Goethe in Fiction

I have posted occasionally on the results of my habit of looking for Goethe's name in the index of books I read, whatever the subject. He shows up everywhere. Just a couple of posts ago,  I introduced  the above subject, which I suspect is a promisingly large one.

There must be some kind of "law" to the effect that once you notice something, it will appear all over the place. Sure enough, this morning, while reading Willa Cather's The Professor's House, I came across a scene in which Goethe himself is the subject.

The protagonist of the novel, Godfrey St. Peter, a professor at a Midwestern collge, is in Chicago to give a lecture on his historical work. His son-in-law gives him and his wife tickets for a performance of Mignon at the city's opera house. St. Peter mentions that, when a student in Paris, he had a subscription to the Opéra Comique, where he occasionally saw Mignon. Cather is a wonderful writer, so allow me to introduce her description of the effect of the overture:

The music seemed extraordinarily fresh and genuine still. It might grow old-fashioned, he told himself, but never old, surely, while there was any youth left in men.

On the entrance of the hero, i.e., Wilhelm Meister, St. Peter's wife leans toward him and whispers:

"Am I over-credulous? He looks to me exactly like the pictures of Goethe in his youth."

To which her husband responds:

"So he does to me. He is certainly as tall as Goethe. I didn't know tenors were ever so tall. The Mignon seems young, too."

She was slender, at any rate, and very fragile beside the courtly Wilhelm.

What a lovely evocation of an era in America -- the novel appeared in 1925 -- when people actually had thoughts about what Goethe looked like.