But what makes a sensitive youth most fearful is the irresistible repetition of his errors. Only too late does he recognize that in the cultivation of his virtues he at the same time raises his mistakes. The former rest on the roots of the latter as well as on their own, and the latter branch out in all directions, secretly but just as powerfully, and as varied as those that flourish in the open. Since we practice our virtues, for the most part, willfully and consciously, whereas our faults take us unconsciously by surprise, the former occasionally give us a little pleasure, but the latter worry and torment us constantly. And here lies the most intricate aspect of self-recognition, an aspect that makes it virtually impossible. Add to all this the turgid blood of youth, the powers of an imagination that is easily paralyzed, the imbalance of the day’s motion—and the impatient urge to free oneself of the dilemma does not seem so unnatural.
Such dire reflections, however, that must lead him who gives himself up to them to endless speculation, would not have developed so decisively in the hearts of German youth if an external inducement had not incited and encouraged him. And this was offered by English literature, especially English poetry, the excellencies of which are accompanied by a profound melancholy that it seems to pass on to anyone studying it. The intellectual Briton sees himself surrounded from his youth by a world of eminence that stimulates all his energies. Sooner or later he becomes aware of the fact that he is going to need all his thinking capacities to put up with it. How many English poets there are who led profligate lives in their youth and felt justified early in life in accusing all earthly things of being naught but vanity! How many tried to make their way in business, in parliament, at court, in the ministry, how many played prominent or secondary roles at embassies, participated in internal unrest, state and governmental changes, and had more sad than good experiences, if not with themselves, then with their friends and benefactors!
But even being only a spectator of such great events forces a man to take life seriously, and where can such earnestness lead except to the contemplation of transitory things and an awareness of the worthlessness of all earthly matters? The German can be serious too. English poetry therefore suited him very well, and because it was conceived on such lofty heights, he found it impressive. A grandiose, vigorous, and worldly sagacity can be found in it, a profound and gentle spirit, a splendid will, a passionate activity—all glorious qualities for which the intellectual, erudite man can only be lauded, yet all these things combined do not make a poet. True poetry proclaims itself as a secular gospel in its ability to liberate us from the earthly burdens that oppress us by producing in us serenity and a physical sense of well-being. It lifts us and our ballast into higher spheres like a balloon, leaving the confused and labyrinthine path of our earthly meanderings below us in bird’s-eye perspective. The liveliest and most serious works should have the same aim—to alleviate passion and pain through a felicitous and ingenious presentation. With this in mind, one should take a look at the majority of English poems, most of which are highly moral and didactic, and one will find that, for the most part, they display a dreary weariness of life. All English contemplative poems, even Young’s “Night Thoughts,” in which this dreariness has been gloriously realized, straggle off before you know it into such sad regions, where the mind is given a problem it cannot solve, where even religion, if the poet has any, does not help him. Volumes could be printed as a commentary to the dread verse:
Then old Age and Experience, hand in hand
Lead him to death, and make him understand,
After a search so painful and so long,
That all his life he has been in the wrong.4
What furthermore makes a complete misanthrope of the English poet and spreads an unpleasant aura of repugnance against all things over his writing is that, because of the numerous schisms in his communal existence, he must dedicate, if not his whole life, then the better part of it to one political party or other. Such a writer is not permitted to glorify his loved ones, to whom he is devoted, or the cause he favors, because he might otherwise arouse ill will. He therefore uses his talents to speak as harshly as possible of his opponent, and satiric weapons, however adeptly used, always serve to sharpen and poison the atmosphere. When this takes place on both sides, the world that lies between is destroyed, with the result that, in a great and intellectually active nation, one finds at best nothing but folly or madness in their verse. Even the most tender poem is concerned with sad subject matter. Here an abandoned young girl is dying; there a faithful lover drowns or, swimming as fast as he can, is eaten by a shark before he can reach his beloved. And when a poet like Gray settles down in a village churchyard and starts to sing the same old melody, he can be sure of attracting a following among the friends of melancholy. Milton, in “Allegro,” must first dispel all gloom with some violent verse before he can arrive at a very moderate measure of joyful expression, and even our blithe friend Goldsmith loses himself in elegiac sentiments in his “Deserted Village” when he lets his “Traveler” cross the face of the earth to find a lost Eden, which the author describes very beautifully, but sadly.
I do not doubt that it would be possible to confront me with lively and gay English poems as well, but most of the best of them belong to an older epoch, and the latest ones that might be included tend toward satire, are bitter, and especially lack a respect for women.
Suffice it to say that the more general, serious poems mentioned above, which tended to undermine human nature, were our favorites. We picked them out from among all others. One person, according to his personality, chose the lighter lament; another sought a more oppressive despair that was ready to sacrifice all. Strangely enough, our father and teacher, Shakespeare, who knew so well how to spread brightness, also helped to increase our gloom. Hamlet and his monologues remained ghosts that haunted us. We knew the main parts by heart and loved to recite them, and every one of us felt he had to be just as melancholy as the Prince of Denmark, even if he hadn’t seen a ghost and didn’t have a royal father to avenge.
But in order that all this melancholy might not lack a suitable setting, it was left to Ossian to lure us to a final Thule, where we wandered across gray, unending moors, amid prominent, moss-covered gravestones, surrounded by grass that was being eerily swept by the wind, and looked up into a sky that was leaden with clouds. This Caledonian night became day only in the moonlight. Defunct heroes and wan maidens hovered around us until, in the end, we really thought we could see the terrible shape of the spirit of Loda.5 In such an atmosphere, with fancies and studies of this nature, tortured by unsatisfied passion, with no external inspiration to do anything really important, our only prospect to succumb, in the end, to a dreary, uncultured, bourgeois existence—we began to think kindly of departing this life should it no longer seem worth living, or at any rate of doing so whenever it suited us. Thus we helped ourselves meagerly over the wrongs and boredom of the day. Sentiments such as these were so universal that Werther had to have the powerful effect it did, because it touched every heart and depicted the innermost workings of a sick youthful madness openly and comprehensibly. The following lines attracted little attention and were written before the publication of Werther, but they prove how well acquainted the English were with this type of misery.
To griefs congenial prone
More wounds than nature gave he knew
While misery’s form his fancy drew
In dark ideal hues and horrors not its own.6
Suicide—however much may already have been said or done about it—is an event of human nature that demands everyone’s sympathy, and it should be dealt with anew in every era. Montesquieu gives his heroes and great men the right to surrender themselves to death in that he says it should be left to every man to end the fifth act of his tragedy as he sees fit. Here, however, we are not dealing with people who have lived active and eminent lives, who have spent their days in the service of some great kingdom or in the cause of freedom and cannot be blamed i
f they wish to follow the ideal that inspired them, once it has disappeared from this earth. We are dealing here with people who are weary of life from a lack of activity under the most peaceful conditions imaginable, through the exaggerated demands they make upon themselves. Since I found myself in such a condition once and know how I suffered and what efforts I had to make to escape it, I do not wish to hide the conclusions I reached after giving much consideration to the various forms of death one might choose.
It is so unnatural for a man to tear himself away from himself—not only to harm but to destroy himself—that he invariably turns to mechanical devices to put his design into action. When Ajax falls on his sword, it is the weight of his body that does him this last service; when a warrior orders his shield bearer not to let him fall into the hands of the enemy, he also assures himself on an external power, in this case a moral, not a physical one. Women seek to cool their despair in the water, and the most mechanical device of all, the pistol, assures quick action with no exertion at all. No one likes to mention hanging, because it is a dishonorable death. You find it in England more frequently than anywhere else, because there, even in one’s youth, one may have seen someone hang without the punishment’s being considered a disgrace. Poison or the slashing of a vein is for the man who is considering taking leave of this life slowly; and the most subtle, quick, and painless death, by the bite of an asp, was worthy of a queen who had lived a life of splendor and passion. But all these things are external aids, are enemies with whom man forms an alliance against himself.
When I contemplated these means and at the same time went on searching in history, I found that of all those who had taken their lives not one had done the deed with the grandeur and freedom of Emperor Otho.7 Although he was at a disadvantage in battle, yet by no means driven to extremity, he decided to leave this world for the salvation of thousands and the welfare of a kingdom that, in a way, was as good as his. He celebrated a festive supper with his friends; next morning they found that he had thrust a dagger into his heart. This death alone seemed to me worthy of emulation, and I was convinced that he who could not behave like Otho had no right to take his life. And with this conviction, I saved myself not only from the dire intention itself, but from the whole caprice of suicide that had crept in upon a bored youth in those magnificent times of peace.
As a part of a rather impressive collection of weapons, I owned a costly, well-sharpened dagger. I used to put it beside my bed before I snuffed out the light and would try to see if it was possible for me to sink the sharp point a few inches into my breast. But I never could and I finally laughed at myself, threw off all hypochondriac specters, and decided to live. But in order to do so happily, I had first to complete a poetic work in which I could express everything I had felt and considered about this important subject. Toward this end, I proceeded to collect all the elements that had been fermenting inside me during the past few years. I tried to reconstruct the events that had oppressed and frightened me most, but nothing wanted to take shape. I lacked an incident, a legend, in which I could incorporate them.
Suddenly I heard of Jerusalem’s death, and hot upon the general rumors, an exact and involved description of the entire incident. In that moment, the plan of Werther was found, the whole thing crystallized, like water in a glass that is on the point of freezing and can be turned to ice immediately with the slightest motion. To hold this strange prize fast and realize a work of such major importance and diverse content was all the dearer to me since I again found myself in an embarrassing situation that left me even less hope than the one that had preceded it and seemed to presage nothing but discontent and unpleasantness….
Jerusalem’s death—the result of his unfortunate attraction to the wife of a friend—shook me out of my dream, and since I did not look upon what had happened to him and me dispassionately, but was startled by the similarity with what was going on in my heart at the same time, I naturally breathed into the work I now undertook all the passion that results when there is no difference between fact and fiction. I isolated myself completely, forbade even my friends to visit me and laid aside inwardly as well everything that was not concerned with my enterprise. On the other hand, I assembled all I possibly could that was in any way connected with it and recapitulated my immediate past, of which I had made no poetic use until now. Under those conditions, and after long and much secret preparation, I wrote Werther in four weeks without ever making a plan of the whole or previously putting any of it down on paper.
And now the finished manuscript lay before me—the entire conception, with very few corrections or changes. I had it bound immediately, for covers are to a book what a frame is to a picture—they make it so much easier to see if the thing can really stand on its own. Since I had written this little volume more or less unconsciously, rather like a sleepwalker, it astonished me when I read it through with the idea of changing a few things and improving it. However, with the feeling that I might want to improve it after more time had elapsed and I could see it in better perspective, I now gave it to my young friends to read. Since, contrary to my usual habitude, I had told no one about it beforehand, nor had anyone been able to find out what I was up to, it made a tremendous impression. Of course, here again, the material was more effective than anything else, proving that their frame of mind was the exact opposite of mine—for I had saved myself from a tempestuous element with this composition, from a situation into which I had been driven through my own fault and the fault of others, through a chance and a chosen way of life, through intent and haste, through stubbornness and compliancy. I felt like a man after absolute confession—happy and free again, with the right to a new life. This time an old household remedy had done me a lot of good. But just as I felt relieved and lighthearted because I had succeeded in transforming reality into poetry, my friends were confusing themselves by believing that they had to turn poetry into reality, enact the novel and shoot themselves! What actually took place now among a few, happened later en masse, and this little book that had done me so much good acquired the reputation of being extremely harmful!
But all the evil that it is said to have done and the misfortune that it is supposed to have brought in its wake were almost avoided by chance, for very soon after its completion, it was nearly destroyed. This came about in the following fashion:
Merck had just returned from Petersburg. He was always busy, so I didn’t see much of him and was only able to tell him more or less generally about this book, Werther, that was so dear to my heart. One day he visited me, and since he didn’t seem to have much to say, I begged him to listen to me. He sat down on the sofa and I began to read the work aloud, letter by letter. After I had been reading for a while without having been able to wring a word of praise from him, I began to hold forth with even more emotion. You can imagine how I felt when, during a pause, he dashed me completely by saying, “Well, that’s quite nice,” and, without another word, withdrew. I was beside myself. Although the things I wrote usually pleased me without my being able to pass any judgment on them at first, I now firmly believed that as far as subject matter, mood, and style were concerned—after all, every one of them was dubious—it was all wrong, and I had produced something impossible. If there had been a stove handy I would have thrown the whole thing into it, but I pulled myself together and lived through some painful days, until at last Merck confessed to me that he had been in the most dreadful predicament humanly possible when I had read the story to him. He had therefore not heard a word I had said and didn’t have the slightest idea what the manuscript was about. In the meantime things had righted themselves, insofar as this was possible, and since Merck, in his energetic days, was the type who could bear even the most terrible fate, he regained his good humor, although he was more bitter now than ever before. He disapproved vehemently of my intention to revise Werther and demanded to see it in print just as it was. I had a clean copy made, but it did not remain in my hands long. Quite by chance, on the day my sister married
George Schlosser, a letter came from Weygand in Leipzig, asking for the manuscript. The whole house was filled and glittering with the gay festivities, and I took the coincidence to be a good omen, sent Werther off, and was pleased when my fee was not swallowed up entirely by the debts I had incurred for Götz von Berlichingen.
The effect of Werther was great—indeed, one might say immense—and excellent because it came at exactly the right time. For just as only a small firing charge is needed to detonate a powerful mine, the explosion Werther caused was so far-reaching because the young people of that era had already undermined themselves; and the shock was so great because everyone could now burst forth with his own exaggerated demands, unsatisfied passions, and imaginary sufferings. The reader should not be asked to receive an intellectual work intellectually; the only thing he really pays any attention to is the content, the material, just as I had experienced with my friends, and this is usually accompanied by the old prejudice which the dignity of the printed word arouses—it should have a didactic purpose. But true representation has none. It neither approves nor disapproves but develops character and action chronologically and in that way illuminates and instructs.
I paid little attention to criticism. For me the book was finished, and all good people could digest it as they pleased. But of course my friends collected the reviews, and since they knew a little more about my opinions, they could have great fun with them. “The Joys of Young Werther,” which was Nicolai’s idea, provided us with plenty of laughs. This good, worthy, and knowledgeable man had already begun to suppress everything that did not suit his viewpoint, which, narrow-minded as he was, he felt was the only true one. He had to pit his strength against me, too, and his little brochure fell into our hands. Chodowiecki’s very fine vignette gave me great pleasure. He was an artist whom I admired profoundly. But Nicolai’s work was really cut of rough cloth. Oblivious of the fact that there was actually nothing much to be done about it, that the flowering of Werther’s youth appears from the start as fatally blighted, the author let my version stand until page 214, and just when the deranged fellow is taking his last fatal step, this judicious psychic doctor lets his patient use a pistol that is loaded with chicken blood, which makes for quite a filthy mess but unfortunately does no further harm. Lotte marries Werther and the whole thing has a happy ending!
The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings Page 16