My Life, vol 1 | Page 8

fine puppet show, which I found among the
effects of my late stepfather, and for which he himself had painted
some beautiful scenery. It was my intention to surprise my people by
means of a brilliant performance on this little stage. After I had very
clumsily made several puppets, and had provided them with a scanty
wardrobe made from cuttings of material purloined from my sisters, I
started to compose a chivalric drama, in which I proposed to rehearse
my puppets. When I had drafted the first scene, my sisters happened to
discover the MS. and literally laughed it to scorn, and, to my great
annoyance, for a long time afterwards they chaffed me by repeating one
particular sentence which I had put into the mouth of the heroine, and
which was--Ich hore schon den Bitter trdbsen ('I hear his knightly
footsteps falling'). I now returned with renewed ardour to the theatre,
with which, even at this time, my family was in close touch. Den

Freischutz in particular appealed very strongly to my imagination,
mainly on account of its ghostly theme. The emotions of terror and the
dread of ghosts formed quite an important factor in the development of
my mind. From my earliest childhood certain mysterious and uncanny
things exercised an enormous influence over me. If I were left alone in
a room for long, I remember that, when gazing at lifeless objects such
as pieces of furniture, and concentrating my attention upon them, I
would suddenly shriek out with fright, because they seemed to me alive.
Even during the latest years of my boyhood, not a night passed without
my waking out of some ghostly dream and uttering the most frightful
shrieks, which subsided only at the sound of some human voice. The
most severe rebuke or even chastisement seemed to me at those times
no more than a blessed release. None of my brothers or sisters would
sleep anywhere near me. They put me to sleep as far as possible away
from the others, without thinking that my cries for help would only be
louder and longer; but in the end they got used even to this nightly
disturbance.
In connection with this childish terror, what attracted me so strongly to
the theatre--by which I mean also the stage, the rooms behind the
scenes, and the dressing-rooms--was not so much the desire for
entertainment and amusement such as that which impels the
present-day theatre-goers, but the fascinating pleasure of finding myself
in an entirely different atmosphere, in a world that was purely fantastic
and often gruesomely attractive. Thus to me a scene, even a wing,
representing a bush, or some costume or characteristic part of it,
seemed to come from another world, to be in some way as attractive as
an apparition, and I felt that contact with it might serve as a lever to lift
me from the dull reality of daily routine to that delightful region of
spirits. Everything connected with a theatrical performance had for me
the charm of mystery, it both bewitched and fascinated me, and while I
was trying, with the help of a few playmates, to imitate the
performance of Der Freischutz, and to devote myself energetically to
reproducing the needful costumes and masks in my grotesque style of
painting, the more elegant contents of my sisters' wardrobes, in the
beautifying of which I had often seen the family occupied, exercised a
subtle charm over my imagination; nay, my heart would beat madly at
the very touch of one of their dresses.

In spite of the fact that, as I already mentioned, our family was not
given to outward manifestations of affection, yet the fact that I was
brought up entirely among feminine surroundings must necessarily
have influenced the development of the sensitive side of my nature.
Perhaps it was precisely because my immediate circle was generally
rough and impetuous, that the opposite characteristics of womanhood,
especially such as were connected with the imaginary world of the
theatre, created a feeling of such tender longing in me.
Luckily these fantastic humours, merging from the gruesome into the
mawkish, were counteracted and balanced by more serious influences
undergone at school at the hands of my teachers and schoolfellows.
Even there, it was chiefly the weird that aroused my keenest interest. I
can hardly judge whether I had what would be called a good head for
study. I think that, in general, what I really liked I was soon able to
grasp without much effort, whereas I hardly exerted myself at all in the
study of subjects that were uncongenial. This characteristic was most
marked in regard to arithmetic and, later on, mathematics. In neither of
these subjects did I ever succeed in bringing my mind seriously to bear
upon the tasks that were set