VI. On Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Travel

Abstract

[886] The Years of Travel relates to the Apprenticeship as the second part of Faust relates to the first. While in the Apprenticeship, the development of problems follows on the concrete reality, in Years of Travel the ground of reality is, if not abandoned, at least stripped of its own sense. Everything that happens in the actual world becomes only signs, only ciphers with a secret significance. Reference is continually made in such a way that “for a little book like ours restraint and mystery may be fitting” and that everything real remains intimation and fragment.

But you—you would know thus and thus,

In better wise what I have known,

What Nature, gladly industrious

For my sake, made long since my own.

In your own selves do you divine

Like force—push on in your own trade!

But should you look on work of mine

  Learn—“Thus he willed it should be made!”

  West-Eastern Divan

  Book of Ill Humor

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-Eastern Divan, trans. Edward Dowden (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1914), 72.