In discussing the Apprenticeship with Eckermann in 1825, Goethe owned that he himself almost lacked the key to that “incalculable production.” It is difficult and perhaps inadvisable, he claimed, to seek such a midpoint, a “decided tendency” which would exist only conceptually. Yet interpreters were and are wont to do just this, and, after pronouncing this caveat, Goethe allowed that one might after all look to the end of the novel: