Johann Wolfgang Goethe: The Sufferings of Young Werther. Stanley Corngold translation. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013.

 

Written in 1774 when Goethe was twenty-five years old, revised for republication in 1787, The Sufferings of Young Werther had the unfortunate effect of inducing suicide among any number of its first readers, rather to its author’s discomfiture (hence the soberer second edition, translated here). Years after the roil subsided, Goethe ruefully observed that writing the book had been therapeutic for him but not for its readers. Whereas “I felt relieved and open now that I had transformed reality into poetry, my friends were confused, thinking that it was necessary to transform poetry into reality and act out such a novel, possibly shooting themselves.” If classic tragedy induces catharsis in its audience, Goethe’s modern tragedy induced it only in the author. Why?

Goethe explains this unhappy éclat by invoking the temper of his generation, reacting as it did to the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism. To the Enlighteners’ optimism, his contemporaries opposed readings in English literature—not, to be sure, buoyant, gritty Chaucer or Shakespeare’s politic comedies but tragic “Hamlet and his soliloquies”—those “ghosts that haunted all the young minds and hearts,” bringing “everyone” to suppose “himself to be just as melancholic as the Prince of Denmark though he had seen no ghost and had no royal father to avenge.” To this, the young men of Goethe’s time added the poetry of ‘Ossian,’ whose foreboding landscapes challenged the secularist light of le sage Locke and his admirer, Voltaire. “In such an element and in such surroundings, with hobbies and studies of this kind, tormented  by ungratified passions, never externally stimulated to perform any meaningful actions, our only prospect the need to endure in a sluggish, vacuous, bourgeois existence—we grew accustomed, in a sort of petulant arrogance, to the idea that when life no longer suited us, we could always take leave of it any way we pleased, and thus we managed as best we could to get through the tribulations and tedium of each day.” Modern rationalism was boring, particularly among those classes who had the leisure to read books. If Werther is the ‘type’ of the anti-rationalist, anti-Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang generation, young men who set passion against reason, subject against object, it might be said that in making themselves into the opposite of the Enlighteners they produced another version of Bacon’s ‘conquest of nature’—the conquest now turned inward, ‘subjectively,’ resulting in willed self-destruction. It remained for rationalism to marry irrationalism, technology to put itself at the service of imagination; there tragedy really began in politics, with fascist and communist mass-murder and tyranny committed by men aspiring to ideality, achieving catastrophe.

With its epistolary framework, Werther resembles many of the most widely-read ‘bourgeois’ novels of the previous century; it departs from them in being very short. Introspection needs less exposition than observation of the world; even Werther’s descriptions of nature are really about himself. “Dearest friend,” he writes to Wilhelm, “what a thing it is, the human heart!” He regrets how he stirred unrequited love for himself in a girl named Leonore, protesting “I was innocent,” while admitting he was not entirely so: “Did I nourish her feelings? Didn’t I delight in those genuine expressions of her nature that so often made us laugh, though they were not laughable at all?” He promises to “improve.” Moreover, “I will not chew over the bit of woe that fate presents us with, the way I have always done; I will enjoy the present and let bygones be bygones”—he, who had suffered no injustice—avoiding the human tendency “to summon up memories of old woes rather than accept an indifferent present.” The older Goethe explained the futility of this resolution, arguing that “our virtues rest upon our faults as on their roots, and the latter branch out surreptitiously just as strongly and variously as do our virtues in the light of day”; the more we strive for the good, the cleverer (as it were) our flaws become. Enlightenment can only lead to a more complex ‘endarkenment’—a claim which, if true, confirms the Christian sense of sin (“Who can know it?” Paul asks, considering the sinfulness of the human heart) against Voltaire on the one hand, Rousseau on the other. This suggests that the ‘totalitarian’ tyrannies of twentieth century, which even Goethe did not envision, had to arise out of the modern project, and that there might be worse to come. (The Chinese communists, after all, seem altogether smarter than their Russian counterparts, and both more ‘sensible’ than Hitler.)

Werther is on the road to clear up a problem with his mother’s inheritance. His aunt has withheld a portion of it but is now ready to release more of it than he had asked for. “I have learned from this little piece of business that misunderstanding and neglect may cause more confusion in the world than do cunning and malice”—an ‘enlightened’ thought if ever there was one. His predominant mood derives less from the Enlightenment, however, than from Rousseau, as he contrasts the natural beauty of the garden and surrounding countryside of the estate he will inherit with the “unpleasant” town nearby. “A wonderful gaiety has seized my entire soul, like the sweet spring mornings I wholeheartedly enjoy. I am alone and glad to be alive in this place, which is made for souls like mine”—so happy, “so deeply immersed in the sense of calm existence that my art is suffering.” Overwhelmed by his oneness with nature, from “the lovely valley” under “the midday sun” to the tiny blades of grass and the insects which live among them, he “feel[s] the presence of the Almighty Who created us in his image.” He can’t draw or paint; “I succumb to the force of the splendor of these displays” in a loss of self, a living, joyous ‘suicide.’ Everything here “appear[s] like paradise.” Here, “I treat my heart like a sick child, its every wish is granted.” Inheritance and childhood will weave their way into his sensibility, up to the moment of his self-destruction.

In society, he brings these communal, egalitarian, Rousseauian sentiments with him. The children in the village of Wahlheim “are fond of me,” surprised that, unlike other “persons of standing,” who “always keep coldly distant from the common people,” “pretend[ing] to descend to their level in order to make the poor commoners feel their superiority all the more keenly,” Werther “believe[s] that the person who feels it necessary to keep aloof from the so-called rabble in order to maintain his dignity is just as reprehensible as the coward who hides from his enemy lest he be defeated.” If, unlike Isaac and his son Jacob, who meet their future wives at the village well, he finds no wife in this village, he does graciously help a servant girl struggling to bring the jug filled with the water she has drawn. 

He nonetheless feels the difference between himself and the villagers, despite their charming lack of bourgeois dullness. “The human race—it’s a uniform thing. Most people spend the greatest part of the time struggling to stay alive, and the little bit of freedom they have left makes them so anxious that they’ll look for any means to get rid of it.” As for himself, these “very good kind of people” relieve him of his melancholy but cannot provide the companionship he longs for; “so many other force lie dormant in me, all rotting away unused, which I must carefully conceal”—an effort that “so constricts my heart.” It is “the fate of our sort”—those at leisure to think more carefully, to feel more profoundly?—to yearn not for ridding themselves of freedom from the day-to-day but to live within it. “Alas, that friend of my youth has gone,” she of “great soul in whose presence I seemed to myself to be more than I was because I was everything I could be.” Now dead, she is the one with whom he was preoccupied, even as lovelorn Leonore wasted her feelings on him.

And so he turns inward. “I turn back into myself and discover a world!” It is a world wherein “everything swims before my senses, and I go on, smiling dreamily into the world.” Locke regards the senses as the reliable portals to the external world, but for the anti-Lockean man they turn the empirical world, known with certainty only through them, into a landscape of reverie. “Like children,” Werther writes, “adults also stumble through the world, and like children, do not know whence they come and whither they go, nor act to some true purpose any more than children do, and like them are ruled by cookies and cakes and birch rods—no one likes to think that, and yet to me it is palpable truth.” Yet this is not enough for men of “our sort”—those “who in all humility realize the sum total, who see how neatly every contented citizens can shape his little garden into a paradise, and how tirelessly even the merest wretch, panting, makes his way beneath his burden, all of them equally determined to see the light of the sun one minute longer—yes, that man keeps still, and he creates his world out of himself, and he is happy because he is human. And then, confined as he is, he still always keeps in his heart the sweet sense of freedom, knowing that he can leave this prison whenever he chooses.” Even in his Rousseauian bliss, Werther already makes the choice of suicide, Hamlet’s “to be or not to be?” not only a question but the source of life’s sweetness. Against scientistic determinism, which fears freedom because it doesn’t know what to do with it, he upholds subjectivism. Rejecting happiness in the ordinary, human-all-too-human sense as too banal, too ‘bourgeois,’ too much the fruit of false enlightenment, he falls back on a freedom that finds, and perhaps can only find, satisfaction in nihilism. 

For this, art offers no real solace. In the village, away from the nature that overcomes him, he draws a picture of a little boy and his infant brother, “a well-composed, very interesting drawing” into which he introduces not “the slightest bit of myself.” But this only “strengthened me in my resolve to stay exclusively with nature. It alone is infinitely rich, and it alone forms the great artist.” For young Werther, it must be greatness or nothing. The same goes for artistic and social rules; just as artistic rules prevent the “man formed by them” from “produc[ing] anything vapid or in poor taste,” so “someone shaped by the laws and decorum” of society “can never become an unbearable neighbor or a notorious villain.” “On the other hand, say what you will, rules will destroy the true feeling of nature and the genuine expression thereof,” especially when it comes to love, ruined by calculations of making a living. “If the young man agrees” to such constraints, “the result is a useful member of society, and I myself will advise any prince to give him a place on a council; except that there’s an end to his love, and if he is an artist, to his art.” “Sedate gentlemen dwell on both banks of the stream” in their “little summer houses” with their “tulip beds and cabbage patches”—all of which would be ruined by “the torrent of genius,” which they therefore attempt to redirect and control, to the ruin of the genius. As for Rousseau, for Werther there can be no truce between the exception and the rule; they are at war. But unlike the philosopher who, being rational, can think of ways to escape the coils of convention, the genius-as-artist and the genius-as-lover refuses such ways ‘in principle’ or, more accurately ‘by sentiment’—sentiment valorized by its very rejection of unerotic reasoning of the modern sort. Werther affirms this way of ordering the genius’s soul when he meets a young peasant who is in love with a widow who employs him “Never in my life have I seen urgent desire and hot, ardent craving in such purity: indeed I can say, a purity such as I have never conceived or dreamed of.” So entranced is Werther by this that he determines never to meet the youth’s beloved, as “it is better to see her through the eyes of her lover; it may be that in my own eyes she would not appear as she stands before me know, and why should I spoil this beautiful image?” Why let reality intrude upon a creature of his imagining? 

The problem with such a firm rejection of reality is that reality tends to obtrude upon imagination, nonetheless. He is about to experience the parallel of both Lenore’s unrequited passion and the unrequited passion of the young peasant, after meeting Charlotte, who is already engaged to “a very good man, who is away on a trip.” Beautiful, kind, and intelligent, she shares Werther’s literary tastes (esteeming Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and, even better, storm-loving, impassioned Klopstock) and his tastes in music. [1] Lotte is even a sort of virgin mother, a secular Mary, who cares for her brothers and sisters because her mother has died. And “you should see her dance! You see, she is so absorbed, so carefree, so natural, as if this were the only thing in the world, as if she thought or felt nothing else; and in such moments everything else surely does vanish from her mind.” Like Werther in nature, she becomes one with what envelops her. They dance together, and he is gone in rapture.

“I am living such happy days as God reserves for His saints; and no matter what happens to me, I cannot say that I have not tasted the joys, the purest joys of life.” The difficulty is that God reserves happy days for those who love Him, not for those who love girls, however wonderful. And this girl is engaged to be married. When he writes to Wilhelm, describing his morning routine of making breakfast and comparing himself to “Penelope’s suitors” as they slaughtered, carved, and roasted oxen and swine, his reader (beginning with Wilhelm?) cannot but recall the fact that Odysseus eventually returned, with bad results for the suitors. Werther does not know himself.

After all, the ill-fated suitors were men, but secularized-Christian Werther, in love with another man’s Mary, wants to be a child—again in imitation of the Biblical command. “Yes, dear Wilhelm, the children are of all things on earth closest to my heart. When I watch them and see in these small beings the seeds of all the virtues, all the powers they will one day need so urgently…when I see all of it so unspoiled, so intact!—I repeat over and over again the golden words of the teacher of mankind: Unless you become as little children! and yet, dear friend, they who are our equals, whom we ought to consider our models, these we treat as inferiors.” But Jesus invites us to become as little children in terms of trusting our Father and His Word; He never suggests that children are without sin. Werther lives out a Christianity in which eros replaces agape and calls itself pure, taking children (the human beings least buffeted by real erotic longing) as models of such purity. 

That he fails to see any of this his readers do see when he describes his time spent with an elderly pastor and his wife, whose daughter’s taciturn, jealous suitor annoys Werther. Jealousy is the obverse of love of one’s own—the theme of possession first introduced when we learned that Werther came to the village in a successful attempt to settle the status of his inheritance. He delivers himself of a short sermon, “speaking out very bluntly against bad moods” and intoning that “if our hearts were always open to enjoy the good that God puts before us each day, we would also be strong enough to endure the bad whenever it comes.” When the pastor’s wife ventures to object that “we have no control over our feelings” because “so much depends on our bodies,” he grants the point while continuing to insist, “a lot depends on ourselves. I know it does with me…. Bad moods are just the same as laziness, for they are a sort of laziness. Our natures are prone to it, and yet, if we just once summon up the strength to pull ourselves together, work flies from our hands, and we find real pleasure in being active.” Bad moods are a vice, “harm[ing] ourselves and our neighbors,” robbing them of their own “simple joys,” making happy people unhappy. “All the gifts, all the favors the world can bestow cannot replace an instant of pleasure in oneself that our tyrant’s envious discontent has turned to bile.” Lotte, who has accompanied him to the pastor’s home, “scolded me on the way back about my excessive emotional involvement in everything and how that would lead to my destruction!”—a telling admonition which only intensifies his emotional involvement as he recalls thinking, “Oh, you angel! For your sake I must live!” And if she cannot be his, ‘must’ he not then die? He continues to model himself after children: “God makes us happiest when He lets us stumble about in our amiable delusions,” as indulgent adults let children do. He then goes on to deplore “the unbelievable self-deception of the human mind,” illustrated by the story of a stingy husband who never suspected that his wife was stealing from him in order to support their children—another Biblical allusion, secularized for purposes of his own self-deception, now pronouncing judgment on the self-delusion of another.

But “No, I am not deceiving myself!” when it comes to Lotte. He is sure that she loves him. And “how I worship myself ever since she has come to love me!” His subjectivism results in self-worship of an especially vulnerable kind, depending as it does on the love of another, about whom he may well be deceiving himself, as he recognizes “when she speaks about her fiancé with such warmth, such love,” making Werther “feel like a man deprived of all his honors and titles and stripped of his sword”—emasculated, Freud would say. He nonetheless persists. “She is sacred to me,” and when she plays a certain tune on the piano “with the touch of an angel, so simple and so soulful,” the “confusion and darkness of my soul disperse, and I breathe freely again.” Freedom for Werther is to be ruled under a benevolent monarch, a human goddess who reciprocates his passion, as he ardently wishes (and thus believes) that she does. 

His friend, Wilhelm, tries to talk some sense into him, suggesting that he get a job—one fit for a young gentleman, in which he would accompany an ambassador on a mission abroad. No, never: “I do not like being anyone’s subordinate, and we all know that on top of this the man is odious”; moreover, “anyone who works himself to the bone to please others, for money or honor or whatever else, without its being his own passion, his own necessity, is a perfect fool.” His freedom is really an expression of his imagined fate or necessity, a submission to his beloved justified by his desire alone, despite her engagement to another.

The fiancé, Albert, arrives a month after Werther had met Lotte. “Even if he were the best, the noblest of men, one to whom I’d be ready to subordinate myself in every way, it would still be unbearable to see him take possession of such perfection—Possession!” Possessiveness: love of one’s own, contested whenever the matter of what is rightly one’s own comes to be contested, as it is with property and erotic love, alike. And yet, admittedly, Albert is “a fine, dear man,” and “I have to love him for the regard he shows her”; “he knows what a treasure he has in Lotte.”  What is more, “his calm exterior stands in sharp contrast to my natural restlessness, which cannot be concealed”; Albert seldom commits the sin of indulging in a bad mood. Because of him, and his nature, “my joy in being with Lotte is gone”—well, except for the fact that he is “always happy when I find her alone.” To Wilhelm’s firm advice to submit to the circumstances he chafes under, Werther “concede[s] your entire argument” while “still search[ing] for a way to slip in between the either and the or.” “Yes, Wilhelm, there are moments when I feel a fit of courage to spring up and shake it all off and then—if only I knew where to, I think I would go.” He admits that he has “acted like a child,” even as he had so recently written encomia to childishness and their supposed purity. “I could be leading the best, the happiest life if I weren’t a fool.” Christians, too, are commanded to be fools, as well as children, but, again, hardly in this way. 

Sensible Albert tries to admonish him, when it comes to folly. He tells Werther a cautionary tale about an accident with a pistol. A servant mistakenly injured a servant girl, accidentally discharging the weapon, which Albert had given him to clean. Since that time, he keeps all his weapons unloaded. Werther tires of Albert’s attempt at self-excuse. “I finally stopped listening altogether, fell into a black mood”—the vice he had condemned in another—and makes a gesture of committing suicide with the pistol. Albert snatches it from him, saying, “I cannot imagine that a man can be so foolish as to shoot himself; the mere thought fills me with revulsion.” Folly, again, and Werther can no longer suppress his own anger, leading to the dialogue that won some young ‘romantics’ to side with Werther, against his sympathetic but critical creator, Goethe. 

Werther’s argument is a powerful one, persuasive to many. “Why is it that you people, I exclaimed, whenever you speak about anything, immediately find yourself saying: this is foolish, this is clever, this is good, this is bad! And what is that supposed to mean? Have you investigated the deeper circumstances of an action to that end? Are you able to explain the causes definitively, why it happened, why it had to happen? If you had done so, you would not be so hasty with your judgments.” Why it had to happen: This is the old pastor’s wife’s argument, the argument from necessity. He concedes Albert’s counter-argument, that some “actions are vicious, however they occur, whatever motives are adduced,” while insisting that even there, “there are some exceptions”—the man who steals to save himself and his family from starvation, the enraged husband who kills his “faithless wife and her worthless seducer,” or “the girl who, in an hour of ecstasy, gives herself over to the irresistible joys of love.” In such circumstances, “even our laws, these cold-blooded pedants, can be moved to withhold their punishment.” Yes, Albert replies, but this isn’t the same as carelessly inflicted injury of the type they are discussing, “because a man swept away by passion loses all his powers of reason and is viewed as a drunkard or a madman.” 

This brings Werther to the core of his argument, a version of which Nietzsche would advance at the end of the century, with consummate rigor and refinement. “Oh, you rationalists!…. You stand there so calmly, without any understanding, you moral men! You chide the drinker, despise the man bereft of his senses, pass by like the priest, thank God like the Pharisee that he did not make you also one of these. I have been drunk more than once, my passions were never far from madness, and I regret neither: for in my own measure I have learned to grasp how all extraordinary men who have achieved something great, something seemingly impossible, have inevitably been derided as drunkards or madmen…. Shame on you, you men of sobriety! Shame on you, you wise men!” At this, poor Albert recovers sufficiently to observe that suicide is no great deed, only “a weakness,” as “it is easier to die than to endure steadfastly a life of torment.” 

At this “vacuous commonplace” Werther’s indignation only intensifies. “You call that weakness? I beg of you, don’t be misled by appearances. A people groaning under the unbearable yoke of a tyrant, do you call them weak when they finally rise up and break their chains?” Before considering this argument, one must first answer Werther’s initial claim, which Albert fails to address. Werther is right to say that the men he (mis)calls rationalists— who are really conventionalists, defenders of the prevailing moral opinions of the regime they esteem (usually because they love ‘their own,’ unthinkingly and therefore not rationally at all)—typically do regard those who swerve from those opinions as defective, out of their minds for some reason or other. Such dissenters sometimes do achieve greatness, although (it must be added) usually they don’t, precisely because they really are as defective as their pious detractors say. What is needed is a criterion for greatness which distinguishes it from madness, vice, or folly. This is what Albert sees; his commonplace response isn’t entirely vacuous.

And so Werther proclaims a criterion for greatness, which seems to be freedom, freedom from the unbearable yoke of the tyrant. Where does that criterion come from? “Human nature, I continued has its limits: it can endure joy, sorrow, pain up to a certain degree, and it perishes the minute it is exceeded. Here, then, the question is not whether one is weak or strong but rather whether one can endure the measure of one’s suffering—be it moral or physical; and I find it just as odd to say that the man who takes his own life is a coward”—a moral weakling—as “it would be improper to call the man who dies from a malignant fever a coward.” Some passions overwhelm the human being, whether they be the joy in immersion in nature Werther once felt, or the despair he is now beginning to feel. This is the moral equivalent of the physical “sickness unto death,” when the natural “forces” of a human being are “so lamed that it is no longer able to recover.” For the mind, “look at a man within his limitations, the way impressions affect him, ideas become entrenched in him, until finally a growing passion robs him of all his powers of calm reflection and destroys him. It is futile for the composed, rational man to appraise the condition of the unhappy person, futile to cheer him up!” To Albert’s objection, that “an intelligent man” would not behave that way, Werther ripostes, “A man is a man, and the modicum of reason he might have counts for little or nothing when passion rages and the limits of human being press against him!” 

Undoubtedly so. But how does this justify the condition of the soul that causes its passions to become so powerful that they overwhelm the “modicum of reason”? And if reason is indeed only a modicum with most men, is law and convention not necessary to their well-being? As for the geniuses, how great are they, if they are ruled by passions, however powerful? That is, does reason (if not necessarily the calculating, self-regarding, unerotic rationalism of the Enlightenment) not rightly set the limits on passion in a human being, that is, a being in whom reason is the distinctive natural characteristic, not passion? Albert’s attempt to distinguish the intelligent man from the impassioned one has more weight, if abstracted from Albert’s own conventionalism. Even that conventionalism has its merits, given the lack of genius, the lack of greatness, in the vast majority of impassioned men. The real geniuses are the ones who see not only the limits of human nature, vis-à-vis the passions, but the grandeur of human nature, given the limits reason sets on the passions. In this, Werther sets himself against Goethe who, with fine irony, has his protagonist inveigh against authors who revise their books because such meddling loses the original poetic inspiration. 

Caught in this self-contradiction, this war with the nature of his own soul which he stages as a psychomachia of noble passion against unintelligent intellect, Werther asks, “Does it have to be this way, that whatever it is that makes a man blissfully happy in turn becomes the source of his misery?” He is now tormented by nature, no longer able to immerse himself in it. In love with supposed necessity, he criticizes the human illusion that “we govern the whole wide world,” when in fact we are only “so little.” “It is as if a curtain had been drawn back from my soul, and the spectacle of infinite life is transformed before my eyes into the abyss of an ever-open grave”—the Heraclitean sense that “everything passes,” that the river (whose torrents he had likened to the marvelous upsurge of genius) submerges everything, shattering it “on the rocks,” the death-dealers which alone are permanent. Now reversing his earlier sense of nature as the supreme harmony, he writes, “my heart is undermined by the destructive force that is concealed in the totality of nature; which has never created a thing that has not destroyed its neighbor or itself”; nature is an “eternally devouring, eternally regurgitating monster.” If nature is monstrous, then nature is unnatural, at least with regard to humans, whose feeble efforts to govern it are useless. When faithful Wilhelm sends him a better edition of Homer than the one he was using, Werther replies, “If my sickness could be cured, these people,” the heroes of Greek antiquity, “would cure it.” 

Self-reprimand doesn’t help, either. “Wretched creature! Are you not a fool! Aren’t you deluding yourself? What is the meaning of this raging, endless passion?” The answer: “Adieu! I see no end to this misery except the grave.” Making what he expects to be his final meeting with Lotte, he greets her little brothers and sisters with a Christlike, “Bring them to me,” although he has no power to redeem them, then tells her, “We will meet again, we will find each other, we will know each other among all the shapes” in the afterlife. She doesn’t take him seriously.

Suicide, not yet. Instead, he accedes to the sensible solution, going away in the employ of the ambassador, attempting to find solace in work. It works for a time, and he meets another kindred spirit, the “broad-minded” Count C., “who, even though he has so comprehensive a view” of things, “is not coldhearted, whose company radiates…much capacity for friendship and love”; “there is no joy in the world so true or heartwarming as seeing a great soul opening itself to one.” Still, a month later he complains that his employer “is the most exacting fool in the world,” “never satisfied with himself” and therefore “impossible to please”—the small-souled counterpart to Count C.’s greatness of soul. He blames Wilhelm for suggesting the notion of such employment, inflicting upon him as it does “the perfect misery, the boredom among these vile people on view here,” with “their thirst for rank,” always “looking to gain the advantage of one tiny step ahead of the other.” Rousseau-like, he chafes under “the disastrous social conditions” of rank. 

He then meets another woman, Fräulein B., whose “great soul, which shines out from her blue eyes,” reminds him of Lotte. “She longs to be away from the hubbub, and for many an hour we fantasize about rustic scenes of unalloyed bliss.” But when he stays too long at a party arranged by his friend and patron, the Count, failing to leave immediately after his social ‘betters’ have arrived, she can only pity him and then endure criticism from her aunt for having associated with such a boor. He offers his resignation, and it is accepted. With nowhere to go, and any chance of marrying Fräulein B. precluded, “I just want to be nearer to Lotte, that’s all”—Lotte, who has by now married Albert.

Upon returning to Wahlheim, he hears how the peasant boy who had fallen in love with the lady who had employed him “tried to take her by force; he did not know what had come over him, as God was his witness, his intentions toward her had always been honorable, and there was nothing he had desired more fervently than that she should marry him and spend her life with him.” She forgave him but her brother kicked him out of the house, not wanting his sister to marry anyone because he wanted his children to receive the family inheritance. In this, the reason for the themes of inheritance and childhood and their pairing becomes clearer. It is more than a question of possession and of possessiveness, although it is that. Inheritance is the human custom that ends childhood. The parent intends to extend his care for his child beyond his grave, yet at the same time the introduction of property disputes adulterates the love that engendered the children, ending their childhood innocence once and for all. In this case, it has also blocked the love between a man and a woman which might have issued in a new family.

As for adultery itself, Lotte “would have been happier with me than with him! Oh, he is not the man to fulfill all the desires of her heart”; “his heart does not beat sympathetically” when they read together, if they read together. And yet, “he loves her with all his soul, and what doesn’t that sort of love deserve?”—even if his soul is inferior to mine. “I am not the only one to whom this happens. All men are disappointed in their hopes, deceived by their expectations,” as he has seen when a local woman lost her first son and her husband failed to obtain his inheritance. Then again, “What if Albert were to die?” Is he really as happy with her as he seems? In all this, “Ossian has driven Homer from my heart,” the forlorn wanderer through storms replacing the courageous husband determined to return home. “Alas, this void! This dreadful void that I feel in my breast!—I often think: If you could press her to your heart just once, just once, the entire void would be filled.” But “I could often rend my breast and bash my brains out when I realize how little we can mean to one another.” His “feelings for her swallow everything” he possesses. For her part, Lotte “has reproached me for my excesses,” but with “Oh such charm and kindness,” thereby feeding them. In answer to another of Wilhelm’s entreaties, he confesses that religion does not console him: “Does not the Son of God himself say that those shall be with him whom the Father has given to him? Now, what if I have not been given?” And Jesus asked his Father, Why hast thou forsaken me?” He received no more answer than has Werther. “God in Heaven! Have You so designed man’s fate that they are happy only before they arrive at reason,” in childhood, “and after they lose it!”

“What is man, the celebrated demigod!”—the Homeric hero who can no longer serve as a model for his conduct. “Does he not lack strength precisely where he needs it most? And if he soars upward in joy or sinks down in sorrow,” as Werther had done, “will he not be arrested in both, just there, just the, brought back to dull, cold consciousness when he was longing to lose himself in the fullness of the infinite?” Horror of horrors: What if the ‘bourgeois’ are, in some sense, right? If what is called mediocrity really is moderation?

Enter the Editor, a third-person narrator new to the second edition Goethe published. At this point, “Indignation and displeasure became more and more deeply rooted in Werther’s soul,” he writes, “growing ever more tightly entangled and gradually taking possession of his entire being. The harmony of his mind was completely devastated, an internal heat and violence, which labored to confuse all his natural powers, produced the most repellant effects and finally left with nothing but an exhaustion from which he sought to rise with even greater anxiety than when he had struggled with all the woes of his past.” When Lotte left to visit her ill father, Werther followed her, guiltily imagining that “he had destroyed the beautiful relationship between Albert and his wife.” Meanwhile, the lovesick village peasant murdered the man who replaced him in the household of his beloved, explaining to the authorities that now “No one will have her, she won’t have anyone.” “Love and loyalty, the most beautiful of human sentiments, and turned into violence and murder,” precisely because love is exclusive, even more than a form of property-holding, but in Christianity real and secular alike a matter of ‘one flesh.’ He once had looked for something in between having and not-having, some way of having Lotte even while knowing she was engaged to another. He no longer believes that possible.

Stating the obvious, Lotte told him “It cannot go on this way,” begging him to “learn moderation,” to “be calm and sensible for just one moment,” to stop “deluding yourself” and “willfully destroying yourself.” But as Werther himself had argued to Wilhelm, moderation, prudence, self-knowledge, and self-preservation aren’t exactly things one can learn as if they were lessons out of a book. It is also true that, as a reader suspects, Lotte hadn’t quite learned those virtues, either. Alone, she acknowledged that Albert was the right man for her—calm and reliable, a faithful husband and someone who “would always be for her and her children.” But “Werther had grown so dear to her…. The secret longing of her heart was to keep him for herself; and at the same time she told herself that she could not, might not keep him; her pure, beautiful spirit, usually so light and able so easily to manage difficulties, felt the pressure of a melancholy to which the prospect of happiness is barred.” Given the fact that “the harmony of their hearts and minds had been so beautifully evident,” it would be surprising if she did not feel at least some of the same thwarted longing that he feels. Each drowns in the well of subjectivity, the fault indeed being not in the stars but in themselves.

When he visited her one last time, they read Ossian together, the passage that goes, “The time of my fading is near, the blast that shall scatter my leaves.” In despair, a “terrible resolve” overtook him; he did what the young peasant did, seizing her and embracing his beloved, finally doing what he had dreamed would be the only thing that would bring him happiness. She pushed him away and said his name “in the collected tone of the loftiest feeling,” “trembling with love and fury,” telling him that he will never see her again. She had finally exercised the virtues she had preached. 

Not so for Werther, who left, convinced that she loved him and ready to die. In an ecstasy of erotic madness, he soliloquized: “I shall go before you! go to my Father, to your Father. To Him I will lament, and He will comfort me until you come and I fly to meet you and hold you and stay with you in never-ending embraces before the countenance of the Infinite Being. I am not dreaming, I am not delirious! Close to the grave, I see more clearly. We shall be!” He sent a note to Albert, asking to borrow his pistols, and Albert complied, telling Lotte to take them down. Did he know, too, that it could not go on like this, fixing on this way to end it and implicating his wife in that plan? Their servant delivered the pistols and Werther wrote in his suicide note, “You, celestial spirit, you favor my decision, and you Lotte, are handing me the implement, you from whose hands I wished to receive my death, and ah! receive it now.” Husband and wife had collaborated in the suicide, and part of each of them knew it. When his dying body was discovered, a copy of G. E. Lessing’s tragedy, Emilia Galloti, lay open on his desk. Werther had misunderstood it. The play is a critique of ‘subjectivism,’ of the notion that a man is an artist even if he only ‘feels’ that he is, without being able either to paint or to draw. As it is, “no clergyman attended” Werther’s funeral. It seems unlikely that he would have wanted one there.

The modern tragedy is the tragedy of radical individualism. That is why writing one draws the passions of fear, its attendant anger, and pity out of the author, who risks instilling them in his readers, men as solitary as he. He unwittingly wrongs wrongly-ordered souls.

 

Note

1. Goldsmith’s Vicar tells the story of lost inheritance spoiling an idyllic country life, albeit with a happy ending. Werther tells the story of a confirmed inheritance and the idyllic country life consequent to it spoiled by the disordered soul of the inheritor. Elsewhere, Goethe said that the Vicar combines the figures of priest and king—if not prophet— in “one person”; again in contrast, Werther is neither priestly nor kingly; he cannot even rule himself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Virus in the Age of Madness. Steven B. Kennedy translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.

 

 

What shocked Bernard-Henri Lévy about the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 “was not the pandemic” itself—influenza pandemics also killed millions, in the last century—but “the very strange way we reacted this time around,” the way much of mankind succumbed to an “epidemic of fear”—indeed, to “the First World Fear.” “The entire planet—rich and poor alike, those with the resources to resist and those without—pounced on the idea of an unprecedented pandemic poised to eradicate the human race.” Not the physical-medical crisis but the attendant moral-political crisis disturbs him. Borrowing the language of Foucault, Lévy finds the chill of the “medical gaze,” which treats persons as bodies takes the hospital as a model for society itself, far graver than the fever caused by the virus.

An experienced ‘public intellectual,’ Lévy’s rhetorical approach can only be admired. Speaking primarily as a man of the Left to the Left, he repeatedly denounces U.S. President Donald Trump (“impossible and unhinged,” “irresponsible,” “hapless,” a man “trampling the Constitution,” “pulling dirty tricks,” and “light[ing] America on fire”—somewhere between Richard Nixon and a fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse). This will surely inoculate him against criticism from that flank, and much-needed that prophylactic is, because the argument he advances puts him far closer to Trump than it does to Trump’s opponent in the presidential election campaign. Lévy gives former Vice President Joseph Biden a kindly and shrewd pat on the shoulder, saying he’s conducted his campaign “with courage and a level head,” while consistently departing from the Democrat’s masked-up public persona and his clamp-down approach to civil-social discipline. 

With Trump, Lévy knows that the world of medical research, like all parts of the academic world, “is a Kampfplatz, a battlefield, a free-for-all no less messy than the one Immanuel Kant bemoaned in metaphysics.” (Well, admittedly, Trump would omit the learned references, but he’s been saying the same thing.) Like Trump, Lévy “know[s] that listening to the ones who know, if we are indeed talking about scientists, is tantamount to listening to a nonstop quarrel and, if the listeners is a government, to inviting Fireworks and Chaos to sit at the king’s table.” “The emperor has no clothes, even if he is a physician. Especially if he is a physician.” Because would-be physician-emperors would rule the political communities the way they rule their wards and operating rooms. “There is a doctrine of hygienics that goes something like this: health becomes an obsession; all social and political problems are reduced to infections that must be treated; and the will to cure becomes the paradigm of political action.” Unfortunately, “the effects of that doctrine can be horribly perverse,” as seen in the last century, when hygienics became eugenics.

Plato’s Socrates saw the problem, Lévy notes. In the Statesman, the interlocutors consider “passing on the physician the responsibility for leading the human flock if the divine pastor drops the ball.” After all, the physician will see “the structural analogy between the animal body and the civic body,” with the head serving as ruler of the one, the “leader” serving as ruler of the other; “the same word, epimeleia…designates the care owed to the first and the administration at work in the second.” Yet Socrates finally demurs. “Politics, he says, is an art that, since the retreat of the gods, deals with a chaotic, changing world, swept by storms and rudderless.” “Difficult times” cause for “citizens-guardians possessing the audacity and strength to think through, carve into stone, and proclaim legal ‘codes.'” Masters of the art of the deal, the politikoi exhibit not only Trumplike smarts but Trumplike decision and determination, evidently even to the point of issuing executive orders. Physicians “might well have extended the health emergency until hell froze over,” but, as we all know and as Lévy shrewdly passes over in silence, Trump has wanted to ‘open up the economy.’ Like Trump, and, belatedly, like French President Emmanuel Macron, it is best to heed “the Platonic recommendation to rely, simply, on the Republic”—not so much raw public opinion but public opinion as refined and enlarged by the people’s representatives. “The republican authorities have grasped that, though the physicians are real heroes in one essential arena, they are neither God the Father nor the archons of a city in the grip of a new plague.” Despite “public opinion,” which “clearly wanted to see medicine calling the shots” (at least in France), one really must avoid “an incestuous union of the political and medical powers, a union that would have been not only incestuous but fatal for both partners, according to Foucault” and not only Foucault, given the irony with which Socrates treats his own proposal to make philosophers kings. Can there be any doubt that President Trump would respond to a proposal to make kings of philosophers, or of physicians, with anything other than a mocking ‘tweet’?

Having shrewdly put himself on Trump’s side while maintaining his bona fides with his audience, Lévy devotes many more of his pages to criticisms of, well, his audience. He skewers those who find ‘good’ in the pandemic, which has left our great cities so peaceful and clean and provides a convenient tool for political agitators. “‘A warning’ from nature, said one, demanding a transition to a world less destructive of biodiversity. ‘An ultimatum,’ said another, from a mistreated Gaia whose patience had worn thin. And, from all of them, servility with respect to the virus” or, perhaps more precisely, a demand for servility with respect to their own proposed policies. Having come to prominence as a firm critic of Communist tyranny during the Cold War, author of the seminal Barbarism with a Human Face at a time when much of the French Left in particular and the European Left generally sought to appease it, Lévy sees in the calls to suspend the ‘world economy’ nothing better than “the old Marxist refrain of the final crisis of capitalism in her morning-after guise of collapsology, or one of the children’s diseases of socialism updated as disasterism.” These socialist “profiteers of the virus” look for a scapegoat, finding it (as usual) in capitalism. Lévy prefers prudence. “To the extent possible, we had to calculate the numbers of lives saved by shutting down the world and compare it with the number imperiled by the shutdown.” It is, after all, “important not to be intimidated by the ultimately false opposition between ‘life’ and ‘the economy,’ but to compare the cost, in lives, of the spread of the virus with the cost of the self-induced coma triggered in a plan that was transformed suddenly into a laboratory for a radical political experiment.” “The only way” to do that “was to launch a major democratic debate and to get into detail, not about diverting utopias concerning the world after, but about the concrete measures to be implemented here and now in the world during.” 

“This was the first time we had ever seen all of the critical minds in the far-left galaxy applaud a state of emergency.” (True enough in the West, perhaps, although in Russia, in China, and in many other places under Communist rule, states of emergency were routinized, excusing the extermination of innumerable “harmful insects,” as Lenin unsentimentally put it.) “All of my life I have fought against the trap of secular religiosity,” even as his distinguished predecessor Alexis de Tocqueville had done, contemplating the Hegelians, Marxists, and race theorists of his own time. 

When “confronted with obscurantism with a scientific face,” one should recall “two things.” First, “viruses are dumb; they are blind; they are not here to tell us their stories or to relay the stories of humanity’s bad shepherds”; hence “there is no ‘good use,’ no ‘societal lesson,’ no last judgment’ to be expected from a pandemic.” Second, medical questions and their implications for policy are “much murkier than we have been led to believe over the past few months.” Such questions and implications necessarily address not only the body but the human soul. And we are no longer so adept at considering matters of the soul as we once were.

For example, those who have welcomed the peace and quiet of pandemic life will quote Pascal: “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” Yes, but for Pascal quietude “was not an indulgence but a struggle.” Hobbies and yoga sessions were not what he had in mind. Following Paul the Apostle, Pascal said, “The self is hateful,” no many how many times one may chant ‘OM’ in search of serenity. Navel-gazing complacency is “indecent in the extreme,” insulting “to those who did not have a home to stay in” and affirming no real spiritual insights but instead orchestrating “a philharmonic of trivialities, minor pleasures, and drumrolls of well-tempered narcissism.” Such a pseudo-spiritual of epicureanism “flew in the face of Greek wisdom, which, from Aristotle on, held that man was a political animal.” It ignored that decidedly introverted ‘modern,’ René Descartes, who touched base with the moment of his cogito ergo sum only in order to fortify the “zest for the sciences, for medicine, for ethics… for intellectual speculation, for friendship, and for the world.” And it dismissed the ‘postmodern’ Edmund Husserl, who insisted that “consciousness is always conscious of something, that existence is rooted in intentionality, and that what is interesting about a given subject is not what he is but what he does and, in doing what he does, how he inhabits the world, shapes it, takes from it, and gives to it.” ‘Social distancing’? “Shaking hands was a fine gesture of civility,” a “sign of republican solidarity promoted by the American Revolution, the spirit of democracy,” and even the “peace-loving Quakers,” whom George Washington deemed useful American citizens, even if they refused to defend the republic in war. 

Neither genuinely philosophic nor genuinely political, our quietists fare no better under the gaze informed by Scripture. “Prophecy is inherently an act of exposure to another intelligence, and even a radically different one, since it is God’s.” The prophet “step[s] outside” of himself. He calls his people to do the same, to leave the comfortable servility of Egypt, to risk everything in a land God has promised for them. The example of prophecy has marked Jews ever since. “A liberal, universalist, humanist Jew” will “experience confinement with oneself only as a regrettably temporary state, one that, if it were to endure, would be starkly contrary to his vocation, which is to move toward his fellow men.” The Orthodox Jew, for his part, must “acquire a master, because there is no shaping of the self without a searing exposure to one who knows more than you”; “study is done in pairs, as philosophy was for Plato.” Torah study is war, and war is more than a tempest in the teapot of the ‘self.’ Contra Sartre, “hell is not other people, but the self,” confined as it is in its resentments, its envies, its sour isolation. The Muharal of Prague went even further, teaching that “hell is the body,” a trap for the spirit longing for freedom, a thing of “opaque matter” under “the sway of medical power.” On that note of Jewish neo-Platonism, Lévy deplores the oversight of the French, who took to hoarding food when news of the pandemic first appeared. “Few seemed shocked, at least in France, that books were not considered basic necessities,” that bodily nourishment seemed more important to a republican citizenry than “nourishment for the mind and the soul.”

The closing of churches and synagogues, museums and parks “and other sites of lay meditation in which humanity satisfies its uncountable noncommercializable spiritual needs” followed from the same mindset. “The sight of a sovereign Pope, heir to John Paul II’s ‘Be not afraid’ and a veteran practitioner of the eminently Catholic ritual of the blessing of the sick and afflicted in the slums of Buenos Aires, distancing himself from the flock, communicating only through the internet ordering that fonts of holy water be emptied, and performing the stations of the cross in the courtyard of the basilica facing an empty St. Peter’s Square” erased “the Jewish image of the Messiah waiting among the scrofulous beggars outside the gates of Rome” and forgets “Jesus’s healing of the leper.” Charles de Gaulle proved himself a better Catholic than the pope when visiting Tahiti in 1956, two years before assuming the presidency of the republic. Lévy remembers a news clip he saw as a child: De Gaulle’s “limousine is blocked by a procession of lepers. He gets out, shakes their hands, holds a child in his arms, hugs the organizer of the strange demonstration, says nothing, and continues on his way.”

Not only has the response of governments to the virus further abridged citizens’ liberty by collecting still more personal data “that everyone knows can be put to bad uses,” but “living in a perpetual state of alert and suspicion” undermines trust among those citizens, the trust that enables them to associate with one another, to resist government encroachments, to sustain republican regimes. This is “a life terrified of itself, gone to ground in its Kafkaesque burrow, which has become a penal colony,” a life “in which one accepts, with enthusiasm or resignation the transformation of the welfare state into the surveillance state,” already far advanced in communist China, with Europe not too far behind. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract is being slowly but surely replaced by a life contract inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and the ‘panopticon’ of the surveillance state.” This can only cause “a profound break… with all the wisdom of the world, notably but by no means exclusively Jewish,” which says “that a life is not a life if it is merely life.” Books are basic necessities, and the Book of Books joins with the books of the philosophers in telling us “that humanity is never identity in and for itself, never reducible to itself,” but thrives “only if…it leaves the confinement that is life in its native state.” In Biblical terms, to bow down before the virus is idolatry, worship of the Baal of the twenty-first century. Under that dispensation, the lion will indeed lie down with the lamb—on “an animal farm” ruled by tyrants underneath the figurehead king of terrors, the newly-crowned virus.

Idolatry means worship of man-made things. “Ironclad egoism” undergirds “COVID-inspired moralism.” Even the Left, perhaps especially the Left, should understand that the policies in place in most countries hardly conduce to greater civil-social and political equality. The Islamic State, Erdogan of Turkey, Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China all have taken the distraction caused by the virus as an opportunity to enhance their own powers at home and abroad. America withdraws from the world, leaving it to the likes of them. The enemies of the United States, “which are the enemies of freedom, are crashing through the world as if America no longer counts for anything, carries no weight, no longer exists.” Without the United States, “the globalization of the twenty-first century will be Chinese or will not happen at all.” 

Against that harsh prospect, Lévy looks not to Karl Marx or Carl Schmitt but to the “somber but committed souls who had fought the beast with bare hands” in the Spanish Civil War—the American Ernest Hemingway, France’s André Malraux. “They were, in our eyes, the most admirable of men because they were both present in the world and present in words, combining the art of the fighter with that of the poet.” They “gave us the weapons and the tools not to remake [the world], but to repair it,” resisting “the twin villainy of accepting the status quo and pretending to ‘cure’ it.” “It was under their hand that we went to Biafra, to the Vietnamese boat people, to Bangladesh”—as Malraux himself had wanted to do, at the end of his life. 

Lévy is right to take the engagé intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s as his forebears. Neither quite a philosopher nor quite a Talmudist, he is nonetheless a real ‘intellectual,’ familiar to Americans since Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the British since Thomas Carlyle—a lay preacher, a rhetorician who does not aim merely at self-aggrandizement, smart enough but too honorable for sophistry, although primed for oratorical exaggeration when hammering a point home. Unlike so many among his contemporaries, he has never been gulled by ideology—the characteristic deformation professionelle of his kind. He artfully both courts and resists chattering-class fashions, while in the end standing firmly for the rights inherent in human beings, rights we owe (to give it an old-fashioned formulation) to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.

 

 

 

 

William Shakespeare: All’s Well That Ends Well.

 

The young Count Bertram of Rousillon, his mother the Countess, Helena (a gentlewoman and ward of the Countess), and elderly Lord Lafeu converse in the Count’s palace. A feature of a comedy not a ‘history play,’ ‘Rousillon’ isn’t exactly the real Roussillon. Claimed by Charlemagne and his heirs among the French kings during the Middle Ages, by Shakespeare’s time the real Roussillon had been ruled by the Spanish Hapsburgs since 1516 and would remain under their rule until the French king obtained it in the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, following a long war. There hadn’t been a count of Roussillon since the twelfth century. Shakespeare’s ‘Rousillon’ anticipates the future French conquest in the sense that the Count in his play owes allegiance to France. Shakespeare’s ‘Rousillon’ serves the purposes of comic semi-fiction.

As so often in Shakespeare, the play doesn’t begin comically. The Count has been called to the King’s court, and his widowed mother regrets it: “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband” (I.i.3). The play begins with a paradox—delivery, a metaphor for birth, described in funereal terms. Lafeu attempts to console her, and her departing son, by saying that the King’s virtue will make of the King a husband to her and a father to the young Count. But the King’s kind step-fatherly status won’t last long, it seems; he is mortally ill; his physicians can do nothing for him. The Countess believes that Helena’s father, a physician “whose skill was almost as great as his honesty,” could have prolonged the King’s life “so far” that he “would have made nature immortal” (I.i.17-18). But this physician evidently could not heal himself, as he too has died, leaving Helena under the Countess’s protection. Lafeu knew the man, saying, “he was skillful enough to have liv’d still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality” (I.i.26-27). Lafeu discreetly reminds the Countess of the limits of what we now call ‘scientific’ knowledge, which can indeed be set up against mortality but not eternally. God might make nature immortal, but physicians cannot.

The Countess claims another kind of knowledge, moral knowledge. Helena has inherited honesty and, more generally, goodness from her father. “The remembrance of her father never approaches her heart but the tyranny of her sorrows takes all livelihood from her cheek” (I.i.43-44). Perhaps alerted by the word “tyranny,” Lafeu makes bold to correct the Countess and also her protégé. “Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead: excessive grief the enemy to the living” (I.i.48-49). 

Bertram interrupts their philosophizing. “Madam, I desire your holy wishes” (I.i.52). His mother blesses him, exhorting him to “succeed thy father in manners, as in shape!” (I.i.54-55). “Thy blood and virtue / Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness / Share with thy birthright!” (I.i.55-57). That is, a young aristocrat’s spirited “blood,” which elevates him above commoners, may rival his moral virtue as he reaches the age of self-rule. Accordingly, she gives him moral advice that will strengthen his virtue against his “blood,” if he chooses to follow it: “Love all, trust a few, / Do wrong to none; be able for thine enemy / Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend / Under thy own life’s key; be check’d for silence, / But never tax’d for speech. What heaven more will, / That thee may furnish, and my prayers pluck down, / Fall on thy head!” (I.i.57-62) Reduced to simple English, her advice is sound. Christianity commands us to love all, but to trust God; humans may be trusted provisionally, after testing. Be just, and match your enemy’s power but not his customs, his habits—the practices that make him your enemy. Guard your friend with your life. Speak but do not chatter. Beyond that, God will do as He will do, and I shall pray that His blessings will fall upon you.

Countess, Count, and Lafeu depart, leaving Helena alone. We learn that in truth her sentiments align with Lafeu’s wise precept: she “think[s] not on my father” (I.i.73). “I have forgot him; my imagination / Carries no favor in’t but Bertram’s” (I.i.76-77). Her tears and her pallor are for his departure to the royal court, not for her father’s departure from this earth, six months earlier. In her mind she has followed the Biblical injunction to leave her father and join with her husband, but as with ‘Rousillon’ itself, imagination isn’t reality. Nor is it likely to become reality, as Count Bertram is far “above me,” a commoner, like a star above the earth (I.i.81). Her “blood” does not equal his. For this reason, her love, like the funereal “delivery” of the Count to the King by the Countess, contradicts itself. “Th’ ambition in my love thus plagues itself: / The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love” (I.i.84-85). Helena initially takes the “blood” of aristocratic birth to be a part of nature; aristocrats are a different ‘species’ than commoners, and to contradict nature only invites nature to enforce this natural limit by killing the thing which contradicts it. Like her father, Helena has contracted an illness that threatens to be fatal, although in her case she might cure herself by refusing to dream of marrying above her putatively natural limit. Her own nature, however, makes that supremely difficult for her to do, as she loves him.

The question, then, is, what is her natural limit? Should she love him? Is social and political rank more natural than virtue? Is her beloved’s virtue worthy of her love? Is her virtue worthy of his love? She admits to herself that she loves him for his body, not his soul—for “his arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls” (I.i.88). She knows she indulges in “idolatrous fancy,” idolatry being precisely devotion to bodies instead of souls and worse, the divinization of the inanimate (I.i.91). She calls into question her own virtue, which is now tested.

Tested in the person of Parolles, Count Bertram’s attendant. Helena says, “I love [Parolles] for his sake”—for Bertram’s sake—yet “I know him a notorious liar” and “think him a great fool, soley a coward” (I.i.93-95). The pun is apt: Parolles’ soul will indeed prove entirely pusillanimous. Parolles’ name means “speech”—highly suspect speech, in Helena’s opinion; in this she follows the Countess’ admonition about the right and wrong use of speech and silence. Parolles immediately proves himself an ironist, addressing her as “fair queen” (I.i.100)—with a likely pun on ‘queen’ as ‘whore,’ a false wish that has fathered the evil thought. He proceeds impudently but not Socratically, asking if she’s “meditating on virginity” (I.i.105). In a way she has been, so she answers by taking up his theme while rejecting his imputation, replying, “Man is enemy to virginity; how may we barricade it against him?” (I.i.107-08). After some punning and suggestive badinage, Parolles speaks his mind: “It is not politic in the commonwealth of nature to preserve virginity. Loss of virginity is rational increase; and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost. That you were made of is metal to make virgins. Virginity by being once lost may be ten times found; by being ever kept, it is ever lost. ‘Tis too cold a companion; away with’t,” being “against the rule of nature” (I.i.120-125, 127). All true enough. Scarcely against perpetual virginity, Helena then asks, now speaking her mind, how might a woman “lose [virginity] to her own liking?” (I.i.141). Parolles doesn’t answer her question, instead urging her to abandon her virginity in haste. 

With perfect equanimity, Helena doesn’t respond to his suggestion, instead turning the conversation to Parolles’ “master” (I.i.154). She worries that when he gets to the King’s court he’ll have “a thousand loves” and therefore a mind whose attention will divide itself in many directions, from friends to enemies and, most pertinently in her own mind, “a mistress,” “a traitress,” and “a dear” (I.i.154-58). He will become self-contradictory, a man of “humble ambition” and “proud humility,” a being of “jarring concord” and “discord dulcet” and “sweet disaster”—in sum, no fit master at all (I.i.159-61). She has given Parolles every reason to suspect that she worries less that the Count will be a fit master for him as that she can never be a fit mistress for his master. The arrival of a page, advising him of his master’s summons to accompany him to the King’s court, has the welcome effect of removing Parolles from her presence and thereby rescuing her from any further unwanted advances. In their farewells she distracts him by ridiculing his self-proclaimed warlikeness, to which he can only rejoin that he intends to “naturalize” her upon his return (I.i.195), unless she gets herself “a good husband” before then (I.i.200-01). Indeed, she will try.

Helena’s dialogue with oily Parolles, her only true rival for the Count’s affections, has roused her fighting spirit. Alone again, she no longer mopes over impossibility of reaching to the star that is her beloved. The stars do not rule us. “The fated sky / Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull / Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.” (I.i.203-05). The power that “mounts my love so high,” enabling me to see him even when he isn’t here, also enables me to distinguish fortune from nature (I.i.206). The distance between us is a matter of fortune, a thing of the fated sky, but nature enables her not only to imagine but to think. “Who ever strove / To show her merit that did miss her love?” (I.i.212-13). I know how to cure the King’s disease, and therefore can justify my own presence in his Court.  

At the Court, in Paris, the King of France has made a geopolitical decision. Two Tuscan city-states are at war—Florence and Siena. And indeed they were, throughout the decade of the 1550s. At that time, France was resisting the ambitions of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who was also Charles I of Spain. The Hapsburgs ruled Roussillon, although the native Catalans remained restive under their rule. In search of allies, France sided with the Lutherans in Germany and the Ottomans; in 1555 Pope Paul IV tilted toward France, ruining the Hapsburgs’ hopes for a worldwide empire. In the following year, Charles divided his kingdom between the Spanish Hapsburgs (headed by his son, Philip II) and the Austrian Hapsburgs (headed by Charles’s brother, Ferdinand). Siena would lose its war with Florence and be surrendered to Spain, Florence’s ally.

In the play, the French King knows he will receive a request from his cousin, the Austrian Hapsburg monarch, to deny aid to Florence. This means that the Austrian Hapsburgs are indirectly opposing the ambitions of the Spanish Hapsburgs. The King, who must know that many of the residents of Siena are of French origin, intends to go along with his cousin’s request, but, hedging his bet, will allow French gentlemen to fight on either side, as they choose. As one of the King’s attendants observes, this “may well serve / A nursery to our gentry, who are sick / For breathing and exploit” (I.ii.15-17). That is, the young aristocrats grow restive; abroad, they will hone their battle skills against foreigners and (it might be thought) not against the King at home; those who survive will return better officers in the army of France. 

Count Bertram, Parolles, and Lafeu arrive at the King’s Court. In terms of the history of the time, this is anomalous not only because there were no more Roussillonian counts but because Roussillon was ruled by the Hapsburgs, owing no allegiance to France and indeed forming part of Spain, France’s rival. However, it may be that these men, all of whose names are French and therefore would number among the substantial French population of Roussillon (as well as ‘Rousillon’) do feel stronger loyalty to the King of France than to any Hapsburg.

The King greets the young Count cordially but with prudent caution. He is no Helena, his judgment swayed by physical appearance. “Youth, thou bear’st thy father’s face,” a face well formed by “frank nature”—the word “frank” meaning both vigorous and Frankish, French (I.ii.19-20). Nature is “curious”—that is, careful—never working “in haste”; that is why his face is so “well compos’d” (I.ii.20-21). But the King knows that a face is only a face. “Thy father’s moral parts / Mayst thou inherit too!” he hopes (I.i..21-22). Having served in battle with the Count’s father, the King judges him as having been “Discipled of the bravest” (I.ii.28); his wit was equal to today’s “young lords,” but unlike them he exhibited neither “contempt nor bitterness” (I.ii.33,36). “His honor, / Clock to itself, knew the true minute when / Exception bid him speak, and at this time / His tongue obey’d his hand” (I.ii.38-41). In all this, and especially in “his humility,” he “might be a copy to these younger times” (I.ii.44-46). Merely speaking of him is medicine to the ailing King; “it much repairs me” (I.ii.30), even as his example, if followed by young French aristocrats, would considerably improve them and repair France. Unfortunately, the “judgments” of today’s young are often “mere fathers of their garments,” and their “constancies / Expire before their fashions” (I.ii.61-63). Finally, the memory of the long-lived Count reminds the King of the Count’s physician, Helena’s father, who might have cured the King, had he still lived.

Back at the Count’s palace in Rousillon, the palace clown, Lavache, asks the Countess’s blessing to marry Isbel, a commoner lass with a regal Spanish name. “I am driven on by the flesh” (I.iii.28), and as a sinner “I do marry that I may repent” (I.iii.35-36), as marriage is a sacrament. What is more, marriage may gain him friends, which he has not now. And if cuckolded, why then he will profit, as the lover will cherish his wife, who according to the Christian teaching is of ‘one flesh’ with himself. Cuckoldry unites even Puritans and Catholics, “howsome’er their hearts are sever’d in religion, their heads are one” because their cuckholds’ horns tangle together like jousting deer in a herd. He even has a ballad to celebrate the thought: “Your marriage comes by destiny, / Your cuckoo sings by kind” (I.iii.59-60). Marriage may be destined but cuckoldry is natural; destiny is really chance, as the odds of drawing a good woman in the marriage lottery are, he estimates, one in ten. “La Vache!” in French slang is an expression of astonishment, as in the English phrase immortalized in America by Phil Rizzuto, ‘Holy Cow!’ Offended and amused at this perpetually surprising man, the Countess sends him to fetch Helena. Before he goes, Lavache compares her to Helen of Troy, whose “fair face” may have caused the Greeks to sack Troy, after the young Trojan prince, Paris, had seduced her and carried her off from her husband, King Menelaus of Sparta (I.iii.67). But this Helen has already resisted the advances of Parolles, although she does intend to go to Paris.

The palace steward reports that he overheard Helena talking to herself about her love for Bertram. The Countess is not surprised, and is in fact pleased, regarding the nature of Helena to be sound. Helena understands her nature to be the nature of youth, when “love’s strong passion is impress’d” (I.iii.124). The Countess calls her in and teases her by saying, “I am a mother to you,” knowing that if she really were Helena’s mother Bertram would be the girl’s brother, and unmarriageable (I.iii.128). It takes some doing, but she extracts the confession, “I love your son” (I.iii.185). Unworthy of him by convention, by social standing, “I follow him not / By any token of presumptuous suit, / Nor would I have him till I do deserve him,” but I “never know how that desert should be,” and so “love in vain” (I.iii.188-92). Why then do you intend to go to Paris and the King’s Court? Because “my father left me some prescriptions / Of rare and prov’d effects, such as his reading / And manifest experience had collected / For general sovereignty” (I.iii.212-15). Among these is a remedy that can cure the King. In curing the King, she might prove herself worthy of the Count. The Countess blesses her mission, possibly suspecting the young lady’s ulterior motive, and approving it.

In Paris, the King bids farewell to the young and older lords who are off to the Tuscan war; in victory, he assures them, they will be rewarded. “See that you come / Not to woo honor, but to wed it,” so that “fame may cry you aloud” (II.i.14-15,17). And beware “the girls of Italy,” who may make you “captives before you serve” (II.i.22). To his indignity, Bertram is judged too young to go. Parolles urges him to disobey, to “steal away bravely” (II.i.29), and Bertram determines do it, “though the devil lead the measure,” as Parolles somewhat self-revealingly intones.

The King next receives a different kind of rhetorician, one who would persuade him to be saved, not hazarded. Telling him that the esteemed physician Gerard de Narbon was her father, Helena describes the medicine he had, which can cure his illness. The King doubts this, since his own “most learned doctors” have failed, concluding “that laboring art can never ransom nature / From her inaidable estate” (II.i.115). He knows the peril he faces, and also knows that she has “no art,” only a lesser sort of knowledge passed down from her good father (II.i.132). True, Helena replies, but “what I can do can do no hurt to try, / Since you set up your rest ‘gainst remedy” (II.i.133-34). More, “He that of greatest works is finisher / Oft does them by the weakest minister” (II.i.135-36). Unlike Parolles, Helena appeals to reason—the medicine can do no harm to a dying man—and piety—the God who can make all things end well can readily pour his through a weak vessel. What is more, God is not only omnipotent but all-knowing; therefore, “Of heaven, not me, make an experiment” (II.i.153). I am willing to make it, on pain of death; if I fail, “with vilest torture let my life be ended” (II.i.173). It may well be that her faith is in nature, in the medicine, that her rhetoric of piety originates only from an intention to counteract the King’s skepticism concerning her competence, but that is still more solid, and undoubtedly better-intentioned, than the rhetoric of Parolles, which is mere verbiage. 

She has persuaded the King. “Methinks in thee some blessed spirit doth speak / His powerful sound within an organ weak; / And what impossibility would slay / In common sense, sense saves another way” (II.i.174-77)—reasoning founded on uncommon premises also persuades. He is especially impressed with her Christlike willingness to sacrifice her life after torture: “Sweet practiser, thy physic I will try, / That ministers thine own death if I die” (II.184-85). He hasn’t reckoned on the serpentine prudence Christ commends along with dovelike innocence. “If I help,” Helena ventures, “what do you promise me?” (II.i.188). And will you “make it even,” repay my life-saving service to you with something equally vital to me? The King agrees. Very well: if my medicine cures you, “Thou shalt give me with thy kingly hand / What husband in thy power I will command” (II.i.192-93)—aside from a man of French royal blood, she assures him. The King again agrees.

Comic piety enters in, in a more obvious way, in dialogue between the Countess and her Clown. The Countess has a mission for him. “I shall now put you to the height of your breeding,” she says (II.ii.1). “I will show myself highly fed and lowly taught,” he promises, anticipating that she will send him to the King’s Court (II.ii.3). The Countess demands to know what “makes you special,” to suppose that he would have business there (II.ii.5). Why, because “I have an answer will serve all men,” the highest as well as the lowest (II.ii.14). You mean “your answer [will] serve all questions,” “an answer of such fitness for all questions?” the Countess inquires (II.ii.18,27). But of course, and he invites her to try him with questions. He answers each with “O Lord, sir!” But what if your impudence leads to your whipping? “I ne’er had worse luck in my life in my ‘O Lord, sir!’ I see things may serve long, but not serve ever.” (II.ii.52-53). Not all appeals to God will answer all questions, especially if the appeal provokes corporal punishment. In this, the Clown is less than Christlike, although not lacking in prudence, either. The irony is that the Countess does have business for him in the King’s Court, namely, to deliver a letter to Helena, for whom she continues to care and whom she will continue to advise.

There, Helena’s cure has worked, and the remaining personages in the palace marvel at it. Pious Lafeu remarks, “They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern”—commonplace—and “familiar things supernatural and causeless” (II.iii.1-3). This causes us “to make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear (II.iii.3-5). This, Bertram and Parolles concede (Parolles a bit too volubly), puts into question the authority of the great physicians Galen and Paracelsus. Helena and the audience know that the fated sky gives us free scope, and evidently so does God, since the King’s cure came from nature, carefully searched by man.

The King in his grace, and according to his contract, grants Helena her choice of bachelors, one of which she takes to be the cure of her own illness, her love-sickness. “This is the man,” she says, indicating Bertram, in an echo of the Gospel announcement of our Savior (II.iii.102). Bertram wants none of it. “Your Highness, / In such a business give me leave to use / The help of mine own eyes” (II.iii.104-06). In this he reveals his rebellious character to the King, apparently preferring his natural judgment to the King’s obligation, but in fact objecting to her inferior social standing (“A poor physician’s daughter my wife! Disdain / Rather corrupt me ever!”) (II.iii.113-14). 

But the King is the King. He can exalt those of low degree, grant noble status to Helena. It is, after all, only a convention, and one within his power to mend. More seriously, he continues, you mistakenly rate convention over nature. “Strange it is that our bloods, / Of color, weight, and heat, pour’d all together, / Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off / In differences so mighty” (II.iii.116-19). In nature there is no such thing as ‘blue’ blood. “If she be / All that is virtuous—save what thou dislik’st, / A poor physician’s daughter—thou dislik’st / Of virtue for the name; but do not so.” (II.iii.119-22). 

Why not? “From lowest place when virtuous things proceed, / The place is dignified by the doer’s deed; / Where great additions swell’s, and virtue none, / It is a dropsied honor.” (II.iii.123-26). Being “young, wise, and fair,” Helena is heir to nature, and her natural virtues “breed honor” (II.iii.129-131). To lack virtue is to dishonor honorable parent, and virtue exhibits itself in acts; “the mere word’s a slave,” a “lying trophy”—as Parolles would rather not believe, and as Bertram misleads himself insofar as he follows Parolles’ advice (II.iii.135,137). “If thou canst like this creature as a maid, / I can create the rest. Virtue and she / Is her own dower; honor and wealth from me.” (II.iii.140-42). 

It is an irrefutable argument, but Bertram rejects it: “I cannot love her, nor will strive to do’t” (II.iii.143). In invoking his own honor as a count, Bertram only provokes the King to invoke his own greater honor. “My honor’s at the stake; which to defeat, / I must produce my power.” (II.iii.147-48). Bertram quickly seems to yield, and the King marries them on the spot.

Bertram remains obdurate in thought if obedient in action. Married, he determines to go to the wars “and never bed her,” never consummate the marriage (II.iii.266). Parolles, unchastened by a severe scolding by Lafeu, presses him on, offering his version of practical wisdom: “A young man married is a man that’s marr’d. / Therefore away, and leave her bravely; go, / The King has done you wrong.” (II.iii.291-93). He goes next to Helena to inform her that her husband will depart tonight “on very serious business” (II.iv.38). She contents herself to say only, “On everything I wait upon his will” (II.iv.52).

In the struggle for Bertram’s mind and heart, and thus his will and actions, Parolles seems to have won, twice calling Bertram his “sweetheart” (II.iii.261,264). Just before his departure Bertram, tells the dismayed Lafeu that Parolles is “very great in knowledge, and accordingly valiant” (II.v.6-7). On the contrary, the elderly lord insists, in front of Parolles, Parolles is a liar and a coward. “There can be no kernel in this light nut the soul of this man is his clothes; trust him not in matter of heavy consequence” (II.v.41-43), such as the war you are about to fight in. He walks away, Helena walks in, and Bertram refuses to kiss her goodbye—one last act of contempt, expressive of his mind and heart.

In Florence, the Duke receives two French lords, who head a troop of soldiers. They are brothers, the captains Dumain. As ‘Parolles’ means speech, words, ‘du main’ means ‘of the hand’; these are men of deeds, not words. Given that “the fundamental reasons of this war” strike the lords as “holy,” the Duke wonders why “our cousin France” does not support him (III.i.2,4). For reasons of state, the lords cannot disclose the reasoning of the King, who prefers not to offend his other cousin, the Austrian monarch who opposes Florence. They content themselves to observe that the young French lords, “that surfeit on their ease” (like the French King, they’ve been described as diseased), “will day by day / Come here for physic” (III.i.17-18). When Bertram arrives a short time later, the Duke makes him the general of his cavalry, whereupon the young Count swears by “Great Mars” to “make me but like my thoughts,” that “I shall prove / A lover of thy drum, hater of love” (III.iii.9-11). Indeed, he has already written to his mother to tell her that while he has deferred to the French King’s command to marry Helena he will never consummate the marriage and instead has gone to war.

The Countess is not amused. “This is not well,” she tells the Clown, when her “rash and unbridled boy” takes it upon himself “to fly the favors of so good a king,” angering him “by misprizing… a maid too virtuous / For the contempt of empire” (III.ii.26-27,29-30). Bertram has gone so far as to lay down a sort of love-test for the woman who is already his bride: If she can remove the ring from his finger, “which shall never come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband; but in such a ‘then’ I write ‘never'” (III.ii.55-58). The Countess blames her son’s corruption on Parolles, “a very tainted fellow and full of wickedness” (III.ii.85). My son “can never win” on the battlefield “the honor that he loses” in turning his back on his King and his wife (III.ii.92-93). 

Faced with an apparently impossible challenge, Helena first prays (and not to Mars) that her husband will survive the war, feeling guilty at the thought that she has caused him to go (which is not true) and risk his life. She thinks that if she now leaves France he will return to it, and to safely; in this, her love is selfless, a desire for what is good for him. She writes to the Countess, announcing her intention to set out on her own mission as a pilgrim to the shrine of Saint Jaques le Grand “with sainted vow my faults to have amended” (III.iv.7). Bertram “is too good and fair for death and me; / Whom I myself embrace to set him free” (III.iv.16-17). Upon reading this intention in Helena’s letter, the Countess can only hope that this will indeed induce her son to return, and for Helena then to reverse her course and return as well. 

It turns out that Helena will soon form other plans, if indeed she hadn’t already done so at the time she wrote her farewell letter to the Countess. As before, she does not intend entirely to leave matters up to God. She heads not for the saint’s shrine, west of Rousillon, but in exactly the opposite direction, to Florence. Outside that city, the elderly Widow Capilet, her daughter Diana, and their friend Mariana converse. Parolles has been courting Mariana, who rightly regards him as “a filthy officer” unworthy of her attention (III.v.15). She warns Diana against both Parolles and Bertram, whose words in her judgment are only “engines of lust” (III.v.18). Diana, named after the chaste goddess of the hunt, assures her: “You shall not need to fear me” (III.v.26). Helena approaches them, ostensibly on the way to the shrine, and the widow invites her to lodge at her house. The lady also asks if she knows Count Rousillon and expresses her pity for his new wife, as the Count has been courting Diana, rather in contradiction to his vow to Mars, not to mention his wedding vow. Not knowing that she is speaking with that wife, the Widow suggests that Diana may be able to do the wronged woman “a shrewd turn” (III.v.64). 

With perfect comic timing, Bertram and Parolles appear, at the head of the army—Parolles in the unheroic role of drummer. Playing along with her disguise, Helena asks her companions which one is “the Frenchman,” that is, the Count. Diana points him out, asking “Is’t not a handsome gentleman?” (III.v.77). “I like him well,” Helena admits; “‘Tis pity he is not honest,” Diana ripostes, not intending to wound anything better than the Count’s reputation. As for Parolles, “Were I his lady / I would poison that vile rascal” (III.v.81). The men march past, the women retire to the Widow’s house.

Encamped in front of Florence, the French lords warn Bertram of Parolles. “He’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality worthy your lordship’s entertainment” (III.vi.8-11). Bertram agrees to test him with a task less daunting than the one he assigned his wife. Parolles lost his drum during Florence’s victorious battle with the Sejoys and has vowed to recover it. Let him try, but have him intercepted by a troop of Florentines; they will pretend to be Sejoys and interrogate him. “Be but your lordship present at his examination,” at which Parolles will be blindfolded; “if he do not, for the promise of his life and in the highest compulsion of base fear, offer to betray you and deliver all the intelligence in his power against you, and that with the divine forfeit of his soul upon oath, never trust my judgment in anything” (III.vi.23-28). Having settled on this plan, Bertram confides to one of the lords that the fair Diana, though “wondrous cold”—having returned his love-letters—will receive a return visit from him (III.vi.103). The lord is eager to come with him and look her over.

The women will be ready for them. Helena admits to the Widow that Bertram is her husband. She enlists the lady’s help. Since the Count “woos your daughter,” let her consent to his suit but demand his ring as a token of his love (III.vii.17). This is nothing more than a “lawful” plot, since your daughter will then deliver the ring to me and “herself most chastely absent,” as her namesake the goddess would do (III.vii.33). With the ring in her possession, Helena will then be able to consummate her marriage in a dark bedroom. Her husband will intend wickedly while acting lawfully, prey to his wife’s noble deception. 

The deceptive plot Bertram is in on proceeds as planned, in Bertram’s absence. On orders from the Second Lord, the men who seize Parolles will speak gibberish, nonsense words that Mr. Words, Mr. Speech, cannot understand. One soldier will act as ‘translator.’ During the stakeout, the men hear Parolles talking to himself, trying to find the words with which he can cover his failure to recover his drum. He wishes he hadn’t promised to retrieve it in the first place. “I find my tongue is too foolhardy; but my heart hath the fear of Mars before, and of his creatures, not daring the reports of my tongue” (IV.i.28-29). He has lied not only to others but even to himself: “What the devil should move me to undertake the recovery of this drum, being not ignorant of the impossibility, and knowing I had no such purpose?” (IV.i.31-33). The Second Lord wonders, “Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?” (IV.i.41). It is. Clever but imprudent, Parolles out-talks himself, deceiving himself more than he deceives anyone other than those (like Bertram) whom he tells what they want to hear. Seized by men who evidently speak some foreign language he doesn’t know, Parolles exclaims, “I shall lose my life for want of language,” although he knows five languages (IV.i.66). For the man who depends upon mere words alone, there are not always words enough; Shakespeare himself was not only a playwright but an actor. “O, let me live,” Parolles pleads with his captors, through the ‘translator,’ “and all the secrets of our camp I’ll show, / their force, their purpose” (IV.i.80-82). The Second Lord considers him a woodcock, a bird easily trapped, synonymous with a fool, a dupe. The con artist is a fool; in trying to fool others with words he won’t live up to, he ends by fooling himself with words he can’t live up to, and getting fooled by others with words that mean nothing at all.

Meanwhile, Bertram is pursuing his other, romantic, plot. At the Widow Capilet’s house, he tries Diana with Parollian sophistries. “You should be as your mother was / When your sweet self was got” (IV.ii.9-10). “She was then honest,” Diana says, irrefutably (IV.ii.11), adding, “My mother did but duty; such, my lord, / As you owe to your wife” (IV.ii.12-13). Not so, the Count replies: “I was compell’d to her, but I love thee” (IV.ii.15). He vows loyalty based upon that loving consent. Diana ventures to doubt his honesty. “Be not so holy cruel,” Bertram pleads, for “love is holy” and I am in love with you (IV.ii.33). Pretending to yield, the lady demands the ring, which he will lend her, not give her, as it is an heirloom “which were the greatest obloquy i’ th’ world / In me to lose” (IV.ii.44). Yes, well, “Mine honor’s such a ring,” and my chastity “the jewel of our house,” the “greatest obloquy i’ th’ world / In me to lose,” the lady rejoins. At this Bertram gives up: “Here, take my ring; / My house, mine honor, yea, my life, be thine; / And I’ll be bid by thee” (IV.51-53). In mock betrothal, she gives him a ring off her own finger in exchange; it is really Helena’s ring, given her by the King as a marriage gift.

Springing the trap, she tells him to visit her bedroom at midnight, but to stay absolutely silent. I shall return your ring later on, with an explanation for this strange lack of speech among lovers, which we know is necessary because it will be Helena in the bed. The required silence is not only necessary but fitting. The problem with Bertram and Parolles is that they talk too much. The plot against Parolles takes advantage of that. The plot against Bertram requires him to act silently in a good way, if with bad intent. If Judaism is said to be a religion of law and outward compliance to it, and Christian a religion of release from the consequences of bad actions with the insistence on right intentions, Helena’s plot executes her rightful intention with respect to Bertram while duping him into acting in accordance with the law, against his own wrongful intention. After he leaves, Helena reflects that Mother told me men talk and act this way; quite understandably, she resolves to “live and die a maid” (IV.ii.74).

Back in the Florentine camp, the French lords have learned that a peace has been concluded. The lords discuss Bertram, who has now received the letter of reprimand from the Countess. “There is something in’t that stings his nature,” the First Lord remarks; “for on the reading it he chang’d almost into another man,” rather as conversion to Christianity changes a sinner into a new man (IV.iii.2-3). This is just, the Second Lord says, as “he has much worthy blame laid upon him for shaking off so good a wife and so sweet a lady,” especially by so incurring “the everlasting displeasure of the King,” the First Lord adds. (IV.iii.5-7). Worse, he has “perverted a young gentlewoman here in Florence,” giving her his ring; worst of all, he has caused his wife to die of grief (one of the lords has heard) at Saint Jaques le Grand. “I am heartily sorry that he’ll be glad of this,” the First Lord laments (IV.iii.60); “how mightily some times we drown our gain in tears!” (IV.iii.63-64). 

Despite his courage on the battlefield, in love Bertram is as much a traitor as Parolles, and the Second Lord asks if it is not damnable in themselves to continue to cooperate in the plot against his vile adviser. The First Lord suggests that in doing so they serve justice, inasmuch as the Count has farther to fall than Parolles: “The great dignity that his valor hath here acquir’d for him”—something cowardly all-talk Parolles has so conspicuously failed to acquire—shall “at home be encount’red with a shame as ample” (IV.iii.64-65). The Second Lord draws the moral: “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipt them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherish’d by our virtues” (IV.iii.69-72). 

The Count arrives, announcing that of his remaining business in Florence, “the greatest” remains unresolved (IV.iii.86); he of course doesn’t specify that this is his recently concluded tryst with Diana—in fact the unwitting consummation of his marriage to Helena—not knowing that the lords know exactly what he means. But now he would hear the continuing interrogation of Parolles. He listens as blindfolded Parolles says he speaks truth regarding his estimate of the number of horsemen under the Count’s command, and indeed he does, the Count confirms, “But I con him no thanks for’t in the nature he delivers it” (IV.iii.144). That is, for once Parolles speaks truly, but the nature of his intent in doing so is false, treasonous. His treachery extends to Bertram’s private affairs, as well; he’s written to Diana, again quite truly, saying “the Count’s a fool, and full of gold” (IV.iii.196).

Having decided that Bertram is to blame for his predicament (after all, he tells himself, he wouldn’t have been captured if he hadn’t been trying to impress the Count), he is happy to betray him. As he tells his interrogator, “I knew the young Count to be a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds” (IV.iii.203-05). In calling Parolles a “damnable, both-sides rogue,” Bertram also speaks the truth and not incidentally does not deny the truth Parolles has spoken (IV.iii.206). In learning the truth, the nature, of Parolles, Bertram begins to learn the truth of himself. He also begins to learn the truth about, the nature of, parole, of speech itself, which can be true or false, honest testimony or a both-sides rogue, subject to yet another form of speech, the speech of judgment, the speech of vindication and of damnation.

As Parolles rattles on, disclosing information on the number of foot soldiers in the army and slandering both of the French lords (cowards, rapists) the Second Lord finds him oddly entertaining. Parolles says of the First Lord,”He has everything that an honest man should not have; what an honest man should have, he has nothing”; “I begin to love him for this,” the Second Lord admits (IV.iii.242-44). The man “hath out-villain’d villainy so far that the rarity redeems him” (IV.iii.255). After assuring his captors that he will readily betray both the Duke of Florence and Count Rousillon, Parolles has his blindfold removed. He sees the Count. “You are undone, Captain,” the soldier-‘translator’ says—”all but your scarf,” which is still knotted around his throat (IV.iii.300-301). The empty suit has nothing left to wear but a sort of noose.

When his interrogators leave him alone, he soliloquizes. True to his nature, he gives his truest confession yet: “If my heart were great, / ‘Twould burst at this” (IV.iii.307-08). Since it isn’t, it doesn’t. “Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live,” although he does draw a modest moral: “Who knows himself a braggart, / Let him fear this; for it will come to pass / That every braggart shall be found an ass” (IV.iii.310-13). “Parolles,” he advises himself, “live safest in shame. Being fool’d, by fool’ry thrive. / There’s place and means for every man alive” (IV.iii.316). Knowing himself, he concludes that even rogues have their place in the natural order, in his own way echoing the Second Lord’s moral. It isn’t only speech, the distinctively human part of human nature, that’s double-sided; nature is, too, and therein lies its comedy and its tragedy, both.

Helena sees this, too. Her plot successful, her marriage consummated without her husband’s knowledge—a sort of just and lawful cuckoldry—she thanks her allies at the Widow’s house, who will be rewarded when she receives the King’s promised reward. There will be justice among the women. Not so much among men, however. She reflects: “O, strange men! / That can such sweet use make of what they hate, / When saucy trusting of the cozen’d thoughts / Defiles the pitchy night” (IV.iv.21-24). But with her female allies at hand and their joint mission accomplished, “All’s Well That Ends Well” (IV.iv.35). Reason, in line with nature, can make sense of nature’s apparent self-contradictions and, if it guides human actions, share in its telos, which is served by many means, among them the natural increase that results from mating. The women will travel to Marseilles to meet with the King, who has stopped there on his way to Rousillon.

At the Count’s palace in Rousillon, the Countess, Lafeu, and the Clown await the return of the prodigal son. They too have heard that Helena has died. Lafeu blames Parolles, whose villainy “would have made all the unbak’d and doughy youth of a nation in his color,” which is the “saffron” yellow of cowardice (IV.v.2-3). The Countess agrees, saying his machinations caused “the death of the most virtuous gentlewoman that ever nature had praise for creating” (IV.v.7-9). Lefeu engages in badinage with the Clown, who plays on the fact that ‘le feu’ means fire by announcing himself to be in the service of the great Prince of this world, a prince even greater than the French King, the prince who “ever keeps a good fire” (IV.v.43). The Clown tells Lafeu that any tricks he plays “are their own right by the law of nature” (IV.v.55)—the concordia discors, the law that admits contraries as servants of its telos, the end that is well.

Sending the Clown away, Lafeu confides to the Countess that he has asked the King to “speak in the behalf of my daughter,” Maudlin, as a bride for the widower, Bertram (IV.v.64). The Countess approves. The King will arrive at Rousillon tomorrow. Bertram is there now, and they go to see him. For her part, having missed the King in Marseilles, Helena has sent a letter to him, a letter signed by Diana, which will further her plot.

Parolles is already in Rousillon, hoping that Lafeu will intervene mercifully in his favor. He runs into the Clown and describes himself as “muddied in Fortune’s mood, and smell[ing] somewhat strong of her strong displeasure” (V.ii.3-5). The Clown is more than equal to a battle of words with Mr. Speech. “Fortune’s displeasure is but sluttish, if it smell so strongly as thou speak’st of; stand aside, sir” (V.ii.6-7). “Nay, you need not stop your nose, sir; I spake but by a metaphor,” Parolles protests (V.ii.9-10). “Indeed, sir, if your metaphor stink, I will stop my nose; or against any man’s metaphor” (V.ii.11-12). The Clown, being a comedian, knows the doubleness, the ambiguity, of words very well. He understands Parolles, that living pun, that walking metaphor of the potential duplicity of speech.

Lafeu comes by, and Parolles turns to him. “I am a man whom Fortune hath cruelly scratched,” he begins, altering his metaphor (V.ii.28). Lafeu is quick to defend Fortune’s honor: “Wherein have you played the knave with Fortune, that she should scratch you, who of herself is a good lady and would not have knaves thrive long under her?” (V.ii.30-32). He knows all about the tale of the drum, mocking Parolles because of it. He does show mercy, however, telling Parolles, “Though you are a fool and a knave, you shall eat” (V.v.50-51). “I praise God for you,” Parolles replies, in a rare show of piety (V.ii.52). 

Lafeu is off to the Count’s palace, where he meets with the King, the Countess, and the French lords, none of whom know Helena is alive. “Your son,” the King tells the Countess, “as mad with folly, lack’d the sense to know / Her estimation home,” that is, her true worth (V.iii.2-4). The Countess attributes her son’s misjudgment to “natural rebellion, done in the blaze of youth,” when passion overcomes “reason’s force” and burns the one who is impassioned (V.iii.6-7). She had warned her son of exactly this danger, how his “blood” contended with virtue for empire over his soul, but he heeded Parolles’ tempting words instead of her parental ones. The King assures her of his forgiveness, and Lafeu observes that for all the injuries Bertram has done, he did “the greatest wrong of all” to “himself” (V.iii.14-15). And in answer to the King’s query, Lafeu reports that Bertram has consented to marry Maudlin, in submission to the King’s intention. The King mentions the Duke of Florence’s letters of commendation; the young Count’s soul has some important warlike virtues, virtues no king, no defender of the realm, would rightly overlook. This marriage can serve France.

Bertram enters, repentant, pleading for mercy. The King grants it, and asks if he remembers the daughter of Lord Lafeu. He does, “admiringly,” as she had been his first choice in marriage, so much so, he claims, that he underestimated the beauty of all other women, including Helena. “Thence it came / That she whom all men prais’d, and whom myself, / Since I have lost, have lov’d, was in mine eye / The dust that did offend it” (V.iii.51-54). He thus radically changes his earlier story. Initially, he had argued that Helena was unworthy of him because beneath him in social standing, a mere physician’s daughter. Helena had proved her merit to the King by curing him, by her knowledge of nature, a knowledge more valuable than any convention. Now, if Bertram’s account is to be credited, it transpires that Bertram’s aversion was also natural, not conventional, an attraction to Maudlin’s beauty which “warp’d” his perception of Helena’s beauty, making her seem “hideous” (V.iii.49,52).

The politic King does credit, or at least says he credits, the Count’s account. “Well excus’d,” he judges (V.iii.55). As always, he draws a moral: “Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust, / Destroy our friends, and after weep their dust; / Our own love waking cries to see what’s done, / While shameful hate sleeps out the afternoon. / Be this sweet Helen’s knell.” (V.iii.63-67). But for a king, the dead past must bury its dead, lest those who continue to live under his rule be ruined. “And now forget her” (V.iii.67), he commands, and marry Maudlin. The Count consents, asking for heaven’s blessing on his second marriage to his first love, without which divine blessing he would be better off dead, his “nature ceased” (V.iii.72). To sensibilities steeped in romance, the King’s command and the Count’s consent jar. But the romance in which ‘we’ have steeped ourselves, stemming from the courtly love of the Middle Ages, and branching into modern Romanticism, ignores facts that Shakespeare knew. In the courtly romances, love was a passion pursued outside marriage; married love was at best Christian-agapic, often politic, but seldom erotic-sentimental. For Shakespeare and especially for Shakespeare’s monarchs and aristocrats, married love is less serious in ‘our’ sense, but much more serious in another way, a way ‘our’ modern understanding of politics doesn’t readily understand, except as a form of cynicism. 

But not so fast. Lafeu asks for “a favor” from Bertram, a token of his love for his daughter, an engagement ring. Bertram gives him the ring Diana had given him in exchange for his own family heirloom. Lafeu and the King immediately recognize it as the wedding gift the King bestowed on Helena. His enraged Majesty demands, How did you despoil Helena of that ring? Not knowing about the gift-ring in the first place, the hapless young Count denies that it belonged to Helena, but his mother sternly corrects him: “I have seen her wear it; and she reckon’d it / At her life’s rate” (V.iii.89-91).

Afraid to admit his (as he believes) tryst with Diana—one of those ladies in Italy Helena had rightly worried might attract him—Bertram claims that he obtained the ring from a lady in Florence who threw it from her window to him, wrapped in a paper with her name written on it. But I explained my marital condition to her, and although she dropped her infatuation she nobly insisted that he keep her ring. This utterly implausible tale, worthy of Parolles, scarcely convinces the King, who no longer extends his credence to the words of the young Count. He too had heard Helena say “she would never put it from her finger / Unless she gave it to yourself in bed” (V.iii.109-10). You must have murdered her. He orders the guards to take Bertram away; “we’ll sift this matter further” (V.iii.123). In his own defense, Bertram rejoins, “If you shall prove / This ring was ever hers, you shall as easy / Prove that I husbanded her bed in Florence, / Where she never was” (V.iii.124-25). Right on the first part, wrong on the second.

The comedy sharpens still again, as the King receives a letter from the Widow Capilet, denouncing Bertram as a seducer. The lady and her daughter then enter the King’s presence, Diana claiming that she is Bertram’s wife. Still trying to lie his way out, entangling himself further, Bertram calls her “a common gamester of the camp” (V.iii.186). Why would a prostitute have the ring? With fine irony, Diana calls none other than Parolles as her witness. But the man is “a most perfidious slave,” Bertram sputters, a man “whose nature sickens but to speak a truth” (V.iii.203,205). A man of nothing but empty, deceiving words, Parolles’ nature is so unnatural that it falls ill if forced to speak truly, the lying Bertram truly protests. In the event, Parolles testifies honestly that Bertram was indeed “mad for” Diana, although the King gets little more out of him and quickly dismisses him as worthless (V.iii.255).

But “she hath that ring of yours,” the King suggests, the heirloom ring you would no more part with than Helena would part with the ring I gave to her (V.iii.207). Thinking quickly, Bertam concocts another word-invention. “Certain it is I lik’d her,” he allows, “and boarded her i’ th’ wanton way of youth” (V.iii.208-09)—the excuse his mother had offered to the King. But it was all her fault. Diana “did angle for me, / Madding my eagerness with her restraint”—truly a creature of “infinite cunning” (V.iii.210-11,214). She received the heirloom in exchange for a commonplace ring such as one might purchase at market. When Diana identifies the ring His Majesty has in his possession, the one he gave to Helena and no ordinary ring at all, the pretense evaporates and Bertram confesses.

This only leads to a new perplexity: How did Diana come into possession of Helena’s ring? Knowing that Helena is waiting in the wings, Diana answers with riddles—exhibiting for one last time the ambiguity of words, even when deployed honestly. When in frustration the King orders her to prison, she calmly turns to her mother and asks her to post bail, and offers one last riddle— which recalls the play’s opening paradox of the “delivery” that is also a burial, but in reverse: “He knows himself my bed he hath defil’d; / And at that time he got his wife with child. Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick; / So there’s my riddle: the one that’s dead is quick— / And now behold the meaning”—the cue for living Helena to enter, pregnant (V.iii.293-98). 

The King can only ask, “Is’t real that I see?” (V.iii.299). So much to hear, so many lying, deceptive, metaphorical, words, some empty of content, others pregnant with meaning: Is seeing really believing? As always in this play, yes and no. “No, my good lord,” Helena answers, focusing attention on the meaning the phrase “is’t” (V.iii.300). “‘Tis but the shadow of a wife you see, / The name and not the thing” (V.iii.301-02). I am married legally, in words, but rejected by my husband. Bertram protests, “Both, both,” we are married both in name and in reality, in convention and in nature. “O, pardon!” (V.iii.302). As a matter of fact, Helena, says, you are right: I have your heirloom ring and I also have your words in your letter, promising that when I get the ring from your finger and you have gotten me with child, you can then call me husband, put the word to the thing. Beaten, bewildered Bertram turns to the King. “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, / I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (V.iii.309-10). She can and doubtless will explain how she pulled them off—both the ring and the plot.

Critics who complain that the Count may still lack sincerity overlook the fact that this is a comedy; true romance isn’t the point, and it never was. Sure enough, good old Lafeu announces, “My eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon,” and asks Parolles, that man of mere cloth, to lend him a handkerchief (V.iii.314). Does he weep for the reconciliation, for his now-ignored daughter, Maudlin, or both?

The King too wants a coherent, step-by-step telling of the plot, “to make the even truth in pleasure flow” (V.iii.319). He makes amends to Diana, offering her the same opportunity he’d granted to Helena, to choose her husband; she will soon come over to the side of nature, leaving virginity behind but in legal, verbal propriety while securing her widowed mother’s prosperity too.

All’s well that ends well? The King remains prudent to the end: “All yet seems well; and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet” (V.iii.326-27). Discord will serve concord, maybe.

This is the point of the Epilogue. “The King’s a beggar, now the play is done” (E.1). That is, in the penultimate reversal of roles, yet another upending of convention, the King, who lives a life of command, can only hope for the best, having reached the limits of both rule by decree and rule by advice. “All is well if this suit be won, / That you express content; which we will pay / With strife [effort] to please you, day exceeding day” (E.2-4). Shakespeare, ruler of all words, himself depends upon something beyond his control, audience approval. “Ours be your patience, then, and yours our parts; / Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts” (E.5-6). We are now the audience to your wordless, unambiguous action, your ‘play,’ which is your applause. With this final reversal of roles, of rulers being ruled, Shakespeare and his players are done. 

Only if Shakespeare has persuaded his audience with words and plot they deem fitting, only if he has succeeded in ruling their sentiments with his reasoned, playful argument and action will they consent to judge his work as he wishes it to be judged. Judgment first came to sight in the contrast between the authority of elders, with their advice, their piety, and their plans, and the passions and plans (often schemes) of the young, who seek to evade authority. Authority based on the experience won over many years and on piety (the ‘faith of our fathers’) finds its criterion in nature. There is the authority of medical knowledge or ‘physic,’ rightful authority over bodily nature. There is also the authority of moral knowledge, knowledge of the virtues that make men and women human or inhuman. Moral knowledge distinguishes ‘blood’—thumoerotic passion, the fight for love and glory—from virtue. It distinguishes courage (Bertram, Helena) from cowardice (Parolles), prudence (the King, the Countess, Helena) from folly (Bertram, Parolles), justice (the women generally, the King, the French lords) from injustice (the young men, especially Bertram with his failure to form a just estimate of Helena’s worth), and finally moderation (Lafeu, the Countess) from immoderation (the young generally, gripped by their passions). 

Speech aimed at persuasion, rhetoric, may be true or false. Speech to oneself, soliloquy, may also be true or false, insightful or self-deceptive. Speech ‘meets’ or ‘courts’ action especially in love, in courtship. Helena deceives in her actions but usually speaks the truth, and for virtuous ends. Parolles speaks lies at the service of passions, finding a ready audience in Bertram. Helena and Parolles are love-rivals, seeking to win the heart of their Count. Helena asks him the crucial, comic question: How to lose one’s virginity to one’s own liking? (And therefore to one worthy of your liking, else your liking will soon turn to disliking.) This is a question concerning bodies and passions but also a moral question concerning good and bad. To answer it, you will need to confront the problem of appearance and reality, deception and unmasking, revealing. As a wise ruler, the King knows that already, but the young lovers need to learn it.

Nature also raises the question of free will, and especially reasoned choice, against fatality (fortune, chance) and perhaps divine providence. The clown Lavache sees this in his cynical or ‘reductionist’ way, by calculating the odds of a good marriage as one in ten. Helena sets her prudent plotting not so much against fate as within its framework. She is right to see that her beloved is ‘above her’ in conventional social standing, but the overarching question is to know one’s place within the order of nature, to have self-knowledge. More, as the French lord asks, as he considers vile Parolles, is it possible to know that one is a coward, a liar and a fool, and still to be all those things? Evidently so, as Parolles illustrates. But he too knows his place in nature. If nature is a concordia discors, an order encompassing disorder, conflict, then even a knavish fool has his place. Virtue, a kind of strength, needs vice to test it, to ‘prove’ itself in both senses of the term. 

All’s well that ends well insofar as reason out-plots passion, bringing the convention of marriage into line with natural passion, in a condition of mutual correction. But reason’s victories are temporary because the discors remains—as it must, if the virtue aiming at the good end will not weaken. The comedy of All’s Well That Ends Well sustains itself throughout, because the audience knows that the wise plotters have the foolish scoundrels firmly under their rule. Any utopian tendency to suppose that this will always be so is wisely deprecated by the King, who has ruled too long, learned the limitations of wise rule too well, to think otherwise.