quid eternis minorem
  Consiliis animum fatigas?[1]

[Footnote 1:  Odes II. xi.]

The cause of this commonest of all follies is that optical illusion of the mind from which everyone suffers, making life, at its beginning, seem of long duration; and at its end, when one looks back over the course of it, how short a time it seems!  There is some advantage in the illusion; but for it, no great work would ever be done.

Our life is like a journey on which, as we advance, the landscape takes a different view from that which it presented at first, and changes again, as we come nearer.  This is just what happens—­especially with our wishes.  We often find something else, nay, something better than what we are looking for; and what we look for, we often find on a very different path from that on which we began a vain search.  Instead of finding, as we expected, pleasure, happiness, joy, we get experience, insight, knowledge—­a real and permanent blessing, instead of a fleeting and illusory one.

This is the thought that runs through Wilkelm Meister, like the bass in a piece of music.  In this work of Goethe’s, we have a novel of the intellectual kind, and, therefore, superior to all others, even to Sir Walter Scott’s, which are, one and all, ethical; in other words, they treat of human nature only from the side of the will.  So, too, in the Zauberfloete—­that grotesque, but still significant, and even hieroglyphic—­the same thought is symbolized, but in great, coarse lines, much in the way in which scenery is painted.  Here the symbol would be complete if Tamino were in the end to be cured of his desire to possess Tainina, and received, in her stead, initiation into the mysteries of the Temple of Wisdom.  It is quite right for Papageno, his necessary contrast, to succeed in getting his Papagena.

Men of any worth or value soon come to see that they are in the hands of Fate, and gratefully submit to be moulded by its teachings.  They recognize that the fruit of life is experience, and not happiness; they become accustomed and content to exchange hope for insight; and, in the end, they can say, with Petrarch, that all they care for is to learn:—­

  Altro diletto che ’mparar, non provo.

It may even be that they to some extent still follow their old wishes and aims, trifling with them, as it were, for the sake of appearances; all the while really and seriously looking for nothing but instruction; a process which lends them an air of genius, a trait of something contemplative and sublime.

In their search for gold, the alchemists discovered other things—­gunpowder, china, medicines, the laws of nature.  There is a sense in which we are all alchemists.

CHAPTER II.

OUR RELATION TO OURSELVES.—­SECTION 4.

The mason employed on the building of a house may be quite ignorant of its general design; or at any rate, he may not keep it constantly in mind.  So it is with man:  in working through the days and hours of his life, he takes little thought of its character as a whole.