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Pari passu, he was toiling at his translation of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. This was published in Edinburgh in 1824. Heartily commended in Blackwood, it was generally recognised as one of the best English renderings of any foreign author; and Jeffrey, in his absurd review of Goethe's great prose drama, speaks in high terms of the skill displayed by the translator.
In one of his Delineations, in Meister's Travels it is, the hero comes-upon a Society of men with very strange ways, one of which was this: "We require," says the Master, "that each of our people shall restrict himself in one direction," shall go right against his desire in one matter, and make himself do the thing he does not wish, "should we allow him the greater latitude on all other sides."
But peace, I pray you, peace. Both my pistols are loaded. The clock strikes twelve. I say Amen. Charlotte! Charlotte! Farewell! Farewell! Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Representing the fruit of twenty years' labour, it was, like "Faust," written in fragments during the ripest period of his intellectual activity.
Goethe prefaces Wilhelm Meister's travels with some lines full of that sagacity which was so closely related to his insight: What shap'st thou here at the world?
Readers of Scott will remember Fenella, the elfish maiden in "Peveril of the Peak." Scott says in his Preface to that novel: "The character of Fenella, which from its peculiarity made a favorable impression on the public, was far from being original. The fine sketch of Mignon in Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre a celebrated work from the pen of Goethe gave the idea of such a being.
Goethe's novel, "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship," may be classed with fictions intended to convey certain views of life; but its chief defect is, that the object of the writer remains in a mist, even at the end of the story. The "Elective Affinities," while it contains many beauties as a work of art, is objectionable in a moral point of view.
I had brought Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre with me, and now for the first time was enraptured by fuller comprehension of this wonderful production. The spirit of the poet attracted me most profoundly to his work by the impression left on my mind by his lively description of the breaking-up of the players' company, in which the action almost becomes a furious lyric.
TRANSLATED BY EDWARD BELL From WILHELM MEISTER'S TRAVELS Our pilgrims had performed the journey according to program, and prosperously reached the frontier of the province in which they were to learn so many wonderful things.
A wide and everyway most important interval divides /Werter/, with its sceptical philosophy and 'hypochondriacal crotchets, from Goethe's next Novel, /Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship/, published some twenty years afterwards.
Goethe's /Wanderjahre/ was published in his seventy-second year; /Werter/ in his twenty-fifth; thus in passing between these two works, and over /Meister's Lehrjahre/ which stands nearly midway, we have glanced over a space of almost fifty years, including within them, of course, whatever was most important in his public or private history.
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