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Updated: May 7, 2025
His Sartor is indeed more contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's Confessions, or the Sorrows of Werther, or the first two cantos of Childe Harold: but reading Byron's letters is mingling with a world gay and grave; reading Goethe's walking in the Parthenon, though the Graces in the niches are sometimes unclad; reading Carlyle's is travelling through glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal black tunnels.
Goethe's Goetz and Werther, Schiller's Brigands and Cabal and Love, were greeted as the promising forerunners of the national literature to come.
To those who study the inducements and encouragements of authorship, it is interesting to know that through all the success, before the public and with the booksellers, of "Goetz von Berlichingen" and "Werther," neither book had paid back to Goethe the money he had spent for their publication. Fame, and fame only, had been, thus far, his reward.
It is possible that the impulse of rebellion against social wrong and evil which burst forth for an instant in Werther may long have held his soul in secret travail; but that he despaired of the task of reforming it as beyond his powers.
Conquer yourself; make an effort: a short journey will be of service to you. Seek and find an object worthy of your love; then return hither, and let us enjoy together all the happiness of the most perfect friendship." "This speech," replied Werther with a cold smile, "this speech should be printed, for the benefit of all teachers.
The hero of the promised story was a German of that particular type in which the sombre irony of Goethe's Mephistopheles is blended with a homely cheerfulness found in the romances of August Lafontaine of pacific memory; but the predominating element in the compound of artlessness and guile, of shopkeeper's shrewdness, and the studied carelessness of a member of the Jockey Club, was that form of disgust which set a pistol in the hands of a young Werther, bored to death less by Charlotte than by German princes.
There is a passionate paragraph in Werther that strikes the very key. 'When I came hither, he writes, 'how the beautiful valley invited me on every side, as I gazed down into it from the hill-top! There the wood ah, that I might mingle in its shadows! there the mountain summits ah, that I might look down from them over the broad country! the interlinked hills! the secret valleys!
He was himself out of humour; his business was unfinished; and he had just discovered that the neighbouring official with whom he had to deal, was an obstinate and narrow-minded personage. Many things had occurred to irritate him. He inquired whether anything had happened during his absence, and Charlotte hastily answered that Werther had been there on the evening previously.
"A truce to malicious phrases, Emil," interrupted Maryan. "Thou art not threatened with the fate of Werther because my sister has broken with thee " "Of course not!" laughed the baron. And Maryan added quickly: "And thou shouldst even offer up to her that painted pot, called gratitude, because she has not closed to thee the road to some daughter of a multi-millionnaire Yankee.
I, who am the author of Werther, am free from this abominable sentimentality. Why cannot others be, who only read what I have conceived? But pardon my violence," he continued, with a milder voice and gentler manner. "Never did an author create a work which brought him at the same time so great fame and bitter reproach as this work has brought to me.
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