『我が生涯 第1巻』

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.

In time, my uncle’s life changed too. He had lived with his sister Friederike and his old friend Jeannette Thome, but his literary work assured him a modest income, and he deemed it more in accordance with his dignity to make a home of his own. He chose for his housekeeper a friend of his own age, the sister of the aesthete Wendt of Leipzig. Without a word to Jeannette, he went one afternoon not for his usual walk but to the church with his chosen bride, and was married in haste; only on his return did he announce that he was leaving, and would have his things removed that very day. He met the old maid’s consternation with quiet composure, and to the end of his life continued his daily visits to “Mam’selle Thome,” who would at times coyly pretend to sulk.

I was meanwhile secretly labouring at the great tragedy I had conceived in Dresden—Leubald und Adelaïde, a sprawling work in the manner of Shakespeare and Goethe. My only confidante was my sister Ottilie, who listened with touching devotion as I recited to her, even during a thunderstorm, the most gruesome scenes. At length, in order to meet the coming rupture with the school “with dignity,” I sent the voluminous manuscript to my uncle, with a long letter in which I communicated, first, my ideas regarding St. Nicholas’s School, and second, my firm determination to let no school pedantry check my free development.