ABSTRACT
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre or, as it is usually called in English, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the main work produced by Goethe during the years of his friendship with Schiller, appeared in 1795 and 1796 in four small stout volumes; published by Unger in Berlin, it introduced to the public for the first time a new and beautifully cut Gothic type. The idea originally occurred to him at the time of Werther; during his first ten years in Weimar he wrote a first version and called it Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission; ten years later this was completely recast into the Apprenticeship. After a further twenty years the Wanderjahre, his hero’s years of wandering, was published as ‘Part One’, implying a further continuation. During the last years of his life Goethe handed it over to Eckermann to enlarge under his supervision. Even this was not the end. In 1910 the early Theatrical Mission came to light, and was christened the Ur-Meister. This manuscript, a copy made by Goethe’s old friend Barbara Schulthess, was found among her papers by a schoolboy, who took it to his teacher. No other world-famous novel has had a similar creative and editorial history, extending over one hundred and twenty-five years. Nor is any other so unequal in its various parts. Side by side with great artistic maturity, freshness of invention and life in rich variety, we find laziness of a kind that almost no other great writer has ever permitted himself. For the final edition of his works the publisher asked Goethe for ‘more copy’ for the Wander^ jahre, to make its two volumes equal in size, and Goethe instructed Eckermann to search the archives for further material. This material, in the form of ‘meditations’, maxims, reflections and poems, was then used to swell the volumes to the size required. The novel contains some of Goethe’s most beautiful characters, his Mignon, his Philiene, as well as shadowy allegorical figures of which the author himself tired so that he thought of abandoning the Lehrjahre and leaving it to Schiller or someone else to finish. No true finis was ever written; Goethe’s own death was the only end.
