Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Read Free Book Online

letters in which she communicates her observations on her pupils to their parents and guardians. I always read those directed to your Ladyship with double attention and double pleasure: for while we have to congratulate you on possessing a daughter who unites all those brilliant qualities through which one rises in the world, I at least must think you no less fortunate in having had bestowed upon you in your foster-daughter a child born to promote the well-being and contentment of others, and also surely her own happiness. Ottilie is almost our only pupil over whom our esteemed headmistress and I are not in agreement. I do not in any way blame this industriouslady for wanting to see the fruits of her conscientiousness in clear and visible form; but there also exist hidden fruits which alone are the true substantial ones and which sooner or later develop into vigorous life. Your foster-daughter is undoubtedly of this kind. As long as I have been teaching her I have always seen her proceed at the same pace; slowly, slowly forwards, never back. If it is ever necessary to begin at the beginning with a child, then it certainly is in her case. She cannot understand what does not follow from what has gone before. She stands incapable, indeed obdurate, before something quite easy to grasp if it is not, for her, connected with anything else. But if one can discover the intermediate stages, she is able to understand the most difficult things.
    With this slow rate of progress she remains behind her fellow-students who, endowed with quite different capabilities, are ever hurrying on, easily grasping, retaining and again applying everything they learn, even the most disconnected facts. If the teacher too hurries ahead she learns and is capable of nothing whatever, as is the case in certain classes taken by excellent but hasty and impatient teachers. Complaint has been made about her handwriting and about her inability to grasp the rules of grammar. I have gone into these difficulties more closely: it is true her writing is slow and stiff, if you will, but not irresolute or clumsy. What I taught her stage by stage of the French language, which is to be sure not my subject, she easily understood. It is a strange thing, I admit: she knows much and knows it well; only when she is questioned she seems to know nothing.
    If I may close with a general observation, I would say: she learns, not as one who is to be educated, but as one who wants to educate; not as a pupil, but as a future teacher. Perhaps your ladyship will think it odd that I, as an educator and teacher, should believe the only way to commend anyone is to declare her to be no different from me. Your Ladyship’s better judgement and knowledge of men and the world will know how to place the best construction on my dull but well-meant words. You will see for yourself that from this child, too, much joy is to be hoped for. I commend myself to your Ladyship and ask that I be allowed to write again as soon as I believe I have something significant and agreeable to report.
    Charlotte was very pleased with this note. Its contents agreed with the idea of Ottilie she herself had. But she could not repress a smile. The schoolmaster’s interest seemed to be somewhat warmer than that usually aroused by seeing virtues in a pupil. But she was not one to get ruffled about such a thing and she resolved to let that situation, as she had so many others, evolve how it would. She knew how to appreciate the sensible man’s sympathetic involvement with Ottilie. She had learned sufficiently in the course of her life how highly any true affection is to be esteemed in a world where indifference and antipathy are rightly at home.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T HE topographical map was soon finished. It represented, to a fairly large scale, the estate and its environs made palpable in their characteristic outlines by pen and paint and fixed by trigonometrical measurements the Captain had been making. Few men could manage