Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 4.djvu/443

Rh wealth, rank, and influence could afford, had at last lost the favour of the court, and was dragged up to answer for all in which he had been indulged hitherto,—nay, was even thrown into prison, where, more than seventy years old, he died an ambiguous death.

This and other tales, that knight of St. Louis, our fellow boarder, knew how to tell with passion and animation; for which reason I was fond of accompanying him in his walks, unlike the others, who avoided such invitations, and left me alone with him. As with new acquaintances I generally took my ease for a long time without thinking much about them or the effect which they were exercising upon me, so I only remarked gradually that his stories and opinions rather unsettled and confused than instructed and enlightened me. I never knew what to make of him, although the riddle might easily have been solved. He belonged to the many to whom life offers no results, and who, therefore, from first to last, exert themselves on individual objects. Unfortunately he had with this a decided desire, nay, even passion, for meditating, without having any capacity for thinking; and in such men a particular notion easily fixes itself fast, which may be regarded as a mental disease. To such a fixed view he always came back again, and was thus in the long run excessively tiresome. He would bitterly complain of the decline of his memory, especially with regard to the latest events, and maintained, by a logic of his own, that all virtue springs from a good memory, and all vice, on the contrary, from forgetfulness. This doctrine he contrived to carry out with much acuteness; as, indeed, anything may be maintained when one has no compunction to use words altogether vaguely, and to employ and apply them in a sense now wider, now narrower, now closer, now more remote.

At first it was amusing to hear him; nay, his persuasiveness even astonished us. We fancied we were