Life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe

by James Sime

At last, yielding to the entreaties of the friend to whom his letters are addressed, he flies from the scene of his misery, and, accepting a diplomatic appointment at a German court, hopes to regain peace of mind by taking part in the world’s work. But he is slighted in an assembly of people with whom, as a man of the middle class, he is not thought fit to associate; and the insult so rankles in his mind that he sends in his resignation, and after some months of brooding he cannot resist the temptation to go back to Lotte. By this time she is married; nevertheless, his passion burns more fiercely than ever, and anguish rends his heart when he sees her in Albert’s possession. She has always had a warm regard for Werther. Now his sufferings arouse her pity, and in the end she cannot conceal from herself that she loves him. But she expostulates with him, and begs him to leave her, to marry some one who can honourably give herself to him, and to return as a friend. Albert becomes jealous and watchful, and utter shipwreck seems to be the destiny of the newly-formed household. Werther, sick at heart, loathing existence, resolves to bring his agony to a violent end, and after a wild scene, in which Lotte almost loses control of herself, the tragedy closes with his death. The pistol with which he shoots himself he borrows from Albert on the plea that he is about to start on a journey. Lotte takes it from its place, and, having wiped the dust from it, hands it to the messenger with a sad foreboding that some terrible disaster is at hand.

“Werther” is a story of a “mind diseased”; and, judged from this point of view, it stands supreme among the prose writings of the eighteenth century. Goethe himself never wrote, in prose, anything more powerful. Werther’s malady was not the malady of an individual only, but of an age. Thoughtful men had outlived their beliefs, their institutions, their customs; all around them was a world touched by the finger of decay. They sought to shake themselves free from the intolerable yoke of the past, but as yet nothing had appeared that could take the place of the old ideas; there was no influence to awaken disinterested enthusiasm, to lead to combined and settled effort for worthy ends. So even the best minds—and perhaps they more than others—felt themselves isolated, and, in the absence of nobler interests, were forced to think much about their own moods, about the ebb and flow of the tides of purely personal feeling. Hence a morbid sensitiveness, an extravagant sentimentalism; hence, too, a disposition to read the facts of existence in the light of individual experience—a tendency to conclude that, because the hungry “I” was unhappy, therefore the universe was a gigantic blunder and imposture. In “Werther” Goethe probes this disease to its roots. It is a profound error to suppose that he intended the hero of the tale to be taken as a complete representation of his own character. Werther wholly lacked many of the qualities that made Goethe great—his original impulse, his creative energy, his strength of will. But Werther’s mood had for a while been Goethe’s mood, and it is for this reason that as we read the solitary sentimentalist’s letters he seems to start into life, and we learn to know him, back into the inmost recesses of his spirit, more intimately than if he stood before us in actual flesh and blood. It was a phase—a passing but most striking phase—of his own many-sided nature that Goethe was disclosing, and he could not but write of it in words of searching power. And yet all was not put down exactly as it came into his mind. With fine, instinctive art he selected those elements of the tale, and those only, that were fitted to reveal his essential purpose, and to prepare the way for the ultimate issue. When we close the book, and look back, we feel that no other issue was possible. Were Werther a man of good sense and resolute will, he could easily, no doubt, disentangle himself, but with his character, and in his circumstances, ruin is inevitable.

Lotte, as she is presented in the first part of “Werther,” is one of the most exquisite of Goethe’s creations. Her youth and beauty, the frankness of her manner, the joyous spirit in which she devotes herself to others, and the warm poetic feeling combined in her nature with a sound and ready judgment, are brought out with so delicate a grace, yet in such clear outlines, that we do not wonder at the influence she exerts over all who know her, and especially over a sensitive mind like Werther’s. It is hard to realize that the Lotte of the second part is also the Lotte of the first, and it may be that here there is a flaw in Goethe’s idea of the character. The maelstrom of passion within whose sweep she is caught is so powerfully depicted that at the moment of reading we are not permitted to raise any question as to the consistency of the conception; but when all is over, we cannot help suspecting that we have been introduced to two Lottes rather than to one. The Lotte who afterwards lives in the imagination is certainly the Lotte of the first part, a sane and wholesome figure, contrasting strongly with the shrill and despairing Werther. Albert stands out less prominently than Werther and Lotte, but he also has living qualities, and if anything could make the final scenes, so far as Lotte is concerned, intelligible, it would be his pompous self-esteem and exasperating respectability.

One of the secrets of the charm of “Werther” lies in its style. It is a style peculiar to Goethe himself, yet without a trace of eccentricity. Strong, lucid, and picturesque, it adapts itself with perfect suppleness to every mood the writer wishes to express; and it is so absolutely unaffected that, as we read, we think of what is said rather than of the artist’s way of saying it. “Werther” is also remarkable as the first modern German book in which we find descriptions of nature that are still full of charm. It was Rousseau who had opened men’s eyes to the splendour and loveliness of the outward world. Goethe had learned all that Rousseau could teach as to the art of suggesting natural scenery to the imagination through written speech, and in “Werther” he went far beyond the highest achievements of his instructor. His descriptions are often merely rapid sketches, but they are sketches drawn with so sure a touch that they never fail to call up a vision having all the freshness of reality. And they intensify interest in the tale, for nature is brought in less for its own sake than for the sake of its relation to feeling. It is with Werther’s eyes that we see the scenes he reproduces, and he finds in them always a power that responds to his own happiness or gloom.

Few books have ever produced so strong a sensation. Almost everywhere in Germany “Werther” was received with mingled astonishment and delight. It had come straight from the writer’s heart, and went as straight to the hearts of those who read it. They found in the tale a voice that gave utterance to much that they themselves had been feeling, and many of them not only shed hot tears for Werther’s fate, but affected his modes of expression, and even dressed as he had dressed—in blue coat, yellow vest, yellow hose, and top-boots. By and by the book was translated into almost every European language, and in far Cathay Werther and Lotte were painted on glass by native artists.

At first there was one discordant note in the general chorus of praise. Kestner was gravely offended by what he took to be a misrepresentation of the relations between Goethe, Lotte, and himself. In reality there was no misrepresentation, for Goethe had dealt freely with the experiences through which he had passed, using only those of them that were adapted to his scheme, and adding scenes in which there was no element of fact. The Lotte of the first part, notwithstanding her black eyes, is Charlotte Buff, perhaps slightly idealized; but in the second part she is wholly a figure of the imagination. As for Albert, Goethe, if he thought of any one in particular in conceiving the character, thought of Brentano, not of Kestner. In the end Kestner had a better understanding of what had been intended, and was not a little proud of the part his wife had unconsciously played in the creation of so famous a romance.

Goethe himself says that when he finished “Werther” he felt as one feels after a general confession. The load that had weighed so heavily on his spirit was for the moment removed, and, once more free and happy, he looked forward hopefully to new activity. By and by he could even jest about the characters whose woes had moved him so deeply. Nicolai, the Berlin bookseller and man of letters, who had done better work in his time, wrote a parody of the book, showing how in reality Werther and Lotte became husband and wife, and lived happily ever after; the pistol with which Werther had tried to shoot himself having been loaded with chicken’s blood. Some verses written by Goethe show that he took offence at this indignity; but afterwards he wrote an amusing little dialogue, in which Werther and Lotte complain of Nicolai’s misconceptions. The chicken’s blood has blinded Werther, and Lotte, while pitying him, is anything but enchanted by the change this has made in his appearance. His eyebrows, she says, will never be so beautiful as they were before. In “Dichtung und Wahrheit” Goethe speaks of this dialogue with some pride, and it certainly shows how completely, at the time when he wrote it, he felt himself emancipated from the influences from which “Werther” had sprung.

He had not yet, however, brought his powers under strict control. Many conflicting ideas struggled in his mind for mastery, and his moods varied from day to day, one giving way to another without any apparent reason and with startling rapidity. Goethe’s nature was too complicated, touched to too many fine issues, to attain suddenly, or soon, to inward repose.

Two complete prose dramas were written in Frankfort after he finished “Werther”—“Clavigo” and “Stella.” “Clavigo” is a dramatic rendering of incidents recorded in the “Memoirs” of Beaumarchais. These “Memoirs” appeared in Paris in the spring of 1774, and in the summer of the same year Goethe’s play was published. In imaginative energy, and in range and depth of feeling, “Clavigo” is far inferior to “Goetz,” but it displays a striking advance in the power of construction. The formerly despised unities are here observed, and the interest, such as it is, steadily grows until it culminates in the catastrophe. The chief defect of the play is that Clavigo, on whose action everything depends, is too feeble a character to excite much interest. His cynical friend, Don Carlos, has, however, marked individuality, and the part played by him is still found by German actors to repay careful study. Maria, the heroine, dies of a broken heart, and in describing Clavigo’s desertion of her, as in describing Weislingen’s desertion of the Maria of “Goetz,” Goethe did a kind of penance for his treatment of Frederika Brion.

“Stella,” which was written in 1775, seems to have been suggested by Swift’s relations to Stella and Vanessa. In this play also Goethe respects the unities, and much technical skill is shown in the development of the story. The play in its original form, however, could not now be acted without exciting ridicule. The hero, Ferdinand, having married Cecilia, whom he loves, feels after a while that his freedom is unduly limited by a wife and daughter; and accordingly he leaves them. Then he falls in love with Stella, but her also he ultimately deserts. When the play opens, he has returned in the hope of being re-united to Stella. He finds her, but at the same time finds his wife and daughter, the latter having become Stella’s companion. There is now a vehement conflict of motives. Which of the two women shall he select? Cecilia suggests that it may be possible for him to live with both, and this solution, with Stella’s hearty consent, he joyfully accepts. Such was the passion for “nature” at the time that the public do not seem to have been in any way offended or perplexed by this strange conclusion; but thirty years afterwards Goethe changed the last act, bringing the play to an end with the suicide of Ferdinand and Stella. A tragic issue, however, could not be made to appear the natural result of conditions which were in the first instance planned for a wholly different scheme.