it was written and in his later years, is conclusive proof of the
degree to which it was a "general confession," as he himself calls it.
"I have lent my emotions to his (Werther's) history," he wrote shortly
after the completion of his work; "and so it makes a wonderful
whole."[158] In one of the best-known passages of his Autobiography he
tells how he morbidly dallied with the idea of suicide, and banished
the obsession only by convincing himself that he had not the courage
to plunge a dagger into his breast. In a remarkable passage, written
in his sixty-third year to his Berlin friend, Zelter, whose son had
committed suicide, he recalls with all seriousness the hypochondriacal
promptings which in his own case might have driven him to the fate of
Werther. "When the _taedium vitae_ takes possession of a man," he wrote,
"he is to be pitied and not to be blamed. That all the symptoms of
this wonderful, equally natural and unnatural, disease at one time
also convulsed my inmost being, _Werther_, indeed, leaves no one in
doubt. I know right well what resolves and what efforts it cost me at
that time to escape the waves of death, as from many a later shipwreck
I painfully rescued myself and with painful struggles recovered my
health of mind." At a still later date (1824) Goethe expressed himself
with equal emphasis to the same purport. "That is a creation
(_Werther_)," he told Eckermann, "which I, like the pelican, fed with
the blood of my own heart. There is in it so much that was deepest in
my own experience, so much of my own thoughts and sensations, that, in
truth, a romance extending to ten such volumes might be made out of
it. Since its appearance, I have read it only once, and have refrained
from doing so again. It is nothing but a succession of rockets. I am
uneasy when I look at it, and dread the return of the psychological
condition out of which it sprang."

[Footnote 158: _Werke, Briefe_, ii. 156.]

These repeated statements of Goethe, made at wide intervals of his
life, sufficiently prove what a large part of himself went to the
making of _Werther_. Yet Werther was not Goethe. From the fate of
Werther he was saved by two characteristics of which we have seen
frequent evidence in his previous history. It was not in his nature to
be dominated for any lengthened period by a single passion to the
exclusion of every other interest. No sooner had he left Wetzlar than
his heart was open to the charms of Maxe Brentano