Mi Vida — Volumen 1

My Life (Volume 1) / Part 4

From Grimma our little band rolled into Leipzig in open carriages, but not before we had stripped ourselves of every outward emblem of the undergraduate, for we knew the local Burschenschaften would exact a bitter reckoning for such presumption. It had been years since I first stood in the Thome house as a wondering boy of eight, and now, as the young man returned to those fantastical rooms above the marketplace, I confess my heart beat faster at the threshold. But the wonder of the place had ripened into something else; with a more cultivated mind, I looked forward to a deeper communion with my uncle Adolph, whose presence had long been a beacon to me.

The moment of communion arrived almost at once. In the great anteroom stood a bookcase that, I was told, was mine—my father’s legacy, a treasury of volumes long left to gather dust. Together with my uncle I pored over them, and I selected at once the handsome Zweibrück edition of Latin authors, together with sundry attractive volumes of poetry and belles-lettres, and arranged for them to be sent on to Dresden. Those books would become my companions in the long winter ahead.

Yet it was not only the bookcase that stirred me; it was the spectacle of the students themselves. I had first glimpsed them at eight years old, and their old German costume—the long hair, the black velvet skull-cap, the bare neck—had taken my fancy utterly. But that old order was vanishing. The traditional student associations, with their distinctive dress, were being throttled by police prosecutions, and in their place had risen the new national clubs, dressed in the fashion of the day but studded with bright club-colours, governed by a fantastic Comment of pedantic rules designed to maintain a defiant esprit de corps against the bourgeois world. To me, this spirit of emancipation—rebellion against school, against family, against all the deadening pedantries of respectable life—coincided with my own growing distaste for drier studies and my ever-deepening devotion to romantic poetry.

But the reckoning with the old order came first, and it came in a most painful hour. At my confirmation in the spring of 1827, when I walked in procession to the altar at the Communion service, the shudder that ran through me at the Bread and Wine was so profound, so ineffaceable, that I never again partook of the Lord’s Supper, lest I take it in levity. The boy who had once gazed with agonised yearning on the altarpiece in the Kreuz Kirche, wishing to take the Saviour’s place upon the Cross, had vanished. I was no longer capable of reverence for the clergyman who taught me; I was ready to mock him, and even to share with my comrades in withholding his class fees to spend on sweets.

I seized upon the first pretext to break with the Kreuz Grammar School altogether. In self-defence against an unjust punishment threatened by the assistant headmaster Baumgarten-Crusius—for whom I otherwise had great respect—I asked to be discharged at once on the plea of a sudden summons to my family in Leipzig. I had already left the Bohme household, and now I lived alone in a tiny garret, waited on by the widow of a court plate-washer who set before me, at every meal, the familiar thin Saxon coffee. In that attic I wrote verses, and there I sketched the first outlines of that stupendous tragedy which was one day to fill my family with such astonishment and dismay.

The irregularities of this premature independence, however, alarmed my mother into consenting to my removal to Leipzig; and so, in the Christmas of 1827, I arrived in that city. What a reunion it was! There was my sister Louisa, now about twenty-two, returned from Breslau, and her hearty manifestations of joy quite won my heart. My mother and my dear Ottilie and Cecilia, my half-sister, were all gathered in, and for a moment I fancied myself in heaven. But the heavens shifted quickly. Louisa was betrothed to Friedrich Brockhaus, a respected and well-to-do bookseller, and her desire to secure an entrance into the higher circles of bourgeois life brought about a marked change in her once-merry manner. I felt the chill of it, and we were estranged for a time. Nor did I help matters, for I gave up my studies entirely once I settled in Leipzig, chafing as I did at the pedantic system of the local schools.

I was entered at St. Nicholas’s School, which enjoyed the better reputation; but the council of teachers, choosing to maintain the dignity of their institution, placed me in the upper third form, whereas at the Kreuz Grammar School in Dresden I had been in the second. To lay aside my beloved Homer—from which I had already made written translations of twelve songs—and take up the lighter Greek prose writers was a humiliation I could not stomach. I never made a friend of any teacher there, and my obstinacy only deepened with every passing day.

And yet, from the same city that wounded me, there came an influence more powerful than any schoolmaster: my uncle Adolph Wagner. His manner and conversation were magnetic; his knowledge spanned philology, philosophy, and general poetic literature. The fact that he could not write with equal charm, that in his prose he perpetrated the most pompous and involved sentences, mattered nothing to me, for in that hazy period of my youth, the more incomprehensible an extravagance was, the more I admired it. I called on him daily, accompanying him on his constitutional walk beyond the city gates, and we would discuss everything serious or sublime throughout the whole realm of knowledge—discussions that, I shrewdly suspect, often provoked the smiles of passers-by who overheard them.

What I most prized in him was his blunt contempt for the modern pedantry of State, Church, and School. When the rector of the school approached my uncle, as the only male representative of my family, with a serious complaint about my behaviour, my uncle took me for a stroll, asked with a calm smile what I had been up to, listened to my grievance, and then—with a sort of gravity that was, I think, half-ironic—exhorted me to be patient, quoting the Spanish proverb, Un rey no puede morir—a king cannot die, meaning the ruler of a school must always be in the right.