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entitled the PVanderjahre ; the first portion of which was compiled so lately as 1807 , and which fills vols . 21 , 22 , 23 . of the newedition . * In that year , Goethe informs us , ( vol . 32 , p . 11 . ) he planned the binding together with a romantic thread , and so forming an attractive whole of a varied mass of compositions including novelle , &c . His expedient is certainly inartificial , and does not appear
to us felicitous—he supposes his hero to be bound to travel for a year , ( a sort of novitiate , ) not resting more than three days in a place ; and he gives an account of his adventures to his Natalie . Why , we are not told . But there is a break in the " second volume , and we are informed that years have intervened . Why , therefore , the journey is continued we do not know . Some of the old characters appear again , new ones are introduced ; and the
end of the printed book is no end of the work , in a critical sense . Mysteries are left unexplained . And we can as little anticipate whether Wilhelm is to be ultimately united to his Natalie , as we know why he left her . Perhaps among the fifteen volumes of posthumous works which are announced , there may be a third part ; till then it would be idle to speak of it as a whole . Nor have we space to enumerate all the parts—we can notice only a few of the more significant . *
Vol . 21 opens with an exquisite piece of moral painting , the idea of which Mr . Taylor tells us is taken from Clemens of Alexandria . Wilhelm falls in with a pious carpenter , whom he calls St . Joseph , and whoj in fact , strives to follow in life the civil condition as well as the holiness of his namesake . Like him he has a wife Mary . They are met by our traveller in the mountains , driving an ass , on which sits a beauteous child .
The traveller never quits the mountains . Here he meets with a noble family , in which wealth is dispensed with benevolence and munificence . Here , too , he finds a singular community , in the account of which Goethe has poured forth all his reflections and speculations on the present state of civilization in the world , and
on the institutions by means of which education may be carried on upon a great scale . We know not how otherwise to designate this community than by saying , that it is a something between Utopia and Lanark . Instead of such ponderous and unromantic means as civil government , with its armies , and corps of
law-* The Ishrjahre was translated into English by Mr . Carlyle , —an honest , as well as able work . Mr . Carly le might have rendered his book more acceptable to the great hody of readers by sacrificing some portion of the peculiarities of his author , which ho might easily have dune , and so doing might have given to his work more of the grace of an original composition . In his suhsequent work , entitled ' German Romance , ' he has inserted a version of the first part of the IVandcrjahrr , entitling it fc Wilhelm
Meister ' s Travels , '—a word which does not by any means express the sense of the ] original term , which is borrowed from the universal custom in Germany , according to which a workman is obliged to travel for a number of years before he is admitted to the freedom of his guild or company . The German fiursche and Handwerker (» tu . dents and journeymen ) constitute most of tho numerous pedestrian ^ travellers met with .
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Goethe ! s Work * . 189
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1833, page 189, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2610/page/45/
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