by Steven Moore
And few writers capture the first, giddy effects of love as effectively as Werther does. His long letter of 16 June, recounting his first meeting with Lotte and the ball they attended that night, sparkles with telling details, like becoming so absorbed in the sound of her voice “that I often did not even hear the words by which she expressed herself.” Later that evening, during a counting game in which anyone who loses count receives a slight slap, Werther receives from Lotte “two slaps on the face myself, and with secret pleasure I thought I felt that they were harder than those she gave the others.”100 Later, when he first suspects Lotte loves him back, he notes the warm wave of self-confidence that results—“Love me! How the thought exults me in my own eyes!” (13 July 1771)—and he registers the electrifying effect of trifles that few previous novelists would have noted:
Oh! how the blood rushes through my veins when my finger accidentally touches hers, when our feet meet under the table. I draw back as from a flame, and a secret force thrusts me forward again. All my senses swim. And oh! her innocence, her pure soul, does not feel the torment which these little intimacies occasion me. When she lays her hand on mine as we converse, and moves nearer to me as she grows more interested, so that her divine breath is wafted to my lips—I feel that I am about to sink to the ground as though struck by lightning. And, Wilhelm, if I should ever dare to— but no, my heart is not so depraved! (16 July 1771)
Near the end, Werther dreams what he dare not do in waking life, and does so with a boldness of language that must have left his first readers gasping:
Last night, I shudder to say, I held her in my arms, clasped her tightly to my bosom and covered her love-lisping lips with unending kisses. My eyes swam in the intoxication of hers. God! am I to blame that I even yet feel an ecstasy in recalling with all their fervour these glowing joys. Lotte! Lotte!—And it is all over with me! My senses are confused. For a week I have lost my powers of deliberation, my eyes have been filled with tears. I am at ease nowhere and everywhere. I desire nothing, require nothing. It is better that I should go. (17 December 1772)
Like a police raid, the editor breaks in right after that sad, prophetic line and takes control of the narrative (in the 1774 original; Goethe moved the passage to the editor’s reconstructed account in the revised edition of 1787, lessening its impact). The cold shower of the editor’s conventional language puts out the flames of Werther’s poetic rhetoric and makes us realize what an extraordinary stylist he is, not to mention a great translator: Werther’s translations of Ossian apparently improve upon the original. ’Twere to consider too curiously to consider whether Werther’s inability to recognize that writing rather than painting was his true talent plays a role in his disintegration. But it’s obvious that his inability to channel and control what might be called his artistic sensibility—his vivid imagination, his gift for metaphor and literary allusion, his Faustian desire to push beyond the limits of knowledge—is one reason that (like some artists) he burns out and dies young. And it’s equally obvious that it is Werther’s wild and whirling words, stunning even in translation, rather than its operatic plot that elevates it to great literature.
Literature in fact is a recurring topic in the bookish novel. Novels are the very first thing Werther and Lotte discuss upon meeting, as Werther reports in his 16 June letter. He is impressed by the titles she mentions (which the editor suppresses); she admits that she used to enjoy romance novels, but now prefers an author “who describes happenings such as I see around me and yet whose story I find as interesting, as sympathetic as my own existence,” like Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, among others (which the editor again suppresses, in both cases not wanting to offend living authors). Lotte means novels of bourgeois realism, and while The Sorrows of Young Werther is probably more arty than what she has in mind, her statements mark a shift in reader expectations for fiction that Goethe was happy to endorse. The shift in Werther’s allegiance from Homer to Ossian represents a more rarefied taste of the time for literary expressions of heightened emotion and reckless heroics, works of “storm and stress,” as the movement came to be called (Storm und Drang). Like Goethe (and Wieland before him), Werther admires Shakespeare, and on two occasion alludes to Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide. (His own letters often resembles soliloquies.) In the first instance (15 November 1772), he also quotes from the New Testament—the book he cites more often than any other—and rather shockingly ascribes his suicidal impulse to the Protestant god and begins to regard himself as a Christ figure, identifying with another imaginative, unconventional man at odds with society.101
The use of literature as social criticism (as opposed to self-validation) is proposed on the final page of the novel, where the editor informs us that Werther pointedly left a copy of Emilia Galotti open on his desk before he shot himself (a detail Goethe picked up from the report on Jerusalem’s suicide). Lessing’s 1772 play concerns a sensitive bourgeois woman who so fears the corrupting influence of court life that she begs her father to kill her so that she can retain her values, implying that it is the fault of a flawed society for driving some of its members to suicide, not the fault of a flawed individual. This, like Werther’s assumption his god wants to sacrifice him as he did his only begotten son, is an evasion of responsibility for his own oversensitivity—the “heart” he indulges like “a sick child”—but the novel does launch a series of attacks against the duller members of society. A content but unimaginative peasant woman has “no other thought, when she sees the leaves falling, but that winter is near” (27 May 1771), whereas for Werther, “As Nature turns to autumn, it becomes autumn within me and around me. My leaves are sear and yellow, and the trees near by have already lost their leaves” (4 September 1772 [1787 version]). Werther mocks his petty-minded boss and especially the “loathsome people” he meets at court, disgusted at “[t]heir love of rank, the way they keep watch and guard to steel the smallest march upon each other, their most wretched and pitiable passions which they make no attempt to conceal” (24 December 1771). “It is a mass of congreve-rockets,” Goethe said of Werther later in life,102 referring to the kinds of rockets used in warfare, not in entertainments.
Like Hamlet, Werther recognizes the time is out of joint, but lacks the capacity to set it right; he more closely resembles David Foster Wallace, whose intellectual powers were not enough to overcome neurological malfunctioning.103 Goethe’s great achievement is his revealing portrait of a character type fairly new to fiction: someone who is smart, cultured, and sensitive, but also depressed, damaged, and self-destructive. A few of these traits can be glimpsed in Des Grieux in Prévost’s Manon Lescault, Tediato in Cadalso’s Lugubrious Nights, and in La Roche’s moping characters, but not all of them together. Healthier, better-adjusted people (and critics) deride people like Werther, calling them self-pitying crybabies, enfeebled pansies lacking willpower. (The same people make the same complaints against Hamlet, and against sensitive types in general.) But Werther is more fully alive than any character in the novel, closer to what we all should be—which is why Frankenstein’s monster reads Werther, to learn “what it is to be a fucking human being,” as Wallace famously said (Burn, 26). His failure to control, channel, or repress that surging vitality is grounds for pity, not scorn. Werther spoke to similar souls in Goethe’s time, who donned Werther-wear (blue coat and yellow vest—Jerusalem’s outfit) and, in extreme cases it’s been rumored, copycatted his suicide. But he also created a new breed of literary hero whose offspring are as various as Marianne Dashwood, Childe Harold, Frankenstein’s monster, Madame Bovary, Bartleby the scrivener, Quentin Compson, Lowry’s consul, Wyatt Gwyon, Alaric Darconville, and Maso’s American woman in the Chinese hat.104 For a “fallen monument,” The Sorrows of Young Werther casts an awful long shadow.
Like Wieland, the polymath Goethe wrote in a variety of genres (and occupied himself with a number of nonliterary concerns), so consequently he didn’t publish another novel until 1795. Encouraged by his close friend Schiller, Go
ethe returned to a novel he had worked on intermittently between 1776 and 1786 called Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Calling, about a young man who abandons the family business to pursue a life on the stage, hoping to establish a German national theater (even though Germany wasn’t yet a nation).105 When Goethe resumed work on it in the early 1790s, he retitled it Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795–96) and turned Wilhelm’s theatrical experience into a prolonged detour on the way to self-actualization. Theater life dominates the first half of the novel—a wonderful depiction of the bohemian lives of actors, backstage machinations, touring, and plenty of discussions of the nature of drama, Shakespeare’s in particular—but during the second half Wilhelm comes to realize he’s not cut out for the theater and learns that, since his youth, he has been under observation by the mysterious Society of the Tower, a Freemason-like lodge that grooms promising individuals for a higher life, which Wilhelm is poised for at the end of the novel as he prepares to marry into nobility and go on a journey.
Look up Bildungsroman in any handbook of literary terms and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is the first novel mentioned; in fact, the German critic who came up with that term, Karl Morgenstern, did so in reference to Goethe’s novel. Though sometimes used for any coming-of-age novel, bildungsroman was originally intended to identify those novels in which a young protagonist deliberately tries to cultivate an informed sensibility, self-consciously following a path of self-fulfillment, often via academic discussion and study. (For example, Wieland’s Don Sylvio is not a bildungsroman because the protagonist merely outgrows a silly obsession, whereas Agathon is one because the protagonist obsesses over the best way to conduct his life, and recalculates his convictions as he matures.) Although the Apprenticeship contains elements of the picaresque and exploits some melodramatic staples of the conventional novel (the Trivialroman, as it’s aptly called in German), it is largely concerned with Wilhelm’s certainty that Fate holds something greater for him than toiling in his father’s business, and with his attempt to discover what that something is. That’s his first mistake: there’s no such thing as Fate or Providence, as a mysterious stranger (a representative of the Society of the Tower) tells him early on: “The texture of this world is made up of necessity and chance. Human reason holds the balance between them, treating necessity as the basis of existence, but manipulating and directing chance, and using it. . . . I can be really happy only with a person who knows what is useful to him and others, and works at controlling his own arbitrariness. Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure.”106 But this is lost on young Wilhelm, who is too eager to pursue the roar of greasepaint, the smell of the crowd.
After that meeting, Wilhelm is distracted by some music into visiting his mistress, an actress named Mariane, and the first of a half-dozen fascinating women he chances to meet over the course of the novel. Wilhelm’s theatrical dreams are predictably deflated—he learns an actor has to put up with “the jealousy of colleagues, the favoritism of managers, and the fickleness of the public” (1.14), and he complains he never hears actors “discussing the poetic merit of a play or criticizing it (rightly or wrongly). All they talked about was: ‘How much will it make? Will it be a hit? How long will it run?’ ” (1.15)—but the women he encounters are unpredictable and often the main attraction of the work. Goethe casts his novel with female roles that were ignored or disparaged in other novels of the time. The aforementioned Mariane is an actress having an affair with both Wilhelm and a rich admirer with nary a word of disapproval from the open-minded narrator, who notes only that she’s untidy. (Order, rather than conventional morality, is more important.) Wilhelm mistrusts her genuine fidelity and leaves her (and unknowingly leaves her pregnant), and then meets the strangest creature in the novel, the mysterious Mignon, an androgynous 12- or 13-year-old who performs in an acrobat troupe, speaks broken German, and becomes Wilhelm’s “slave.” He is touched by the sad songs she sings—some of Goethe’s most famous lyrics—but he never knows what to make of her, remains oblivious of her love for him, and watches her die three or four years later dressed as an angel.107 He’s equally ambivalent about one of the great flirts of literature, a roguish actress named Philine, who thinks nothing of kissing him on the mouth at a picnic a day after meeting him, and who charms her way through various scrapes in the novel. (“And if I love you,” she laughs in Wilhelm’s face, “what’s that to you?” [4.9].) Nor does he know what to make of a sardonic, histrionic actress named Aurelie, whose “theatrical display of passion” scares him, especially after she slashes his hand with a dagger so that he won’t forget his promise never to deceive a woman (4.20). She plays Ophelia to his Hamlet in a much-discussed production, and later this “unhappy and wrought-up” woman dies after a triumphant performance as the deceived mistress in Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, the same play Werther left as a symbolic suicide note. Then there’s Melina, the wife of a theater manager, who refers “rather crudely to Wilhelm’s ‘pedantic’ ideals, his presumptuous claims of educating the public” (5.16). The aristocratic women Wilhelm later meets and becomes engaged to (first one, then another) are smart, competent, and orderly. All of these female characters are intriguing individuals, and each teaches Wilhelm something during his apprenticeship to master “the greatest of all arts,” in Carlyle view, “the art of life” (xi).
Even though Wilhelm realizes his theatrical calling was a wrong number, his growing understanding of drama and the other arts plays a crucial role in his maturation. As he progresses from the puppet shows of his youth to commercial theater to the life-changing discovery of Shakespeare, he finds in drama the order and form lacking in life. The Apprenticeship is as much critifiction as bildungsroman, for the novel is filled with discussions about aesthetics, about the purposes of (and differences between) plays and novels, and the proper way to regard works of art. As a boy, Wilhelm (like most people) valued only the subject matter, not the artistry, of a work, as he admits to the mysterious stranger, who criticizes a particular painting owned by Wilhelm’s grandfather (and which his business-minded father sold off):
“It wasn’t exactly the best painting in the collection: the composition was not good, the colors were nothing special, and the execution was mannered.”
“I didn’t understand that [Wilhelm replies], and still don’t understand it: The subject is what appeals to me in a painting, not the artistry.”
“Your grandfather seemed to think otherwise, for the major part of his collection consisted of excellent things in which one always admired the merits of the painter without reference to the subject. And that particular picture was hanging in the anteroom to show that he did not value it highly. . . . But if the paintings had remained in your home, you would probably have developed more understanding for the works themselves, instead of always putting yourself and your feelings into them.” (1.17).
Studying Shakespeare helps Wilhelm to admire the merits of a play without reference to the subject matter—though he still wants to play Hamlet because he can relate to him—so the next step is to apply those insights to life, as Aurelie urges:
“I admire your profound insights into literature, especially dramatic literature. You are able to penetrate to the very depths of what was in the poet’s mind and to appreciate the subtlest nuances in its presentation. . . . It seems as if some presentiment of the whole world lies within you, and this is brought to life and developed by your contact with poetry. For truly,” she went on, “nothing comes into you from the outside world. I have rarely met anyone who knew so little of the people with whom he lives—indeed fundamentally misjudges them. Let me say this: when I hear you explaining Shakespeare, it seems as if you have just come from a council of the gods and heard them discussing how to make humans; but when you are associating with real people, you seem like some first child of creation growing up to gape at lions and monkeys, sheep and elephants in strange astonishment and good-nat
ured devotion, treating them affably as your equals, simply because they live and move.” (4.16)
Near the end, the mysterious stranger—finally revealed to be a member of the Society called the Abbé—brings Wilhelm to his grandfather’s art collection to reevaluate that favorite painting of his youth, and tells him: “People tend to believe that the faculty of appreciating art develops as naturally as the tongue or the palate, and they judge a work of art as they do food. They do not understand that a different kind of culture is required to attain a true appreciation of art” (8.7). Moreover, the aesthetic distance required for an appreciation of the merits of a work of art—that is, for its form as opposed to its content—is analogous to insight required to perceive the form of a fully developed self, as the Abbé argues: “But because most people are themselves without form, since they cannot give a shape to their own self, their personality, they labor away at depriving [art] objects of their form, so that everything shall become the same loose and flabby substances as themselves” (8.7). Society offers a number of prefabricated forms for those too lazy or unwilling to find their own form—for Wilhelm, it was to become a businessman like his father—and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is both the story of an individual finding his own form and an instruction manual for readers who want to “give a shape to their own self.” Does Wilhelm succeed? You’ll have to read the sequel Goethe published 30 years later, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years.108