Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill WERTHER La Nouvelle Htlalse appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later, in another country and in very different environments, a youthful genius, who possessed little in common with Rousseau, but who wrote under the influence of his romance and j his ideas, published a little book which contained all the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill WERTHER La Nouvelle Htlalse appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later, in another country and in very different environments, a youthful genius, who possessed little in common with Rousseau, but who wrote under the influence of his romance and j his ideas, published a little book which contained all the merits and none of the defects of La Nouvelle He'lofse, a book j which stirred thousands upon thousands of minds, which awoke lively enthusiasm and a morbid longing for death in a whole generation, which in not a few cases induced hysterical sentimentality, idleness, despair, and suicide, and which was honoured by being proscribed by a fatherly Danish government as irreligious. This book was Werther. St. Preux has changed his costume, has donned the famous Werther garb, the blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and Rousseau's belle dme has passed into German literature as die schtine Seek. And what is Werther? No definitions can give anyi real idea of the infinite wealth of an imaginative master-) piece, but we may briefly say that the great importance of this story of ardent, unhappy love, lies in its being so treatedl that it gives expression not merely to the isolated passion and suffering of a single individual, but to the passions, longings, and sufferings of a whole age. The hero is a young man of the burgher class; he is artistically gifted, and paints for pleasure, but by profession he is Secretary to a Legation. Goethe has involuntarily made this young man see, and feel, and think as he himself did in his youth, has endowed him with all his own rich and brilliant genius. This transforms Werther into a great symbolic figure; he is more than the spirit of the new era, he is its genius. He is ] almost too rich and great for his destiny. There is, perhaps, actual...