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
- 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.
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