Goethe, Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers(1774): The Discovery of the Sentimental Self
Wilhelm Amberg, Vorlesung aus Goethes Werther (Young Girls Reading Goethe's Werther), 1870
INTRODUCTION
I have referred previously to various elements characteristic of the Romantic work of art, as well as of the “romantic personality” or “romantic spirit” that it arguably reflects, in a search for common denominators which might help us arrive at a more general definition of Romanticism. I suggested that a “psychology” of Romanticism would be both a cause of the work of art and of the response it evokes in the individual consciousness. In either case, the search hangs on the existence of an individualized “psyche,” a “self,” that can feel, remember, hope and evoke. In order for Romanticism to be born, a “self” had to be discovered first, in consciousness, in art and literature, in philosophy, and in the consciousness of that “self” as reflected in social interaction.
Fuseli. Study for Self, 1780-90, Victoria and Albert Museum
In an early work of Goethe, a short book entitled The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, we come upon, arguably, the initial discovery of that “self” that would later expand into the full-blown spirit of Romanticism. Why do I say 'discovery?' After all, the sentimental ego, - the consciousness of sentiment that expresses itself in a voice that always says “I” - had appeared before in the eighteenth century, - in the Confessions of Rousseau, for example. But in the case of Werther, the discovery was that of its public, for the book was disseminated among an unprecedentedly large and new readership, eager for the printed word and scattered throughout Europe and America in numbers that had not been registered before. The effect of this short novel was such thatit was followed by an epidemic of copy-cat suicides. It was a success because it reflected an intellectual fashion of the times, prevalent among readers of books. Napoleon carried the book with him on campaign, in his knapsack.
The second sentence of the first paragraph of this book asks“What is the heart of man?” This is a novel inquiry, and one which Werther will answer by telling us what is in his own heart. It is a question that had never been asked that way before. The reader is asked to explore the “heart” of a man, his emotions, sentiments, passions, and the entire panoply of feeling that constitutes the guide to his actions and that leads eventually to his premature and senseless death.
The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary novel. It is actually the internal dialogue of Goethe with himself arising from an incident in his life that he now looks back upon and unfolds in dozens of letters which no one ever answers, nor is meant to answer. Goethe explores the feelings, the sorrows, of a fictional character, Werther, that was once himself. It could, according to Goethe’s modern biographer, Nicholas Boyle, have been equally well translated as ‘the passion and death of young Werther,’ for, Boyle argues, it is a representation of Goethe’s own symbolic “Christ-figure” as lived and experienced in his own self, short of the final desperate act of suicide. Cf.Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and The Age, vol. 1, (Oxford, 1992)
The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary novel. It is actually the internal dialogue of Goethe with himself arising from an incident in his life that he now looks back upon and unfolds in dozens of letters which no one ever answers, nor is meant to answer. Goethe explores the feelings, the sorrows, of a fictional character, Werther, that was once himself. It could, according to Goethe’s modern biographer, Nicholas Boyle, have been equally well translated as ‘the passion and death of young Werther,’ for, Boyle argues, it is a representation of Goethe’s own symbolic “Christ-figure” as lived and experienced in his own self, short of the final desperate act of suicide. Cf.Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and The Age, vol. 1, (Oxford, 1992)
The young Goethe
Werther believes that he commits suicide for love. Frustrated in his passion for Charlotte(Lotte), he sacrifices his life for his love, or at least that is what he thinks he's doing. I will describe in further detail below how the events inthe novel are drawn form Goethe’s own experiences as a law clerk at the Reichskammergericht, the Imperial Courts of Law, in Wetzlar, during the years 1772-73,and how it is a faithful and detailed description of both the world of the town and the surrounding countryside of his own day, as well as of the cult of sentimentality (Empfindsamkeit) prevalent then among Germany’s incipient bourgeoisie. Goethe articulated the psychology of the reading public, the urban middle class, of the then quite fractured German polity. In this book, he combined the social and cultural phenomenon of his time, Germany in the 1770’s,with a preoccupation with sentiment and character, and he did so, as Nicholas Boyle points out, with “a voice that said “I” of internal longing and division.” I will attempt to explain how Sentimentalism, an amalgam of the Leibnizian idea of the individual soul, the “window-less” Monad, with the character ideal of the Pietists, so intellectually fashionable among the Germans of the1770’s, is reflected in Goethe's book, and how, within this mix, German, and indeed European, Romanticism was born.
Caspar David Friedrich, Mountain landscape with rainbow (Gebirglandschaft mit den Regenbogen),1810, Essen
GOETHE IN LEIPZIG
Leipzig in the Eighteenth Century
The idea of a book for the German reading public arose despite Goethe's experiences as a student in Leipzig. When Goethe arrived in Leipzig in 1765, the city had a reputation for enlightenment, vigorous trade,studious endeavor and a liberality in its way of life that contrasted with that of Dresden, the capital of Saxony and residence of the Saxon Prince-Electors. But the Court influenced the city of Leipzig by its absence, though its familiar Baroque splendor in nearby Dresden made itself felt quite directly. It came alive for Goethe in the person of a friend he made there as he began his studies at the University. Ernst Wolfgang Behrisch(1738-1809), was Goethe’s only friend and constant companion during the last two years of Goethe’s University studies in Leipzig, from 1766 to 1768. He was the Tutor of Count Lindenau, the son of the Chief Equerry of the Court in Dresden, and held to the courtly conventions and exquisite style of an aristocratic taste for etiquette, fashion, art and literature, in contrast to Goethe’s own bourgeois Frankfurt background.
The slightly older Behrisch was a decisive influence on Goethe, causing him to revise some of his artistic and literary preconceptions.The courtier Behrisch had nothing but contempt for the printed word, for its readers, and for the world of printing and publishing, and he encouraged Goethe to put down his literary work in handwritten calligraphy, so that its distribution would be limited to the select few, rather than be made public in print for the benefit of the many.
Count Lindenau was the owner of the Hotel Auerbach, and its now famous Cellar in the basement, and these premises became one of Goethe’s favorite haunts when he joined Behrisch in disdainful isolation from the society of students and plebeians. Nicholas Boyle, has this to say about the friendship:
“In Leipzig, and in the person of Behrisch, Goethe firs experienced the seductions of a courtly culture that was the personal affair of a few select individuals, elevated above the anonymous mass of the public – and the public, as Leipzig showed with especial clarity, was something created by ugly mechanical devices such as printing-presses, which, so Behrisch claimed,deformed their operators, and by the lowly workings of trade.” [Boyle, op.cit.,Oxford, 1992, p. 68]
Leipzig in the 1770's
Goethe would not take the advise of Behrisch for very long. The Sorrows of Young Werther is addressed to the anonymous bourgeois reading public of printed books. A lot would happen before Goethe would chose this path for his literary expression,but the weight of the alternative made his eventual decision more significant,as he chose a deliberately “democratic” outlet for his own self-revelation. The influence of Behrisch, and its disposition toward restricting his output for the benefit of a select, hence ‘aristocratic,’ audience remained with him, however. The division of loyalties would re-emerge again for him at the court in Weimar. The Tiefurt Journal (1781-1784), originated by the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia, and to which Goethe contributed for a while, was a hand-written collection of writings that was meant for the eyes of only eleven individuals at the court.
GOETHE IN STRASBOURG
Goethe returned home from Leipzig in 1768, very ill. During his recovery he became acquainted with Pietism, of which more below, through the influential personality of Susanna von Klettenberg, a relative of his. When he recovered, although already thinking seriously about dedicating his life to literature, he submitted to his father's wish that he finish his law career by obtaining his license, and so he proceeded to matriculate at the University of Strasbourg for that purpose.
Two events occur during Goethe's life in Strasbourg that bear on the origins of Werther. One is his love for Friederike Brion; the other, his seminal meeting with Herder. The affair with Brion, whom he betrayed, taught him the feeling of guilt. His deferential friendship with Johann Gottfried Herder expanded his literary horizons, taught him Ossian, Shakespeare and the value of folkloric poetry (Volkspoesie). Most relevant with regards to Werther, Goethe was exposed for the first time to the bourgeois literature of the English, the novels of Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, and Jonathan Swift. Their irony alerted him to the possibility of incorporating his own emotions, feelings and experiences into a work of literature, just as these authors had written their own ironic sensibility into their works and expressed thereby an 'attitude' that colored every detail of the life and experience to which their works referred.
Friederike Brion in Alsatian costume
GOETHE IN FRANKFURT
Goethe returned to Frankfurt to live in the home of his parents and practice law in the city with Georg Schlosser, his future brother in law. Schlosser was an experienced lawyer who was also involved in social issues and concerned with the education of the poor, about which he published a treatise. He introduced Goethe to Johann Heinrich Merck, the Military Paymaster for the Landgraf of Darmstadt, a man who recognized Goethe's talent and fostered it, while guiding him in the world of affairs. Merck and Schlosser would recruit Goethe as an editor for their journal of reviews, the Frankfurter Gelehrter Anzeiger (Frankfurt Literary Advertiser), providing Goethe with an opportunity to expand his literary career during the year 1772.
Johann Heinrich Merck (1741-1791)
Through Merck, Goethe became acquainted with a circle of authors devoted to a 'sentimentalist' approach to literary creativity whose center of gravity was the city of Darmstadt. Their sources were British, but translated to a typically German emphasis on personal interiority. Sentiment(Empfindsamen) informed both their writing and the spirit of their interactions with each other. For them, God, soul and immortality were proved by the indisputable existence of feelings. Among these authors were Cristoph Martin Wieland,the future editor of Der Teutsche Merkur in Weimar, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Sophie von La Roche, Caroline Flachsland, Herder's fiance, and Franz Michael Leuchsenring, tutor of the Crown Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, who, as the apostle of sentiment, was their guiding light. What brought these various individuals together was their cult of sensibility which the rising generation in Germany had learned from Rousseau, and particularly from the English novelists, Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne, or from the poetry of Thomas Gray. They gave themselves the name of“Gemeinschaft der Heiligen” (Society of Saints). Werther would be the critical manifesto of this cult of sensibility.
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), statue at the Herderkirche in Weimar
However, Goethe persisted in successfully straddling the worlds of Sentimentalism, of Herder's thought, as well as the more mundane world of the Frankfurt Advertiser. The latter was a practical and worldly publication that hoped to say much more about the political condition of Germany than the Sentimentalists would ever have considered. The unstated goal of the Advertiser was to create an all-German readership, a political nation, and its interest in language, both for its own sake and for its reflection on German history and thought, derived from, or at least mirrored, the work and interests of Herder. Merck himself proposed to actively influence Goethe in the direction of documentary realism.“Your endeavor, your unswerving aim,” he wrote to Goethe, “is to give poetic form to the real. Others seek to realize the so-called poetic, the imaginative,and the result is nothing but stupid nonsense.”
GOETHE IN WETZLAR
Despite his increasingly active literary career, and the enthusiasm with which he pursued it, Goethe once again submitted to his father's wishes when he chose to take up lodgings at Wetzlar in order to acquire further experience in the practice of the law as a matriculated probationer (Praktikant) before the Imperial Cameral Court(Reichskammergericht), which was, since 1693, located in that town. He was to be in Wetzlar from mid-May, 1772 to the Fall of that year, and his experiences there became the plot of Werther.
The former hall of the Reichskammergericht in Wetzlar
Goethe spent more time reading Homer and Pindar than attending to his legal practice. He may have read Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse at this time as well. In early summer, he met Charlotte Buff at a dance in the nearby town of Garbenheim. She was the daughter of a functionary of the Teutonic Order in the village, a widower, and Charlotte was his oldest child. Goethe would visit her at their home in Garbenheim, surrounded by the younger children she supervised. He was already acquainted with Charlotte's betrothed, Johann Christian Kestner, a member of the Hannover Legation settled in Wetzlar, and they had a cordial relationship. Goethe soon fell passionately in love with Charlotte. For a time,the three of them shared some time and conversation together, but by mid-August, tension had developed between them and Goethe had to leave. He corresponded with Merck on the matter, and dramatized the relationship in his mind and in his parting messages to both Kestner and Charlotte.
Portrait of Charlotte Buff
An acquaintance of Goethe's student days in Leipzig, the shy and withdrawn Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, was also a student at the Imperial Court in Wetzlar. On October 30, 1772, Jerusalem borrowed Kestner's hunting-pistols and shot himself at his home. A copy of Lessing's play Emilia Galotti was found next to his body. There were rumors that he had been in love with the wife of a friend. The story reached Goethe during a visit to Wetzlar. He was deeply shocked. He saw the similarities between his own situation and Jerusalem's, and attributed it to similar causes: solitude, frustration and disappointed love. Kestner wrote a detailed report of the incident, which he made available to Goethe and upon which Goethe then relied when he began to write Werther about a year after the event.
GOETHE'S RETURN TO FRANKFURT: (1773-1774): The Writing of the Novel
Upon his return to Frankfurt, Goethe gravitated to the circle of his Sentimentalist friends in order to assuage his deep disappointment and his pain. The mood was conducive to the sentimentalism of the “saints” of Darmstadt, since the passion he felt was, at bottom, frustrated desire, and that kind of indulgence in personal sorrows was the very purpose of this cult. One of the more prominent“saints” would later write in his Journal that “[i]f another and later species comes to reconstruct the human being from the evidence of our sentimental writings they will conclude it to have been a heart with testicles.” (cited in Boyle, op. cit, at p. 139). Sexual repression softened into delicate emotion and caused sweet tears to overflow.
Andrea Appiani, Two Children of the Artist, 1808
Nevertheless, a distance was growing intellectually between Goethe and his sentimentalist friends. The effort throughout the year1773 to publish his play Götz von Berlichingen, a heroic drama about an Imperial knight of the sixteenth century, both poet and mercenary, whose reputation could be used as an appeal for a unity of German historical and literary consciousness,had involved Goethe in a decidedly Herderian intellectual direction. As well, he tired of the aristocratic religiosity of the Sentimentalists. As author and thinker, he wrote to Lavater, he had embarked on a life that sought to replace the 'word of God' by the 'word of men.' With his work at the Frankfurt Advertiser and his published drama on Götz, Goethe was laying the foundations of what later came to be known as the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement in Germany, a literary programme that would be the precursor of Romanticism. But alone among those favoring this trend, Goethe's work preserved the cult of sentiment.
Götz von Berlichingen
The account of Jerusalem's death had led to a strong desire in Goethe to articulate his experience in Wetzlar in some creative literary form, and in the course of 1773 he would address himself to the task. But it was not until the beginning of 1774 that a new experience would cause both his sentiments and his wish to document a real personal experience to crystallize into the little book that would make him famous throughout Europe.
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 during the winter of 1773-74. He fell in love with the daughter of his friend Sophie von La Roche, Maximiliane, whom he had met when she was sixteen and still unattached, in the autumn of 1772. Since then he had kept up a sentimental correspondence with Sophie in which he made occasional references to his continued interest in her daughter. “Your Maxe,” he wrote in August 1773, in typical sentimentalist fashion, “I cannot do without so long as I live, and I shall always venture to love her.” He was twenty-four at the time.
Portrait of Maximiliane von La Roche
However, on January 9th, 1774, Maximiliane was married to Peter Brentano, a wealthy dealer in herrings, oil, and cheese, a widower with five children, with whom she settled in Frankfurt. 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 he soon had a confrontation with Goethe which resulted in Goethe's expulsion from the house. The experience was a haunting repetition, albeit somewhat more farcical,of his sad parting from Lotte Buff. During the winter he had asked Merck to return the letters he had written to him from Wetzlar. Early in February of 1774, he resumed his work on the novel, and, writing “almost in a state of somnambulism,” finished it within a few weeks, by April, 1774.
Title page of the 1774 edition of Werther
STRUCTURE OF THE NOVEL
[All quotations from the novel are from the Dover edition of2002, translated by Thomas Carlyle and R.D. Boylan, and edited by Nathan Haskell Dole.]
The novel is structured in the form of letters written by Werther to his friend Wilhelm. With the exception of a few letters he writes to Lotte and her fiancee, Albert, or in some instances to both, and a few that seem to have no correspondent at all, the rest are all written to this one man,who appears to be a serious man, sober and centered in comparison to Werther,and a good and reliable friend, concerned over Werther's welfare and willing to take instructions from him, such as to relay messages to Werther's mother. But there are no responses from Wilhelm, nor is Wilhelm the one who discloses these letters to us, but rather a mysterious“Editor” whose name we shall never know and who is not Wilhelm nor any other known character in the novel. The Editor knows everything about Werther (“I have felt it my duty to collect accurate information from the mouths of persons well acquainted with [Werther's] history”), and both introduces the letters,with a short and ominous Preface, and concludes the story with a lengthy appendix that contains the narrative of the final days, the death, and the funeral of Werther, with corroboration by means of several letters of Werther to Wilhelm and others that were written a few days or hours prior to his suicide.
The novel is written in 'real time,' beginning shortly after Werther's arrival in the unnamed town, on May 4, 1771, and concluding with his suicide just before Christmas of 1772. But the frequency of the letters is uneven. There is a two and a half-week period of silence when Werther first becomes infatuated with Lotte; a month and half elapses at the conclusion of Book I, after Werther leaves Wahlheim, and from September 10 to October 20, 1771, there are no letters. Book II begins with the letter of October 20, 1771, but then another month passes without correspondence, a lapse that serves to convey Werther's dissatisfaction with his new environment and the pain of his absence from beloved Wahlheim. After his return to Wahlheim, in August of 1772, the letters are once again regularly spaced, until the denoument in December.
The Editor's appendix is written as straight-forward narrative, but includes the last letters from Werther to Wilhelm, to Albert and Lotte, and an undated note, all of which ostensibly came into the Editor's possession after Werther's death.
SUMMARY OF THE PLOT
The novel's emphasis is on mood, which is what primarily holds the reader's attention, rather than on plot. But a plot must be outlined: What does Werther write about in his letters?
The first six weeks of letters enable us to become acquainted with Werther and his environment. When the novel begins, with his letter to Wilhelm of May 4, 1771, Werther is in a jubilant mood, after having just escaped from a failed liaison with a woman named Leonora, a reference to Goethe's own close call with Friederike Brion during his Strasbourg days. Werther has settled in an unnamed rural town,determined to spend some time painting, sketching, and taking excursions around the countryside. He describes the beauties of Nature and the loveliness of the people he watches, young women at the well, children at play, while he speculates on the sentimental life, - “Children are closest to my heart.”(Letter of June 29). He does not accomplish much other than contemplation, and is critical of the 'emptiness of the seeking life,' preferring to admire what he regards as the easier lifestyle of the peasants. He makes the acquaintance of many of the locals, including two peasant brothers, Hans and Philip, and a country lad who is in love with a widow who employs him. He also discourses at length about his aesthetic inclinations, a subject I will discuss further. (Letters of May 10, 17 and 30).
Werther meets Lotte
Werther discovers Wahlheim (the actual Garbenheim), a village a short distance away from his town, and is charmed. His love of the town increases after he meets the village bailiff's daughter, Lotte, at a dance. Their interaction is immediately successful - they are both enthusiasts for Sentimentalist literature, avid book readers, and they exchange views on Oliver Goldsmith and Klopstock, as well as ancient authors like Homer and Ossian. Lotte, however, is engaged to Albert, a good and kindly fellow, who is due to return shortly. Werther must resign himself to no more than a friendship with Lotte.
Werther meets Lotte
The letters beginning with the one of May 26, 1771, and ending with the last letter prior to his departure at the end of Book I, reveal Werther's happiest days. It is here that he joyfully 'discovers' Wahlheim (May26), that he meets Lotte and becomes totally infatuated with her, and, after a2 1/2 week break in correspondence, breathlessly breaks the news to Wilhelm(June 16). He will then also discover his literary commonalities with Lotte,the works and authors they love in common, and will describe her in the full context of her family relations and obligations (June 16). Werther's dislike for his mother, (Letter of May 5, 1772), would appear to motivate his search for an alternative family.
In the following weeks, Werther grows more and more infatuated with Lotte, cherishing her unique charm and insight as she uncomplainingly carries the burden of motherhood. She is the eldest of eight children, and assumed the responsibility of caring for her siblings after her mother's death. However, Albert returns, and Werther must meet the man who has Lotte's heart. After determining that he will leave, Werther nonetheless stays,forming a friendship with Albert, whom he finds to be both intelligent and open-minded,though much more sensible than himself.
Caspar David Friedrich, Der Sommer, 1807
Upon Albert's arrival, Werther grows increasingly infatuated with Lotte. He can't resist feeling that Lotte would be happier with him; they are both initiates, after all, in the intense, subjective emotionalism of the Sturm und Drang, and Albert is not. However, the faithful Lotte has no intention of betraying her beloved, and Werther determines, at Wilhelm's recommendation, to take an official position at Court in another city rather than remain in an impossible triangular relationship. After a dramatic exchange with Lotte, and a moonlit walk with both of them, Werther leaves Wahlheim without informing either of his plan.
Book II begins at Werther's new location, the town where the Court is located (the actual Wetzlar). The letters beginning with that of October 20, 1771 and ending with that of May 5, 1772 announcing his departure from the place where he held his job at Court, pertain to his failed term of employment with an Ambassador. His official position as some sort of adjutant to this Ambassador, whom he loathes, is a great disappointment to him. He clashes with his employer, who is as meticulous and cerebral as Werther is spontaneous and emotional. Werther also despises the social scene that governs his new environment, in which the aristocratic class rules over all, though he cultivates rewarding friendships with two aristocrats, Count C. and Fräulein von B. But whatever there could be to his position that he might have considered congenial vanishes on the day that he is publicly snubbed at one of Count C.'s social functions.(Letter of March 15, 1772).
Werther writing
The letters beginning with that of May 9, 1772 describe the process of Werther's return to his beloved. Humiliated, he resigns from his position and travels with another friend, a Prince, to the Prince's hunting-lodge. This situation, too, is short-lived, as Werther finds himself irrevocably drawn back to Wahlheim and to Lotte, even though in the interim he has learned, as he reveals in his letter to Albert and Lotte of February 20,1772, that the couple has married and concealed the news from him until after the event.
When Werther returns to Wahlheim, he discovers that his infatuation with Lotte has only grown stronger during the separation. As Lotte herself suggests to him, the impossibility of his possessing her seems to feed his obsession. Albert and Werther become increasingly estranged, he wishfully imagines Albert's death (Letter of August 21, 1772), and Lotte is caught in the middle. As well, the countryside has taken a turn away from the idyllic: his beloved walnut-trees, where he would sit with Charlotte, have been cut down, the young Hans is dead, and the country lad's tale of love has ended in murder. Meanwhile, Werther meets Heinrich, a former employee of Lotte's father, who has been driven mad by an unrequited and concealed passion for her, a passion that mirrors his own. Werther feels increasingly hopeless. There is hiatus in his correspondence with Wilhelm, from December 6 to December 20, and by then the Editor has taken over the narrative.
The final section of the novel is entitled “The Editor to the Reader.” We no longer hear Werther's voice, the voice that always says “I”, and the narrative becomes journalistic. The Editor tells the reader of the final days of Werther, before Christmas of 1772, and includes the final letters that Werther wrote to Wilhelm prior to his suicide, a sealed letter to Charlotte, to be opened after his death, a farewell to Albert, and an undated note, wherein he hints of his decision to kill himself. In the first of these letters, Werther describes a fearful storm and flood, which reflect the turmoil within his own soul. (Letter of December 12). In the last letter, written on December 20, Werther appears to agree with Wilhelm's suggestion that he return home, although he procrastinates, and asks Wilhelm to ask his mother to pray for his soul.
In a very objective manner, the Editor fills us in on several incidents that occur in the course of the month of December, leading up to the fateful denoument. The Editor is omniscient; he tells us not only what is in the heart and mind of Werther but also what is in the heart and mind of Albert, who expresses to Lotte his desire that she tell Werther to visit her less frequently. Three days before Christmas of 1772, in an attempt to salvage what is left of their relationship, Lotte issues her ultimatum, and orders Werther not to visit her until Christmas Eve when he will be just another friend attending the festivities. Werther decides that he cannot live on such terms with Lotte, electing instead to kill himself and he reveals his decision in a long letter to Charlotte, written over several days, which he leaves sealed for her to read after his death. In defiance of her ultimatum, he pays Charlotte a final visit, during which he reads to her several of the songs of Ossian and then forcefully and repeatedly kisses her. He is ordered to leave and never to see her again.
Werther's suicide discovered
At home, alone, Werther continues his letter to Charlotte with lengthy farewells. He then sends his servant to ask for Albert's hunting pistols for a journey. Albert instructs Charlotte to hand the fatal weapons to the servant. Ambiguities, the ambivalence of the couple, tease the reader from between the Editor's sober lines: might Werther have been saved? Albert's weapons reach their destination.Werther is joyous when he hears that Charlotte has handled the guns. He finally concludes his letter to her and writes farewell notes to Wilhelm and Albert, arranges his papers and, with a calmness hitherto unknown to his restless soul, shoots himself in the head at midnight. He lingers unconscious until morning and is found by his servant. Lotte, Albert and Lotte's brothers and sisters are summoned and watch him die. On his bureau lies an open copy of Lessing's Emilia Galotti. He is buried at night, and no priest is present.
Werther's Death
Friedrich Schiller
[It is interesting to see how, and with what felicitous instinct, everything that gives sustenance to the sentimental personality comes together in the character of Werther: the wistfulness of unhappy love, the sensitivity for Nature, the religious feelings, the philosophical spirit of contemplativeness, and finally, so as to leave nothing out, the sepulchral, formless, melancholic world of Ossian. Friedrich Schiller]
THE LAW OF THE HEART
Werther and Lotte
I referred above to the first paragraph of the first letter of the book, the key to its position as the fountainhead of later Romantic literature: “What is the heart of man?” Throughout the book, Werther writes to his friend Wilhelm about the laws of the heart, and it is given to us, his readers, to understand that his gradual abdication from reason and from life is the surrender to the guidance of his heart. The clearest exposition of his “argument” is in a dialogue Werther has with Albert over the virtue of suicide, and it is suicide that the book is primarily about: love that leads to suicide. I discuss Werther's argument in favor of suicide below, but suffice it to say at this point that it is precisely in this final act of self-destruction where Goethe places the heart, or Sentiment, in opposition to Reason and hence throws his gauntlet in defiance to the Enlightenment.
Throughout the novel we read examples of the primacy of sentiment in the character of Werther. A character is a “conscience,” and the conscience of Werther is not impelled by duty, but by sentiment. The contrast between his early days in Wahlheim and his tour of duty with the Ambassador,where he is expected to submit to obligation, is sharp enough to convey the sense that responsibility is an enemy of all that Werther holds dear: his loves, his creativity, his adoration of Nature in landscape and in himself and his beloved.
Sentimental Portraiture: Portrait of Karl August of Weimar and his siblings
Werther is not however a love story, but the story of the self-destruction of a feeling heart, of a sentimental soul. The feeling heart is Werther's “self.” The whole book is the voice of Werther alone, thevoice that always says “I”, and this voice has its only source in Werther’s own sensibility. It is the development of Werther’s mood that holds our attention, not the development of the plot. Feeling, - Werther's feeling, - is All! As stated above, it is through the existence of sentiment, of feelings and emotions, that the Sentimentalists prove the existence of God, of the soul and immortality.
Before they turn to self-destruction, Werther's feelings areall about his infatuation with Charlotte. It is this overwhelming passion that governs his sentiments towards such other preoccupations of his as his creative genius, the landscape, or the good peasants he meets in Wahlheim. When his “love” becomes despair, these other interests will also lose their luster.
Werther and Lotte
Werther's feelings for Lotte are uncompromising and forceful. There can be no moderation or temperance in “romantic” love, no compromise or subordination. Werther loathes lukewarm feeling, be it in love or in literature: “You should see how foolish I look in company when her name is mentioned, particularly when I am asked plainly how I like her. How I like her! - I detest the phrase. What sort of creature must he be who merely liked Cahrlotte, whose whole heart and senses were not entirely absorbed by her. Like her! Some one asked me lately how I liked Ossian.” (Letter of July 10, 1771)
Nicholas Boyle, points out that Werther's appropriation of everything about him– “my Waldheim,” “my Homer,” “my walnut-trees” – reveals an inability of his sensitivity to capture the phenomenal world. Sentiment fails to grasp its“object” because it dwells exclusively in the interior of the self. Sentiment is only mere subject, mere “I”conceived as feelings and emotions, and there is no “real” world outside forthis sentimental ego to seek to possess. The self has no windows looking ontothe outside. As well, since its own inner world is the world of sentiment, the only way to know the self is by means of its pure expression of sentiment. We can only know the self of another by acquaintance with the feelings of the other. Accordingly, the literature of the self must be confessional, both an inspection and a revelation of the private inner life of the self, depending on what side of the book we are on. Therefore, Werther must of necessity be an epistolary novel.
Sentimental Portraiture: Pietro Rotari, Young Girl Writing a Love Letter, 1755
This conjunction of the inner-directed life with the exploration of the life of sentiment has its roots in Pietism and in the official philosophy of the time in Germany, which was Leibniz's rationalism I will discuss both very briefly, so as to provide a background to the Sentimentalist phenomenon in German literature.
THE ROOTS OF WERTHER IN PIETISM AND LEIBNIZIAN PHILOSOPHY
Pietists
Pietism is a movement in the Lutheran Church, most influential between the latter part of the 17th century and the middle of the18th. It was a movement designed to awaken the Lutheran Church from its lethargy and dogmatism, and from what appeared to be a growing intellectuality and rationality that was supplanting the precepts of the Bible and replacing the emotions with logic and philosophy. Its first great leader was Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) of Frankfurt, a German theologian who began to hold devotional meetings in 1670. His Collegia Pietatis (Schools of Piety) were designed to bring Christians into helpful fellowship and increase Bible study. Spener's book, Pia desideria (1675), emphasized the need forearnest Bible study and the belief that the lay members of the church should have part in its spiritual control. Although Spener did not intend separation from the church, his repudiation of the importance of doctrine and his desire to limit church membership to those who had experienced personal regeneration tended to undermine orthodoxy, and Pietism was severely attacked.
After Spener's death, his work was carried on by August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), but by then Pietism had already entered a period of decline. Its effect was strongest in northern and central Germany, particularly in Prussia, but reached into Switzerland, Scandinavia, and other parts of Europe. Although the movement bore resemblance to aspects of Puritanism, such as the use of distinctive dress and the renunciation of worldly pleasures, the essential aim of the true Pietist was to place the spirit of Christian living above the letter of doctrine.
Pietism has a natural affinity for state absolutism in that it was a religion which concentrates on inward psychological motivations, from which the individual can then conceive of the state of his soul. It is a religion which eschews public worship and focuses on the small intimate group and the leadership of one of its members, and which openly opposes ecclesiastical hierarchies. Most importantly, it is a religion that advocates harmony with the State and the prevailing social and political order. Thus, Francke’s famous orphanage at Halle had as one of its principal functions the recruitment of Prussian military chaplains.
Pietism served to reconcile the individual with a unified rational order, and in this sense, it complemented the prevailing philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) which was the philosophy of German officialdom. Leibniz understood the universe to be a harmonious rationally comprehensible order, consistent with the Absolutist State, and his main concern was the place within this system of the individual self, the human being’s rational soul, regarded as the unit of which all reality consists. His Monadologie, of 1714, interpreted individual life in terms of pure inwardness. The Monad, says Leibniz, is the individual self, the human soul, a force which reflects within it all of the cosmos in its perfect rational ordering, and which is in no way altered or determined by forces external to it, such as the forces of cause and effect. The individual evolves from within itself independently, according to a rational pattern which reflects the harmonious evolution of the entire world, including the State. The Monad has no windows open to the world, for, although it appears to interact with the world and with other Monads, its law of development, the law of its own being, is totally autonomous.
Leibniz (1646-1716)
Leibniz's philosophy is a consistent rationalism. In hisview, the universe forms one context in which each occurrence can be seen inrelation to every other. Since the universe is the result of a divine plan, Leibniz calls it “the best of all possible worlds,” even though it contains evil as a necessary ingredient. The Monads are the ultimate constituents, the basic element, of the universe, closed off from their surroundings, and each of which represents the universe from a different point of view. Being simple, Monads are immaterial and thus cannot act. Apparent interaction is explained interms of the principle of pre-established harmony. Magnified to the level ofthe political state, this is a vision of self-contained individuals, living within a harmonic and pre-established order, which was, in effect, the eighteenth century German autocratic State.
-It should be quite evident, therefore, that Pietism and Leibnizian Monadology constitute the essential philosophical content in the gradual development of Romanticism since, in either case, they fed into that unique preoccupation with the self, the individual soul and its destiny, which flows into the Romantic psychology. But with Sentimentalism, Pietist inwardness becomes detached from the rationalism of the eighteenth century.
MADNESS AND SEXUAL DESIRE
Two portraits of emotion: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, The Ill-Humored Man, and Portrait of the Artist As He Imagines Himself Laughing, 1783
Two portraits of emotion: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, The Ill-Humored Man, and Portrait of the Artist As He Imagines Himself Laughing, 1783
The Law of the Heart, because it is autonomous from Reason, may lead to madness. Thus Werther's encounter with the mad youth, Heinrich, towards the end of the novel is of particular interest, in that it forecasts Werther's own self-abandon. The incident is described in the letter to Wilhelm of November 30, 1772, after Werther has lost all hope and declared his heart to be dead, and it is written only four days before Charlotte's ultimatum.
We learn that Heinrich was a secretary to Charlotte's father, and that he lost his reason over his infatuation with Charlotte. “Think, whilst you peruse this plain narration,” Werther writes to Wilhelm, “what an impression the circumstance has made upon me!” (Letter of December 1, 1772). Heinrich is out in the country looking for flowers to take to “his mistress,” but can find none in the wintry landscape and cannot understand why they cannot grow. He speaks wistfully to Werther of his past happiness, while Werther, observing the youth's “swimming eyes,” concludes that he is deranged.
Shortly, his mother comes to fetch Heinrich, and Werther inquires about Heinrich's madness. He was a good youth once, and lived a responsible life, before he became melancholic, and it has been only six months since he is as calm as at present, says the mother, for before that he was chained down and raving in a madhouse. The happiness he talks of, she adds, is the happiness he experienced in the madhouse while unconscious.
As Werther walks away, he engages the youth in an imaginary dialogue: “'You were happy!' I exclaimed, as I returned quickly to the town, 'as gay and contented as a man can be!' God of heaven! And is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy beforehe has acquired his reason, or after he has lost it? 'Unfortunate being! Andyet I envy your fate. I envy the delusion to which you are a victim.'” (Letter of November 30, 1772).
The way out from under the Law of the Heart becomes the wayout of Reason, and into unconsciousness. In the mad youth, Werther envies themadness that has yet failed to totally possess him, and which in the end willlead him to suicide and to the unconsciousness he seeks, for the madness ofHeinrich foreshadows Werther's own.
Charlotte, caught in the middle of a most disturbing triangular relationship, abets Werther's madness, whether consciously or not, by awakening his sexual desire. The letters begin to intimate the repression of sexual desire in both of them. In the peculiar letter to Wilhelm of September12, 1772, Werther describes a scene where Lotte is playing with a canary. She describes the bird as a “new friend,” and then kisses the bird on its beak. She wants Werther to kiss the bird as well, which he does. Werther is hungry for more: “A kiss,” I observed, “does not seem to satisfy him: he wishes for food, and seems disappointed by these unsatisfactory endearments.” Lotte then makes the bird eat seeds from her lips. The episode is distressing for Werther: “I turned my face away. She should not act thus. She ought not to excite my imagination with such displays of heavenly innocence and happiness, nor awaken my heart from its slumbers, in which it dreams of the worthlessness of life! And why not? Because she knows how much I love her.”
Despite his protestations of her innocence, it is evident in that letter that the sexual boundaries between Werther and Lotte are gradually starting to blur. Werther begins to express his sexual desire for Lotte in his correspondence, as in his short letter to Wilhelm of October 30, 1772: “One hundred times have I been on the point of embracing her. Heavens! What a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and re-passing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it! And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts. Do not children touch everything they see? And I!”
Baroque figure in the Park at Herrenhausen, Hanover
Nothing more than the total frustration of his sexual desirelies in store for Werther and his letters begin to reveal an acceleratingbreakdown. Nature mediates between him and reality. Following the episode ofthe canary, where Nature is a go-between in a dissimulated sexual tryst,Werther writes about the felling of his beloved walnut-trees by a careless andunfeeling landlord. Under these trees heused to sit with Charlotte in their visits to the countryside together. “Thoseglorious trees, the very sight of which has so often filled my heart with joy .. . .” (Letter of September 15). His despair increases. Less than a week laterhe reports to Wilhelm that his favored reading of Homer's epics has beenreplaced in his heart by the gloom of McPherson's Ossian. In his last meeting with Lotte, Werther willread endless pages of Ossian to her, a passion he is certain they share,although we do not have Lotte's word for it. 'Pathless wilds', 'impetuouswindstorms', 'deep sorrows' and 'dying glory', sinking exhausted into thegrave, what Schiller describes as the “sepulchral, formless, melancholic worldof Ossian,”such are the pessimistic thoughts that forecast Werther's decisionto end his life. His is a heart that has tired of sentiment, and with the deathof hope comes the death of any feeling of nostalgia, for there is no longer anypath that leads back home. He wonders whether he will be missed.
“Yes, such is the frailty of man, that even there, where hehas the greatest consciousness of his own being, where he makes the strongestand most forcible impression, even in the memory, in the heart, of his beloved,there also he must perish, - vanish, - and that quickly.” (Letter of October26).
“Oh, so vergänglich ist der Mensch, daß er auch da, wo er seinesDaseins eigentliche Gewißheit hat, da, wo er den einzigen wahren Eindruck seinerGegenwart macht, in dem Andenken, in der Seele seiner Lieben, daß er auch da verlöschen,verschwinden muß, und das so bald!” (Am 26. Oktober)
Charlotte at Werther's tomb
NOSTALGIA
The question of nostalgia is raised in the very first ofWerther's letters to Wilhelm, (Letter of May 4, 1771): “No doubt you are right, my best of friends,there would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men – and God knows whythey are so fashioned – did not employ their imaginations so assiduously inrecalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot withequanimity.”
The question of nostalgia is raised in the very first ofWerther's letters to Wilhelm, (Letter of May 4, 1771): “No doubt you are right, my best of friends,there would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men – and God knows whythey are so fashioned – did not employ their imaginations so assiduously inrecalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot withequanimity.”
Nostalgia, in its guise as escapism, is described as avoyage, from the present here to the distant there. The “nativesoil,” for which the voyage is undertaken, is love: “in the arms of his wife,”or in “the affections of his children,” his “own cottage,” the goal is home. Asit was for Odysseus.
“Distance, my friend, is like futurity. A dim vastness is spread before our souls:the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision; and wedesire earnestly to surrender up our whole being, that it may be filled withthe complete and perfect bliss of one glorious emotion. But alas! When we have attained our object,when the distant there becomes the present here, all is changed:we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish forunattainable happiness. . . . So doesthe restless traveler pant for his native soil, and find in his own cottage,in the arms of his wife, in the affections of his children, and in the labornecessary for their support, that happiness which he had sought in vain throughthe wide world.” (Letter of June 21,1771).
And after his disappointment with the world of work andnormative society, Werther does precisely that, he returns to visit the home ofhis childhood:
“I have paid my visit to my native place with all thedevotion of a pilgrim, and have experienced many unexpected emotions. . . . Igot out of the carriage, and sent it on before, that alone, and on foot, Imight enjoy vividly and heartily all the pleasure of my recollections. . . . How things have since changed! Then, inhappy ignorance, I sighed for a world I did not know, where I hoped to findevery pleasure and enjoyment which my heart could desire, and now, on my returnfrom that wide world, O my friend, how many disappointed hopes and unsuccessfulplans have I brought back!” (Letter of May 9, 1772)
But the law of the heart will finally take Werther back tohis beloved:
“Whither am I going? I will tell you in confidence. Iam obliged to continue a fortnight longer here, and then I think it would bebetter for me to visit the mines in ______. But I am only deluding myself thus. The fact is, I wish to be near Charlotte again, - that is all. I smile at the suggestions ofmy heart, and obey its dictates.” (Letter of July 18, 1772)
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENT: Genius and Frustrated Creativity
Because the sentimentalist novel is perforce a subjectiverevelation of the inner self, it follows that it must also be autobiographical,at least to some extent. The autobiographical element in ‘Werther’ is quitetransparent. Werther’s birthday is on August 28th, as is Goethe’s; Werther goesto work at the court in Wetzlar, as did Goethe; he meets Charlotte, betrothedto the kind and understanding Albert, as Goethe met Charlotte Buff, betrothedto the kind and understanding Kestner. Goethe’s own experience of infatuationand melancholy, frustration and despair, is recapitulated in the story ofWerther, who, however, proceeds in the end to kill himself. This melancholy isthat of Goethe’s own generation, which accounts for the instantaneous andenormous success of the novel.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fane with his Guardians, detail
In a much later retrospective, Goethe said of the Werthertype: “We are dealing here with those who lost the taste for life essentiallyfor want of action, in the most peaceful state imaginable, through exaggerateddemands upon themselves.” The 'demands' to which he is referring are thedemands of genius, the requirement that men in their youth are to be‘creators.’ This “genius” theory has its origins in Leibniz's Monad and is animport in the Sturm und Drang tradition: “Prometheus” and, particularly,“Wandrers Sturmlied” (appended below)are Goethe’s poems of the period which best illustrate this notion. The Monad,the individual soul, perceives the world from within itself as the reflectionof the cosmos. It is self-sufficient, windowless,but in its perception, creative. Themore intense its perceptions, the more forceful, the more creative it is. This'more forceful' Monad is the “Genius,” although Leibniz does not call it thus. But it is in his notion of the Monad asself-creative substance that the idea of the Genius originates.
In the joyful early days of his first arrival, Wertherrefers often to his need and capacity to create:
“I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisitesense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents. I should be incapable of drawing a singlestroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artistthan now.” (Letter of May 10, 1771)
“. . . I often think with longing, Oh, would I coulddescribe these conceptions, could impress upon paper all that is living so fulland warm within me, that it might be the mirror of my soul, as my soul is themirror of the infinite God! O my friend – but it is too much for my strength- I sink under the weight of thesplendor of these visions!” (Letter of May 10, 1771)
The cult of sentiment fosters the idea of “genius,” and inso doing deflects all creative energy from any alternative option forindividual fulfillment in the world of action. The sentimental self must findsalvation through genius or not at all, for there are no social or politicalavenues for salvation under consideration. When Werther is snubbed by the aristocracy in Book II, he seeks refugein Homer, and in bitter resentment. The world of convention denies him thepossibility of self-expression:
“O my friend! Why is it that the torrent of genius so seldombursts forth, so seldom rolls in full-flowing stream, overwhelming yourastounded soul? Because, on either side of this stream, cold and respectablepersons have taken up their abodes, and, forsooth, their summer-houses andtulip-beds would suffer from the torrent; wherefore they dig trenches, andraise embankments betimes, in order to avert the impending danger.” (Letter of May 26, 1771)
The notion of “Genius” and its frustration lead in turn tothe prescription of salvation through self-murder. Goethe himself recognized this in old age:
“In such an element, with such surrounding influences, withtastes and studies of this kind, tortured by unsatisfied passions, by no meansexcited from without to important actions, with the sole prospect that we mustadhere to a dull, spiritless, citizen life, we became - in gloomy wantonness – attached to thethought, that we could at all events quit life at pleasure, if it no longersuited us, and thus miserably enough helped ourselves through the disgusts andweariness of the days. This feeling wasso general, that Werther produced its great effect precisely because itstruck a chord everywhere, and openly and intelligibly exhibited the internalnature of a morbid youthful delusion.” (TheAuto-Biography of Goethe, Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life, trans. ByJohn Oxenford, Esq. London, 1848, p. 507)
For Kant, genius was by no means without rules or restraint,as it became for the wildest among those who fell in with the Sturm und Drangmovement. It was rather the origin andsource of all genuine rules; “the talentof the innate disposition (ingenium) through which nature gives rules toart.” Critique of Judgment, PP. 46. And in this definition of Kant's Goethe saw asignificant change. He saw in Kant the critical solution of the old conflictbetween “genius” and “rules,” which had dominated the poetics of the eighteenthcentury. “The word genius,” Goethe wroteof his own youth in the Sturm und Drang period, “became a universal watch-word. . . It was long before the time wherein it could be said that genius is thatpower of man which gives laws and rules through acting and doing. In those days it manifested itself only whenit broke existing laws, overthrew established rules, and declared itselfuntrammeled . . . And so I found an almost greater obstacle to developing andexpressing myself in the false cooperation of those who agreed with me than inthe opposition of those who disagreed.” (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life, PartIV, Book XIX)
GENIUS IN THE SERVICE OF STYLE AND STYLE IN THE SERVICE OF SENTIMENT
In Werther, Goethe will defy rules and conventions inthe service of sentiment. As a question of style and 'technique', Goethe's genius becomes manifest by the manner inwhich he uses disjointed language in order to break its conventional boundariesand thus better express the torrent of Werther's “romantic” emotion andtemperament. Sentimental expression and feeling overcome the observance ofproper rules of grammar and diction. There are innumerable examples of thisnovel mode of expression in Werther, but suffice it to quote thefollowing, written in Werther's first outburst of infatuation with Lotte, and asubsequent letter as he neared his final breakdown:
“Why do I not write to you? You lay claim to learning, and ask such a question. You should haveguessed that I am well – that is to say – in a word, I have made anacquaintance who has won my heart: I have – I know not.” (Letter of June 16)
[“Warum ich dir nicht schreibe? - Fragst du das und bistdoch auch der Gelehrten einer. Dusolltest raten, daß ich mich wohl befinde, und zwar - Kurz und gut, ich habe eine Bekanntschaft gemacht,die mein Herz näher angeht. Ich habe – ich weiß nicht.” (Am 16. Junius)]
“Only to gaze upon her dark eyes is to me a source of happiness!And what grieves me, is, that Albert does not seem so happy as he – hoped to be– as I should have been – if – I am no friend to these pauses, but here I cannotexpress it otherwise; and probably I am explicit enough.” (Letter of October 10,1772)
[“Wenn ich nur ihre schwarzen Augen sehe, ist mir's schon wohl!Sieh, und was mich verdrießt, ist, daß Albert nicht so beglückt zu sein scheinet,als er – hoffte – als ich – zu sein glaubte – wenn – Ich mache nicht gern Gedankenstriche,aber hier kann ich mich nicht anders ausdrücken – und mich dünkt deutlich genug.”(Am 10. Oktober)]
Baroque figure in the gardens of Herrenhausen, Hanover
“CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS" IN WERTHER
Werther was written by Goethe for the anonymousbourgeois reading public of printed books. This is something of which he musthave been quite intentionally aware, if for no other reason, because of the counter-availinginfluence of Ernst Behrisch, his friend of the Leipzig days, who had urged himto write his works in hand-written calligraphy for the select few. But his work with the Frankfurt Advertiser,and the influence of Merck, had led him in an opposite direction.
In Werther we read hostility to the few, or at least,towards the hierarchical society of estates. It is probably anachronistic torefer to this as a “class” consciousness, more than a decade before the FrenchRevolution. The society of theeighteenth century, in Germany no less than in the countries to the west, wasorganized along the line of rigid estates, or corporate social hierarchies,based on inherited wealth, power and status, and it is to the expression ofthis organization in social commerce that Goethe directs his attacks in Werther. Although the book was written when theAmerican Revolution was still in the future, the temper of the democraticrevolution was already present in its pages.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Alexander, 10th. Duke of Hamilton (1782)
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Alexander, 10th. Duke of Hamilton (1782)
What exactly was the 'democratic' revolution? In the last four decades of the eighteenthcentury, most of Europe and America was swept by a single revolutionarymovement, which, in the argument of the historian R. R. Palmer, questioned “thepossession of government, or any public power by any established, privileged,closed or self-recruiting groups of men.” This movement, which Palmer defines as “democratic,” “denied that anyperson could exercise coercive authority simply by his own right, or by rightof his status, or by right of “history,” either in the old-fashioned sense ofcustom and inheritance, or in any newer dialectical sense, unknown to theeighteenth century, in which “history” might be supposed to give some specialelite or revolutionary vanguard a right to rule. The “democratic revolution” emphasized thedelegation of authority and the removability of officials, precisely because .. . neither delegation nor removabilitywere much recognized in actual institutions.” (R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolutions, Volume I: TheChallenge, A Political History of Europeand America, 1760-1800, Princeton, 1959, pp.4-5).
The Court of Karl August in Weimar
In Werther, the conflict between the self and thecorporate institutions which hemmed it in appears in the form of Werther'sloathing for the social constraints imposed on him when he takes on a positionas an adjutant to an Ambassador. Thescene is set for this conflict at the beginning of Book II of the novel. ForBook II is an inverted mirror image of Book I with regards to the underlyingsocial assumptions, and Werther's place in them, which are thereinrevealed. In Book I, Werther is on top,and he makes patronizing and condescending statements about the peasants ofWahlheim.
“I know very well that we are not all equal, nor can be so,but it is my opinion that he who avoids the common people, in order not to losetheir respect, is as much to blame as a coward who hides himself from his enemybecause he fears defeat.” (Letter of May15, 1771).
“. . . I occasionally forget myself, and take part in the innocentpleasures which are not yet forbidden to the peasantry, and enjoy myself . . .with genuine freedom and sincerity, . . . .” (Letter of May 17, 1771).
In Book II, Wertheris at the bottom and resents the arrogance of his social superiors, the aristocratsand court officials he meets in the course of his official assignments. He is snubbed. But his behavior, leading to resignation fromoffice, is erratic and irrational.
Henry Raeburn, Portrait of Master William Blair
Henry Raeburn, Portrait of Master William Blair
In a reflection which suggests the possibility of a“bourgeois psyche,” Werther evaluates himself on the basis of how he measuresup against the achievements and the status of others. (Letter of October 20,1771). But in accordance with his owninability and disinclination to act, he condemns the very striving that wouldlead to achievement and high status, a life he describes with disgust as “theseeking life.” “Oh, the brilliant wretchedness, the weariness, that one isdoomed to witness among the silly people whom we meet in society here! Theambition of rank! How they watch, how they toil, to gain precedence!” (Letterof December 24, 1771). However, in thespirit of bourgeois egalitarianism, and consonant with the “democratic”revolutionary impetus of the times, as described by R. R. Palmer, Werther alsoconsoles himself by condemning distinctions of rank between the aristocracy andhimself. Since Werther reasons by way ofsentiment and cannot perceive himself as more than mere subject, hiscondemnation is framed in terms of spiritual impediment, rather than classopposition. “. . . I would not havethese institutions prove a barrier to the small chance of happiness which I mayenjoy on this earth.” (Letter of December 24, 1771).
The episode of his snubbing, described in a letter toWilhelm of March 15, 1772, reveals the core of his conflict. While acting in accordance to what isexpected of him, 'toiling to gain precedence' by making the rounds with hissuperiors in serious discussion, he lingers on at a reception for courtlyaristocrats where he is clearly not wanted. His unwelcome presence is made very clear to him. Embarrassed andmortified, he finally withdraws from the assembly and walks off to thecountryside by himself, to read Homer. But the effect is devastating on hissensitive ego, particularly after his friend and erstwhile ally, the Fräulein vonB., relates to him the reactions and comments of those who had snubbed him.Werther feels humiliated and defeated, and the incident leads to hisresignation and departure from the city. “[M]y heart became embittered.”
W.H. Auden, who is of the opinion that Werther is an egocentric monster,and that Goethe intended us to see him that way, cites Werther's resignation asthe preeminent example of his selfishness. He writes,
“If a man thinks the social conventions of his time and place to besilly or wrong, there are two courses of behavior that will earn him anoutsider's respect. Either he may keep his opinions to himself and observe theconventions with detached amusement, or he may deliberately break them for thepleasure of the shock he causes. . . . Werther, by staying on when it is clearthat his presence is unwelcome, defies the company, but his precious ego ishurt by their reactions, and he resigns from his post, returns to Lotte anddisaster for all.”
Werther's social discomfort and anger betrays a ressentimentin the bourgeois personality, and it foreshadows the coming period of social turbulence,deracination and realignment that accompanies the Age of Revolutions, a periodof social dislocation that had not been seen in Europe since theReformation. Werther's discomfort is anaspect of social hatred towards the “estates” society of his time, the socialstructure of hierarchical conventions organized as a pyramid of static castes,as opposed to rival classes, where status was determined by the circumstancesof birth rather than by relative merit in the competition for worldly success.
The German Bourgeoisie: Tischbein, Familie Reclam [Portrait of the Reclam Family] Berlin (1790)
Wether's reaction to his social circumstances raises thequestion of social conflict in the light of its later “romantic” portrayal, and it also raises aquestion regarding the “romantic personality,” both crucial elements in ananalysis of the Romantic Movement, for what contemporaries, and later critics,often saw as the progressive and beneficial effects of a heroic social emancipation,Nietzsche, for one, would interpret as ressentiment. It is a questionthat must be analyzed: to what extent is the romantic personality a resentfulpersonality? It is the problem ofRousseau.
AFTERMATH: The Fate of Werther and the Epidemic ofSuicides
Werther became a success among the reading publicbecause it mirrored the then fashionable cult of sentimentality, and becausethe public took to reading the novel Werther in the same way thatWerther himself devoured his books in the novel. As mentioned before, Goethe recognized thisin his retrospective autobiography: “. .. Werther produced its great effect precisely because it struck a chordeverywhere, and openly and intelligibly exhibited the internal nature of amorbid youthful delusion.” (TheAuto-Biography of Goethe, Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life, trans. ByJohn Oxenford, Esq. London, 1848, p. 507)
Werther's suicide, the self-destruction of a sentimentalconscience, is the consequence of the “morbid youthful delusion” Goethe is referringto. In the book, the letter of August 12, 1771, wherein Werther narrates toWilhelm his discussion with Albert about suicide, is therefore of crucialimportance, and I will take a moment to review it in detail.
Eighteenth Century Hunting pistols
In the letter, Werther tells Albert he intends to take atrip in the mountains for a few days and, spotting Albert's pistols, he asks toborrow them for his journey. This isprecisely what he will do in December, once he has made his decision to killhimself, and it is exactly what the young student in Wetzlar, K.W. Jerusalem,did in real life when he decided to commit suicide. At this point, all is still in thefuture. Albert responds by tellingWerther about an accident that occurred while his servants were cleaning thepistols and how he has since distrusted having them around and has kept themunloaded. As Albert is going on aboutthis, Werther suddenly points the mouth of the pistol to his forehead above hiseye, thus forecasting his own suicide. Albert's response is one of shock and incomprehension.
What follows is a defense of suicide that anticipatesGoethe's statement in Dichtung und Wahrheit, above, to the effect thatthe pain of unsatisfied genius was assuaged by the available option of self-murder. To Albert's objection that suicide isunreason, Werther responds that its rationality lies in the causes, onceidentified. And he goes further in justifying any act that is committed, asAlbert puts it, “under the influence of violent passion.” Werther's argument is a defense ofunreason. When Albert states thatsuicide is an act of weakness, Werther responds that it requires strength tocast off the yoke of an unbearable burden: “The question, therefore, is, not whether a man is strong or weak, butwhether he is able to endure the measure of his sufferings.” In the end, Albert and Werther “partedwithout conviction on either side.”
Werther's argument, however, bears on the question of why inhis old age Goethe would describe “romanticism” to Eckermann as a sickness. Forthe difference between Albert and Werther in this dialogue seems to center onwhether or not the 'self ' is willing and able to withstand suffering in theservice of a higher goal, or at least in the service of the continuation oflife itself, despite its bleakness, a proposition that Albert would seem to bearguing by appealing to moral duty, and which Werther altogether rejects. The Classical, in contrast to the Romantic,could therefore be understood as a position in favor of life and duty derivingfrom a condition of strength, of physical and psychic good health, “wherein itcould be said that genius is that power of man which gives laws and rulesthrough acting and doing,” as Goethe put it in Dichtung und Wahrheit, andwhich is an iteration of Spinoza's conclusion that all that is morally good isactive and all that is morally bad is passive.
Goethe in 1819
But in his youthful Sturm und Drang period, Goethe felt thatsuicide was a welcome escape from the sufferings of frustrated creativity, fromthe torture of “unsatisfied passions,” and from the death of hope, although hehimself chose to escape by recording his lived experience as literature. Of thewriting of his first version of Werther, he would say in his old age: “Ihad rescued myself more by this composition than by any other, from a stormyelement which had tossed me forcibly to and fro, through my own fault and thatof others, through accident and choice, through intention and haste, throughstiff-neckedness and weakness. I felt asafter a general confession, happy and free again, and entitled to a new life.” Dichtungund Wahrheit, (Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life) Book XIII.
The enormous success of the novel, the Werther-fever (Wertherfieber),is a tribute to Goethe's ability to fuse together the fashionable tastes of thereading public with the argument, then so prevalent, that social and culturalconditions deprived youth of an outlet for promotion and individual creativity,an argument he placed in the mind of Werther. In the same way that Werther was led to suicide by the despair ofinactivity, submission, and passive contemplation, his young readers reactedaccordingly to their own despair, enamored of that passivity of pure feelingwhich never succeeds in becoming either creative or productive. The book foundan echo in the despair of young people throughout Europe and reports ofWerther-related suicides were recorded until well into the nineteenthcentury. Werther was a trap ofsubjectivity.
UNDINE: THE TURN TO THE ROMANTIC
As the abyss between the self and the real world was not bridged in Werther,unless by means of Albert's hunting pistols, the generation of Romanticism thatfollowed preoccupied themselves with the attempt of straddling this gap, andany and all gaps that could conceivably yield to their imagination. A brieflook at the story of Undine reveals one way in which Romanticism movedbeyond the narrow subjectivity of the sentimental self that is so famouslyenshrined in Werther.
Undine is a short Romantic novel written in the first decade of the nineteenthcentury by the German author Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte, Baron Fouqué(1777 – 1843), and it is a wonderful work to illustrate the manner in which theRomantics attempted to bridge the dualism implicit in the earlier literature ofthe Sturm und Drang.
Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte, Baron Fouqué
De la Motte was heavily influencedby the German Romantics, particularly by August Wilhelm Schlegel. His work is very much within the tradition ofthis genre, of which he is one of its most accomplished representatives. The short novel Undine is his best known work.
ROMANTICISM AND KANTIAN DUALISM
Kant
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason laid strict rules to limit transcendentinquiry beyond what we can know through sensual perception and understanding.He set the rules delimiting the power of understanding in his quest to answerthe question “what can I know?” Anything that could not be subordinated to thetable of the Categories of the Understanding was beyond our ability toknow. But in the later sections of theFirst Critique, he admitted that the noumenon, the thing in itself which causesour sensations but is unknowable in itself, had a heuristic or regulativefunction in relation to the understanding. The noumenon, he argued, is knowable by Reason. It is the Idea behind and beyond thephenomenon, known through empirical knowledge. In moving from theepistemological to the ethical and aesthetic concerns of the Second and ThirdCritiques, the function of the Ideas grew in importance to the point at whichthey operated as if constitutive, in the moral imperative and the aestheticjudgment. The self-enclosure of Kant’s system seemed to open out as both moralbehavior and art offered access to the noumenal realm.
Coleridge, who learned his Idealism during the trip he made to Germany in1799, believed that Kant had compromised himself due to political conditions inPrussia. “I could not believe,” he wrotein the Biographia, “it was possiblefor him to have meant no more by his Noumenon,or THING IN ITSELF, than his mere words express: or that in his own conceptionhe confined the whole plastic powerto the forms of the intellect, leaving for the external cause, the materiale of our sensations, a matterwithout form.” (Biographia Literaria,I, 155).
Coleridge
For Coleridge, it was the limits that Kant had placed upon scientificendeavors to penetrate the metaphysical sphere that constituted the highestvalue of Kant’s work. Coleridge argued in favor of a form of direct knowledgeof the noumenal realm which was the basis of a richer human experience than anywhich Science could provide. This was, he believed, the purport of Kant’s ownstatement in the 1787 Preface to the Critiqueof Pure Reason: “I have . . . found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the preconception that it ispossible to make headway in metaphysics without a previous criticism of pure reasonis the source of all that unbelief, always very dogmatic, which wars againstmorality.”
Hegel
The Idealists sought to move beyond what they saw as Kant’s compromisebetween a strictly phenomenal world of sensible objects and a strictly noumenalworld of absolute Ideas, and to make the Absolute apply to the here and now ofevery-day existence. They sought toincorporate the noumenon into the dialectical structure of their philosophicalsystems. They attacked Kant as a dualist. Fichte argued that the thing-in-itselfcould not possibly be the “cause” of our experience because causality fellwithin the categories of the understanding by Kant’s own criterion. How could causality condition theunconditioned? The argument that thenoumenon is the cause of experience is an unwarranted application of a categoryof the understanding to a non-empirical object.
Fichte
The Idealists would replace the unconditioned noumenal realm bySelf-Consciousness, a “subject which becomes its own object.” Self-Consciousnesshas the unconditioned power of a ‘substantial ego’ affording it immediateknowledge of its own ground. The bridge between the noumenal and thephenomenal, they argued, could thus be breached.
In this intellectual environment German Romanticism grew apace. Whatappealed to the Romantics about the self-consciousness systems of theIdealists, particularly that of Schelling, is that it argued that the knowledgeof 'self' endows man with insight into the rationality and purposiveness of thewhole natural universe. For Schellingthe identification of mind and nature is based upon a form of intuitiveknowledge, a gnosis, which affords animmediate and direct comprehension unlocking the secrets of Nature. He was inspired by myth, which does notdistinguish between a symbolic and a rational experience of reality. Goethe hadalready said that the universal shimmers through the particular. For Schellingthe ‘shimmering’ was the gnosis. Notlimited to empirical inquiry and barred from the knowledge of the noumenon, thecreative mind of the poet is provided with an immediate insight into thetranscendental powers which, in turn, construct the ultimate phenomenonexperienced by the senses. There-creation of an alien experience, the experience of a truth that transcendsthe sphere of the control of scientific method, was possible through aself-consciousness that culminated in the work of art.
Schelling
This is the ground of the work of art of the Romantic period which seeksto transcend the real and empirical and penetrate the mystery of the unknown,the equivalent of the philosophical noumenon. Such is the background of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan,’ aswell as of the fairy tales of the German Romantics.
In his book on German Romanticism, (GermanRomanticism and Its Institutions, Princeton, 1990), Theodore Ziolkowskiremarks on three facets of the Romantic image that characterized the work ofthree prominent German Romantics: “Eichendorff was fascinated by theambivalence of a nature at once serene and threatening and by the tensionbetween the security of home and the demonic lure of the unfamiliar. Novalis was philosophically andscientifically convinced that death represented an extension of life, and hesaw that tranquil death reflected in the nocturnal side of nature that heportrayed so vividly in his writings. And Hoffmann, like the characters of hisfiction, sometimes teetered precariously on the line between reality andimagination, between bourgeois sobriety and the poet’s frenzy.” (pp. 3-4) Thesethree facets correspond to the two realms that Romanticism intended to breach,the realm of the supernatural or fantastic and the realm of the empiricalphenomenon, of every-day reality. The security of home and the lure of theunfamiliar, the objects of reality and the objects of the imagination, thenatural and the supernatural, these are the polarities that Romanticism soughtto overcome. It was the dualism implicitin the Kantian critique that Kant himself had sought to breach by way of theCategorical Imperative and the Aesthetic Judgment of Taste. The Romantics now sought to use these toolsto bring the strange and unfamiliar, the supernatural, into the life of thereal.
Jose Antonio Villarrubia (b. 1961), Undine, (n.d.)
UNDINE: THE STORY
The story of Undine is all about elemental forces of Nature engaging withhuman beings. The water-spirits that arethe main protagonists of the story, Undine and her “uncle” Kühleborn, areagents without cause, forces that are perceived to operate, but do so beyondthe law of causality that governs the phenomenal world.
A spirit of the rivers and of water has exchanged a human little girl,the daughter of a fisherman, for an underwater sprite named Undine. As the story begins, the fisherman and hiswife have lost their daughter, who has drowned. Shortly thereafter, Undine appears on their doorstep, a beautiful littlegirl, presumably of the same age. The fisherman and his wife do not know thatUndine is a “spirit,” and they adopt her. She grows up to be a lovely and spirited young maiden in their home,which is located in a peninsula that projects onto a lake. As she grows older, the maiden becomesincreasingly more beautiful, but occasionally spiteful and unruly. One day a knight appears at the fisherman’shome. He has braved the forest, where heexperienced various haunting encounters with spirits, and was compelled towardsthe peninsula where the fisherman’s house is located. The knight, Huldbrand von Ringstetten, fallsin love with Undine. Undine then tells Huldbrand that she is a mermaid, thatshe has no soul, and that she has been placed on earth because she wants tomarry a human being in order to thereby acquire a soul.
Undine
Huldbrand and Undine marry, but during the wedding ceremony he meets onceagain with Bertalda, a woman he had been attracted to before his trip into theforest. Bertalda is jealous of Undine, and seeks to undo the bond between theyoung married couple. Undine noticesthis and decides to befriend Bertalda.
Undine, as a gesture of friendship towards Bertalda, and wanting to makeup for Bertalda’s disappointment, reveals to her guests that Bertalda is thelong-lost daughter of the fisherman and his wife, whom she has invited to bepresent at the announcement. Horrifiedby this revelation, which threatens her social status, Bertalda denies it, andheaves insults at the fisherman and his wife who are present, and turns herback on them. Her behavior causes her to be outcast, and to make amends forthis unintended grievance towards her, Undine invites Bertalda to come and livewith her and Huldbrand at the castle in Ringstetten.
Jules Lefebvre (1836-1911), Undine, 1882
Life in the castle is not easy for Undine, nor is her marriage.Huldbrand’s desire for Bertalda begins to surface and deepen, and he begins totire of Undine. Undine orders a certainspring of water sealed. It is the conduitthrough which her “uncle” Kühleborn comes to spy on her life and to do ill tothe humans around her. Kühleborn mistrusts both Huldbrand and Bertalda, andacts to protect Undine. But Undine doesnot want him around, and believes that Huldbrand will be loyal to her if sheacts like a human being. The spring issealed, but Bertalda, who relies on the water for her skin care, is offendedand leaves the castle in a rage into the night. A harrowing rescue follows, where Huldbrand and Bertalda are almostdrowned by Kühleborn, but they return safely due to Undine’s intervention andsome sort of normalcy returns to the castle.
Chauncey B. Ives, Undine, 1884
When the three protagonists decide to take a trip down the Danubetogether to visit Vienna, the denoumentof the story begins. The tricks ofKühleborn, who rules the Danube and constantly creates difficulties for thetravelers, increasingly irritate Huldbrand to the point where he becomes angrywith Undine and berates her for not being a human being. His anger and contemptare too much for Undine. The magic isbroken and, forlorn, she plunges into the Danube and vanishes beneath thewaves.
Ernst Haeckel, Mädchen (1904)
The free passage from the phenomenal to the supernatural realm ischaracteristic of Romanticism, and it is a way of bridging the gap rather thanhighlighting it. Ziolkowski: “. . . it was one of the principal aims ofthat generation to overcome the split between mind and matter, rationalism andsentimentalism, reason and emotion, which characterized the eighteenthcentury. Romanticism discovered historyprecisely because, in that temporal dimension, the kind of change, development,and synthesis could take place that was exemplified by Fichte’s “productiveimagination” and the energy of Hegel’s dialectics.” (German Romanticism, p. 5)
John Waterhouse, Undine, 1872
The “Genius” poems of Goethe
[The following two poems wereobtained on the internet and I have no further reference to their source. TheEnglish translation, of unknown origin, follows.]
Prometheus
Bedeckedeinen Himmel, Zeus,
Mit Wolkendunst!
Und übe, Knaben gleich,
Der Disteln köpft,
An Eichen dich und Bergeshöhn!
Mußt mir meine Erde
Doch lassen stehn,
Und meine Hütte,
Die du nicht gebaut,
Und meinen Herd,
Um dessen Glut
Du mich beneidest.
Mit Wolkendunst!
Und übe, Knaben gleich,
Der Disteln köpft,
An Eichen dich und Bergeshöhn!
Mußt mir meine Erde
Doch lassen stehn,
Und meine Hütte,
Die du nicht gebaut,
Und meinen Herd,
Um dessen Glut
Du mich beneidest.
Ich kenne nichts Ärmeres
Unter der Sonn als euch Götter.
Ihr nähret kümmerlich
Von Opfersteuern
Und Gebetshauch
Eure Majestät
Und darbtet, wären
Nicht Kinder und Bettler
Hoffnungsvolle Toren.
Unter der Sonn als euch Götter.
Ihr nähret kümmerlich
Von Opfersteuern
Und Gebetshauch
Eure Majestät
Und darbtet, wären
Nicht Kinder und Bettler
Hoffnungsvolle Toren.
Da ich ein Kind war,
Nicht wußte, wo aus, wo ein,
Kehrte mein verirrtes Aug
Zur Sonne, als wenn drüber wär
Ein Ohr zu hören meine Klage,
Ein Herz wie meins,
Sich des Bedrängten zu erbarmen.
Nicht wußte, wo aus, wo ein,
Kehrte mein verirrtes Aug
Zur Sonne, als wenn drüber wär
Ein Ohr zu hören meine Klage,
Ein Herz wie meins,
Sich des Bedrängten zu erbarmen.
Wer half mir wider
Der Titanen Übermut?
Wer rettete vom Tode mich,
Von Sklaverei?
Hast du's nicht alles selbst vollendet,
Heilig glühend Herz?
Und glühtest, jung und gut,
Betrogen, Rettungsdank
Dem Schlafenden dadroben?
Der Titanen Übermut?
Wer rettete vom Tode mich,
Von Sklaverei?
Hast du's nicht alles selbst vollendet,
Heilig glühend Herz?
Und glühtest, jung und gut,
Betrogen, Rettungsdank
Dem Schlafenden dadroben?
Ich dich ehren? Wofür?
Hast du die Schmerzen gelindert
Je des Beladenen?
Hast du die Tränen gestillet
Je des Geängsteten?
Hast du die Schmerzen gelindert
Je des Beladenen?
Hast du die Tränen gestillet
Je des Geängsteten?
Hat nicht mich zum Manne geschmiedet
Die allmächtige Zeit
Und das ewige Schicksal,
Meine Herren und deine?
Die allmächtige Zeit
Und das ewige Schicksal,
Meine Herren und deine?
Wähntest du etwa,
Ich sollte das Leben hassen,
In Wüsten fliehn,
Weil nicht alle Knabenmorgen-
Blütenträume reiften?
Ich sollte das Leben hassen,
In Wüsten fliehn,
Weil nicht alle Knabenmorgen-
Blütenträume reiften?
Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, weinen,
Genießen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich.
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, weinen,
Genießen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich.
Prometheus
Cover thy spacious heavens, Zeus,
With clouds of mist,
And, like the boy who lops
The thistles' heads,
Disport with oaks and mountain-peaks,
Yet thou must leave
My earth still standing;
My cottage too, which was not raised by thee;
Leave me my hearth,
Whose kindly glow
By thee is envied.
With clouds of mist,
And, like the boy who lops
The thistles' heads,
Disport with oaks and mountain-peaks,
Yet thou must leave
My earth still standing;
My cottage too, which was not raised by thee;
Leave me my hearth,
Whose kindly glow
By thee is envied.
I know nought poorer
Under the sun, than ye gods!
Ye nourish painfully,
With sacrifices
And votive prayers,
Your majesty:
Ye would e'en starve,
If children and beggars
Were not trusting fools.
Under the sun, than ye gods!
Ye nourish painfully,
With sacrifices
And votive prayers,
Your majesty:
Ye would e'en starve,
If children and beggars
Were not trusting fools.
While yet a child
And ignorant of life,
I turned my wandering gaze
Up tow'rd the sun, as if with him
There were an ear to hear my wailings,
A heart, like mine,
To feel compassion for distress.
And ignorant of life,
I turned my wandering gaze
Up tow'rd the sun, as if with him
There were an ear to hear my wailings,
A heart, like mine,
To feel compassion for distress.
Who help'd me
Against the Titans' insolence?
Who rescued me from certain death,
From slavery?
Didst thou not do all this thyself,
My sacred glowing heart?
And glowedst, young and good,
Deceived with grateful thanks
To yonder slumbering one?
Against the Titans' insolence?
Who rescued me from certain death,
From slavery?
Didst thou not do all this thyself,
My sacred glowing heart?
And glowedst, young and good,
Deceived with grateful thanks
To yonder slumbering one?
I honour thee! and why?
Hast thou e'er lighten'd the sorrows
Of the heavy laden?
Hast thou e'er dried up the tears
Of the anguish-stricken?
Was I not fashion'd to be a man
By omnipotent Time,
Hast thou e'er lighten'd the sorrows
Of the heavy laden?
Hast thou e'er dried up the tears
Of the anguish-stricken?
Was I not fashion'd to be a man
By omnipotent Time,
And by eternal Fate,
Masters of me and thee?
Masters of me and thee?
Didst thou e'er fancy
That life I should learn to hate,
And fly to deserts,
Because not all
My blossoming dreams grew ripe?
That life I should learn to hate,
And fly to deserts,
Because not all
My blossoming dreams grew ripe?
Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!
Wanderers Sturmlied
Wen du nicht verlässest, Genius, Nicht der Regen, nicht der Sturm Haucht ihm Schauer übers Herz. Wen du nicht verlässest, Genius, Wird dem Regengewölk, Wird dem Schloßensturm Entgegensingen, Wie die Lerche, Du da droben. Den du nicht verlässest, Genius, Wirst ihn heben übern Schlammpfad Mit den Feuerflügeln. Wandeln wird er Wie mit Blumenfüßen Über Deukalions Flutschlamm, Python tötend, leicht, groß, Pythius Apollo. Den du nicht verlässest, Genius, Wirst die wollnen Flügel unterspreiten, Wenn er auf dem Felsen schläft, Wirst mit Hüterfittichen ihn decken In des Haines Mitternacht. Wen du nicht verlässest, Genius, Wirst im Schneegestöber Wärmumhüllen; Nach der Wärme ziehn sich Musen, Nach der Wärme Charitinnen. Umschwebt mich, ihr Musen, ihr Charitinnen! Das ist Wasser, das ist Erde, Und der Sohn des Wassers und der Erde, Über den ich wandle Göttergleich. Ihr seid rein, wie das Herz der Wasser, Ihr seid rein, wie das Mark der Erde, Ihr umschwebt mich, und ich schwebe Über Wasser, über Erde, Göttergleich. Soll der zurückkehren, Der kleine, schwarze, feurige Bauer? Soll der zurückkehren, erwartend Nur deine Gaben, Vater Bromius, Und helleuchtend umwärmend Feuer? Der kehren mutig? Und ich, den ihr begleitet, Musen und Charitinnen alle, Den alles erwartet, was ihr, Musen und Charitinnen, Umkränzende Seligkeit, Rings ums Leben verherrlicht habt, Soll mutlos kehren? Vater Bromius! Du bist Genius, Jahrhunderts Genius, Bist, was innre Glut Pindarn war, Was der Welt Phöbus Apoll ist. Weh! Weh! Innre Wärme, Seelenwärme, Mittelpunkt! Glüh entgegen Phöb Apollen; Kalt wird sonst Sein Fürstenblick Über dich vorübergleiten, Neidgetroffen Auf der Zeder Kraft verweilen, Die zu grünen Sein nicht harrt. Warum nennt mein Lied dich zuletzt? Dich, von dem es begann, Dich, in dem es endet, Dich, aus dem es quillt, Jupiter Pluvius! Dich, dich strömt mein Lied, Und kastalischer Quell Rinnt ein Nebenbach, Rinnet Müßigen, Sterblich Glücklichen Abseits von dir, Der du mich fassend deckst, Jupiter Pluvius! Nicht am Ulmenbaum Hast du ihn besucht, Mit dem Taubenpaar In dem zärtlichen Arm, Mit der freundlichen Ros umkränzt, Tändelnden ihn, blumenglücklichen Anakreon, Sturmatmende Gottheit! Nicht im Pappelwald An des Sybaris Strand, An des Gebirgs Sonnebeglänzter Stirn nicht Faßtest du ihn, Den Blumen-singenden, Honig-lallenden, Freundlich winkenden Theokrit. Wenn die Räder rasselten, Rad an Rad rasch ums Ziel weg, Hoch flog Siegdurchglühter Jünglinge Peitschenknall, Und sich Staub wälzt', Wir vom Gebirg herab Kieselwetter ins Tal, Glühte deine Seel Gefahren, Pindar, Mut. – Glühte? – Armes Herz! Dort auf dem Hügel, Himmlische Macht! Nur so viel Glut, Dort meine Hütte, Dorthin zu waten! |
The Wanderer's Storm-Song
[Goethe says of this ode,that it is the only one remaining out of several strange hymns and dithyrambscomposed by him at a period of great unhappiness, when the love-affair betweenhim and Friederike Brion had been broken off by him. He used to sing them whilewandering wildly about the country. This particular one was caused by his beingcaught in a tremendous storm on one of these occasions. He calls it ahalf-crazy piece, or halbunsinn.]
He whom thou ne'er leavest, Genius,
Feels no dread within his heart
At the tempest or the rain.
He whom thou ne'er leavest, Genius,
Will to the rain-clouds,
Will to the hailstorm,
Sing in reply
As the lark sings,
Oh thou on high!
Feels no dread within his heart
At the tempest or the rain.
He whom thou ne'er leavest, Genius,
Will to the rain-clouds,
Will to the hailstorm,
Sing in reply
As the lark sings,
Oh thou on high!
Him whom thou ne'er leavest, Genius,
Thou wilt raise above the mud-track
With thy fiery pinions.
He will wander,
As, with flowery feet,
Over Deucalion's dark flood,
Python-slaying, light, glorious,
Pythius Apollo.
Thou wilt raise above the mud-track
With thy fiery pinions.
He will wander,
As, with flowery feet,
Over Deucalion's dark flood,
Python-slaying, light, glorious,
Pythius Apollo.
Him whom thou ne'er leavest, Genius,
Thou wilt place upon thy fleecy pinion
When he sleepeth on the rock,--
Thou wilt shelter with thy guardian wing
In the forest's midnight hour.
Thou wilt place upon thy fleecy pinion
When he sleepeth on the rock,--
Thou wilt shelter with thy guardian wing
In the forest's midnight hour.
Him whom thou ne'er leavest, Genius,
Thou wilt wrap up warmly
In the snow-drift;
Tow'rd the warmth approach the Muses,
Tow'rd the warmth approach the Graces.
Thou wilt wrap up warmly
In the snow-drift;
Tow'rd the warmth approach the Muses,
Tow'rd the warmth approach the Graces.
Ye Muses, hover round me!
Ye Graces also!
That is water, that is earth,
And the son of water and of earth
Over which I wander,
Like the gods.
Ye Graces also!
That is water, that is earth,
And the son of water and of earth
Over which I wander,
Like the gods.
Ye are pure, like the heart of the water,
Ye are pure like the marrow of earth,
Hov'ring round me, while I hover
Ye are pure like the marrow of earth,
Hov'ring round me, while I hover
Over water, o'er the earth
Like the gods.
Like the gods.
Shall he, then, return,
The small, the dark, the fiery peasant?
Shall he, then, return, waiting
Only thy gifts, oh Father Bromius,
And brightly gleaming, warmth-spreading fire?
Return with joy?
And I, whom ye attended,
Ye Muses and ye Graces,
Whom all awaits that ye,
Ye Muses and ye Graces,
Of circling bliss in life
Have glorified--shall I
Return dejected?
The small, the dark, the fiery peasant?
Shall he, then, return, waiting
Only thy gifts, oh Father Bromius,
And brightly gleaming, warmth-spreading fire?
Return with joy?
And I, whom ye attended,
Ye Muses and ye Graces,
Whom all awaits that ye,
Ye Muses and ye Graces,
Of circling bliss in life
Have glorified--shall I
Return dejected?
Father Bromius!
Thourt the Genius,
Genius of ages,
Thou'rt what inward glow
To Pindar was,
What to the world
Phoebus Apollo.
Thourt the Genius,
Genius of ages,
Thou'rt what inward glow
To Pindar was,
What to the world
Phoebus Apollo.
Woe! Woe Inward warmth,
Spirit-warmth,
Central-point!
Glow, and vie with
Phoebus Apollo!
Coldly soon
His regal look
Over thee will swiftly glide,--
Spirit-warmth,
Central-point!
Glow, and vie with
Phoebus Apollo!
Coldly soon
His regal look
Over thee will swiftly glide,--
Envy-struck
Linger o'er the cedar's strength,
Which, to flourish,
Waits him not.
Linger o'er the cedar's strength,
Which, to flourish,
Waits him not.
Why doth my lay name thee the last?
Thee, from whom it began,
Thee, in whom it endeth,
Thee, from whom it flows,
Jupiter Pluvius!
Tow'rd thee streams my song.
And a Castalian spring
Runs as a fellow-brook,
Runs to the idle ones,
Mortal, happy ones,
Apart from thee,
Who cov'rest me around,
Jupiter Pluvius!
Thee, from whom it began,
Thee, in whom it endeth,
Thee, from whom it flows,
Jupiter Pluvius!
Tow'rd thee streams my song.
And a Castalian spring
Runs as a fellow-brook,
Runs to the idle ones,
Mortal, happy ones,
Apart from thee,
Who cov'rest me around,
Jupiter Pluvius!
Not by the elm-tree
Him didst thou visit,
With the pair of doves
Held in his gentle arm,--
With the beauteous garland of roses,--
Caressing him, so blest in his flowers,
Anacreon,
Storm-breathing godhead!
Not in the poplar grove,
Near the Sybaris' strand,
Not on the mountain's
Sun-illumined brow
Didst thou seize him,
The flower-singing,
Honey-breathing,
Sweetly nodding
Theocritus.
Him didst thou visit,
With the pair of doves
Held in his gentle arm,--
With the beauteous garland of roses,--
Caressing him, so blest in his flowers,
Anacreon,
Storm-breathing godhead!
Not in the poplar grove,
Near the Sybaris' strand,
Not on the mountain's
Sun-illumined brow
Didst thou seize him,
The flower-singing,
Honey-breathing,
Sweetly nodding
Theocritus.
When the wheels were rattling,
Wheel on wheel tow'rd the goal,
High arose
The sound of the lash
Of youths with victory glowing,
In the dust rolling,
As from the mountain fall
Showers of stones in the vale--
Then thy soul was brightly glowing, Pindar--
Glowing? Poor heart!
Wheel on wheel tow'rd the goal,
High arose
The sound of the lash
Of youths with victory glowing,
In the dust rolling,
As from the mountain fall
Showers of stones in the vale--
Then thy soul was brightly glowing, Pindar--
Glowing? Poor heart!
There, on the hill,--
Heavenly might!
But enough glow
Thither to wend,
Where is my cot!
Heavenly might!
But enough glow
Thither to wend,
Where is my cot!
