Werther and Montaigne: The Romantic Renaissance

Abstract

BENJAMIN BENNETT Werther and Montaigne: The Romantic Renaissance ι ACCORDING TO Dichtung und Wahrheit, Montaigne was one of Goethe's "friends" as early as 1771, and I shall argue that Die Leiden des jungen Werthers contains serious thought about several important questions raised in the Essais, especially "Du repentir" and "De l'expérience."11 will not attempt to treat all the possible parallels between Werther and Montaigne, however obvious some of these may be, as for example the discussion of suicide in "Coustume de l'isle de Cea." My aim, rather, is to understand better the character and significance of Goethe's indebtedness to Renaissance thought in general,2 and to suggest some possible conclusions concerning the unity of European Romanticism. To begin with the texts, there is more than merely a hint of Montaigne in the question by which the main theme of Werther is established: "O was ist der Mensch, daß er über sich klagen darf!" (p. 5, 4. Mai). We must understand first that this question has two distinct meanings. In the first place it expresses a certain pragmatic humility—what right has a man to complain about himself, if it is really himself he is complaining about?—and in this meaning it echoes a main point of the essay "Du repentir": There are some impetuous, prompt and sudden sins: let us leave them aside. But as for these other sins so many times repeated, planned, and premeditated, constitutional sins, or even professional or vocational sins, I cannot imagine that they can be implanted so long in one and the same heart, without the reason and conscience of their possessor constantly willing and intending it to be so. And the repentance which he claims comes to him at a certain prescribed moment is a little hard for me to imagine and conceive.3 2 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA A person's constitutional faults, says Montaigne, cannot in honesty be the object of repentance, and the applicability of this idea to Werther is clear enough. Despite his protestations at the beginning—"ich will mich bessern, will nicht mehr ein bißchen Übel, das uns das Schicksal vorlegt, wiederkäuen" (p. 5)— Werther in the end not only must accept his constitutional "hypochondria,"4 but actually defends it on quasi-theological grounds in the letters of 15 and 30 November 1772. In the second place, however, Werther's question, "O was ist der Mensch, daß er über sich klagen darf," is a theoretical question rich in implications: what is this creature, man, that is permitted to be dissatisfied with itself? how is it possible to be a single entity, yet at the same time stand over against oneself as one's own accuser? And the question in this meaning expresses not humility but pride, for it involves the recognition of man's unique status among created things, his freedom. If all our faculties were the direct expressions of a single level of existence, like the faculties of a horse or an angel, then obviously we could never be dissatisfied with ourselves; but neither would we be that creature to whom God says in Pico's Oration, "We have made you neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that, with free choice and as a mark of honor, you, as it were the shaper and maker of your own self, might present yourself in whatever form you please."5 If our nature did not include the possibility of existing on completely different levels, if we did not therefore possess a capacity for radical self-dissatisfaction, then true change would be impossible for us, and the idea of a free existence would be meaningless. Therefore Montaigne, even in arguing against repentance, must still distinguish two acceptable forms of self-dissatisfaction, one more superficial than ordinary repentance—"le regretter"—and one more profound: "It [repentance] must grasp me by the vitals and afflict them as deeply and as completely as God sees into me" (p. 791). Therefore the essay "Du repentir" must be prefaced by a vivid evocation of the mutability of all things, including one's own self. Our recognition that the text itself cannot claim to be...