Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth by George Brandes (page 3)

Thus was I tossed backwards and forwards in my reflections.

XVIII.

What I dreaded most was that if I reached a recognition of the truth, a lack of courage would prevent me decisively making it my own. Courage was needed, as much to undertake the burdens entailed by being a Christian as to undertake those entailed by being a Pantheist. When thinking of Christianity, I drew a sharp distinction between the cowardice that shrunk from renunciation and the doubt that placed under discussion the very question as to whether renunciation were duty. And it was clear to me that, on the road which led to Christianity, doubt must be overcome before cowardice–not the contrary, as Kierkegaard maintains in his _For Self-Examination_, where he says that none of the martyrs doubted.

But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both. I concluded therefrom that I had no consciousness of sin, and found this idea confirmed when I looked into my own heart. For however violently at this period I reproached myself and condemned my failings, they were always in my eyes weaknesses that ought to be combatted, or defects that could be remedied, never sins that necessitated forgiveness, and for the obtaining of this forgiveness, a Saviour. That God had died for me as my Saviour,–I could not understand what it meant; it was an idea that conveyed nothing to me.

And I wondered whether the inhabitants of another planet would be able to understand how on the Earth that which was contrary to all reason was considered the highest truth.

XIX.

With Pantheism likewise I was on my guard against its being lack of courage, rather than a conviction of its untruth, which held me back from embracing it. I thought it a true postulate that everything seemed permeated and sustained by a Reason that had not human aims in front of it and did not work by human means, a Divine Reason. Nature could only be understood from its highest forms; the Ideal, which revealed itself to the world of men at their highest development, was present, in possibility and intent, in the first germ, in the mist of primeval creation, before it divided itself into organic and inorganic elements. The whole of Nature was in its essence Divine, and I felt myself at heart a worshipper of Nature.

But this same Nature was indifferent to the weal or woe of humans. It obeyed its own laws regardless of whether men were lost thereby; it seemed cruel in its callousness; it took care that the species should be preserved, but the individual was nothing to it.

Now, like all other European children, I had been brought up in the theory of personal immortality, a theory which, amongst other things, is one way of expressing the immense importance, the eternal importance, which is attributed to each individual. The stronger the feeling of his own _ego_ that the individual has, the more eagerly he necessarily clings to the belief that he cannot be annihilated. But to none could the belief be more precious than to a youth who felt his life pulsate within, as if he had twenty lives in himself and twenty more to live. It was impossible to me to realise that I could die, and one evening, about a year later, I astonished my master, Professor Broechner, by confessing as much. “Indeed,” said Broechner, “are you speaking seriously? You cannot realise that you will have to die one day? How young! You are very different from me, who always have death before my eyes.”

But although my vitality was so strong that I could not imagine my own death, I knew well enough that my terrestrial life, like all other men’s, would come to an end. But I felt all the more strongly that it was impossible everything could be at an end then; death could not be a termination; it could only, as the religions preached and as eighteenth- century Deism taught, be a moment of transition to a new and fuller existence. In reward and punishment after death I could not believe; those were mediaeval conceptions that I had long outgrown. But the dream of immortality I could not let go. And I endeavoured to hold it fast by virtue of the doctrine of the impossibility of anything disappearing. The quantity of matter always remained the same; energy survived every transformation.

Still, I realised that this could not satisfy one, as far as the form which we term individuality was concerned. What satisfaction was it to Alexander that his dust should stop a bung-hole? or to Shakespeare that Romeo and Juliet were acted in Chicago? So I took refuge in parallels and images. Who could tell whether the soul, which on earth had been blind to the nature of the other life, did not, in death, undergo the operation which opened its eyes? Who could tell whether death were not, as Sibbern had suggested, to be compared with a birth? Just as the unborn life in its mother’s womb would, if it were conscious, believe that the revolution of birth meant annihilation, whereas it was for the first time awakening to a new and infinitely richer life, so it was perhaps for the soul in the dreaded moment of death….

But when I placed before my master these comparisons and the hopes I built upon them, they were swept away as meaningless; he pointed out simply that nothing went to prove a continuation of personality after death, while on the contrary everything argued against it,–and to this I could not refuse my assent.

Then I understood that in what I called Pantheism, the immortality of the individual had no place. And a slow, internal struggle commenced for renunciation of the importance and value of the individual. I had many a conversation on this point with my teacher, a man tired of life and thoroughly resigned.

He always maintained that the desire of the individual for a continuation of personality was nothing but the outcome of vanity. He would very often put the question in a comical light. He related the following anecdote: In summer evenings he used to go for a walk along the Philosopher’s Avenue (now West Rampart Street). Here he had frequently met, sitting on their benches, four or five old gentlemen who took their evening ramble at the same time; by degrees they made each other’s acquaintance and got into conversation with one another. It turned out that the old gentlemen were candle-makers who had retired from business and now had considerable difficulty in passing their time away. In reality they were always bored, and they yawned incessantly. These men had one theme only, to which they always recurred with enthusiasm–their hope in personal immortality for all eternity. And it amused Broechner that they, who in this life did not know how to kill so much as one Sunday evening, should be so passionately anxious to have a whole eternity to fill up. His pupil then caught a glimpse himself of the grotesqueness of wishing to endure for millions of centuries, which time even then was nothing in comparison with eternity.

XX.

But in spite of it all, it was a hard saying, that in the pantheistic view of life the absorption of the individual into the great whole took the place of the continued personal existence which was desired by the _ego_. But what frightened me even more was that the divine All was not to be moved or diverted by prayer. But pray I had to. From my earliest childhood I had been accustomed, in anxiety or necessity, to turn my thoughts towards a Higher Power, first forming my needs and wishes into words, and then later, without words, concentrating myself in worship. It was a need inherited from many hundreds of generations of forefathers, this need of invoking help and comfort. Nomads of the plains, Bedouins of the desert, ironclad warriors, pious priests, roving sailors, travelling merchants, the citizen of the town and the peasant in the country, all had prayed for centuries, and from the very dawn of time; the women, the hundreds and hundreds of women from whom I was descended, had centred all their being in prayer. It was terrible, never to be able to pray again…. Never to be able to fold one’s hands, never to raise one’s eyes above, but to live, shut in overhead, alone in the universe!

If there were no eye in Heaven that watched over the individual, no ear that understood his plaint, no hand that protected him in danger, then he was placed, as it were, on a desolate steppe where the wolves were howling.

And in alarm I tried once more the path towards religious quietude that I had recently deemed impracticable,–until the fight within me calmed again, and in renunciation I forced my emotion to bow to what my reason had acknowledged as the Truth.

ADOLESCENCE

Julius Lange–A New Master–Inadaption to the Law–The University Prize Competition–An Interview with the Judges–Meeting of Scandinavian Students–The Paludan-Muellers–Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson–Magdalene Thoresen–The Gold Medal–The Death of King Frederik VII–The Political Situation–My Master of Arts Examination–War–_Admissus cum laude praecipua_–Academical Attention–Lecturing–Music–Nature–A Walking Tour–In Print–Philosophical Life in Denmark–Death of Ludwig David– Stockholm.

I.

Among my many good comrades, there was one, Julius Lange, with whom comradeship had developed into friendship, and this friendship again assumed a passionate character. We were the two, who, of them all, were most exactly suited to one another, completed one another. Fundamentally different though we were, we could always teach each other something. We grew indispensable to one another; for years there seldom a day went by that we did not meet. The association with his junior cannot possibly have given Julius Lange a delight corresponding to that which his society gave me. Intellectually equal, we were of temperaments diametrically opposed. Having the same love of Art and the same enthusiasm for Art,–save that the one cared more for its pictorial and the other for its literary expression,–we were of mutual assistance to one another in the interchange of thoughts and information. Entirely at variance in our attitude towards religious tradition, in our frequent collisions we were both perpetually being challenged to a critical inspection of our intellectual furniture. But I was the one who did the worshipping.

When Julius Lange, on December 17, 1861, after having twice been to see me and found me out, the third time met with me and informed me: “I have received an invitation to go to Italy on Saturday and be away five months,” was, though surprised, exceedingly glad for my friend’s sake, but at the same time I felt as if I had received a blow in the face. What would become of me, not only during the interval, but afterwards? Who could say whether Lange would ever come back, or whether he would not come back changed? How should I be able to endure my life! I should have to work tremendously hard, to be able to bear the loss of him. I could hardly understand how I should be able to exist when I could no longer, evening after evening, slip up to my friend’s little room to sit there in calm, quiet contentment, seeing pictures and exchanging thoughts! It was as though a nerve had been cut. I only then realised that I had never loved any man so much. I had had four eyes; now I had only two again; I had had two brains; now I had only one; in my heart I had felt the happiness of two human beings; now only the melancholy of one was left behind.

There was not a painting, a drawing, a statue or a bas-relief in the galleries and museums of Copenhagen that we had not studied together and compared our impressions of. We had been to Thorwaldsen’s Museum together, we went together to Bissen’s studio, where in November, 1861, I met for the first time my subsequent friends, Vilhelm Bissen and Walter Runeberg. The memory of Julius Lange was associated in my mind with every picture of Hobbema, Dubbels or Ruysdael, Rembrandt or Rubens, every reproduction of Italian Renaissance art, every photograph of church or castle. And I myself loved pictures even more ardently than poetry. I was fond of comparing my relations with literature to affection for a being of the same sex; my passion for pictures to the stormy passion of a youth for a woman. It is true that I knew much less about Art than about Poetry, but that made no difference. I worshipped my favourite artists with a more impetuous enthusiasm than any of my favourite authors. And this affection for pictures and statuary was a link between my friend and myself. When we were sitting in my room together, and another visitor happened to be there, I positively suffered over the sacrifice of an hour’s enjoyment and when Lange got up to go, I felt as though a window had been slammed to, and the fresh air shut out.

II.

I had for a long time pursued my non-juridic studies as well as I could without the assistance of a teacher. But I had felt the want of one. And when a newly appointed docent at the University, Professor H. Broechner, offered instruction in the study of Philosophy to any who cared to present themselves at his house at certain hours, I had felt strongly tempted to take advantage of his offer. I hesitated for some time, for I was unwilling to give up the least portion of my precious freedom; I enjoyed my retirement, the mystery of my modest life of study, but on the other hand I could not grapple with Plato and Aristotle without the hints of a competent guide as to the why and wherefore.

I was greatly excited. I had heard Professor Broechner speak on Psychology, but his diction was handled with such painful care, was so monotonous and sounded so strange, that it could not fail to alarm. It was only the professor’s distinguished and handsome face that attracted me, and in particular his large, sorrowful eyes, with their beautiful expression, in which one read a life of deep research–and tears. Now, I determined to venture up to Broechner. But I had not the courage to mention it to my mother beforehand, for fear speaking of it should frighten me from my resolution, so uneasy did I feel about the step I was taking. When the day which I had fixed upon for the attempt arrived –it was the 2nd of September, 1861,–I walked up and down in front of the house several times before I could make up my mind to go upstairs; I tried to calculate beforehand what the professor would say, and what it would be best for me to reply, interminably.

The tall, handsome man with the appearance of a Spanish knight, opened the door himself and received the young fellow who was soon to become his most intimate pupil, very kindly. To my amazement, as soon as he heard my name, he knew which school I had come from and also that I had recently become a student. He vigorously dissuaded me from going through a course of Plato and Aristotle, saying it would be too great a strain– said, or implied, that I should be spared the difficult path he had himself traversed, and sketched out a plan of study of more modern Philosophy and Aesthetics. His manner inspired confidence and left behind it the main impression that he wished to save the beginner all useless exertion. All the same, with my youthful energy, I felt, as I went home, a shade disappointed that I was not to begin the History of Philosophy from the beginning.

My visit was soon repeated, and a most affectionate intimacy quickly sprang up between master and pupil, revealed on the side of the elder, in an attitude of fatherly goodwill to which the younger had hitherto been a stranger, the teacher, while instructing his pupil and giving him practical guidance, constantly keeping in view all that could further his well-being and assist his future; my attitude was one of reverence and affection, and of profound gratitude for the care of which I was the object.

I certainly, sometimes, in face of my master’s great thoroughness and his skill in wrestling with the most difficult thoughts, felt a painful distrust of my own capacity and of my own intellectual powers, compared with his. I was also not infrequently vexed by a discordant note, as it were, being struck in our intercourse, when Broechner, despite the doubts and objections I brought forward, always took it for granted that I shared his pantheistic opinions, without perceiving that I was still tossed about by doubts, and fumbling after a firm foothold. But the confidential terms upon which I was with the maturer man had an attraction for me which my intimacy with undecided and youthfully prejudiced comrades necessarily lacked; he had the experience of a lifetime behind him, he looked down from superior heights on the sympathies and antipathies of a young man.

To me, for instance, Ploug’s _The Fatherland_ was at that time Denmark’s most intellectual organ, whereas Bille’s _Daily Paper_ disgusted me, more particularly on account of the superficiality and the tone of finality which distinguished its literary criticisms. Broechner, who, with not unmixed benevolence, and without making any special distinction between the two, looked down on both these papers of the educated mediocrity, saw in his young pupil’s bitterness against the trivial but useful little daily, only an indication of the quality of his mind. Broechner’s mere manner, as he remarked one day with a smile, “You do not read _The Daily Paper_ on principle,” made me perceive in a flash the comicality of my indignation over such articles as it contained. My horizon was still sufficiently circumscribed for me to suppose that the state of affairs in Copenhagen was, in and of itself, of importance. I myself regarded my horizon as wide. One day, when making a mental valuation of myself, I wrote, with the naivete of nineteen, “My good qualities, those which will constitute my personality, if I ever become of any account, are a mighty and ardent enthusiasm, a thorough authority in the service of Truth, _a wide horizon_ and philosophically trained thinking powers. These must make up for my lack of humour and facility.”

It was only several years after the beginning of our acquaintance that I felt myself in essential agreement with Hans Broechner. I had been enraptured by a study of Ludwig Feuerbach’s books, for Feuerbach was the first thinker in whose writings I found the origin of the idea of God in the human mind satisfactorily explained. In Feuerbach, too, I found a presentment of ideas without circumlocution and without the usual heavy formulas of German philosophy, a conquering clarity, which had a very salutary effect on my own way of thinking and gave me a feeling of security. If for many years I had been feeling myself more conservative than my friend and master, there now came a time when in many ways I felt myself to be more liberal than he, with his mysterious life in the eternal realm of mind of which he felt himself to be a link.

III.

I had not been studying Jurisprudence much more than a year before it began to weigh very heavily upon me. The mere sight of the long rows of _Schou’s Ordinances_, which filled the whole of the back of my writing-table, were a daily source of vexation. I often felt that I should not be happy until the Ordinances were swept from my table. And the lectures were always so dreary that they positively made me think of suicide–and I so thirsty of life!–as a final means of escape from the torment of them. I felt myself so little adapted to the Law that I wasted my time with Hamlet-like cogitations as to how I could give up the study without provoking my parents’ displeasure, and without stripping myself of all prospects for the future. And for quite a year these broodings grew, till they became a perfect nightmare to me.

I had taken a great deal of work upon myself; I gave lessons every day, that I might have a little money coming in, took lessons myself in several subjects, and not infrequently plunged into philosophical works of the past, that were too difficult for me, such as the principal works of Kant. Consequently when I was nineteen, I begun to feel my strength going. I felt unwell, grew nervous, had a feeling that I could not draw a deep breath, and when I was twenty my physical condition was a violent protest against overwork. One day, while reading Kant’s _Kritik der Urteilskraft_, I felt so weak that I was obliged to go to the doctor. The latter recommended physical exercises and cold shower-baths.

The baths did me good, and I grew so accustomed to them that I went on taking them and have done so ever since. I did my gymnastic exercises with a Swede named Nycander, who had opened an establishment for Swedish gymnastics in Copenhagen.

There I met, amongst others, the well-known Icelandic poet and diplomatist, Grimur Thomsen, who bore the title of Counsellor of Legation. His compatriots were very proud of him. Icelandic students declared that Grimur possessed twelve dress shirts, three pairs of patent leather boots, and had embraced a marchioness in Paris. At gymnastics, Grimur Thomsen showed himself audacious and not seldom coarse in what he said and hinted. It is true that by reason of my youth I was very susceptible and took offence at things that an older man would have heard without annoyance.

IV.

I continued to be physically far from strong. Mentally, I worked indefatigably. The means of deciding the study question that, after long reflection, seemed to me most expedient, was this: I would compete for one of the University prizes, either the aesthetic or the philosophical, and then, if I won the gold medal, my parents and others would see that if I broke with the Law it was not from idleness, but because I really had talents in another direction.

As early as 1860 I had cast longing eyes at the prize questions that had been set, and which hung up in the Entrance Hall of the University. But none of them were suited to me. In 1861 I made up my mind to attempt a reply, even if the questions in themselves should not be attractive.

There was amongst them one on the proper correlation between poetic fiction and history in the historical romances. The theme in itself did not particularly fascinate me; but I was not ignorant of the subject, and it was one that allowed of being looked at in a wide connection, i.e., the claims of the subject as opposed to the imagination of the artist, in general. I was of opinion that just as in sculpture the human figure should not be represented with wings, but the conception of its species be observed, so the essential nature of a past age should be unassailed in historic fiction. Throughout numerous carefully elaborated abstractions, extending over 120 folio pages, and in which I aimed at scientific perspicuity, I endeavoured to give a soundly supported theory of the limits of inventive freedom in Historical Romance. The substructure was so painstaking that it absorbed more than half of the treatise. Quite apart from the other defects of this tyro handiwork, it lauded and extolled an aesthetic direction opposed to that of both the men who were to adjudicate upon it. Hegel was mentioned in it as “The supreme exponent of Aesthetics, a man whose imposing greatness it is good to bow before.” I likewise held with his emancipated pupil, Fr. Th. Vischer, and vindicated him. Of Danish thinkers, J.L. Heiberg and S. Kierkegaard were almost the only ones discussed.

Heiberg was certainly incessantly criticised, but was treated with profound reverence and as a man whose slightest utterance was of importance. Sibbern’s artistic and philosophical researches, on the other hand, were quite overlooked, indeed sometimes Vischer was praised as being the first originator of psychological developments, which Sibbern had suggested many years before him. I had, for that matter, made a very far from sufficient study of Sibbern’s researches, which were, partly, not systematic enough for me, and partly had repelled me by the peculiar language in which they were couched.

Neither was it likely that this worship of Heiberg, which undeniably peeped out through all the proofs of imperfections and self- contradictions in him, would appeal to Hauch.

When I add that the work was youthfully doctrinaire, in language not fresh, and that in its skeleton-like thinness it positively tottered under the weight of its definitions, it is no wonder that it did not win the prize. The verdict passed upon it was to the effect that the treatise was thorough in its way, and that it would have been awarded the prize had the question asked been that of determining the correlation between History and Fiction in general, but that under the circumstances it dwelt too cursorily on Romance and was only deemed deserving of “a very honourable mention.”

Favourable as this result was, it was nevertheless a blow to me, who had made my plans for the following years dependent on whether I won the prize or not. Julius Lange, who knocked at my door one evening to tell me the result, was the witness of my disappointment. “I can understand,” he said, “that you should exclaim: _’Oleum et operam perdidi!’_, but you must not give up hope for so little. It is a good thing that you prohibited the opening of the paper giving your name in the event of the paper not winning the prize, for no one will trouble their heads about the flattering criticism and an honourable mention would only harm you in People’s eyes; it would stamp you with the mark of mediocrity.”

V.

The anonymous recipient of the honourable mention nevertheless determined to call upon his judges, make their acquaintance, and let them know who he was.

I went first to Hauch, who resided at that time at Frederiksberg Castle, in light and lofty rooms. Hauch appeared exaggeratedly obliging, the old man of seventy and over paying me, young man as I was, one compliment after the other. The treatise was “extraordinarily good,” they had been very sorry not to give me the prize; but I was not to bear them any ill- will for that; they had acted as their consciences dictated. In eighteen months I should be ready to take my Magister examination; the old poet thought he might venture to prophesy that I should do well. He was surprised at his visitor’s youth, could hardly understand how at my age I could have read and thought so much, and gave me advice as to the continuation of my studies.

Sibbern was as cordial as Hauch had been polite and cautious. It was very funny that, whereas Hauch remarked that he himself had wished to give me the prize with an _although_ in the criticism, but that Sibbern had been against it, Sibbern declared exactly the reverse; in spite of all its faults he had wanted to award the medal, but Hauch had expressed himself adverse. Apparently they had misunderstood one another; but in any case the result was just, so there was nothing to complain of.

Sibbern went into the details of the treatise, and was stricter than Hauch. He regretted that the main section of the argument was deficient; the premises were too prolix. He advised a more historic, less philosophical study of Literature and Art. He was pleased to hear of the intimate terms I was on with Broechner, whereas Hauch would have preferred my being associated with Rasmus Nielsen, whom he jestingly designated “a regular brown-bread nature.” When the treatise was given back to me, I found it full of apt and instructive marginal notes from Sibbern’s hand.

Little as I had gained by my unsuccessful attempt to win this prize, and unequivocally as my conversation with the practical Sibbern had proved to me that a post as master in my mother tongue at a Grammar-school was all that the Magister degree in Aesthetics was likely to bring me, whereas from my childhood I had made up my mind that I would never be a master in a school, this conversation nevertheless ripened my determination to give up my law studies, but of course only when by successfully competing for the prize the next year I had satisfactorily proved my still questionable ability.

VI.

The Meeting of Scandinavian students at Copenhagen in June, 1862, taught me what it meant to be a Scandinavian. Like all the other undergraduates, I was Scandinavian at heart, and the arrangements of the Meeting were well calculated to stir the emotions of youth. Although, an insignificant Danish student, I did not take part in the expedition to North Zealand specially arranged for our guests, consequently neither was present at the luncheon given by Frederik VII to the students at Fredensborg (which was interrupted by a heavy shower), I was nevertheless deeply impressed by the Meeting.

It was a fine sight to behold the students from the three other Scandinavian Universities come sailing across the Sound from Malmoe to Copenhagen. The Norwegians were especially striking, tall and straight, with narrow faces under tasseled caps, like a wood of young fir trees; the national type was so marked that at first I could hardly see any difference between them.

For me, there were three perfect moments during the festivities. The first was at the meeting of all the students in the Square of Our Lady, after the arrival of the visitors, when the scholars of the Metropolitan School, crowding the windows of the building, greeted them with a shout of delight. There was such a freshness, such a childish enthusiasm about it, that some of us had wet eyes. It was as though the still distant future were acclaiming the young ones now advancing to the assault, and promising them sympathy and conquest.

The second was when the four new flags embroidered by Danish ladies for the students were consecrated and handed over. Clausen’s speech was full of grandeur, and addressed, not to the recipients, but to the flags as living beings: “Thou wilt cross the Baltic to the sanctuary at Upsala. Thou wilt cross the Cattegat to the land of rocks….” and the address to each of the flags concluded: “Fortune and Honour attend thee!” The evening after the consecration of the flags, there was a special performance at the Royal Theatre for the members of the Meeting, at which Heiberg, radiant as she always was, and saluted with well-merited enthusiasm, played _Sophie_ in the vaudeville “_No_,” with a rosette of the Scandinavian colours at her waist. Then it was that Paludan-Mueller’s prologue, recited by our idolised actor, Michael Wiehe, caused me the third thrilling moment. Listening to the words of the poet from a bad place in the gallery, I was hardly the only one who felt strangely stirred, as Wiehe, letting his eyes roam round the theatre, said:

Oh! that the young of the North might one day worthily play Their part! Oh that each one might do his best For the party he has chosen! That never there be lack Of industry, fidelity, strength and talents! And may he firm step forth, the mighty genius (_Mayhap, known only to the secret power within him, Seated amongst us now_), the mighty genius, Who, as Fate hath willed it, is to play The mighty part and do the mighty things.

Involuntarily we looked round, seeking for the one to whom the poet’s summons referred.

The general spirit of this Meeting has been called flat in comparison with that pervading former meetings. It did not strike the younger participants so. A breath of Scandinavianism swept over every heart; one felt borne along on a historic stream. It seemed like a bad dream that the peoples of the North had for so many centuries demolished and laid waste each other, tapped one another for blood and gold, rendered it impossible for the North to assert herself and spread her influence in Europe.

One could feel at the Meeting, though very faintly, that the Swedes and Norwegians took more actual pleasure in each other, and regarded themselves as to a greater extent united than either of them looked upon themselves as united with the Danes, who were outside the political Union. I was perhaps the only Dane present who fancied I detected this, but when I mentioned what I thought I observed to a gifted young Norwegian, so far was he from contradicting me that he merely replied: “Have you noticed that, too?”

Notwithstanding, during the whole of the Meeting, one constantly heard expressed on every hand the conviction that if Germany were shortly to declare war against Denmark–which no one doubted–the Swedes and Norwegians would most decidedly not leave the Danes in the lurch. The promise was given oftener than it was asked. Only, of course, it was childish on the part of those present at the Meeting to regard such promises, given by the leaders of the students, and by the students themselves in festive mood, as binding on the nations and their statesmen.

I did not make any intellectually inspiring acquaintances through the Meeting, although I was host to two Upsala students; neither of them, however, interested me. I got upon a friendly footing through mutual intellectual interests with Carl von Bergen, later so well known as an author, he, like myself, worshipping philosophy and hoping to contribute to intellectual progress. Carl von Bergen was a self-confident, ceremonious Swede, who had read a great many books. At that time he was a new Rationalist, which seemed to promise one point of interest in common; but he was a follower of the Bostroem philosophy, and as such an ardent Theist. At this point we came into collision, my researches and reflections constantly tending to remove me farther from a belief in any God outside the world, so that after the Meeting Carl von Bergen and I exchanged letters on Theism and Pantheism, which assumed the width and thickness of treatises. For very many years the Swedish essayist and I kept up a friendly, though intermittent intercourse. Meanwhile von Bergen, whose good qualities included neither character nor originality, inclined, as years went on, more and more towards Conservatism, and at forty years old he had attained to a worship of what he had detested, and a detestation of what he had worshipped. His vanity simultaneously assumed extraordinary proportions. In a popular Encyclopaedia, which he took over when the letter B was to be dealt with, and, curiously enough, disposed of shortly afterwards, _von Bergen_ was treated no less in detail than _Buonaparte_. He did battle with some of the best men and women in Sweden, such as Ellen Key and Knut Wicksell, who did not fail to reply to him. When in 1889 his old friend from the Students’ Meeting gave some lectures on Goethe in Stockholm, he immediately afterwards directed some poor opposition lectures against him, which neither deserved nor received any reply. It had indeed become a specialty of his to give “opposition lectures.” When he died, some few years later, what he had written was promptly forgotten.

There was another young Swedish student whom I caught a glimpse of for the first time at the Students’ Meeting, towards whom I felt more and more attracted, and who eventually became my friend. This was the darling of the gods, Carl Snoilsky. At a fete in Rosenborg Park, amongst the songs was one which, with my critical scent, I made a note of. It was by the then quite unknown young Count Snoilsky, and it was far from possessing the rare qualities, both of pith and form, that later distinguished his poetry; but it was a poet’s handiwork, a troubadour song to the Danish woman, meltingly sweet, and the writer of it was a youth of aristocratic bearing, regular, handsome features, and smooth brown hair, a regular Adonis. The following year he came again, drawn by strong cords to Christian Winther’s home, loving the old poet like a son, as Swinburne loved Victor Hugo, sitting at Mistress Julie Winther’s feet in affectionate admiration and semi-adoration, although she was half a century old and treated him as a mother does a favourite child.

It was several years, however, before there was any actual friendship between the Swedish poet and myself. He called upon me one day in my room in Copenhagen, looking exceedingly handsome in a tight-fitting waistcoat of blue quilted silk. In the absence of the Swedo-Norwegian Ambassador, he was Charge d’Affaires in Copenhagen, after, in his capacity as diplomatic attache, having been stationed in various parts of the world and, amongst others, for some time in Paris. He could have no warmer admirer of his first songs than myself, and we very frequently spent our evenings together in Bauer’s wine room–talking over everything in Scandinavian, English, or French literature which both of us had enthusiastically and critically read. On many points our verdicts were agreed.

There came a pause in Snoilsky’s productive activity; he was depressed. It was generally said, although it sounded improbable, that he had had to promise his wife’s relations to give up publishing verse, they regarding it as unfitting the dignity of a noble. In any case, he was at that time suffering under a marriage that meant to him the deprivation of the freedom without which it was impossible to write. Still, he never mentioned these strictly personal matters. But one evening that we were together, Snoilsky was so overcome by the thought of his lack of freedom that tears suddenly began to run down his cheeks. He was almost incapable of controlling himself again, and when we went home together late at night, poured out a stream of melancholy, half-despairing remarks.

A good eighteen months later we met again in Stockholm; Snoilsky was dignified and collected. But when, a few years later, so-called public opinion in Sweden began to rave against the poet for the passion for his second wife which so long made him an exile from his country, I often thought of that evening.

As years passed by, his outward bearing became more and more reserved and a trifle stiff, but he was the same at heart, and no one who had known him in the heyday of his youth could cease to love him.

VII.

A month after the Students’ Meeting, at the invitation of my friend Jens Paludan-Mueller, I spent a few weeks at his home at Nykjoebing, in the island of Falster, where his father, Caspar Paludan-Mueller, the historian, was at the time head master of the Grammar-school. Those were rich and beautiful weeks, which I always remembered later with gratitude.

The stern old father with his leonine head and huge eyebrows impressed one by his earnestness and perspicacity, somewhat shut off from the world as he was by hereditary deafness. The dignified mistress of the house likewise belonged to a family that had made its name known in Danish literature. She was a Rosenstand-Goeiske. Jens was a cordial and attentive host, the daughters were all of them women out of the ordinary, and bore the impress of belonging to a family of the highest culture in the country; the eldest was womanly and refined, the second, with her Roman type of beauty and bronze-coloured head, lovely in a manner peculiarly her own; the youngest, as yet, was merely an amiable young girl. The girls would have liked to get away from the monotony of provincial life, and their release came when their father was appointed to a professorship at Copenhagen University. There was an ease of manner and a tone of mental distinction pervading the whole family. Two young, handsome Counts Reventlow were being brought up in the house, still only half-grown boys at that time, but who were destined later to win honourable renown. One of them, the editor of his ancestress’s papers, kept up his acquaintance with the guest he had met in the Paludan-Mueller home for over forty years.

There often came to the house a young Dane from Caracas in Venezuela, of unusual, almost feminine beauty, with eyes to haunt one’s dreams. He played uncommonly well, was irresistibly gentle and emotional. After a stay of a few years in Denmark he returned to his native place. The previously mentioned Groenbeck, with his pretty sister, and other young people from the town, were frequent guests during the holidays, and the days passed in games, music, wanderings about the garden, and delightful excursions to the woods.

On every side I encountered beauty of some description. I said to Jens one day: “One kind of beauty is the glow which the sun of Youth casts over the figure, and it vanishes as soon as the sun sets. Another is stamped into shape from within; it is Mind’s expression, and will remain as long as the mind remains vigorous. But the supremest beauty of all is in the unison of the two harmonies, which are contending for existence. In the bridal night of this supremest beauty, Mind and Nature melt into one.”

A few years later the old historian was called upon to publish the little book on Gulland, with its short biography prefixed, as a memorial to his only son, fallen at Sankelmark, and again, a few years later, to edit Frederik Nutzhorn’s translation of Apuleius in memory of his son’s friend, his elder daughter’s fiance. During the preparation of these two little books, our relations became more intimate, and our friendship continued unbroken until in the month of February, 1872, a remark in one of my defensive articles caused him to take up his pen against me. My remark was to the effect that there were men of the same opinions as myself even among the priests of the established church. Caspar Paludan- Mueller declared it my public duty to mention of whom I was thinking at the time, since such a traitor was not to be tolerated in the lap of the Church. As I very naturally did not wish to play the part of informer, I incurred, by my silence, the suspicion of having spoken without foundation. The Danish man whom I had in my thoughts, and who had confided his opinions to me, was still alive at the time. This was the late Dean Ussing, at one time priest at Mariager, a man of an extraordinarily refined and amiable disposition, secretly a convinced adherent of Ernest Renan. A Norwegian priest, who holds the same opinions, is still living.

VIII.

In August, 1863, on a walking tour through North Sjaelland, Julius Lange introduced me to his other celebrated uncle, Frederik Paludan-Mueller, whose Summer residence was at Fredensborg. In appearance he was of a very different type from his brother Caspar. The distinguishing mark of the one was power, of the other, nobility. For Frederik Paludan-Mueller as a poet I cherished the profoundest admiration. He belonged to the really great figures of Danish literature, and his works had so fed and formed my inmost nature that I should scarcely be the same had I not read them. It was unalloyed happiness to have access to his house and be allowed to enjoy his company. It was a distinction to be one of the few he vouchsafed to take notice of and one of the fewer still in whose future he interested himself. Do the young men of Denmark to-day, I wonder, admire creative intellects as they were admired by some few of us then? It is in so far hardly possible, since there is not at the present time any Northern artist with such a hall-mark of refined delicacy as Frederik Paludan-Mueller possessed.

The young people who came to his house might have wished him a younger, handsomer wife, and thought his choice, Mistress Charite, as, curiously enough, she was called, not quite worthy of the poet. Unjustly so, since he himself was perfectly satisfied with her, and was apparently wholly absorbed by a union which had had its share in isolating him from the world. His wife was even more theologically inclined than himself, and appeared anonymously–without anyone having a suspicion of the fact–as a religious authoress. Still, she was exceedingly kind to anyone, regardless of their private opinions, who had found favour in the poet’s eyes.

The dry little old lady was the only one of her sex with whom Paludan- Mueller was intimate. He regarded all other women, however young and beautiful, as mere works of art. But his delight in them was charming in him, just because of its freedom from sense. One evening that he was giving a little banquet in honour of a Swedish lady painter, named Ribbing, a woman of rare beauty, he asked her to stand by the side of the bust of the Venus of Milo, that the resemblance, which really existed between them, might be apparent. His innocent, enthusiastic delight in the likeness was most winning.

IX.

Two other celebrated personages whom I met for the first time a little later were Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson and Magdalene Thoresen.

I became acquainted with Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson at the Nutzhorns, their son, Ditlev, being a passionate admirer of his. His _King Sverre_ of 1861 had been a disappointment, but _Sigurd Slembe_ of the following year was new and great poetry, and fascinated young people’s minds. Bjoernson, socially, as in literature, was a strong figure, self- confident, loud-voiced, outspoken, unique in all that he said, and in the weight which he knew how to impart to all his utterances. His manner jarred a little on the more subdued Copenhagen style; the impression he produced was that of a great, broad-shouldered, and very much spoilt child. In the press, all that he wrote and did was blazoned abroad by the leading critics of the day, who had a peculiar, challenging way of praising Bjoernson, although his ability was not seriously disputed by anyone. The National Liberal Leaders, Alfred Hage, Carl Ploug, etc., had opened their hearts and houses to him. It is said that at one time Heiberg had held back; the well-bred old man, a little shocked by the somewhat noisy ways of the young genius, is said to have expressed to his friend Krieger some scruples at inviting him to his house. To Krieger’s jesting remark: “What does it matter! He is a young man; let him rub off his corners!” Heiberg is credited with having replied: “Very true! Let him! but not in my drawing-room! That is not a place where people may rub anything off.” Heiberg’s wife, on the other hand, admired him exceedingly, and was undoubtedly very much fascinated by him.

In a circle of younger people, Bjoernson was a better talker than conversationalist. Sometimes he came out with decidedly rash expressions of opinion, conclusively dismissing a question, for instance, with severe verdicts over Danish music, Heyse’s excepted, judgments which were not supported by sufficient knowledge of the subject at issue. But much of what he said revealed the intellectual ruler, whose self- confidence might now and again irritate, but at bottom was justified. He narrated exceptionally well, with picturesque adjectives, long remembered in correct Copenhagen, spoke of the _yellow_ howl of wolves, and the like. Take it all in all, his attitude was that of a conqueror.

He upheld poetry that was actual and palpable, consequently had little appreciation for poetry, that, like Paludan-Mueller’s, was the perfection of thought and form, and boldly disapproved of my admiration for it.

X.

It was likewise through Frederik Nutzhorn that I, when a young beginner in the difficult art of life, became acquainted with Madame Magdalene Thoresen. Our first conversation took place in the open air one Summer day, at the Klampenborg bathing establishment. Although Magdalene Thoresen was at that time at least forty-six years old, her warm, brownish complexion could well stand inspection in the strongest light. Her head, with its heavy dark hair, was Southern in its beauty, her mouth as fresh as a young girl’s; she had brilliant and very striking eyes. Her figure was inclined to be corpulent, her walk a trifle heavy, her bearing and movements full of youth and life.

She was remarkably communicative, open and warmhearted, with a propensity towards considerable extravagance of speech. Originally incited thereto by Bjoernson’s peasant stories, she had then published her first tales, _The Student and Signe’s Story_, which belonged, half to Norwegian, half to Danish literature, and had been well received. She was the daughter of a fisherman at Fredericia, and after having known both the buffets and the smiles of Fortune, had come to be on terms of friendship with many men and women of importance, now belonging to the recognised personalities of the day. She was also very well received and much appreciated in the Heiberg circle.

In comparison with her, a woman, I might have been called erudite and well-informed. Her own knowledge was very desultory. She was interested in me on account of my youth, and her warm interest attached me to her for the next five years,–as long, that is, as she remained in Denmark. She very soon began to confide in me, and although she scarcely did so unreservedly, still, no woman, at least no mature and gifted woman, had told me so much about herself before. She was a woman who had felt strongly and thought much; she had lived a rich, and eventful life; but all that had befallen her she romanticised. Her poetic tendency was towards the sublime. She was absolutely veracious, and did not really mean to adorn her tales, but partly from pride, partly from whimsicality, she saw everything, from greatest to least, through beautifully coloured magnifying-glasses, so that a translation of her communications into every-day language became a very difficult matter, and when an every-day occurrence was suspected through the narrative, the same could not be reproduced in an every-day light, and according to an every-day standard, without wounding the narrator to the quick. For these reasons I never ventured to include among my Collected Essays a little biographical sketch of her (written just as she herself had idealised its events to me), one of the first articles I had printed.

She saw strong natures, rich and deep natures, in lives that were meagre or unsuccessful. Again, from lack of perspicacity, she sometimes saw nothing but inefficiency in people with wide intellectual gifts; thus, she considered that her son-in-law, Henrik Ibsen, who at that time had not become either known or celebrated, had very imperfect poetic gifts. “What he writes is as flat as a drawing,” she would say. Or she would remark: “He ought to be more than a collaborator of Kierkegaard.” It was only much later that she discovered his genius. Bjoernson, on the other hand, she worshipped with an enthusiastic love; it was a trouble to her that just about this time he had become very cool to her.

Vague feelings did not repel her, but all keen and pointed intelligence did. She was wholly and entirely romantic. Gallicism she objected to; the clarity of the French seemed to her superficial; she saw depth in the reserved and taciturn Northern, particularly the Norwegian, nature. She had groped her way forward for a long time without realising what her gifts really were. Her husband, who had done all he could to assist her education, had even for a time imagined, and perhaps persuaded her, that her gifts lay in the direction of Baggesen’s. Now, however, she had found her vocation and her path in literature.

On all questions of thought, pure and simple, she was extremely vague. She was a Christian and a Heathen with equal sincerity, a Christian with her overflowing warm-heartedness, with her honest inclination to believe, a Heathen in her averseness to any negation of either life or Nature. She used to say that she loved Christ and Eros equally, or rather, that to her, they both meant the same. To her, Christianity was the new, the modern, in contrast to the rationalism of a past age, so that Christianity and modern views of life in general merged in her eyes into one unity.

Hers was a deeply feminine nature, and a productive nature. Her fertile character was free from all taint of over-estimation of herself. She only revealed a healthy and pleasing self-satisfaction when she imagined that some person wished to set up himself or herself over her and misjudge acts or events in her life with respect to which she considered herself the only person qualified to judge. At such times she would declare in strong terms that by her own unassisted strength she had raised herself from a mean and unprotected position to the level of the best men and women of her day. Herself overflowing with emotion, and of a noble disposition, she craved affection and goodwill, and gave back a hundredfold what she received. If she felt herself the object of cold and piercing observation, she would be silent and unhappy, but if she herself were at ease and encountered no coolness, she was all geniality and enthusiasm, though not to such an extent that her enthusiasm ceased to be critical.

She could over-value and under-value people, but was at the same time a keen, in fact a marvellous psychologist, and sometimes astonished one by the pertinent things she said, surprising one by her accurate estimate of difficult psychological cases. For instance, she understood as few others did the great artist, the clever coquette, and the old maid in Heiberg’s wife, the actress.

She had no moral prejudices, and had written _Signe’s Story_ as a protest against conventional morality; but she was none the less thoroughly permeated by Christian and humane ideas of morality, and there was no element of rebellion in her disposition.

On the whole, she was more a woman than an authoress. Her nature was tropical in comparison with Mrs. Charite Paludan-Mueller’s North Pole nature. She lived, not in a world of ideas remote from reality, but in a world of feeling and passion, full of affection and admiration, jealousy and dislike. Being a woman, she was happy at every expression of pleasure over one of her books that she heard or read of, and liked to fancy that the solitary young man who sent her an enthusiastic letter of thanks was only one of hundreds who thought as he did. Like a woman, also, she was hurt by indifference, which, however, her warm heart rarely encountered.

This richly endowed woman made me appear quite new to myself, inasmuch as, in conversations with my almost maternal friend, I began to think I was of a somewhat cold nature, a nature which in comparison with hers seemed rather dry, unproductive and unimaginative, a creature with thoughts ground keen.

Magdalene Thoresen compared me one day to an unlighted glass candelabra, hanging amid several others all lighted up, which had the gleam of the fire on the countless facets of its crystals, but was itself nothing but cold, smooth, polished, prisms.

Thus during my association with Magdalene Thoresen I came to regard myself in a new light, when I saw myself with her eyes, and I was struck more than ever by how different the verdicts over me would be were my various friends and acquaintances each to describe me is I appeared to them. To Magdalene Thoresen I was all mind, to others all passion, to others again all will. At the Nutzhorns’ I went by the name of the modest B., elsewhere I was deemed conceitedly ambitious, some people thought me of a mild temper, others saw in me a quarrelsome unbeliever.

All this was a challenge to me to come to a clear understanding about my real nature. The fruits of my work must show me what sort of man I was.

XI.

I continued my legal studies with patient persistence, and gradually, after having made myself master of Civil Proceedings, I worked my way through the whole of the juridic system, Roman Law excluded. But the industry devoted to this was purely mechanical. I pursued my other studies, on the contrary, with delight, even tried to produce something myself, and during the last months of 1862 elaborated a very long paper on _Romeo and Juliet_, chiefly concerning itself with the fundamental problems of the tragedy, as interpreted in the Aesthetics of the day; it has been lost, like so much else that I wrote during those years. I sent it to Professor Broechner and asked his opinion of it.

Simultaneously I began to work upon a paper on the Idea of Fate in Greek Tragedy, a response to the Prize question of the year 1862-1863, and on December 31, 1862, had finished the Introduction, which was published for the first time about six years later, under the title _The Idea of Tragic Fate_. Appended to this was a laborious piece of work dealing with the conceptions of Fate recorded in all the Greek tragedies that have come down to us. This occupied the greater part of the next six months.

The published Introduction gives a true picture of the stage of my development then, partly because it shows the manner in which I had worked together external influences, the Kierkegaardian thoughts and the Hegelian method, partly because with no little definiteness it reveals a fundamental characteristic of my nature and a fundamental tendency of my mind, since it is, throughout, a protest against the ethical conception of poetry and is a proof of how moral ideas, when they become part of an artistic whole, lose their peculiar stamp and assume another aspect.

In November, 1862, I joined a very large recently started undergraduates’ society, which met once a fortnight at Borch’s College to hear lectures and afterwards discuss them together. It numbered full fifty members, amongst them most of the men of that generation who afterwards distinguished themselves in Denmark. The later known politician, Octavius Hansen, was Speaker of the Meetings, and even then seemed made for the post. His parliamentary bearing was unrivalled. It was not for nothing he was English on the mother’s side. He looked uncommonly handsome on the platform, with his unmoved face, his beautiful eyes, and his brown beard, curled like that of Pericles in the Greek busts. He was good-humoured, just, and well-informed. Of the numerous members, Wilhelm Thomsen the philologist was certainly the most prominent, and the only one whom I later on came to value, that is, for purely personal reasons; in daily association it was only once in a way that Thomsen could contribute anything from his special store of knowledge. One day, when we had been discussing the study of cuneiform inscriptions, the young philologist had said, half in jest, half in earnest: “If a stone were to fall down from the Sun with an inscription in unknown signs, in an unknown language, upon it, we should be able to make it out,”–a remark which I called to mind many years later when Thomsen deciphered the Ancient Turkish inscriptions in the Mountains of Siberia.

A great many political lectures were given. I gave one on Heiberg’s Aesthetics.

On January 1, 1863, I received a New Year’s letter from Broechner, in which he wrote that the essay on Romeo and Juliet had so impressed him that, in his opinion, no one could dispute my fitness to fill the Chair of Aesthetics, which in the nature of things would soon be vacant, since Hauch, at his advanced age, could hardly continue to occupy it very long.

Thus it was that my eager patron first introduced what became a wearisome tangle, lasting a whole generation, concerning my claims to a certain post, which gradually became in my life what the French call _une scie_, an irritating puzzle, in which I myself took no part, but which attached itself to my name.

That letter agitated me very much; not because at so young an age the prospect of an honourable position in society was held out to me by a man who was in a position to judge of my fitness for it, but because this smiling prospect of an official post was in my eyes a snare which might hold me so firmly that I should not be able to pursue the path of renunciation that alone seemed to me to lead to my life’s goal. I felt myself an apostle, but an apostle and a professor were, very far apart. I certainly remembered that the Apostle Paul had been a tent-maker. But I feared that, once appointed, I should lose my ideal standard of life and sink down into insipid mediocrity. If I once deviated from my path, I might not so easily find it again. It was more difficult to resign a professorship than never to accept it. And, once a professor, a man soon got married and settled down as a citizen of the state, not in a position to dare anything. To dispose of my life at Broechner’s request would be like selling my soul to the Devil.

So I replied briefly that I was too much attached to Hauch to be able or willing to speculate on his death. But to this Broechner very logically replied: “I am not speculating on his death, but on his life, for the longer he lives, the better you will be prepared to be his successor.”

By the middle of June, 1863, the prize paper was copied out. In September the verdict was announced; the gold medal was awarded to me with a laudatory criticism. The gold medal was also won by my friend Jens Paludan-Mueller for a historic paper, and in October, at the annual Ceremony at the University, we were presented with the thin medal bearing the figure of Athene, which, for my part, being in need of a Winter overcoat, I sold next day. Clausen, the Rector, a little man with regular features, reserved face and smooth white hair, said to us that he hoped this might prove the first fruits of a far-reaching activity in the field of Danish literature. But what gave me much greater pleasure was that I was shaken hands with by Monrad, who was present as Minister for Education. Although Clausen was well known, both as a theologian and an important National Liberal, I cared nothing for him. But I was a little proud of Monrad’s hand-pressure, for his political liberality, and especially his tremendous capacity for work, compelled respect, while from his handsome face with its thoughtful, commanding forehead, there shone the evidence of transcendent ability.

XII.

On the morning of November 15th, 1863, Julius Lange and I went together to offer our congratulations to Frederik Nutzhorn, whose birthday it was. His sisters received me with their usual cheerfulness, but their father, the old doctor, remarked as I entered: “You come with grave thoughts in your mind, too,” for the general uneasiness occasioned by Frederik VII’s state of health was reflected in my face. There was good reason for anxiety concerning all the future events of which an unfavourable turn of his illness might be the signal.

I went home with Julius Lange, who read a few wild fragments of his “System” to me. This turned upon the contrasting ideas of _Contemplation_ and _Sympathy_, corresponding to the inhaling and exhaling of the breath; the resting-point of the breathing was the moment of actual consciousness, etc.; altogether very young, curious, and confused.

In the afternoon came the news of the King’s death. In the evening, at the Students’ Union, there was great commotion and much anxiety. There were rumours of a change of Ministry, of a Bluhme-David-Ussing Ministry, and of whether the new King would be willing to sign the Constitution from which people childishly expected the final incorporation of Slesvig into Denmark. That evening I made the acquaintance of the poet Christian Richardt, who told me that he had noticed my face before he knew my name. Julius Lange was exceedingly exasperated and out of spirits. Ploug went down the stairs looking like a man whose hopes had been shattered, and whom the blow had found unprepared. His paper had persistently sown distrust of the Prince of Denmark.

The Proclamation was to take place in front of Christiansborg Castle on December 16th, at 11 o’clock. I was fetched to it by a student of the same age, the present Bishop Frederik Nielsen. The latter had made my acquaintance when a Free-thinker, but fortunately he recognised his errors only a very few years later, and afterwards the valiant theologian wrote articles and pamphlets against the heretic he had originally cultivated for holding the same opinions as himself. There is hardly anyone in Denmark who persists in error; people recognise their mistakes in time, before they have taken harm to their souls; sometimes, indeed, so much betimes that they are not even a hindrance to their worldly career.

The space in front of the Castle was black with people, most of whom were in a state of no little excitement. Hall, who was then Prime Minister, stepped out on the balcony of the castle, grave and upright, and said, first standing with his back to the Castle, then looking to the right and the left, these words: “King Frederik VII is dead. Long live King Christian IX!”

Then the King came forward. There were loud shouts, doubtless some cries of “Long live the King,” but still more and louder shouts of: “The Constitution forever!” which were by no means loyally intended. At a distance, from the Castle balcony, the different shouts could, of course, not be distinguished. As the King took them all to be shouts of acclamation, he bowed politely several times, and as the shouts continued kissed his hand to right and left. The effect was not what he had intended. His action was not understood as a simple-hearted expression of pure good-will. People were used to a very different bearing on the part of their King. With all his faults and foibles, Frederik VII was always in manner the Father of his people; always the graceful superior; head up and shoulders well back, patronisingly and affectionately waving his hand: “Thank you, my children, thank you! And now go home and say ‘Good-morning’ to your wives and children from the King!” One could not imagine Frederik VII bowing to the people, much less kissing his hand to them.

There was a stormy meeting of the Students’ Union that evening. Vilhelm Rode made the principal speech and caustically emphasised that it took more than a “Kiss of the hand and a parade bow” to win the hearts of the Danish people. The new dynasty, the head of which had been abused for years by the National Liberal press, especially in _The Fatherland_, who had thrown suspicion of German sympathies on the heir-presumptive, was still so weak that none of the students thought it necessary to take much notice of the change of sovereigns that had taken place. This was partly because since Frederik VII’s time people had been accustomed to indiscriminate free speech concerning the King’s person–it was the fashion and meant nothing, as he was beloved by the body of the people –partly because what had happened was not regarded as irrevocable. All depended on whether the King signed the Constitution, and even the coolest and most conservative, who considered that his signing it would be a fatal misfortune, thought it possible that Christian IX. would be dethroned if he did not. So it is not difficult to form some idea of how the Hotspurs talked. The whole town was in a fever, and it was said that Prince Oscar was in Scania, ready at the first sign to cross the Sound and allow himself to be proclaimed King on behalf of Charles XV. Men with Scandinavian sympathies hoped for this solution, by means of which the three kingdoms would have been united without a blow being struck.

In the middle of the meeting, there arrived a message from Crone, the Head of Police, which was delivered verbally in this incredibly irregular form–that the Head of Police was as good a Scandinavian as anyone, but he begged the students for their own sakes to refrain from any kind of street disturbance that would oblige him to interfere.

I, who had stood on the open space in front of the Castle, lost in the crowd, and in the evening at the meeting of the students was auditor to the passionate utterances let fall there, felt my mood violently swayed, but was altogether undecided with regard to the political question, the compass of which I could not fully perceive. I felt anxious as to the attitude of foreign powers would be in the event of the signing of the Constitution. Old C.N. David had said in his own home that if the matter should depend on him, which, however, he hoped it would not, he would not permit the signing of the Constitution, were he the only man in Denmark of that way of thinking, since by so doing we should lose our guarantee of existence, and get two enemies instead of one, Russia as well as Germany.

The same evening I wrote down: “It is under such circumstances as these that one realises how difficult it is to lead a really ethical existence. I am not far-sighted enough to perceive what would be the results of that which to me seems desirable, and one cannot conscientiously mix one’s self up in what one does not understand. Nevertheless, as I stood in the square in front of the Castle, I was so excited that I even detected in myself an inclination to come forward as a political speaker, greenhorn though I be.”

XIII.

On the 18th of November, the fever in the town was at its height. From early in the morning the space in front of the Castle was crowded with people. Orla Lehmann, a Minister at the time, came out of the Castle, made his way through the crowd, and shouted again and again, first to one side, then to the other:

“He has signed! He has signed!”

He did not say: “The King.”

The people now endured seven weeks of uninterrupted change and kaleidoscopic alteration of the political situation. Relations with all foreign powers, and even with Sweden and Norway, presented a different aspect to the Danish public every week. Sweden’s withdrawal created a very bitter impression; the public had been induced to believe that an alliance was concluded. Then followed the “pressure” in Copenhagen by the emissaries of all the Powers, to induce the Government to recall the November Constitution, then the Czar’s letter to the Duke of Augustenborg, finally the occupation of Holstein by German troops, with all the censure and disgrace that the Danish army had to endure, for Holstein was evacuated without a blow being struck, and the Duke, to the accompanyment of scorn and derision heaped on the Danes, was proclaimed in all the towns of Holstein.

On Christmas Eve came tidings of the convocation of the Senate, simultaneously with a change of Ministry which placed Monrad at the head of the country, and in connection with this a rumour that all young men of twenty-one were to be called out at once. This last proved to be incorrect, and the minds of the young men alternated between composure at the prospect of war and an enthusiastic desire for war, and a belief that there would be no war at all. The first few days in January, building on the rumour that the last note from England had promised help in the event of the Eider being passed, people began to hope that the war might be avoided, and pinned their faith to Monrad’s dictatorship.

Frederik Nutzhorn, who did not believe there would be a war, started on a visit to Rome; Jens Paludan-Mueller, who had been called out, was quartered at Rendsborg until the German troops marched in; Julius Lange, who, as he had just become engaged, did not wish to see his work interrupted and his future prospects delayed by the war, had gone to Islingen, where he had originally made the acquaintance of his fiancee. Under these circumstances, as a twenty-one-year-old student who had completed his university studies, I was anxious to get my examination over as quickly as possible. At the end of 1863 I wrote to my teacher, Professor Broechner, who had promised me a short philosophical summary as a preparation for the University test: “I shall sit under a conjunction of all the most unfavourable circumstances possible, since for more than a month my head has been so full of the events of the day that I have been able neither to read nor think, while the time of the examination itself promises to be still more disquiet. Still, I dare not draw back, as I should then risk–which may possibly happen in any case–being hindered from my examination by being called out by the conscription and perhaps come to lie in my grave as _Studiosus_ instead of _candidatus magisterii_, which latter looks infinitely more impressive and is more satisfying to a man as greedy of honour as Your respectful and heartily affectionate, etc.”

XIV.

Shortly before, I had paid my first visit to Professor Rasmus Nielsen. He was exceedingly agreeable, recognised me, whom perhaps he remembered examining, and accorded me a whole hour’s conversation. He was, as always, alert and fiery, not in the least blase, but with a slight suggestion of charlatanism about him. His conversation was as lively and disconnected as his lectures; there was a charm in the clear glance of his green eyes, a look of genius about his face. He talked for a long time about Herbart, whose Aesthetics, for that matter, he betrayed little knowledge of, then of Hegel, Heiberg, and Kierkegaard. To my intense surprise, he opened up a prospect, conflicting with the opinions he had publicly advocated, that Science, “when analyses had been carried far enough,” might come to prove the possibility of miracles. This was an offence against my most sacred convictions.

Nielsen had recently, from the cathedra, announced his renunciation of the Kierkegaard standpoint he had so long maintained, in the phrase: “The Kierkegaard theory is impracticable”; he had, perhaps influenced somewhat by the Queen Dowager, who about that time frequently invited him to meet Grundtvig, drawn nearer to Grundtvigian ways of thinking,– as Broechner sarcastically remarked about him: “The farther from Kierkegaard, the nearer to the Queen Dowager.”

In the midst of my final preparations for the examination, I wrestled, as was my wont, with my attempts to come to a clear understanding over Duty and Life, and was startled by the indescribable irony in the word by which I was accustomed to interpret my ethically religious endeavours,–_Himmelspraet_. [Footnote: Word implying one who attempts to spring up to Heaven, and of course falls miserably to earth again. The word, in ordinary conversation, is applied to anyone tossed in a blanket.]

I handed in, then, my request to be allowed to sit for my Master of Arts examination; the indefatigable Broechner had already mentioned the matter to the Dean of the University, who understood the examinee’s reasons for haste. But the University moved so slowly that it was some weeks before I received the special paper set me, which, to my horror, ran as follows: “Determine the correlation between the pathetic and the symbolic in general, in order by that means to elucidate the contrast between Shakespeare’s tragedies and Dante’s _Divina Commedia_, together with the possible errors into which one might fall through a one-sided preponderance of either of these two elements.”

This paper, which had been set by R. Nielsen, is characteristic of the purely speculative manner, indifferent to all study of history, in which Aesthetics were at that time pursued in Copenhagen. It was, moreover, worded with unpardonable carelessness; it was impossible to tell from it what was to be understood by the correlation on which it was based, and which was assumed to be a given conclusion. Even so speculative a thinker as Frederik Paludan-Mueller called the question absolutely meaningless. It looked as though its author had imagined Shakespeare’s dramas and Dante’s epic were produced by a kind of artistic commingling of pathetic with symbolic elements, and as though he wished to call attention to the danger of reversing the correct proportions, for instance, by the symbolic obtaining the preponderance in tragedy, or pathos in the epopee, or to the danger of exaggerating these proportions, until there was too much tragic pathos, or too much epic symbolism. But a scientific definition of the expressions used was altogether lacking, and I had to devote a whole chapter to the examination of the meaning of the problem proposed to me.

The essay, for the writing of which I was allowed six weeks, was handed in, 188 folio pages long, at the right time. By reason of the sheer foolishness of the question, it was never published.

In a postscript, I wrote: “I beg my honoured examiners to remember the time during which this treatise was written, a time more eventful than any other young men can have been through, and during which I, for my part, have for days at a time been unable to work, and should have been ashamed if I could have done so.”

In explanation of this statement, the following jottings, written down at the time on a sheet of paper:

_Sunday, Jan. 17th_. Received letter telling me I may fetch my leading question to-morrow at 5 o’clock.

_Monday, Feb. 1st_. Heard to-day that the Germans have passed the Eider and that the first shots have been exchanged.

_Saturday, Feb. 6th_. Received to-day the terrible, incomprehensible, but only too certain news that the Danevirke has been abandoned without a blow being struck. This is indescribable, overwhelming.

_Thursday, Feb. 28th_. We may, unfortunately, assume it as certain that my dear friend Jens Paludan-Mueller fell at Oversoe on Feb. 5th.

_Feb. 28th_. Heard definitely to-day.–At half-past one this night finished my essay.

XV.

I thought about this time of nothing but my desire to become a competent soldier of my country. There was nothing I wanted more, but I felt physically very weak. When the first news of the battles of Midsunde and Bustrup arrived, I was very strongly inclined to follow Julius Lange to the Reserve Officers’ School. When tidings came of the abandonment of the Danevirke my enthusiasm cooled; it was as though I foresaw how little prospect of success there was. Still, I was less melancholy than Lange at the thought of going to the war. I was single, and delighted at the thought of going straight from the examination-table into a camp life, and from a book-mad student to become a lieutenant. I was influenced most by the prospect of seeing Lange every day at the Officers’ School, and on the field. But my comrades explained to me that even if Lange and I came out of the School at the same time, it did not follow that we should be in the same division, and that the thing, moreover, that was wanted in an officer, was entire self-dependence. They also pointed out to me the improbability of my being able to do the least good, or having the slightest likelihood in front of me of doing anything but quickly find myself in hospital. I did not really think myself that I should be able to stand the fatigue, as the pupils of the military academy went over to the army with an equipment that I could scarcely have carried. I could not possibly suppose that the conscription would select me as a private, on account of my fragile build; but like all the rest, I was expecting every day a general ordering out of the fit men of my age.

All this time I worked with might and main at the development of my physical strength and accomplishments. I went every day to fencing practice, likewise to cavalry sword practice; I took lessons in the use of the bayonet, and I took part every afternoon in the shooting practices conducted by the officers–with the old muzzle-loaders which were the army weapons at the time. I was very delighted one day when Mr. Hagemeister, the fencing-master, one of the many splendid old Holstein non-commissioned officers holding the rank of lieutenant, said I was “A smart fencer.”

XVI.

Meanwhile, the examination was taking its course. As real curiosities, I here reproduce the questions set me. The three to be replied to in writing were:

1. To what extent can poetry be called the ideal History?

2. In what manner may the philosophical ideas of Spinoza and Fichte lead to a want of appreciation of the idea of beauty?

3. In what relation does the comic stand to its limitations and its various contrasts?

The three questions which were to be replied to in lectures before the University ran as follows:

1. Show, through poems in our literature, to what extent poetry may venture to set itself the task of presenting the Idea in a form coinciding with the philosophical understanding of it?

2. Point out the special contributions to a philosophical definition of the Idea made by Aesthetics in particular.

3. What are the merits and defects of Schiller’s tragedies?

These questions, in conjunction with the main question, may well be designated a piece of contemporary history; they depict exactly both the Science of the time and the peculiar philosophical language it adopted. Hardly more than one, or at most two, of them could one imagine set to- day.

After the final (and best) lecture, on Schiller, which was given at six hours’ notice on April 25th, the judges, Hauch, Nielsen and Broechner, deliberated for about ten minutes, then called in the auditors and R. Nielsen read aloud the following verdict: “The candidate, in his long essay, in the shorter written tests, and in his oral lectures, has manifested such knowledge of his subject, such intellectual maturity, and such originality in the treatment of his themes, that we have on that account unanimously awarded him the mark: _admissus cum laude praecipua_.”

XVII.

The unusually favourable result of this examination attracted the attention of academical and other circles towards me. The mark _admissus cum praecipua laude_ had only very rarely been given before. Hauch expressed his satisfaction at home in no measured terms. His wife stopped my grandfather in the street and informed him that his grandson was the cleverest and best-read young man that her husband had come across during his University experience. When I went to the old poet after the examination to thank him, he said to me (these were his very words): “I am an old man and must die soon; you must be my successor at the University; I shall say so unreservedly; indeed, I will even say it on my death-bed.” Strangely enough, he did say it and record it on his death-bed seven years later, exactly as he had promised to do.

In Broechner’s house, too, there was a great deal said about my becoming a professor. I myself was despondent about it; I thought only of the war, only wished to be fit for a soldier. Hauch was pleased at my wanting to be a soldier. “It is fine of you, if you can only stand it.” When Hauch heard for certain that I was only 22 years old (he himself was 73), he started up in his chair and said:

“Why, it is incredible that at your age you can have got so far.” Rasmus Nielsen was the only one of the professors who did not entertain me with the discussion of my future academic prospects; but he it was who gave me the highest praise:

“According to our unanimous opinions,” said he, “you are the foremost of all the young men.”

I was only the more determined not to let myself be buried alive in the flower of my youth by accepting professorship before I had been able to live and breathe freely.–I might have spared myself any anxiety.

XVIII.

A few days later, on May both, a month’s armistice was proclaimed, which was generally construed as a preliminary to peace, if this could be attained under possible conditions. It was said, and soon confirmed, that at the Conference of London, Denmark had been offered North Slesvig. Most unfortunately, Denmark refused the offer. On June 26th, the war broke out again; two days later Alsen was lost. When the young men were called up to the officers’ board for conscription, “being too slight of build,” I was deferred till next year. Were the guerilla war which was talked about to break out, I was determined all the same to take my part in it.

But the Bluhme-David Ministry succeeded to Monrad’s, and concluded the oppressive peace.

I was very far from regarding this peace as final; for that, I was too inexperienced. I correctly foresaw that before very long the state of affairs in Europe would give rise to other wars, but I incorrectly concluded therefrom that another fight for Slesvig, or in any case, its restoration to Denmark, would result from them.

In the meantime peace, discouraging, disheartening though it was, opened up possibilities of further undisturbed study, fresh absorption in scientific occupations.

When, after the termination of my University studies, I had to think of earning my own living, I not only, as before, gave private lessons, but I gave lectures, first to a circle before whom I lectured on Northern and Greek mythology, then to another, in David’s house, to whom I unfolded the inner history of modern literature to interested listeners, amongst them several beautiful young girls. I finally engaged myself to my old Arithmetic master as teacher of Danish in his course for National school-mistresses. I found the work horribly dull, but there was one racy thing about it, namely, that I, the master, was three years younger than the youngest of my pupils; these latter were obliged to be at least 25, and consequently even at their youngest were quite old in my eyes.

But there were many much older women amongst them, one even, a priest or schoolmaster’s widow, of over fifty, a poor thing who had to begin–at her age!–from the very beginning, though she was anything but gifted. It was not quite easy for a master without a single hair on his face to make himself respected. But I succeeded, my pupils being so well- behaved.

It was an exciting moment when these pupils of mine went up for their teacher’s examination, I being present as auditor.

I continued to teach this course until the Autumn of 1868. When I left, I was gratified by one of the ladies rising and, in a little speech, thanking me for the good instruction I had given.

XIX.

Meanwhile, I pursued my studies with ardour and enjoyment, read a very great deal of _belles-lettres_, and continued to work at German philosophy, inasmuch as I now, though without special profit, plunged into a study of Trendelenburg. My thoughts were very much more stimulated by Gabriel Sibbern, on account of his consistent scepticism. It was just about this time that I made his acquaintance. Old before his time, bald at forty, tormented with gout, although he had always lived a most abstemious life, Gabriel Sibbern, with his serene face, clever eyes and independent thoughts, was an emancipating phenomenon. He had divested himself of all Danish prejudices. “There is still a great deal of phlogiston in our philosophy,” he used to say sometimes.

I had long been anxious to come to a clear scientific understanding of the musical elements in speech. I had busied myself a great deal with metrical art. Bruecke’s _Inquiries_ were not yet in existence, but I was fascinated by Apel’s attempt to make use of notes (crotchets, quavers, dotted quavers, and semi-quavers) as metrical signs, and by J.L. Heiberg’s attempt to apply this system to Danish verse. But the system was too arbitrary for anything to be built up upon it. And I then made up my mind, in order better to understand the nature of verse, to begin at once to familiarise myself with the theory of music, which seemed to promise the opening out of fresh horizons in the interpretation of the harmonies of language.

With the assistance of a young musician, later the well-known composer and Concert Director, Victor Bendix, I plunged into the mysteries of thorough-bass, and went so far as to write out the entire theory of harmonics. I learnt to express myself in the barbaric language of music, to speak of minor scales in fifths, to understand what was meant by enharmonic ambiguity. I studied voice modulation, permissible and non- permissible octaves; but I did not find what I hoped. I composed a few short tunes, which I myself thought very pretty, but which my young master made great fun of, and with good reason. One evening, when he was in very high spirits, he parodied one of them at the piano in front of a large party of people. It was a disconcerting moment for the composer of the tune.

A connection between metrical art and thorough-bass was not discoverable. Neither were there any unbreakable laws governing thorough-bass. The unversed person believes that in harmonics he will find quite definite rules which must not be transgressed. But again and again he discovers that what is, as a general rule, forbidden, is nevertheless, under certain circumstances, quite permissible.

Thus he learns that in music there is no rule binding on genius. And perhaps he asks himself whether, in other domains, there are rules which are binding on genius.

XX.

I had lived so little with Nature. The Spring of 1865, the first Spring I had spent in the country–although quite near to Copenhagen–meant to me rich impressions of nature that I never forgot, a long chain of the most exquisite Spring memories. I understood as I had never done before the inborn affection felt by every human being for the virgin, the fresh, the untouched, the not quite full-blown, just as it is about to pass over into its maturity. It was in the latter half of May. I was looking for anemones and violets, which had not yet gone to seed. The budding beech foliage, the silver poplar with its shining leaves, the maple with its blossoms, stirred me, filled me with Spring rapture. I could lie long in the woods with my gaze fastened on a light-green branch with the sun shining through it, and, as if stirred by the wind, lighted up from different sides, and floating and flashing as if coated with silver. I saw the empty husks fall by the hundred before the wind. I followed up the streams in the wood to their sources. For a while a rivulet oozed slowly along. Then came a little fall, and it began to speak, to gurgle and murmur; but only at this one place, and here it seemed to me to be like a young man or woman of twenty. Now that I, who in my boyhood’s days had gone for botanical excursions with my master and school-fellows, absorbed myself in every plant, from greatest to least, without wishing to arrange or classify any, it seemed as though an infinite wisdom in Nature were being revealed to me for the first time.

As near to Copenhagen as Soendermarken, stood the beech, with its curly leaves and black velvet buds in their silk jackets. In the gardens of Frederiksberg Avenue, the elder exhaled its fragrance, but was soon over; the hawthorn sprang out in all its splendour. I was struck by the loveliness of the chestnut blooms. When the blossom on the cherry-trees had withered, the lilac was out, and the apple and pear-trees paraded their gala dress.

It interested me to notice how the colour sometimes indicated the shape, sometimes produced designs quite independently of it. I loitered in gardens to feast my eyes on the charming grouping of the rhubarb leaves no less than on the exuberance of their flowers, and the leaves of the scorzonera attracted my attention, because they all grew in one plane, but swung about like lances.

And as my habit was, I philosophised over what I saw and had made my own, and I strove to understand in what beauty consisted. I considered the relations between beauty and life; why was it that artificial flowers and the imitation of a nightingale’s song were so far behind their originals in beauty? What was the difference between the beauty of the real, the artificial and the painted flower? Might not Herbart’s Aesthetics be wrong, in their theory of form? The form itself might be the same in Nature and the imitation, in the rose made of velvet and the rose growing in the garden. And I reflected on the connection between the beauty of the species and that of the individual. Whether a lily be a beautiful flower, I can say without ever having seen lilies before, but whether it be a beautiful lily, I cannot. The individual can only be termed beautiful when more like than unlike to the ideal of the species. And I mused over the translation of the idea of beauty into actions and intellectual conditions. Was not the death of Socrates more beautiful than his preservation of Alcibiades’ life in battle?–though this was none the less a beautiful act.

XXI.

In the month of July I started on a walking tour through Jutland, with the scenery of which province I had not hitherto been acquainted; travelled also occasionally by the old stage-coaches, found myself at Skanderborg, which, for me, was surrounded by the halo of mediaeval romance; wandered to Silkeborg, entering into conversation with no end of people, peasants, peasant boys, and pretty little peasant girls, whose speech was not always easy to understand. I studied their Juttish, and laughed heartily at their keen wit. The country inns were often over-full, so that I was obliged to sleep on the floor; my wanderings were often somewhat exhausting, as there were constant showers, and the night rain had soaked the roads. I drove in a peasant’s cart to Mariager to visit my friend Emil Petersen, who was in the office of the district judge of that place, making his home with his brother-in-law and his very pretty sister, and I stayed for a few days with him. Here I became acquainted with a little out-of-the-world Danish town. The priest and his wife were an interesting and extraordinary couple. The priest, the before-mentioned Pastor Ussing, a little, nervous, intelligent and unworldly man, was a pious dreamer, whose religion was entirely rationalistic. Renan’s recently published _Life of Jesus_ was so far from shocking him that the book seemed to him in all essentials to be on the right track. He had lived in the Danish West Indies, and there he had become acquainted with his wife, a lady with social triumphs behind her, whose charms he never wearied of admiring. The mere way in which she placed her hat upon her head, or threw a shawl round her shoulders, could make him fall into ecstasies, even though he only expressed his delight in her in half-facetious terms. This couple showed me the most cordial kindness; to their unpractised, provincial eyes, I seemed to be a typical young man of the world, and they amazed me with the way in which they took it for granted that I led the dances at every ball, was a lion in society, etc. I was reminded of the student’s words in Hostrup’s vaudeville: “Goodness! How innocent they must be to think _me_ a dandy!” and vainly assured them that I lived an exceedingly unnoticed life in Copenhagen, and had never opened a ball in my life.

The priest asked us two young men to go and hear his Sunday sermon, and promised that we should be pleased with it. We went to church somewhat expectant, and the sermon was certainly a most unusual one. It was delivered with great rapture, after the priest had bent his head in his hands for a time in silent reflection. With great earnestness he addressed himself to his congregation and demanded, after having put before them some of the cures in the New Testament, generally extolled as miracles, whether they dared maintain that these so-called miracles could not have taken place according to Nature’s laws. And when he impressively called out: “Darest thou, with thy limited human intelligence, say, ‘This cannot happen naturally?'” it was in the same tone and style in which another priest would have shouted out: “Darest thou, with thy limited human intelligence, deny the miracle?” The peasants, who, no doubt, understood his words quite in this latter sense, did not understand in the least the difference and the contrast, but judged much the same as a dog to whom one might talk angrily with caressing words or caressingly with abusive words, simply from the speaker’s tone; and both his tone and facial expression were ecstatic. They perceived no heresy and felt themselves no less edified by the address than did the two young Copenhagen graduates.

XXII.

My first newspaper articles were printed in _The Fatherland_ and the _Illustrated Times_; the very first was a notice of Paludan- Mueller’s _Fountain of Youth_, in which I had compressed matter for three or four lectures; a commissioned article on Dante was about the next, but this was of no value. But it was a great event to see one’s name printed in a newspaper for the first time, and my mother saw it not without emotion.

About this time Henrik Ibsen’s first books fell into my hands and attracted my attention towards this rising poet, who, among the leading Danish critics, encountered a reservation of appreciation that scarcely concealed ill-will. From Norway I procured Ibsen’s oldest dramas, which had appeared there.

Frederik Algreen-Ussing asked me to contribute to a large biographical dictionary, which he had for a long time been planning and preparing, and which he had just concluded a contract for with the largest Danish publishing firm of the time. A young man who hated the August Association and all its deeds could not fail to feel scruples about engaging in any collaboration with its founder. But Algreen-Ussing knew how to vanquish all such scruples, inasmuch as he waived all rights of censorship, and left it to each author to write as he liked upon his own responsibility. And he was perfectly loyal to his promise. Moreover, the question here was one of literature only, and not politics.

As the Danish authors were to be dealt with in alphabetical order, the article that had to be set about at once was an account of the only Danish poet whose name began with _Aa_. Thus it was that Emil Aarestrup came to be the first Danish poet of the past of whom I chanced to write. I heard of the existence of a collection of unprinted letters from Aarestrup to his friend Petersen, the grocer, which were of very great advantage to my essay. A visit that I paid to the widow of the poet, on the other hand, led to no result whatever. It was strange to meet the lady so enthusiastically sung by Aarestrup in his young days, as a sulky and suspicious old woman without a trace of former beauty, who declared that she had no letters from her husband, and could not give me any information about him. It was only a generation later that his letters to her came into my hands.

In September, 1865, the article on Aarestrup was finished. It was intended to be quickly followed up by others on the remaining Danish authors in A. But it was the only one that was written, for Algreen- Ussing’s apparently so well planned undertaking was suddenly brought to a standstill. The proprietors of the National Liberal papers declared, as soon as they heard of the plan, that they would not on any account agree to its being carried out by a man who took up such a “reactionary” position in Danish politics as Ussing, and in face of their threat to annihilate the undertaking, the publishers, who were altogether dependent on the attitude of these papers, did not dare to defy them. They explained to Algreen-Ussing that they felt obliged to break their contract with him, but were willing to pay him the compensation agreed upon beforehand for failure to carry it out. He fought long to get his project carried through, but his efforts proving fruitless, he refused, from pride, to accept any indemnity, and was thus compelled to see with bitterness many years’ work and an infinite amount of trouble completely wasted. Shortly afterwards he succumbed to an attack of illness.

XXIII.

A young man who plunged into philosophical study at the beginning of the sixties in Denmark, and was specially engrossed by the boundary relations between Philosophy and Religion, could not but come to the conclusion that philosophical life would never flourish in Danish soil until a great intellectual battle had been set on foot, in the course of which conflicting opinions which had never yet been advanced in express terms should be made manifest and wrestle with one another, until it became clear which standpoints were untenable and which could be maintained. Although he cherished warm feelings of affection for both R. Nielsen and Broechner the two professors of Philosophy, he could not help hoping for a discussion between them of the fundamental questions which were engaging his mind. As Broechner’s pupil, I said a little of what was in my mind to him, but could not induce him to begin. Then I begged Gabriel Sibbern to furnish a thorough criticism of Nielsen’s books, but he declined. I began to doubt whether I should be able to persuade the elder men to speak.

A review in The _Fatherland_ of the first part of Nielsen’s _Logic of Fundamental Ideas_ roused my indignation. It was in diametric opposition to what I considered irrefutably true, and was written in the style, and with the metaphors, which the paper’s literary criticisms had brought into fashion, a style that was repugnant to me with its sham poetical, or meaninglessly flat expressions (“Matter is the hammer-stroke that the Ideal requires”–“Spontaneity is like food that has once been eaten”).

In an eleven-page letter to Broechner I condensed all that I had thought about the philosophical study at the University during these first years of my youth, and proved to him, in the keenest terms I could think of, that it was his duty to the ideas whose spokesman he was, to come forward, and that it would be foolish, in fact wrong, to leave the matter alone. I knew well enough that I was jeopardising my precious friendship with Broechner by my action, but I was willing to take the risk. I did not expect any immediate result of my letter, but thought to myself that it should ferment, and some time in the future might bear fruit. The outcome of it far exceeded my expectations, inasmuch as Broechner was moved by my letter, and not only thanked me warmly for my daring words, but went without delay to Nielsen and told him that he intended to write a book on his entire philosophical activity and significance. Nielsen took his announcement with a good grace.

However, as Broechner immediately afterwards lost his young wife, and was attacked by the insidious consumption which ravaged him for ten years, the putting of this resolution into practice was for several years deferred.

At that I felt that I myself must venture, and, as a beginning, Julius Lange and I, in collaboration, wrote a humorous article on Schmidt’s review of _The Logic of Fundamental Ideas_, which Lange was to get into _The Daily Paper_, to which he had access. Three days after the article was finished Lange came to me and told me that to his dismay it was–gone. It was so exactly like him that I was just as delighted as if he had informed me that the article was printed. For some time we hoped that it might be on Lange’s table, for, the day before, he had said:

“I am not of a curious disposition, but I should like to know what there really is on that table!”

However, it had irrevocably disappeared.

I then came forward myself with a number of shorter articles which I succeeded in getting accepted by the _Fatherland_. When I entered for the first time Ploug’s tiny little office high up at the top of a house behind Hoejbro Place, the gruff man was not unfriendly. Surprised at the youthful appearance of the person who walked in, he merely burst out: “How old are you?” And to the reply: “Twenty-three and a half,” he said smilingly, “Don’t forget the half.”

The first article was not printed for months; the next ones appeared without such long delay. But Ploug was somewhat uneasy about the contents of them, and cautiously remarked that there was “not to be any fun made of Religion,” which it could not truthfully be said I had done. But I had touched upon dogmatic Belief and that was enough.

Later on, Ploug had a notion that, as he once wrote, he had excluded me from the paper as soon as he perceived my mischievous tendency. This was a failure of memory on his part; the reason I left the paper was a different one, and I left of my own accord.

Bold and surly, virile and reliable as Ploug seemed, in things journalistic you could place slight dependence on his word. His dearest friend admitted as much; he gave his consent, and then forgot it, or withdrew it. Nothing is more general, but it made an overweening impression on a beginner like myself, inexperienced in the ways of life.

When Ibsen’s _Brand_ came out, creating an unusual sensation, I asked Ploug if I might review the book and received a definite “Yes” from him. I then wrote my article, to which I devoted no little pains, but when I took it in it was met by him, to my astonishment, with the remark that the paper had now received another notice from their regular reviewer, whom he “could not very well kick aside.” Ploug’s promise had apparently been meaningless! I went my way with my article, firmly resolved never to go there again.

From 1866 to 1870 I sought and found acceptance for my newspaper articles (not very numerous) in Bille’s _Daily Paper_, which in its turn closed its columns to me after my first series of lectures at the University of Copenhagen. Bille as an editor was pleasant, a little patronising, it is true, but polite and invariably good-tempered. He usually received his contributors reclining at full length on his sofa, his head, with its beautifully cut features, resting against a cushion and his comfortable little stomach protruding. He was scarcely of medium height, quick in everything he did, very clear, a little flat; very eloquent, but taking somewhat external views; pleased at the great favour he enjoyed among the Copenhagen bourgeoisie. If he entered Tivoli’s Concert Hall in an evening all the waiter’s ran about at once like cockroaches. They hurried to know what he might please to want, and fetched chairs for him and his party. Gay, adaptable, and practised, he was the principal speaker at every social gathering. In his editorial capacity he was courteous, decided, and a man of his word; he did not allow himself to be alarmed by trifles. When Bjoernson attacked me (I was at the time his youngest contributor), he raised my scale of pay, unsolicited. The first hitch in our relations occurred when in 1869 I published a translation of Mill’s Subjection of Women. This book roused Bille’s exasperation and displeasure. He forbade it to be reviewed in his paper, refused me permission to defend it in the paper, and would not even allow the book in his house, so that his family had to read it clandestinely, as a dangerous and pernicious work.

XXIV.

In the beginning of the year 1866 Ludvig David died suddenly in Rome, of typhoid fever. His sorrowing parents founded in memory of him an exhibition for law-students which bears and perpetuates his name. The first executors of the fund were, in addition to his most intimate friend, two young lawyers named Emil Petersen and Emil Bruun, who had both been friends of his. The latter, who has not previously been mentioned in these pages, was a strikingly handsome and clever young man, remarkable for his calm and superior humour, and exceedingly self- confident and virile. His attitude towards Ludvig David in his early youth had been somewhat that of a protector. Unfortunately he was seriously wounded during the first storming of the Dybboel redoubts by the Germans; a bullet crushed one of the spinal vertebrae; gradually the wound brought on consumption of the lungs and he died young.

Ludvig David’s death was a great loss to his friends. It was not only that he took such an affectionate interest in their welfare and happiness, but he had a considerable gift for Mathematics and History, and, from his home training, an understanding of affairs of state which was considerably above that of most people. Peculiarly his own was a combination of keen, disintegrating intelligence, and a tendency towards comprehensive, rounded off, summarising. He had strong public antipathies. In his opinion the years of peace that had followed the first war in Slesvig had had an enervating effect; public speakers and journalists had taken the places of brave men; many a solution of a difficulty, announced at first with enthusiasm, had in course of time petrified into a mere set phrase. He thought many of the leading men among the Liberals superficial and devoid of character, and accused them, with the pitilessness of youth, of mere verbiage. Influenced as he was by Kierkegaard, such a man as Bille was naturally his aversion. He considered–not altogether justly–that Bille cloaked himself in false earnestness.

He himself was profoundly and actively philanthropic, with an impulse– by no means universal–to relieve and help. Society life he hated; to him it was waste of time and a torture to be obliged to figure in a ballroom; he cared very little for his appearance, and was by no means elegant in his dress. He was happy, however, in the unconstrained society of the comrades he cared about, enjoyed a merry chat or a frolicsome party, and in intimate conversation he would reveal his inmost nature with modest unpretension, with good-natured wit, directed against himself as much as against others, and with an understanding and sympathetic eye for his surroundings. His warmest outburst had generally a little touch of mockery or teasing about it, as though he were repeating, half roguishly, the feelings of another, rather than unreservedly expressing his own. But a heartfelt, steadfast look would often come into his beautiful dark eyes.

XXV.

His death left a great void in his home. His old father said to me one day:

“Strange how one ends as one begins! I have written no verses since my early youth, and now I have written a poem on my grief for Ludvig. I will read it to you.”

There was an Art and Industrial Exhibition in Stockholm, that Summer, which C.N. David was anxious to see. As he did not care to go alone, he took me in his son’s place. It was my first journey to a foreign capital, and as such both enjoyable and profitable. I no longer, it is true, had the same intense boyish impressionability as when I was in Sweden for the first time, seven years before. The most trifling thing then had been an experience. In Goeteborg I had stayed with a friend of my mother’s, whose twelve-year-old daughter, Bluma Alida, a wondrously charming little maiden, had jokingly been destined by the two mothers for my bride from the child’s very birth. And at that time I had assimilated every impression of people or scenery with a voracious appetite which rendered these impressions ineffaceable all my life long. That Summer month, my fancy had transformed every meeting with a young girl into an adventure and fixed every landscape on my mental retina with an affection such as the landscape painter generally only feels for a place where he is specially at home. Then I had shared for a whole month Goeteborg family and social life. Now I was merely travelling as a tourist, and as the companion of a highly respected old man.

I was less entranced at Stockholm by the Industrial Exhibition than by the National Museum and the Royal Theatre, where the lovely Hyasser captivated me by her beauty and the keen energy of her acting. I became exceedingly fond of Stockholm, this most beautifully situated of the Northern capitals, and saw, with reverence, the places associated with the name of Bellman. I also accompanied my old friend to Ulriksdal, where the Swedish Queen Dowager expected him in audience. More than an hour before we reached the Castle he threw away his cigar.

“I am an old courtier,” he remarked. He had always been intimately associated with the Danish Royal family; for a long time the Crown Prince used to go regularly to his flat in Queen’s Crossway Street, to be instructed by him in political economy. He was consequently used to Court ceremonial.

Beautiful were those Summer days, lovely the light nights in Stockholm.

One recollection from these weeks is associated with a night when the sky was overcast. I had wandered round the town, before retiring to rest, and somewhere, in a large square, slipping my hand in my pocket, and feeling it full of bits of paper, could not remember how they got there, and threw them away. When I was nearly back at the hotel it flashed upon me that it had been small Swedish notes–all the money that I had changed for my stay in Stockholm–that I had been carrying loose in my pocket and had so thoughtlessly thrown away. With a great deal of trouble, I found the square again, but of course not a sign of the riches that in unpardonable forgetfulness I had scattered to the winds. I was obliged to borrow six Rigsdaler (a sum of a little over thirteen shillings) from my old protector. That my requirements were modest is proved by the fact that this sum sufficed.

The Danish Ambassador was absent from Stockholm just at this time, and the Charge d’Affaires at the Legation had to receive the Danish ex- Minister in his stead. He was very attentive to us, and took the travellers everywhere where C.N. David wished his arrival to be made known. He himself, however, was a most unfortunate specimen of Danish diplomacy, a man disintegrated by hideous debauchery, of coarse conversation, and disposition so brutal that he kicked little children aside with his foot when they got in front of him in the street. Abnormities of too great irregularity brought about, not long afterwards, his dismissal and his banishment to a little Danish island.

This man gave a large dinner-party in honour of the Danish ex-Minister, to which, amongst others, all the Swedish and Norwegian Ministers in Stockholm were invited. It was held at Hasselbakken, [Footnote: a favourite outdoor pleasure resort at Stockholm.] and the arrangements were magnificent. But what highly astonished me, and was in reality most out of keeping in such a circle, was the tone that the conversation at table gradually assumed, and especially the obscenity of the subjects of conversation. It was not, however, the Ministers and Diplomats present, but a Danish roue, a professor of Physics, who gave this turn to the talk. He related anecdotes that would have made a sailor blush. Neither Count Manderstroem, nor any of the other Ministers, neither Malmgren, nor the dignified and handsome Norwegian Minister Bretteville, seemed to be offended. Manderstroem’s expression, however, changed very noticeably when the professor ventured to make some pointed insinuations regarding the Swedish attitude, and his personal attitude in particular, previous to the Dano-German war and during its course. He suddenly pretended not to understand, and changed the subject of conversation.

It produced an extremely painful impression upon me that not only the Danish Charge d’Affaires, but apparently several of these fine gentlemen, had determined on the additional amusement of making me drunk. Everybody at table vied one with the other to drink my health,