The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · a novel in letters, in two books, framed by an editor’s preface and closing report · first printed at Leipzig by Weygand, autumn 1774; the revised text of 1787, in the first volume of Goethe’s Schriften (Göschen) · scored on Goethe’s German in the text of 1787, read from knowledge; no text in hand, German quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and Michael Hulse’s translation read alongside for sense
Mode
Epistolary novel of feeling, cut to one voice and closed by a report; confession, idyll, social novel and case history in one short book
Mythos
The natural year as the course of a passion, from bloom to frost; Homer giving way to Ossian; the language of the Passion taken up for a death no clergyman attends
Phase
From 4 May 1771 into December 1772: a spring and summer near Wahlheim, a season at an embassy, a return, and the last weeks told by the editor to the burial
Presentation
Fiction; a short preface, two books of dated letters, almost all to Wilhelm, a few to Lotte and Albert, none answered on the page; then the editor’s report, with Werther’s last letters and Goethe’s own German version of songs from Macpherson’s Ossian
Register
German prose that moves from the plainest notation to a long surge of feeling within one letter, exclamatory at its height, set against the editor’s dry report
Scale
One young man, one district, one summer and one winter; the world as it reaches him through Lotte, Albert, an envoy and a count
Governing Proposition
A young man leaves home for a small town in May, falls in love with a woman promised to another, writes of it to a friend whose answers are never given, flees to an embassy where the nobility shows him the door, comes back, and a few days before Christmas shoots himself with Albert’s pistols, which Lotte has handed to his servant. The wager of the book is that a feeling made absolute, in a self with no work it accepts and no world that will receive it, turns everything it touches into a mirror and then into an enemy, and that a novel shut inside that self, in one unanswered voice, can show the condition from within and still let the world have the last word.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Before any letter there is a short preface, in which an editor presents the papers that follow. Then the voice begins, on 4 May 1771, and its first sentence is a flight: “Wie froh bin ich, daß ich weg bin!”
“How glad I am to be away!” The letters go almost all to one friend, Wilhelm; a few, later, go to Lotte and to Albert. Wilhelm’s replies are never given. What he counsels is known only from what Werther answers, and what Lotte and Albert are is known only as Werther sees them. The book is two books of such letters, running from that May into the December of the following year, and then the editor again, who takes the story out of Werther’s hands in its last weeks and carries it to the burial.
The work is the text of 1787. The book first appeared at Leipzig, from Weygand, in the autumn of 1774, as Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, and that first version is the one that made the stir. Goethe revised it for the first volume of his Schriften, published by Göschen, as Die Leiden des jungen Werther, and the revised text is the one he let stand. The revision added the strand of the peasant lad, the farmhand who loves the widow he works for, is dismissed, and kills the man who replaced him; it drew Albert with more dignity and less pedantry, and Lotte with more inner warmth and more hesitation; it enlarged and recast the editor’s report to the reader; and it smoothed some of the roughest diction of the Sturm und Drang.
The first version was written fast, early in 1774, in some four weeks by Goethe’s own later account. Behind it stand two things from 1772. In the summer of that year, at Wetzlar, Goethe had known Charlotte Buff, who was betrothed to Johann Christian Kestner. In October, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem shot himself, with pistols borrowed from Kestner. The book joins the two: Werther is given the summer and Jerusalem’s end. Its world is small and close: a town, a well outside it, the village of Wahlheim, and the house where Lotte keeps the household of her father, the bailiff. Beyond that lie only the embassy and the rooms of the nobility, and the book goes there once, to be sent back.
Movement II
Book One is a spring. Werther walks out to the well beyond the town and finds there the patriarchal world of the old stories, as if nothing had happened between Homer and this morning. At Wahlheim he reads his Homer, cooks peas in the inn’s kitchen, and watches the children of the place. He has no work he will take up, and for now he needs none: the heart is enough, and on 22 May he says where its world lies: “Ich kehre in mich selbst zurück und finde eine Welt!”
“I return into myself and find a world!” The sentence is the book’s happiness and its diagnosis at once. Every later letter tests what that world is worth when the self that holds it is pressed by anything outside.
The first sight of Lotte is at a door. Her mother is dead, and she keeps house for her father and her younger brothers and sisters; Werther finds her among the children, cutting bread for them. The height of the meeting is made of the most ordinary act in the book, and the book never forgets it. Then the ball, and after it the thunderstorm. Lotte stands at the window, with the rain on the fields, lays her hand on Werther’s, and says one word: “Klopstock!” The name is the poet whose ode both of them are thinking of, and the word is the whole of their intimacy: a shared reading, at a window, in a storm, with nothing said beyond it.
Albert comes back. He is not a villain and not a fool: steady, orderly, a man with an office, and in the text of 1787 drawn with a dignity that keeps Werther from despising him and the reader from taking Werther’s side by default. The three are much together. Then, over a pistol of Albert’s that Werther holds to his own temple, the two argue whether a man may take his own life. Neither moves the other. The argument is the first time the book lets the order of law and good sense speak at length against the heart, and it is lost on both sides; what remains of it is the pistol, which has been seen, and which will come back.
Movement III
In the letter of 18 August the spring turns. Nature, which had been the fullness of his heart, the field in which he found a world, has become the opposite: “ein ewig verschlingendes, ewig wiederkäuendes Ungeheuer”
“an ever-devouring, ever-ruminating monster.” Nothing in the valley has changed. The same well and the same children stand where they stood in May. What has changed is the heart that looks at them, and the letter is the book’s argument made visible in a single page: the world is what the heart makes of it, and the heart that has made everything of one object begins to turn on everything else, and then on itself.
Book One ends in flight, and Book Two opens on the other cure, work. Werther takes a post at an embassy, under an envoy who is a pedant, and his letters from there are sour with the office and with the small exactness of rank around him. For a while the book tries the world outside Lotte, a place to stand that is not the heart. The stretch is required: without it nothing would show that the world has no place for him either. It also runs a little past its work, and here, for the only time, the form keeps going without deepening.
The world declines him. At Count C.’s he stays on into a gathering of the nobility, and is asked to leave. The scene is brief and exact, and it is the social law the book has been building in silence: the young man of no rank is shut out of the rooms where the order of the world is kept, as the man with no work is shut out of the order of the day. The snub does what the envoy could not: it sends him back. The one place where the heart is the measure is the valley, and he returns to it knowing that it belongs to Lotte and to Albert, and that the heart has nowhere else to go.
Movement IV
He comes back in the second year, and the seasons are running the other way. The letters thin out; the crowded dating of the first spring gives way to the sparse dating of weeks in which nothing moves. He tells Wilhelm what has happened to his reading, and the sentence marks the turn of the whole book: “Ossian hat in meinem Herzen den Homer verdrängt.”
“Ossian has driven Homer from my heart.” The patriarchs of the well and the cooking of peas give way to the grave songs of the north, to heroes and lovers mourned on the heath. The myth Werther lives in is one he chooses, and names as he chooses it, and he chooses it as the year falls.
The peasant lad of the 1787 text is his case in another life. The farmhand loved the widow he worked for, was dismissed, and has killed the man who replaced him. Werther pleads for him against Albert and against the magistrate: the man is guilty before the law, and Werther cannot see him so, because he sees himself. The plea is the book’s law speaking aloud, the heart claiming that what it suffers excuses what it does, and the editor’s narrative lets it be seen from outside, a young man arguing his own cause under another name. The strand is the clearest gain of the revision: without it the book could not show Werther judging himself in someone else.
The late letters take on another tongue. He writes of a cup and of the Father, and the language of the Passion is laid over the passion of one young man, so that the death to come is shaped in advance as a sacrifice. His account of himself gives out. At the point where the voice can no longer carry the story, the editor takes the pen, and the form of the book breaks exactly where its subject does. What follows is told in the third person, rapture giving way to report, with Werther’s last letters set inside it like evidence: the book’s closed room is opened, at last, onto the world it had kept out.
Movement V
Near the end Werther reads aloud to Lotte from his own German version of the songs of Selma, from Macpherson’s Ossian: several pages of laments for the dead, kept whole inside the editor’s report. It is the climax of shared feeling in the book, and it is made of a dead bard’s grief in a living man’s translation. The length is the passage’s risk. It must stand, since it is where the two of them meet for the last time inside the same feeling; at that length it is permitted more than compelled, and it is a different kind of writing set at the centre of the end.
Werther sends his servant to Albert for his pistols, and Lotte hands them to the servant without a word. The scene is a dramatist’s: nothing is said, and the act is the whole of what she can neither do nor refuse. He shoots himself with them a few days before Christmas, in December 1772, at the turn of the year in which he arrived in May. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti lies open on his desk. The pistols that were held to his temple in the summer’s argument are the pistols of the death, and the man who argued for order lent them.
The editor closes the book in sentences without a single exclamation, and the last are these: “Handwerker trugen ihn. Kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet.”
“Workmen carried him. No clergyman attended him.” The voice that made a world of itself has gone, and the world it kept out speaks last, in its own flat terms: who carried the body and who did not come. The year has come to its winter. The book that opened with a young man glad to be away ends with a community that will not follow him to the grave, and the reader stands, for the first time, outside him.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds little to remove from Book One: the arrival, the spring at the well, the children, the bread cut at the door, the ball and the thunderstorm, Albert’s return, the quarrel over suicide with a pistol held to the temple, the flight. Each step closes a door. Book Two is where the test bites. The embassy, the pedantic envoy and the snub at Count C.’s are required, since they show that the world outside Lotte has no place for him either, but the stretch runs a little past its work. The Ossian reading, several pages of Goethe’s own version of the songs of Selma, is the climax of shared feeling and must stand; at its length it is permitted more than compelled. The peasant lad added in 1787 earns his place.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a feeling made absolute, in a self with no work, no office it accepts and no world that will receive it, turns everything it touches into a mirror, and then into an enemy. The nature letters show it. The heart that found a world in itself on 22 May finds only itself, and in the letter of 18 August nature, once its fullness, has become “ein ewig verschlingendes, ewig wiederkäuendes Ungeheuer”, an ever-devouring, ever-ruminating monster. The quarrel with Albert over suicide and the class wall at Count C.’s place the condition socially. Held below the top because the book discloses from inside the condition: the editor’s cooler voice is late and spare, and part of what the book gives is the mood itself, which its century took as a gospel.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height comes often, and some of it is great. The thunderstorm after the ball, Lotte at the window with her hand on Werther’s, and the one word “Klopstock!”, which names the poet whose ode both are thinking of and is the whole of their intimacy, is one of the summits of German prose. Lotte cutting bread for the children at the door is the opposite kind, a height made of the ordinary. The letter of 18 August reaches terror. The last night, the pistols and the editor’s final sentences have a cold grandeur no earlier German novel had. Held in the mid eights because the frequency is bought partly in exclamation: many letters rise by declaring that they rise, and the rapture is at times announced rather than made.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth is built, not only evoked. The book’s year is nature’s: Werther arrives in May and dies at the solstice, and the cycle carries the passion from bloom to frost. Homer gives way to Ossian, the patriarchal idyll of the well and the peas cooked in the inn’s kitchen to the grave songs of the north, and the shift is load-bearing: it is the turn of the book. The late letters take up the language of the Passion, the cup and the Father, and the death is set as a sacrifice no clergyman attends. The type Werther became in the world is reach, credited under Pressure on Tradition. Held where it stands because the archetype is built in one consciousness that names its own myths as it goes: the patterns are quoted by Werther more than borne by the action against his knowledge.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the epistolary novel of feeling: Richardson, and above all Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), with Gellert and the German sentimental novel behind. The turn is in form and in stake. Goethe cut the correspondence to one voice: no answering letters, no counsel given room, no moral authority inside the book, and an editor who reports and does not judge. In Rousseau passion is disciplined into virtue; here nothing disciplines it, and the hero dies unabsolved. The stake was real: a book that took the suicide’s side was banned in Leipzig, attacked from the pulpit and parodied by Nicolai in Freuden des jungen Werthers (1775). Held a step below the top because the novel of passion in letters and the cult of feeling were proven ground; the swerve is in degree and in the single voice more than in kind.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Because only Werther writes, the reader is shut inside the self the book diagnoses: Wilhelm’s advice is felt only in what Werther answers, Lotte and Albert only as he sees them, and the closure of the form is the closure of the condition. Then the form breaks. When Werther can no longer give an account of himself the editor takes the pen, and the book passes from the first person to the third, from rapture to report, so that the death is told by the world the letters had kept out. The final sentences are the editor’s, and that is the argument. The peasant lad of 1787 is a second instrument: the report lets Werther be seen pleading a case that is his own. Held below the top because the middle of Book Two keeps the form without deepening it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Two and a half centuries of return, and the book has not settled. It was read first as a gospel of feeling and a licence for suicide, then by Goethe himself as a thing to be worked past, then as the founding document of German Romanticism, as a critique of the sentimentality it seems to preach, as a social novel of the bourgeois shut out of the court, and as a case study of narcissism. The questions stay open: how far the editor is the book’s judgment; whether Lotte is the screen of a projection or a woman who half answers; whether the fairer Albert of 1787 redeems the order Werther dies against. Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar (1939) and Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (1972) return to it in fiction. Held below the higher figures because the yield is concentrated: a short book in one voice.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the European novel of the eighteenth century, with German literature inside it. The force: the book made the inner life of one sensibility the whole subject of a novel, with no moral frame around it, and showed that a German prose book could stand with Richardson and Rousseau. It is a founding text of the Sturm und Drang and of the Romantic self, and the novel of subjectivity runs through it. Held a step below the very top because Rousseau’s Julie had moved the same field first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an immediate European sensation, in French within a few years and in English from the French (1779); a fashion in dress, the blue coat and yellow waistcoat; imitations and parodies in several languages; Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis, Chateaubriand’s René and Massenet’s Werther (1892); and a term of sociology, the “Werther effect”, for imitative suicide.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival of centuries. The form survives whole in both versions, with no loss; that there are two is no charge, since both are complete, printed and distinguished. Presence has been continuous since 1774: in print without a break, a fixture of German schooling and university study, translated into the major languages many times over, adapted for the opera stage and in film. The fabric gives nothing to charge. What holds the figure at the lower edge of what centuries allow is the kind of presence: a good share of the reading is of a document of its age, the Werther fever and the cult of sensibility, and the surface, the effusion, the exclamation and the Ossian it worships, is visibly of its moment. It remains a book the general reader opens in many languages, not only one the academy keeps; nothing here stands level with the texts of millennia.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on Goethe’s German. The command is of a prose that moves from the plainest notation, peas cooked in an inn’s kitchen or a child’s grimace, to a long periodic surge of feeling within a single letter, and back. The letters are varied in length and pitch with care, from a line or two to a set piece, and the dating is itself a rhythm: crowded in the weeks of rapture, sparse in the weeks of dullness. The scene-making is a dramatist’s: the ball, the storm, the bread, the pistols handed over by Lotte without a word, the open Emilia Galotti. The editor’s dry report is a second register mastered beside the first. Held at 9.0 by the exclamatory habit, the dashes, sighs and apostrophes that the subject licenses but does not always need, and by the Ossian passage, a translation inside the novel and at its length a different kind of making.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the whole: the world is what the heart makes of it, and the heart that makes everything of one object will be unmade by it. Take the two most distant elements, the spring letters with the well, the children at Wahlheim and Homer, and the December night with the pistols and Ossian. The same law produces both: the idyll and the grave are one gaze turned from expansion to contraction. The snub at Count C.’s obeys it too, the world refusing the self the heart has made. The peasant lad of 1787 is the law at work in another life, and Werther’s plea for him is the law speaking. The editor’s voice is the one element outside the gaze, set exactly where the gaze fails. Held at 9.0 because the range is narrow, one consciousness, one district, one summer and winter, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on what a short novel holds. Consciousness, fully: the book is a mind. Love and desire. The family, in Lotte’s motherless household of brothers and sisters and her father the bailiff. Nature, as the field of the whole argument. Class and the state, in the embassy, the envoy and the nobility’s closed rooms. Law and crime, in the peasant lad’s killing and Albert’s office. Labour, glimpsed in the peasants and in the work Werther will not do. Religion, in the Passion language and the burial without a clergyman. Literature, in Homer, Ossian, Klopstock and Lessing, as forces in the action. Each passes through the heart and is changed by it. What holds the axis in the high sevens is the vantage: every order is seen through one young man, history is absent, and the others are present as what he feels them to be.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, then The Living Form and The Imperishable at 9.2. A book that made the inner life of one sensibility the whole subject of a novel and carried it across Europe within a few years, in translation, in dress, in imitation and in a term of sociology; a form in one unanswered voice that breaks into the editor’s report where the voice fails, so that the world it kept out speaks last; and a text whole in both its versions and in print without a break since 1774.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8, held by the vantage: family, class, the state, law, labour, religion and literature are all active in the plot, and each is seen through one young man’s heart, with history absent and the others present as what he feels them to be. Next above it, The Inevitable, The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6: the middle of Book Two and the length of the Ossian reading; heights at times announced by exclamation rather than made; myths quoted by the hero more than borne by the action. The sound of Goethe’s German beyond the passages known here is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther in the revised text of 1787, first printed in the first volume of the Göschen edition of his Schriften, scored as one work on the German original: the editor’s preface, two books of dated letters from 4 May 1771 into December 1772, and the editor’s report to the reader, with Werther’s last letters and Goethe’s own German version of songs from Macpherson’s Ossian. The first version, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Leipzig, Weygand, 1774), is context and is not scored; its reach belongs to the same work in its history, and nothing in the scores credits the revision with a sensation it did not cause. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. German is quoted only where the words are certain, in the spelling of the standard editions, with the desk’s own plain English beneath; letters are cited by date only where the date is certain, and events are paraphrased. Translation · Michael Hulse’s Penguin translation (1989) was read alongside the German for sense. It is not quoted, and nothing in it is charged to the book. Facts that could not be verified, among them the book’s length in words, the number of letters Goethe added or altered in 1787, the full sequence of letter dates, the exact wording of passages known only in substance, and accounts of particular later readers, are not given.