ous nature. Now and then the tender phrase is wanting,
but is replaced by a crude picture of a heart pierced with an arrow.
Later on we find an address like "lovable, subtle, beneficent,
well-formed, overloved woman." Luther greets his "friendly, dear 'lord,'
Frau Catherine von Bora, Doctor Lutherin in Wittenberg" with teasing
endearments, as he complains of the fare at the court of Saxony and
expresses his longing for home: "What a good wine and beer have I at
home, besides a charming wife, or should I say 'lord!'" An attractive
originality shines forth from the letters of Duchess Elizabeth Charlotte
of Orleans, and from those of Goethe's mother. Naturalness was the ideal
in letter writing of the late eighteenth century, as artificiality had
been that of the preceding era. Frau Gottsched, in her letters, reveals
a roguish grace that contrasts with the stilted style of her tyrant
husband. Goethe's letters of love and longing in Werther will stand as a
model as long as literature shall be esteemed in the world, although
there is a realistic and totally indefensible sentimentality in
Werther's love of Lotte, the wife of another man.

Werther, beautiful of form, spiritual, and highly gifted, had,
naturally, frequently aroused love without returning it; now Nemesis
seizes him; he loves, loves to madness the wife of another man. The
loveliness of Lotte (by the way, she is a real person, Charlotte Buff;
while the lover is a composite of Goethe himself and young Jerusalem,
who had actually shot himself at Wetzlar for the love of another man's
wife), as we see her in pictures of German artists, feeding her numerous
brothers and sisters, who cling to her, fans Werther's love, which is
stronger than all the other forces of his heart. Unable to resist his
passion, he chooses death as an inevitable necessity. The romance
presented in the letters of the hero only concentrates the sequence of
events forcibly upon the tragic climax. Lotte is the passive instrument
in bringing about Werther's suicide. As to Werther he is Goethe himself,
the novel is simply a fragment of a great confession.

Goethe's numberless works, touching upon universal interests, are among
the most profound and most exhaustive treatises on womanly nature ever
written. Women accompany him through his long life and influence him at
every step of his career as poet, philosopher, and statesman. His
extraordinary mother, of a patrician Frankfort family, spirited,
natu