rankly
admitted his indiscretion, but in a second letter he took a bolder
tone. "Oh! ye unbelieving ones, I would proclaim ye of little faith,"
he wrote. "Could you but realise the thousandth part of what _Werther_
is to a thousand hearts, you would not reckon the cost it has been to
you."[161] Lotte and Kestner, from all we know of them, were both
persons of sound nature, not unduly sensitive, and, in their hearts,
they may not have been displeased at their association with the
brilliant youth of genius on whom the eyes of the world were now
turned. At all events, neither appears to have borne him a permanent
grudge for presenting them to the public in such a dubious light.
Though, as has already been said, correspondence between Goethe and
them gradually became more and more intermittent, mutual respect and
cordiality remained, and in later years we find Goethe in the capacity
of sage adviser to the prudent Kestner.[162]

[Footnote 160: By Sainte-Beuve.]

[Footnote 161: _Werke, Briefe_, ii. 207.]

[Footnote 162: The family of Kestner eventually published the
correspondence of Goethe with their parents.--A. Kestner, _Goethe und
Werther, Briefe Goethes, meistens aus seiner Jugendheit, mit
erlaeuternden Documenten_ (Stuttgart und Tuebingen, 1854).]

The subsequent influence of _Werther_ was at once more powerful and
more enduring than the influence of _Goetz von Berlichingen_, and
Goethe himself has suggested the reason. The so-called _Werther_
"period," he says, belongs to no special age of the world's culture,
but to the life of every free spirit that chafes under obsolete
traditions, obstructed happiness, cramped activity, and unfulfilled
desires. "A sorry business it would be," he adds, "if once in his life
every one did not pass through an epoch when _Werther_ appeared to
have been specially written for him."[163] The long series of
imitations of Werther--_Rene_, _Obermann_, _Childe Harold_, _Adolphe_
(to mention only the best-known)--bears out Goethe's remark that
Wertherism belongs to no particular age of the world, though it may
assume various forms and be expressed in different tones.[164] But in
Goethe's little book the name and the thing Wertherism has received
its "immortal _cachet_." To the intrinsic power of _Werther_ it is the
supreme tribute that Napoleon, the first European man in the world of
action, as Goethe was the first in the world of thought, read it seven
times in the course of his life, tha