“That is a peculiar result of my development,” answered Wilhelm thoughtfully.  “While I was still at the gymnasium I sketched and painted hard, and after the final examination I went to the Art Academy for two years; but the further I went into the study of art, and the more attentively I followed in the beaten track of art-studies, the clearer it was to me that he who would secure an abiding success in art must be a blind copyist of nature.  Certainly the personal peculiarities of an artist often please his contemporaries.  It is the fashion to do him honor if he flatters the prevailing direction of taste.  But those of the race who follow after, scorn what those before them have admired, and exactly what those of one time have prized as progressive innovations, they who come after reject as mere aberration.  What the artist has himself accomplished, I mean his so-called personal comprehension or his capricious interpretation of nature, passes away; but what he simply and honorably reproduces, as he has truly seen it, lives forever, and the remotest age will gladly recognize in such art-work its old acquaintance, unchanging nature.”

Fraulein Ellrich hung on his words in astonishment, while her parents calmly went on eating their fish.

“So,” went on Wilhelm, speaking chiefly to his opposite neighbor, “so, I tried when I drew or painted to reproduce nature with the greatest truth; but at a certain point I became conscious of a perception that a hidden meaning in an unintelligible language lay written there.  The form of things, and also every so-called accident of form, appeared to me to be the necessary expression of something within, which was hidden from me.  The wish arose in me to penetrate behind the visible face of nature, to know why she appears in such a way, and not in another.  I wanted to learn the language, the words of which, with no understanding of their sense, I had been slavishly copying; and so I turned to the study of physical science.”

“So your two years at the Art School were not wasted,” remarked Herr Ellrich.

“Certainly not, for to an observer of natural objects it is most valuable to have a trained eye for form and color.”

“Yes, and beside, drawing and painting are such charming accomplishments, and so useful to a young man in society.”

“Playing the piano and singing are still more so,” put in Frau Ellrich.

“But dancing most of all,” cried Fraulein Ellrich.  “Do you dance?”

“No,” answered Wilhelm shortly.

The words jarred upon him, and a silence ensued.

The councilor broke this with the question: 

“Then you are a doctor of physical science?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is your particular department?  Zoology, botany?”

“I have principally studied chemistry and physics, and I think of devoting myself to the latter.”

“Physics, oh yes.  A wide and beautiful sphere.  So much is included in it.  Electricity, galvanism, magnetism—­those are all new faculties very little known; and as regards submarine telegraph the knowledge cannot be too useful.”