The Youth of Goethe

by P. Hume Brown

If English literature contributed to the tone of feeling in Werther, it also, though Goethe does not mention the fact, suggested the literary form in which it is cast. In the case of his former loves, his emotions had found vent in a succession of lyrics thrown off as occasion prompted, but his later experiences had been of a more complex nature, and demanded a larger canvas for their development. It would appear that Goethe's original intention was to adopt the dramatic form which had been so successful in the case of Götz, and we are led to believe that, in accordance with this intention, he actually made a beginning of his work. In the interval between his discontinuing and resuming it, however, he changed his mind; and in the form in which we have it Werther is mainly composed of letters addressed by its central character to an absent friend. There can be little doubt that the epistolary form was suggested by a book with which Goethe was familiar, and which had been received with enthusiasm in Germany as in other continental countries—Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe (1747-8). Richardson's example, moreover, had been followed in another work which had achieved as sensational as success as Clarissa—Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse. In form and substance Werther was as much inspired by Richardson and Rousseau as Götz had been by Shakespeare, yet in Werther, as in Götz, the world recognised an original creation which bore a new message to every heart capable of receiving it.

The portentous work was published in the autumn of 1774, but the form in which we now have it belongs to a later date. In the first complete edition of Goethe's Works (1787), Werther appeared with certain modifications, which did not, however, as in the case of Götz, organically affect its original form.[153] Expressions which to Goethe's maturer taste appeared objectionable were altered—not always, German critics are disposed to think, in the direction of improvement; the story of the unfortunate peasant in whose fate Werther saw an image of his own, was introduced; and, in deference to the feelings of Kestner and Lotte, the characters of the two persons in the book with whom readers identified them were presented in a somewhat more favourable light.[154]

With what degree of similitude Goethe has portrayed himself in the character of Werther must necessarily be matter of opinion, but that his work was essentially drawn from his own experience the merest outline of it conclusively shows. Equally in the case of the two parts of which the book is composed we have the presentment of successive phases of emotion through which we know that he had himself passed when he sat down to write it. The first part, the substance of which was probably drafted in the year 1773, is all but an exact transcript of Goethe's own experience from the day he settled in Wetzlar till the day he left it. Like Goethe himself, Werther settles in the spring of the year in a country town, unattractive like Wetzlar, but also, like Wetzlar, situated in a charming neighbourhood. His first few weeks there are spent as Goethe spent them—in daydreaming and vague longings; finding distraction alternately in sketching, in reading Homer, in intercourse with children and simple people, in contemplations on nature and the life of man, inspired by Spinoza and Rousseau. Then befalls the incident which also befell Goethe: he meets a girl at a ball, and he is overmastered by a passion which changes the current of his life and paralyses every other motive at its source. At the first meeting Werther learns that Charlotte is betrothed,[155] but her betrothed is absent, and, oblivious of the future, he for a few weeks lives in a state of intoxicating bliss. Albert, who, like Charlotte, has in the first part all the characteristics of his original, at length appears on the scene, and all three are gradually convinced that the situation is intolerable. There are "painful scenes," such as, according to Kestner, actually happened in Goethe's own case; and after an agonising struggle with himself Werther succeeds in breaking away from the enchanted spot, the last conversation between the three turning on the prospect of a future life—a memory, as we have seen, of an actual talk between Lotte, Kestner, and Goethe. So ends the first part, which, with unimportant variations, is a close record of the circumstances of Goethe's own sojourn in Wetzlar.

A tragic end to Werther Goethe had before him from its first conception, as is proved by his eagerness to ascertain the details of Jerusalem's suicide. But to justify dramatically such an end to his hero, certain modifications in the relations of all the three characters were rendered necessary, and again his own experience suggested the mode of treatment. In the uncomfortable relations that had arisen between himself and the Brentanos, husband and wife, he found a situation which would naturally involve a catastrophe in the case of a character constituted like Werther. When in February, 1774, therefore, he sat down to complete the tale of Werther's woes, it was under a new inspiration that the characters of Albert and Charlotte fashioned themselves in his mind. Not Kestner and Lotte Buff, but the Brentanos, suggested their leading traits as well as the relations of all parties, which involved the closing tragedy. Albert becomes a jealous and somewhat morose husband, and Charlotte is depicted with the characteristics of Maxe Brentano rather than of Lotte Buff—with a more susceptible temperament and less self-control.[156]

In the opening of the second part the character of Werther is further revealed in a new set of circumstances. Against his own inclinations he accepts an official appointment under an ambassador at a petty German Court, and his helpless unfitness in this situation for the ordinary business of life may be regarded as a commentary on Goethe's own invincible distaste for the practice of his profession. Werther finds the ambassador intolerable; and a public insult to which, as a commoner, he is subjected at a social gathering of petty nobility, drives him to resign his post. After a few months' residence with a prince, whose company in the end he finds uncongenial, he is irresistibly drawn to the scenes of his former happiness and misery. But in the interval an event happens which makes the renewal of old relations impossible. Charlotte and Albert have married, and the sight of Albert enjoying the privileges of a husband is a constant reminder of the hopelessness of his passion. Blank despair gradually takes possession of Werther's soul; in the hopeless wail of Ossian he finds the only adequate expression of his fate.[157] In the commentary which Goethe introduces to prepare readers for Werther's suicide, he suggests another motive for the act besides Werther's infatuation for Charlotte, which Napoleon as well as other critics have regarded as a mistake in art. In his state of mental and moral paralysis, we are told, Werther recalled all the misfortunes of his past life, and specially the mortification he had received during his brief official experience. But on the mind of the reader this incidental suggestion of other motives makes little impression; he feels that Werther's helpless abandonment to his passion for Charlotte is the central interest of the author himself, as it is a wholly adequate cause of the final catastrophe.

By the fulness of its revelation of himself and by the impression it made on the public mind Werther holds a unique place among the longer productions of Goethe. His own testimony, both at the time when it was written and in his later years, is conclusive proof of the degree to which it was a "general confession," as he himself calls it. "I have lent my emotions to his (Werther's) history," he wrote shortly after the completion of his work; "and so it makes a wonderful whole."[158] In one of the best-known passages of his Autobiography he tells how he morbidly dallied with the idea of suicide, and banished the obsession only by convincing himself that he had not the courage to plunge a dagger into his breast. In a remarkable passage, written in his sixty-third year to his Berlin friend, Zelter, whose son had committed suicide, he recalls with all seriousness the hypochondriacal promptings which in his own case might have driven him to the fate of Werther. "When the tædium vitæ takes possession of a man," he wrote, "he is to be pitied and not to be blamed. That all the symptoms of this wonderful, equally natural and unnatural, disease at one time also convulsed my inmost being, Werther, indeed, leaves no one in doubt. I know right well what resolves and what efforts it cost me at that time to escape the waves of death, as from many a later shipwreck I painfully rescued myself and with painful struggles recovered my health of mind." At a still later date (1824) Goethe expressed himself with equal emphasis to the same purport. "That is a creation (Werther)," he told Eckermann, "which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart. There is in it so much that was deepest in my own experience, so much of my own thoughts and sensations, that, in truth, a romance extending to ten such volumes might be made out of it. Since its appearance, I have read it only once, and have refrained from doing so again. It is nothing but a succession of rockets. I am uneasy when I look at it, and dread the return of the psychological condition out of which it sprang."

These repeated statements of Goethe, made at wide intervals of his life, sufficiently prove what a large part of himself went to the making of Werther. Yet Werther was not Goethe. From the fate of Werther he was saved by two characteristics of which we have seen frequent evidence in his previous history. It was not in his nature to be dominated for any lengthened period by a single passion to the exclusion of every other interest. No sooner had he left Wetzlar than his heart was open to the charms of Maxe Brentano, and, during the months that followed, her image and that of Lotte Buff alternately distracted his susceptibilities. Byron declared that he was capable of only one passion at a time, but Goethe was always capable of at least two. The other characteristic equally distinguishes Goethe from Werther. "I turn in upon myself," Werther writes, "and find a world—but a world of presentiments and of dim desires, not a world of definite outlines and of living force." Of a "living force" in himself Goethe was never wholly unconscious; the record of his creative efforts during the months that followed his leaving Wetzlar are sufficient evidence of the fact. The intellectual side of his nature—the impulse to know or to create—kept in check the emotional, and proved his safeguard in more crises than the Wertherian period during which, by his own testimony, he so narrowly escaped shipwreck.

The imprint of Goethe's character and genius which Werther made on the mind of his contemporaries was never effaced during his lifetime, and was even a source of embarrassment to him in his future development. For years after its appearance he found it necessary to travel incognito to avoid being pointed at as "the author of Werther"; and in the case of each of his subsequent productions the reading public had a feeling of disappointment that they were not receiving what they expected from the writer who had once so profoundly moved them. In truth, probably no book ever given to the world has made such an instantaneous, profound, and general sensation as Werther. The effect of Götz von Berlichingen had as yet been confined to Germany; on the publication of Werther its author became a European figure in the world of letters. In Germany Werther was hawked about as a chap-book; within three years three translations appeared in France, and five years after its publication it was translated into English. The dress worn by Werther (borrowed from England), consisting of a blue coat, yellow vest, yellow hose, and top-boots, became the fashion of the day and was sported even in Paris.