Freedom of My Mind

Having read the fascinating book Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf, it seemed the next thing to do was read an example of the literature produced during that era of German Romanticism. Except that it isn’t as easy to find poetry by the German Romantics as it is by the English Romantics (without spending money or reading poorly edited editions from online). So, I chose the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe, which is admittedly a bit of a cheat. It was written almost twenty years before the time that Wulf covers (1790s), though the book is discussed because of its influence on the young romantics.

The Sorrows of Young Werther is the principal example of a movement in German Literature called Sturm und Drang, which means storm and stress, and there is certainly plenty of that in the book. The novel is written as a series of letters by a young man, Werther, who responds passionately to life, nature, art, and love. It is love, ultimately, that proves too much for him. The woman he loves, Lotte, is engaged to and then marries another man, a very sensible man who works for the government.

Werther, on the other hand, cannot settle down to a job at an embassy, despising the shallow hypocrisy, snobbery, and unnaturalness of the people around him. So he returns to the countryside where Lotte now lives with her husband, and proceeds to fall ever deeper into depression, until he cannot bear to live anymore and shoots himself with her husband’s pistols.

The book starts out well enough, though perhaps I was more intrigued by the introduction to the book by Burton Pike than by the book itself. Pike writes of Werther’s longing to “outsoar human limits” and become one with nature, or the infinite. Werther has a longing stronger than his ability to sketch or create art. Werther even bemoans that “I don’t know how to express myself, my power to represent is so weak.” Werther is described by Pike as a man of sensitive feeling, but weak as an artist.

Goethe himself, of course, was a strong artist, as Pike points out. However, the frustration that comes with an inability to express oneself fully is extremely tantalizing. One wonders if this is, in fact, what most humans do feel and that one of the purposes of art is to give expression to these unexpressed experiences, even if vicariously. We are most of us artists without an art.

This introduction put me mostly in sympathy with Werther at the beginning of the book, and there was real sympathy for his initial unrequited love, his joy in the spring (the book progresses through the seasons), and his distaste for a job he had no affinity for.

Unfortunately, about two-thirds of the way through this short novel, my sympathy had melted away into impatience with his narcissism and I was well ready for the inevitable suicide that is the most famous feature of the book. But he persisted in hanging on, disrupting the peace of Lotte’s marriage.

(In this, the novel reminded me of a balled called “Mayerling,” by Kenneth MacMillan, about the unhappy Prince Rudolph of the Hapsburg Empire. It is long for a ballet and so convinced was I of his misery and self-loathing that a good twenty minutes before the ballet ended, I was more than ready for him to finally shoot himself. Perhaps I would have been more sympathetic if he hadn’t been taking his misery out on all the women in his life).

I would be very curious to know if The Sorrows of Young Werther was influential on many women or if was more inspiring to men. Andrea Wulf writes about how, in a time when the monarch or ruler could decide even a person’s occupation, it was liberating to have such unbounded and apparently free emotions expressed. The idea was to be free inside, even if you could not be free politically or socially.

Once again, this is an idea I am entirely sympathetic to, though perhaps not to the idea of suicide as an assertion of free will (Dostoevsky’s book The Possessed includes a character who commits suicide as an act of rationality and freedom). However, Werther praises the pure love of a peasant who killed his beloved’s fiancé. This is not the kind of romanticism most women crave.

As I read the following: “What if Albert where to die? You would! Yes, she would – and then I chase after the will-o-the-wisp until it leads me to abysses before which I draw back trembling,” I couldn’t help thinking that if this were a noir, he would kill Albert.

Though it turns out, we were in a noir, in a way. Werther clearly has a fellow feeling with the peasant who murders his rival and tries to save him from the law. Near the end, Werther admits he had imagined killing Albert, or even Lotte or himself. It’s the dark side of fine sensibilities and acute sensations.

But to return to my initial sympathy, since it is easy to be distracted by everything that seems wrong in this book, especially to a contemporary reader: Werther’s desire to find some way to express his overwhelming emotions. Or is it his desire that the expression of those emotions would somehow freeze them in time so that he will not lose them? That it will exalt him?

“…my friend, when the world around me grows dim to my eyes, and world and sky rest entirely in my soul like the form of a beloved, then I often yearn and think: Oh, could you express this, could you breathe onto paper what lives in you so fully and warmly that it would become the mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the infinite God!”

Or: “Alas, how often, then, did I long to fly with the pinions of a crane flying above me to the shore of the uncharted ocean, to drink that burgeoning bliss of life from the foaming beaker of the infinite, and to feel for only a moment, within the narrow power of my breast, a drop of the blessedness of that being that brings forth everything in itself and through itself.”

Burton Pike writes of “the fugitive sense we have that our inner feelings are more alive and more genuine than the world outside ourselves, and in conflict with it, is not unknown in our own time.”

It is easy see ourselves in this sentiment, though the character of Werther himself still frustrates.