In his autobiography he
describes accurately the life of the author of Wilhelm Meister.
For as there is in
That book, mingled with a rare and serene
wisdom, a certain pettiness or exaggeration of trifles, wisdom
applied to produce a constrained and partial and merely well-bred
man, - a magnifying of the theatre till life itself is turned into
a stage, for which it is our duty to study our parts well, and
conduct with propriety and precision, - so in the autobiography,
the fault of his education is, so to speak, its merely artistic
completeness. Nature is hindered, though she prevails at last in
making an unusually catholic impression on the boy. It is the
life of a city boy, whose toys are pictures and works of art,
whose wonders are the theatre and kingly processions and
crownings. As the youth studied minutely the order and the
degrees in the imperial procession, and suffered none of its
effect to be lost on him, so the man aimed to secure a rank in
society which would satisfy his notion of fitness and
respectability. He was defrauded of much which the savage boy
enjoys. Indeed, he himself has occasion to say in this very
autobiography, when at last he escapes into the woods without the
gates: "Thus much is certain, that only the undefinable,
wide-expanding feelings of youth and of uncultivated nations are
adapted to the sublime, which, whenever it may be excited in us
through external objects, since it is either formless, or else
moulded into forms which are incomprehensible, must surround us
with a grandeur which we find above our reach." He further says
of himself:
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