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Vienna, February 27, 1875
Dearest Friend,
I would very much like to broach a subject that I consider serious but that fills me with painful agitation and embarrassment on your behalf, for which you will soon forgive me. You must know how sincerely I rejoiced at all the qualities you possessed and I lacked, your gift of treating the world with humor and your poetic genius in
dealing with life, which gives you the right to consider yourself a poet even though you have never turned your hand to rhyme and verse. You will remember how prominent a part my urgings played in turning your vague plan to attend a German university into a fixed reality. Can you believe that I wanted to keep you far away from me for a year, when in fact I was thinking of the advantages that might accrue to you from the resulting freedom and diversion? This, and our old friendship, may persuade you to grant me the right to pass judgment on your latest affair, and encourages me to say straight out that it is very wrong of you, and causes grave harm to yourself and deep sorrow to me, to encourage the imprudent affection of a sixteen-year old girl and—the inevitable outcome—to take advantage of it. I do not think badly of you and cannot persuade myself that you are being deliberately frivolous; rather I feel that what attracts you is the romantic aspect of the matter, the unconstrained freedom on both sides, the opposition to the sham and sanctimonious stolidity and insipidity of so-called good society. But remember, dear friend, that it is only the initiation of our actions that lies in our hands, i.e., is determined by the admixture of an inner urge, while their course is rarely so determined and their outcome never.
What you start with innocent intent, or perhaps no intent at all, may have the same effect as something that you pursue with dishonorable intentions from the very beginning. Yet, I confess, I attach lesser weight to this consideration than I do to another, which I hope will impress you