Only private circumstances and persons are dealt with. War is, indeed, alluded to, and in such a manner that we are enabled to conclude that the war following on the French Revolution is meant; but nothing definite is said about it. As to the locality, we are led to the conclusion that it is somewhere in Central Germany; but the landscape possesses no marked features, it only chimes in like a faint musical accompaniment to the mood. In the world depicted in the tale, art is regarded, in the perverted fashion of the day, as the school of life, instead of life as the school of art; national, historical events are but "etwas Theatergeräusch hinter den Koulissen" (a little noise behind the scenes).[1] None of the characters have any practical aim in view; they are simply driven onward by the current of their longings and moods; they wander about, untrammelled by circumstances, heedless of the boundaries of countries, leading "planless" existences. Goethe's avoidance of all psychological extremes is a significant witness to the centripetal tendency of "soul." Such an extreme is crime, conceived of as criminal. Even where Goethe touches upon the horrible, as, for example, incestuous passion (the story of the Harper), his desire is only that we should be powerfully affected, not that we should judge; he does not bring the case before the moral, much less before the legal tribunal. And the story loses some of its painfulness from the manner in which it is communicated to us. We do not hear it from the Harper himself; his lips are sealed; it is told us after his death by a stranger. It is in this highly idealised world, on which the poet's hand has set the seal of beauty, that Wilhelm wanders about, without a plan, but not without an aim. He is in pursuit of the ideal--an ideal profession, an ideal woman, ideal culture. He is first a merchant, then an actor, then a doctor; loves first Marianne, then the Countess, then Therese, then Nathalie. His first ideal of culture is experience, his second intellectual refinement; then he seeks it in renunciation; and he ends with experiments in social reform which made the _Wanderjahre_, in its day, one of the books to which socialistic revolutionaries most eagerly appealed. But the main thing to be noted is, that Wilhelm is constantly remoulding his ideal. He does not find it; he loses it, so to speak. It is not so much that he becomes the bourgeois, the philistine (Spiessbürger), as that the word loses its meaning for him.