century. Angels are all around us today, if we are to believe Professor Michel Serres, or Dr. William Bloom, or Ms. Jane Howard, who represent three peaks of modern angelology: the first a distinguished French academic who identifies angels with radio waves, with airplanes (and their passengers), and with the Internet; the second a psychologist who runs workshops entitled "Devas, Fairies and Angels: A Practical Approach"; and the third an agony aunt who pours out sugared reassurances to her clients, telling them all (in person, by telephone, in best-selling books) that they are in the peaceful embrace of their divine guardian angel. Modern anxieties, like Victorian certainties, can be fed into a popular culture of sentimentalized reassurances.
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And, obviously, such belief is much older than the nineteenth century; for an earlier example of the association of children with angels, I turn to Goethe, whose career, spanning almost sixty years, seems to contain within itself most of the literary history of his timeeighteenth century Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, German Romanticism. Within
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
, begun in 1777 and rewritten in 17941796, we can find traces of all theseand even of Gothic melodrama. Early in the story Wilhelm rescues and adopts a girl who is being beaten by the leader of the troop of acrobats she belongs to. The girl, known only as Mignon, is a mysterious figure, of whom nothing is known: only at her funeral is she recognized by an Italian marchese as his niece, and he then reveals that she was the child of an incestuous union between his brother and sister. While Mignon is alive, however, we know nothing of her origin; and the funeral oration delivered by the otherwise all-knowing Abbé says of her: "Von dem Kinde, das wir hier bestatten, wissen wir wenig zu sagen. Noch ist es unbekannt, woher es kam, seine Eltern kennen wir nicht, und die Zahl seiner Lebensjahren vermuten wir nur." (
Wilhelm Meister
8:8). (Little is known about the child we are here burying. We do not know where she came from, or who her parents were, and we can only guess at her age.) Goethe cleared up the first two mysteries for us, but not the last, which is the most interesting, for whereas Mignon's origins belong to the Gothic mystery that forms what to us must seem a very dated layer of the novel, her age is a piece of information that would enter more immediately into our reading. We need to know her age in order to know whether she has reached puberty and, so, to understand more about her intense and intimate devotion to Wilhelm: does she regard him as a father figure or as a potential lover? The doctor who treats Mignon when she is in Natalie's care manages to learn more about
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