fe spot during the carrying out of the
adventure--if he did not manage to slip out of it altogether. He took
up every subject rapidly, with the utmost enthusiasm--and dropped it
again as quickly. So that he learned a great many things, but did not
learn much. When he came to young man's estate, he wrote very pretty
verses, played passably on several instruments, drew very nice
pictures, spoke with a certain degree of correctness and fluency
several languages, and was, consequently, a paragon of up-bringing. He
could get into the most surprising ecstasies about everything, and give
utterance to the same in the most magniloquent words. But it was with
him as with the drum--which gives forth a sound which is loud in
proportion to its emptiness. The impression made upon him by everything
grand, beautiful, sublime, resembled the outside tickling which excites
the skin without affecting the inner fibres. Ludwig belonged to that
class of people who say, "I want to do" so-and-so; but who never get
beyond this principle of "wanting to do" into action. But, as in this
world, those who announce, with the proper amount of loudness and
emphasis, what they "intend," or are "going" to do, are held in far
greater consideration than those who quietly go and "do" the things in
question, it of course happened that Ludwig was considered "capable" of
performing the grandest deeds, and was admired accordingly, people not
troubling themselves to ascertain whether he had "done" the deeds which
he had talked about so loudly. There were, it must be said, people who
"saw through" Ludwig, and, starting from what he said, took some pains
to find out what he had done, or if he had done anything at all. And
this grieved him all the more that, in solitary hours, he was sometimes
obliged to admit to himself that this everlasting "meaning" and
"intending" to do things, without ever doing them, was, in reality, a
miserable sort of business. Then he came upon a book--forgotten and out
of date--in which was set forth that mechanical theory of the mutual
interdependence of things. He eagerly adopted this theory, which
justified and accounted for his doings, or rather his "intentions"
of doing, in his own eyes, and in those of others. According with
this theory, if he did not carry out anything which he had intended
to do--what he had said he was going to do--it was not he who
was to blame: its not happening was simply a part of the mutual
interdependence of