If we are to believe Foscolo's love letters to her, Countess Antonietta Fagnani Arese, that naughty Milanese beauty who irritated him into some of his finest writing, said teasingly that he was a little novel in the flesh.¹ And a novel in the making, if we want to translate her humorous expression in a way that does justice to its larger implications. Ugo Foscolo, restless exile, patriot, soldier, scholar, poet, Byronic lover, was himself the stuff of which Romantic novels are made, and he knew it so well that he kept trying to pour his whole incandescent life-experience into some adequate narrative, from The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis on. However, in the intimacy of drawing room or boudoir, Antonietta did not call him “un personaggio da romanzo,” a character fit for a novel, as she well might have if she had tried to fit him into the mold of an available idiom. She called him a novel as such. The metaphor was more than a society quip or bon mot, and more than a simple idiosyncrasy of the kind that the private language of lovers can foster. It was attuned to his rapid style. It both revealed the large scope of his personality and good-humoredly punctured his (however sincere) addiction to heroic roles and melodrama. Above all, it wittily stated that convergence of life and literature which operated at the center of Foscolo's concerns.

Countess Arese can be credited with her share of wit and insight, despite (or because of) the fact that she cynically played her men one against the other in the game of love. Besides, it is hard to see how Ugo Foscolo of all lovers could have become so passionately involved in her if she had been just a mindless, ravishing brunette beauty with wealthy leisure at her command, instead of an intelligent and pretty cultivated woman who, in the patriarchal society of her conservative class, place, and age, had to use marriage as a shield and duplicity as a weapon for her urge to live a fuller life than convention allowed. The role of Aspasia was dangerous; and if we grant exceptional men like Foscolo, Byron, or Goethe the right to fulfill themselves at the expense of several women's feelings, we might as well concede that a true Aspasia is as rare as a good poet. The poet at any rate seems to need her in some form. Giacomo Leopardi—Foscolo's direct literary descendant—certainly did, no less than his physically more fortunate master.

Readers of good poetry, then, should acknowledge their debt to women like Antonietta Fagnani Arese, or Fanny Targioni Tozzetti (the inspirer of Leopardi's “Aspasia” lyrics). That is the very debt which the purveyors of that poetry could not bring themselves to admit—except by writing their verse and prose in fierce or desolate protest. Foscolo's occasionally patronizing words to his Antonietta (whom, at the height of their liaison, he credits with much heart and little imagination) surely do little justice to her mind—which he seems to respect far more, despite himself, when he lashes out at her infidelity in the parting letter—last but one of the series, undated but probably written in February 1803, and numbered 284 by Plinio Carli.² Here Foscolo, in cold rage, calls her “a feminine Lovelace”—referring to a notorious character in Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, the book which, along with Pamela, had started in eighteenth-century Europe the clamorous tradition of the epistolary novel. That tradition of course included, in a straight line of succession, Rousseau's La nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe's Werther, and Foscolo's own Jacopo Ortis.

Pinpointing the above-mentioned convergence of literature and life, Ortis is named in this letter (he had actually appeared in many as the author's alias); as for Werther, which Foscolo variously recognized as a kindred book and a model source at least for the reshaping of his own novel, Antonietta was apparently translating it for him at the time of their passion.³ The Arese translation, which Foscolo rated above the ones then in print, was never published (and he was probably reworking it for a while); but he mentions it honorably in his January 16, 1802 letter to Goethe.⁴ This letter announces the arrival, by private delivery, of a complimentary copy of Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1801 edition, Mainardi publisher)—and that copy was duly preserved in Weimar's Goethe Archive. Goethe's opinion of the handsome tribute is not known, or at least did not prompt a reply to Foscolo (whose name fails to appear, for instance, in Eckermann's Gespräche mit Goethe); a strange omission in view of Goethe's keen interest in contemporary Italian literature, for whose sake he eventually took up the cudgels when it came to defending Manzoni's artistry. Perhaps the by now classically oriented genius of Weimar did not want to be admired for the radical work of his Sturm-und-Drang youth, as the epistolary exchange with Schiller in those very years⁵ may confirm. He was, let us remember, cool to Hölderlin and hostile to Kleist.

On our part, in any case, we can hardly fail to notice the decisive intersections, at the beginning of the new century, in Foscolo's life and work. Given his strong autobiographical bent, his sense of history, and his political commitment, we can hardly discount the juncture of certain shocks at the moment of his literary flowering between the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth: Napoleon's ambiguous role, with the destruction of any hope for Venetian liberal patriots; the suicide, in real life, of Foscolo's own brother, Giovanni, and of the Paduan student Girolamo Ortis; Antonietta Arese's comet-like visitation from 1801 to early 1803, which coincided with the reworking and completion of Ortis. The novel had been originally written (Part i) in 1798, in the wake of the Campoformio treaty (1797); interrupted by the political vicissitudes of 1799 which saw Italy invaded by Austrian and Russian forces during Napoleon's expedition to Egypt; “completed” by an Angelo Sassoli at the behest of the original publisher, Marsigli of Bologna; then resumed by Foscolo after Napoleon's return, and finally printed in 1802.⁶ Foscolo had trouble with pirated editions and fakes—an odd compliment to him, to be sure, if rather unwelcome.

If ever the making of a novel could itself be a novel in the making, such was the case with Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis; and since the fictional suicide, Jacopo, is Fascolo's self-portrait, we are sent back once more to Countess Arese's teasing quip about her fiery poet lover. It would not be until 1817 that the final authoritative edition could appear, in London, with further changes (including the division of the story in two parts), but in this regard the turning point had occurred with the Milan edition of 1802. If Goethe presided over the development of the book with his long-standing example, Antonietta Arese gave it the central impulse with her intervention in Foscolo's life; the crucial intertwining of these concomitant stimuli is documented also by the fact that some of the fictional letters Jacopo Ortis addresses to his friend Lorenzo Alderani (the Wilhelm of Jacopo Ortis' Werther) closely mirror some of the letters Ugo Foscolo was actually writing at the time to his bewitching mistress and translator of Werther. This is true in particular of Ortis' July 19 letter to Teresa, his beloved, which in the 1802 edition markedly changes from its first version in the incomplete 1798 edition (where it was numbered xlv and happened to be the very last part penned by Foscolo himself).⁷ The changes overwhelmingly reflect phrases and ideas from Foscolo's own letters to Isabella Roncioni (a real life model of chaste Teresa he had had to give up in Florence) and to Antonietta herself, as Giovanni Gambarin has pointed out in a detailed footnote to his critical edition.⁸ For instance, the 1802 version introduces the motif of Jacopo's request of his beloved's portrait as a souvenir—a request Foscolo made to Isabella Roncioni in his parting letter of 1801 from Florence, and also to Antonietta in several letters.

In one of these,⁹ probably written in December 1801 or January 1802, he talks of an exchange of portraits and dwells on the way he would like to have them done, fashions, posture and all. Here is what he envisages for her:

… I still don't know what to suggest about your portrait. I would long to have it in a melancholy attitude, picturesque but not romanesque, and in the background [sic] some tree of a dark green, like cypress or oak. For the rest, leave it to the painter: if he is a real artist and has ever been in love, he'll be able to do much better than what I could tell him. And which painter, seeing you so beautiful, could not bank on your divine physiognomy? Don't put on your head any coiffure, or French rags, or flowers. Let your hair go as it stands, and nature will make it much lovelier than your hairdresser could ever do with all his art. The arm naked, and the dress white; if you want a shawl, the fittest color would seem to be the black; or if it were to stand out too sharply on the white, choose one that is less violent but tending to the pathetic. I'd like for you to have a book on your knees or in your hand: Werther, or Ortis, and have the painter put small capital letters in the pages, so one may see that you have either one of these two books …

Antonietta's portrait is already painted here, and the disappointment expressed in the following letter¹⁰ at the preliminary sketch the painter (a lady) had done, only enhances the vividness of Foscolo's own verbal brushwork:

No, no, the more I think of it the more I dislike that drawing: you hold the book too awkwardly; I would want you seated with the book loosely opened on your knees; the arm then would be stretched and the hand would have something soft and nonchalant. Do consult more carefully yesterday's letter; in fact, why don't you copy that pictorial article and have the painter read it …

Taken together in their sequence, or even each by itself, the two letters are also quite a lively portrait of Ugo Foscolo, showing his intimate side, playful and vehement in turn, and if the second one is signed “Il tuo Ortis” (Your Ortis), the obsessively passionate and self-destructive aspect—the one that chiefly went into the novel, very cathartically—is not allowed to hold unchallenged sway; Didymus tempers him into self-irony or supersedes him in joyful release:

… Now I'll tell you my life after your last kiss. I took the way of the old city ramparts, and I made love to yesterday's utterly beautiful sun. Back home, a bit tired, I took three or four cups of tea, and then lay down, but had no chance to sleep. I have chatted with [my brother's] teacher until evening, and he was fondly advising me not to get up so early any more, because the air of this season and sky is most fatal, so much so as he believes I have spent my hours in walking and philosophizing. Thus from story to story night came, and that Chaldean face did so many crazy things, and said such strange ones, that I laughed to split my sides. … It was months since I had had such a laugh, unless you except the story of the Church with which my Scimiotta (Monkey pet) made me laugh while I ate panettone (Milanese Xmas cake). Then supper time came … or rather, I made it come around seven; my little family had already supped. Therefore I got up to take a stroll; but who knows how, at nine or shortly before I found myself in bed, at ten I was asleep; I woke up this morning after six; I had my servant (mine and not mine) light the fire, where I am now writing you and sipping a piping hot tea; and may the Lord God bless you. …

That is the breezy finale of the first letter, a true hymn to joy, while the second letter, after the “pictorial” beginning, harps on possible rivals or disturbers of the amatory peace in comically violent, self-parodying terms, only to subjoin that “Werther and Jacopo Ortis are the two only real honest men on earth,” for the others are despicable “courtly polished rabble” who “play satellite to your planet [meaning obviously Antonietta]” and “talk very badly of anybody, who do no good because they have no virtue, and do no evil because they do not have courage.” “Yet,” Foscolo goes on, “Werther and Ortis, despite their heart, talent and honesty, are not preferred to certain wretches who act as pimps to women in order to satisfy their lust, and sell their honor to men in order to foster their vices. Hooray! As for me, I'd say goodby to all society and all belles if I had to be soiled by such wretches.—I am obviously on a preaching stunt. Never mind: when on earth shall I come to stay with you? You are wrong if you think letters are enough for me. …”

Whichever way we approach it, the pulsing knot of life and literature, image and passion, reading, living and writing, appears harder and harder to disentangle: their interplay is so complex. On the one hand, these letters give us as nearly unreflected an experience as was possible for such a cultivated writer as Foscolo to have. They actually show the urgency of all but instant communication rather than the niceties of elaborate composition, and we may regard them in part as “sources” for the novel that was still in progress during the first year of Foscolo's love affair with Countess Arese. On the other hand, the letters cannot help being literary prose of a frequently high order; their addressee was a most provocative Muse, the same who, in that very period, elicited from her exuberant worshiper the Ode all'amica risanata (Ode to His Lady on Her Recovery)—one of Foscolo's enduring lyrics, a memorable celebration of feminine beauty and capriciousness. And nothing of what he wrote her, be it ever so intimate and circumstantial, could fail to respond in style to that thoroughly enjoyed yet repeatedly elusive Aphrodite.

Moreover, the letters as such, and what they reveal of the liaison that prompted them, bask in the reflected light of the novel in progress—Jacopo Ortis' Last Letters—as well as of Werther. Werther, we saw, had hovered on the creative horizon of Ortis in its 1798 inception (Letter xlv of the 1799 edition has a direct reference to Goethe's book along with others, Clarissa included), but it re-entered Foscolo's creative orbit even more forcefully when, having resumed work on his own interrupted book, he could have Antonietta Arese as officiating mediator between the German text and his literary consciousness. Life mirrored literature and the nexus between Foscolo's own work and that of an inspiring literary model, just as much as literature fed on his turbulent life.

The resulting constellation of interacting forces is emblematized by him in that letter which contains directives for the prospective painter of Antonietta's portrait. That letter is life directly experienced—and at the same time, literature. It utters an intimate message and grasps a living image; the image in turn, statically conceived as a tableau à la Gainsborough, and abounding in color as Foscolo's poems rarely are (but then note how the Ode to his Lady on her Recovery antithetically seizes her image as pure motion), fixes the important elements of Foscolo's creative life in that feverish phase: with Antonietta as presiding Muse, holding the key to his communion with Nature in the background and congenial literature (Goethe) in the foreground. She is actually projected as part of Nature herself, a privileged, culminating part, to be sure, the crown of creation. In the mentioned farewell letter to Isabella Roncioni, as well as in the corresponding first redaction of Ortis' letter to Teresa at the end of the novel's 1798 draft, the request of a souvenir portrait entails no such painterly and emblematic elements as this paramount real life missive to Antonietta does.

Needless to say, the portrait motif, which at its best embodies the endeavor to rescue a significant image, figure or situation from the erosion of time, was to be found also in Werther, and will be found in Mme. De Staël's Corinne (known to Foscolo) as well as, decades later, in a novel related to Corinne: Melville's Pierre. What Foscolo does with it in his epistolary exchange with Countess Arese finds little counterpart in Jacopo Ortis (where Teresa herself, the chaste, sad, unpossessible sweetheart, is the painter), and places these letters as a whole much above the level of mere source material or side illustration for the novel's composition. I will return to this question eventually; at the moment what matters is the work of narrative art which Aphrodite Antonietta helped to elicit. Its “intertextual” or analogical relationship to Goethe's exemplary novel never ceased busying Foscolo's critical awareness, as we can see from the detailed comparison he draws between Ortis and Werther in the 1817 Notizia Bibliografica,¹¹ a disguised self-descriptive account he published on the occasion of his novel's definitive London edition.

Thematic analogy is no consequence of servile imitation on Foscolo's part, but rather a deliberate choice springing from a recognition of affinity. The affinity extended to the existential predicament and real life cues; the epistolary form and the theme of suicide as catastrophe seemed viable enough,¹² instead of preemptive, to the eager Italian writer who needed models to emulate, whether classical or modern, in his urge to shape the inner turmoil of a restless, adventurous life into the kind of incisive formulation that would make a difference in Italian literature, indeed shake it from Arcadian complacency. Foscolo's own Arcadian phase, which accounted for the repudiated youthful lyrics (their Ossianic dark shudders notwithstanding), was already overcome by his forceful if rhetorically Alfierian tragedy, Thyestes, of 1796 (a great success on the Venetian stage). In a sense, Thyestes' liberty-minded suicide foreshadows Jacopo Ortis', who significantly quotes Dante's purgatorial episode of Cato:¹³ “libertà va cercando, ch'è sì cara / come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta (He is seeking liberty, which is so precious, / as those well know who for its sake repudiate life). Both gestures symbolically purge an existential despair at the stagnation Foscolo sensed all around him, but by the same token enact a preliminary to rebirth.

Here it pays to observe the preponderance of the political element as description, discussion and motivation, in Ortis' Part i—an element which sharply differentiates Foscolo's novel from its great German model even though it does not lead to a successfully unified poetical treatment of the largely autobiographical character. Libertarian political passion entered neither Werther's compass nor that of its immediate artistic predecessor, La Nouvelle Héloïse, as a motivating element; it came into Ortis from revered Alfieri's example and it was no matter of mere literary infatuation. Indeed one of the reasons why Werther is the greater work of art is the avoidance of political passion as such, regardless of the noteworthy admixture of social critique into what is after all a subversive Sturm-und-Drang novel rather than just a pathetic bourgeois idyll.¹⁴ Instead of impoverishing Goethe's book, that basic lack of a political protest—due no doubt to the chronology of Werther (1774) which, unlike Ortis (1798, 1802), antedates both the American and the French Revolution—makes for better focus, more sustained narrative development, and richer treatment of the dominant love motif within the chosen narrower compass.

One follows with growing interest the peripeteia of Werther from the joyous effusions of his first contacts with the idyllic world of Waldheim—which afford him a refreshing communion with living Nature no less than with her well attuned human denizens—to the blossoming of his love for Lotte, which, instead of fulfilling the initial auspices of natural and human harmony, gradually turns into a growth of destructive alienation, a ripening to death.¹⁵ The expansion of consciousness at first makes Werther say Yes to the world—it happens to be an Edenic world—and gives that world a chance to live in his consciousness, from its cosmic perspective of forest, field, valley, river, mountain, and sky down to the minimal creatures and events which alert his perception to the verge of ecstasy. In keeping with the intrinsic freedom of the letter form, style in such moments effortlessly heightens into rhythmical prose, sustained by waves of musical anaphora:

… Wenn das liebe Tal um mich dampft, und die hohe Sonne an der Oberfläche der undurchdringlichen Finsternis meines Waldes ruht, und nur einzelne Strahlen sich in das innere Heiligtum stehlen, ich dann im hohem Grase am fallendem Bache liege, und näher an der Erde tausend mannigfaltige Gräschen mir merkwürdig werden; wenn ich das Wimmeln der kleinen Welt zwischen Halmen, die unzähligen, unergründlichen Gestalten der Würmchen, der Mückchen, näher an meinem Herzen fühle, und fühle die Gegenwart des Allmächtigen, der uns nach seinem Bilde schuf, das Wehen des Alliebenden, der uns in ewiger Wonne schwebend trägt und erhält; mein Freund! wenn's dann um meine Augen dämmert, und die Welt um mich her und der Himmel ganz in meiner Seele ruhn wie die Gestalt einer Geliebten—dann sehne ich mich oft und denke: Ach könntest du das wieder ausdrücken, könntest du dem Papiere das einhauschen, was so voll, so warm in dir lebt, dass es würde der Spiegel deiner Seele, wie deine Seele ist der Spiegel des unendlichen Gottes!—Mein Freund—Aber ich gehe darüber zugrunde, ich erliege unter der Gewalt der Herrlichkeit dieser Erscheinungen.¹⁶

… When the lovely valley steams around me, and the high sun rests on the surface of my wood's impenetrable darkness, and only single rays sneak into the inner sanctum, and I then lie down in the high grass near the brook's falls, and closer to earth a thousand small herbs become perceptible to me; when I feel the teeming of the little world between grass stalks, the numberless, unfathomable shapes of the mites, of the midges closer to my heart, and feel the presence of the Almighty, who made us in his image, the blowing wind of the All-loving, who carries and sustains us in perennial delight; o my friend! when then twilight gathers around my eyes, and the world about me and the sky wholly rest in my soul like the figure of a beloved woman—then do I often sigh and think: O could you only express all this again, could you infuse onto the paper what in you lives so fully, so warmly, so that it would become the mirror of your soul as your soul is the mirror of infinite God!—o my friend—But I founder on that, I succumb to the sovereign power of these phenomena.

Whispering or rich spirant alliterations conspire with the cadence created by the insistent end-verbs sealing clause after clause to create a syntactical crescendo effect. The specific resources of the German language generate a chiasmic design to make live microcosm and God-pervaded microcosm hinge on the sentient “I” of the writer persona through the pivotal verb fühle (I feel), while the persona's soul (“deine Seele”) becomes a central mediator between the inspired writing which should mirror it on paper and the inspiring Godhead of whom it in turn is the mirror. The pulsing prose achieves a unique intensity, and critics¹⁷ have accordingly noted the affinity between such lyrical effusions in Werther and the coeval Sturm und Drang hymns (especially Ganymed) freely uttering the ecstatic transport of a lay religiousness disentangled from any church.

But our main concern now is to realize how motifs spontaneously coming up so early in the story become clues to later developments of structural and thematic import, for Goethe is nothing if not a profoundly organic writer. For instance, when world and sky, an all-encompassing reality (one could almost say a cosmic womb), are internalized by the speaker persona as “the figure of a beloved woman,” the simile prophesies Werther's falling in hopeless love with Lotte, in whom all the God-suffused beauty of living nature will come to a focus for him. She will be the emotional and aesthetic epitome of the All, and her hold on him (as inner image) will be unshakable. He cannot have her in the circumstances of a relative human world to which she is committed, but since she is by then his absolute, and he wants nothing less than an absolute, he will then have to kill himself—thereby attaining a negative absolute, death, a love death consecrated to her. Erich Trunz, who has appended an insightful commentary to his critical edition of the novel, aptly says that this love death for Werther is an “Entgrenzung,” a liberation from the constraining finite—an inverted fulfillment of sorts, I would add, foreshadowing many a Liebestod in German literature and music, but differing to some extent from the more extremely nihilist implications of Jacopo Ortis' suicide.

The death-wish looming in Werther's lovesick mind when he realizes that Lotte cannot be his other than in friendship—because she marries and loyally loves her sensible, thoughtful Albert—prompts a recurrence of scene and rhythm in the August 18 letter to friend Wilhelm, in which it is inevitable to overhear the direct echo of the May 10 letter in mournful key. At the outset we have once again the surging syntax scanned by the heightening repetition of temporal clauses introduced by Wenn, and the energizing view of the living world in panoramic as well as in microscopic scale. The awareness of creative natural forces underneath, a joyful dynamism, is retrospectively colored by sadness at the loss of such communion—for now “a curtain has been pulled open before my soul, and the spectacle of endless life changes under my eyes into the abyss of the eternally yawning grave …”; Nature the tireless creative force becomes Nature the voracious destroyer:

Himmel und Erde und ihre webenden Kräfte um mich her: ich sehe nichts als ein ewig verschlingendes, ewig wiederkäuendes Ungeheuer.¹⁸

Sky and Earth and their busy forces all around me: I see nothing but an eternally devouring, eternally ruminating monster.

The vision of a sustaining Nature invested by divine afflatus and benevolence, which ecstatically climaxed the May 10 letter on a note of defeat before the inexpressible, has made way for the infernal revelation of the irrational dark powers that underlie the deceptive grace and majesty of visible phenomena—a transmogrification already hinting at Schopenhauer's and Melville's Weltanschauung, and, before them, at Foscolo's own, in Jacopo Ortis.

Goethe will overcome the impasse in the integrative vision of Faust, whose Erdgeist (Spirit of the Earth) demonically unites in himself the destructive and the creative powers that here in polarized separation haunt Werther's doomed mind. Within the scope of this novel, let us go on to observe how the rhythmical scansion and darkening tone of this August 18 letter forecast the funereal Ossian passages which Werther will read to Lotte (in Goethe's own translation) toward the end, to express his own lugubrious passion and finally snatch a kiss before the final catastrophe. In Werther's own confession, the conversion to a sinister view of reality, and to a deathbound approach, is marked by the fact that Ossian supersedes Homer in his literary taste. Homer had presided, along with the Bible, over the earlier scenes of an idyllic world amounting to an objective, warm reality, while sunny Homer's disappearance from the horizon heralds the advent of a night of the soul under the sign of Ossian: the night of the self-involved, tendentially wordless and therefore self-destructive subjectivity.

Thus the literary references conspire with the development of imagery and style to articulate the theme, and there is a perfect convergence in this case when hymn is eventually metamorphosed into dirge. Rhythm and tone of Goethe's Ossian well suit the fateful occasion—Werther's kiss and his decision to die—while clearly recalling, in the changed key, Werther's early effusions of May 10 and his transition from ecstatic contemplation of the living universe to the horror of its demoniac destructiveness in the August 18 letter. A musical permutation occurs from the very start:¹⁹

Stern der dämmernden Nacht, schön funkelst du im Westen, hebst dein strahlend Haupt aus deiner Wolke, wandelst stattlich deinen Hügel hin. Wornach blickst du auf die Heide? Die stürmenden Winde haben sich gelegt; von ferne kommt des Giessbachs Murmeln; rauschende Wellen spielen am Felsen ferne; das Gesumme der Abendfliegen schwärmet übers Feld. Wornach siehst du, schönes Licht? Aber du lächelst und gehst, freudig umgeben dich die Wellen und baden dein liebliches Haar. Lebe wohl, ruhiger Strahl. Erscheine, du herrliches Licht von Ossians Seele!

Und es erscheint in seiner Kraft. Ich sehe meine geschiedenen Freunde, sie sammeln sich auf Lora, …

Star of descending night! fair is thy light in the west! thou liftest thy unshorn head from thy cloud; thy steps are stately on thy hill. What dost thou behold in the plain? The stormy winds are laid. The murmur of the torrent comes from afar. Roaring waves climb the distant rock. The flies of evening are on their feeble wings; the hum of their course is on the field. What dost thou behold, fair light? But thou dost smile and depart. Thy waves come with joy around thee: they bathe thy lovely hair. Farewell, thou silent beam. Let the light of Ossian's soul arise!

And it does arise in its strength! I behold my departed friends. Their gathering is on Lora, …

Now that the infectious vogue of Ossian is a matter of literary archaeology, we might well feel that this episode, with the emphasis it receives from the extended quotation (over six pages), from the climactic placement and function, and Lotte's tearful response, dates Werther beyond salvage—were it not that the structural reasons I just mentioned concur with deft handling and seminal value of theme to make us reconsider.

It is Werther, not Goethe, who succumbs to literature, just as in Inf. v it is Paolo and Francesca, not Dante, who succumb to (meretricious) literature; just as, later on in European writing, it will be “Tristan,” not Thomas Mann, who succumbs to literary and musical seduction, and again Aschenbach, not Thomas Mann, who lets literature strengthen the call of homoerotic love to death. Werther, the overly sensitive mind, the potential creator, is dominated by Ossian; Goethe dominates Ossian by incorporating the dirge in his own language and fictional context. Incidentally, I tend to agree with Roy Pascal, who sees in Werther certain problems of the creative spirit who is made vulnerable by his very creativity, rather than with Erich Trunz, who sees him merely as the artist manqué because he fails to commit himself to the initially cultivated art of painting.

Werther is not just the man of feeling, this side of reason and of objective creativity; he is a spontaneous artist in his letters and an intentional one in what is fictionally purported to be his translation from Ossian (Goethe being, of course, the actual translator). That solemn, tearful scene, then, though it may grate on a modern reader's taste, must be seen also as Werther's swansong as an artist—the limited artist he can be. One touch of parody, and we would have Thomas Mann's Tristan instead of Goethe's terribly serious Werther. Make friend Wilhelm, the dutiful reporting voice, a bit more detached; make him sarcastic, and he would play Mephistopheles to the budding Faust that Werther is. But Faust is involved in open experience, not in absolutist love-death. Analogously, the need to pursue his radical theme to the bitter end prevented Foscolo from augmenting his dosage of Sternian ingredients in Ortis to the point where humor, the Didymean antidote, would have stopped poor Jacopo from taking that last destructive step. It was in the nature of the theme that these Sturm-und-Drang heroes should be taken seriously by their authors and, above all, by themselves. If these novels date in some regards, then after all greater works of literature tend to date: Othello's jealousy, Achilles' wrath, Hamlet's perplexity, Lear's and Goriot's paternal folly, Emma Bovary's dreamy yearning, need our cooperation to be taken as seriously as they are supposed to be; we need only remember that a reader of Robert Graves' sophistication has seen the Iliad as intentional satire.

The obvious lack of parody in Goethe's presentation of his hero in Werther (the novel as such is not devoid of humorous touches, at least in Part i) does not imply lack of criticism; the writer lets him follow his path to self-destruction, and that is an implicit criticism, not an invitation to imitate Werther's example, as some readers actually did. The latter grotesquely brought the work of art back to one occasional source in real life—the suicide of Mr. Jerusalem, whose yellow waistcoat and blue jacket were also donned by Werther and became as famous for decades as Gautier's red waistcoat was to be somewhat later, for different reasons. The inner logic that brings Werther to suicide is sustained by many an artful touch in the handling of narrative incident, dialogue, imagery, and word-play, as we already saw in part when touching on the organic growth of the overall theme. We saw that Werther's initial opening to a new life gradually becomes a ripening for death, and he himself characterizes the process when he says toward the end, in the December 10 letter: “It is necessary that nothing should be harvested before it is ripe,”²⁰ though he says it in a seemingly casual way. The curve of his “ripening” develops against the background of the seasonal cycle: the joyful first letters are penned in spring, and the suicide is consummated in December of the following year; the handsome old walnuts he so much cherished in the parsonage (letter of July 1st, Part i) are eventually chopped down (letter of Sept. 15, Part ii), and it is an intimation of waste and death. When Werther says to Wilhelm “Mir wäre besser, ich ginge” (It is better for me to go),²¹ he is punning in a macabre way. When Werther says to Lotte, at the end of Part i, “We shall see each other again,”²² that auspicious expression carries a funereal overtone to be borne out later by his last passionate message to her: “We shall be! We shall see each other again!”²³—for here he specifies that he dies for her and he feels sure that he will be reunited to her in death, or in another world. When it is autumn around him in Nature, it is autumn in his soul,²⁴ and winter cannot be far behind. Shortly later (November 30) he meets the deranged youth who seeks flowers in winter and finds none.²⁵ Intimations of world repudiation and suicide have cropped up almost from the start, and they have counterpointed even the early happy messages, for Werther feels like a prisoner in a world that has no use for his higher forces, which he thinks must remain unused and disguised, to rot away; only with his deceased lady friend (letter of May 17, first year) could he be wholly himself and rise above the level of mere social pleasantry and heartiness. His (largely unachieved) potential is what sets him apart and condemns him to suicide since he cannot fully express it; here we have the theme of the artist's alienation from bourgeois society, long before Flaubert, Mann, and Joyce.

In such a carefully orchestrated development, the cues and inner echoes never sound contrived. Such is the case with the motif of the pistols, which Werther asks of Albert once in the early phase (occasioning a heated discussion of the ethical merits of suicide) and then again later, to use them for killing himself. The same goes for the episodes which could be mistaken for accessory, and work instead as figures (or counter-figures) of Werther's own destiny, since it is strictly through his perception that we are exposed to them: the young handyman who kills his lady out of jealousy, and the young madman at large in the fields. In both cases Werther recognizes alternative destinies to his own, choices he must discard: killing Albert, who stands legally and emotionally between Lotte and himself, and yielding to the seduction of gentle madness. The episodic characters thus introduced are artistically realized in their own right, thanks to the dramatic and epic gift Goethe shares with his beloved Shakespeare; otherwise they could not convincingly perform their structural function of thematic reinforcement through mirroring and enrichment. In retrospect, even the masterly and ostensibly joyous scene of the dance in Part i, when Werther first gets to know Lotte (in a quite casual way), takes on ominous implications, not just because of the storm that breaks out (it's very un-Virgilian meteorology after all), but on account of its breathless crescendo; Werther and Lotte whirl around as if caught in a storm of their own, from which Lotte can escape, and Werther cannot. And all the time, needless to say, the symbolic dimension makes itself felt as a natural projection of the straight narrative. The dance scene is first and foremost a lovely verbal picture of social behavior, which advances the plot while adding to the character portrayal of both Werther and Lotte.

No one, in short, can read Werther today as mere sentimental effusion, of mainly historical interest. It is too subtly organized—and formally organic—for that. The vegetal imagery conspires with the year-cycle framework to give it a firm warp and woof. And, in this context, Werther's self-portrayal achieves a dramatic climax in the Christological references of November 15, 21, and 30,²⁶ which find a most striking echo in his farewell letter to Lotte²⁷ penned just before his suicide, between eleven and twelve p.m.:

Hier, Lotte! Ich schaudre nicht, den kalten, schrecklichen Kelch zu fassen, aus dem ich den Taumel des Todes trinken soll! Du reichtest mir ihn, und ich zage nicht. All! All! So sind alle die Wünsche und Hoffnungen meines Lebens erfüllt!

Here, Lotte! I am not shuddering at grasping the cold, fearsome cup from which I must drink the tumult of death! You are offering it to me, and I do not tremble. All! All! Thus are fulfilled all the desires and hopes of my life!

The chalice motif had come up, as a forceful existential protest, in the November 15 letter:²⁸

Was ist es anders als Menschenschicksal, sein Mass auszuleiden, seinen Becher auszutrinken?—Und ward der Kelch dem Gott vom Himmel auf seinem Menschenlippe zu bitter, warum soll ich grosstun und mich stellen, als schmeckte er mir süss?

Is it anything but human destiny to fill one's measure of suffering, to empty one's cup?—And if the cup (chalice) tasted too bitter to the Heaven-sent God on his human lips, why should I act grandly and pretend it tastes sweet to me?

His religious feeling, wholly heretical, can only express itself in “a whole litany of antitheses”;²⁹ and in fact, in the Nov. 21 letter, it is Lotte who gives him the cup “full of poison” from which he drinks his destruction.³⁰ Place this alongside the Nov. 15 reference in the immediately preceding letter, and the final Dec. 13 letter to Lotte quoted above, and you will have a rendingly dissonant chord: one Gospel image through its dizzy variations gives the graph of Werther's abysmal swaying “zwischen Sein und Nichtsein,”³¹ so that the Hamletic despair can find its fearful release in the Golgotha cry:

Mein Gott! mein Gott! warum hast du mich verlassen?

My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?

Werther can identify with Christ in his non-Christian way because he has his own Olive Garden and his Calvary; the language of prayer becomes one and the same thing with the language of protest and despair; it is as if the individual could come to know himself only in utter repudiation and abandon, in the curse of individuality. Werther can identify with Christ because he—like Christ—wants to go back to the Father; but he does not know this Father, this arch, inscrutable Protestant God:

Vater, den ich nicht kenne! Vater, der sonst meine ganze Seele Füllte und nun sein Angesicht von mir gewendet hat, rufe mich zu dir! Schweige nicht lange! Dein Schweigen wird diese dürstende Seele nicht aufhalten—Und würde ein Mensch, ein Vater, zürnen können, dem sein unvermutet rückkehrender Sohn um den Hals fiele und riefe: “Ich bin wieder da, mein Vater! Zürne nicht, dass ich die Wanderschaft abbreche, die ich nach deinem Willen länger aushalten sollte. Die Welt ist überall einerlei, auf Mühe und Arbeit Lohn und Freude; aber was soll mir das? mir ist nur wohl, wo du bist, und vor deinem Angesichte will ich leiden und geniessen.”—Und du, lieber himmlishcher Vater, solltest ihn von dir weisen?³²

Father, whom I do not know! Father, who once filled my whole soul and now has turned his face away from me, call me to you! Be silent no more! Your silence will not stop this thirsty soul—And could a man, a father, indeed be angry when his unexpectedly returning son threw his arms around his neck and called out: “Here I am again, father! Do not be angry if I cut short the wandering that according to your will I should have borne longer. The world is the same all over, for toil and work, wages and joy; but what matters that to me? I am well only where you are, and in your presence only will I suffer and rejoice.”—And you, dear heavenly Father, you should cast him away?

The suicide is a prodigal son presumptive, and in competition with Christ rather than in imitation of him, so that Werther can appropriate His last cry of anguish without falling back on the established religion—and yet the whole book vibrates with religious feeling, of such a personal nature that we have no trouble recognizing here a forerunner of the existentialist attitude instigated by modern man's loss of the reassuring old creeds.

It is this religious feeling that powers the recurrent wave-like rhythms of Werther as they move from the hymnic to the elegiac tone and back again to a hymn in the teeth of despair: Werther's final letter to Lotte, who turns out to be his true godhead and will presumably answer the desolate question that God the Father, unknown and absent, has left unanswered. The crowning of this strong drive toward a feminine godhead will be seen in Faust, whose Part ii ends with the glorification of redeeming-redeemed Gretchen in the sight of Mary, both translated into “das Ewig Weibliche.” Here in Werther's final sequences, it is significant that twice, when an impassioned appeal to the absent God takes shape, that father figure is superseded by Lotte in a comparably exalted capacity. Her deification springs from the absolutist claim of an unfulfilled Eros, for whom the all becomes nothing without her, and she—visually epitomized in her black eyes—invades the all:

Wie mich die Gestalt verfolgt! Wachend und träumend füllt sie meine ganze Seele! Hier, wenn ich die Augen schliesse, hier in meiner Stirne, wo die innere Sehkraft sich vereinigt, stehen ihre schwarzen Augen. Hier! ich kann dir es nicht ausdrücken. Mache ich meine Augen zu, so sind sie da; wie ein Meer, wie ein Abgrund ruhen sie vor mir, in mir, füllen die Sinne meiner Stirn. …³³

How her form pursues me! In waking or in dreaming she fills my whole soul! Here, when I close my eyes, here in my forehead, where the inner power of vision unites, stand her black eyes. Here! I cannot express it for you. If I close my eyes, there hers are; as a sea, as an abyss they rest before me, in me, and fill the senses of my forehead. …

Just as Laura obsesses Petrarch, Lotte obsesses Werther, and there is a touch of the demonic as well as of the divine in the surreal visionary climax reported here; in Werther's subjective world she supersedes God the Father, that God who used to “fill” him while she is the only fullness he now knows. The ambiguities of erotic-religious experience are conveyed with rare force by the web of recurrent-developing imagery allied to the surging rhythms of a prose which repeatedly aspires to the condition of music. Although Werther declares himself unable to render this deep experience in adequate words, he manages to do it so well that his expression projects for us a tangible, dynamic infinity, the divine-demonic essence of Lotte, goddess of love and death, nocturnal, unseizable and inescapable, funereal and splendid. This “Entgrenzung”³⁴ of Lotte—a prefiguring of Werther's own submersion in death—has little to do with the plain, reasonable, if sensitive, and practical Lotte of real life, and the discrepancy is underlined by Goethe himself by way of juxtaposition, as we see by comparing this letter with the previous one featuring Lotte's own innocently solicitous words to her friend. It all bears out the intrinsic critique Goethe implants in the self-description of his tragic hero. It is as if he resumed, to bring it to a head, the troubadour tradition of doomed love, from Cavalcanti to Petrarch, while looking forward to a different solution, as his later fiction was to attest. Werther's extreme subjectivism is its own doom; the later Goethe will have left this crucial phase behind, just as the mature Dante was to leave behind his Cavalcantian phase of death-ridden, subjectivized love. Love in the Western world, certainly in the literary one, had had a long heterodox tradition, as Denis de Rougemont pointed out;³⁵ and through whatever modifications it has led, chiefly with Goethe but also Rousseau before and Foscolo after him, to the confessional strain of modern writing.

The very passionate intensity Goethe injected into the confessions of his own enfant du siècle testifies to the closeness of creature to creator in this model case, where bringing forth the fictional child was also an act of necessary repudiation, and the repudiation, a saving exorcism. Werther secretly haunted Goethe, and only in his old age, when writing the Trilogy of Passion, could the poet bring himself to welcome back the prodigal son of his own stormy youth. Likewise Ugo Foscolo, for whom the writing of Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis amounted to a cathartic endeavor, spent the rest of his literary life neutralizing that confessional character, Jacopo Ortis, whose self-destructive bent paradoxically supplied him with the quick of creativeness, and called forth the ironic Didymus, an anti-self terribly needed in the saving dialectic of imagination. There was so much to kill in the domain of his turbulent self, and so much to revive, that only by this symbolic sacrifice could Ugo Foscolo liberate himself for the exceptional task awaiting him. Out of this total negation the difficult limited affirmations historical flesh is heir to could arise. The initial claim to an unqualified fulfillment, to an emotional infinite, would thus make the limited fulfillments possible, for both writers. Ortis is not born as a mere literary imitation of Werther; at any rate it takes courage to snatch the club from the hands of Hercules, and Foscolo was the first to acknowledge his debt to the formidable German model, which helped him to channel and release his creative powers instead of stifling them—as might have happened to a less vigorous talent.

Foscolo was also the first to analyze in detail the similarity along with the telling differences between Ortis and Werther, in his bibliographical notice appended to the 1817 London edition of the novel that had suddenly made him famous almost a score of years before. The comparison is as penetrating and straightforward as we could expect from a man of his temper, who had not hesitated to enter a direct confrontation with Goethe's early masterpiece when the circumstances of his own life had impelled him to voice his “heroic furies” through the mask of Jacopo Ortis and thereby control them. The analogy of conception and vehicle acted as a stimulant on Foscolo's inventive talent, which found repeated incentive in extant literature (whether as translator-critic or conscious imitator) for the expressive release of his tumultuous experience. He is as literary as a writer can afford to be precisely because he is as personal as one could ever be; he needed molds to contain and shape that lava. In this again he resembles Ezra Pound, and certainly his impact on the Italian literary scene was revolutionary, and far from short-lived. But if he looms larger on the Italian horizon, he demands to be placed in a European perspective too, if only because of the enduring enrichment he had brought to poetry and of the tireless experimentation that marked his intense career—an experimentation we are in a better position to evaluate after Ezra Pound.

Ortis, as its author indicates, differs from Werther not just because the political element plays such a large part in it that it precedes and almost forestalls unhappy love as the motivation of suicide, but also because it is a story contained within a narrower compass of development, and jerkier in narrative treatment. In Werther we follow the organic development of the hero's attitude from joyful expansiveness to brooding despair through a tragic peripeteia of sorts, though the seeds of alienation were there to begin with; in Ortis instead, the chips are down from the start, for the axe has fallen on the protagonist's hopes for a better or simply viable world:

Il sacrificio della patria è consumato.

The sacrifice of our fatherland is consummated.

That opening clause of the novel (which refers to Napoleon's ruthless bartering of Venice's freedom in 1797 for the political advantages a settlement with Austria would afford) already hints at the final sacrifice which Jacopo will consummate in his own person when even the love of Teresa will be denied him, and he will see no reason to cling to an uprooted life. Thus, properly speaking, in Ortis we have no dramatic development because we have no reversal of situation and attitude, no peripeteia to say it in Aristotelian terms; it is a more static novel than its German counterpart, and Jacopo Ortis' “tragic monologue,” as Angelo Jacomuzzi has aptly called it,³⁶ is already an epilogue, a predetermined catastrophe which the episode of Teresa can only temporarily delay; one could graphically abstract it as a descending curve with a rebounding tract in the midst, or, in more concrete terms, one could describe it as a positive reversal manqué.

The painful realization of defeat for his liberal ideals, supported by objective description and philosophizing interludes, passes into the reawakening of hope when Teresa appears, but the ecstatic moment makes way for another disappointment and then nothing is left but suicide—a gesture compounded of Plutarchian as well as Wertherian aspects, but still significant as a radical challenge to a world which has no providential God to illuminate it and no human justice to sustain it either. In this sense, Ortis in the literary sphere amounts to a more extreme act of contestation than its poetically richer and more coherent model. Cheated in his revolutionary hopes (a terrible thing for an aspiring young man who has seen the initial promise of the French Revolution, that revolution to which Goethe's Werther and the whole Sturm und Drang movement were only tentatively pointing), robbed of a country he loved, and forced to renounce the one thing which might have reconciled him to this existence—a great love, itself frustrated by the political circumstances—Jacopo Ortis flings his body in bloody protest at the world, and at God himself if such an entity be conceivable anymore.

Werther's ultimate sacrifice is preceded by prayer, heretical of course, but sublime; Ortis argues with God or “God” only to blaspheme, blasphemy being his only way to acknowledge a possible godhead. This reflects the overall physiognomy of each novel, Werther's being clearly more focused and narratively modulated, with the consequence that its Pietist inspiration ultimately reabsorbs the concurrent Sturm-und-Drang ideology, with which it seemed bound to clash. Pietism transforms protest into prayer and violence itself into a strange gentleness, while Ortis seesaws between gentleness and violence for the same reason that its Christian and biblical component conflicts with its Jacobin, materialist, ultimately Hobbesian³⁷ ideology without ever bringing such tense polarity to a resolution. As happens with so many disaffected Catholics, blasphemy, that verbal violence, becomes a negative verification of God's presence, or a stratagem to summon him back from an unendurable absence. Werther never accuses his “unknown Father,” he actually makes his suicide a sacrificial offering in which the person of the priest and the person of the victim are one, and God the Father and God the Mother—in Lotte—are also one. His self-removal from the world of flesh and blood is a way of seeking God beyond the established creeds. Ortis instead quarrels with God because he cannot find Him, and the contradiction between the letters in which he invokes or praises God, and those which describe his desolate, infernal view of nature and history as a product of blind forces, is nearly schizoid; it actually pulls his mind apart at the seams and goes a long way toward justifying his suicide.

The later work of Foscolo will show no such destructive tension between the ancestral creed and the stark image of reality that modern science has begun to formulate; Foscolo will accept the latter and stoically build on it what can be called a newfangled humanism deprived of any metaphysical guarantees. Thus I Sepolcri, thus Le Grazie, works where characteristically we find no reference to a Christian God, and therefore no blasphemy; the Greek gods that populate these poems are cherished fictions, cultural data, ciphers of man-made values. Thus the storm of Ortis was cathartic to Foscolo in a different way than Werther proved cathartic to Goethe, for the German poet evolved a kind of humanism steeped in an immanent spiritualism (and the end of Faust ii actually comes pretty close to a neo-Catholic mythology), while Foscolo made a pretty radical choice between his received transcendent faith and the bare world-view conveyed by Enlightenment philosophy. When Jacopo Ortis, toward the very end, in his letter to Teresa asks God to annihilate him, he is in effect annihilating God:

T'amai dunque t'amai, e t'amo ancor di un amore che non si può concepire che da me solo. E' poco prezzo, o mio angelo, la morte per chi ha potuto udir che tu l'ami, e sentirsi scorrere in tutta l'anima la voluttà del tuo bacio e piangere teco—io sto col piè nella fossa; eppure tu anche in questo frangente ritorni, come solevi, davanti a questi occhi che morendo si fissano in te, in te che sacra risplendi di tutta la tua bellezza. E fra poco! Tutto è apparecchiato: la notte è già troppo avanzata—addio—fra poco saremo disgiunti dal nulla, o dalla incomprensibile eternità. Nel nulla? Sì, sì; poiché sarò senza di te, io prego il sommo Iddio, se non ci riserba alcun luogo ov'io possa riunirmi teco per sempre, lo prego dalle viscere dell'anima mia, e in questa tremenda ora della morte, perché egli m'abbandoni soltanto nel nulla. Ma io moro incontaminato, e padrone di me stesso, e pieno di te, e certo del tuo pianto! Perdonami, Teresa, se mai—ah consolati, e vivi per la felicità de' nostri miseri genitori; la tua morte farebbe maledire le mie ceneri. …³⁸

I loved you then I loved you, and I still love you with a love that can only be conceived by myself. It is a small price, o my angel, to die when one has heard you say that you love him and felt his whole soul flooded by the delight of your kiss, and wept with you—I have one foot in the grave; yet you even now return, as you used to, before these eyes which dying come to rest on you, on you who sacred shine with all your beauty. And before long! All is prepared: the night wears on—goodbye—before long we shall be divided by nothingness, or by the incomprehensible eternity. In nothingness? Yes—Yes, yes; since I shall be without you, I pray almighty God, if He reserves no place where I can be reunited to you forever, I pray Him from my deepest soul, and in this dreadful hour of death, that He may only abandon me in nothingness. But I die untainted, and self-possessed, and full of you, and sure of your tears! Forgive me, Teresa, if ever—ah console yourself, and live for the happiness of our poor parents; your death would cause my ashes to be cursed. …

Consider the equivalence of “nothingness” and “incomprehensible eternity,” and the resolution of religion in nihilism; consider the idea that Jacopo and his beloved Teresa will be separated, instead of united, by death, and compare this tolling insistence on the word “nulla,” nothingness, with the quite different tone and tenor of Werther's final letter to Lotte, which rings with the certainty of reunion in the beyond, echoing triumphantly, in the funereal context, the earlier words “We shall be! We shall see each other again!” Jacopo's final words are an utter denial of the Beyond, and a protesting assertion of this world's values—the “incomprehensible eternity” is really nothing when compared to the fleeting plenitude of Jacopo's timebound consciousness in his last moments.

To ask God for annihilation is itself blasphemy, since God is traditionally, for a Christian mind, the creator and preserver of being; and blasphemy indeed had occurred earlier in the novel:³⁹

Midnight

I used to send my thanks to the Godhead, and my prayers, but I never feared it. Yet now that I feel the whole flagellation of misfortune I fear and beseech it.

My intellect is blinded, my soul is prostrate, my body is buffeted by death's languor.

It is true! the wretched need another world, different from this one where they eat a bitter bread, and drink water mingled with tears. The imagination creates that world, and the heart is consoled. Virtue, always unhappy down here, holds out by the hope of a reward—but woe to those who in order not to be rascals need religion!

I have knelt in a little church at Arquà, because I felt that God's hand weighed on my heart.

Am I perhaps weak, Lorenzo? May Heaven never let you feel the need for solitude, for tears, and for a church!

Two a.m.

The sky is stormy: the stars few and pale; and the moon half buried in the clouds beats at my windows with livid rays.

Dawn

Lorenzo, don't you hear? your friend is invoking you: what a sleep! a ray of daylight is glimmering and perhaps only to revive my pain in blood—God does not hear me. He actually condemns me at every minute to the agony of death; and He compels me to curse my days which are not stained by crime.

What? if you are a strong, intolerant, jealous God, who avenges the iniquities of the fathers on the sons, and who visits in his fury the third and the fourth generation, shall I hope to appease you? Send into me—but not into anyone else—your anger which kindles in hell the flames that shall burn millions and millions of peoples to whom you did not make yourself known.—But Teresa is innocent: and instead of deeming you cruel, she worships you with most sweet serenity. I do not worship you, because in fact I fear you—and I feel that I need you. Do, do strip yourself of the attributes in which men have clothed you to make you like themselves. Aren't you the Consoler of the Afflicted? And was not your Divine Son called the Son of Man? Hear me then. This heart feels you, but do not be offended at the moan Nature wrings from man's lacerated inside. And I murmur against you, and cry, and invoke you, hoping to free my soul—free it? but how, if it is not full of you? if it has not implored you in prosperity, and only runs to you for help, and asks for your arm's support now that it is downcast in misery? if it fears you, and has no hope in you? Neither does it hope or desire anything but Teresa: and I see you in her alone.

Here, o Lorenzo, here comes from my lips the crime for which God has withdrawn His look from me. I have never worshiped Him as I worship Teresa.—Blasphemy! The equal of God, she who at a mere gust will be bones and nothing? You see man humiliated. Shall I then put Teresa before God?—Ah! from her a beauty celestial and immense radiates, omnipotent beauty. I measure the universe with one glance; I contemplate eternity with astonished eyes; everything is chaos, everything fades, and sinks into nothingness; God becomes incomprehensible to me; and Teresa is always before me.

The emotional charge is unmistakable, and it affects everything Foscolo is appropriating from Werther—notably the motif of the unknown God, who no longer fills the soul of Jacopo because Teresa takes over and becomes his godhead; but, unlike Werther, Jacopo Ortis experiences an eclipse of God into chaos and nothingness, and no wonder, considering the shaken faith that the midnight entry voices with its ruthless critique of popular religion and its intellectual destruction of the idea of a Beyond in anthropological terms. Jacopo has a bitterer cup to empty than Werther (and the chalice motif likewise echoes in several passages of Ortis), his Gethsemane is more excruciating, because it will lead to nihilism or at least a totally irreligious stance, sharply contrasting with the very personal faith Werther is left with in his supreme moments.

As against the hymnal rhythm that surges from Werther's fictional pen in ample waves of liberated prose, Ortis' lines achieve a hammering and often staccato effect with their repeated questions and exclamations—just as the total narrative structure of Ortis tends to the staccato versus the legato shape of Werther. Even the lovely 2 a.m. entry, with its utter brevity and powerful synaesthetic image of the moon beating at the windows, contributed to syncopate the rhythmic form of a prose which is the portrait of a “lacerated inside,” of an intense, torn mind, caught between irreconcilable values and struggling to free itself from those it no longer finds viable even if it has a residual attachment to them, because they are part of its background. And this is where the persona Jacopo Ortis coincides with his creator Ugo Foscolo—never mind how carefully he tried to dissociate himself from the identity of his tormented creature in his public pronouncements on the novel, for instance this:

But would Ortis seem any longer the twenty-year old youth who feels his passions so strongly and quickly, to the point where he can never find a way to develop them? If instead of concentrating the excessive warmth of his style according to his way of feeling and conceiving, he had endeavored to expand it conformably to art's dictates, the readers would have seen the author in him instead of the man; …⁴⁰

The fact is, that in Ortis' case the persona is much closer to the author than in the case of Werther, both novels clearly having a strong confessional touch to begin with, the mark of ebullient adolescence weathered in imaginative minds that must come to terms with a crucial alternative to which their projected heroes succumb: All or Nothing. The sacrifice of Werther and Jacopo Ortis, consummated as it was on the white page, enabled their creators to survive.

Notes

1. The actual expression he quotes (or refers to) from their conversation in three of the letters he wrote her between 1801 and 1803 is “un romanzetto ambulante,” a little novel going around on two feet. The letters in question are respectively numbered 158, 210 (where he begins: “You are right, perhaps I am like this because my life is a continuous novel [un continuo romanzo] …”), and 273 in Vol. i of Foscolo's Epistolario, ed. by Plinio Carli (in Edizione Nazionale, Vol. xiv, Florence: Le Monnier, 1949). In that volume the letters to Antonietta, including two she wrote Foscolo to accompany her translation of Werther [Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, in Goethes werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, Band 6 (Romane und Novellen), herausgegeben von Erich Trunz. Hamburg: Christianwegner Verlag, 1963] and to request restitution of her correspondence, are printed together to emphasize their dramatic sequence.

2. Epistolario i, p. 410.

3. See Letter 283, p. 410 of Epistolario i, dated January 14, 1803. It is by Antonietta and it accompanies her completed translation of Werther. A much decried scurrilous phrase seals this not altogether unfriendly farewell.

4. Epistolario i, p. 129, No. 86. The relevant part of this letter reads as follows: “You will receive from Mr. Grassi the first small volume of a modest work of mine which your Werther perhaps originated … Countess Antonietta Aresi [sic], my eternal and only lady friend, translated Werther from its last edition into the style of Ortis: and this will be the only Italian version to be spared mutilation by the ignorance of translators or by the preposterousness of governments. …” Plinio Carli, the editor of Foscolo's letters for the Edizione Nazionale, appends very informative footnotes on scholarly discussions of this letter's authenticity and on historical and bibliographical references, including one to a book by F. Zschek, dated 1894, which discusses this letter in the framework of a comparison between Werther and Ortis. Since Foscolo elsewhere (Letter of Sept. 1808 to Bartholdy, and Bibliographical note prepared for the Zurich 1816 edition of Ortis) makes Werther much less influential on Ortis, and emphasizes the differences between the two books, most scholars came to agree that the 1802 letter to Goethe reflects an unguarded youthful enthusiasm. In 1973, however, Giorgio Manacorda has made a cogent case for F.'s acquaintance with Michiel Salom's Italian translation of Werther (publ. in 1788 and 1796); an earlier translation, by Gaetano Grassi, had appeared in 1782). Manacorda's book, Materialismo e masochismo—Il “Werther,” Foscolo e Leopardi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973), also spotlights the psychoanalytical implications of certain linguistic and thematic elements in Ortis, and the agreement with some of my own independent findings is remarkable.

5. The only reference to Werther in the rich exchange is to be found in Schiller's letter to Goethe of February 19, 1795 (p. 86 of Emil Staiger's edition: Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1966). And this is what is said: “[Körner] finds in W. Meister all the strength that was in Werther's Sorrows, but controlled by a virile spirit and purified into the quiet grace of an accomplished work of art.” The letters, we should keep in mind, reach well into the spring of 1805, and they touch upon every work of the two correspondents as well as on most exponents of the European culture of the time.

6. A detailed discussion of these adventurous circumstances surrounding the rise of Foscolo's romantic novel is to be found in Giovanni Gambarin's eighty-four-page Introduction to his critical edition of Ortis, Vol. iv of Edizione Nazionale, published in Florence in 1955 and including the 1798 edition, Sassoli's arbitrary Epilogue, and the definitive London edition of 1817 (with the variants and afterword of the 1816 Zurich edition). Apropos of the Sassoli “Epilogue” an epoch-making reassessment has come in 1970, and it cannot be ignored. Mario Martelli's article, “La parte del Sassoli,” in Studi di filologia italiana xxviii, pp. 177-251, uses painstaking linguistic and stylistic analysis to prove that Sassoli must have worked on F.'s own directions, for “the basic elements of F's compositional technique—juxtaposition of quotes, dismemberment of quotations, reuse of the greatest possible number of elements from the text quoted—are to be found … both in S.'s conclusion of Ortis and in F's other works.”

7. My references here will be to Gambarin's critical edition; but it should be kept in mind that the novel is also available in Opere di F. and as a separate book with foreword by Carlo Muscetta (Turin: Einaudi, 1973). Both follow the 1817 London edition. Franco Gavazzeni instead, in U. F., Opere, Tomo I (Naples: Ricciardi, 1974), includes the Milan edition of 1802. Two recent English translations of Ortis are by Douglas Radcliffe-Umstead (in the series North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures) and, respectively, by Dale McAdoo and Anthony Winner (included in the volume Great European Short Novels Vol. i, Ed. with Preface and Introduction by A. Winner. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. Pp. 253-390).

8. Edizione Nazionale, Vol. iv, p. 219.

9. Epistolario i, p. 363: Letter 249 (numbered xcvii in the Arese sequence). Translation mine.

10. Epistolario i, p. 365: Letter 250 (xcvii Arese sequence). Translation mine.

11. See Gambarin's critical edition of Ortis, pp. 477-541.

12. For the relevance of the suicide theme (and act) to the European Romantics in general (including Foscolo), see H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics—an essay in cultural history (New York: Ungar, 1966), p. 64, and Chapter vii, “The Lure of Nothingness,” pp. 58-65.

13. Dante, The Divine Comedy, Purg. i, 71-72. For an exemplary treatment of the Sturm und Drang movement as a whole, and of Werther's revolutionary implications, see Roy Pascal, Der Sturm und Drang (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1963). Originally published in English as The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953).

14. I refer to, and quote from, the following edition of Werther: Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, Band 6 (Romane und Novellen, ed. Erich Trunz. Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1963). In this volume Werther comes first, and the editor's exegetical, historical and bibliographical notes in the Appendix are excellent. They also refer to studies of Werther and Ortis. A distinguished and handy English language edition is: Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Novella, tr. by Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan, Foreword by W. H. Auden (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1973). Another fine translation is: Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther. The New Melusina Novelle, Introduction by Victor Lange, tr. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1949). In both editions, of course, Macpherson's “Ossian” text which Werther reads to Lotte in the climactic scene (In Goethe's own translation) is given in the original version, from which I shall also quote later on.

15. An intimation of the destructiveness to come can already be seen in the nearly morbid excitement with which Werther responds to the joyful messages of nature toward the end of the May 10 letter: “But I founder on that, I succumb to the sovereign power of these phenomena.”

16. Goethes Werke, Vol. 6, Werther, Part i, May 10 letter, p. 9. Translation mine.

17. See German Sturm und Drang and Goethes Werke 6.

18. Goethes Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 51-53. Translation mine.

19. Ibid., pp. 108 ff.

20. Ibid., p. 101.

21. Ibid., pp. 100 and 101.

22. Ibid., p. 57; letter of September 10.

23. Ibid., p. 117; letter of December 22.

24. Ibid., p. 76; letter of September 4.

25. Ibid., p. 88.

26. Ibid., pp. 85-91.

27. Ibid., p. 123.

28. Ibid., p. 86.

29. Ibid., p. 87; letter of November 22.

30. Ibid., p. 86.

31. Ibid., p. 86. The expression means “between being and non being.”

32. Ibid., p. 90; letter of November 30.

33. Ibid., p. 92; letter of December 6.

34. This word, which might be awkwardly rendered in English as “unlimiting” or release from limits, infinite expansion, is used by Erich Trunz in the interpretive essay appended to his critical edition of Werther to convey the quality of the suicidal hero's feeling about his own death.

35. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World. New York: Doubleday, 1940, 1955.

36. Angelo Jacomuzzi, Il monologo tragico di Jacopo Ortis, Torino: Fògola editore, 1974.

37. For a recent assessment of Thomas Hobbes's impact on Italian thought (through Vico), with cursory but emphatic acknowledgment of Foscolo's part in the contact, see Ferruccio Focher, Vico e Hobbes. Naples: Giannini, 1977.

38. Edizione Nazionale, vol. iv, p. 472. Translation mine.

39. Ibid., pp. 377-78 (letter of June 2, 1798); pp. 382-83 (letter of July 7, 1798). Translation mine.

40. Ibid., p. 527 (“Notizia bibliografica”). Translation mine.