approved rules of play-writing.

[Illustration: JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE _From the Painting by J.
Stieler_]

The next year he published _The Sufferings of Young Werther_, a tragic
tale of a weak-willed sentimental youth of hyperesthetic tendencies,
who commits suicide because of disappointment in love. The story was
the greatest literary triumph that Germany had ever known, and in
point of sheer artistic power it remains to this day the best of
novels in the tragic-sentimental vein. These two works carried the
name of Goethe far and wide and made him the accepted leader of the
literary revolution which long afterwards came to be known, from the
title of a play by Klinger, as the Storm and Stress.

The years 1773-1775 were for Goethe a time of high emotional tension,
from which he sought relief in rapid, desultory, and multifarious
writing. Exquisite songs, musical comedies of a sentimental tinge,
humorous and satiric skits in dramatic form, prose tragedy of
passionate error, and poetic tragedy of titanic revolt--all these and
more welled up from a sub-conscious spring of feeling, taking little
counsel of the sober intellect. Several minor productions were left
unfinished and were afterwards published in fragmentary form. Such is
the case with _Prometheus_, a splendid fragment, in which we get a
glimpse of the Titan battling, as the friend of man, against the
ever-living gods. Of the works completed and published at this time,
aside from _Götz_ and _Werther_, the most notable were _Clavigo_ and
_Stella_, prose tragedies in which a fickle lover meets with condign
punishment. Another prose tragedy, _Egmont_, with its hero conceived
as a "demonic" nature borne on to his doom by his own buoyancy of