We have run into Goethe a number of times already, and we will keep running into him, for there are few modern writers of German in whose work Goethe is as immediately and constantly present as in Hofmannsthal's. Der Tor und der Tod, for example, in its whole conception, is a rewriting of the opening scene, “Nacht,” of Faust, a minimally elaborated monologue on self-consciousness that leads in a few hundred lines to death. In the case of Werther and the Chandos letter, however, I am concerned not only with the relation between the texts, but with Hofmannsthal's use of Goethe as a personal model in a time of vocational crisis.

There is no question that Chandos' crisis reflects a crisis of Hofmannsthal's own; after a decade of astonishing facility and productivity, Hofmannsthal suddenly finds himself unsure of his own verbal mastery. But to what extent does the ironic subtlety of language in the “Brief” already mark the end of the crisis? We have seen that the crisis of a poetic career, in its philosophical and technical aspects, is fully developed only in the post-Chandos tragedies. Requadt suggests, “that the lowered level of style, which is announced in the Chandos letter, is to be found in comedy and in the popular mystery-play”; and he then qualifies this point by insisting that the truly social, “namely a hovering linguistic connection between individuals,” is still beyond Hofmannsthal's reach.