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JENNIFER A. HERDT classes can cultivate only on stage: "A nobleman can and must be someone who represents by his appearance [scheinen], whereas the burgher simply is [sein], and when he tries to put on an appearance (literally, ‘to appear’), the effect is ludicrous or in bad taste. The nobleman should act and achieve, the burgher must labor and create, developing some of his capabilities in order to be useful” (HA 7.5.3, 291, E 175). Wilhelm here connects the right to shine, to cultivate an impressive appearance, with the opportunity to develop a fully-developed personality. By Book 7 he has learned to be more suspicious of outer appearances. They still seem to be revealing, as when Werner arrives and marvels over the change in Wilhelm’s appearance; he now looks positively noble. The changes seem to extend even to physical characteristics: “Your eyes are more deep set, your forehead is broader, your nose is more delicate and your mouth is much more pleasant” (HA 7.8.1, 499, E 306). Werner, in contrast, has become skinny and bald, and round-shouldered, his voice shrill, his face pale. We hear echoes here of Lavater’s influential theory of physiognomy (1775), according to which physical features expressed specific character traits. But it is telling that it is Werner who draws attention to these features and who sees them as significant. Even here, his focus is on the economic significance of these external characteristics, their instrumental rather than intrinsic meaning: “With your figure you should be able to get me a rich heiress” (HA 7.8.1, 499, E 306, translation modified). Wilhelm, in the meantime, has acquired the shining appearance he longed for, but he now more clearly sees that it is not this that guarantees the capacity to find beauty and goodness only in the truly beautiful and good, any more than membership in the hereditary nobility guarantees the possession of true virtue. With this we approach the matter of the Tower Society’s employment of ritual, like theater — a matter of appearance, of Schein. On the one hand, Goethe uses the Society as a mouthpiece for his own philosophy of ethical formation. On the other hand, he treats the Society and its efforts with a light irony that invites the reader to further test and probe that philosophy, rather than simply taking it as authoritative. Within Wilhelm Meister, the Society is a way of grappling with the role that external guiding forces or authorities can take when the very notions of external providence and external authority, and certainly of traditional religious authorities, are problematized in favor of organic, internal teleology. But the Tower Society is portrayed as itself a work in progress, as continually reinventing itself, in process of continual change even as it seeks to influence the development of individuals under its survey. This extends to its use of ritual. At the key moment when the Tower Society decides to reveal itself to Wilhelm, it does so by summoning him up to the tower of Lothario’s castle, in a space rendered mysterious and unfamiliar through the presence of darkness, tapestries, a cloth-covered table “instead of an altar,” and figures who appear «112°
