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applauded by the young and the many . The prudent and the serious , however , were startled . Herder , among others , received it with frowns . It became the subject of numerous imitations ; but not from the author : no other work of his bears the slightest resemblance to it * .
In the following year appeared his Werter } of which , on account of its bearing upon his personal character , we will speak here . Its subject , as every one knows , is a diseased attachment to a married woman , for which the wretched lover has no other remedy than an act of suicide . That the author was , up to a certain point , the subject of his own story there can be no doubtj-. One of his youthful attachments supplied part of the materials ,
but it had its origin in a more serious hallucination . He had at one time ( connected doubtless with the malady we have already mentioned ) his imagination so haunted with images of selfdestruction , that to harden himself against their impression , he sharpened a dagger and used to sleep with it against his bosom . For several years he was tormented by a number of
painful impressions , for which he could find neither vent nor cure , when the sad death of young Jerusalem , occasioned by a similar love for the wife of a friend , awakened him out of his dream , and the work was composed in four weeks . Goethe happily compares the effect of the incident on his mind ,, to water in a vessel , which being already at the freezing point , on being shaken turns at once to solid ice .
No work ever acquired so sudden and wide celebrity . It became popular throughout Europe . Our own translation , by the bye , manifests a singular want of discernment of its real character . It is known as the 6 Sorrows of Werter . ' Werter has no sorrows—they are sufferings , the German Leiden . In Germany it produced innumerable imitations ; and we have a remote and
* Goethe ' s mother related to a friend that he came home one day from the town , library snapping his fingers and jumping about as if he were crazy , —* Oh , mother , 1 have found suck a book , the Life of Old Gbtz , I will turn it into a play , and I will call it the Knight with the Iron Hand—how that iron hand will make the Philistines stare . ' Our readers probably know that at the German universities the world is divided between Student and Philistine—and so among poets , artists , men of taste—all the others are Philistines . It is a curious coincidence that Sir Walter Scott began his literary career by a forgotten translation of this tragedy . It were irood for his reputation were some unhappy imitations of Goethe also forgotten .
f Goethe ' s mother made to our friend also the following remark ;— ' If you look closely you will find there are two Werters , not one . During the first half of the book my son describes his own real attachment to Charlotte—a virtuous woman , who never gave him any encouragement ; but , in the last half , when Werter becomes crazy , it is no longer himself , but poor Jerusalem . * The same friend has communicated to us a more valuable remark from the lips of Goethe himself . A
few years since , being with the great poet , he took the liberty of reminding him that it was himself who set the fashion in favour of Ossian , who afterwards was so excessively bepr&ised in France , Italy , and Germany , —* Why , that is true , * Goethe replied , ' but , in fact , Werter praises Homer while he is in his senses , and O * 9 Jjux only after he is crazy , No one ever had the sense to find that out—reviewers uewr see such things / .. .. ..... , * .
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Goethe . 29 %
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1832, page 297, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1812/page/9/
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