Wilhelm could put off no longer the visiting of his commercial friends.
He proceeded to their place with some anxiety, knowing he should there
find letters from his people. He dreaded the reproofs which these would
of course contain: it seemed likely also that notice had been given to
his trading correspondents, concerning the perplexities and fears which
his late silence had occasioned. After such a series of knightly
adventures, he recoiled from the school-boy aspect in which he must
appear: he proposed within his mind to act with an air of sternness and
defiance, and thus hide his embarrassment.
To his great wonder and contentment, however, all went off very easily
and well. In the vast, stirring, busy counting-room, the men had
scarcely time to seek him out his packet: his delay was but alluded to
in passing. And on opening the letters of his father, and his friend
Werner, he found them all of very innocent contents. His father, in
hopes of an extensive journal, the keeping of which he had strongly
recommended to his son at parting, giving him also a tabulary scheme for
that purpose, seemed pretty well pacified about the silence of the first
period; complaining only of a certain enigmatical obscurity in the last
and only letter despatched, as we have seen, from the castle of the
count. Werner joked in his way; told merry anecdotes, facetious
burgh-news; and requested intelligence of friends and acquaintances,
whom Wilhelm, in the large trading-city, would now meet with in great
numbers. Our friend, extremely pleased at getting off so well, answered
without loss of a moment, in some very cheerful letters; promising his
father a copious journal of his travels, with all the required
geographical, statistical, and mercantile remarks. He had seen much on
his journey, he said, and hoped to make a tolerably large manuscript out
of these materials. He did not observe that he was almost in the same
case as he had once experienced before, when he assembled an audience
and lit his lamps to represent a play which was not written, still less
got by heart. Accordingly, so soon as he commenced the actual work of
composition, he became aware that he had much to say about emotions and
thoughts, and many experiences of the heart and spirit, but not a word
concerning outward objects, on which, as he now discovered, he had not
bestowed the least attention.
In this embarrassment, the acquisitions of his friend Laertes came very
seasonably to his aid. Custom had united these young people, unlike one
another as they were; and Laertes, with all his failings and
singularities, was actually an interesting man. Endowed with warm and
pleasurable senses, he might have reached old age without reflecting for
a moment on his situation. But his ill-fortune and his sickness had
robbed him of the pure feelings of youth, and opened for him instead of
it a view into the transitoriness, the discontinuity, of man's
existence. Hence had arisen a humorous, flighty, rhapsodical way of
thinking about all things, or, rather, of uttering the immediate
impressions they produced on him. He did not like to be alone; he
strolled about all the coffee-houses and _tables-d'hôte_; and, when he
did stay at home, books of travels were his favorite, nay, his only,
kind of reading. Having lately found a large circulating library, he had
been enabled to content his taste in this respect to the full; and
erelong half the world was figuring in his faithful memory.
It was easy for him, therefore, to speak comfort to his friend, when the
latter had disclosed his utter lack of matter for the narrative so
solemnly promised by him. "Now is the time for a stroke of art," said
Laertes, "that shall have no fellow!
"Has not Germany been travelled over, cruised over, walked, crept, and
flown over, repeatedly from end to end? And has not every German
traveller the royal privilege of drawing from the public a repayment of
the great or small expenses he may have incurred while travelling? Give
me your route previous to our meeting: the rest I know already. I will
find you helps and sources of information: of miles that were never
measured, populations that were never counted, we shall give them
plenty. The revenues of provinces we will take from almanacs and tables,
which, as all men know, are the most authentic documents. On these we
will ground our political discussions: we shall not fail in side-glances
at the ruling powers. One or two princes we will paint as true fathers
of their country, that we may gain more ready credence in our
allegations against others. If we do not travel through the residence of
any noted man, we shall take care to meet such persons at the inn, and
make them utter the most foolish stuff to us. Particularly, let us not
forget to insert, with all its graces and sentiments, some love-story
with a pastoral bar-maid. I tell you, it shall be a composition which
will not only fill father and mother with delight, but which booksellers
themselves shall gladly pay you current money for."
They went accordingly to work, and both of them found pleasure in their
labor. Wilhelm, in the mean time, frequenting the play at night, and
conversing with Serlo and Aurelia by day, experienced the greatest
satisfaction, and was daily more and more expanding his ideas, which had
been too long revolving in the same narrow circle.