ated your anxiety is, and till you have more truly felt, in the book itself, the innocent mingling of fiction and truth. Thou hast, dear Kestner, exhausted everything, cut away all the ground of my excuse, and left me nothing to say; yet I know not, my heart has still more to say, although I cannot express it. I am silent, but the sweet presentiment I must still retain, and I hope eternal Fate has that in store for me which will bind us yet closer one to the other. Yes, dear ones, I who am so bound to you by love, must still remain debtor to you and your children for the uncomfortable hours which my. name it as you will given you... . . And now, my dear ones, when anger rises within you, think, oh think only that your old Goethe, ever and ever, and now more than ever, is your own.' has Their anger fell. They saw that he had committed an indiscretion, but had done no more. They wrote forgiveness, as we gather from this letter Goethe sent on the 21st of November: Here I have thy letter, Kestner! On a strange desk, in a painter's studio, for yesterday I began to paint in oil, I have thy letter, and must give thee my thanks! Thanks, dear friend! Thou 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 I have to thank for it; thus thou art not Albert. thus And '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 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 us. 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 a 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: RUHEPLATZ DES DICHTERS GOETHE ZU SEINEM ANDENKEN FRISCH BEPFLANZT BEI DER JUBELFEIER AM 28 aug. 1849. CHAPTER VI. SURVEY OF GERMAN LITERATURE. THERE never was a solitary Great Man. We may single one man from out the crowd, and place him on a pedestal; but, if we look attentively, we shall perceive others surrounding him also deserving pedestals, though none perhaps so eminent as he. Shakespeare, who lets few things escape his glance, has noted this in Julius Cæsar: 'When went there by an age, since the great flood, The reason is, that whenever the confluence of circumstances calls for great energies, the energies are ready to the call. Men are equal to their destiny, and, as Schiller finely says, 'grow with the circle wherein they move.' 'Es wächst der Mensch mit seinem grosserem Kreise.' Eminent as Goethe stood above his contemporaries, he did not stand alone; around him, on his first splendid entrance into the arena, were men who had already fixed the fluctuating reverence of the public - Lessing, Herder, Klopstock, Wieland, and many lesser names. These, and their works, I might presuppose the reader to be more or less familiar with; and, consulting my own ease rather than his profit, might pass on with the briefest indication. |