The artist must choose his point of view. It is impossible to paint the house at once from the inside and from the outside. "Faust" is properly an epic poem; "Wilhelm Meister" is a prose epic,—and prose, not from lack of metre, but precisely from its point of view. It treats life, not as proceeding from the bosom and moving to the ends of benign Destiny, but as contained in thought, will, character, aspiration, love, and as contingent, rather than eternally predestined, in its result. Much of religious grandeur, therefore,—to the great disgust of Novalis,—it loses; much of economic value it gains. A prose picture: yet even here we read through all else to man, and through all else in man himself to the upbuilding of his spirit. As Goethe reads life, let us see if we can read his book.
We assume, then, his point of view. Growth,—our eyes are given us that we may see this as the end, all else as material and means. Prices and kingdoms may rise or fall; we are not indifferent; but the immortal architectures of man's spirit are priceless, and here the sceptres are indeed held by divine right.
What, now,—every one will hasten to question,—what are the chief forces that induce or regulate growth? What is their typical order in appearance and combination? What is the complete result? To these questions Wilhelm Meister is Goethe's answer.
The first place in the list of producing forces is given by him to Imagination. He makes Wilhelm describe, with elaborate and lingering detail, a puppet-show which in childhood enchanted him, and whose mechanism he afterwards possessed and managed with enduring fascination. Mariana yawns in listening; the lounging novel-reader will yawn too. But under this tedious triviality, as the reader of stock-novels will deem it, lurks a meaning serious enough to entice all save those who are indeed trivial. It indicates the play-instinct in children as the first fountain of growth. Nature justifies Goethe. How grave and absorbed are children at their play! With what touching implicit faith do they assume this as something that pays for its costs! Crabtree scowls; Moneybags pooh-poohs; but Nature is too strong for them, and the children play on. It is significant. In truth, a child's faculty for play, that is, for imaginative engagement, is the prime measure of his capacity for growth. Follow his play, you who would know him,—follow it with studious, sympathetic eye; for in the range and depth of imaginative interest it displays you read the promise of his being. The child that is not fascinated by his fancies is of a meagre nature, and will come to nothing great.
Why is imagination so concerned in growth? That I call a delightful question, and could run with rejoicing to answer it; but here, not without effort, I must pass it by. There is more to be said upon it than we have space for now: some other day. Enough now that imagination is so concerned with growth; enough that Nature, by the being of every child born into the world, makes oath to the fact.
But there is a spice of devil in this angel. Of old, when the sons of God came together, Satan came with them; and still, when the primal powers of man's soul assemble to perform their grand act of worship, which is the complete upbuilding of a human spirit, Factitious Tendency, the father of mischief, is punctually at hand. So in young Wilhelm. He craves free play for the divine energies of his being. But the hard actual world resists him; instead of offering itself humbly as a vehicle for his fine imaginings, it tries to make a mere tool of him. So he flies from it in scorn. The cold, spacious emptiness of his father's life, the shrivelled content of old Werner's,—these show him the quality of real life. Fie upon reality, then! He will away, and find a concocted play-world, where all shall suit his purpose, and where he shall have nothing to do but picture forth in beauty his inward being.
He finds this, poor boy, in the stage. There no reality will exist but such as is made for his purposes. There his fine imaginations may have it all their own way. There, in heroic costume and by gas-light, his sole business shall be to express sublime sentiments in the most effective manner, while all the surroundings are strictly accessory. How fine to discover an heroic situation dumbly begging him to appear and be its speaking lay-figure!
Making play, instead of ennobling work till through that the soul can play,—that is child's play. Finding spiritual deliverance in a there, in a "got-up" situation,—that is romanticism. And it is the representative error of nobly imagining youth.
But lay-figure heroics are not heroism; and the made-up situation proves more straitening than that situation which God has made for all, namely, the real world. The stage is found to be wooden as its own boards. It gives Wilhelm for companions a crew of spiritual incapables, who have excellent appetites at others' cost, who higgle, bicker, sneak away from duty, are good for nothing, and pretend everything; while, but for his escape, it would make his own life a mere cul-de-sac with a slough at the end.
Yet he is boy-wise as well as boy-foolish. His imaginations fertilize, though they mislead him. His impulse to live over the world, rather than under it, is the vital impulse of the human soul.