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When Lotte hears it she rushes to Amaldi and wildly demands her lover in the name of her unborn child. When the father hears the whole story he no longer thinks of rank but of honor. He bids Karl marry his true love and retire to the country, where, as overseer of a large estate, he will be less encumbered by a plebeian wife than in the career which had been planned for him.
From the first the expression of her love does not ring perfectly true. We suspect her of phrase-making, she is quite too ethereal and ecstatic for a plain fiddler's daughter. No trace here of that homely poetic realism, Gretchen at the wash-tub, or Lotte cutting bread and butter, with which Goethe knew how to invest his bourgeois maidens.
"What," said Madeline, "that vapid, swarthy creature in the widow's cap, who looked as though her clothes had been stuck on her back with a pitchfork!" The signora never allowed any woman to be beautiful. "Instead of being vapid," said Lotte, "I call her a very lovely woman. She was by far the loveliest woman in the rooms the other night; that is, excepting you, Madeline."
But what is there Celtic, turbulent, and Titanic about the German Werther, that amiable, cultivated, and melancholy young man, having for his sorrow and suicide the perfectly definite motive that Lotte cannot be his?
Gemmingen's 'head of the house' is an upright German nobleman of the admirable sort, who returns home after a long absence to find the affairs of his family very much deranged. His eldest son, Karl, has fallen madly in love with Lotte Wehrmann, the daughter of an impecunious artist, gotten her with child, and promised to marry her when his father shall have returned and given his consent.
Lotte, was really, though not formally, engaged to Kestner, a man of two-and-thirty, secretary to the Hanoverian legation. The discovery of this relation made no difference to Goethe; he remained the devoted friend to both. But the position was too critical to last. On September 10 they met in the German house for the last time. Goethe and Schlosser went together to Wetzlar in November.
I shall always associate her with Lotte; and I never smell the peculiar smell of Tarpaulin without thinking of "the Sorrows of Werter." "Werter" has certainly the very droop and bewilderment of youth's first passion. It is good to plunge one's hands, when one has grown cynical and old, into that innocent, if somewhat turbid, fountain.
But in sober earnest, Lotte is advising me to marry. She wants me to marry Mrs Bold. She's a widow with lots of tin, a fine baby, a beautiful complexion, and the George and Dragon hotel up in High Street. By Jove, Lotte, if I marry her, I'll keep the public house myself it's just the life that suits me.
But the wooing went no further. After all he had not really been in love with Lotte in particular so much as with an ideal of domestic bliss. Shortly before his departure from Bauerbach there had been some talk of his accompanying Reinwald on a contemplated journey to Weimar, where he might make the acquaintance of Karl August, Goethe and Wieland.
There was one story that began: "A king sat in a little boat on one of those deep, still lakes that open like a bright eye in the midst of the Norwegian mountains ..." And another: "Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing. Her hair was golden as the sun's rays and her soul as clear and blue as her eyes.
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