《我的生平——第一卷》

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.