AFTER WETZLAR
1772--1773
In _Götz von Berlichingen_ Goethe had given expression to the ideals
and emotions he had brought with him from Strassburg; Shakespeare and
the memory of Friederike had been the main impulses to its production.
As the result of his experience at Wetzlar, he was filled with a new
inspiration, which, though it did not immediately find utterance, left
him no repose till it was embodied in a work in which the man and the
artist in him equally found deliverance. That the conception came to
him shortly after his leaving Wetzlar we have conclusive evidence. In
the beginning of November, 1772, after his return to Frankfort from
Wetzlar, he received the news that a youth named Jerusalem, a casual
acquaintance of his own,[127] had committed suicide as the result of
an unhappy love adventure. Instantly, Goethe tells us in his
Autobiography, the plan of _Werther_ shaped itself in his mind; and
his contemporary letters bear out the statement. Immediately on
receiving the news of Jerusalem's death, he wrote to Kestner for a
detailed account of all the circumstances, and he made a careful copy
of the information with which Kestner supplied him. In point of fact,
it was not till after more than a year that _Werther_ came to
fruition, but that he was in labour with the portentous birth all its
lineaments were to show.
[Footnote 127: Goethe had made Jerusalem's acquaintance in Leipzig.
Jerusalem called Goethe a _Geck_, a coxcomb, a description which, as
we have seen, was not inapplicable to him in his Leipzig days.
Jerusalem was a friend of Lessing, who highly esteemed him, and after
his death published his MSS.]
But before _Werther_ came to birth, Goethe went through another
experience which was to form an essential part of its tissue. Merck,
to whom Goethe attributes the chief influence over him during this
Frankfort period, was again the intermediary. Before Goethe left
Wetzlar, Merck had arranged that they should meet at Ehrenbreitstein,
where he would introduce Goethe to a family resident there.[128] The
family was that of Herr von la Roche, a Privy Councillor in the
service of the Elector of Trier, and it consisted of himself, his wife
and two daughters. The head of the house, a matter-of-fact man of the
world, plays no part in Goethe's relations to the family. It was Frau
von la Roche to whom, as a desirable acquaintance, Merck specially
wished to introduce his friend, and the sequel proved that he had
rightly divined their mutual affinities. The cousin of Wieland, with
whom she had had a _liaison_ before her marriage, she was now past
forty, but, according to Goethe's description of her, she possessed
all the charm of youth with the dignity and repose of maturity. What
is evident is, that Goethe saw in her the type of a high-bred woman
such as had not yet crossed his path. In his reminiscence of her, his
words have a warmth which is in notable contrast to the coldness of
his portrait of Lotte Buff. "She was a most wonderful woman," he
writes; "I knew no other to compare with her. Slight and delicately
formed, rather tall than short, she had contrived even in advanced
years to retain a certain elegance both of form and bearing which
pleasingly combined the manner of a Court lady with that of a
dignified burgess's wife."[129] In addition to these graces, Frau von
la Roche had precisely the temperament and the mental qualities that
appealed to Goethe in the emotional phase through which he was now
passing. She lived in the same world of sentiment as the ladies of the
Darmstadt circle, and she had the gift of effusive utterance, as she
had shown in a novel in the manner of Richardson which had brought her
some celebrity.
[Footnote 128: In point of fact, Goethe announced himself. Merck
arrived after him.]
[Footnote 129: In a letter to Schiller (July 24th, 1799) Goethe gives
a much less favourable estimate of Frau von la Roche, whom he had just
met: "Sie gehört zu den nivellierenden Naturen, sie hebt das Gemeine
herauf und zieht das Vorzügliche herunter...."]
With Frau von la Roche Goethe established a Platonic relation which he
assiduously cultivated during the remainder of his residence in
Frankfort, but there was another member of the household to whom he
was attracted by a livelier feeling. This was the elder of the two
daughters, Maximiliane by name, a girl of seventeen, whose charms were
subsequently to be given to the lady of Werther's infatuation. From
what we have seen of Goethe's inflammability, we are prepared for the
naïve remark in which he records his new sensation. "It is a very
pleasant sensation," he says, "when a new passion begins to stir in us
before the old one is quite extinct. So, as the sun sets, we gladly
behold the moon rise on the opposite horizon, and rejoice in the
double splendour of the two heavenly lights." Be it said that the
atmosphere of the household was provocative of relaxed feelings.
Goethe was not the only guest. Besides Merck there was a youth named
Leuchsenring whose special line of activity had endeared him to a wide
circle. Leuchsenring made it his business to enter into correspondence
with susceptible souls whose effusions he carried about with him in
dispatch-boxes and was in the habit of reading aloud to sympathetic
listeners. The reading of these precious documents was part of the
entertainment of the circle in which Goethe now found himself, and he
assures us that he enjoyed it. We see, therefore, the world in which
he was now moving--a world in which those who belonged to it made it
their first concern to titillate their sensibilities, and squandered
their emotions with a profusion and abandonment in which
self-respecting reserve was forgotten. It was a world wide as the
poles apart from that of Sesenheim, where human relations were founded
on natural feeling and only the language of the heart was spoken. Once
again Goethe had taken on the hue of his surroundings. In Leipzig he
had been what we have seen him; now under the influence of Darmstadt
he appears in still another phase--to be by no means the last.
From Goethe's connection with the family of von la Roche was to come
the occasion which immediately prompted the production of _Werther_,
but more than a year was to elapse before the occasion came, and in
the interval his own mental experiences were to supply him with
further materials which were to find expression in that work. In his
correspondence of the period we have the fullest revelation of these
experiences, and they leave us with the impression that he spoke only
the literal truth when he tells us in his Autobiography that, on being
delivered of _Werther_, he felt as if he had made a general
confession. The same period, moreover, is signalised by a succession
of minor productions which, though they did not attain to the
celebrity of _Götz_ and _Werther_, exhibit a range of intellectual
interests and a play of varied moods which materially enhance our
conceptions of his genius.
The circumstances in which Goethe had left Friederike had precluded
subsequent communications with her and her family; in the case of the
Wetzlar circle there was no such impediment to future epistolary
intercourse. He had left Lotte Buff, as he tells us, with a clearer
conscience than he had left Friederike, and on the part of Lotte and
Kestner there was apparently no feeling that prompted a breach of
their relations with him. For more than a year he kept up assiduous
communications with Wetzlar; then his letters became less frequent and
finally ceased when changes in the circumstances of both parties
effaced their mutual interests. While the correspondence was in full
flood, however, Goethe's letters leave us in no doubt as to the real
nature of his passion for Lotte; if words mean anything, his memories
of her were a cause of mental unrest to which other distractions of
the time gave a morbid direction, and which threatened to end in moral
collapse.
A few extracts from his letters to Wetzlar will reveal his state of
mind during the months that immediately followed his return to
Frankfort. Within a week after his return we have these hurried lines
addressed to Kestner: "God bless you, dear Kestner, and tell Lotte
that I sometimes imagine I could forget her; but then comes the
recitative, and I am worse than ever." In the same month (September)
he again addresses Kestner: "I would not desire to have spent my days
better than I did at Wetzlar, but God send me no more such days!...
This I have just said to Lotte's silhouette." In the beginning of
November he paid a flying visit to Wetzlar, and apparently had reason
to regret it. "Certainly, Kestner," he wrote the day after he left,
"it was time that I should go; yesterday evening, as I sat on the
sofa, I had thoughts for which I deserve hanging." On Christmas Day he
writes still at the same high pitch: "It is still night, dear Kestner,
and I have risen to write again by the morning light, which recalls
pleasant memories of past days.... Immediately on my arrival here I
had pinned up Lotte's silhouette; while I was in Darmstadt, they
placed my bed here, and there to my great joy hangs Lotte's picture at
its head." In April, 1773, Kestner and Lotte were married, and Goethe
insisted, against Kestner's wish, on sending the bride her
marriage-ring, which was accompanied by the following note: "May the
remembrance of me as of this ring be ever with you in your happiness.
Dear Lotte, after a long interval we shall see each other again, you
with the ring on your finger, and me always _yours_. I affix no name
nor surname. You know well who writes." A few days later we have the
following words in a letter to Kestner: "To part from Lotte, I do not
yet understand how it was possible.... It cost me little, and yet I
don't understand how it was possible. There is the rub." In the course
of the summer Kestner removed to Hanover, where he had received an
official appointment, and took his wife with him. The correspondence
then became less frequent, though on both sides it was maintained in
the same friendly spirit. Only for a time, on the publication of
_Werther_, as we shall see, was there the shadow of possible
estrangement. "Alienated lovers," is Goethe's remark, already quoted,
"become the best friends, if only they can be properly managed"; and
Goethe showed himself an adept in this art of management.
While Goethe was pouring forth his confessions to Kestner and Lotte,
his circumstances at home were not such as to conduce to calm of mind.
Frankfort remained as distasteful to him as ever. "The Frankforters,"
he wrote to Kestner, "are an accursed folk; they are so pig-headed
that nothing can be made of them." With his father his relations had
not become more cordial after his return from Wetzlar. "Lieber Gott,"
he wrote on receiving a letter from his father, "shall I then also
become like this when I am old? Shall my soul no longer attach itself
to what is good and amiable? Strange the belief that the older a man
becomes, the freer he becomes from what is worldly and petty. He
becomes increasingly more worldly and petty."[130] His father's
insistence on his attention to legal business was a permanent cause of
mutual misunderstanding. "I let my father do as he pleases; he daily
seeks to enmesh me more and more in the affairs of the town, and I
submit."[131]
[Footnote 130: Goethe to Kestner, November 10th, 1772. _Werke,
Briefe_, Band ii. 35.]
[Footnote 131: To the same, September 15th, 1773. _Ib._ p. 104.]
In his sister Cornelia, as formerly, he had a sympathetic confidant
equally in his affairs of the heart and in his literary and artistic
ambitions, but in the course of the year 1773 he was deprived of her
soothing and stimulating influence. In October she was betrothed to
J.G. Schlosser, who has already been noted as one of Goethe's sager
counsellors, and the marriage took place on November 1st. "I rejoice
in their joy," he wrote to Sophie von la Roche, "though, at the same
time, it is mostly to my own loss." Other friends, also, in the course
of the same year, he complains, were departing and leaving him in
dreary solitude. "My poor existence," he writes to Kestner, "is
becoming petrified. This summer everyone is going--Merck with the
Court to Berlin, his wife to Switzerland, my sister, and Fräulein
Flachsland, you, everybody. And I am alone. If I do not take a wife or
hang myself, say that life is right dear to me, or something, if you
like, which does me more honour."[132] So in May he describes himself
as alone and daily becoming more so; in October as "entirely alone,"
and as indescribably rejoiced at the return of Merck towards the close
of the year.
[Footnote 132: _Ib._ pp. 82-3.]