Goethe: ‘It is impossible to describe one’s feelings save in the flash and fire of the moment’.

Passion Incapable of Being Converted into Action

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE HAD been dominated, politically and culturally, by the French — the rationalism of the Philosophes was the intellectual fashion. Werther was a book about feelings, told from the point of view of a character who is ruled by his emotions to an unprecedented degree. It was a revolt against French ideas, and the founding work of the German romantic movement.

German critics August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel were among the first to reclaim the word ‘romantic’ as a positive term. To Sir Joshua Reynolds, it would have meant, as art historian William Vaughn puts it, ‘those emotive extremes that lay beyond the proper sphere of the artist to depict’. For the Schlegels, emotive extremes would characterise the art and literature of the new century. They seized on the romantic as being closer to the spirit of the age than the watered-down classicism that had been in vogue for so long.1

In his Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1809), August Schlegel praised Goethe for jettisoning the tired rules of neoclassicism in favour of ‘organic form’.2 Thanks to Schlegel’s promotion, and the fact that his work was so widely translated, Goethe’s name soon became indelibly connected with the romantic movement in England, Italy, Spain and — most surprising of all — France. Goethe’s reputation was consolidated by Madame de Staël’s appreciation of his work in her De l’Allemagne, which, as Martin Swales points out, virtually inverted the supremacy of France over Germany in the world of letters in one fell swoop.3 By 1826 Goethe was being praised by French critics for having revived that country’s literature by replacing the old classical insistence on learning and imitation with a new approach that drew on personal confession, ‘finding the subject matter within oneself’.4

For the young Goethe, there was simply no other way to write. As Barker Fairley has shown in his study of the author, Goethe was fiercely anti-intellectual as a youth. At the age of eighteen, he had already realised that books had nothing to teach him, and that everything he had to offer the world could be found by plumbing the depths of his own soul. He was extraordinarily creative — but the idea of editing or refining his work, let alone ordering it or subjecting it to intellectual scrutiny, was absolutely abhorrent to him. ‘It is impossible to describe one’s feelings save in the flash and fire of the moment,’ he wrote in 1775.5

By the time he died, Goethe was seen, in most European countries, as the father of German romanticism. The irony in this is that Goethe enjoyed being called ‘romantic’ about as much as Gerard Way likes being called ‘emo’. He very quickly tried to distance himself from Werther’s emotional excess, maintaining that it was a crazy book written at a crazy time in his life. The older Goethe never read from Werther in public, and admitted once or twice that he was almost scared to open the thing, in case the terrible mood that had inspired it was somehow trapped between its pages, and might overtake him again.

Thomas Carlyle would have agreed that Werther was better left on the shelf. Not that Carlyle didn’t admire Goethe, in fact, he did more for the cause of Goethe in Britain than anyone, including Madame de Staël. De Staël had unintentionally done Goethe a disservice by presenting to her English readers a version of his Faust that played up the work’s ‘satanic’ overtones at the expense of its more important ideas. This merely confirmed Wordsworth and Coleridge’s suspicions that there was something offensively immoral in Goethe. Carlyle’s translations and essays improved Goethe’s reputation in Britain a great deal. But Carlyle was not unbiased in his appreciation. ‘Carlyle’, writes Swales, ‘saw in Goethe’s career a reflection of his own spiritual development that led from gloomy despair to the recognition of community service.’6 In other words, Carlyle saw Werther as a phase that Goethe had grown out of, and that the literary world had — or ought to have — as well.

In England Werther had been a smash hit. It had run to fourteen editions and been turned into a popular play. It was, for a while, inescapable: like something in the air, you could catch it just by walking around and breathing — although young men with good educations and nothing to do seemed more susceptible than most. Lord Byron didn’t even have to read the book to understand its importance — he couldn’t have, in any case, since he’d never learned to do anything other than swear in German. But Byron instinctively picked up on the mood of gloomy introspection in Goethe’s novella, and rode the same unhappy bandwagon all the way to the bank, which in turn led to another wave of tortured poetry by young men with lots of feelings — all of them bad. Years later Carlyle, fed up with all the sobbing and moping Werther had inspired, made an example of Byron as an English ‘sentimentalist’ — hopefully, he said, the last:

For what good is it to ‘whine, put finger i’ the eye, and sob,’ in such a case? Still more, to snarl and snap in malignant wise, ‘like dog distract, or monkey sick?’ Why should we quarrel with our existence, here as it lies before us, our field and inheritance…7

Carlyle is effectively telling the sentimentalists, the Werther faces and the Byronic brooders to grow up and get over it. And this is almost exactly what Charlotte, when she can no longer take his hysterics, says to Werther. In life, as in art, Werther follows his heart exclusively, and refuses to be bound by manners, good taste or commonsense — all of which he sees as every bit as deadening to life and love as they are to art. But by refusing to see reason and indulging his feelings to the exclusion of all else, Werther drives everybody crazy — in the real world, it seems, being emotional is not okay. Charlotte, who at first finds that her kind heart will not permit her to turn Werther completely away, eventually runs out of patience:

‘Oh! why were you born with that excessive, that ungovernable passion for everything that is dear to you?’ Then, taking his hand, she said, ‘I entreat of you to be more calm: your talents, your understanding, your genius, will furnish you with a thousand resources. Be a man, and conquer an unhappy attachment toward a creature who can do nothing but pity you.’8

Charlotte, in other words, sees that Werther needs to take control of his life. She wants him to stop standing around emoting and do something — anything. But Werther is paralysed by feeling. This, as Carlyle himself admitted, is why Werther is an important book. Werther, Carlyle insisted,

attempted the more accurate delineation of a class of feelings deeply important to modern minds, but for which our elder poetry offered no exponent, and perhaps could offer none, because they are feelings that arise from Passion incapable of being converted into Action.9

The hero’s ‘quarrel with existence’ is not one that can be resolved by practical means, because his revolt is a revolt against the practical world — he demands the right to be unreasonable in the Age of Reason.