resses his
tender heart, like a sickly child, all whose caprices we indulge." One
or the other of those attitudes toward reality, the active and the
passive, were soon taken by the whole youth of the time; and just as
Schiller's _Brigands_ gave birth to a whole series of wild dramas,
_Werther_ left in the novels of the time a long line of tears. More than
that, even in reality Karl Moor found imitators who engaged in an open
struggle against society, and one met at every corner languishing
Siegwarts, whose delicate soul was hurt by the cruel contact of the
world.

What strikes us most in this morbid sentimentality is the eternal
melancholy sighing after nature. Ossian's cloudy sadness and Young's
dark Nights veil every brow. They fly into the solitudes of the forests
in order to dream freely of a less brutal world. They must, indeed, have
been very far from nature to seek for it with such avidity. Many, in
fact, of these ardent, feverish young men became in the end a prey, some
to madness, others to suicide. A species of moral epidemic, like that
which followed upon the apparent failure of the Revolution in 1799, had
broken out. The germ of Byronism may be clearly detected already in the
Wertherism of those times. Exaggerated and overstrained imaginations
found insufficient breathing-room in the world, and met on all sides
with boundaries to their unlimited demands. Hearts, accustomed to follow
the dictates of their own inspiration alone, bruised themselves against
the sharp angles of reality. The thirst for action which consumed their
ardent youth could not be quenched, in fact, in the narrow limits of
domestic life; and public life did not exist. Frederick had done great
things, but only, like the three hundred other German governments, to
exclude the youth of the middle classes from active life. Thence the
general uneasiness. _Werther_ was as much an effect as a cause of this
endemic disease; above all, it was the expression of a general state of
mind. It is this which constitutes its historical importance, while the
secret of its lasting value is to be found in its artistic form.

Besides, if I may say so without paradox, the disease was but an excess
of health, a juvenile crisis through which Herder, young Goethe,
Schiller, and indeed the whole generation had to pass.

"Oh," exclaimed old Goethe fifty years later in a conversation with
young Felix Mendelssohn, "oh, if I could but write a fourth volume of my
life