him at every period
of his life; without some immediate impulse out of his own experience
or from the urgency of friends he was incapable of the sustained
inspiration requisite to the execution of a prolonged artistic whole.
We have seen how he dallied with the subject of _Goetz von
Berlichingen_, and how it was only at the instance of his sister
Cornelia that he concentrated his energies in throwing it into
dramatic form. In the case of _Werther_ we have an illustration of the
same characteristic. Shortly after leaving Wetzlar, on hearing the
news of Jerusalem's death, there arose in him a pressing desire to
embody his late experience in some imaginative shape; and in the
course of the following year he actually addressed himself to the
task. But his inspiration flagged, and it was not till the beginning
of 1774 that a new experience supplied a fresh impulse constraining
him to complete the "prodigious little work" which was to take his
contemporaries by storm.

[Footnote 150: In his sixty-second year Goethe also said of himself:
"Denn gewoehnlich, was ich ausspreche, das tue ich nicht, und was ich
verspreche, das halte ich nicht."]

We have it from Goethe's own hand that it was a new and "painful
situation" that gave him the necessary stimulus to resume his work on
_Werther_ and to carry it to a conclusion. We have seen how on leaving
Wetzlar in the autumn of 1772 he had made the acquaintance of the
family von la Roche, and how he had been captivated by the elder
daughter, Maximiliane. Since then he had kept up a sentimental
correspondence with the mother in which we have occasional references
to his continued interest in the daughter. "Your Maxe," he wrote in
August, 1773, "I cannot do without so long as I live, and I shall
always venture to love her." This was, of course, in the current style
of the time, but a situation arose which made such amorous trifling
dangerous. On January 9th, 1774, the Fraeulein von la Roche was married
to Peter Brentano, a dealer in herrings, oil, and cheese, a widower
with five children, with whom she settled in Frankfort. Goethe
immediately became an assiduous frequenter of the Brentano household,
where he was not unwelcome to the young wife, whose new surroundings
were in unpleasant contrast to those of the home she had left. But
Brentano was not so magnanimous as Kestner, and a fortnight had not
passed before there were "painful scenes" between him and Goethe. On
the 21st Goethe wr