Passions of Young Love

The Sorrows of Young Werther 

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.”   ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote this epistolary novel in the space of a few weeks in 1774. His burst of creative energy imbued the whole work with a rare intensity. He drew upon his own experiences, and perhaps because of this, it captured a mood of the times and was greeted with enthusiasm by the public. It was the one work that can be said to have made Goethe’s reputation; to the end of his life, he was for many readers primarily “the author of Werther.” At the same time, it was a turning point in his career, for it marked the end of his “storm and stress” period. The outburst of all-consuming emotion was followed by a quieter period, which led to his classical style of the 1780’s. Goethe himself later regarded The Sorrows of Young Werther as a kind of therapeutic expression of a dangerous side of his own personality, one that he overcame and controlled. He was appalled to find that Werther became regarded as a model of behavior, influencing men’s fashion and inspiring a rash of suicides all over Europe.

The immediacy of the work is, in large part, the result of its epistolary form. After a brief foreword by the fictional editor, the reader plunges straight into the world of Werther’s mind, and the style of his letters, full of exclamations, broken sentences, and impassioned flights of imagination, expresses his personality better than could any description. The novel thus captures the peak of his emotion, and the letters pesent the high points of his life. When he finally becomes too incoherent to write, the editor enters, which creates a chilling effect. The editor observes events from a distance, and his observing Werther with a sympathetic but dispassionate eye retards the headlong rush of the story.

The novel possessed a further immediacy for its first readers in that it was set in their own contemporary world. The first letter is dated May 4, 1771, and from there Goethe leads the reader through that year’s summer, fall, and winter into the next year with its new hope in the spring and the final tragedy at the end of the year in midwinter. Werther both shares and demonstrates the interests of his generation: He reads Homer, loves nature and the simple folk in the fashion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and chafes against the conventions of aristocratic eighteenth century society.

The short novel is well-written with some beautiful passages of prose, but it is basically the story of one character, Werther, who writes letters to his friend William, but they seem to be aimed at the reader of the novel. His passion for Lotte is sometimes difficult to appreciate, however since he is overcome by his passion, he is doomed as she already has a lover and is married to him fairly soon into the story (it only covers about a year and a half of Werther's life). Goethe would go on to write some of the greatest poetry, drama (Faust), and travel literature ever written in German. His complete oeuvre is impressive. And for a twenty-four year old writer, this novel is impressive also.

Return to Goethe's Faust

Faust, Part I

A drama by 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Whatever is the lot of humankind
I want to taste within my deepest self.
I want to seize the highest and the lowest,
to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,
and thus expand my single self titanically
and in the end go down with all the rest.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part I






Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust begins with a prologue set in Heaven. The scene is modeled on the opening of the Book of Job in the Old Testament.  While the angels Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael praise the Lord, Mephistopheles mocks human beings as failed creations because reason makes them worse than brutes.  God tells Mephistopheles that he will illuminate his servant Faust. Mephistopheles wagers with god that he can corrupt Faust instead. With the assent of god Mephistopheles goes into action.

In the next scene, Faust appears in acute despair because his intellectual studies have left him ignorant and without worldly gain and fame. In order to discover the inner secrets and creative powers of nature, he turns to black magic. Thus, he conjures up the Earth Spirit, the embodiment of the forces of nature. However, the Earth Spirit mocks Faust’s futile attempts to understand him.  As he despairs of understanding nature, he prepares to poison himself. 
At that moment, church bells and choral songs announcing that “Christ is arisen” distract Faust from killing himself. Celestial music charms Faust out of his dark and gloomy study for a walk in the countryside on a beautiful spring day in companionship with his fellow human beings. Observing the springtime renewal of life in nature, Faust experiences ecstasy. At this moment, Faust yearns for his soul to soar into celestial spheres.

This Easter walk foreshadows Faust’s ultimate spiritual resurrection. However, he must first undergo a pilgrimage through the vicissitudes and depths of human life.  In a famous moment he proclaims that "two souls are dwelling in my breast".  It is in this battle within himself that he becomes emblematic of modern man.  As he battles Mephistopheles offers him a wager for his everlasting soul that will provide him a fleeting moment of satisfaction in this world. Mephistopheles commands a witch to restore Faust’s youth so that he is vulnerable to sensuous temptations. When Faust sees the beautiful young girl Margaret, he falls into lust and commands Mephistopheles to procure her. Mephistopheles devises a deadly scheme for seduction. Faust convinces Margaret, who is only fourteen years old, to give her mother a sleeping potion, prepared by Mephistopheles, so that they can make love. Mephistopheles makes poison instead; the mother never awakens.

Unwittingly, Margaret has murdered her mother. Furthermore, she is pregnant by Faust and alone. When Faust comes to visit Margaret, he finds her brother, Valentine, ready to kill him for violating his sister. Mephistopheles performs trickery so that Faust is able to stab Valentine in a duel. Dying, Valentine curses Margaret before the entire village as a harlot. Even at church, Margaret suffers extreme anguish as an evil spirit pursues her.

In contrast, Faust escapes to a witches’ sabbath on Walpurgis Night. He indulges in orgiastic revelry and debauchery with satanic creatures and a beautiful witch until an apparition of Margaret haunts him. Faust goes looking for Margaret and finds her, in a dungeon, insane and babbling. At this moment, Faust realizes that he has sinned against innocence and love for a mere moment of sensual pleasure. Even though it is the very morning of her execution, Margaret refuses to escape with Faust and Mephistopheles. Instead, she throws herself into the hands of God. As Faust flees with Mephistopheles, a voice from above proclaims, “She is saved!”

Goethe will continue his drama with a second part, but the narrative from this first section has become one of the markers for the beginning of the modern era of human culture. I have previously written about some of the ideas in this drama in my discussion of "Active vs. Reactive Man".  Translated by many over the two centuries since its original publication it has become a touchstone for the study of the development of the human spirit.  It has also inspired other artists to create operas and novels based on the characters from Goethe's drama.

The Creature and his Creator

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: 

The 1818 Text 

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

A Fantastic Story.

Fantastic, filled with both vivid emotions and exciting action, Mary Shelley's story of the haunted Victor Frankenstein, and his creation who does the haunting, still stirs the soul. Just as Goethe's Faust sought the secrets of arcane knowledge, Victor Frankenstein engages in the secrets of both licit and illicit science to bring a being to life. Once this is accomplished he immediately rues his action and spends the rest of the novel trying through a variety of means to atone for his mistake.

The novel is a classic tale of the uncanny which, according to the novelist and critic David Lodge, invariably use "I" narrators, imitating documentary forms of discourse like confessions, letters and depositions to make events more credible. Beginning with letters from Robert Walton, whose own search for the source of the magnetic north pole mirrors Victor Frankenstein's quest, the first book of the novel relates Victor Frankenstein's narrative of his youth and education. It surely was more than coincidental that Victor attended University at Ingolstad which was heralded as the original site of the Faust legends that Goethe adapted for his immensely influential drama.

'Monster' or 'Creature'?

The center of the novel continues Victor's story and that of his creation, the monster. At least that is what he calls his creation. While it is monstrous in the sense that it is larger than normal human size it is a creature made of human parts and, we find after some intervening events in Victor's life that the creature has some very human traits like the need for companionship -- one that is not met by his creator. Victor's emotions seem to swing from the the heights of elation to the depths of despair coloring his actions and clouding his reason. I found the monster's narration to be the most persuasive of the two. He pleads with Victor, " Remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed."(p 66) Victor is unable to satisfy him and the monster who searches for acceptance throughout attempts to exert power over his creator as he tells him, "You are my creator, but I am your master; -obey!"(p 116) His words and actions only serve to speed the descent of Victor.

I saw the monster as a classic example of "the other", a precursor to modern images much as those found in Kafka. The action builds effectively through the third book of the novel building suspense and leading to an ending that involves a triangle of relationships between Victor, the creature, and Robert Walton whose narrative in letters bookends the tale. The power of the book, however, remains in the questions it raises; questions that we are dealing with to this day.

The Narrative:

A man is found while near death by Robert Walton.  Walton, an explorer, was on a trip to the Arctic where  his ship is stuck and surrounded by ice.  As they looked out on the enormous ice field, Walton and his crew saw a gigantic man being pulled by a dogsled. The following day they discovered another, smaller man, desperately ill, adrift on a sheet of ice. Walton writes that he brought the man onto his ship, allowed him to rest, and attempted to nurse him back to health.  That man was Victor Frankenstein who goes on to relate the story of how he came to be in this place.  

While at university, Victor became obsessed with the idea of bringing the dead back to life. He built the Creature out of body parts scavenged from charnel houses and graves. Victor succeeded in bringing the Creature to life, but upon seeing the hideous Creature Victor ran from the lab, abandoning his creation.  Alone and abandoned, the Creature spent two years hiding in the forest, aware of his ugliness. He learned to read in this time, and eventually he came to understand that Victor was the cause of his misery.  The narrative thus continues with the struggle of the Creature to find his creator and to end his misery.  The catalyst for the denouement of the story is Victor's realization of the mistake he made with his original creation.  Is this realization enough to save him and others?  I will leave it to other readers to answer that question for themselves.

Active vs Reactive Man

As one advances in life, one realizes more and more that the majority of men - and of women - are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalized, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training.
- Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (pp. 65-66)


The drama Faust by Goethe is a work that I have read and returned to over the years.  In addition to the enjoyment of the drama I have found it a font of ideas containing connections with other works.  Reading Ortega y Gasset's seminal The Revolt of the Masses raised one of those ideas, reminding me of the importance of Goethe's drama for modern thinkers like Ortega y Gasset.  For it is the realization man gains through the experience of life that extends only to those who choose to think and act. Men and women of principle who have identified their goals, and who act upon them with a "spontaneous and joyous effort", are those who strive with a purpose. It is in opposition to this that we consider the directionless striving of Goethe's Faust. His action is that which leads not to nobility, but rather to the ultimate dissolution of his life and ideals.


Faust Part I, embodies a search for the essence of human spiritual growth and understanding. Early in the play we find Faust concluding, "and see there is nothing we can know!" (I, 364). He says this following a life whose purpose was the pursuit of wisdom and understanding.  It was a pursuit that appeared to be fruitless yet, in spite of his apparent conclusion, moments later he is seeking and finding, "enchantment at the sight of this" (sign of the Macrocosm) (I, 430). The enchantment he seeks is that which comes with the union of human spirit with the spirit of nature, or the universe, for which all noble humans strive. Yet this is not possible for Faust, for he is torn apart by a duality of spirit, as shown by the famous lines:

Two souls , alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And either would be severed from its brother;
The one holds fast with joyous earthly lust
Onto the world of man with organs clinging;
The other soars impassioned from the dust,
To realms of lofty forebears winging. (I, 1112-17)


This duality is the manifestation of Faust's ultimate inability to focus on a purpose for his life and his striving. He wagers with Mephistopheles (I, 1692-8), but by that point he has succumbed completely to a permanent separation from the Macrocosm, and thus from the reality of himself. It is Mephistopheles who identifies this separation (I, 1346-54), which seems not unlike the separation of man and god presented by Augustine in his Confessions (Book I, 1).


What do we make of this separation or duality? When combined with Faust's striving - or perhaps avoiding - it becomes the path to Faust's ultimate dissolution. For it is this separation that prevents Faust from focusing on a purpose for his life, without which he he cannot gain the understanding he is seeking. And what do we see as the role of knowledge? It seems that knowledge is not enough to save Faust, not just because he views the attempt to gain knowledge as futile, but because he lacks a purpose or goal for that knowledge beyond the striving itself. Faust becomes like the man described by Ortega y Gasset, "incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed . . . as a reaction to external compulsion."


But , you may say, is he not inwardly driven toward the striving or action for some purpose? An answer to this question may be found in Mephistopheles request to, "explore what life can be." (I, 1543), and in Faust's reply in which he concludes, "Existence seems a burden to detest. Death to be wished for, life a hateful jest." (I, 1570-1) Faust's inward compulsion is seen to be directed toward death, and only Mephistopheles is able to compel him toward action in this world. Thus striving in this world cannot be maintained by Faust alone, without purpose, and we ultimately see him as an empty creature waiting to be fulfilled by death and, he hopes, union with god.


Is this the nobility of the sort desired by men and women of principle? Those who are "active and not reactive" reject the lure of Mephistopheles and the irrational; focusing on their purpose in life with a joyous rationality. They are driven by an inward striving toward knowledge and understanding as suggested by the famous statement of Aristotle at the beginning of his Metaphysics, "All men by nature desire to know" (980a). These are the men and women described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics:


Now those activities are desirable in themselves from which nothing is sought beyond the activity. And of this nature virtuous actions are thought to be, for to do noble and good deeds is a thing desirable for its own sake. (1176a 33)


That the doing of noble and good deeds requires a purpose distinguishes the active man from the merely reactive. It is this that leads to the nobility of spirit and it is this that Faust rejects as he says, "Thus I reel from desire to fulfillment, and in fulfillment languish for desire." (I, 3249-50) Later in the same scene Faust again admits the purposelessness of his striving (I, 3348-9). We thus see in Faust the rejection of the virtuous activity that leads to nobility in man, a rejection that leads Faust to death and dissolution.



Faust Part I by Johann Goethe, trans. by Walter Arndt. Norton Classics, New York. 1976 (1808)
Confessions by St. Augustine, trans Rex Warner. Penguin, New York. 1963 (401)
Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, trans. David Ross. Random House, New York. 1941.
The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset. W. W. Norton, New York. 1957 (1930)

Eros and Memories of Love

Strait is the Gate 
by André Gide


"I advanced slowly;  the sky was like my joy---warm, bright, delicately pure.  No doubt she was expecting me by the other path.  I was close to her, behind her, before she heard me;  I stopped . . . and as if time could have stopped with me, "This is the moment," I thought, "the most delicious moment, perhaps, of all, even though it should precede happiness itself---which happiness itself will not equal." (p 96)


"Enter ye in at the strait gate:  for wide is the gate and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction and many there be which go thereat:  Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." (Matthew 7:13-14).

This is the text from which Gide drew the title of his short novel, Strait is the Gate. It is a first person narrative that begins forthrightly with the words:
"Some people might have made a book out of it; but the story I am going to tell is one that it took all my strength to live and over which I have spent all my virtue. So I shall set down my recollections quite simply, and if in places they are ragged I shall have recourse to no invention and neither patch nor connect them; any effort I might make to dress them up would take away from the last pleasure I hope to get in telling them." (p 3)

The author signals in this short paragraph the importance of virtue (of what sort we shall find out) and that these are personal "recollections", subject to the vicissitudes of memory and desire, but not invented. Finally, the narrator claims to have pleasure, or at least hopes to, in telling them. One may see already the potential for the contradiction of truth presented as fiction and fiction telling the truth.

The setting is the Protestant upper-middle-class world of Normandy in the 1880s. The narrator, Jerome Palissier, originally from Le Havre, is eleven when the story begins. His father having died he is living with his mother and a governess. He is surrounded by family including a creole aunt Lucille who alternately fascinates and terrifies him. She has two young daughters, Alissa and Juliette Bucolin, who are devoted to their father. Alissa and Jerome become childhood sweethearts and this gradually develops into a situation such that it becomes assumed, at least unofficially, that they are engaged. Unfortunately Alissa never truly agrees to any such arrangement. Complicating matters further are the feelings of Juliette for Jerome and the entry of Jerome's good friend Abel Vautier who quickly becomes infatuated with Juliette. The relations among these young people are complicated by the strength of youthful Eros, their own growth, and their search for identity.  It is this search that leads Alissa in the direction of religion, in spite of which she professes to love Jerome. But she is no longer her former self and as Jerome is about to leave the country home of Fonguesemare where they have been together she claims that he has been in love with a ghost. Jerome replies that the ghost is not an illusion on his part: "Alissa, you are the woman I loved . . . What have you made yourself become?" Jerome leaves, "full of a vague hatred for what I still called virtue". Strong stuff for teenagers.

Three years later he returns but their relations are never the same;  the strength of her religious convictions has altered Alissa both spiritually and physically. The affairs narrated here are apparently drawn from Gide's own life, however loosely. Their are also parallels with Gide's own work as Alissa may be seen as corresponding to Michel, the protagonist in Gide's novel, The Immoralist, written about a decade earlier. Strait is the Gate presents itself as a small gem of a literary work. With its focus on the passions and desires of young love I am reminded of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. Gide's biographer, Alan Sheridan, suggests that it is also a meditation on Gide's relationship with his own wife, Madeleine. Whether that is the case or not this short novel is has a beautiful clarity of prose and a haunting style that suggests the memories of young love that, while strong enough to leave permanent impressions, in some way become ghosts of one's youth.

Faustian Bargain

The Picture of 

Dorian Gray 

by Oscar Wilde

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”  ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered a work of classic Gothic fiction with a strong Faustian theme. It is also a classic example of the Victorian novel and one of those books that can effect the reader in a powerful and unique way. The idea of selling your soul to the devil, like Faust as related by Marlowe, Goethe and others is an image that intrigues the modern reader. But there is in Wilde's version of this story a focus on the purity of innocence (as seen in the passage quoted above) that is lost as one lives a life, whether filled with licentiousness or mere everyday experience.

The plot narrates the story of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Espousing a new hedonism, Lord Henry suggests the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfilment of the senses. Realizing that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian (whimsically) expresses a desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than he. Wilde gives the story his own imprimatur with the artistic twist and thus adds to the evidence of his genius that includes the drama, stories, poetry and criticism that he created.

View all my reviews

Multiplicity in Unity

Hector Berlioz

Today is the birthday of Hector Berlioz, who was born on this day in 1803. He is considered one of the masters, if not the founder, of musical romanticism. I have enjoyed his music by both performing and listening to them for almost fifty years.  He is best known for his large works including the Symphonie Fantastique, Harold in Italy (Concerto for Viola and Orchestra), Operas (Les Troyens and Beatrice et Benedict), and his works for Chorus and Orchestra including his Requiem and La Damnation de Faust. There have been few figures in the history of music with so fascinating, almost hypnotic, an appeal for the present-day listener as Berlioz. With his life span encompassing roughly the rise and fall of two French empires, he emerges as perhaps the first totally modern mind in music— the man of affairs as well as of notes, a great conductor, concert organizer, writer of distinction. 
Whatever he touched, in any medium, bore the mark of his volatile, yet strangely sober, personality. Unlike his predecessors Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, he was equipped to challenge the intellectual world on all fronts and make his charge across any field. This basic phase of Berlioz’s gift—its multiplicity in unity.  
Among composers, Berlioz shares a fascination with Goethe's Faust as this drama has served as the source for operas by Gounod, Spohr, Boito and Busoni among others. Berlioz wrote his "legende dramatique" for Orchestra and Chorus; first performed at the Opera-Comique, Paris, December 1846. It did not meet with critical acclaim, perhaps due to its halfway status between opera and cantata; the public was not impressed, and two performances (and a cancelled third) rendered a financial setback for Berlioz: "Nothing in my career as an artist wounded me more deeply than this unexpected indifference", he remembered. It was subsequently performed more successfully in Paris after his death (1877). The Metropolitan Opera premiered it first in concert (1896) and then on stage (1906). The Met revived the production on November 7, 2008 directed by Robert LePage, with innovative computer-generated stage imagery that responds to the voices of the performers.
Berlioz is known for the musical excesses of his compositions and some of his harmonies sound almost modern even today. One of the unique aspects of Berlioz compositional style resulted from his lack of piano training. Many of the great classical and romantic composers (think Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms) were also great pianists and composed "at the piano". Of the romantics, Brahms would preview his orchestral compositions in piano versions and Liszt (a friend of Berlioz) would transcribe symphonies and operas for piano. You can hear Berlioz lack of pianism in his abrupt chord changes and harmonics that seem otherworldly (some of this may have been drug-induced as well). It is worthwhile to remember this great Romantic on this day.

A Commonplace Entry

Imagination

While we were enjoying unlimited vistas, we noticed a commotion on the water at some distance to our left and, somewhat nearer on our right, a rock rising out of the sea; one was Charybdis, the other Scylla.  Because of the considerable distance in nature between these two objects which the poet has placed so close together, people have accused poets of fibbing.  What they fail to take into account is that the human imagination always pictures the objects it considers significant as tall and narrower that they really are, for this gives them more character, importance and dignity.  A thousand times I have heard people complain that some object they had known only from a description was disappointing when seen in reality, and the reason was always the same.  Imagination is to reality what poetry is to prose:  the former will always think of objects as massive and vertical, the latter will always try to extend them horizontally.

- Goethe

as quoted in A Certain World, A Commonplace Book by W. H. Auden. The Viking Press, 1970, p 201

Literary Blog Hop: April 28-May 1

Literary Blog Hop: April 28-May 1

To me the Literary Book Blog Hop is a chance to reflect on my reading life.    This week's question is a both confounding and challenging.

Discuss your thoughts on sentimentality in literature. When is emotion in literature effective and when is it superfluous? Use examples.

When I think of on reflection about sentimentality in literature I am taken back to my reading of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.  You may ask what this novel has to do with the question, but if you bear with me and journey into that story you will find a literate monster at the heart of the story.  Shelley's  Dr. Frankenstein creates a monster who transcends the modern cinematic view  of the monster (James Whale's version comes closest to the original).  Shelley's monster finds a copy of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther in a leather portmanteau, along with two others—Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, and Milton's Paradise Lost. He sees Werther's case as similar to his own. He, like Werther, was rejected by those he loved. It is Goethe whom I think of as did the monster and his elegiac Sorrows of Young Werther whose sturm und drang context was, if not sentimental a close relative of sentimentality, epitomized by young Werther.  Goethe's novel itself looked back to more sentimental novels and influenced a generation of European readers.  


Of modern sentimentality I have little use, but the example of Werther I find haunting in its extreme of suicide -- seen as the solution to his problem of love and life.  The passions once aroused are not to be trusted.  One further example, more benign in its outcome, perhaps because the author maintained more control or has a different relationship with her subject. 
 I am thinking of Mary Garth in George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch.  
While I see little sentimentality in the portrayal of the primary protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, Garth's life including her family exhibits a loving version of the sentimental in literature and has always seemed a counterbalance to the turbulence in the lives of many of the other characters in that novel.  One conclusion I can draw from the above is that sentimentality takes many forms and can be effective when used well by an attentive author.  It may be superfluous, but I leave that discussion for others on another day. Admittedly, these musings on sentimentality are personal and not necessarily a popular expression of the subject, but the literary world  is large and I am both confounded and challenged when I consider some of its many rooms.

The Sorrows of Young Werther

When Johann Wolfgang Goethe was only 24 years old he wrote this epistolary novel. It quickly became the best-seller of 1774 and swept across Europe inspiring fashion fads and more. I'm not sure what they saw in this novel for it has lost some of its appeal over the years.
It is well-written with some beautiful passages of prose, but it is basically the story of one character, Werther, who writes letters to his friend William, but they seem to be aimed at the reader of the novel.
His interests are often somewhat uninteresting and his passion for Lotte is difficult to appreciate. However, given that he has a passion, he is doomed as she already has a lover and is married to him fairly soon into the story (it only covers about a year and a half of Werther's life). Goethe would go on to write some of the greatest poetry, drama (Faust), and travel literature ever written in German. His complete oeuvre is impressive. So for a twenty-four year old writer, this novel is impressive also.

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. Trans. by Burton Pike. Modern Library. (1774).