rlotte is depicted with
the characteristics of Maxe Brentano rather than of Lotte Buff--with a
more susceptible temperament and less self-control.[156]

[Footnote 156: Goethe gave the blue eyes of Maxe to Charlotte. Lotte
Buff's eyes were brown.]

In the opening of the second part the character of Werther is further
revealed in a new set of circumstances. Against his own inclinations
he accepts an official appointment under an ambassador at a petty
German Court, and his helpless unfitness in this situation for the
ordinary business of life may be regarded as a commentary on Goethe's
own invincible distaste for the practice of his profession. Werther
finds the ambassador intolerable; and a public insult to which, as a
commoner, he is subjected at a social gathering of petty nobility,
drives him to resign his post. After a few months' residence with a
prince, whose company in the end he finds uncongenial, he is
irresistibly drawn to the scenes of his former happiness and misery.
But in the interval an event happens which makes the renewal of old
relations impossible. Charlotte and Albert have married, and the sight
of Albert enjoying the privileges of a husband is a constant reminder
of the hopelessness of his passion. Blank despair gradually takes
possession of Werther's soul; in the hopeless wail of Ossian he finds
the only adequate expression of his fate.[157] In the commentary which
Goethe introduces to prepare readers for Werther's suicide, he
suggests another motive for the act besides Werther's infatuation for
Charlotte, which Napoleon as well as other critics have regarded as a
mistake in art. In his state of mental and moral paralysis, we are
told, Werther recalled all the misfortunes of his past life, and
specially the mortification he had received during his brief official
experience. But on the mind of the reader this incidental suggestion
of other motives makes little impression; he feels that Werther's
helpless abandonment to his passion for Charlotte is the central
interest of the author himself, as it is a wholly adequate cause of
the final catastrophe.

[Footnote 157: "Werther," Goethe remarked to Henry Crabb Robinson,
"praised Homer while he retained his senses, and Ossian when he was
going mad."]

By the fulness of its revelation of himself and by the impression it
made on the public mind _Werther_ holds a unique place among the
longer productions of Goethe. His own testimony, both at the time when