In the books dealing with Meister’s connection with the drama Goethe displays to perfection his matchless power of giving charm, through sheer force of style, even to scenes and incidents that are not in themselves very impressive. The characters, too, have astonishing vitality. We are told little about them, and their motives are never elaborately analysed. They are simply made to act before us, and we thus learn to know them, each in his and her own clearly marked individuality, as if we had met them in real life. Meister himself, with his wavering impulses and vague strivings after an ideal existence, is revealed with absolute truth to nature, and, although he never wins (nor is intended to win) our full respect, we are compelled, almost in spite of ourselves, to follow him with interest from stage to stage of his career. The most important character, however, is not Meister, but Mignon, one of the strangest, most pathetic figures in the world’s literature. Transported in childhood from “the land where the citrons blossom” to the cold North, she is never at home in the scenes in which we find her. Calm, gentle, self-possessed, she conceals a burning passion that in the end consumes her life; yet she is of so ethereal a nature that she seems to glide through the world as one who in no way belongs to it. A more truly poetic conception never took form in a romance; and Mignon alone, even if “Wilhelm Meister” had contained no other element of interest, would have sufficed to make the book immortal. In relation to her the hero is seen at his best, and it is she who gives the work such unity as it possesses--a unity of spirit rather than of form. The songs sung by Mignon and by the Harper (another highly poetic figure, marked out from the beginning, like Mignon, for a tragic doom) are among Goethe’s lyrical masterpieces, remarkable equally for the depth of their meaning and the purity, sweetness, and grace of their expression. In almost startling contrast to Mignon is the gay, bright, coquettish Philline--the type of feminine Bohemianism; a character thoroughly self-consistent and full of bounding life until we hear about her in the unfortunate concluding scenes, when things are told of her that tend to make her utterly unintelligible.