even, periodic without heaviness, capable of an irony that never quite breaks into mockery, and able to pass from the troupe’s quarrels and Philine’s slipper to the cool solemnity of the exequies without strain. The dialogues on Hamlet are criticism done in fiction and still among the best readings of the play. The songs are lyric of the first order, each placed where the prose cannot go. The craft falls in the construction: the middle books are overlong, characters are dropped and recovered by convenience, and the last books bring in Lothario, Therese, Jarno and the Abbé with more exposition than scene. The making is load-bearing in the prose and the songs, not throughout the architecture.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Mignon, the figure of wordless longing who dies of it, and the Tower, the society of rational educators who keep papers on everyone. The book’s answer is that they obey one law, that Mignon’s poetry is what formation must honour and leave behind, and her embalmed body in the Hall of the Past, under its inscription to life, is its attempt to hold both under one roof. Many readers, from the first, have felt that law imposed: that the prose world outlives the poetic one and the narrator sides with it. The comic and the tragic sit together more easily, and the sixth book obeys the law by contrast. The range is very wide; the coherence is real but strained at the join the book makes most of.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Orders of reality held: consciousness, in Wilhelm’s self-deceptions and their slow correction; the family, from the father’s house to Mariane and the son Felix, whom Wilhelm learns late is his, and the fear for Felix’s life that turns him from self-cultivation to care; labour and commerce, in Werner’s ledger and his praise of double-entry bookkeeping; the arts, in the theatre as an institution, criticism, music and the grandfather’s sold collection; the classes, in the Count’s castle, the burgher’s letter and Lothario’s plan to give up feudal privilege; religion, in the sixth book’s Moravian piety; and America and the Revolution at the edge. They are integrated by Wilhelm’s path through them. Not higher because the state and history press mainly from off stage, and the natural order is barely present.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, then The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Bottomless Well at 8.8. The founding work of the novel of formation, which reorganised what a novel could be about and fed a line of novels across Europe and a century of song; a text whole and in print since 1795; and a debate over the Tower, the ending and the place of Mignon that two centuries of critics have not closed.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6, held by what the book permits rather than compels: the troupe’s repeated wanderings, the length of the talk of the theatre, and the revelations and secret society of the last two books, while the spine from the merchant house to Hamlet and the Tower passes the subtractive test. Next above it, The Inner Law at 8.0: one law, real and strained at the join between Mignon’s poetry and the Tower’s prose.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.6, The Living Form at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, The Swerve at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.5.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, scored as the novel published by Johann Friedrich Unger in Berlin in four volumes, 1795 to 1796, in eight books, with the Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele and the songs of Mignon and the Harper as part of it. Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung, the earlier and unfinished version, is context only, and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre is a separate work; nothing is scored on either. Every axis is judged on Goethe’s German. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. German is quoted only where its words are certain, cited by book only; everything else is paraphrased. Every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. Translation · Thomas Carlyle’s (1824), which brought the book into English, and Eric A. Blackall’s, made in cooperation with Victor Lange for the Suhrkamp, later Princeton, edition of Goethe’s works (1989), the closer for sense, are the English versions known to this reading; neither is quoted, and nothing is charged to either. The critics named are cited as the record of the novel’s reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them most chapter references, the length of the book in words, the wording of Schlegel’s judgments beyond his review, and the terms of the first Romantic objections to the book, are not given.