ABSTRACT
We now reach the first steps to Parnassus. Even in poetry, Goethe does not follow an ordered Gradus ad Parnassum. He reads much, he sees much. During the period of occupation in the Seven Years War he hears French plays, catching the ‘sound and tone’ of the actors’ voices in the same way as in the Orbis sensualium pictus of Comenius he had learned to listen to the twitterings of birds. He tells us that he once took a volume of Racine out of his father’s library, memorized the lines, and recited them ‘like a well-drilled parrot’, without being able to understand them in their context. He makes friends with a rather precocious young boy in the company, whom he calls Derones, and studies French with him. Above all, armed with a free pass issued to his grandfather, the Schultheiss, he rummages round behind the scenes and in the dressing-rooms, ‘where the behaviour was not always very decorous’ ; and he loses his heart a little to his young friend’s sister, also a member of the company, though he complains of her behaving towards him ‘like an aunt’. His father cannot have kept too strict an eye on these visits to the theatre, for they seem to have taken place almost every evening, over a period of two years, ending with late home-coming and a hasty supper.
