Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/749

Rh tzlar. Lotte lnﬁi. GOE to free will. The study of a dry and dull biography of Glitz, published in 1731, supplied the subject for his awakened powers. From this miserable sketch he conceived within his mind a complete picture of Germany in the 16th century. The chief characters of his play are creatures of his imagina- tion representing the principal types which made up the his- tory of the time. Every personage is made to live; they speak in short sharp sentences like the powerful lines of a great master's drawing. The ﬁrst sketch of Giitz was ﬁnished in six weeks, in the autumn of 1771. Cornelia was con- sulted at every stage in the work. Herder saw it, and gave his approval. On his return from Vetzlar in 1773 Goethe wrote the piece over again, and published it, with the help of Merck, in the form in which we now possess it. It ran like wild-fire through the whole of Germany. It was the progenitor, not only of the “ Sturm und Drang ” period to which it gave the tone, but of the romantic knightly literature which teemed from the German press. At a later period, in 1804, Goethe prepared another edition for the stage, which took ﬁve hours in acting. It has never been represented since. With the manuscript of Gijtz in his pocket, Goethe left Frankfort in the spring of 177:2 for Vetzlar, a quiet country town on the Laliii, one of the seats of government of the Holy Ronian Empire. The emperors lived at Vienna; they were crowned at Frankfort ; they_held their parliaments at Ratisbon, and at Wetzlar their courts of justice. It was the custom for young lawyers to attend the sittings of these courts for a certain time before they could be admitted to practise on their own account. The com- pany of these students, of the embassies from the com- ponent parts of the empire, and of various imperial officials, made the society a pleasant and lively one. Goethe soon found friends. The secretary of the Brunswick legation, Gone, formed a round table of knights,—a Ritter-tafel. The members adopted names from the age of chivalry, and ap- portioned among themselves the neighbouring villages as coiniiiaiideries and ﬁefs. Goethe took the name of Gotz. Deeds of prowess were performed in friendly rivalry, chieﬂy of eating and drinking. This masquerade at least served to keep the idea of Gotz constantly before his mind. But the place has sadder associations. It is impossible to dis- sociate the name of Wetzlar from that of Werther. The Deutsches Hans, then the property of the knights of the Ten- tonic order, exists still in the main street of Wetzlar. It was occupied by one of the officials of the order, by name Buff, an honest man with a large family of children. The second (l‘.L'.1g‘l1lZel‘, Lotte, blue-eyed, fair, and just twenty years of age, was ﬁrst met by Goethe shortly after his arrival at a ball at Wolpertshausen. She strongly attracted him ; he became a constant visitor at the house. He found that Lotte was a second mother to her brothers and sisters, and he delighted to play games with them and tell them stories. Lotte was really though not formally engaged to Kestner, a man of two—ai1d-tliirty, secretary to the Hanoverian legation. The discovery of this relation made no difference to Goethe ; he remained the devoted friend to both. He visited Lotte and her children ; he walked with Kestiier about the streets till midnight ; they kept their common birthday together in the German house on the 28th of August; Kestiier felt no jealousy ; Goethe was content with Lotte’s friendship ; her heart was large enough for both. But the position was too critical to last. On September 10 they met in the German house for the last time. Lotte spoke of the other world, and of the possibility of returning from it. It was arranged between them that whoever died ﬁrst should appear to the others. This conversation conﬁrmed Goethe’s purpose ; he determined to go away. He made no adieu, but wrote a line to Kestner to say that he could not have borne to stay a moment longer. Merck had probably persuaded T H E 725 him to this step. To divert his mind he took him to Eliren— hreitsteiii and introduced him to Sophie la Roche, the friend of Wieland’s youth, and to her daughter Maxiniiliane, with whom Goethe was charmed. The places in the neigh- bourhood of Coblentz were visited. Goethe returned to Frankfort by the river in a yacht. Here he was possessed with the memory of Lotte. He fastened her silhouette over his bed. Kestiier came to Frankfort in September; Goethe and Schlosser went together to Wetzlar in Novem- ber. man attached to the Brunswick legation. He had been with Goethe at the university of Leipsic, but he had seen little of him at Wetzlar. Of a moody temperament, dis- heartened by failure in his profession, and soured by a hopeless passion for the wife of another, he had borrowed a pair of pistols from Kestner under pretence of a journey, and had shot himself on the night of October 29. Goethe obtained a full narrative of the circuinstances from Kestner, and immediately afterwards began his Wert/ze7', in which the circumstances above related are all interwoven. Goethe tells us that it was written in four weeks, but this can hardly have been the case. We have notices of its slow progress during the whole of the summer of 1773. In 1774 it is far advanced enough to be shown to some intimate friends. It is not till the middle of Septem- ber 1771 that two copies of the book are sent in the greatest secrecy to Sophie la Roche and Lotte Buff. In October it spread over the whole of Germany. It was enthusiastically beloved or sternly condemned. It was printed, imitated, translated into every language of Europe, criticized in every periodical, with the fullest meed of praise or scorn. It made the round of the world, and penetrated even to China. The Wertlzer fever wrung the hearts of men and women with imaginary sorrows; floods of tears were shed; young men dressed in blue coats and yellow breeches shot themselves with Wertlzer in their hands. It opened the ﬂoodgates of pent—up sentiinentalism which had been stirred by the philosophy of the time, and which the calamities of the next generation were sternly to suppress. It may be imagined that Kestner and Lotte were not well satisfied with the liberty which Goethe had taken with them. They were married on April 4, 1773, and Goethe provided the wedding ring. Notwithstanding the coolness which the publication of ll'm‘t/w)- produced between them, the correspondence between Goethe and Kestner continued to the end of the century. Lotte saw Goetlieiii Weiinar in 1816, when she was 63 years old; she was still beautiful, but her head shook with palsy. She died in 1828. The second part of Wart/zer represents the agony of a jealous hnsbaiid. This was inspired by Brentano, an Italian merchant resident in Leipsic, a widower with five children, who had married Maxiniiliaiie, the daughter of Sophie la Roche. Goethe loved her as an elder brother, but her husband scarcely approved of the intimacy. Merck tells us that his ideas went very little beyond his business, and that it was dispiriting to have to look for his young girl friend among barrels of lierriiigs and piles of cheeses. "Goethe,” he says, “much consoles her for the smell of oil and cheese, and for her husband's manners. " G612 and Werz‘/ze-2' formed the solid foundation of Goethe's fame. They were read from one end of Germany to the other. It is difficult to imagine that the same man can have produced both works, so different are they in matter and in style. Wcrtlzer represents the languid seiitinientalisni, the passionate despair, which possessed an age vexed by evils which not-liiiig but the knife could cure, and tortured by the presence of a high ideal which revealed to it at once the. depth of its misery and the hopelessness of a better lot. 0612 was the ﬁrst manly appeal to the chivalry of German spirit, which, caught up by other voices, sounded through- out the fatherland like the call of a warder’s truinpet,._till Here he heard of the death of Jernsaleiii, a young- I Ferlhcr.