After this trial was surmounted, a new one was to make its appearance, which proved to be far more unpleasant, because it concerned a matter which one does not so easily put off and exchange.
I had been born and bred in the Upper-German dialect, and although my father always laboured after a certain purity of language, and, from our youth upwards, had made us children attentive to what may be really called the defects of that idiom, and so prepared us for a better maimer of speaking, I retained nevertheless many deeper-seated peculiarities, which, because they pleased me by their naïveté, I was fond of making conspicuous, and thus every time I used them incurred a severe reprimand from my new fellow-townsmen. The Upper-German, and perhaps chiefly he who lives by the Rhine and Maine (for great rivers, like the sea-coast, always have something animating about them), expresses himself much in similes and allusions, and makes use of proverbial sayings with a native common-sense aptness. In both cases he is often blunt, but when one sees the drift of the expression, it is always appropriate; only something, to be sure, may often slip in, which proves offensive to a more delicate ear.
Provincial Dialect.
Every province loves its own dialect: for it is, properly speaking, the element in which the soul draws its breath. But every one knows with what obstinacy the Misnian dialect has contrived to domineer over the rest, and even, for a long time, to exclude them. We have suffered for many years under this pedantic tyranny, and only by reiterated struggles have all the provinces again established themselves in their ancient rights. What a lively young man had to endure from this continual tutoring, may be easily inferred by any one who reflects that modes of thought, imagination, feeling, native character, must be sacrificed with the pronunciation which one at last consents to alter. And this intolerable demand was made by men and women of education, whose convictions I could not adopt, whose injustice I believed I felt, though I was unable to make it plain to myself. Allusions to the pithy biblical texts were to be forbidden me, as well as the use of the honest-hearted expressions from the Chronicles. I had to forget that I had read the Kaiser von Geisersberg, and eschew the use of proverbs, which nevertheless, instead of much fiddle-faddle, just hit the nail upon the head;—all this, which I had appropriated to myself with youthful ardour, I was now to do without; I felt myself paralyzed to the core, and scarcely knew any more how I had to express myself on the commonest things. I was told, besides, that one should speak as one writes, and write as one speaks; while, to me, speaking and writing seemed once for all two different things, each of which might well maintain its own rights. And even in the Misnian dialect had I to hear many things which would have made no great figure on paper.
Every one who perceives in this the influence which men and women of education, the learned, and other persons who take pleasure in refined society, so decidedly exercise over a young student, would be immediately convinced that we were in Leipzig, even if it had not been mentioned. Each one of the German universities has a particular character: for, as no universal cultivation can pervade our fatherland, every place adheres to its own fashion, and carries out, even to the last, its own characteristic peculiarities; exactly the same thing holds good of the universities. In Jena and Halle roughness had been carried to the highest pitch: bodily strength, skill in fighting, the wildest self-help was there the order of the day; and such a state of affairs can only be maintained and propagated by the most universal riot. The relations of the students to the inhabitants of those cities, various as they might be, nevertheless agreed in this, that the wild stranger had no regard for the citizen, and looked upon himself as a peculiar being, privileged to all sorts of freedom and insolence. In Leipzig, on the contrary, a student could scarcely be anything else than polite, as soon as he wished to stand on any footing at all with the rich, well-bred, and punctilious inhabitants.
All politeness, indeed, when it does not present itself as the flowering of a great and comprehensive mode of life, must appear restrained, stationary, and from some points of view, perhaps, absurd; and so those wild huntsmen from the Saale[3] thought they had a great superiority over the tame shepherds on the Pleisse.[4] Zachariä's Renommist will always be a valuable document, from which the manner of life and thought at that time rises visibly forth; as in general his poems must be welcome to every one who wishes to form for himself a conception of the then prevailing state of social life and manners, which was indeed feeble, but amiable on account of its innocence and childlike simplicity.
All manners which result from the given relations of a common existence are indestructible, and, in my time, many things still reminded us of Zachariä's epic poem. Only one of our fellow-academicians thought himself rich and independent enough to snap his fingers at public opinion. He drank acquaintance with all the hackney-coachmen, whom he allowed to sit inside the coach as if they were gentlemen, while he drove them on the box, thought it a great joke to upset them now and then, and contrived to satisfy them for their smashed vehicles as well as for their occasional bruises; but otherwise he did no harm to any one, seeming only to make a mock of the public en masse. Once, on a most beautiful promenade-day, he and a comrade of his seized upon the donkeys of the miller in St. Thomas's-square; well-dressed, and in their shoes and stockings, they rode around the city with the greatest solemnity, stared at by all the promenaders, with whom the glacis was swarming. When some sensible persons remonstrated with him on the subject, he assured them, quite unembarrassed, that he only wanted to see how the Lord Christ might have looked in a like case. Yet he found no imitators, and few companions.
Student-life at Leipzig.
For the student of any wealth and standing had every reason to show himself attentive to the mercantile class, and to be the more solicitous about the proper external forms, as the colony[5] exhibited a model of French manners. The professors, opulent both from their private property and from their liberal salaries, were not dependent upon their scholars, and many subjects of the state, educated at the Government schools or other gymnasia, and hoping for preferment, did not venture to throw off the traditional customs. The neighbourhood of Dresden, the attention paid to us from thence, and the true piety of the superintendent of the course of study, could not be without a moral, nay, a religious influence.
At first this kind of life was not repugnant to me; my letters of introduction had given me the entrée into good families, whose circle of relatives also received me well. But as I was soon forced to feel that the company had much to find fault with in me, and that after dressing myself in their fashion, I must now talk according to their tongue also, and as, moreover, I could plainly see that I was, on the other hand, but little benefited by the instruction and mental improvement I had promised myself from my academical residence, I began to be lazy, and to neglect the social duties of visiting, and other attentions, and indeed I should have sooner withdrawn from all such connexions, had not fear and esteem bound me fast to Hofrath Böhme, and confidence and affection to his wife. The husband, unfortunately, had not the happy gift of dealing with young people, of winning their confidence, and of guiding them, for the moment, as occasion might require. When I visited him I never got any good by it; his wife, on the contrary, showed a genuine interest in me. Her ill health kept her constantly at home. She invited me to spend many an evening with her, and knew how to direct and improve me in many little external particulars; for my manners were good, indeed, but I was not yet master of what is properly termed étiquette. Only one female friend spent the evenings with her; but she was more dictatorial and pedantic, for which reason she displeased me excessively, and, out of spite to her, I often resumed those unmannerly habits from which the other had already weaned me. Nevertheless she always had patience enough with me, taught me piquet, ombre, and similar games, the knowledge and practice of which is held indispensable in society.