art ever the same good soul! O that I could spring on thy neck, throw myself at Lotte's feet, one, one minute, and all, all that should be done away with, explained, which I could not make clear with quires of paper! O ye unbelieving ones! I could exclaim. Ye

of little faith! Could you feel the thousandth part of what Werther is to a thousand hearts, you would not reckon the sacrifice you have made towards it! Here is a letter, read it, and send me word quickly what thou thinkest of it, what impression it makes on thee. Thou sendest me Hennings' letter; he does not condemn me; he excuses me. Dear brother Kestner! if you will wait, you shall be contented. I would not, to save my own life, call back Werther, and believe me, believe in me, thy anxieties, thy gravamina will vanish like phantoms of the night if thou hast patience; and then, between this and a year, I promise you in the most affectionate, peculiar, fervent manner, to disperse, as if it were a mere north-wind fog and mist, whatever may remain of suspicion, misinterpretation, etc., in the gossiping public, though it is a herd of swine. Werther must—must be! You do not feel him, you only feel me and yourselves; and that which you call stuck on, and in spite of you, and others, is interwoven. If I live, it is thee I have to thank for it; thus thou art not Albert. And thus—

"Give Lotte a warm greeting for me, and say to her: To know that your name is uttered by a thousand hallowed lips with reverence, is surely an equivalent for anxieties which would scarcely, apart from anything else, vex a person long in common life, where one is at the mercy of every tattler.'

"If you are generous and do not worry me, I will send you letters, cries, sighs after Werther, and if you have faith, believe that all will be well, and gossip is nothing, and weigh well your philosopher's letter, which I have kissed.

"O then!—hast not felt how the man embraces thee, consoles thee, and in thy—in Lotte's worth, finds consolation enough under the wretchedness which has terrified you even in the fiction. Lotte, farewell,—Kestner, love me, and do not worry me."

The pride of the author in his darling breaks out in this letter, now his friends have forgiven him. We must admit that Kestner had reason to be annoyed; the more so as his friends, identifying him with the story, wrote sympathetically about it. He had to reply to Hennings on the subject, and in telling him the true story, begged him to correct the false reports. He says: In the first part of Werther, Werther is Goethe himself. In Lotte and Albert he has

us.

borrowed traits from us, my wife and myself. Many of the scenes are quite true, and yet partly altered; others are, at least in our history, unreal. For the sake of the second part, and in order to prepare for the death of Werther, he has introduced various things into the first part which do not at all belong to us. For example, Lotte has never either with Goethe or with any one else stood in the intimate relation which is there described; in this we have certainly great reason to be offended with him, for several accessory circumstances are too true and too well known for people not to point to He regrets it now, but of what use is that to us? It is true he has a great regard for my wife; but he ought to have depicted her more faithfully in this point, that she was too wise and delicate ever to let him go so far as is represented in the first part. She behaved to him in such way as to make her far dearer to me than before, if this had been possible. Moreover, our engagement was never made public, though not, it is true, kept a secret : still she was too bashful ever to confess it to any one. And there was no engagement between us but that of hearts. It was not till shortly before my departure (when Goethe had already been a year away from Wetzlar at Frankfurt, and the disguised Werther had been dead half a year) that we were married. After the lapse of a year, since our residence here, we have become father and mother. The dear boy lives still, and gives us, thank God, much joy. For the rest, there is in Werther much of Goethe's character and manner of thinking. Lotte's portrait is completely that of my wife. Albert might have been made a little more ardent. The second part of Werther has nothing whatever to do with us. . . When Goethe had printed his book, he sent us an early copy, and thought we should fall into raptures with what he had done. But we at once saw what would be the effect, and your letter confirms our fears. I wrote very angrily to him. He then for the first time saw what he had done; but the book was printed, and he hoped our fears were idle." In another letter to the same, Kestner says: "You have no idea what a man he is. But when his great fire has somewhat burnt itself out, then we shall all have the greatest joy in him."

..

We have thus brought to a close the history of Werther, its composition and effect: a history so important in the biography of its author, that we might have been excused for having devoted so much space to it, even if the letters, which have furnished the evidence, did not throw so strong a light upon a period very inadequately represented in the Wahrheit und Dichtung.

On the 28th August 1849, the hundredth anniversary of the great poet's birth, when all Germany joined in a jubilee, a small marble monument was erected in the well-known Wertherplatz without the Wetzlar gates, where Goethe was wont to sit and muse; three lime trees are planted round it, bearing this inscription:

CHAPTER VI.

THE LITERARY LION.

GOETHE was now at the perilous juncture in an author's career, when having just achieved a splendid success, he is in danger either of again snatching at laurels in presumptuous haste, or of suffering himself to repose upon the laurels he has won, talking of greatness, instead of learning to be great. Both perils he avoided. He neither traded on his renown, nor conceived that his education was complete. Wisely refraining from completing fresh important works, he kept up the practice of his art by trifles, and the education of his genius by serious studies.

Among these trifles are Clavigo, the Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilen, and the Prolog zu Bahrdt's Neuesten Offenbarungen. For the composition of Clavigo we must retrace our steps a little, and once more see him in the Frankfurt circle during the summer of 1774, that is, before the publication of Werther, which was delayed till October. In his sister's pleasant circle we have already noticed Antoinette Gerock, who was fascinating enough to fix his attentions. They were accustomed to meet once a week, in picnics and pleasure parties; at one of these it was agreed to institute a marriage lottery. He thus speaks of it: "Every week lots were drawn to determine the couples who should be symbolically wedded; for it was supposed that every one knew well enough how lovers should conduct themselves, but few had any proper conceptions of the requisite demeanour between man and wife. General rules were laid down to the effect that these wedded couples should preserve a polite indifference, not sitting near each other, nor speaking to each other too often, much less indulging in anything like caresses. At the same time, side by side with this polite indifference, this well-bred calm, anything like discord or suspicion was to be sedulously avoided; and whoever succeeded in gaining the affections of his wife without using the importunities of a lover, was supposed to have achieved their ideal. Much sportive confusion and agreeable pleasantry of course arose from this scheme." Strangely enough, to him it fell

thrice to have the same girl appointed by hazard to fill the place of his wife. When fate had brought them together for the third time, it was resolved unanimously that they should be no longer separated, that heaven had spoken, and that hereafter they were to consider themselves as man and wife, and not to draw lots as the others did. At these reunions something new was generally read aloud by one of the party. One evening Goethe brought with him as a novelty the "Mémoire" of Beaumarchais. During the conversation which ensued, Goethe's partner said to him: "If I were thy liege lady, and not thy wife, I would command thee to change this memoir into a play, to which it seems well suited." He answered: "That thou mayst see, my love, that liege lady and wife are one, I here undertake that this day week I will read a play on this very matter." So bold a promise excited astonishment, but he resolved on fulfilling it. "What, in such cases," he says, "is termed invention, was with me spontaneous. While escorting my titulary wife home I was silent; and on her inquiring the cause, I told her that I was thinking out the play, and had already got into the middle of it—intending to show her how gladly I would do anything to please her. Upon which she pressed my hand, and I snatched a kiss. 'Thou must not step out of thy character,' she exclaimed; they say it is not proper for married folks to be loving.' 'Let them say what they please,' I replied, we will have it our own way.""

He confesses that before reading the memoir aloud, the subject had appeared to him eminently dramatic; though, without such a stimulus as he had received, this piece, like so many others, would have remained among the number of possible creations. The only novelty in it was his mode of treating the villains. He was weary of those characters so frequently represented, who, from revenge, or from hate, or from trivial motives, ruin a noble nature; and he wished in Carlos to show the working of clear good sense, against passion and inclination. Justified by the precedent of Shakspeare, he translated, word for word, such portions of the memoir as were dramatic; borrowing the dénouement from an English ballad.* He was ready before the week expired, and read the piece to a delighted audience.

A few words on this memoir may be useful. Beaumarchais had two sisters living in Madrid, one married to an architect, the other, Marie, engaged to Clavijo, a young author without fortune. No sooner had Clavijo obtained the office he had long solicited, than he

So he says; but his memory deceived him. The ballad was an old German ballad, Das Lied vom Herren und der Magd. See Herder's Nachlass, 1, 159.

M