nearer to Nature.

There is no book in any language which so lives and moves and has its
being in Nature as _Werther_.[11] In _Wahrheit und Dichtung_ Goethe
said of the 'strange element' in which _Werther_ was designed and
written:

I sought to free myself internally from all that was foreign to
me, to regard the external with love, and to allow all beings,
from man downwards, as low as they were comprehensible, to act
upon me, each after its own kind. Thus arose a wonderful affinity
with the single objects of Nature, and a hearty concord, a
harmony with the whole, so that every change, whether of place or
region, or of the times of the day and year, or whatever else
could happen, affected me in the deepest manner. The glance of
the painter associated itself with that of the poet; the
beautiful rural landscape, animated by the pleasant river,
increased my love of solitude and favoured my silent observations
as they extended on all sides.

The strong influence of _La Nouvelle Heloise_ upon _Werther_ was very
evident, but there was a marked difference between Goethe's feeling
for Nature and Rousseau's. Rousseau had the painter's eye, but not
the keen poetic vision.

Goethe's romances are pervaded by the penetrating quality peculiar to
his nation, and by virtue of which in _Werther_, the outer world, the
scenery, was not used as framework, but was always interwoven with
the hero's mood. The contrast between culture and Nature is always
marked in Rousseau, and his religion was deism; Goethe resolves
Nature into feeling, and his religion was a growing pantheism. As a
work of art, _Werther_ is excellent, _La Nouvelle Heloise_ is not.
Goethe used his hero's bearing towards Nature with marvellous effect
to indicate the turns and changes of his moods, just as he indicated
the threatening calamity and the growing apprehension of it by
skilful stress laid upon some of her little traits--a faculty which
only Theodore Storm among later poets has caught from him.

The growth of amorous passion is portrayed as an elementary force,
and the revolutionary element in the book really consists in the
strength of this passion and the assertion of its natural rights.
Everything artificial, forced, conventional, in thought, act, and
feeling--and what at that time was not?--was repugnant to Werther;
what he liked most of all was the simplicity of children and
uneducated people.

Nothi