Goethe and Frederike.
In the years which we are following, the young men of America were solving the political questions and preparing for the military struggles of the American Revolution. France was in the glow of hope which made even Louis XVI. himself suppose that a golden age was come again for Frenchmen. In England the protest against form and authority showed itself in signs as easily read as the letters of Junius and the Wilkes riots in London. The autocracy attempted by poor George III., in an attempt which cost him America, was only the most absurd imitation of the despotism of Louis XIV. In Germany, the revolt against the traditions of the past showed itself in the new outburst of national literature. Young men were sick of the sway of France and the French language, to which Frederick even had been so subservient. In all senses Frederick was now a very old lion—and there were those who said he had lost his teeth. To be German, to write and read German, to recall German memories, and to throw off conventional restraints of whatever kind—such was the drift and determination of the movement which received the excellent title of the "Sturm und Drang."
Soon after Goethe left Strasburg he printed his play of "Goetz von Berlichingen." The hero is a true character of history. He was born about the year 1480 and died in 1562. His life had been published in 1731, and Goethe made the drama on the lines of the true history. The play defies all the "unities" of the French drama, like the plays of Shakespeare, whom all the young Germans were reading with enthusiasm; and the action passes from place to place, and from year to year, just as the author chooses. The whole tendency of the drama is revolutionary, and as Goetz dies, his last words are: "Freedom! Freedom!" His wife cries, "Only above, above with thee! The world is a prison-house." His sister says, "Gallant and gentle! Woe to this age that has lost thee!" And the last words of the play are: "And woe to the future that cannot know thee."
With such an appeal to all the fresh young life of Germany, the young author comes before the world. His play is received with enthusiasm and, at the first step, his genius is recognized by his countrymen.
Before it was published, he had returned to Frankfort, having in a way satisfied his father's wishes by his legal studies, and his career for his future calling is to begin in a residence at Weslar. This was the seat of the Court of Appeal of the old German Empire. How far justice was really promoted, may be seen from the single statement that, while the docket of cases was twenty thousand behindhand in 1772, only sixty decisions were made in a year. In what was called praxis or practice, the young Goethe was placed in a "circumlocution office" like Weslar. There is something ludicrous in the position, so absurd is it. To take Schiller's capital figure, it is indeed Pegasus in harness.
It happened that in this formal residence, he became intimately acquainted with Charlotte Buff and a young man named Kestner, to whom she was betrothed. They were fond of him, he of them, and he shared in the hospitalities of their new home after they were married. In the simple life of Kestner and Charlotte Buff and in the suicide of a young man named Jerusalem, whom they all knew, he found the details for the picture of life described in his celebrated novel called the "Sorrows of Young Werther," the novel most remarkable perhaps of modern times, if its influence on literature and society be regarded.
In the characters of the book, Werther, Lotte, and Albert show traits which were at once recognized as belonging to Goethe, Charlotte Buff, and Kestner. But it must not be understood that the intricate "elective affinities" of the novel really describe the personal relations of the three. To young readers it may be said that the transfer of the scientific term "elective affinity," from the new chemistry of that time, to the language of the affections, was first made in this book. It was afterward dwelt upon in the novel called "Elective affinities." The phrase has long since been used, now in ridicule and now seriously, quite as much in discussions of the working of the human heart as to express the relations of acids and alkalies.
It would be very hard to persuade the young people of to-day to read "The Sorrows of Werther." It would be hard to make them understand that for a generation of men, from 1774, when it was published, until this century was well advanced, people of sense and real feeling regarded it as a central and important book, which they valued because it had awakened them and given them strength. The English critics, when at last they found there was such a book, were content to laugh at its exaggerated sentiment. In truth, as Carlyle has well said, "'Werther' expressed the dim-rooted pain under which thoughtful men were languishing." Europe responded to "Werther," because, even in its sentimental languishing, it expressed this pain. America was finding another method of expressing her dissatisfaction in 1774. And it may be doubted whether from that day to the end of the century, a copy of the "Sorrows of Werther" was heard of in the United States, unless indeed the Baroness Riedesel soothed with it the more physical sorrows of the bivouacs of Saratoga, or the barracks of her captivity.