SOURCE: “The Field of View in Goethe's Novelle,” in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, May, 1976, pp. 63-72.

In the following essay, Balfour traces the various optical motifs in Goethe's Novelle and concludes that Goethe used the symbol of sight to “reveal the Universal, the divine and the miraculous.”

The skill of any successful story-writer depends to a large extent upon his ability to stimulate the reader's imaginative powers so that a number of vivid scenes and visual impressions arise in his mind. As Goethe states in his Maximen und Reflexionen: ‘Der Dichter ist angewiesen auf Darstellung. Das Höchste derselben ist, wenn sie mit der Wirklichkeit wetteifert, das heißt, wenn ihre Schilderungen durch den Geist dergestalt lebendig sind, daß sie als gegenwärtig für jedermann gelten können.’¹ A writer can achieve this both through exact narrative description and also through the eyes...