Fernando impartially embraces
both ladies, and Caecilie's concluding remark is: "We are thine!"[206]
[Footnote 206: In deference to the general opinion that this ending
was immoral, Goethe, in a later form of the play, makes Fernando shoot
himself.]
Such is the play which, in a bad English translation that did not
mitigate its absurdities, provoked the wit of the _Anti-Jacobin_.[207]
In Fernando, the central figure of the play, we are, of course, to
recognise Goethe himself,[208] and in no other of his dramas has he
presented a less attractive character. Weislingen, Clavigo, and
Werther have all their redeeming qualities, but Fernando is an
emotional egotist incapable of any worthy motive, and it is the most
serious blemish in the play, even in view of the factitious world in
which it moves, that he is made the adored idol of two such different
women as Caecilie and Stella. The situation, as Goethe himself tells
us, was suggested by the relations of Swift to Stella and Vanessa, but
he did not need to go so far afield for a motive. In the world around
him he was familiar both with the creed and the practice which the
conclusion of the play approves.
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