The love of Rousseau is, in fact, not social; it is not a product of civilization, but it is a creation of nature; it is one with nature. The nature-sense and the love-sense are here most intimately associated. And he observes both, nature and love, with feeling. The sensibilité de l’âme finds in nature and in love objects of the most glorious delight, of the sweetest pain, of the most burning tears.
“Out of the perceptions of mingled pain and ecstasy which the vision of nature, of beauty, or of a fine action, induced in him, he wove the web of sensibility with which he enveloped the creatures of his imagination. Incessantly thrust back into himself, his heart bleeding from wounded friendship or from unrequited love, self-tormentingly dissecting his own wishes and illusions, his own faculties and impossibilities, he became one of the first heralds of the Weltschmerz, of the woes of Werther and René, to which Byron and Heine had only to add self-mockery.”[142]
The sentimentality of the eighteenth century took its rise in England, as I have explained at some length in my pseudonymous work, “The Sexual Life in England,” vol. ii., pp. 95-107 (Berlin, 1903). In that country it found its most characteristic expression in the romances of Richardson and Sterne, and in landscape-gardening; but it was by Rousseau and Goethe that for the first time it was really brought into contact with the realities of life.
For the history of Julie, the history of Werther—this was the history of all happily or unhappily loving youths and maidens of that day; each maiden had her Saint Preux, each youth his Lotte.
The profound influence exercised by Rousseau, especially on women, has been described by H. Buffenoir in a very careful study.[143] The significance which “Werther” had for the emotional life of the time has been explained with the most cultivated understanding by Erich Schmidt in a well-known monograph.[144]
He shows that the nature-sense and sentimentality are much more deeply felt in Goethe’s “Werther” than in Rousseau’s “Nouvelle Héloïse.” Goethe himself says in “Wahrheit und Dichtung,” speaking of this poetical, rational, intimate, and loving absorption into nature:
“I endeavoured to separate myself inwardly from everything foreign to me, to regard the outward world lovingly, and to allow all beings, from the human onwards, to influence me, each in its kind, as deeply as was possible. Thus arose a wonderful alliance with the individual objects of nature, and an inward harmony, a harmony with the whole; so that every change, whether of places and of regions, or of days and seasons, or of any possible kind, moved me to my inmost soul. The painter’s view became associated with that of the poet; the beautiful country landscape through which the friendly river was wandering, increased my inclination to solitude, and favoured my quiet attitude of contemplation extending itself in every direction.”
Werther’s feeling for nature is intimately related to his love passion. The two harmonize, and each exercises a reciprocal influence upon the other. Nature is to Werther a second beloved. The youth of nature, the spring of nature, are also the youth and the spring of his love.
In the peculiar association of love with the nature-sense and sentimentality, which is so characteristic of the time of Julie and Werther, are to be found the first beginnings of the “Weltschmerz,” with its erotically significant “ecstasy of sorrow.” The following words in Goethe’s “Stella” appear to me to bind Weltschmerz and eroticism in an extremely distinct relationship. Stella says of men:
“They make us at once happy and miserable! They fill our heart with feelings of bliss! What new, unknown feelings and hopes fill our souls, when their stormful passion invades our nerves! How often has everything in me trembled and throbbed, when, in uncontrollable tears, he has washed away the sorrows of a world on my breast! I begged him, for God’s sake, to spare himself!—to spare me!—in vain!—into my inmost marrow he fanned the flames which were devouring himself. And thus the girl, from head to foot, became all heart, all sentiment.”