0.]

CHAPTER VII

WETZLAR AND CHARLOTTE BUFF

MAY--SEPTEMBER, 1772

During the summer and autumn of 1772 Goethe found himself in a society
and surroundings which were in curious contrast to those of Darmstadt;
and the next four months were to supply him with an experience which,
wrought into one book of transcendent literary effect, was to make his
name known, literally, to the ends of the earth,[116] and which may be
regarded as the most remarkable episode in his long life. It was as
"the author of _Werther_" that he was known to the reading world,
until after his death the publication of the completed _Faust_
gradually effaced the conception of Goethe as the master-sentimentalist
of European literature.

[Footnote 116: Werther, as Goethe reminds us in one of his Venetian
epigrams, was known in China:--

Doch was foerdert es mich, dass auch sogar der Chinese
Malet mit aengstlicher Hand Werthern und Lotten auf Glas?]

It was mainly as a temporary escape from the tedium of Frankfort that,
towards the end of May, 1772, Goethe proceeded to Wetzlar, a little
town on the Lahn, a confluent of the Rhine. His settlement in Wetzlar
had the semblance of a serious professional purpose, since Wetzlar was
the historic legal capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and the seat of
the Imperial Court of Justice. If he had any such serious purpose, his
experience of the place speedily dispelled it. The place itself he
found distasteful; a "little, ill-built town," he calls it, though the
modern visitor finds it not unattractive, with its climbing, tortuous
streets, reminiscent of the Middle Age, and with its impressive
cathedral, one of the most interesting specimens of mediaeval
architecture to be found in Germany, and still unfinished in Goethe's
day. Instead of the spectacle of an august tribunal administering
prompt and even justice, what he saw was a multitude of corrupt
officials, deluded litigants, and endless delays of law. Wetzlar, in
fact, he gives us to understand, destroyed any respect he may ever
have had alike for judges and the law they professed to administer. He
duly enrolled himself as a "Praktikant,"[117] but, as was the case
with the majority of that class who haunted the town, his legal
activity was confined to this step. "Solitary, depressed, aimless," so
he described himself to his friends during his first weeks in
Wetzlar.[118] Disgusted with law, he found refuge in the study of
literature