As sung by Ali and Fatima on the death of Mahomet, the ode was an allegory of his life from its beginning to its triumphant close when he passed from the present with the consciousness that he had won to his faith the nation from which he had sprung. But it also undoubtedly expressed the aspiration of the poet himself. The ambition to impress himself on the world, and the consciousness of powers to give effect to his ambition, were indeed the ruling impulses behind all his distracted activities. But he was thwarted in his ambition alike by external circumstances and by his own temperament, and there came occasions when he was disposed to accept failure as his wisest choice. In two poems of this period he gives expression to this mood, and the necessity for overcoming it. In the one, Adler und Taube, a young eagle is wounded by a fowler, but after three days recovers, though with disabled wings. Two doves alight near the spot, and one of them addresses soothing words to the crippled king of the birds. "Thou art in sorrow," he coos; "be of good courage, friend! hast thou not here all that peaceful bliss requires?... O friend, true happiness is content, and everywhere content has enough." "O wise one," spoke the eagle, and, moved to deep earnest, sinks more deeply into himself; "O wisdom! thou speakest like a dove." In the other poem, Künstlers Erdewallen ("The Artist's Earthly Pilgrimage"), composed in the form of a dialogue, we have equally a draft from Goethe's own experience. To provide for his family needs, the artist is forced to prostitute his genius by painting pictures for the vulgar connoisseur, and he desponds at the prospect of a life spent under such conditions, but the muse whispers consolation: "Thou hast time enough to take delight in thyself, and in every creation which thy brush lovingly depicts." It was a consolation which at this time and at other periods of his life Goethe had to take home to himself.

CHAPTER X

WERTHER, CLAVIGO

1774

In his fortieth year Goethe wrote to Wieland: "Without compulsion, there is in my case no hope."[150] So it was with him at every period of his life; without some immediate impulse out of his own experience or from the urgency of friends he was incapable of the sustained inspiration requisite to the execution of a prolonged artistic whole. We have seen how he dallied with the subject of Götz von Berlichingen, and how it was only at the instance of his sister Cornelia that he concentrated his energies in throwing it into dramatic form. In the case of Werther we have an illustration of the same characteristic. Shortly after leaving Wetzlar, on hearing the news of Jerusalem's death, there arose in him a pressing desire to embody his late experience in some imaginative shape; and in the course of the following year he actually addressed himself to the task. But his inspiration flagged, and it was not till the beginning of 1774 that a new experience supplied a fresh impulse constraining him to complete the "prodigious little work" which was to take his contemporaries by storm.

We have it from Goethe's own hand that it was a new and "painful situation" that gave him the necessary stimulus to resume his work on Werther and to carry it to a conclusion. We have seen how on leaving Wetzlar in the autumn of 1772 he had made the acquaintance of the family von la Roche, and how he had been captivated by the elder daughter, Maximiliane. Since then he had kept up a sentimental correspondence with the mother in which we have occasional references to his continued interest in the daughter. "Your Maxe," he wrote in August, 1773, "I cannot do without so long as I live, and I shall always venture to love her." This was, of course, in the current style of the time, but a situation arose which made such amorous trifling dangerous. On January 9th, 1774, the Fräulein von la Roche was married to Peter Brentano, a dealer in herrings, oil, and cheese, a widower with five children, with whom she settled in Frankfort. Goethe immediately became an assiduous frequenter of the Brentano household, where he was not unwelcome to the young wife, whose new surroundings were in unpleasant contrast to those of the home she had left. But Brentano was not so magnanimous as Kestner, and a fortnight had not passed before there were "painful scenes" between him and Goethe. On the 21st Goethe wrote as follows to the mother of Madame Brentano: "If you knew what passed within me before I avoided the house, you would not think, dear Mama, of luring me back to it again. I have in these frightful moments suffered for all the future; I am now at peace, and in peace let me remain."[151] He had now gone the round of all the experiences embodied in Werther; on February 1st he resumed the discontinued work, and, writing "almost in a state of somnambulism," finished it in a few weeks.

But besides his own immediate personal experience, there went other influences to the production of Werther which affected alike its form and its contents. In his Autobiography Goethe has minutely analysed these influences, and the most potent of them he traces to the impression made by English literature on himself and his contemporaries. What impressed them as the prevailing note of that literature was a melancholy disillusion which regarded life as a sorry business at the best, and Goethe specifies Young, Gray, and Ossian as representative interpreters of this mood. In verses like these, he says, we have the precise expression of the moral disease which he has depicted in Werther:—

To griefs congenial prone,
More wounds than nature gave he knew;
While misery's form his fancy drew
In dark ideal hues and horrors not its own![152]