It was a bad, a very bad, experience for the honorable
young fellow; the highborn, frivolous girl had trampled
on all the ideals and illusions of his life with her
small feet, for he then saw only too clearly, that
she had not loved him, but that he had only served
her pleasures and her lusts, while he, he had loved
her so truly!
About a year after the catastrophe with charming Angelica,
the handsome cadet happened to be in his captain’s
quarters, and accidentally saw a large photograph
of a lady on his writing table, and on going up and
looking at it, he recognized—Angelica.
“What a beautiful girl,” he said, wishing
to find out how the land lay. “That is
the lady I am going to marry,” the captain, whose
vanity was flattered, said, “and she is as pure
and as good as an angel, just as she is as beautiful
as one, and into the bargain she comes of a very good
and very rich family; in short, in the fullest sense
of the word, she is ‘a good match.’”
It can easily be proved that Austria is far richer
in talented men in every domain, than North Germany,
but while men are systematically drilled there for
the vocation which they choose, like the Prussian
soldiers are, with us they lack the necessary training,
especially technical training, and consequently very
few of them get beyond mere diletantism. Leo
Wolfram was one of those intellectual diletantes, and
the more pleasure one took in his materials and characters,
which were usually boldly taken from real life, and
in a certain political, and what is still more, in
a plastic plot, the more he was obliged to regret that
he had never learnt to compose or to mold his characters,
or to write; in one word, that he had never become
a literary artist, but how greatly he had in himself
the materials for a master of narration, his “Dissolving
Views,” and still more his Goldkind,[4]
prove.
[Footnote 4: Golden Child.]
This Goldkind is a striking type of our modern society,
and the novel of that name contains all the elements
of a classic novel, although of course in a crude,
unfinished state. What an exact reflection of
our social circumstances Leo Wolfram gave in that
story our present reminiscences will show, in which
a lady of that race plays the principal part.
It may be ten years ago, that every day four very
stylishly dressed persons went to dine in a corner
of the small dining-room of one of the best hotels
in Vienna, who, both there and elsewhere, gave occasion
for a great amount of talk. They were an Austrian
landowner, his charming wife, and two young diplomatists,
one of whom came from the North, while the other was
a pure son of the South. There was no doubt that
the lady came in for the greatest share of the general
interest in every respect.
