The year 1794 marks the beginning of more intimate relations between Goethe and Schiller.  Their memorable friendship lasted until Schiller’s death, in 1805—­the richest decade in the whole history of German letters.  The two men became in a sense allies and stood together in the championship of good taste and humane idealism.  Goethe’s literary occupations during this period were very multifarious; a list of his writings in the various fields of poetry, drama, prose fiction, criticism, biography, art and art-history, literary scholarship, and half a dozen sciences, would show a many-sidedness to which there is no modern parallel.  Of all this mass of writing only a few works of major importance can even be mentioned here.

In 1796 appeared Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, a novel which captivated the literary class, if not the general public, and was destined to exert great influence on German fiction for a generation to come.  It had been some twenty years in the making.  In its earlier form it was called Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission.[3] This tells the story of a Werther-like youth who is to be saved from Werther’s fate by finding a work to do.  His “mission,” apparently, is to become a good actor and to promote high ideals of the histrionic art.  Incidentally he is ambitious to be a dramatic poet, and his childhood is simply that of Wolfgang Goethe.  For reasons intimately connected with his own development Goethe finally decided to change his plan and his title, and to present Wilhelm’s variegated experiences as an apprenticeship in the school of life.  In the final version Wilhelm comes to the conclusion that the theatre is not his mission—­all that was a mistaken ambition.  Just what use he will make of his well-disciplined energy does not clearly appear at the end of the story, since Goethe bundles him off to Italy.  He was already planning a continuation of the story under the title of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeymanship.  In this second part the hero becomes interested in questions of social uplift and thinks of becoming a surgeon.  Taken as a whole Wilhelm Meister moves with a slowness which is quite out of tune with later ideals of prose fiction.  It also lacks concentration and artistic finality.  But it is replete with Goethe’s ripe and mellow wisdom, and it contains more of his intimate self than any other work of his except Faust.

During this high noon of his life Goethe again took up his long neglected Faust, decided to make two parts of it, completed the First Part, and thought out much that was to go into the Second Part.  By this time he had become somewhat alienated from the spirit of his youth, when he had envisaged life in a mist of vague and stormy emotionalism.  His present passion was for clearness.  So he boldly decided to convert the old tragedy of sin and suffering into a drama of mental clearing-up.  The early Faust—­the pessimist, murderer, seducer—­was