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VII.

SUICIDE IN THE WERTER OF GOETHE AND IN THE CHATTERTON OF DE VIGNY.

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IN the seventeenth century, when religion prevailed, there were men, who, disdaining ordinary devotion, aimed at a higher, and carried into their piety the excitement of an over-wrought imagination. Fenelon, in his Spiritual Letters, counselled these restless and exalted souls to permit their minds to enjoy a little repose. Requiescite pusillum. It is dangerous," said he, "to have the inner man too much agitated." Thus he dreaded this preference which man is often disposed to give to the inner life over the outer, to contemplation over action. He knew that many preferred rather to dream than to act; he knew particularly that this serious melancholy did not calm the passions, but on the contrary, excited them until they became a disease of the soul.

Werter, with other ideas and sentiments than those of the seventeenth century, is also one of those ardelions of the inner life; and it is his misfortune. "I look within myself," said

he, "and I find there a world, but rather in gloomy apprehensions and forebodings, than in reality and in action." Such is the world in which he loves to live. His friends in vain persuade him to follow some profession. "Become the attaché of an embassy," said they "it is not too confining." Werter, however, refuses for a long time. One day, when he was melancholy and sad from the hopeless love which he cherishes for Charlotte, he accepts the appointment of secretary to the embassy. He prepares dispatches, seals letters, and sends off couriers. He has an occupation. But, what is strange, and calculated to disconcert the most firm resolutions-he very soon perceives that his ambassador is a fool, and, at an evening party at the residence of the minister, he meets two or three barons or marquises, who are impertinent.

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This trial is too severe for Werter; and he tenders his resignation. A few days afterwards, he attaches himself to a prince who is amiable and affable; but he soon discovers that this prince also has a great fault. "He values," said Werter, my mind and my talents more than my heart, of which alone I am vain, and which is the only source of all my strength, of all my happines, and of all my misery." Thus he always withdraws within himself, scorning the mind and talents which are the instruments of the man who acts, and hastens to return to the inner life; for it is there that he lives, and moves, and has his being.

Having quitted his ambassador because he was a fool, and the prince because he over-prized talents, Werter abandons all business. And in truth he was right; for what profession can we find, where we do not come in contact with rogues, fools, impertinent and good-for-nothing people? "I am only a traveller and a pilgrim upon earth," says he to his friends.

And are we better than him? Yes, if we have an occupation and persevere in it; not only because employment is the means of adding to our personal worth the strength of character which is derived from a profession, recognized in society; but because the professions (and it is this which constitutes their chief merit) are the fulfilment of the divine law of labor. God has placed us in this world to act and not to dream; to all our thoughts, to all our sentiments, he has connected action as a necessary condition: worship to piety, the care of a family to love, the cultivation of the arts to the idea of the beautiful. God is never satisfied with thought alone, because it very soon subsides into revery.* divine law ennobles all the professions of men; it alleviates the fatigues of labor, it lightens the tediousness of business. "I would be very happy to go to see you," writes Fenelon to a friend, "but I have no time. I am compelled to confer with a metropolitan chapter about a suit, which I must dispatch quickly, so that I may write my letters, and examine

This

* Revery has in all times inspired a disgust for labor, and led to suicide. There is in Stobaus an account of a young man who, compelled by his father to undertake agricultural work, hung himself, leaving a letter, in which he declared that agriculture was too monotonous a trate; that it was always necessary to sow in order to reap, and to reap in order to sow, and that this circle was endless and insupportable.

my accounts. Oh! how miserable would these thorny details render life, if the will of God did not embellish and sweeten all the occupations which he has given us."

This reverence for the will of God, this love for the divine law which makes life easy and pleasant, is what Werter does not possess, because, being a child of the eighteenth century, he has not the simple and firm faith which his fathers had; and that is the reason why this pilgrim and sojourner upon earth, as he loves to call himself, did not finish his pilgrimage. In this pilgrimage of life, which is painful and hard, those alone reach the end of it, who walk in the path which God has marked out for them. Those who only walk in the path which is pleasing to themselves, run a great risk of having their pilgrimage cut short.

Werter, such as Goëthe had created him, could not live. When he wished to make his characters live, he made them different from Werter. See his Hermana, in his Hermann and Dorothea. What a simple and firm character! What a masculine heart and mind! What a contrast with Werter! The love which he has for Dorothea is not for him a subject of profound and subtle reflections; he does not remark, like Werter, that since he loves, no faculty of his soul remains inactive, and that he believes that he is more than he is, because he is then all that he can be -no: he thinks only that in times of war and disaster, it is good for a man to marry, "because there were many fine women who require the protection of a husband, and that we need the consoling looks of a woman in the hour of sorrow and affliction." We recognize in these sentiments, at once manly and tender, men who were born to live. But what do you wish Werter to do? Did he wish, and were he able to seduce Charlotte-he would then perhaps live. But what would there be in this history so strange and peculiar? Would it be superior to a thousand and one histories of the same kind? Was it, in fact, difficult for Goëthe to tell us, that a young man endeavored to make himself loved by a young woman? And yet, if this history has not this denouement, it can only have one other, that of suicide. It is not that Werter has not many qualities which would dispose a man to love life. Thus he is good; but his goodness is of a piece with his character: it is soft and contemplative; it resembles in no respect, the active and patient goodness of Hermann. Werter loves man and nature; and even in the

first transport of his love, when he had only experienced the sweetness of it, Werter loved every body, the village conversations, the prattling of children, the stories of old women; he loved to see the vapors of the morning rising in the valley, the sun at noonday in the forest, the grass growing on the margin of the streams, the insects in the grass,-life every where, God every where. But let us not be deceived. This mingled tenderness and love which he feels for every thing, was the effect of this cheerfulness of the heart which love inspires. These outpourings of the heart do not continue long; the heart soon becomes hardened, and fixes itself upon the beloved object; very soon the lover, without being conscious of it, knows but two persons, his betrothed and himself. He loves himself so much the more, since he feels that he is beloved, and the love which he feels elevates him in his own eyes. "She loves me," said Werter to his friend; "you may imagine how happy I am, how much (I say it confidentially to you, for you will understand me) I adore myself, since she loves me." This expression admirably portrays this egotism which constitutes the foundation of love; a charming egotism of which we are unconscious, and imagine that we are living for another when we are living only for ourselves!

Happy and proud of this love, Werter does not know what to do; he cannot marry Charlotte; he cannot, nor does he wish to seduce her. He has now reached that point where, as Lord Edward said to Saint Preux, being forced to act like an honorable man, he prefers to die. But in Goethe, this idea of suicide, of which Jean Jacques Rousseau has only made an eloquent controversy between Lord Edward and Saint Preux, becomes the subject of his romance. In proportion as Werter loses the hope of a success which he does not even desire, he is inclined to commit suicide. The works of nature which formerly enchanted his senses and his soul, now sadden and oppress him. Formerly when he was happy, but when his love for Charlotte "had made his blood boil," he went to Wahleim; there he saw in a little cottage a peasant woman working with her children around her; he played himself with the youngest, and on returning home he wrote to a friend "that nothing so much calms the passions as seeing such a creature as she, who in peace and happiness ran within the narrow circle of her ex

istence, finding each day what was necessary for her comfort, and seeing the leaves fall without thinking of any thing but the approach of winter." Now this quiet repose seems irksome, this labor dull, because his own happiness formerly threw a charm over the sight of human occupations.

We have explained the character of Werter, such as we have conceived it. The little taste which we have for this sort of character, (common even among people who do not kill themselves,) does not however prevent us from recognizing the interest with which Goëthe has invested his hero. We do not love Werter, but we love to see the struggles which he makes against the disgust of life. We love to see how the idea of death by degrees gets the better of his mind. Goëthe well knew that whatever disgust we may have for life, there is nevertheless a great distance between this disgust and a determination to die. Even in those who have most firmly resolved to die, what contradictory sentiments, what different emotions in the interval between the first and the last thought! The soul then seems to become more alive and sensible than ever. It attaches itself with a kind of mournful joy to the recollections of life, which seems more pleasing as we are about to quit it, and without ceasing to wish to die, it breaks out in unavailing regrets; it feels itself smitten with an indescribable sensibility, which causes the slightest circumstance, even a word, a motion, or a look, to shock and wound it. But in this very impatience, we feel the struggle and the revolt of life against a fatal resolution, which a man who has reached this point has no longer the power to change and no longer the courage to accomplish. The spectacle of man in these moments of hesitation and suffering is full of interest, and it is on this account that Goëthe has prolonged the history of the last days of Werter. The details are apparently minute and trivial, and admirably calculated to hurry him on to suicide. It was the Sunday before Christmas. Christmas is a holiday for children in Germany: and when Werter goes to see Charlotte, he finds her occupied in preparing playthings for her brothers and sisters. She had determined to do every thing in order to avoid meeting Werter; she felt that it was for his honor and her repose. She was embarrassed in seeing him; yet they entered into a conversation.

"'You also,' said Charlotte, (concealing her embarrass

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