SIXTH BOOK.
Thus I felt urged alternately to promote and to retard my recovery; and a certain secret chagrin was now added to my other sensations, for I plainly perceived that I was watched, that they were loath to hand me any sealed paper without taking notice what effect it produced, whether I kept it secret, whether I laid it down open and the like. I therefore conjectured that Pylades, or one of the cousins, or even Gretchen herself, might have attempted to write to me, either to give or to obtain information. In addition to my sorrow, I was now more cross than hitherto, and had again fresh opportunities to exercise my conjectures, and to mislead myself into the strangest combinations.
It was not long before they gave me a special overseer. Fortunately it was a man whom I loved and valued. He had held the place of tutor in the family of one of our friends, and his former pupil had gone alone to the university. He often visited me in my sad condition; and they at last found nothing more natural than to give him a chamber next to mine, as he was then to provide me with employment, pacify me, and, as I was well aware, keep his eye on me. Still, as I esteemed him from my heart, and had already confided many things to him, though not my affection for Gretchen, I determined so much the more to be perfectly candid and straightforward with him; as it was intolerable to me to live in daily intercourse with any one, and at the same time to stand on an uncertain, constrained footing with him. It was not long, then, before I spoke to him about the matter, refreshed myself by the relation and repetition of the minutest circumstances of my past happiness, and thus gained so much, that he, like a sensible man, saw it would be better to make me acquainted with the issue of the story, and that, too, in its details and particulars, so that I might be clear as to the whole, and that, with earnestness and zeal, I might be persuaded of the necessity of composing myself, throwing the past behind me, and beginning a new life. First he confided to me who the other young people of quality were who had allowed themselves to be seduced, at the outset, into daring hoaxes, then into sportive breaches of police, afterwards into frolicsome impositions on others, and other such dangerous matters. Thus actually had arisen a little conspiracy, which unprincipled men had joined, who, by forging papers and counterfeiting signatures, had perpetrated many criminal acts, and had still more criminal matters in preparation. The cousins, for whom I at last impatiently inquired, had been found to be quite innocent, only very generally acquainted with those others, and not at all implicated with them. My client, owing to my recommendation of whom I had been tracked, was one of the worst, and had sued for that office chiefly that he might undertake or conceal certain villanies. After all this, I could at last contain myself no longer, and asked what had become of Gretchen, for whom I, once for all, confessed the strongest attachment. My friend shook his head and smiled. "Make yourself easy," replied he: "this girl has passed her examination very well, and has borne off honorable testimony to that effect. They could discover nothing in her but what was good and amiable: she even won the favor of those who questioned her, and could not refuse her desire of removing from the city. Even what she has confessed regarding you, my friend, does her honor: I have read her deposition in the secret reports myself, and seen her signature."—"The signature!" exclaimed I, "which makes me so happy and so miserable. What has she confessed, then? What has she signed?" My friend delayed answering, but the cheerfulness of his face showed me that he concealed nothing dangerous." If you must know, then," replied he at last, "when she was asked about you, and her intercourse with you, she said quite frankly, 'I cannot deny that I have seen him often and with pleasure; but I have always treated him as a child, and my affection for him was truly that of a sister. In many cases I have given him good advice; and, instead of instigating him to any equivocal action, I have hindered him from taking part in wanton tricks, which might have brought him into trouble.'"
My friend still went on making Gretchen speak like a governess; but I had already for some time ceased to listen to him, for I was terribly affronted that she had set me down in the reports as a child, and believed myself at once cured of all passion for her. I even hastily assured my friend that all was now over. I also spoke no more of her, named her no more: but I could not leave off the bad habit of thinking about her, and of recalling her form, her air, her demeanor; though now, in fact, all appeared to me in quite another light. I felt it intolerable that a girl, at the most only a couple of years older than me, should regard me as a child; while I conceived I passed with her for a very sensible and clever youth. Her cold and repelling manner, which had before so charmed me, now seemed to me quite repugnant: the familiarities which she had allowed herself to take with me, but had not permitted me to return, were altogether odious. Yet all would have been well enough, if by signing that poetical love-letter, in which she had confessed a formal attachment to me, she had not given me a right to regard her as a sly and selfish coquette. Her masquerading it at the milliner's, too, no longer seemed to me so innocent; and I turned these annoying reflections over and over within myself until I had entirely stripped her of all her amiable qualities. My judgment was convinced, and I thought I must cast her away; but her image!—her image gave me the lie as often as it again hovered before me, which indeed happened often enough.
Nevertheless, this arrow with its barbed hooks was torn out of my heart; and the question then was, how the inward sanative power of youth could be brought to one's aid? I really put on the man; and the first thing instantly laid aside was the weeping and raving, which I now regarded as childish in the highest degree. A great stride for the better! For I had often, half the night through, given myself up to this grief with the greatest violence; so that at last, from my tears and sobbing, I came to such a point that I could scarcely swallow any longer; eating and drinking became painful to me; and my chest, which was so nearly concerned, seemed to suffer. The vexation I had constantly felt since the discovery made me banish every weakness. It seemed to me something frightful that I had sacrificed sleep, repose, and health for the sake of a girl who was pleased to consider me a babe, and to imagine herself, with respect to me, something very much like a nurse.
These depressing reflections, as I was soon convinced, were only to be banished by activity; but of what was I to take hold? I had, indeed, much to make up for in many things, and to prepare myself, in more than one sense, for the university, which I was now to attend; but I relished and accomplished nothing. Much appeared to me familiar and trivial: for grounding myself, in several respects, I found neither strength within nor opportunity without; and I therefore suffered myself to be moved by the taste of my good room-neighbor, to a study which was altogether new and strange to me, and which for a long time offered me a wide field of information and thought. For my friend began to make me acquainted with the secrets of philosophy. He had studied in Jena, under Daries, and, possessing a well-regulated mind, had acutely seized the relations of that doctrine, which he now sought to impart to me. But, unfortunately, these things would not hang together in such a fashion in my brain. I put questions, which he promised to answer afterwards: I made demands, which he promised to satisfy in future. But our most important difference was this: that I maintained a separate philosophy was not necessary, as the whole of it was already contained in religion and poetry. This he would by no means allow, but rather tried to prove to me that these must first be founded on philosophy; which I stubbornly denied, and, at every step in the progress of our discussions, found arguments for my opinion. For as in poetry a certain faith in the impossible, and as in religion a like faith in the inscrutable, must have a place, the philosophers appeared to me to be in a very false position who would demonstrate and explain both of them from their own field of vision. Besides, it was very quickly proved, from the history of philosophy, that one always sought a ground different from that of the other, and that the sceptic, in the end, pronounced every thing groundless and useless.
However, this very history of philosophy, which my friend was compelled to go over with me, because I could learn nothing from dogmatical discourse, amused me very much, but only on this account, that one doctrine or opinion seemed to me as good as another, so far, at least, as I was capable of penetrating into it. With the most ancient men and schools I was best pleased, because poetry, religion, and philosophy were completely combined into one; and I only maintained that first opinion of mine with the more animation, when the Book of Job and the Song and Proverbs of Solomon, as well as the lays of Orpheus and Hesiod, seemed to bear valid witness in its favor. My friend had taken the smaller work of Brucker as the foundation of his discourse; and, the farther we went on, the less I could make of it. I could not clearly see what the first Greek philosophers would have. Socrates I esteemed as an excellent, wise man, who in his life and death might well be compared with Christ. His disciples, on the other hand, seemed to me to bear a strong resemblance to the apostles, who disagreed immediately after their Master's death, when each manifestly recognized only a limited view as the right one. Neither the keenness of Aristotle nor the fulness of Plato produced the least fruit in me. For the Stoics, on the contrary, I had already conceived some affection, and even procured Epictetus, whom I studied with much interest. My friend unwillingly let me have my way in this one-sidedness, from which he could not draw me; for, in spite of his varied studies, he did not know how to bring the leading question into a narrow compass. He need only have said to me that in life action is every thing, and that joy and sorrow come of themselves. However, youth should be allowed its own course: it does not stick to false maxims very long; life soon tears or charms it away again.
The season had become fine: we often went together into the open air, and visited the places of amusement which surrounded the city in great numbers. But it was precisely here that matters went worse with me; for I still saw the ghosts of the cousins everywhere, and feared, now here, now there, to see one of them step forward. Even the most indifferent glances of men annoyed me. I had lost that unconscious happiness of wandering about unknown and unblamed, and of thinking of no observer, even in the greatest crowds. Now hypochondriacal fancies began to torment me, as if I attracted the attention of the people, as if their eyes were turned on my demeanor, to fix it on their memories, to scan and to find fault.
I therefore drew my friend into the woods; and, while I shunned the monotonous firs, I sought those fine leafy groves, which do not indeed spread far in the district, but are yet of sufficient compass for a poor wounded heart to hide itself. In the remotest depth of the forest I sought out a solemn spot, where the oldest oaks and beeches formed a large, noble, shaded space. The ground was somewhat sloping, and made the worth of the old trunks only the more perceptible. Round this open circle closed the densest thickets, from which the mossy rocks mightily and venerably peered forth, and made a rapid fall for a copious brook.
Scarcely had I dragged hither my friend, who would rather have been in the open country by the stream, among men, when he playfully assured me that I showed myself a true German. He related to me circumstantially, out of Tacitus, how our ancestors found pleasure in the feelings which Nature so provides for us, in such solitudes, with her inartificial architecture. He had not been long discoursing of this, when I exclaimed, "Oh! why did not this precious spot lie in a deeper wilderness! why may we not train a hedge around it, to hallow and separate from the world both it and ourselves! Surely there is no more beautiful adoration of the Deity than that which needs no image, but which springs up in our bosom merely from the intercourse with nature!" What I then felt is still present to my mind: what I said I know not how to recall. Thus much, however, is certain, that the undetermined, widely expanding feelings of youth and of uncultivated nations are alone adapted to the sublime, which, if it is to be excited in us through external objects, formless, or moulded into incomprehensible forms, must surround us with a greatness to which we are not equal.