The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
translated by Michael Hulse
(Penguin, 1989)
A schoolmaster’s daughter who outlived the writer, dying two yea4rs after him in 1834, never forgot either Goethe or the other young gentleman, Jerusalem, and would show visitors to the village a wooden seat (the Wertherstuhl) which Goethe had sat on.
Page 5.
‘His affection for a woman who was already promised to someone else, his efforts to make masterpieces of foreign literature a part of our own, and his own, and his endeavours to capture Nature not only in words but also with a pencil and brush, albeit without any proper technique: any of these would have been sufficient to swell his heart and weigh upon his breast.’
Pages 7-8.
Goethe was in Wetzlar from 6 to 11 November, and took the opportunity to find out the details of Jerusalem’s death. Later that month he also received a meticulous written account which he had asked Kestner for, and on which he was to base the final pages of his novel in due course. Once in possession of the precise facts, Goethe (according to Dichtung und Wahrheit) beheld the structure of the novel in its entirety.
Page 10.
Between midnight and one, Jerusalem shot himself. A Franciscan monk head the shot and saw the flash of the powder, but, since everything remained quiet, he thought no more about it. Jerusalem appeared to have killed himself sitting at his desk, Kestner reported.
Page 10.
Jerusalem died around midday, and was buried the same night shortly before eleven. Kestner reported that barbers’ apprentices bore him to the grave, and that a cross was carried ahead of Jerusalem. He added the plain statement which Goethe subsequently chose to use as the final words of the novel: ‘No priest attended him.’
Page 11.
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, published by Weygand in Leipzig later in 1774, was received in its time (and continues to be read) as partly autobiographical, partly biographical.
Page 11.
In the first part of the novel Werther was Goethe, and in the second Jerusalem.
Page 11.
Werther is the first great achievement of what a later age was to label ‘confessional’ literature.
Page 11.
The knowledge that real events lay behind Goethe’s fiction was taken as an excuse of maudlin indulgences.
Page 11.
Knowing that there was once a reality which had been fictionalized into a different realm of experience was not enough: ‘reality’ had to include the ‘poesy’, and was sanctified by it.
Page 12.
An essential part of the Werther legend has always insisted that there was a spate of ‘Liebestod all over Europe’, in the words of a recent poem by Michael Hofmann. But there seems little evidence that Goethe’s novel prompted a suicide epidemic.
Page 12.
Whether the myth of a suicide epidemic has any truth to it or not, many of Goethe’s contemporaries were ready to assume that the novel might exert a corrupting influence, and a heated debate raged over the question.
Page 13.
When the Leipzig theological faculty applied for a ban on the novel, on the grounds that it recommended suicide, the city council imposed the ban within two days.
Page 13.
Imitating Werther’s life and death was one thing, and imitating the book in which he appeared was another. The success of Werther was rapid and immense. The novel was soon translated into every major European language. There were poems about Werther. There were plays about Werther. … Werther songs were sung. Meissen porcelain showed Werther scenes. Ladies wore Werther jewellery and their scent was Eau de Werther. They carried Werther fans and wore Werther gloves.
Pages 13-14.
The fifteen years following first publication were the heyday of Werther fever.
Page 14.
Those were lean years for English literature. Fielding and Richardson, Sterne and Smollett, Goldsmith and Gray were all dead, and for a few years Goethe’s novel dominated the English scene.
Page 14.
In 1894 the first Japanese translation was made.
Page 16.
The proto-Romantic cult of the genius exempt from the customary rules and judgements of society was characteristic of German writing of the Sturm und Drang, and once it was coupled with that sentimental, melancholy sensitivity which was known as Empfindsamkeit it produced an intellectual and emotional mood in which everyone (as Goethe put it in Dichtung und Wahrheit) felt he could be the Prince of Denmark.
Page 17.
Beyond the struggles of one individual to assert his own larger sense of his place in Creation, beyond Werther’s frustration at feeling trapped by society’s trammelling rules, a very real and discontented sense of the gap between aristocratic high society and the common folk remains persistently and fretfully present in the novel.
Page 18.
Werther is a signal accomplishment, the first great tragic novel, a work of exhilarating style and insight.
Page 18.
Werther has often been translated into English, but it seems that since the first fever of the 1780s it has not been very much read, and Longfellow’s feeling that ‘it is not understood’ may still be true today.
Page 19.
To complain of Werther’s self-pity or lack of will is like complaining of Hamlet’s procrastination. The weaknesses in Werther’s character are certainly there. They are there for a reason. They are there as an essential part of the portrait of a man ill-equipped to cope with his life. They are there as the fatal flaws in a character likeable, generous, creative, spontaneous, responsive and full of vitality.
Page 19.
What a creature is Man, that he may bewail himself!
Page 25.
I mean to enjoy the present moment, and what is past will be over and done with.
Page 25.
The pains people endure would be less if only … they did not put so much imaginative energy into recalling the memory of past misfortune, rather than bear an indifferent present with equanimity.
Page 25.
If you ask how the people are here I have to answer: just as they are everywhere! The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.
Page 29.
All our learned teachers and educators are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want; but no one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.
Page 31.
Only Nature has inexhaustible riches, and only Nature creates a great artist. A good deal can be said of the advantages of rules, much the same as can be said in praise of bourgeois society. A man shaped by the rules will never produce anything tasteless or bad, just as a citizen who observes laws and decorum will never be an unbearable neighbour or an out-and-out villain; and yet on the other hand, say what you please, the rules will destroy the true feeling of Nature and its true expression!
Page 32.
Whenever my mind is tottering all the tumult is soothed to quiet by the sight of a creature like this living in the small daily round of her existence in a state of happy tranquility, getting by from one day to the next, seeing the leaves fall and thinking nothing but that winter is coming.
Page 34.
Must we go tinkering about with Nature before we can enjoy it?
Page 35.
I have made an acquaintance who has touched my heart very closely! … I am unable to tell you how, and why, she is perfection itself; suffice to say that she has captivated me utterly.
Page 36.
My entire soul was transfixed by her figure, her tone, her manner.
Page 38.
Never in all my life have I danced so well. I was no longer a mere mortal. Holding the most adorable of creatures in my rms and flying about with her like lightning, so that I forgot everything about me.
Page 41.
The thunder was passing by and a wonderful rain was falling on the land, filling the warm air with the most refreshing fragrance.
Page 43.
The sun and moon and stars can go about their business as they please, but as for me, I do not know if it is day or night, and the whole world is as nothing to me.
Page 43.
My days are as happy as any God set aside for his saints.
Page 44.
Distance is like the future: before our souls lies an entire and dusky vastness which overwhelms our feelings as it overwhelms our eyes … And then, ah! Once we hasten onwards, and what lay ahead becomes the here and now, everything is just as it was, and there we are as poor and confined as ever our souls longing for the elusive balm.
Page 44.
It is good that my heart can feel the simple and innocent pleasure a man knows when the cabbage he eats at table is one he grew himself; the pleasure he takes not only in eating the cabbage but in remembering all those good days, the fine morning he planted it, the mellow evenings he watered it and the delight he felt in its daily growth.
Page 45.
Nothing on earth is closer to my heart than children. When I watch them and see in the smallest of creatures the seeds of all the virtues and strengths they will one day need so badly; when I see their obstinacy as future resolution and firmness of character and their caprice as good humour and that light touch which makes it easy to negotiate the troubles of life, and all of it so unspoilt, so intact!
Page 45.