With health restored Goethe went to Strassburg to continue his legal studies. This city, French in government and institutions, German in people and spirit, was a good place in which to com plete a cosmopolitan training. Goethe set him self earnestly to work to learn dancing and to pass his preliminary examinations. He studied also music, art, anatomy, and chemistry. He had begun to work on his dissertation when, in Sep tember (1770) he met Herder (q.v.), and in October made the fateful acquaintance of Friede rike Brion, the winning daughter of a pastor of Sesenheim. He loved her, and let her love him till her visit to Strassburg broke the idyllic illusion. He would not, perhaps he felt he ought not, to fetter his fortunes and his genius to a yoke so unequal. He left Strassburg (August, 1771), carrying with him a sense of wrong to be atoned. Similar situations haunt his literary work of the next years. The Marie of Gotz, the Marie of Clavigo, the Clhrchen of Egmont, the Gretchen of Faust, spring from this experience, of which he has left a charming and wholly ob jective account in his autobiographic Dichtung und lVahrheit. Friederike died unmarried in 1813. They saw one another without strong emo tion on either side in 1779.
Meantime Goethe had formed a close intimacy with Herder, who was confined for months to his room through an operation on the eyes. This was hardly less important to Goethe's literary devel opment than the psychic trial at Sesenheim. They read literary masterpieces and talked of them. Goethe learned through Herder to dis trust French classical canons, to appreciate Shakespeare, and to realize that all poetic devel opment must be based on national character if it is to be enduring or beneficent. It was Herder, too, who brought Goethe under the influence of Rousseau, as appears in Gotz, and especially in Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Herder's in fluence was furthering, even when it was merely restraining, for Goethe was already meditating his Gotz and even his both profited by a maturing delay. But Herder finished his work for Goethe at Strassburg. When they met again (1776) Goethe felt he had nothing to gain, and presently it was he who repaid the old debt.
Goethe with his licentiate's degree went back to Frankfort (1771), and began the nominal prac tice of law, contributing critical notices to the press, and working on Gotz, which he intended for a more daring proclamation of the newly claimed liberties of the German stage than Lessing, who had won them, would have ventured or approved. It was the trumpet call of the decade of Storm and Stress (q.v.), in which German young blood held high carnival, and in a blind following of Shakespeare naturally showed more of his faults than of his spirit. Glitz was a dramatic adap tation of the autobiography of a robber knight of the sixteenth century, striking in its local color and naivete. In his sturdy independence Goethe saw foreshadowed the reassertion of individual ism in the eighteenth century, and he made Glitz, far more than that knight had made himself, typical of the national revolt against the Roman law and Church. For to Goethe at this time the only progress practicable for Germany lay in the stressing of individuality. But the play as
written in 1771 proved too lawless even for his youthful taste. It was first printed in 1840, and remains a curious monument of a period of ferment. It appeared much modified in struck an answering chord in every heart, and made its as yet unnamed author the literary lender of his time. It gave an immense stimulus to dramatic production, though in casting all thought of the unities to the winds Leasing thought the 'captivating monstrosity' retarded the development of dramatic art. Goethe may have thought so, too; for hesubjected it to a radical revi sion many years later (1804) for the Weimar stage.
This was a period of manifold activity. To it belong some line songs, among them the "Wan derer's Sturmlied," orations, essays, reviews, and minor work in much bulk, to which he was stim ulated by the shrewd and cautious criticism of Merck, some of whose traits Goethe used for Mephistopheles. This production was inter rupted by a new psychic experience. In 1772 Goethe went to Wetzlar to practice law, and fell love with Charlotte Buff (Lotte), the be trothed of his friend Kestner. From the rather delicate situation thus created Goethe ran away (September 11, 1772), and on his way back to Frankfort managed to find heart for a flirtation with Maximiliane von Laroche, who was to be the mother of one of his last adorers, Bettina von Arnim-Brentano, and from home he writes to Charlotte that he `found a new maiden,' An toinette Gerock, presently to be succeeded in his facile heart by Anna Miineh, for whom he wrote Clavigo, giving literary expression the while to his Wetzlar experiences in Die Leiden des jungen Werther, which revealed powers in the German tongue till then unimagined and still unsur passed. The story, which has been often trans lated into many languages, is sentimentally mor bid and typical of its generation. It was sug gested by the suicide of Jerusalem, a student who had formed an attachment for a friend's wife, similar to Goethe's for Lotte. But Goethe, having expressed the mood of his time and age, quickly recovered from it to enter on a period of great creative fecundity, the fruits of which were to appear later in Faust, Prometheus, Eg mont, and Stella, as well as in many lyrics. Then came his passing betrothal to Lili Schone mann (died 1817), a banker's daughter, the nearest that he was ever to come to a love match. For her he wrote some very beautiful songs, and he cherished her memory till death. But for the time they drew apart (September, 1775), and soon after Goethe was invited by Karl August to be one of his Court at Weimar. Meantime Goethe had written Clavigo (1774) and many slighter pieces, among them Gotten Hilden und Wieland, and had found in Merck. an army pay master at Darmstadt, a friend and a caustically discriminating critic, of much value to him in the discipline of genius. His relations to Lili found expression a little later in Stella (1776). In May, 1775. he had made a journey to Switzer land with his friends the Counts Stolherg. and there became intimate with Lavater, whom he had already met.