infinite wealth of an imaginative masterpiece, but we may briefly
say that the great importance of this story of ardent, unhappy love,
lies in its being so treated that it gives expression not merely to
the isolated passion and suffering of a single individual, but to
the passions, longings, and sufferings of a whole age. The hero is a
young man of the burgher class; he is artistically gifted, and paints
for pleasure, but by profession he is Secretary to a Legation. Goethe
has involuntarily made this young man see, and feel, and think as he
himself did in his youth, has endowed him with all his own rich and
brilliant genius. This transforms Werther into a great symbolic figure;
he is more than the spirit of the new era, he is its genius. He is
almost too rich and great for his destiny. There is, perhaps, actually
a certain discrepancy between the first part of the book, in which
Werther's mind manifests itself in its energetic, youthful health and
strength, and the second part, in which he succumbs to circumstances.
In the first half there is in Werther more of Goethe himself, who
certainly did not commit suicide; in the second, more of that young
Jerusalem whose unhappy death inspired the book. But such as he is,
Werther is a type. He is not only the child of nature in his passion,
he is nature in one of its highest developments, genius. Losing himself
in nature, he feels its whole infinite life within himself, and feels
himself "deified" thereby. Turn, for instance, to that wonderful entry
in his journal written on August 18, 1771. It is as powerful and full
of genius as a _Faust_ monologue. Read that description of how "the
inner, glowing, holy life of nature" opens before him, of how he
perceives the "unfathomable powers working and creating in the depths
of the earth," of how he yearns to "drink the surging joy of life
from the foaming cup of infinity, in order that, as far as his narrow
limitations permit, he may taste one drop of the bliss of that being
which produces everything in and by itself," and you will understand
how it is that, when he begins to feel like a prisoner who sees no way
of escape, he is seized by a burning, so to speak, pantheistic, desire
to fling his human life away, that he may "rend the clouds asunder with
the storm-wind and grasp the billows;" you will feel the justification
for his dying exclamation: "Nature! thy son, thy friend, thy lover,
approaches his end."
A soul which demands so much room must inevitably be an offence to
society, especially when society is hedged in by as many rules as it
was at the close of the most social of all centuries. Werther abhors
all rules. At a time when poetry was fettered by them, he reduces all
its laws to one: "Know what is good and dare to put it into words." An
artist, his views on painting are as heretical as his views on poetry.
He meets a young brother artist, fresh from the schools, who deafens
him with the doctrines of all the famous theorists, Winckelmann and
Sulzer amongst others. This fellow is a perfect terror to him. "Nature
alone," he writes, "fashions the great artist. Much may be said in
favour of the laws of art, about as much as may be said in praise of
the laws of society. The artist who observes them will never produce
anything bad or absolutely valueless, just as the man who submits to
the control of convention and decorum will never be an unbearable
neighbour or a remarkable scoundrel; nevertheless, every rule, say
what you will, tends to destroy true feeling for nature and to prevent
its sincere expression." Werther's detestation of rules explains his
abhorrence for all technical and conventional expressions. He gnashes
his teeth with annoyance when the prince, who has no artistic taste,
brings out some æsthetic platitude in reply to an eager remark he
himself has let fall on the subject of art, and he is enraged by the
string of ready-made social judgments which Albert has at his fingers'
ends. "Why," he cries, "must you people, when you speak of a thing,
immediately say, 'it is stupid' or 'it is clever,' 'it is good' or
'it is bad'? What do you mean? Have you investigated into the inner
significance of the action? Have you traced its causes, divined its
inevitability? If you had, you would not be so ready to pass judgment!"
He revolts against the pedantry of the ambassador who cavils at the
style of his secretary's despatches, he wishes misfortune may befall
the theological blue-stocking who has cut down the pretty hazels in the
rectory garden, and he is unreasonably embittered by the arrogance of
antiquated erudition, by all lifeless, solemn ceremonial, and by the
claims which those of a certain rank in society make on the submission
and obedience of their inferiors.
He seeks refuge with children, who "of all things upon earth are
nearest to his heart," and with uncultured souls, whose genuine
feelings and genuine passions give them a beauty in his eyes which
nothing can surpass. Watching the girls fetch water from the well
reminds him of patriarchal times, of Rebecca and Eleazer, and when he
cooks his own green peas he lives in thought in those Homeric days
when Penelope's haughty suitors killed and prepared their own food.
Nature enchants and captivates him. If he is not a Christian, if, as
he expresses it, he is not one of those who have been given to the
Son--something in his heart telling him that the Father has reserved
him for Himself--it is because to him that Father is Nature; Nature is
his God.
Wherever he goes in society he offends against its cold and formal
regulations. He is ejected in the most insulting manner from an
aristocratic gathering; he, the plebeian, all unwitting of offence,
having remained in his chief's drawing-room after the arrival of
distinguished guests. Himself ardently, hopelessly in love, he does
what he can to save an unfortunate youth whom an unconquerable and not
unrequited passion has driven to offer violence and to murder a rival.
Werther's petition is not only rejected by the representatives of the
law, but he is himself compelled by the law to bear witness against the
man he would so willingly shield and save.
All this, however, is mere minor detail. The woman he loves, and whom
he could so easily have won, had no plighted word stood between them,
becomes the wife of another; this is the shock that breaks his heart.
This book represents the full heart, right or wrong, in collision
with the conventions of everyday life, its craving for infinity, for
liberty, which makes life seem a prison and all society's partition
walls seem prison walls. "All that society does," says Werther, "is
to paint them for each individual with fair perspectives opening to
a wide horizon. The walls themselves are never broken down." Hence
this dashing of the head against the wall, these long sobs, this deep
despair which nothing but a bullet through the heart can still. On
the occasion of their meeting, Napoleon reproached Goethe for having
mixed up the love-story with the revolt against society; the reproach
was unreasonable, for the two are indissolubly connected; it is only
together that they express the idea of the book.
Unlike _La Nouvelle Héloïse, Werther_ is no glorification of the
triumph of virtue and deistic piety over natural instincts and
passions; it represents passion running its predestined course. In
this tragedy of the human heart, the law-defying being and the lawless
passion meet their inevitable doom. The termination to the story,
however, was not of Goethe's invention; he made use of a manuscript
describing the death of young Jerusalem (_vide_ Kestner's book on
Goethe and Lotte). In its last lines he only altered a single word, as
being too vulgar. The manuscript runs, "Barbiergesellen trugen ihn";
in the book we read, "Handwerker trugen ihn, kein Geistlicher hat ihn
begleitet." This sentence in its cutting brevity intimates that a life
is at an end, that a human being at war with himself and society,
mortally wounded in his deepest sympathies, has succumbed. Mechanics
bore him to the grave, middle-class society held pharisaically aloof;
no priest accompanied him, for he was a suicide, and had defied the
laws of religion; but he had loved the people and had associated with
the uncultured, so they followed him to the grave.
It is well known to what an outburst of sentimental literature
this work gave rise; how its passionate emotion turned into heavy
sentimentality, as in the case of Clauren, Lafontaine, and Rahbek, the
Dane, or was diluted into sickly platonism, as in Ingemann's feeble
imitation, _Varners Vandringer_, But _Werther_ was not responsible for
all this; absorption in feeling and emotions is only one feature of the
book. There wells forth from the very midst of this absorption such a
healthy love of nature and of life, such a hearty, revolutionary ire at
conventional society, its prejudices, its compulsory regulations, its
terror of genius, whose stream might possibly overflow its banks and
flood the "tulip beds and kitchen-gardens," that the main impression
which the work leaves on our minds is that of the impulse towards
originality and poetry which it depicts, arouses, and satisfies.
What an advance we have here upon _La Nouvelle Héloïse_! In the first
place, there is a far deeper and purer feeling for nature than in
Rousseau. The additional fact, that scenery is looked at from a new
point of view, is to be ascribed to the influence of a literary event
which occurred in 1762, and made a great impression; namely, the
publication of Ossian. The Scottish bard so melted even Napoleon's
hard heart that he much preferred him to Homer. At this time the
authenticity of Ossian had not been called in question; at a later
period men turned from these poems with the pique which people who
have been raving about the singing of a nightingale would show if they
discovered that some rascal hidden among the bushes had been imposing
on them. In the hearts of his contemporaries, Macpherson succeeded in
supplanting Homer. Among others he influenced Goethe, which accounts
for our finding the healthy Homeric view of nature which prevails
in the first half of _Werther_, superseded in the second by the
Ossianic mist pictures which harmonise with the increasing morbidity,
restlessness, and lyrical passion of the tale.
Rousseau's chief female figure is drawn with uncertain touch. Like most
French heroines, she is wanting in womanly simplicity. In genuineness
and sincerity of passion she falls far short of her namesake, the real
Héloïse, whose every word comes from the heart. Julie's utterances are
cold; she perpetually relapses into lectures on Virtue and the Supreme
Being. She makes such observations as the following: "To such a degree
are all human affairs naught, that with the exception of the being
which exists by itself, there is no beauty except in that which is
not." She means in our illusions. Julie dissects feelings, and reasons
in high-flown language. In contrast with her how naïve and natural
is the vigorous Charlotte! Think of the latter, for instance, in the
famous scene where she is cutting bread and butter for her little
sisters and brothers. If she offends it is not by declamation, but by
a touch of sentimentality, as, for instance, in the scene where her
thoughts and Werther's meet, when, looking out into the rain through
the wet window-pane, she utters the word: "Klopstock!"
From St. Preux to Werther the advance is equally great In the former
there was, as his name implies, some reminiscence of the ideal knight.
It is Goethe, the poet of the modern era, who finally disposes of this
ideal. In his heroes, physical courage, which never fails in its effect
on naïve readers, is almost too much ignored. It is so in the case of
Wilhelm Meister and Faust. And Werther too is no knight, but a thinking
and feeling microcosm. From his limited point in space he embraces
the whole of existence, and the trouble in his soul is the trouble
which heralds and accompanies the birth of a new era. His most enduring
mood is one of limitless longing. He belongs to an age of anticipation
and inauguration, not to one of abandonment and despair. We shall see
his antithesis in Chateaubriand's René. The main source of Werther's
unhappiness is to be found in the disparity between the limitations
of society and the infinity of the heart. In early days the heroes of
literature were kings and princes; their worldly position harmonised
with their spiritual greatness; the contrast between desire and power
was unknown. And even after literature had widened its bounds, it still
admitted only those whose birth and wealth raised them above the low
toils and troubles of life. In Wilhelm Meister Goethe indicates the
cause. "O thrice happy," he cries, "are they who are placed by birth
on the heights of humanity, and who have never dwelt in, have never
even travelled through, the valley of humiliation in which so many
an honest soul spends a miserable life. They have scarcely entered
existence before they step on board a ship to take the great common
journey; they profit by every favourable breath of wind, while the
others, left to their own resources, swim painfully after, deriving
but small benefit from the favouring breeze, and often sink when their
strength is exhausted to a miserable death beneath the waves." Here we
have one of the blessings of life, namely, wealth, praised in eloquent
terms, and what may be said of wealth, the lowest in order of life's
outward advantages, may be said with still more reason of all the other
external forms of happiness and power.
It is at the change of the century that we first come upon this strange
incongruity, a personality who is a sort of god and ruler in the
spiritual world, whose capacity of feeling is such that by means of it
he draws into his own life the whole life of the universe, the demand
of whose heart is a demand for omnipotence (for omnipotence he must
have in order to transform the cold, hard world into a world after
his own heart), and who, along with all this, is--what? A Secretary
of Legation, perhaps, like Werther, with a few hundred thalers a
year, a man who is so needy that he is glad when the Hereditary Prince
makes him a present of twenty-five ducats, who is confined half the
day to his office, who is debarred from all except bourgeois society,
and looks for the fulfilment of all his desires of happiness in the
possession of a girl who is carried off from under his nose by a
commonplace prig. Would he cultivate a talent, there are obstacles in
his way; would he gratify a desire, some conventional rule restrains
him; in his longing to follow his ardent impulses, to quench his
burning spiritual thirst, he passionately stretches out his hands, but
society peremptorily says: No. It seemed as if there were a great and
terrible discord between the individual and the general condition of
things, between heart and reason, between the laws of passion and those
of society. The impression that this was so had taken deep hold of that
generation. It appeared to them that there was something wrong with
the great machinery of existence, and that it would soon collapse. Nor
was it long before they heard the crash, before that time came when
all barriers were broken down and all forms done away with; when the
established order was overthrown and distinctions of class suddenly
disappeared; when the air was filled with the smoke of gunpowder and
the notes of the "Marseillaise" when the ancient boundaries of kingdoms
were changed and re-changed, kings were dethroned and beheaded, and the
religion of a thousand years was abolished; when a Corsican lieutenant
of artillery proclaimed himself the heir of the Revolution and declared
all careers open to the man of talent, the son of a French innkeeper
ascended the throne of Naples, and a quondam grenadier grasped the
sceptres of Sweden and Norway.
It is the longing and the vague unrest of anticipation that distinguish
Werther. A revolution lies between him and the next great type, the
Frenchman, René. In René the poetry of prophecy is superseded by
that of disillusionment. In place of pre-revolutionary discontent we
have anti-revolutionary dissatisfaction. All those great changes had
been powerless to bring man's actual condition into harmony with
the cravings of his spirit. The struggle for the human rights of the
individual appeared to have resulted solely in a new tyranny. Once
again we meet the young man of the age in literature. How changed
he is! The fresh colour has gone from his cheek, the ingenuousness
from his mind; his forehead is lined, his life is empty, his hand is
clenched. Expelled from a society which he anathematises because he can
find no place in it, he roams through a new world, through primeval
forests inhabited by savage tribes. A new element, not to be found
in Werther, has entered into his soul--the element of melancholy.
Werther declares again and again that nothing is so obnoxious to him
as ill-humour and despondency; he is unhappy, but never melancholy.
René, on the other hand, is lost in an idle grief which he is unable
to control. He is heavy-hearted and misanthropical. He is a transition
figure, standing midway between Goethe's Werther and Byron's Giaour and
Corsair.
IV
RENÉ
Chateaubriand was not, like Goethe, a man of peace. A star of
destruction stood above his cradle; he was born in the same year as
Napoleon, and the cruel and dark spirit of that age of the sword is
apparent in his writings, and imparts to them a peculiar, wild poetry.
But, it may be objected, has he really anything at all in common with
Goethe and Rousseau? Did he actually learn anything from them? I regard
it as certain that not only he but the whole age was moulded by the
books we have just criticised. A species of proof can be adduced. When
Chateaubriand reproaches Byron for never mentioning his name, for
ignoring all that Childe Harold owes to René, he emphasises the fact
that it is not so with himself, that he will never deny the influence
which Ossian, Werther, and St. Preux have exercised upon his mind.
Again, describing Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, he writes: "The library
he carried with him contained _Ossian, Werther, La Nouvelle Héloïse_,
and the Old Testament; sufficient indication of the chaos reigning in
his brain. He mixed realistic thought with romantic feeling, systems
with dreams, serious studies with fantasies, and wisdom with madness.
It was out of the heterogeneous productions of this century that he
fashioned the empire."[1] I give this pronouncement for what it is
worth, but so much is clear, that if Rousseau's _Héloïse_, Goethe's
_Werther_, and Ossian's poems were so much in the air that they seemed
to a contemporary to be important factors in the creation of the
empire, they must indubitably have had part and lot in the epoch-making
literary works which appeared at the same period.
Comparing Chateaubriand's talent with the contemporary genius of
Napoleon, it seems to us as if the new century had concentrated all its
energy and spirit of enterprise in its great general and conqueror,
leaving none to spare for the young contemporaries who did not follow
him on his warlike path. The procession of men of action and warriors
passes them by and leaves them standing irresolute and dissatisfied.
René is supposed to live in the days of Louis XV., but the description
given of that period would apply equally well to the time of
Chateaubriand's youth. It was, says René, a time when people had
relapsed from the reverence for religion and the austere morality which
had hitherto prevailed, into a condition of impiety and corruption,
when genius had degenerated into mere nimbleness of wit, and the
serious and right-minded felt ill at ease and lonely. All this applies
very accurately to the close of the eighteenth century as it would be
seen by Chateaubriand.
In _Atala_ Chactas had told René the story of his life; now René in
return relates his past history to Chactas. He describes his childhood
in the old manor-house of the remote province, he tells how ill at ease
and repressed he felt in the presence of his father, and how he was
only happy in the society of his sister Amélie. Brother and sister,
both by nature melancholy, and both poetically inclined, are early
left orphans and obliged to quit their home. René's great longing is
for the peace of the cloister; but he is changeable in his longings;
they presently take the form of a desire to travel. This desire he
gratifies. He finds food for his melancholy among the ruins of Greece
and Rome, and discovers as much forgetfulness of the dead among living
peoples as upon the soil of past nations; the workmen whom he questions
in the streets of London know nothing of that Charles the Second at
the foot of whose statue they stand. What, then, is the value of fame?
He travels to Scotland to live in the memory of the heroes of Morven,
and finds herds of cattle grazing on the spots where Ossian sang and
Fingal conquered. He returns to Italy and studies its monuments of
art, but finds that for all his pains he has learned nothing. Past and
Present are two incomplete statues; the one has been dug up from the
earth in a mutilated condition, the other stands unfinished, and can
only be completed by the Future. Nature has as little power as history
to soothe his disordered soul. He climbs Mount Etna, and, standing on
its summit, sees on one side the sun rise above the horizon, with the
whole of Sicily spread out far beneath, surrounded by the great sea,
and looking so small that its rivers resemble the lines on a map; on
the other side he looks down into the crater of the volcano, with its
burning glow and its black smoke. This situation he considers to be
exactly typical of his own character and life. "All my life long," he
says, "I have had a widespread and yet insignificantly small world
before my eyes, and at my side a yawning abyss."
So volcanic and pretentious a nature was, naturally, out of place in
the land that had given it birth. It is in vain that Chateaubriand
attempts to conform in his modes of expression to the standards of
that society to which he considers himself, spiritually, infinitely
superior; he is invariably treated and spoken of as an _esprit
romanesque_ for whom life has no use. Here we come for the first
time on the term which in a slightly different form was to become
so familiar in France as the denomination of a whole school. There
is, undoubtedly, something of the Romanticist before the days of
Romanticism in this mysterious suffering, which is so conscious of
being interesting. From all these half-forgotten memories of vanished
grandeur, all these impressions of the vanity of name and fame, these
transports of indignation at the baseness and littleness of mankind,
René has distilled an obstinate conviction that there is no such thing
as happiness, and a persuasion of the weariness and emptiness of
life even while he feels its healthy glow tingling in his veins. His
favourite expressions are: "La folie de croire au bonheur; dégoût de la
vie; profond sentiment d'ennui," &c.