The Sorrows of Young Werther. Ii

[Translated by George L. Howe]

I

WHILE his friends read and reread his touching letters, wept for him, and pictured his lonely languishings with an uneasy pity, Goethe was walking briskly down the pretty valley of the Lahn, on the way to Coblentz. There, at Frau de la Roche’s, Merck was to meet him.

A misty chain of mountains in the distance, the whitened pinnacles of the rocks above him, a stream filtering under a vault of reeds in the bottom of a gorge at his feet, composed a landscape aptly solemn.

His pride in having broken the spell of Wetzlar tempered the pathos of his still recent memories. Brooding over the adventure he had just enacted, he thought, ‘Why not make an elegy of it? Or an idyll?’ Then he wondered whether, after all, his real vocation were not to draw and paint such scenery as he was now traversing. ‘Come,’ he decided, ‘I am going to toss my good knife into the river. If I see it hit the water, I shall be a painter; if the reeds hide it, I shall give up Art forever.’

He did not see the knife sink, but he caught the rippling of the water. The oracle seemed ambiguous. He postponed his decision.

He walked as far as Ems, then took a boat down the Rhine and reached Frau de la Roche’s. He was welcomed most graciously. Councillor de la Roche was a man of the world, a great reader of Voltaire, a skeptic and a cynic. His wife, accordingly, was a sentimentalist. She had published a novel, she entertained the devotees of letters, and in spite of her husband, or perhaps because of him, she had made his house the rendezvous of the Apostles of the Heart.

Goethe was specially taken with the black eyes of sixteen-year-old Maximiliane de la Roche — pretty, bright, and precocious. He took long walks with her in the country, where he held forth on God and the Devil, Nature and the Heart, Rousseau and Goldsmith, and played his part so perfectly, in short, that Lotte might never have existed. The memory of her even added a zest to the new friendship. ‘It is a pleasant sensation,’ he noted, ‘when the heart listens for the first accents of an infant Love before the last sigh of a dead one has echoed itself into nothingness. Even so, turning from the setting sun, one hails the moon, climbing her own horizon.’

But before long he would have to go back to Frankfort.

The return to the paternal roof after disaster always brings a mixed feeling of relief and dismay. The fledgling has tried to fly; he has had to fold his wings; safe in the nest, he still longs for the great space that would not sustain him. The child ecsapes the troubles of an exacting and hostile world; he returns to the domestic round, where old habits are renewed, but where he finds again the weariness of feelings he has known too well, the loving bondage of home.

Those who have gained a traveler’s perspective are astonished to find their families still busy with stale and useless quarrels. Again Goethe heard in the house the same phrases that had irritated him when he was a child. His sister Cornelia complained of her father, his mother complained of Cornelia, and Councillor Goethe, whose temper was far from smooth, vowed he would drive back to his case-books a son whose head was so full of wraiths and fancies that he could not see the world about him.

Goethe felt himself succumbing to the depression he dreaded. He decided that his only hope of salvation lay in starting some great work of literature. The only difficulty was the choice. He still envisaged a Faust, perhaps a Prometheus, or perhaps even a Cæsar. But when he had sketched several schemes, written several verses, rubbed out and torn up, he admitted that none of it was good. Between his work and himself there always intervened the face of Lotte.

His lips still tasted the only kiss he had got from her; his hands remembered the touch of hers, so firm, so gentle; his ears remembered the sound of her frequent and cheery voice. Now that she was far from him he found she had always belonged to him. As soon as he sat down at his desk, his fancy rambled off to painful and profitless dreams.

Like all the bereaved, he tried to reconstruct the past. If Lotte had not been engaged. ... If Kestner had been less worthy or less kind. . . . If he himself had been less honorable. . . . If he had been brave enough to stay. ... Or to escape wholly, and crush by force of will the ghosts that tempted him. . . .

Over his bed he had hung a silhouette of Lotte, cut out of black paper by some rural artist. He stared at this image with an almost fanatic devotion. Each evening before he went to bed he kissed it. ‘Lotte,’ he would whisper, ‘will you give me one of your brooches?’ Often at nightfall he sat till late conversing with the portrait of his lost friend. Natural and easy as this makebelieve was at first, after a few days it seemed an empty and sorry rite, but he still drew from it some balm for his unrest. The mediocre and even absurd snip of paper had become an altar.

Almost every day he wrote Kestner with tender messages for Charlotte. He still spoke of his devotion in that half-tragic, half-jesting tone wdiich at Wetzlar had alone allowed him to release his stormy feelings without arousing Kestner.

‘We were talking,’ he wrote him, ‘of what may be happening above the clouds. I am not sure, but what I do know is that the Lord God must be a chilly fellow to let you have Lotte.'

And on another occasion: ‘Lotte has n’t dreamed of me? I am very much hurt, and command that she dream of me this very night, and without telling you about it afterward.’

Sometimes spite and pride got the better of him; ‘I shall not write again till I can tell Lotte that someone else is in love with me — deeply in love.’

After several attempts, he saw he could not go back to work on the themes he had planned till he had rid himself of this obsession. There was only one task now for which he was fit—a book about Lotte, a masterpiece in which Lotte would be the heroine.

In spite of his vast material, his diary, his memories, even his still burning heart, the obstacles were great. The subject was distinctly slight: a young man arrives in a city, falls in love with a girl who is already taken, and retreats from his attempt. Was there a book in that? Why did the hero draw back? All the women would blame him. If he had really been in love, he would have stayed. As it had happened, Goethe had left because the call of his art, the will to create, had been stronger than his love. Who but another artist would accept that explanation? The more he thought, the slimmer and triter did the theme become, the less did he seem likely to make anything of it, the greater grew his weariness and disgust for writing.

In the middle of November Kestner sent him some astounding news. The young Jerusalem, the handsome melancholy youth in blue jacket and yellow vest, who had so often walked abroad in the moonlight and whom they laughingly called ‘the Lover,’ had just killed himself with a pistol-shot.

‘Unhappy Jerusalem!’ answered Goethe. ‘The news is a terrible shock. . . . Those who experience nothing because they worship the idol of vanity and the bauble of pleasure — they are guilty of this misfortune and the misfortunes of us all. The Devil damn them, dear friends! The poor chap. . . . When I came back from our walk and met him in the moonlight, I said, “He is in love,” and Lotte will remember that I laughed. ... I had hardly ever spoken to him. . . . When I left I had one of his books. Now I shall treasure it, with his memory, as long as I live.’

The adventures of others always stirred Goethe when they completed the possible but unachieved fragments of his own experience. He pursued the story of Jerusalem with an almost morbid eagerness. He saw that if he himself had been only a little different, if a few elements had been lacking in the fabric of his own intelligence, he too would have tended toward the same despair. But he was specially interested in the tale because his first thought, when he had heard it, had been: ' I have got my ending.’ Yes, the hero of his idyll could and should kill himself. Death, and death alone, held the element of tragic grandeur that had been lacking in his own adventure.

He begged Kestner for a full account of all he could learn of the case, and Kestner, who was not without talent, sent it to him.

II

Between his Wetzlar diary and the story of Jerusalem’s death Goethe had certainly collected the beginning and the end of a masterpiece. The two tales were true; they would be tragic if only they could be convincingly set down. The book would breathe the deepest and intensest passion. At last he could write from experience. He was confident. He loved his subject. And yet, still busy with his dreams, he could not set himself to work.

In order to write, he had always needed, in some quick and lightning glance, scorning details, to survey the whole. This time that flash was lacking. His love affair with Lotte and the death of his friend would do, but the two episodes did not fit, for they were taken from different series in the game of destiny. The characters of the protagonists in the diary could not justify so dramatic an end. Kestner’s equable good-nature, Lotte’s gayety and wholesome simplicity, and Goethe’s own invulnerable spirits and persistence were traits which made the hero’s suicide impossible. In vain he tried to picture the meetings of Frau Herd with Jerusalem, or his last meditations. He would have to recast his characters and forge another chain of events. But events are strangely linked. Touch one and the others fall apart. It seems that truth must after all be one, for as soon as you displace it, however slightly, however carefully, you open a whole Pandora’s box of troublesome alternatives.

Again calm eluded him. A vast brood of purposes and plans romped in his weary brain. As soon as he caught glimpses of beautiful and misty figures, they would vanish. Like a pregnant woman obsessed by her womb, he could find no attitude that brought repose.

To learn the details of the drama he went back to Wetzlar. There was the house where the young man had killed himself—his pistols, his chair, and his bed. He spent several hours with Charlotte. The engaged couple seemed perfectly happy. Even the memory of their former evenings seemed missing from their calm and ordered life. Goethe felt unhappy and alone. His love revived. Sitting on the sofa in the Teutonic Headquarters, and gazing at Lotte, who was so placid and fresh, he said to himself, ‘Jerusalem was right. And I, too, might —’ But Goethe remained Goethe, and returned to Frankfort master of himself.

Home seemed drearier than ever. Kestner’s wedding was drawing near. At night, in his lonely room, ‘upon his virgin couch,’ Goethe pictured Charlotte in the bridal chamber, her gown striped with blue, her hair braided for the night — ravishing, chaste. Desire and jealousy cruelly kept him awake. If he is to live, a man must progress toward some goal. But what hope was left to him? He saw himself doomed to the life of a lawyer or petty official in a town whose stupid mediocrities would always be hostile to his dreams. His brain, which he knew could have created, would fritter itself away in foolish testimony and dispute. ‘I shall live on here like a giant chained by dwarfs,’ he thought, and if he was not modest, at least he was not wrong. It was as if he were to be buried alive. One after the other, all the comrades of his youth would go. His sister Cornelia was about to be married. His friend Merck was leaving for Berlin. Soon Charlotte and her husband in their turn would quit Wetzlar, ‘while I remain,’ he wrote the Kestners. ‘If I do not marry or hang myself, conclude that I love life.’ And a little later: ‘I wander in deserts where no water is.’

He came to think that a frequent cause of suicide must be the hunger of a humdrum life to astonish itself, almost to amuse itself, by some act that would break the monotonous routine. ‘The love of living,’ he thought, ‘depends on our interest in the regular round of day and night and the seasons, and on the pleasure their revolutions bring us. When that interest ceases, nothing is left but a weary burden. An Englishman hanged himself to escape dressing and undressing every day. I once heard a gardener groan in his boredom, “Must I always watch these dull clouds float from west to east?” — a symptom of that disgust which is commoner among thoughtful people than we know. . . . Think it over impartially: what have I to get from life? Another Frederica to desert? Another Lotte who will forget me? A stupid life as a lawyer in Frankfort? . . . I swear it would be natural, even praiseworthy, to escape delights like those.

‘Yet, if we reflect on the methods of suicide, we see it is so repugnant to the nature of man that to cut himself off from the living he must have recourse to tricks. With firearms we kill ourselves indirectly. When Ajax falls on his sword, it is the weight of his body which does him that last service. The only real suicide is that of the Emperor Otto, who plunged a dagger in his own breast.’

For several evenings as he went to bed he laid a dagger beside him. Before blowing out the light he tried plunging the point in his breast. But he could not even make a scratch. The flesh betrayed the spirit. ‘After all,’ he thought, ‘it is because I wish to live.’

And when he questioned himself honestly, when he tried to brush aside the ready-made phrases and confusing prejudices which obscure the real thought, when he sought the reasons why, in spite of all, he wished to live, he found first the ever-renewed pleasure in the splendid spectacle which is the world, then the sweet and solemn prospect of the birth of a new love, and finally the vaguer but eager impulse to watch over the still mysterious masterpiece growing within him — growing, he felt, cruelly slowly. ‘Do not be dismayed,’ he wrote his friends in Wetzlar. ‘ I am almost as happy as you two who love each other; I am hopeful as a real lover.’

Just before Charlotte’s marriage he begged, the privilege of buying the ring himself. He had a strange passion for irritating his wound. Since he was to depict his woes, he should have them harrowing. Goethe, posing for himself, struck his best attitude.

On the morning of the wedding, Kestner wrote him an affectionate letter. Goethe had asked for the bridal nosegay. They sent it to him, and he stuck it in his hat for his Sunday walk. On Good Friday, he decided, he would take down Lotte’s portrait, dig a grave in the garden, and solemnly bury it. But when the day came that ceremony seemed a little ridiculous, so he gave it up. The slumbers over which the black and white silhouette presided were peaceful from that time on. The Kestners had set out for Hanover. Goethe could not imagine their life in that new world, for he knew nothing about it. His sorrow, like his love, needed visible idols if it were to last. Had he not already lost the moment for preserving emotions so fragile?

III

He had kept up a sentimental correspondence with that delightful Maximiliane de la Roche whose black eyes had been such a consolation for Wetzlar. One day he learned that she was marrying a wholesale grocer of Frankfort, Peter Anton Brentano, fifteen years older than she, a widower with five children. ‘Fine! Very fine!' wrote Goethe to Kestner. ‘Dear Max de la Roche is marrying a distinguished tradesman!’ Doubtless the skeptical Herr de la Roche had preferred to the Romance of Youth a large fortune with a numerous family.

Goethe was really sorry for poor Max, who was to exchange one of the sweetest nooks in the world for a gloomy mansion at Frankfort, and her mother’s cultivated circle for a society of newly rich merchants. None the less he looked forward to being near so amiable a person.

As soon as he heard of her arrival, he flew to her, used every weapon to win over the widower’s five children, and after the first quarter of an hour succeeded, of course, in making himself indispensable. When Goethe tried to please, no one could resist him. Brentano himself was flattered by the visits of a Bürgermeister’s grandson who was said to be nobody’s fool, so he displayed his most gracious welcome.

Goethe, picking up his passion where he had left it, rushed into an ardent devotion with his usual energy. To be with Max, to console her for ‘her husband’s manners and the smell of cheese,’ to distract her by walks and readings, became the only aim of his life. Work was abandoned again. And why should he write? What occupation is there worth the fugitive smile, the sweet content and gratitude, one can bring to a beautiful face?

Max was unhappy among the jars of oil and the tubs of herring. She did not like Frankfort. She tried to love her husband, but it was not an easy task. Goethe became her confidant.

Being less practical than Charlotte Buff, she did not set him to peeling vegetables or to picking fruit, but she spent hours with him over cello and piano duets and the latest French novels.

They often went skating together. Goethe borrowed his mother’s redvelvet mantle and threw it over his shoulder like a cape. He skated perfectly. Gliding with sovereign grace, while the wind behind him bellied out his royal train, he looked like a young god. So, at least, thought pretty Frau Brentano, for whom the spectacle was meant, and the Frau Geheimrätin, his mother.

‘Everything is well with me,’ he wrote. ‘The last three weeks have been continuous delight, and now we are contented and happy as can be. I say we, for since the middle of January I have never been alone. The destiny I cursed so often has now earned the politer terms of benevolence and kindness, for this is my first recompense for the loss of my sister. Max is still the same angel whose simplicity and charm captivate us all, and my devotion to her is the joy of my life.’

How happy it would all have been had Brentano not been jealous! At the beginning he had found the little fellow convenient for escorting his wife, for he was occupied by his business, where no one could take his place. Several times he had chosen Goethe to judge between them; on certain points, surely, the sensible sex would all agree. Unfortunately Goethe was a traitor to it, because he was an artist. As the comic poets have noted, there is always a delightful comradeship between a husband and another man of sense, — that is, one who agrees with him, — but a lover who undermines the husband’s authority is justly odious.

Brentano noticed that his wife did not get used to Frankfort, criticized the habits of his old and respectable family, and was always talking of music, books, and other unhealthy subjects. He concluded, not without reason, that some evil genius was whispering counsel subversive to the conjugal hierarchy, and that this foe was young Goethe.

As soon as he made these momentous discoveries, he began to treat Goethe with a coldness so insulting as to make his situation in the house most difficult. If he answered haughtily, as he should, he could never come back; if he meekly accepted the affronts, they would doubtless grow more frequent. Soon Max herself, worn out by quarrels which spoiled all her pleasure, begged him to be careful and to come less often. ‘For the sake of my peace,’ she told him, ‘this cannot — no, cannot — go on.’

He began to pace about the room, repeating between his teeth, ‘No, it cannot go on.’ Max, seeing how violent he had become, tried to calm him. ‘I beg you,’ she said, ‘control yourself. Think of the happiness you will earn by your wit, your knowledge, your talents; and be a man. Why me, Goethe, who belong to another — just why must it be me?’

He went home vowing never to return, but he was miserable. In his excitement he talked aloud to himself. So on the path to his happiness he was always to encounter the petty laws of society. Only in the constant and loving company of a woman could he find calm and joy and self-forgetfulness. Yet to earn that happiness legally he must either give up his own freedom or condemn his chosen one to ‘misery and guilt.’ The conflict between the aims of the individual and the rules of the State had never seemed so unjust. . . . Charlotte? Charlotte at least loved Kestner. But Max could not, did not even pretend to love her grocer. Yet he, Goethe, must yield. ‘Your knowledge and talents will make you happy! ‘ What mockery! Knowledge is dead, but the tree of life is green. Knowledge, too, is limited by human frailty. What do the wisest know? Nothing of the real essence of things. What is man, who lacks strength when most he needs it? Laughter or tears, is he not always confined, always brought back to the sorry spectacle of his smallness at the very moment he hopes to soar to the Infinite?

Then all at once, he did not know how, the crisis passed, and he was tranquil again, and master of himself. He looked down upon his own distress as if it had been another’s. ‘Why yes,’ he whispered, ‘that is how Jerusalem must have felt. And doubtless it was after such a scene as this that he . . .’

And suddenly, with a lucid flash, he saw how his unhappy episode could fit in with the death of Jerusalem. Doubtless it was less tragic, — in fact, it was not tragic at all, — and he knew that it was ended, but none the less it showed him the course and current of sensations he had never known. Max and her husband, Charlotte and Kestner, Goethe and Jerusalem, seemed to melt, to mingle and dissolve, while their component atoms, plunging incredibly fast through the vast spaces of the mind, combined in just and natural measures. It was all beautiful and delicious, and Goethe, at last, was perfectly happy.

Thus were born three new heroes: Werther, Charlotte, and Albert. Werther was a Goethe who was not an artist. Albert was a pettier Kestner, complicated with Brentano’s jealousy and Goethe’s own intellect. Charlotte was a Lotte who had been brought up by Frau de la Roche, to read Rousseau and Klopstock.

The next day he locked himself in to work, and in four weeks the book was written.

IV

When Goethe had finished Die Leiden des jungen Werthers he felt as joyful and free as if he had just been to confession. Reverie and remorse, doubt and desire, had each found its fit and lasting place. The Cathedral was built. Already the last work-thoughts were leaving their labors. In the close, which was silent at last, the architect awaited the first of the faithful. His past was no longer within him, but before him. He saw that it was good, as he gazed on it with languid triumph and dreamed of the new life he could begin.

The book would not be put on sale till the time of the Leipzig Fair, but the author must first, at least, send it to Charlotte. He often tried to picture her reading it. Perhaps she would begin Werther at night, in her bed, when her swelling breasts would lift the counterpane; perhaps sitting in a chair across from Kestner, who, a little jealous, would study her expression unobserved. For the first time she would know what Goethe’s love had been. Doubtless she would blush when she reached the passion of the end — those furious kisses which she had never got from him and which now, by means of an art almost magical, he could imprint upon her lips. . . . And dear Max Brentano? She too would doubtless ponder long.

As soon as the first copies came from the printer, he made a package of two, one for Charlotte and one for Kestner. ‘Lotte,’ he wrote, ‘when you read this little book you can guess how dear it is to me; this copy is as precious as if it were the only one in the world. It is for you, Lotte. I have kissed it a hundred times; I have scaled it that no one but you may touch it. Ah, Lotte! . . . I hope that you and Kestner read it separately, and that each of you sends me a line. Lotte, Lotte, farewell.’

Kestner and his wife smiled and proceeded to obey. Each took one of the little volumes and opened it with a loving eagerness.

Charlotte was a little uneasy. She knew Goethe’s fiery nature and dislike of control, whether by himself or by the useful laws of society. In real life his fear of committing himself, of becoming involved, had usually pent in the brimstone torrent before it was too late. But what would Goethe be untrammeled?

With the very first pages she foresaw that the test would be hard for her husband. The scene at the dance, so simple in the event, had here somehow assumed a tone of passionate sensuality: ‘To hold in my arms that most charming of beings! To fly with her like the storm! To see everything fade and vanish about me! To feel! . . . I swore then that the woman I loved should waltz only with me, at the risk of my life! You understand.’

Charlotte paused thoughtfully. Candidly, she had known from the first that Goethe loved her in that way. The idea had glided into the depths of her consciousness, but she had firmly locked it there, and long ago had succeeded in forgetting its indiscreet and restless presence. Yet the memory was there, for, as she read, Charlotte suffered a sweet, a troublous reminiscence.

She reached the passage: ‘Ah, what flames course through my veins when by chance my finger meets hers, or our feet touch beneath the table. I fly as if from fire, but a secret impulse draws me back. Dizziness lays hold on me, and trouble is in my soul. Ah, her innocence and purity do not let her guess how the least touch of intimacy tortures me! When, as she speaks, she lays her hand on mine . . .’ Charlotte set down the book and thought for a while. Had she been wholly innocent? Had she not always, in moments like that, fathomed the trouble of Goethe? Had it not stirred her deliciously? Even now did not an illogical delight steal over her as she read? She rebuked her coquetry. She looked across at her husband, who skimmed the pages of the little book with a dark and worried gaze.

After a short time he too glanced up, and asked what she thought. He seemed stiff and angry. ‘It is unworthy,’ he said impressively. ‘Goethe draws characters who at first are like us; then somehow he transforms them to falseness and fancy. Who is this sentimental Lotte forever weeping over Werther’s hand? Have you ever gazed at the heavens and exclaimed, “O Klopstock!” Worst of all, to a young man you had just met? . . . It is hard to imagine you in the rôle. Ah, I see now that Goethe never understood your charm. Only I, Charlotte, only I. . . . What is lovable in you is that gay and natural dignity which forbids every thought of evil. . . . But he — why, he has spoiled even his own portrait! The real Goethe behaved far better than Werther. During those four months there was something noble and generous in our friendship, but he could not express it. . . . And as for me, whom he makes so insensitive; me, whose heart “does not beat in sympathy to a noble book” — am I really so cold? Ah! I am sure that if I had had to lose you, Lotte, it is I who should have been Werther.’

At that the couple approached each other. A scene of conjugal tenderness ensued which perhaps was hardly what the author would have wished. It was side by side, holding one another’s hands, that they finished the novel together. Kestner, at least, ended the reading in a burst of anger. To disguise their simple and straightforward story as a tragic adventure struck him as nothing short of monstrous. Yes, this hybrid of Goethe and Jerusalem was some double-headed monster. Doubtless, too, Kestner saw that the last meeting of Werther and his beloved was taken whole from the letter he had written Goethe about Jerusalem’s death. But when he recognized a heroine named Lotte, who had begun with the character of his Lotte, he suffered as if some sottish painter had chosen the face and body of his wife for the subject of an obscene picture.

Charlotte, to tell the truth, was more affected than angry, but she could understand her husband’s feelings and agreed with him for the sake of calm. Besides, she shared his fear. What would the neighbors say? All their friends, in Wetzlar and even in Hanover, could not fail to recognize them. How could they explain which parts of the book were copied from them and which were not? How could they escape a gossip which would be malicious, but natural after all? Had they been clearheaded they would have foreseen that the vast ocean of human indifference and forgetfulness would swallow in half a year the adventure that seemed so momentous. But Wisdom and Sorrow are seldom bedfellows. Their happy and secluded life seemed forever spoiled by the indiscretion of their friend.

V

The next day Kestner wrote Goethe a severe and dissatisfied letter: —

It is true that into each character you have woven something alien to him, and that you have joined several in one. That is very good. But, if you had heeded your heart in that weaving and mixing, the originals whose traits you have borrowed would not have been prostituted as they are. You wished to copy nature to make your picture real, but you brought together so many contradictions that you have missed your aim. . . . The true Lotte would be most unhappy if she resembled yours. . . . And Lotte’s husband, whom you called your friend — and God knows he was — feels as she does.

What a wretched creature your Albert is! . . . If he had to be mediocre, must you have made such a sot in order to triumph over him yourself and cry, ‘What a fine fellow I am! ‘

For several days Goethe had been impatiently waiting for the verdict of Kestner and Lotte. He hoped for two long and enthusiastic letters, for lists of the passages that had specially moved them, for quotations perhaps, perhaps for the recalling of episodes he had forgotten or neglected. Happily and eagerly he broke the seal, only to be stupefied by that acid condemnation. ‘What?’ he thought. ‘Is it possible that an intelligent man can understand so little what a book should be? Why does he wish Werther to be Goethe? On the contrary, it was necessary to kill Werther before creating Goethe. I may have had some traits of Werther, but I was saved in the crisis by that quality we call decision. Omit Goethe’s will and you have Werther left. Omit imagination and you have Albert. Why does he say my Albert is “wretched” ? Why should I have made Albert unworthy? The beauty of my subject is that Werther and Albert, though they are rivals, are equal. Besides, why does Kestner assume that he is Albert? Does he think I cannot find a reasonable man within myself? ‘

The more he reflected, the more he reread Kestner’s letters, the less he understood and the more his bewilderment grew. Yet he hated to think he had hurt his friends. For a long time he sought a way to appease them. But what could he do? Hold back his novel? He had not the courage: —

My dear displeased friends: I must write you at once to ease my heart. The deed is done, the book is out, so forgive me if you can. Do not write me till events have proved how exaggerated your fears are, and until you are able to see the mixture of fact and fiction that the book contains. . . . And now, my dearest friends, when you feel your anger mount, remember, only remember, that your old Goethe is devoted to you forever and ever and more than ever.

As they had expected, when the book was published the Kestners were asked questions and given sympathy. Lotte’s brother, Hans Buff, sent them the verdict of the Teutonic Headquarters. There, at least, everyone knew Goethe, and the sorrows of the young Werther had met with brilliant success as a farce. ‘By the way,’ wrote Hans, ‘have you read Werther? There is a curious spectacle here. There are only two copies in town and, as everyone is anxious to read them, everyone steals as best he can. Last evening Papa, Caroline, Lele, Wilhelm, and I read together from a single copy. We tore off the binding; each section went through five pairs of hands. . . . Poor Werther! We laughed heartily as we read it. Did he laugh too when he wrote it?’

Kestner had to swear to the importunate friends who sent their sympathy that his household was exemplary, that his wife had always loved him, that Goethe had never dreamed of suicide, and that a novel was a novel. Finally Charlotte persuaded him to write Goethe a letter of absolution.

But a pardon was nothing. The young author was intoxicated. All Germany was shedding tears for Werther’s fate. The young men wore his blue jacket, his yellow waistcoat, and his brown-topped boots. The girls copied Charlotte’s gowns, especially the pinkberibboned one of her first meeting with her friend. In every garden the sensitive built little antique monuments to Werther’s memory. Climbing plants twined round Wertherian urns. Songs and poems were written about him. Even the French, who were so apt to be scornful, hailed this disciple of Rousseau. Since La nouvelle Héloïse no work of the intellect had moved Europe to such an extent.

Goethe answered in a tone which was hardly repentant: —

O ye of little faith! If you could feel the thousandth part of what Werther means to thousands of hearts, you would not even think of the sacrifice you have made to him.

. . . To save my life, I would not suppress Werther. Believe me, Kestner, believe me, your doubts and dreads will fade like phantoms of the night. If you are generous, and do not torment me, I will send you letters, tears and sighs for Werther, and, if you have confidence, trust that all will turn out well and that gossip is meaningless. Lotte, farewell; Kestner, love me and trouble me no more.

After this his correspondence with the Kestners became most infrequent.

Embalmed, encased forever in his periods, they had lost most of their reality for him. Once a year, for a long time, he wrote them letters which began ‘My dear children’ and asked for news of an ever-growing family.

In 1816, Frau Sekretärin Kestner, a widow fifty-nine years old, ugly but pleasant and cheerful, paid a visit to His Excellency Minister of State von Goethe at Weimar. She hoped that the great man could be of service to her sons, August and Theodore, but especially to Theodore, who was going to devote himself to science.

She found an old man, polite but bored, in whose features she sought in vain the face of the young madman of Wetzlar, whom ‘one was forced to love.’ The conversation was halting. Goethe, not knowing what to say, showed her his engravings and dried plants. They read in each other’s eyes surprise and disillusion. Finally the Minister offered the old lady his own box at the theatre, but begged her to excuse him for being unable to escort her. As she went out, she thought: ‘If I had happened to meet him without knowing his name, he would have made no impression on me.’

The truth was that Doctor Goethe had died long ago; Fräulein Lotte Buff, who had been so fond of dancing and moonlight walks, was dead too. Of all the characters in that story only one was still alive, and he was the sorrowful Werther.