SOURCE: “The Tyranny of the Ideal: The Dialectics of Art in Goethe's Novelle,” in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer, 1980, pp. 217-31.

In the following essay, Brown concludes that Goethe used Novelle to transform neo-classical literary structure into a Romantic form, and she uses Goethe's concept of the ideal to show that it is Honorio and the princess, not the lion, who are tamed at the story's conclusion.

Goethe first began to think about the epic which later became the Novelle in 1797. This year was also important in his thinking about painting, for he was engaged in what turned out to be a fundamental reinterpretation of the neoclassical hierarchy of genres, the doctrine of the compatibility of various objects and styles in painting.¹ As preparation for his new journal, Die Propyläen, Goethe asked his friend J. H. Meyer to write an essay on this doctrine, which appeared...