When Goethe published Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in 1795/96, the Romantic generation was enthusiastic at first. The work raised the status of the novel as a genre and used theatre to foreground the sphere of art – both of which were important Romantic concerns. Later, though, a more critical view prevailed. Novalis, for example, complained that “it lacks the Romantic element,” dealing “only with ordinary human things”.