Whether in novelistic fiction or drama, Werther and Faust are the two foremost characters by whom Goethe has enriched the world of literature, yet how different they are! Werther is commonly understood as a proto-Romantic hero and like others of his kind he ends his own life. Faust, like Goethe himself, lived on to a ripe old age, having lived out his days to the full. A close reader of the novel and the drama will note that both Werther and Faust are identified as 'wanderers.' Goethe himself saw himself as a Wanderer' too. t follows that Goethe himself incorporated two aspects of wandering, a fact reflect by Goethe's habit of contrasting survors like Wilhelm Meister with non-survors like Mignon and the Harper in the novel Wilhelm Mwisters Lehrjahre. Some have supposed that Goethe 'rewarded' those who held an optimistic and constructive attitude to life in line with the author himself and 'punished' those who showed themselves to be irresponsible 'romantics.' It may also be that the co-existence of two wandering propensities within Goethe's psyche, as perhaps within the human psyche itself, complemented each other within an all-embracing all.

1. From Werther to Faust Part II or The Wanderer's Short and
Long Road to Eternity
1. Werther, Only a Wanderer on Life's Path1
Ich kehre in mich selbst zurück und finde eine Welt.
I turn back into myself and discover a world.
Do these words testify to a complete withdrawal into the inner self in accord with a
process Harold Bloom and others have termed "internalization" with its supposed result
that all references the author makes to biographical and historical facts or religious truth
have only a psychological and aesthetic validity? However, what are we to make of the
many references in the novel to biblical motifs, such as the meeting a young woman at a
well or evocations of the words and deeds of Christ? Indeed, the idea of an interior world
cited above has a biblical precedent in the principle that the Kingdom of Heaven is within
the human soul. This article looks at Goethe's famous novel in the light of a then current
theosophical theory in which the taking of one's life offers the chance to place a Trojan
horse in Heaven. Did this idea influence Goethe in the long term? Ultimately a glorified
Gretchen bestows saving grace to Faust at the point of his entering eternity.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe at only 25 years of age experienced one of the world's greatest
literary sensations, albeit a very controversial one, when his novel Die Leiden des jungen
1
The word Wanderer occurs twice in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, once as a citation
from Ossian and again in Werther's complaint. "Am 16. junius. ja wohl bin ich nur ein
Wandrer, ein Waller auf der Erde." Wanderer in German often conveys the idea of the
spiritual pilgrimage of the Christian believer through the brief passage of earthly
existence as many messages on wayside crosses in Germany attest. The word Wanderer,
by which Goethe rendered the word "traveller" in his translation of a song in Ossian,
appears in Werther within a context from which we infer a dark vision of death's finality
and man's existential loneliness in an age bereft of Christian or other philosophical
consolations.

2. Werthers ("The Sorrows of Young Werther") was published in 1774. Its composition
during the same year had taken only three months of intense concentration and self-
isolation. Goethe thus became a European celebrity overnight, but to the detriment of
many a young man who emulated Werther's example by committing suicide, often
dressed like him in a blue coat and yellow waistcoat. Some have seen in this tragic
outcome a reason to reproach Goethe for irresponsibly exciting destructive passions
among the impressionable young ‘men of his day, but few would admit that he could
have foreseen the wave of suicides that his novel provoked. In writing a story that sprang
from Goethe's concern with his personal emotional predicament at a certain time in his
life, he happened to strike a chord that would resonate throughout Europe on the eve of
revolution, a revolution that released the pent-up discontent and longing for change of a
new generation..
The reactions to the novel collectively reflected the range of attitude and opinion that
prevailed among the educated sections of society. The question of suicide was
particularly problematic for many who upheld the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
While they rejected the opprobrium of suicide incurred by Church doctrines, they were
horrified by suicidal acts in view of their extreme defiance of reason and good sense. In
the affair Callas, had not Voltaire taken up the case of a father afflicted and persecuted
after the suicide of his son? Friedrich Nicolai thoroughly condemned Werther for taking
his own life but sympathized with young men in his situation sufficiently to write an
alternative, a happy, ending of the story, showing how the application of reason could
overcome extreme psychological disorders. In England the tragic death of the youthful
poet Chatterton in 1770 had already set in train a widespread preoccupation with the issue
of suicide, particularly when committed by the young and artistically inclined. In 1774
another notable suicide took place when Clive of India took his life. If an earlier attempt
of his had succeeded, the history of the British Empire might well have turned out
differently.
In terms of literary history the story of Werther is a milestone marking the highpoint of
an epoch that has come to be labeled ‘Storm and Stress' (Sturm und Drang originally
being the title of a drama depicting an episode in the American War of Independence).
Appropriately enough, the Werther meets Lotte, quite literally his femme fatale, at a ball

3. at which the noise of storm and thunder outside produces an ominous atmospheric effect.
Significant also is the exclamation "Klopstock" that coincided with the blast of the raging
storm, for Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock had introduced in German poetry a form of verbal
expression that at times broke the bounds of grammar and syntax to reach a higher
emotional and spiritual pitch.
The novel was more than an expression of discontent with prevailing political and social
conditions, a discontent shared even by many defenders of the rationalism that typified
the age of Enlightenment. It presented the experience of a young man at once burdened
and exhilarated by a supercharged self-consciousness characterized by introversion (see
Book 1, May 22) and hypersensitivity. In the realm of prose fiction Laurence Sterne, the
author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, reveled in a newfound authorial
freedom bordering of total sovereignty in dealing with subject matter irrespective of
literary conventions. In his ‘Speech on Shakespeare Day' (1771) Goethe had, for his part,
placed himself, the "Wanderer," at the head of a new form of literature, and in Die Leiden
des jungen Werthers the word ‘Wanderer' continues to possess a high degree of
significance. On one level it evokes the image of a pilgrim journeying through life
towards his heavenly home but it also betokens the Poet-Artist as one who inhabits his
own world of the imagination and who cannot correlate this with the real and imperfect
world around him.
The sense given to ‘Wanderer' is but one indication of a strong religious and mystical
element in the novel. The very title may be construed in religious terms as ‘Leiden' can
mean 'the Passion' as well as ‘suffering'. The superabundant references and allusions to
biblical motifs found in the novel raise the question as to whether the novel is imbued
with genuine religious sentiments or simply betrays the effects of "spilt religion," to use a
term with which the critic, T. E. Hulme once characterized the Romantic poets.
.
Cast in the epistolary style adopted by Richardson, Rousseau and others, the novel tells
of Werther's descent from the initial bliss he experiences as a newcomer to a rural
paradise (of the kind recently evoked by Rousseau). His letters are addressed to a certain

4. Wilhelm (the name recalled Goethe's mentor Shakespeare in later works), whose answers
are not revealed. Werther falls in love with Lotte (Charlotte), a young woman who has
the charge of her many siblings after her mother's death. In a certain sense she is an
archetypal mother figure, as captured in the powerful impression she made on Werther in
a scene where she slices a loaf to feed her brothers and sisters as though dispensing a
sacrament (see Thackeray's parody). Elsewhere Werther explicitly interprets her action of
washing a small girl's face as one analogous to the rite of baptism.
Lotte holds Werther in deep affection but unfortunately for him. she remains faithful to
Albert, a young man of integrity and amiable character. Werther and Albert respect each
other deeply though they have antithetic views on many subjects, including, significantly
enough, that of suicide. While Albert shows compassion for the mentally distraught, he
firmly holds to conservative values and thus rejects any argument justifying suicide.
Werther lends undivided moral support to all who end their lives because of the
unbearable suffering they have endured, and does so invoking the compassion of Christ
for common humanity. Werther's depiction of the tragic life and self-induced death of a
young woman forsaken in love (see Book 1, 12. August) anticipates Gretchen in Goethe's
Faust. Werther's initial euphoria turns to despair, induced, or perhaps only aggravated, by
his disappointment in love. His sensitive mind is afflicted by emotional oscillations
between extreme elation and extreme fits of dejection during one of which he experiences
a nightmarish vision of nature as an all-devouring and regurgitating monster (see Book 1,
18. August). He feels anguish at the thought that he might inadvertently crush a worm on
one of his country walks. He becomes increasing frustrated by the pettiness and class-
bound injustices of court society. Even his reading matter reflects a fundamental change
in mood when he abandons the works of Homer for the Gothic Ossian. As Goethe much
later in life observed to Henry Crabb Robinson, his change of reading matter coincided
with the turning point in the novel, after which Werther began down the slippery slope to
his ultimate demise. The nadir of his emotions is revealed in the letter dated November
15, the so-called "Gethsemane Letter," in which he implicitly compares himself to Christ
in the Garden of Gethsemane when anguished by the prospect of death and to Hamlet
when uttering "to be or not to be" (see Book 2, 15. November). In preparation for his act

5. Werther experiences a strange sense of euphoria and uplift for in a final climax of
emotional outpouring Werther makes a desperate last ditch attempt to impress Lotte by
his dramatic reading of passages from Ossian, purportedly an ancient Gaelic epic
translated into English by James Macpherson but later exposed as a forgery, with their
bloodcurdling battles and forsaken lovers about to perish surrounded by an unmitigated
storm-laden gloom beside a shore and waves raging against perilous crags. The reading
serves Werther as a kind of aphrodisiac working up his and her emotions to such a pitch
that he and she are locked in a firm and passionate embrace despite Lotte's ineffectual
and perhaps not totally resolute resistance. He steals a rapturous embrace from a
traumatized but despite it all passionate Lotte, before she escapes his clutches and runs
away. If only he had taken her earlier advice and kept away until Christmas Eve when
nothing could have gone wrong!
Goethe's setting of Werther's death a few days before Christmas might indicate Goethe's
deliberate inversion of the birth-death cycle, a return to the womb, expressing he libidinal
urge to be united with the anima, the archetypal female. In his article "The Image of "the
Wanderer" and "the Hut" in Goethe's Poetry' 2
Professor L. A. Willoughby interprets the
image or figure of ‘the Wanderer' in Goethe's works in the light of C. G. Jung's theory of
the collective unconscious, according to which the primary male urge or ‘libido' seeks to
achieve harmony and union with the ‘anima' or ‘eternally feminine' principle. As the
‘anima' conflates the maternal and conjugal aspects of womanhood it arouses the largely
unconscious oedipal fear of committing incest. Lotte, for her part, seems to have suffered
from a ‘mother complex' in view of the vow she made to her mother's ghost that she
never forsake her many brothers and sisters. The fact that Lotte defers to Werther's final
request to be handed Albert's pistols convinces Werther that she is a willing party to his
project of going on before into eternity. She is seen by him to dispense a means of grace
analogous to the Holy Chalice. Earlier, in Werther's mind, she had administered the
sacrament of baptism when washing the face of a little girl whom Werther had frightened
by an impulsive, though doubtless innocent, kiss. This kiss forebodes Werther's and
Lotte's final fateful embrace. Of course, a more cynical explanation of Lotte's willingness
2
Jn Etudes Germaniques, Dec., 1951.

6. to hand over the instrument of his destruction is that she had a shrewd idea of his
intention and would be somewhat relieved by his demise. Werther, who has already
contemplated suicide as a way of resolving his inner conflicts, now feels assured that
Lotte approves of his design to take his life so as to enter heaven and like Christ in St
John's Gospel prepare the way for others, though Werther had only Lotte and himself in
mind for an entry into the celestial sphere. This strange notion was not Goethe's
invention. as will become clear in due course. An editor reports on Werther's final days
and the circumstances his death. Many significant details, such as the finding of a copy of
Lessing's drama Emilia Galotti, were not inventions of Goethe either.
The novel has deep roots in Goethe's own experiences in 1772 at Wetzlar (an important
seat of the Imperial Chamber of Justice and one relatively close to Goethe's native
Frankfurt am Main) to round off his legal studies. There he fell in love with his
inspiration for Lotte, the nineteen-year-old Lotte Buff, but she, like Werther's Lotte with
regard to Albert, remained faithful to the young man she had chosen to marry, Christian
Kestner. Not only did Goethe suffer the gentle but firm rejection of his amorous advances
but also reacted against what he felt to be the ultra-conservative and petty environment of
provincial Wetzlar. Having resigned his position, the frustrated and deeply hurt young
Goethe toured the Lahn valley and paid a visit to the family of Sophie von la Roche,
considered the first woman novelist writing in the German language. As though he had
not had enough emotional punishment that year, he became enamored with Maximiliane,
a daughter of his hostess, but the sixteen-year-old was soon to marry a wealthy middle-
aged Italian businessman, Pietro (Peter) Brentano, who subsequently made it very clear to
Goethe that he would no longer be welcome as a visitor to his household. Incidentally
two of their children, Bettina and Clemens, became celebrated writers of the Romantic
school. It was a consolation of sorts that Maximiliane and Brentano provided material for
Goethe's famous novel. Maximiliane lent Lotte her dark eyes and Brentano's abrasive
nature re-emerges in the character of Albert.
After returning to Frankfurt, Goethe learned of the suicide of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, a
young man from Wolfenbüttel, whom Goethe knew in Wetzlar as a companion of his

7. own age with similar literary and philosophical interests. Jerusalem served as secretary in
a legation from Braunschweig (Brunswick) at the Imperial Chamber of Justice. His self-
inflicted death immediately followed his failure to induce a married woman to yield to his
protestations of love and leave her husband. Furthermore, he was frustrated in his
profession, being on very bad terms with his superior. In November 1744 Goethe
received a detailed and perceptive account of the final crisis in Jerusalem's life from
Kestner, with whom he remained on friendly terms despite their earlier rivalry. This
report contains significant details which Goethe incorporated into Werther. Chief among
them was the fact reported by Kestner that a copy of Emilia Galotti was found beside
Jerusalem's body. Goethe also included the laconic final remark in Kestner's report. No
clergyman attended the funeral. The report clearly indicated that Jerusalem's suicide
resulted from a belief that his death would prepare the way for a blissful reunion with his
loved one in the hereafter. The very same conviction was the basis of Werther's resolve to
commit suicide. Differences between the account and the novel are also revealing.
Jerusalem's death occurred at the end of October, while that of Werther is placed just
before Christmas Eve, which again indicates Goethe's free use of symbols derived from
Christian traditions.
One can hardly mention Jerusalem without making a reference to Ephraim Lessing and
his relevance to the question of Jerusalem's suicide, and Werther's, in view of the fact a
copy of Emilia Galotti was found beside Jerusalem's body. A short reflection on relevant
aspects of the drama may prove enlightening.
Lessing, that powerful advocate of tolerance and social emancipation, had recently
caused a sensation through his drama Emilia Galotti, in which the heroine incites her
father to kill her in order to save her from "a fate worse than death," sexual enslavement
to a corrupt noble. The play derives its theme partly from the story of Virginia as told by
Livy in his history of early Rome and partly from the story of Saint Ursula and the eleven
thousand virgins who accepted death in ancient Cologne rather than lose their virginity.
Here the borderline between suicide and self-induced martyrdom is not altogether clear,
nor is it in Werther's case, at least in terms of his own subjective perspective. Lessing

8. was involved in the events associated with Jerusalem's death in a direct and personal way.
He served as the chief librarian of Wolfenbüttel, Jerusalem's home town, his circle of
acquaintances including Jerusalem's father, Jerusalem himself and Moses Mendelssohn, a
Jewish scholar whose ambition it was to reconcile traditional Jewish philosophy with
mainstream European thought and the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The view is
commonly maintained that Werther had fully "interiorized" religious symbols so that they
were simply ciphers indicating a purely mental state without a claim to any assertion
about external realities. In fact such a transition was not completed in a brief instant. The
writers and philosophers of the time sought a higher truth combining religious faith and
psychological theories intimating the collective unconscious.
In some ways Lessing showed more understanding than Goethe himself for the
unfortunate Jerusalem and his extreme act, and so as to counteract the impression that he
was merely a befuddled eccentric, Lessing published some of the young man's
philosophical essays. According to Kestner's report, Jerusalem had assured himself that
the soul was imperishable after reading Moses Mendelssohn's "Phaeton," a philosophical
treatise on the immortality of the soul. Mendelssohn had exerted a great influence on his
close friend Lessing in the latter's quest to throw a favourable light on Jews and their
traditions in a development that culminated in the drama Nathan der Weise, a forceful
plea for tolerance and mutual appreciation among Christians, Jews and Moslems. It
would make good reading for many today.
On the basis of evaluating the data presented above, can we reach a clearer perception of
the novel's importance in the context of developments in literature and Goethe's own
progress? We might focus on this question: Is Werther the first Romantic novel? Putting
the same question another way: Does the novel endorse a total rejection of society and
convention? Further: How does the novel fit into the picture of Goethe's development as
a poet and writer?
The words "romantisch" appears several times in the novel. The original meaning of the
word being derived from 'Roman,' it simply meant "corresponding to the spirit or nature

9. of a novel with reference to its themes involving stories of love and adventure." It
certainly did not refer to the Romantic movement, which came into existence about
twenty years later. 3
On the other hand, Werther was a proto-Romantic to the extent that
his kind of oppressive self-consciousness also afflicted the Romantic poets in later years.
Werther was acutely self-conscious, to the point of having a severe mental condition
aggravated by his having an artistic talent without the ability to translate his inner vision
into an adequate vehicle of artistic expression. Was Werther was a piece of proto-
Romantic fiction which the mature Goethe would come to disavow as an excusable
youthful aberration? Here we ought to consider whether Goethe, even as a young man,
advocated or condoned suicide in the first place. Werther's altercations with Albert have
the quality of a debate in which Albert has the better arguments. We should not confuse
an empathetic portrayal of a person suffering from a grave malady with an endorsement
of this person's actions. If he had been that much convinced of Werther's attitudes Goethe
would have presumably taken his life too. In any case one should be wary of treating
Werther in isolation from Goethe's works and the trends and forces underlying them.
It is important to take account of a fundamental dualistic structure that will constantly
resurface in Goethe's works, particularly those that encompass two classes of persons,
non-survivors like Werther and survivors like Albert. The same contrast is found in the
drama Torquato Tasso, in which the distraught poet earns our sympathy though Antonio,
3
The German Romantic movement came into existence as a reaction to Goethe's
insistence that the artist-poets is responsible to society as a citizen committed to the well-
being of humanity. The controversy came to a head after Goethe's publication of Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre. The main character, Wilhelm Meister, is a member of an itinerant
wandering troupe of actors whose repertoire includes Hamlet among other Shakespearean
works. A divide between Wilhelm and the more erratic and unstable members of the
troupe gapes open. To the erratic characters belong the patriarchal and distraught harp
player and a high-spirited but unstable young Italian tomboy, Mignon. While Mignon and
the harp player fall by the wayside and die, Wilhelm survives and discovers his true
vocation as a surgeon, a very practical and socially acceptable alternative to being a
vagrant actor. Those who came to form the Romantic movement strongly objected to
Goethe's utilitarian leanings as the title of a romantic novel by Josef Eichendorff, Aus
dem Leben eines Taugenichts ("From the Life of a Good-for-Nothing") makes clear.

10. his robust and successful counterpart, earns our respect but little more. In the case of
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre it is the survivor Wilhelm who engages our chief interest
while Mignon and the Harp Player are dealt a tragic fate. Perhaps even here we should be
wary of a judgmental disapproval of the non-survivors as if we were to say that it served
them right to perish before their time. The coupling of antithetic characters is arguably
rooted in a dichotomy residing in the human mind itself. This view was upheld by
Friedrich Gundolf, one of Germany's most authoritative experts on Goethe before the
nightfall of free intellectual life in Germany in 1933. 4
When we consider Goethe's final great work Faust Part II we see how many of the
unresolved tensions and contradictions in Goethe's personality at the time of his writing
Werther yield to an overwhelming sense of harmony and reconciliation. In the final
scenes of the play Faust must prepare for the inevitable, his death and the verdict of
divine judgment on his eternal state. He receives forgiveness through the mediation of
Gretchen transfigured into a figure like Mary Magdalene, the penitent sinner whose
greatest and decisive attribute is love. In a sense she fulfills a role that Werther claimed
for himself as one who would go beyond to prepare for a reconciliation with Lotte in the
hereafter. We should not forget that the image of the forsaken maiden, in which critics
detect an embryonic Ur-Gretchen, makes its debut in Werther's defence of those who
commit suicide when unable to further endure their unrelieved suffering. In the context of
the Faust dramas Gretchen chose to face death by execution rather than avail herself of
the opportunity to escape from prison with the help of Mephistopheles and Faust. Thus,
while she did not commit suicide, she chose to face death rather than to seize a chance to
flee from it.
Ultimately Faust is redeemed, but the nature of his redemption in any literal or
theological sense is open to question. Perhaps the key to unlocking the enigma it poses it
is to be found in the recognition that the completion of Faust Part II fell close to the
4
Mignon und der Harfner stammen aus einer andren Schicht von Goethes Wesen und
Leben als alle andren Figuren des Meister." Friedrich Gundolf, "Wilhelm Meisters
Theatralische Sendung," Goethe (Berlin, 1916) 345

11. completion of Goethe's life. As the marginal references in the last scene of the drama
disclose to a reader if not to a spectator, Faust is identified as 'the Wanderer' returning to
his final place of rest. We have noted that the term 'Wanderer' designates Werther
negatively as a homeless wayfarer through the wilderness of life. To use modern
colloquialism, Werther gatecrashed his way into the afterlife. Faust returns there too, but
in better grace, only after exploring every avenue open to him in this life.
2. Goethe's Faust
The subject of Faust and his identification as a wanderer was broached in the review of
the article by Geoffrey Hartman cited above. The Faust dramas find their origin early in
Goethe's literary career when he was still in a critical phase of his development associated
with the term Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress"). In 1773 he composed a work to
which the title Urfaust has been given. It was never published during Goethe's life time
but a copy of the manuscript was found by chance in the latter half of the nineteenth
century. It portrays the tragedy of Gretchen, an innocent young woman whom Faust
seduces and, as the phrase goes, gets into trouble. In a distraught state of mind she
commits infanticide and despite the opportunity of escape faces execution as her due.
Essentially the drama fits the mould of the bürgerliches Trauerpiel, the middle class
tragedy promoted by Ephraim Lessing in his capacity of a literary critic and a playwright.
This genre was based om the notion that great tragedy was no longer the preserve of the
gods and those enjoying an elevated social status as set forth by advocates of Greek
classicism but rather demonstrable in the world inhabited by commoners and members
of the middle and lower classes. Typical of this genre are depictions of the plight of
innocent young women with a middle class background subject to the liberties taken on
them by lascivious and corrupt aristocrats.
Faust invades Gretchen's domestic peace in the idyllic setting of a small cottage, which,
metaphorically at least, he destroys in an impetuous and callous fashion. The tragedy of
a young unmarried woman who commits infanticide is largely based on a series of events
that took place in Frankfurt in 1772 when Susanna Margaritha Brandt was executed for
the crime of infanticide, though other sources may have contributed the material on

12. which Goethe based the story of Gretchen. In Faust Part II, a play completed during the
last years of Goethe's life, the counterpart of Gretchen is Helen of Troy in keeping with
Christopher Marlowe's version of the tragedy of Dr. Faustus. Faust enjoys an ecstatic
but short lived union with Helen of Troy. Their son Euphorion, Goethe's tribute to Lord
Byron, perishes like Icarus on falling to earth from the celestial heights. Faust's ultimate
salvation is secured not by Helen but by the intercession a Gretchen transfigured into
Mary Magdalene. The redemption is thus couched in terms consistent with Christian
traditions, not classical ones. Like Job he is restored to divine favour, as The LORD had
prophesied in "The Prologue in Heaven." It is as the "Wanderer," so named in the margin
of the pages to final scene, that Faust is received into Heaven. The resounding final
words that all temporal things are but symbols of the Eternal seem to point to a deeply
religious and mystical truth. Is the drama an expression of religious belief? Perhaps so,
but not one that confirms traditional theology, for the terms of Faust's damnation laid
down that he should never rest of a bed of idleness.
The Faust dramas are inextricably entwined with Goethe's life experience. Arguably
Goethe, an incorrigible heartbreaker, sought forgiveness from womankind for all the pain
he had caused members of the fair sex. An accusation of hypocrisy has been leveled
against him on account of documented evidence that he as a minister and lawyer at the
court of Weimar gave his consent to the execution of a young woman who, like
Gretchen, had committed infanticide.5
It is hard to find supporting evidence for Hartman's assertion that Goethe abandoned
poetry for prose, the only "progressive" form language. The last novel that Goethe wrote,
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre ("Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years") may be a
genial anticipation of the logically disconnected nouveau roman but it certainly struck
contemporary readers as a deviation from what was expected of a novel, what with it
having little plot to speak of and the many independent self-contained novellen with little
obvious bearing on the main characters. In their final works Rousseau and Lawrence
5
Rüdiger Scholz, Das kurze Leben der Johanna Catharina Ḧhn : Kindesmorde und
Kindesm̈rderinnen im Weimar Carl Augusts und Goethes : die Akten zu den F̈llen
Johanna Catharina Ḧhn (Würzburg, 2005).

13. Sterne along with other authors evinced a rhapsodic loosening of organisation in treating
subject matter. Be that as it may, there was no reduction in Goethe's output of poetry and
verse in his final years.