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From Main Street to Wall Street, by W. Z. Ripley

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

JANUARY, 1926

THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER

BY ANDRÉ MAUROIS

[Translated by George L. Howe]

THE Frankfort diligence stopped at the 'Geist.' A German student set down his luggage, astounded the innkeeper by refusing dinner, and rushed toward the Cathedral like a madman. The sextons, as they watched him climb the tower, looked at each other anxiously. He was handsome and well dressed, but his gesture was wild and he muttered to himself.

The gabled roofs, in waves, topped the dry, the pure lines of the castle of the Rohans. Under the noon sun flashed the Alsatian plain, pricked with villages and vines. At the very moment, in every hamlet, girls were dreaming, women hoping. As he looked at the virgin canvas, where already his desire sketched so many various and happy visions, he sipped the joy of amorous hope, the expectation sweet and vague, so keen in youth, so obstinate in age.

He often returned to the tower. The roof overhung its supports. He might have been floating in the blue. At first there was a little dizziness. Still morbid and nervous from a sickly boyhood, he dreaded heights, and noises,

VOL. 137 - NO. 1

A

I

and the dark. He must cure his weakness.

The vast plain was a tablet without message for his heart, but slowly it marked out memories and names. Now, at a glance, he saw Zabern, where Weyland had brought him, and Drusenheim, whence stretches, on lovely meadow, the path to Sesenheim. And there, in a peasant parsonage set among gardens and smothered in jasmine, lived charming Frederica Brion.

Behind the castle turrets, behind the hills, off on the horizon, the dark clouds were heaping. The student's eye descended to the moving figures which wound through the alleys a hundred yards below. How he longed to penetrate their lives! Outwardly, to be sure, they were different lives, but inwardly they joined in mysterious unions. To lift the roofs from the houses! To be the unseen witness of those surprising secrets by which man can alone be understood! The day before, at the Marionetten-Theater, he had seen the legend of Doctor Faust. Now, as he watched the hurrying clouds climb the

steeple above him, it was as if Faust himself were snatching him up.

'What should I do? If the Devil offered me power, and treasures, and women, in change for the oath, should I sign?' And, trying his conscience freely and briefly, 'I should not sign,' he whispered, to own the whole world, but to Understand—yes, I should sign. My friend, you are too inquisitive.'

It began to rain, so he went back to the narrow winding staircase. 'Write another Faust? There are lots of them already. But Spiess and poor old Widmann are not much good. Their Faust is a cheap rascal, damned by his baseness from the start. Hell is cheated, for it would have got him anyway. But mine-mine would be great. He would be a sort of Prometheus. He might be beaten by the gods, perhaps, but at least he would have tried to grasp their secret.'

Below, the glass poured into the Cathedral a sombre and velvet light. Here and there a woman knelt in the shadow. Vaguely, touched by a gentle hand, murmured the organ. Goethe looked up at the vault. He felt often that he was one with a beautiful tree, that he entered its perfect scheme, and his thoughts would rise like sap, spread to the branches, break forth in leaves, in flowers, in fruit. The vast unanimous arches of the nave called up the same manifold and magnificent fancy.

'Everything here has its purpose, its proportion, as in the work of Nature. Ah! to write books like cathedrals! If only you could utter all that you feel! If you could fix upon paper that fire which courses through you!'

As soon as he drew back thus within himself, lo! here was a whole world. He had just discovered Shakespeare; he admired him as a man measures his rival. Why should he not be the German Shakespeare? He had the genius; he knew he had the genius. But how

could he chain it, or to what shape could he force the spirit? He longed to see his emotion captive at last, firm as the mighty vaults. Their architect too, long before, had doubted and despaired among those dream cathedrals which precede the true.

He would not lack subjects: the story of Chevalier Götz von Berlichingen, Faust again, idylls, German and rustic, in the tone of a modern Theocritus. . . . Perhaps a Mahomet.

Perhaps a Prometheus. Any hero would suit through whom he could challenge the world. Nor did he dread the titanic task of copying his heroes from himself, or giving them life with the breath of his own spirit. Perhaps a Cæsar.

One life would not be enough for so many plans. Herder, the Master, had told him he had the 'character of a fluttering bird.' But to fill out the beautiful empty frames one needed memories and passions. One must live, and live a thousand lives. 'Not the being,' he repeated to himself, but the becoming, the becoming everything.'

Not to be anything? Not even husband of the charming Frederica? No, not even that.

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Then he thought of her tears. After all, had he the right to leave her when he had shown the world that he would marry her? When even her father, the pastor, had welcomed him as a son?

"The right? All is fair in love. After all, the adventure was as amusing for her as for me. She must have known that Councilor Goethe's son could never marry a pretty farm-girl. Does she think my father would ever have consented? Could she have been happy in a sphere so different from her own?'

'Sophistry! Betray her, but betray her frankly. The Councilor's son is no better than the pastor's daughter. My mother was poorer than Frederica. And as for the "different sphere," she

was superb this winter when she danced on the waxed floors of the ballrooms of Strassburg.'

'You are right, but what is there to do? I cannot, no I cannot marry her. I should imprison myself. One's first duty is to develop one's character and capacities. I must remain Goethe. And when I speak that name I mean all that it prophesies. My virtues, my failings, all of them are good, because they are all natural. I was right to love Frederica, because then love was in my heart. But if one day I must escape, to better myself, escape will still be Goethe, and will still be right.'

At that he thought of Frederica, crying by the road, and himself, his head sunk, riding off without daring to look back.

between the yearnings of the young and the stagnation of the old was springing a wave of impatience and disgust, that melancholia of the eras of peace and transition which was called then, as it is called now, the Curse of the Age. The young attachés of Wetzlar were afflicted like all their contemporaries. They sought in their numerous books, in Rousseau, in Herder, the course their hearts should follow. And while they waited for the answer, they drank.

Doctor Goethe delighted them. He was like them, but superior to them. Like them, he repeated at every turn, 'Nature. Respect Nature. Live in Nature.' For Nature was the keyword of the time, as Reason had been in the generation before; as Liberty, then

'What a scene for a Faust!' he Sincerity, then Violence, then Justice, thought.

II

A parchment with a red seal made a lawyer of the student. Frederica, who had been deserted, wept. Doctor Goethe's horse trotted toward Frankfort, where skating and philosophy would quiet his uneasy conscience. When spring came round, Herr Councilor Goethe felt that a bench in the Imperial Tribunal at Wetzlar would be the final crown to his son's legal studies.

The chief princes of Germany maintained embassies to this pompous and sordid ghost of an oracle, and thus created in its provincial town a small, a pleasant, and an idle society. When Goethe reached the Kronprinz Inn, he found a table d'hôte noisy with young attachés and secretaries. From their first words he found himself among the mental scenery that was dear.

Europe was passing through one of its crises of intellectual unrest. For nine years its kings had lived in peace; its antique constitutions were still able to avert revolt. But from the contrast

were to be in the generations ahead. But to Goethe Nature was more than a word. He lived in Nature, he joined himself to her, and received her with a sort of reckless joy. While his new friends, the diplomats and lovers of letters, locked themselves in their rooms to pretend, at least, to work, Goethe, boldly publishing his contempt for the Imperial Tribunal and his firm purpose of learning the Common Law only from Homer and Pindar, set out each morning with a book under his arm for the fair meadows of Wetzlar. The spring was divine. On the fields and in the lowlands the trees were great nosegays of white or pink. Lying in the tall grass beside a brook, Goethe dreamed about the countless little plants, the insects, or the blue sky. After the torments of Strassburg, the hesitation and remorse of Frankfort, suddenly came an astounding calm, an unheralded vigor.

He opened his Homer. The modern, the human side of the tale absorbed him. Yonder girls round the fountain were Nausicaa and her virgins. A woman

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