by an edition of his collected works, or at any rate a very exhaustive selection from them. He would not and could not direct so great an undertaking himself, from another country; he only knew one man who was capable of doing so, and him he requested to undertake the matter. He had drawn up a plan of the edition, a sketch of the order in which the writings were to come out, and what the volume was to contain, and he placed it before me for approval or criticism. The edition was to be preceded by an account of Goldschmidt as an author and of his artistic development; if I would undertake to write this, I was asked to go to see Goldschmidt, in order to hear what he himself regarded as the main features and chief points of his literary career.
The draft of what the projected edition was to include made quite a little parcel of papers; besides these, Steen gave me to read the actual request to me to undertake the task, which was cautiously worded as a letter, not to me, but to Bookseller Steen, and which Steen had been expressly enjoined to bring back with him. Although I did not at all like this last-mentioned item, and although this evidence of distrust was in very conspicuous variance with the excessive and unmerited confidence that was at the same time being shown me, this same confidence impressed me greatly.
The information that Goldschmidt, undoubtedly the first prose writer in the country, was about to break off his literary activity and permanently leave Denmark, was in itself overwhelming and at once set my imagination actively at work. What could the reason be? A crime? That was out of the question. What else could there be but a love affair, and that had my entire sympathy. It was well known that Goldschmidt admired a very beautiful woman, who was watched the more jealously by her husband, because the latter had for a great number of years been paralysed. He would not allow her to go to the theatre to sit anywhere but in the mirror box [Footnote: The mirror box was a box in the first Royal Theatre, surrounded by mirrors and with a grating in front, where the stage could be seen, reflected in the mirrors, but the occupants were invisible. It was originally constructed to utilise a space whence the performance could not otherwise be seen, and was generally occupied by actresses, etc.], where she could not be seen by the public. The husband met with no sympathy from the public; he had always been a characterless and sterile writer, had published only two books, written in a diametrically opposite spirit, flatly contradicting one another. As long as he was able to go out he had dyed his red hair black. He was an insignificant man in every way, and by his first marriage with an ugly old maid had acquired the fortune which alone had enabled him to pay court to the beautiful woman he subsequently won.
It had leaked out that she was the original of the beautiful woman in The Inheritance, and that some of the letters that occur in it were really notes from Goldschmidt to her.
What more likely than the assumption that the position of affairs had at last become unbearable to Goldschmidt, and that he had determined on an elopement to London? In a romantic purpose of the sort Goldschmidt could count upon the sympathy of a hot-blooded young man. I consequently declared myself quite willing to talk the matter over with the poet and learn more particulars as to what was expected of me; meanwhile, I thought I might promise my assistance. It was Easter week, I believe Maunday Thursday; I promised to call upon Goldschmidt on one of the holidays at a prearranged time.
Good Friday and Easter Sunday I was prevented from going to him, and I had already made up my mind to pay my visit on Easter Monday when on Monday morning I received a letter from Bookseller Steen which made me exceedingly indignant. The letter, which exhibited, as I considered, (incorrectly, as it turned out), unmistakably signs of having been dictated to him, bore witness to the utmost impatience. Steen wrote that after undertaking to pay a visit to Goldschmidt I had now let two days elapse without fulfilling my promise. There was “no sense in keeping a man waiting” day after day, on such important business; in Steen’s “personal opinion,” it had not been at all polite of me, as the younger author, not to inform Goldschmidt which day I would go to see him.
I was very much cooled by reading this letter. I saw that I had wounded Goldschmidt’s vanity deeply by not going to him immediately upon receipt of his communication; but my chief impression was one of surprise that Goldschmidt should reveal himself such a poor psychologist in my case. How could he believe that I would allow myself to be terrified by rough treatment or won by tactless reprimands? How could he think that I regarded the task he wished to allot me as such an honour that for that reason I had not refused it? Could not Goldschmidt understand that it was solely the appeal to my better feelings from an opponent, struck by an untoward fate, that had determined my attitude?
Simultaneously, though at first very faintly, a suspicion crossed my mind. Was it possible that the whole touching story which had been confided to me was a hoax calculated to disarm my antagonism, arouse my sympathy and secure Goldschmidt a trumpeting herald? Was it possible that the mysterious information about the flight to London was only an untruth, the sole purpose of which was to get me into Goldschmidt’s service?
I dismissed the thought at once as too improbable, but it recurred, for I had learnt from experience that even distinguished authors sometimes did not shrink from very daring means of securing the services of a critic. A critic is like the rich heiress, who is always afraid of not being loved for herself alone. Even then, I was very loth to believe that any recognised author, much less a writer whose position was a vexed question, would make advances to me from pure benevolence, for the sake of my beautiful eyes, as they say in French.
At any rate, I had now made up my mind not to have anything whatever to do with the matter. I replied emphatically:
“Lessons in politeness I take from no one, consequently return you the enclosed papers. Be kind enough to appeal to some one else.”
This reply was evidently not the one the letter had been intended to evoke. Steen rushed up to me at once to apologise, but I did not see him. Twice afterwards he came with humble messages from Goldschmidt asking me to “do him the honour” of paying him a visit. But my pride was touchy, and my determination unwavering. Undoubtedly Steen’s letter was sent at Goldschmidt’s wish, but it is equally undoubted that its form had not been approved by him. That the alliance so cleverly led up to came to nothing was evidently as unexpected by the poet as unpalatable to him.
Not long afterwards, I accidentally had strong confirmation of my suspicion that the story of a flight from Denmark was merely an invention calculated to trap me, and after the lapse of some time I could no longer harbour a doubt that Goldschmidt had merely wished to disarm a critic and secure himself a public crier.
This did not make me feel any the more tenderly disposed towards Goldschmidt, and my feeling lent a sharper tone than it would otherwise have had to an essay I wrote shortly afterwards about him on the production of his play _Rabbi and Knight_ at the Royal Theatre.
Three years passed before our paths crossed again and a short-lived association came about between us.
XVIII.
In my public capacity about this time, I had many against me and no one wholly for me, except my old protector Broechner, who, for one thing, was very ill, and for another, by reason of his ponderous language, was unknown to the reading world at large. Among my personal friends there was not one who shared my fundamental views; if they were fond of me, it was in spite of my views. That in itself was a sufficient reason why I could not expect them, in the intellectual feud in which I was still engaged, to enter the lists on my behalf. I did not need any long experience to perceive that complete and unmixed sympathy with my endeavours was a thing I should not find. Such a sympathy I only met with in reality from one of my comrades, Emil Petersen, a young private individual with no connection whatever with literature, and without influence in other directions.
Moreover, I had learnt long ago that, as a literary beginner in a country on a Liliputian scale, I encountered prompt opposition at every step, and that ill-will against me was always expressed much more forcibly than good-will, was quickly, so to say, organised.
I had against me at once every literary or artistic critic who already held an assured position, from the influential men who wrote in _The Fatherland_ or the _Berlin Times_ to the small fry who snapped in the lesser papers, and if they mentioned me at all it was with the utmost contempt, or in some specially disparaging manner. It was the rival that they fought against. Thus it has continued to be all my life. Certain “critics,” such as Falkman in Denmark and Wirsen in Sweden, hardly ever put pen to paper for some forty years without bestowing an affectionate thought upon me. (Later, in Norway, I became Collin’s _idee fixe_.)
Add to these all who feared and hated a train of thought which in their opinion was dangerous to good old-fashioned faith and morality.
Definite as were the limits of my articles and longer contributions to the dispute concerning Faith and Science, and although, strictly speaking, they only hinged upon an obscure point in Rasmus Nielsen’s philosophy, they alarmed and excited a large section of the ecclesiastics of the country. I had carefully avoided saying anything against faith or piety; I knew that Orthodoxy was all-powerful in Denmark. However, I did not meet with refutations, only with the indignation of fanaticism. As far back as 1867 Bjoernson had come forward in print against me, had reproached the Daily Paper with giving my contributions a place in their columns, and reported their contents to the Editor, who was away travelling, on the supposition that they must have been accepted against his wishes; and although the article did not bear Bjoernson’s name, this attack was not without weight. The innocent remark that Soeren Kierkegaard was the Tycho Brahe of our philosophy, as great as Tycho Brahe, but, like him, failing to place the centre of our solar system in its Sun, gave Bjoernson an opportunity for the statement,–a very dangerous one for a young author of foreign origin to make,–that the man who could write like that “had no views in common with other Danes, no Danish mind.”
The year after I was astonished by inflammatory outbursts on the part of the clergy. One day in 1868 the much-respected Pastor Hohlenberg walked into my friend Benny Spang’s house, reprimanded her severely for receiving such an undoubted heretic and heathen under her roof, and demanded that she should break off all association with me. As she refused to do so and turned a deaf ear to his arguments, losing all self-control, he flung his felt hat on the floor, continued to rage and rail against me, and, no result coming of it, dashed at last, in a towering passion, out through the door, which he slammed behind him. There was a farcical ending to the scene, since he was obliged to ring at the door again for his hat, which, in his exasperation, he had forgotten. This was a kind of private prologue to the ecclesiastical drama which from the year 1871 upwards was enacted in most of the pulpits of the country. Only the parsons instead of flinging their hats upon the floor, beat their hands against the pulpit.
But what surprised me, a literary beginner, still more, was the gift I discovered in myself of hypnotising, by my mere existence, an ever- increasing number of my contemporaries till they became as though possessed by a hatred which lasted, sometimes a number of years, sometimes a whole life long, and was the essential determining factor in their careers and actions. By degrees, in this negative manner, I succeeded in engaging the attentions of more than a score of persons. For the time being, I encountered the phenomenon in the person of one solitary genius-mad individual. For a failure of a poet and philosopher, with whom I had nothing to do, and who did not interest me in the least, I became the one enemy it was his business to attack.
Rudolf Schmidt, who was a passionate admirer of Rasmus Nielsen, in whose examination lectures he coached freshmen, was enraged beyond measure by the objections, perfectly respectful, for that matter, in form, which I had raised against one of the main points in Nielsen’s philosophy. In 1866 he published a pamphlet on the subject; in 1867 a second, which, so possessed was he by his fury against his opponent, he signed with the latter’s own initials, Gb. And from this time forth, for at least a generation, it became this wretch’s task in life to persecute me under every possible pseudonym, and when his own powers were not sufficient, to get up conspiracies against me. In particular, he did all he could against me in Germany.
Meanwhile, he started a magazine in order to bring before the public himself and the ideas he was more immediately serving, viz.: those of R. Nielsen; and since this latter had of late drawn very much nearer to the Grundtvigian way of thinking, partly also those of Grundtvig. The magazine had three editors, amongst them R. Nielsen himself, and when one of them, who was the critic of the _Fatherland_, suddenly left the country, Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson took his place. The three names, R. Nielsen, B. Bjoernson, and Rudolph Schmidt, formed a trinity whose supremacy did not augur well for the success of a beginner in the paths of literature, who had attacked the thinker among them for ideal reasons, and who had been the object of violent attacks from the two others. The magazine _Idea and Reality_, was, as might be expected, sufficiently unfavourable to my cause.
The sudden disappearance of the critic of _The Fatherland_ from the literary arena was, under the conditions of the time, an event. He had no little talent, attracted by ideas and fancies that were sometimes very telling, repelled by mannerisms and a curious, far-fetched style, laid chief emphasis, in the spirit of the most modern Danish philosophy, on the will, and always defended ethical standpoints. From the time of Bjoernson’s first appearance he had attached himself so enthusiastically and inviolably to him that by the general public he was almost regarded as Bjoernson’s herald. At every opportunity he emphatically laid down Bjoernson’s importance and as a set-off fell upon those who might be supposed to be his rivals. Ibsen, in particular, received severe handling. His departure was thus a very hard blow for Bjoernson, but for that matter, was also felt as a painful loss by those he opposed.
XIX.
Not long after this departure, and immediately after the publication of my long article on Goldschmidt, I received one day, to my surprise, a letter of eight closely written pages from Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson, dated April 15th, 1869.
What had called it forth was my remark, in that article, that Bjoernson, like Goldschmidt, sometimes, when talent failed, pretended to have attained the highest, pretended that obscurity was the equivalent of profundity. When writing this, I was thinking of the obscure final speech about God in Heaven in Bjoernson’s _Mary Stuart_, which I still regard as quite vague, pretentious though it be as it stands there; however, it was an exaggeration to generalise the grievance, as I had done, and Bjoernson was right to reply. He considered that I had accused him of insincerity, though in this he was wrong; but for that matter, with hot-tempered eloquence, he also denied my real contention. His letter began:
Although I seldom read your writings, so that possibly I risk speaking of something you have elsewhere developed more clearly, and thus making a mistake, I nevertheless wish to make a determined protest against its being called a characteristic of mine, in contrast to Oehlenschlaeger (and Hauch!!), to strain my powers to reach what I myself only perceive unclearly, and then intentionally to state it as though it were clear. I am quite sure that I resemble Oehlenschlaeger in one thing, namely, that the defects of my book are open to all, and are not glossed over with any sort or kind of lie; anything unclear must for the moment have seemed clear to me, as in his case. My motto has always been: “Be faithful in _small_ things, and God shall make you ruler over great things.” And never, no, never, have I snatched after great material in order to seem great, or played with words in order to seem clever, or been silent, in order to appear deep. Never. The examples around me have been appalling to me, and I am sure that they have been so because I have from the very beginning been on my guard against lies. There are passages in every work which will not yield immediately what one impatiently demands of them;–and then I have always waited, never tried; the thing has had to come itself unforced, and it is possible that what I have received has been a deception; but I have believed in it; to me it has been no deception. Before I finally conclude, I always, it is true, go over again what I have written (as in the case of _Synnoeve_, and _A Happy Boy, Between the Fights_, etc). I wish to have the advantage of a better perception. Thus far, in what I have gone through, I have seen weak places which I can no longer correct. Lies I have never found.
Unfortunately one is often exposed to the danger of being untrue; but it is in moments of surprise and absolute passion, when something happens to one’s eye or one’s tongue, that one feels is half mad, but when the beast of prey within one, which shrinks at nothing, is the stronger. Untrue in one’s beautiful, poetic calm, one’s confessional silence, at one’s work, I think very few are.
This summing up, which does honour to Bjoernson and is not only a striking self-verdict, but a valuable contribution to poetic psychology in general, in its indication of the strength of the creative imagination and its possibilities of error, was followed by a co- ordinate attempt at a characterisation and appreciation of Goldschmidt:
You are likewise unjust to Goldschmidt on this point, that I know with certainty. Goldschmidt is of a naive disposition, susceptible of every noble emotion. It is true that he often stages these in a comic manner, and what you say about that is true; he does the same in private life, but you have not recognised the source of this. In the last instance, it is not a question of what we think, but of what we do. Just as this, on the whole, is an error that you fall persistently into, it is in particular an error here, where, for instance, his two brothers, with the same qualifications and with the same dual nature, have both developed into characters, the one indeed into a remarkable personality. But Goldschmidt began as a corsair captain at seventeen; his courage was the courage behind a pen that he fancied was feared, his happiness that of the flatterer, his dread that of being vapid; and there were many other unfavourable circumstances, for that matter…. He is now striving hard towards what he feels has, during his life, been wasted in his ability, both moral and intellectual qualities, and for my part, I respect this endeavour more than his decisive success within narrow limits.
In this passage the distinction and contrast between contemplative life and actual existence was quite in the Rasmus Nielsen spirit; the use that was made of it here was strange. One would suppose that the example adduced established that similar natural qualifications, similar family and other conditions, in other words, the actual essential conditions of life, were of small importance compared with one’s mode of thought, since the brothers could be so different; Bjoernson wished to establish, hereby, that the mode of life was more important than the mode of thought, although the former must depend on the latter. For the rest, he alluded to Goldschmidt’s weak points, even if in somewhat too superior a manner, and without laying stress upon his great artistic importance, with leniency and good-will.
But if, in other things he touched upon, he had an eye for essentials, this failed him sadly when the letter proceeded to a characterisation of the addressee, in which he mixed up true and false in inextricable confusion. Amongst other things, he wrote:
Here, I doubtless touch upon a point that is distinctive of your criticism. It is an absolute beauty worship. With that you can quickly traverse our little literature and benefit no one greatly; for the poet is only benefited by the man who approaches him with affection and from his own standpoint; the other he does not understand, and the public will, likely enough, pass with you through this unravelling of the thousand threads, and believe they are growing; but no man or woman who is sound and good lays down a criticism of this nature without a feeling of emptiness.
I chanced to read one of your travel descriptions which really became a pronouncement upon some of the greatest painters. It was their nature in their works (not their history or their lives so much as their natural dispositions) that you pointed out,–also the influence of their time upon them, but this only in passing; and you compared these painters, one with another. In itself, much of this mode of procedure is correct, but the result is merely racy. A single one of them, seized largely and affectionately, shown in such manner that the different paintings and figures became a description of himself, but were simultaneously the unfolding of a culture, would have been five times as understandable. A contrast can be drawn in when opportunity arises, but that is not the essential task. Yes, this is an illustration of the form of your criticism. It is an everlasting, and often very painful, juxtaposition of things appertaining and contrasting, but just as poetry itself is an absorption in the one thing that it has extracted from the many, so comprehension of it is dependent on the same conditions. The individual work or the individual author whom you have treated of, you have in the same way not brought together, but disintegrated, and the whole has become merely a piquant piece of effectiveness. Hitherto one might have said that it was at least good-natured; but of late there have supervened flippant expressions, paradoxical sentences, crude definitions, a definite contumacy and disgust, which is now and again succeeded by an outburst of delight over the thing that is peculiarly Danish, or peculiarly beautiful. I cannot help thinking of P.L. Moeller, as I knew him in Paris.
There are a thousand things between Heaven and Earth that you understand better than I. But for that very reason you can listen to me. It seems to me now as if the one half of your powers were undoing what the other half accomplishes. I, too, am a man with intellectual interests, but I feel no cooperation. Might there not be other tasks that you were more fitted for than that of criticism? I mean, that would be less of a temptation to you, and would _build_ up on your personality, at the same time as you yourself were building? It strikes me that even if you do choose criticism, it should be more strongly in the direction of our educating responsibilities and less as the arranger of technicalities, the spyer out of small things, the dragger together of all and everything which can be brought forward as a witness for or against the author, which is all frightfully welcome in a contemporary critical epidemic in Copenhagen, but, God help me, is nothing and accomplishes nothing.
This part of the letter irritated me intensely, partly by the mentor’s tone assumed in it, partly by a summing up of my critical methods which was founded simply and solely on the reading of three or four articles, more especially those on Rubens and Goldschmidt, and which quite missed the point. I was far from feeling that I had been understood, and for that reason warned against extremes; on the contrary, I saw myself only caricatured, without even wit or humour, and could not forget that the man who had sketched this picture of me had done his utmost to injure me. And he compared me with P.L. Moeller!
The fact that the conclusion of the letter contained much that was conciliatory and beautiful consequently did not help matters. Bjoernson wrote:
When you write about the Jews, although I am not in agreement with you, _altogether_ in agreement, you yet seem to me to touch upon a domain where you might have much to offer us, many beautiful prospects to open to us. In the same way, when you interpret Shakespeare (not when you make poetry by the side of him), when you tranquilly expound, I seem to see the beginnings of greater works, in any case of powers which I could imagine essentially contributing to the introduction into our culture of greater breadth of view, greater moral responsibility, more affection.
When I now read these words, I am obliged to transport myself violently back, into the feelings and to the intellectual standpoint that were mine at the time, in order to understand how they could to such a pitch incense me. It was not only that, like all young people of any account, I was irritable, sensitive and proud, and unwilling to be treated as a pupil; but more than that, as the way of youth is, I confused what I knew myself capable of accomplishing with what I had already accomplished; felt myself rich, exuberantly rich, already, and was indignant at perceiving myself deemed still so small.
But the last straw was a sentence which followed:
I should often have liked to talk all this over with you, when last I was in Copenhagen, but I noticed I was so pried after by gossips that I gave it up.
The last time Bjoernson was in Copenhagen he had written that article against me. Besides, I had been told that some few times he had read my first articles aloud in public in friends’ houses, and made fun of their forced and tyro-like wording. And now he wanted me to believe that he had at that time been thinking of visiting me, in order to come to an understanding with me. And worse still, the fear of gossip had restrained him! This hero of will-power so afraid of a little gossip! He might go on as he liked now, I had done with him. He did go on, both cordially and gracefully, but condescendingly, quite incapable of seeing how wounding the manner of his advances was. He wished to make advances to me and yet maintain a humiliating attitude of condescension:
There are not many of us in literature who are in earnest; the few who are ought not to be daunted by the accidental separation that opposed opinions can produce, when there is a large field for mutual understanding and co-operation. I sometimes get violently irate for a moment; if this in lesser men, in whom there really is something base, brings about a lifelong separation, it does not greatly afflict me. But I should be very sorry if it should influence the individuals in whom I feel there are both ability and will. And as far as you are concerned, I have such a strong feeling that you must be standing at a parting of the ways, that, by continuing your path further, you will go astray, that I want to talk to you, and consequently am speaking from my heart to you now. If you do not understand, I am sorry; that is all I can say.
In the Summer I am going to Finmark, and involuntarily, as I write this, the thought occurs to me what a journey it would be for you; away from everything petty and artificial to a scenery which in its magnificent loneliness is without parallel in the world, and where the wealth of birds above us and fish beneath us (whales, and shoals of herrings, cod and capelans often so close together that you can take them up in your hands, or they press against the sides of the boat) are marvel upon marvel, in the light of a Sun that does not set, while human beings up there live quiet and cowed by Nature. If you will come with me, and meet me, say, at Trondhjem, I know that you would not regret it. And then I should get conversation again; here there are not many who hit upon just that which I should like them to. Think about it.
A paragraph relating to Magdalene Thoresen followed. But what is here cited is the essential part of the letter. Had its recipient known Bjoernson better, he would in this have found a foundation to build upon. But as things were, I altogether overlooked the honestly meant friendliness in it and merely seized upon the no small portion of it that could not do other than wound. My reply, icy, sharp and in the deeper sense of the word, worthless, was a refusal. I did not believe in Bjoernson, saw in the letter nothing but an attempt to use me as a critic, now that he had lost his former advocate in the Press. The prospect of the journey to the North did not tempt me; in Bjoernson’s eyes it would have been Thor’s journey with Loki, and I neither was Loki nor wished to be.
But even had I been capable of rising to a more correct and a fuller estimate of Bjoernson’s character, there was too much dividing us at this time for any real friendship to have been established. Bjoernson was then still an Orthodox Protestant, and in many ways hampered by his youthful impressions; I myself was still too brusque to be able to adapt myself to so difficult and masterful a personality.
Eight years elapsed before the much that separated me from Bjoernson crumbled away. But then, when of his own accord he expressed his regret on a public occasion at the rupture between us, and spoke of me with unprejudiced comprehension and good-will, I seized with warmth and gratitude the hand stretched out to me. A hearty friendship, bringing with it an active and confidential correspondence, was established between us and remained unshaken for the next ten years, when it broke down, this time through no fault of mine, but through distrust on Bjoernson’s part, just as our intimacy had been hindered the first time through distrust on mine.
The year 1869 passed in steady hard work. Among the many smaller articles I wrote, one with the title of _The Infinitely Small and the Infinitely Great in Poetry_, starting with a representment of Shakespeare’s Harry Percy, contained a criticism of the hitherto recognised tendency of Danish dramatic poetry and pointed out into the future. The paper on H.C. Andersen, which came into being towards midsummer, and was read aloud in a clover field to a solitary listener, was representative of my critical abilities and aims at that date. I had then known Andersen socially for a considerable time. My cordial recognition of his genius drew us more closely together; he often came to see me and was very ready to read his new works aloud to me. It is hardly saying too much to declare that this paper secured me his friendship.
The fundamental principles of the essay were influenced by Taine, the art philosopher I had studied most deeply, and upon whom I had written a book that was to be my doctor’s thesis. Lightly and rapidly though my shorter articles came into being, this larger task was very long in hand. Not that I had little heart for my work; on the contrary, no question interested me more than those on which my book hinged; but there were only certain of them with which, as yet, I was equal to dealing.
First and foremost came the question of the nature of the producing mind, the possibility of showing a connection between its faculties and deriving them from one solitary dominating faculty, which would thus necessarily reveal itself in every aspect of the mind. It puzzled me, for example, how I was to find the source whence Pascal’s taste, both for mathematics and religious philosophy, sprang. Next came the question of the possibility of a universally applicable scientific method of criticism, regarded as intellectual optics. If one were to define the critic’s task as that of understanding, through the discovery and elucidation of the dependent and conditional contingencies that occur in the intellectual world, then there was a danger that he might approve everything, not only every form and tendency of art that had arisen historically, but each separate work within each artistic section. If it were no less the critic’s task to distinguish between the genuine and the spurious, he must at any rate possess a technical standard by which to determine greater or lesser value, or he must be so specially and extraordinarily gifted that his instinct and tact estimate infallibly.
Further, there was the question of genius, the point on which Taine’s theory roused decisive opposition in me. He regarded genius as a summing up, not as a new starting-point; according to him it was the assemblage of the original aptitudes of a race and of the peculiarities of a period in which these aptitudes were properly able to display themselves. He overlooked the originality of the man of genius, which could not be explained from his surroundings, the new element which, in genius, was combined with the summarising of surrounding particles. Before, when studying Hegel, I had been repelled by the suggestion that what spoke to us through the artist was only the universally valid, the universal mind, which, as it were, burnt out the originality of the individual. In Taine’s teaching, nation and period were the new (although more concrete) abstractions in the place of the universally valid; but here, too, the particularity of the individual was immaterial. The kernel of my work was a protest against this theory.
I was even more actively interested in the fundamental question raised by a scientific view of history. For some years I had been eagerly searching Comte and Littre, Buckle, Mill and Taine for their opinions on the philosophy of History. Here, too, though in another form, the question of the importance of the individual versus the masses presented itself. Statistics had proved to what extent conscious actions were subordinated to uniform laws. We could foresee from one year to another how many murders would be committed and how many with each kind of instrument. The differences between men and men neutralised each other, if we took the average of a very large number. But this did not prove that the individual was not of considerable importance. If the victory of Salamis depended on Themistocles, then the entire civilisation of Europe henceforth depended on him.
Another aspect of the question was: Did the consistent determinism of modern Science, the discovery of an unalterable interdependency in the intellectual, as in the physical worlds, allow scope for actions proceeding otherwise than merely illusorily from the free purpose or determination of the individual? Very difficult the question was, and I did not feel confident of solving it; but it was some consolation to reflect that the doubt as to the possibility of demonstrating a full application of the law in the domain in which chance has sway, and Ethics its sphere, was comparatively infinitesimal in the case of those domains in which men make themselves felt by virtue of genius or talent as producers of literary and artistic works. Here, where natural gifts and their necessary deployment were of such extraordinary weight, the probability of a demonstration of natural laws was, of course, much greater.
The general fundamental question was: Given a literature, a philosophy, an art, or a branch of art, what is the attitude of mind that produces it? What are its sufficing and necessary conditions? What, for instance, causes England in the sixteenth century to acquire a dramatic poetry of the first rank, or Holland in the seventeenth century a painting art of the first rank, without any of the other branches of art simultaneously bearing equally fine fruit in the same country?
My deliberations resulted, for the time being, in the conviction that all profound historical research was psychical research.
That old piece of work, revised, as it now is, has certainly none but historic interest; but for a doctor’s thesis, it is still a tolerably readable book and may, at any rate, introduce a beginner to reflection upon great problems.
After the fundamental scientific questions that engaged my attention, I was most interested in artistic style. There was, in modern Danish prose, no author who unreservedly appealed to me; in German Heinrich Kleist, and in French Merimee, were the stylists whom I esteemed most. The latter, in fact, it seemed to me was a stylist who, in unerring sureness, terseness and plasticism, excelled all others. He had certainly not much warmth or colour, but he had a sureness of line equal to that of the greatest draughtsmen of Italian art. His aridity was certainly not winning, and, in reading him, I frequently felt a lack of breadth of view and horizon, but the compelling power of his line- drawing captivated me. When my doctor’s thesis was finished, towards the middle of December, 1869, both it and the collection of articles bearing the name _Criticisms and Portraits_ were placed in the printer’s hands. In the beginning of 1870 two hitherto unprinted pieces were added, of which one was a paper written some time before on Kamma Rahbek, which had been revised, the other, a new one on Merimee, which in general shows what at that time I admired in style.
It had long been settled that as soon as I had replied to the critics of my thesis I should start on prolonged travels, the real educational travels of a young man’s life. I had a little money lying ready, a small bursary, and a promise of a travelling allowance from the State, which promise, however, was not kept. This journey had for a long time been haunting my fancy. I cherished an ardent wish to see France again, but even more especially to go to Italy and countries still farther South. My hope of catching a glimpse of Northern Africa was only fulfilled thirty-five years later; but I got as far as Italy, which was the actual goal of my desires. I knew enough of the country, its history from ancient days until then, and was sufficiently acquainted with its Art from Roman times upwards and during the Renaissance, to be regarded as passed for intellectual consecration in the South.
When the thesis was done with and the printing of the second book was nearing completion, not anxiety to travel, but melancholy and heavy- heartedness at the thought of my departure, gained the upper hand. It had been decided that I was to remain away at least a year, and it was less to myself than to others whom I must necessarily leave behind, that the time seemed immeasurably long. Professor Schioedte advised me rather to take several short journeys than one long one; but that was impracticable. I wanted to get quite away from the home atmosphere. As, however, there were some who thought of my journey with disquiet and dread, and from whom it was difficult for me to tear myself, I put off my departure as long as I could. At last the remnant of work that still bound me to Copenhagen was finished, and then all the new and enriching prospects my stay in foreign countries was to bring me shone in a golden light. Full of undaunted hope, I set out on my travels at the beginning of April, 1870.
SECOND LONGER STAY ABROAD
Hamburg–My Second Fatherland–Ernest Hello–_Le Docteur Noir_– Taine–Renan–Marcelin–Gleyre–Taine’s Friendship–Renan at Home– Philarete Chasles’ Reminiscences–_Le Theatre Francais_–Coquelin –Bernhardt–Beginnings of _Main Currents_–The Tuileries–John Stuart Mill–London–Philosophical Studies–London and Paris Compared– Antonio Gallenga and His Wife–Don Juan Prim–Napoleon III–London Theatres–Gladstone and Disraeli in Debate–Paris on the Eve of War– First Reverses–Flight from Paris–Geneva, Switzerland–Italy–Pasquale Villari–Vinnie Ream’s Friendship–Roman Fever–Henrik Ibsen’s Influence–Scandinavians in Rome.
I.
The first thing that impressed me was Hamburg, and by that I mean the European views prevalent there. At that time, doubtless mainly for national reasons, Denmark hated Hamburg. Different Danish authors had recently written about the town, and in as depreciatory a strain as they could. The description of one amounted to an assertion that in Hamburg people only talked of two things, money and women; that of another commenced: “Of all the places I have ever seen in my life, Hamburg is the most hideous.”
The situation of the town could not be compared with that of Copenhagen, but the Alster quarter was attractive, the architecture and the street life not uninteresting. What decided me, however, was not the externals of the town, but the spirit I noticed pervading the conversation. The idea underlying things was that a young man must first and foremost learn to keep himself well and comfortably; if he could not do this in Hamburg, then as soon as possible he must set off to some place across the sea, to Rio, or New York, to the Argentine, or Cape Colony, and there make his way and earn a fortune. The sons of the families I was invited to visit, or heard talked about, had long been away; in the houses I went to, the head of the family had seen other parts of the world. The contrast with Copenhagen was obvious; there the young sons of the middle classes were a burden on their families sometimes until they were thirty, had no enterprise, no money of their own to dispose of, were often glued, as it were, to the one town, where there was no promotion to look forward to and no wide prospect of any sort.
It was a long time since I had been so much struck by anything as by an expression that a Hamburg lady, who had been to Copenhagen and had stayed there some time, used about the young Danish men, namely, that they had _l’apparence chetive_. I tried to persuade her that life in Copenhagen had only accidentally appeared so wretched to her; but I did not convince her in the least. She demonstrated to me, by numerous examples, to what an extent enterprise was lacking in Denmark, and I was obliged to restrict myself to explaining that the tremendous pressure of political pettiness and weakness had brought a general slackness with it, without people feeling or suspecting it, and had robbed nearly every one of daring and success. The result of the conversation was that Denmark was shown to me in a fresh light.
A Hamburg merchant who had lived for a long time in Mexico invited me to dinner, and at his house I had the same impression of apparent happiness, comfort, enterprise and wide outlook, in contrast to the cares and the narrowness at home, where only the few had travelled far or collected material which might by comparison offer new points of view and give one a comprehensive experience of life. My psychological education in Danish literature, with its idolising of “thoroughness” had imprinted on my mind that whoever thoroughly understood how to observe a man, woman and child in a Copenhagen backyard had quite sufficient material whence to brew a knowledge of human nature. It now dawned upon me that comparative observation of a Mexican and a North German family, together with their opinions and prejudices, might nevertheless considerably advance one’s knowledge of human nature, should such comparisons constantly obtrude themselves upon one.
The same man let fall an observation which set me thinking. When the conversation turned upon the strained relations between France and Prussia since the battle of Koeniggratz, and I expressed myself confident that, in the event of a war, France would be victorious, as she generally was victorious everywhere, he expressed well-supported doubts. Prussia was a comparatively young state, extremely well organised and carefully prepared for war; antiquated routine held great sway in the French army; the Emperor himself, the esteem in which he was held, and his management were on the down grade. These were words that I had never heard in Denmark. The possibility of France being defeated in a war with Prussia was not even entertained there. This merchant showed me an original photograph of the execution of the Emperor Maximilian, taken on the spot a moment before the word to fire was given, and a second taken immediately afterwards. The calm bearing of the Emperor and the two generals compelled admiration. This was the first time I had seen photography taken into the service of history.
In the Hamburg Zoological Gardens I was fascinated by the aquarium, with its multitudes of aquatic animals and fish. There, for the first time in my life, I saw an elephant, and did not tire of gazing at the mighty beast. I was struck by the strange caprice with which the great Being we call Nature goes to work, or, more correctly, by the contrast between the human point of view and Nature’s mode of operations. To us, the elephant’s trunk was burlesque, its walk risibly clumsy; the eagle and the kite seemed to us, as they sat, to have a severe appearance and a haughty glance; the apes, picking lice from one another and eating the vermin, were, to our eyes, contemptible and ridiculous at the same time; but Nature took everything equally seriously, neither sought nor avoided beauty, and to her one being was not more central than another. That must be deemed Nature’s central point which is equidistant from the lowest and from the highest being; it was not impossible, for instance, that the _harefish_, a great, thick, odd-looking creature, was the real centre of terrestrial existence, in the same way as our celestial sphere has its centre, through which a line reaches the pole of the zodiac in the constellation of the Dragon. And I smiled as I thought of R. Nielsen and his pupils always speaking as if they stood on the most intimate footing with the “central point” of existence, and pouring contempt on others who, it was to be supposed, could not approach it.
I was very unfavourably impressed in Hamburg by German drama and German dramatic art.
At the town theatre, Hebbel’s _Judith_ was being performed, with Clara Ziegler in the leading part. At that time this lady enjoyed a considerable reputation in Germany, and was, too, a tall, splendid- looking female, with a powerful voice, a good mimic, and all the rest of it, but a mere word-machine. The acting showed up the want of taste in the piece. Holofernes weltered knee-deep in gore and bragged incessantly; Judith fell in love with his “virility,” and when he had made her “the guardian of his slumbers” murdered him, from a long disremembered loyalty to the God of Israel.
At the Thalia Theatre, Raupach’s _The School of Life_ was being produced, a lot of silly stuff, the theme of it, for that matter, allied to the one dealt with later by Drachmann in _Once upon a Time_. A Princess is hard-hearted and capricious. To punish her, the King, her father, shuts a man into her bedroom, makes a feigned accusation against her, and actually drives her out of the castle. She becomes a waiting- maid, and passes through various stages of civil life. The King of Navarra, whose suit she had haughtily rejected, disguised as a goldsmith, marries her, then arrays himself in silks and velvets, to tempt her to infidelity. When she refuses, he allows every possible injustice to be heaped upon her, to try her, makes her believe that the King, on a false accusation, has had her husband’s eyes put out, and then himself goes about with a bandage before his eyes, and lets her beg. She believes everything and agrees to everything, until at last, arrived at honour and glory, she learns that it has all been only play- acting, trial, and education.
This nonsense was exactly on a par with taste in Germany at the time, which was undeniably considerably below the level of that in France and Denmark, and it was acted by a group of actors, some very competent, at the chief theatre of Hamburg. Slowly though business life pulsated in Denmark, we were superior to Germany in artistic perception.
The low stage of artistic development at which Hamburg had then arrived could not, however, efface the impression its superiority over Copenhagen in other respects had made upon me. Take it all together, my few days in Hamburg were well spent.
II.
And then I set foot once more in the country which I regarded as my second fatherland, and the overflowing happiness of once more feeling French ground under my feet returned undiminished and unchanged. I had had all my letters sent to Mlle. Louise’s address, so fetched them shortly after my arrival and saw the girl again. Her family invited me to dinner several times during the very first week, and I was associated with French men and women immediately upon my arrival.
They were well-brought-up, good-natured, hospitable bourgeois, very narrow in their views. Not in the sense that they took no interest in politics and literature, but in that questions for them were decided once and for all in the clerical spirit. They did not regard this as a party standpoint, did not look upon themselves as adherents of a party; their way of thinking was the right one; those who did not agree with them held opinions they ought to be ashamed of, and which they probably, in private, were ashamed of holding and expressing.
Mlle. Louise had a cousin whom she used to speak of as a warm-hearted man with peculiar opinions, eager and impetuous, who would like to make the acquaintance of her friend from the North. The aunts called him a passionate Catholic, and an energetic writer in the service of the Church Militant. Shortly after my arrival, I met him at dinner. He was a middle-aged, pale, carelessly dressed man with ugly, irregular features, and a very excitable manner. With him came his wife, who though pale and enthusiastic like himself, yet looked quite terrestrial. He introduced himself as Ernest Hello, contributor to Veuillot’s then much talked of Romish paper, _L’Univers_, which, edited with no small talent by a noted stylist, adopted all sorts of abusive methods as weapons in every feud in which the honour of the Church was involved. It was against Veuillot that Augier had just aimed the introduction to his excellent comedy, _Le Fils de Giboyer_, and he made no secret of the fact that in the Deodat mentioned in the piece he had had this writer of holy abuse in his mind. Hello was in everything Veuillot’s vassal.
He was one of the martial believers who despised and hated the best free research men, and who knew himself in a position to confute them. He possessed some elements of culture, and had early had thoroughly drilled into him what, in comparison with the views of later times on History and Religion, was narrow and antiquated in Voltaire’s education, and for this reason regarded, not only Voltaire’s attack on the Church, but all subsequent philosophy inimical to the Church, as belonging to a bygone age. He was a fanatic, and there was a sacristy odour about all that he said. But there was in his disposition an enthusiastic admiration for weakness in fighting against external strength, and for courage that expressed itself in sheer defiance of worldly prudence, that made him feel kindly towards the young Dane. Denmark’s taking up arms, with its two million inhabitants, against a great power like Prussia, roused his enthusiasm. “It is great, it is Spartan!” he exclaimed. It must certainly be admitted that this human sympathy was not a prominent characteristic, and he wearied me with his hateful verdicts over all those whom I, and by degrees, all Europe, esteemed and admired in France.
As an instance of the paradoxicalness to which Huysmans many years later became addicted, the latter tried to puff up Hello as being a man of remarkable intellect; and an instance of the want of independence with which the new Catholic movement was carried on in Denmark is to be found in the fact that the organ of Young Denmark, _The Tower_, could declare: “Hello is one of the few whom all men of the future are agreed to bow before…. Hello was,–not only a Catholic burning with religious ardour,–but a genius; these two things explain everything.”
When Hello invited me to his house, I regarded it as my duty to go, that I might learn as much as possible, and although his circle was exceedingly antipathetic to me, I did not regret it; the spectacle was highly instructive.
Next to Hello himself, who, despite his fanaticism and restlessness, impressed one as very inoffensive at bottom, and not mischievous if one steered clear of such names as Voltaire or Renan, the chief member of his circle was the black doctor, (_le Docteur noir_,) so much talked of in the last years of the Empire, and who is even alluded to in Taine’s _Graindorge_. His real name was Vries. He was a negro from the Dutch West Indies, a veritable bull, with a huge body and a black, bald physiognomy, made to stand outside a tent at a fair, and be his own crier to the public. His conversation was one incessant brag, in atrocious French. Although he had lived seventeen years in France, he spoke almost unintelligibly.
He persuaded himself, or at least others, that he had discovered perpetual motion, vowed that he had made a machine which, “by a simple mechanism,” could replace steam power and had been declared practicable by the first engineers in Paris; but of course he declined to speak freely about it. Columbus and Fulton only were his equals; he knew all the secrets of Nature. He had been persecuted–in 1859 he had been imprisoned for eleven months, on a charge of quackery–because all great men were persecuted; remember our Lord Jesus Christ! He himself was the greatest man living. _Moi vous dire le plus grand homme d’universe_. Hello and the ladies smiled admiringly at him, and never grew tired of listening to him. This encouraged him to monopolise the conversation: He, Vries, was a man possessed of courage and wisdom; he understood Phrenology, Allopathy, Homoeopathy, Engineering Science, Metereology –like Moliere’s doctors and Holberg’s Oldfux. His greatest and most special gift was that of curing cancer. Like writing-masters, who hang out specimens of how people wrote when they came to them, and of their caligraphy after they had benefited by their instruction, he had his cancer patients photographed before and after his treatment, looking ghastly the first time, and as fresh as a flower the second, and these pictures hung on view in his house. No wonder, therefore, that Napoleon III–so Vries said–had his portrait in an album containing, besides, only portraits of European sovereigns.
He pretended that he had made many important prophecies. This was a bond between him and Hello, who claimed the same extraordinary power, and had foretold all sorts of singular events. He performed miraculous cures; this appealed to Hello, who was suspicious of all rational Science and ready to believe any mortal thing. He could read everybody’s characters in their faces. This was a pretext for the most barefaced flattery of Hello, his wife, and their friends of both sexes, and of course everything was swallowed with alacrity. To me he said: “Monsieur is gentle, very calm, very indulgent, and readily forgives an injury.”
Hideous though he was, his powerful brutality had a great effect on the ladies of the circle. They literally hung upon his words. He seized them by the wrists, and slid his black paws up their bare arms. The married women whispered languishingly: “You have a marvellous power over women.” The husbands looked on smilingly.
Now when Hello and he and their friends and the ladies began to talk about religious matters and got steam up, it was a veritable witches’ Sabbath, and no mistake, every voice being raised in virulent cheap Jack denunciation of freedom, and common sense. Satan himself had dictated Voltaire’s works; now Voltaire was burning in everlasting fire. Unbelievers ought to be exterminated; it would serve them right. Renan ought to be hanged on the first tree that would bear him; the Black Doctor even maintained that in Manila he would have been shot long ago. It was always the Doctor who started the subject of the persecution of heretics. Hello himself persecuted heretics with patronising scorn, but was already ready to drop into a hymn of praise to the Madonna.
I had then read two of Hello’s books, _Le Style_ and _M. Renan, L’Allemagne et l’Atheisme au 19me Siecle_. Such productions are called books, because there is no other name for them. As a matter of fact, idle talk and galimatias of the sort are in no wise literature. Hello never wrote anything but Roman Catholic sermons, full of theological sophistries and abuse of thinking men. In those years his books, with their odour of incense, made the small, flat inhabitants of the sacristy wainscotting venture out of their chinks in the wall in delight; but they obtained no applause elsewhere.
It was only after his death that it could occur to a morbid seeker after originality, with a bitter almond in place of a heart, like Huysmans, to make his half-mad hero, Des Esseintes, who is terrified of the light, find satisfaction in the challenges to common sense that Hello wrote. Hello was a poor wretch who, in the insane conviction that he himself was a genius, filled his writings with assertions concerning the marvellous, incomprehensible nature of genius, and always took up the cudgels on its behalf. During the Empire, his voice was drowned. It was only a score of years later that the new Catholic reaction found it to their advantage to take him at his word and see in him the genius that he had given himself out to be. He was as much a genius as the madman in the asylum is the Emperor.
III.
A few days after my arrival, I called upon Taine and was cordially received. He presented me with one of his books and promised me his great work, _De l’Intelligence_, which was to come out in a few days, conversed with me for an hour, and invited me to tea the following evening. He had been married since I had last been at his house, and his wife, a young, clear-skinned lady with black plaits, brown eyes and an extremely graceful figure, was as fresh as a rose, and talked with the outspoken freedom of youth, though expressing herself in carefully selected words.
After a few days, Taine, who was generally very formal with strangers, treated me with conspicuous friendliness. He offered at once to introduce me to Renan, and urgently advised me to remain six months in Paris, in order to master the language thoroughly, so that I might enlighten Frenchmen on the state of things in the North, as well as picture the French to my fellow-countrymen. Why should I not make French my auxiliary language, like Turgenieff and Hillebrandt!
Taine knew nothing of German belles lettres. As far as philosophy was concerned, he despised German Aesthetics altogether, and laughed at me for believing in “Aesthetics” at all, even one day introducing me to a stranger as “A young Dane who does not believe in much, but is weak enough to believe in Aesthetics.” I was not precisely overburdened by the belief. But a German Aesthetic, according to Taine’s definition, was a man absolutely devoid of artistic perception and sense of style, who lived only in definitions. If you took him to the theatre to see a sad piece, he would tear his hair with delight, and exclaim: “_Voila das Tragische!_”
Of the more modern German authors, Taine knew only Heine, of whom he was a passionate admirer and whom, by reason of his intensity of feeling, he compared with Dante. A poem like the _Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_ roused his enthusiasm. Goethe’s shorter poems, on the other hand, he could not appreciate, chiefly no doubt because he did not know German sufficiently well. He was not even acquainted with the very best of Goethe’s short things, and one day that I asked him to read one poem aloud, the words in his mouth rang very French.
_Lieber dur Laydenn moecht ee mee schlag’e, als so feel Froedenn des Laybengs airtrah’ge_, was intended to be–
Lieber durch Leiden,
Moecht ich mich schlagen
Als so viel Freuden
Des Lebens ertragen.
Goethe’s prose he did not consider good, but heavy and prolix, and lacking in descriptive power. He would praise Voltaire’s prose at his expense. “You perceive the figure and its movements far more clearly,” he said. The German romanticists disgusted him; their style, also, was too inartistic for him (_ils ne savent pas ecrire, cela me degoute d’eux_).
I frequently met friends at his house, amongst others, Marcelin, who had been his friend from boyhood, and upon whom, many years later, he wrote a melancholy obituary. This man, the proprietor of that supremely worldly paper, _La Vie Parisienne_, was a powerful, broad- shouldered, ruddy-cheeked man, who looked the incarnation of health and very unlike one’s preconception of the editor of the most frivolous and fashionable weekly in Paris. He was a draughtsman and an author, had studied the history of the last few centuries in engravings, and himself owned a collection of no fewer than 300,000. What Taine had most admired in him was the iron will with which, left, at nineteen years of age, penniless, and defectively educated, as head of his family, he had kept his mother and brothers and sisters by his work. Next to that Taine admired his earnestness. Marcelin, who was generally looked upon as belonging to gay Paris, was a solitary-minded man, an imaginative recreator of the peoples of the past, as they were and went about, of their ways and customs. He it was who opened Taine’s eyes to the wealth of contributions to history locked up in collections of engravings, more especially perhaps as regarded people’s external appearance, and what the exterior revealed. Another friend who came to Taine at all sorts of times was Gleyre, the old painter, who had been born in French Switzerland, but was otherwise a Parisian. And he was not the only deeply idealistic artist with whom Taine was connected in the bonds of friendship. Although a fundamental element of Taine’s nature drew him magnetically to the art that was the expression of strength, tragic or carnal strength, a swelling exuberance of life, there was yet room in his soul for sympathy with all artistic endeavour, even the purely emotional. That which drew him to the idealistic painters was, at bottom, the same quality as drew him to Beethoven and Chopin.
Gleyre’s best-known picture is the painting in the Louvre, somewhat weak in colouring, but showing much feeling, a Nile subject representing a man sitting on the banks of the river and watching the dreams of his youth, represented as beautiful women, fleeing from him on a decorated dahabeah, which is disappearing. The title is _Lost Illusions_. There is more strength in the painting, much reproduced in engraving, of a Roman army, conquered by Divico the Helvetian, passing under the yoke –a picture which, as an expression of the national pride of the Swiss, has been placed in the Museum at Lausanne.
Still, it was the man himself, rather than his pictures, that Taine thought so much of. Intellectually, Taine was in his inmost heart an admirer of the Italian and the English Renaissance, when most pagan and most unrestrained; his intellectual home was the Venice of the sixteenth century; he would have been in his right place at one of the festivals painted by Veronese, and should have worn the rich and tasteful costume of that period. But socially, and as a citizen, he was quite different, was affectionate and subdued and calm, excessively conventional; temperate in all his judgments, as in his life.
If I succeeded in winning his good-will, it was most emphatically not because I had written a book about him, which, for that matter, he could not understand; he barely glanced through it; he read, at most, the appreciative little review that Gaston Paris did me the honour to write upon it in the _Revue Critique_. But it appealed to him that I had come to France from pure love of knowledge, that I might become acquainted with men and women and intellectual life, and that I had spent my youth in study.
He grew fond of me, advised me as a father or an elder brother might have done, and smiled at my imprudences–as for instance when I almost killed myself by taking too strong a sleeping draught–(_vous etes imprudent, c’est de votre age_). He sometimes reproached me with not jotting down every day, as he did, whatever had struck me; he talked to me about his work, about the projected Essay on Schiller that came to nothing on account of the war, of his _Notes sur l’Angleterre_, which he wrote in a little out-of-the-way summer-house containing nothing save the four bare whitewashed walls, but a little table and a chair. He introduced into the book a few details that I had mentioned to him after my stay in England.
When we walked in the garden at his country-house at Chatenay, he sometimes flung his arm round my neck–an act which roused great astonishment in the Frenchmen present, who could scarcely believe their eyes. They knew how reserved he usually was.
It quite irritated Taine that the Danish Minister did nothing for me, and introduced me nowhere, although he had had to procure me a free pass to the theatre. Again and again he reverted to this, though I had never mentioned either the Minister or the Legation to him. But the revolutionary blood in him was excited at what he regarded as a slight to intellectual aristocracy. “What do you call a man like that? A Junker?” I said no. “Never mind! it is all the same. One feels that in your country you have had no revolution like ours, and know nothing about equality. A fellow like that, who has not made himself known in any way whatever, looks down on you as unworthy to sit at his table and does not move a finger on your behalf, although that is what he is there for. When I am abroad, they come at once from the French Embassy to visit me, and open to me every house to which they have admittance. I am a person of very small importance in comparison with Benedetti, but Benedetti comes to see me as often as I will receive him. We have no lording of it here.”
These outbursts startled me, first, because I had never in the least expected or even wished either to be received by the Danish Minister or to be helped by him; secondly, because it revealed to me a wide difference between the point of view in the Romance countries, in France especially, and that in the North. In Denmark, I had never had the entree to Court or to aristocratic circles, nor have I ever acquired it since, though, for that matter, I have not missed it in the least. But in the Romance countries, where the aristocratic world still occasionally possesses some wit and education, it is taken as a matter of course that talent is a patent of nobility, and, to the man who has won himself a name, all doors are open, indeed, people vie with one another to secure him. That a caste division like that in the North was quite unknown there, I thus learnt for the first time.
IV.
Through Taine, I very soon made the acquaintance of Renan, whose personality impressed me very much, grand and free of mind as he was, without a trace of the unctuousness that one occasionally meets in his books, yet superior to the verge of paradox.
He was very inaccessible, and obstinately refused to see people. But if he were expecting you, he would spare you several hours of his valuable time.
His house was furnished with exceeding simplicity. On one wall of his study hung two Chinese water-colours and a photograph of Gerome’s _Cleopatra before Caesar_; on the opposite wall, a very beautiful photograph of what was doubtless an Italian picture of the Last Day. That was all the ornamentation. On his table, there always lay a Virgil and a Horace in a pocket edition, and for a long time a French translation of Sir Walter Scott.
What surprised me most in Renan’s bearing was that there was nothing solemn about it and absolutely nothing sentimental. He impressed one as being exceptionally clever and a man that the opposition he had met with had left as it found him. He enquired about the state of things in the North. When I spoke, without reserve, of the slight prospect that existed of my coming to the front with my opinions, he maintained that victory was sure. (_Vous l’emporterez! vous l’emporterez_!) Like all foreigners, he marvelled that the three Scandinavian countries did not try to unite, or at any rate to form an indissoluble Union. In the time of Gustavus Adolphus, he said, they had been of some political importance; since then they had retired completely from the historical stage. The reason for it must very probably be sought for in their insane internecine feuds.
Renan used to live, at that time, from the Spring onwards, at his house in the country, at Sevres. So utterly unaffected was the world-renowned man, then already forty-seven years of age, that he often walked from his house to the station with me, and wandered up and down the platform till the train came.
His wife, who shared his thoughts and worshipped him, had chosen her husband herself, and, being of German family, had not been married after the French manner; still, she did not criticise it, as she thought it was perhaps adapted to the French people, and she had seen among her intimate acquaintances many happy marriages entered into for reasons of convenience. They had two children, a son, Ary, who died in 1900 after having made a name for himself as a painter, and written beautiful poems (which, however, were only published after his death), and a daughter, Noemi (Madame Psichari) who, faithfully preserving the intellectual heritage she has received from her great father, has become one of the centres of highest Paris, a soul of fire, who fights for Justice and Truth and social ideas with burning enthusiasm.
V.
A source of very much pleasure to me was my acquaintance with the old author and College de France Professor, Philarete Chasles. Gregoire introduced me to him and I gradually became at home, as it were, in his house, was always a welcome visitor, and was constantly invited there. In his old age he was not a man to be taken very seriously, being diffusive, vague and vain. But there was no one else so communicative, few so entertaining, and for the space of fifty years he had known everybody who had been of any mark in France. He was born in 1798; his father, who was a Jacobin and had been a member of the Convention, did not have him baptised, but brought him up to believe in Truth, (hence the name Philarete,) and apprenticed him to a printer. At the Restoration of the Royal Family, he was imprisoned, together with his father, but released through the influence of Chateaubriand; he then went to England, where he remained for full seven years (1819-1826), working as a typographer, and made a careful study of English literature, then almost unknown in France. After having spent some further time in Germany, he returned to Paris and published a number of historical and critical writings.
Philarete Chasles, as librarian to the Mazarin Library, had his apartments in the building itself, that is, in the very centre of Paris; in the Summer he lived in the country at Meudon, where he had had his veranda decorated with pictures of Pompeian mosaic. He was having a handsome new house with a tower built near by. He needed room, for he had a library of 40,000 volumes.
His niece kept house for him; she was married to a German from Cologne, Schulz by name, who was a painter on glass. The pair lived apart. Madame Schulz was pretty, caustic, spiteful, and blunt. Her daughter, the fourteen-year-old Nanni, was enchantingly lovely, as developed and mischievous as a girl of eighteen. Everyone who came to the house was charmed with her, and it was always full of guests, young students from Alsace and Provence, young negroes from Hayti, young ladies from Jerusalem, and poetesses who would have liked to read their poems aloud and would have liked still better to induce Chasles to make them known by an article.
Chasles chatted with everyone, frequently addressing his conversation to me, talking incessantly about the very men and women that I most cared to hear about, of those still living whom I most admired, such as George Sand, and Merimee, and, in fact, of all the many celebrities he had known. As a young man, he had been taken to the house of Madame Recamier, and had there seen Chateaubriand, an honoured and adored old man, and Sainte-Beuve an eager and attentive listener, somewhat overlooked on account of his ugliness, in whom there was developing that lurking envy of the great, and of those women clustered round, which he ought to have combatted, to produce just criticism.
Chasles had known personally Michelet and Guizot, the elder Dumas and Beyle, Cousin and Villemain, Musset and Balzac; he knew the Comtesse d’Agoult, for so many years the friend of Liszt, and Madame Colet, the mistress, first of Cousin, then of Musset, and finally of Flaubert, of whom my French uncle, who had met her on his travels, had drawn me a very unattractive picture. Chasles was on terms of daily intimacy with Jules Sandeau; even as an old man he could not forget George Sand, who had filched the greater part of his name and made it more illustrious than the whole became. Sandeau loved her still, forty years after she had left him.
Chasles was able, in a few words, to conjure up very vividly the images of the persons he was describing to his listener, and his anecdotes about them were inexhaustible. He took me behind the scenes of literature and I saw the stage from all its sides. The personal history of his contemporaries was, it is quite true, more particularly its chronicle of scandals, but his information completed for me the severe and graceful restraint of all Taine said. And side by side with his inclination for gay and malicious gossip, Chasles had a way of sketching out great synopses of intellectual history, which made one realise, as one reflected,’ the progress of development of the literatures with which one was familiar. Those were pleasant evenings, those moonlight Spring evenings in the open veranda out there at Meudon, when the old man with the sharp-pointed beard and the little skull-cap on one side of his head, was spokesman. He had the aptest and most amusing way of putting things. For instance, to my question as to whether Guizot had really been as austere by nature as he was in manner, he replied: “It is hard to say; when one wishes to impress, one cannot behave like a harlequin.”
Although I had a keen enough eye for Philarete Chasles’ weaknesses, I felt exceedingly happy in his house. There I could obtain without difficulty the information I wished for, and have the feeling of being thoroughly “in Paris.” Paris was and still is the only city in the world that is and wishes to be the capital not only of its own country but of Europe; the only one that takes upon itself as a duty, not merely to meet the visitor half-way by opening museums, collections, buildings, to him, but the only one where people habitually, in conversation, initiate the foreigner in search of knowledge into the ancient, deep culture of the nation, so that its position with regard to that of other races and countries is made clear to one.
VI.
I had not let a single day elapse before I took my seat again in the _Theatre Francais_, to which I had free admission for an indefinite period. The first time I arrived, the doorkeeper at the theatre merely called the sub-officials together; they looked at me, noted my appearance, and for the future I might take my seat wherever I liked, when the man at the entrance had called out his _Entree_. They were anything but particular, and in the middle of the Summer, after a visit of a month to London, I found my seat reserved for me as before.
The first evening after my arrival, I sat, quietly enjoying _Hernani_ (the lyric beauty of which always rejoiced my heart), with Mounet-Sully in the leading role, Bressant as Charles V, and as Dona Sol, Mlle. Lloyd, a minor actress, who, however, at the conclusion of the piece, rose to the level of the poetry. The audience were so much in sympathy with the spirit of the piece that a voice from the gallery shouted indignantly: “_Le roi est un lache!_” Afterwards, during the same evening, I saw, in a transport of delight, Mme. de Girardin’s charming little piece, _La Joie fait Peur_. A certain family believe that their son, who is a young naval officer, fallen in the far East, has been cruelly put to death. He comes back, unannounced, to his broken-hearted mother, his despairing bride, his sister, and an old man- servant. This old, bent, faithful retainer, a stock dramatic part, was played by Regnier with the consummate art that is Nature itself staged. He has hidden the returned son behind a curtain for fear that his mother, seeing him unexpectedly, should die of joy. The sister comes in. Humming, the servant begins to dust, to prevent her going near the curtain; but unconsciously, in his delight, his humming grows louder and louder, until, in a hymn of jubilation, tratara-tratara! he flings the broom up over his head, then stops short suddenly, noticing that the poor child is standing there, mute with astonishment, not knowing what to think. Capital, too, was the acting of a now forgotten actress, Mlle. Dubois, who played the young girl. Her exclamation, as she suddenly sees her brother, “_Je n’ai pas peur, va_!” was uttered so lightly and gaily, that all the people round me, and I myself, too, burst into tears.
I was much impressed by Edmond Thierry, then director of the _Theatre Francais_. I thought him the most refined man I had so far met, possessed of all the old French courtesy, which seemed to have died out in Paris. A conversation with him was a regular course in Dramaturgy, and although a young foreigner like myself must necessarily have been troublesome to him, he let nothing of this be perceptible. I was so charmed by him that nearly two years later I introduced a few unimportant words of his about Moliere’s _Misanthrope_ into my lectures on the first part of _Main Currents in European Literature_, simply for the pleasure of mentioning his name.
It was, moreover, a very pleasant thing to pay him a visit, even when he was interrupted. For actors streamed in and out of his house. One day, for instance, the lovely Agar burst into the room to tell her tale of woe, being dissatisfied with the dress that she was to wear in a new part. I saw her frequently again when war had been declared, for she it was who, every evening, with overpowering force and art, sang the _Marseillaise_ from before the footlights.
The theatrical performances were a delight to me. I had been charmed as much only by Michael Wiehe and Johanne Luise Heiberg in my salad days when they played together in Hertz’s _Ninon_. But my artistic enjoyment went deeper here, for the character portrayal was very much more true to life. The best impressions I had brought with me of Danish art were supremely romantic, Michael Wiehe as Henrik in _The Fairies_, as the Chevalier in _Ninon_, as Mortimer in Schiller’s _Mary Stuart_. But this was the real, living thing.
One evening I saw _Ristori_ play the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth with thrilling earnestness and supreme virtuosity. You felt horror to the very marrow of your bones, and your eyes filled with tears of emotion and anxiety. Masterly was the regular breathing that indicated slumber, and the stiff fingers when she washed her hands and smelt them to see if there were blood upon them. But Mme. Favart, who with artistic self-restraint co-ordinated herself into the whole, without any virtuosity at all, produced no less an effect upon me. As the leading character in Feuillet’s _Julie_, she was perfection itself; when I saw her, it seemed to me as though no one at home in Denmark had any idea of what feminine characterisation was. What had been taken for such (Heiberg’s art, for instance,) only seemed like a graceful and brilliant convention, that fell to pieces by the side of this.
The performances at the _Theatre Francais_ lasted longer than they do now. In one evening you could see Gozlan’s _Tempete dans un verre d’Eau_, Augier’s _Gabrielle_, and Banville’s _Gringoire_. When I had seen Mme. Favart and Regnier in _Gabrielle_, Lafontaine as Louis XI, his wife as Loyse, Mlle. Ponsin as Nicole, and Coquelin, at that time still young and fresh, as Gringoire, I felt that I had enjoyed one of the greatest and most elevating pleasures the world had to offer. I went home, enraptured and enthusiastic, as much edified as the believer returning from his church. I could see _Gringoire_ a dozen times in succession and find only one expression for what I felt: “This is holy.”
The piece appealed to me so much, no doubt, because it was more in agreement than the rest with what in Denmark was considered true poetry. But during the three years since I had last seen him, Coquelin had made immense strides in this role. He rendered it now with an individuality, a heartfelt sincerity and charm, that he had not previously attained; in contrast to harsh King Louis and unfeeling Loyse, was so poor, and hungry, and ill and merry and tender and such a hero and such a genius– that I said to myself: “Who, ever has seen this, has lived.”
Quite a short while after my arrival–April 12, 1870–I saw for the first time Sarah Bernhardt, who had just begun to make a name at the Odeon. She was playing in George Sand’s beautiful and mutinous drama _L’autre_, from which the great-grandmother in Bjoernson’s _Leonarda_ is derived. The piece is a plea for the freedom of love, or rather, for indulgence with regard to what are branded by society as the sins of love. Sarah Bernhardt was the young girl who, in her innocence, judges all moral irregularities with the utmost severity, until her eyes are opened to what the world really is. She is, without knowing it, the child of unlawful love, and the father’s curse is that of not daring to be anything to his child–whom he has educated and over whom he watches–not daring to claim his right to her affection, as he would otherwise stain her mother’s memory. In his presence, the young girl utters all the hard words that society has for those who break her laws; she calls her unknown father false and forsworn. George Sand has collected all the justified protests and every prejudice for this young girl to utter, because in her they inspire most respect, and are to their best advantage.–So far her father has not revealed himself. Then at last it dawns upon her that it is he, her benefactor, who is the _other one_ whom she has just condemned, and as the curtain falls she flings herself, melted, into his arms.
Sarah played the part with great modesty, with what one might assume to be the natural melancholy of the orphan, and the enthusiasm of the young virgin for strict justice, and yet in such wise that, through all the coldness, through the expressive uncertainty of her words, and especially through the lovely, rich ring of her voice, one suspected tenderness and mildness long held back.
VII.
I tried, while I was in Paris, to understand something of the development of French literature since the beginning of the century, to arrange it in stages, and note the order of their succession; I wanted, at the same time, to form for myself a similar general view of Danish literature, and institute parallels between the two, being convinced beforehand that the spirit of the age must be approximately the same in two European countries that were, so to speak, intellectually allied. This was my first naive attempt to trace The Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature.
The French poetry of the nineteenth century seemed to me to fall into three groups: Romanticism, the School of Common Sense, the Realistic Art. I defined them as follows:
I. What the French call _Romanticism_ has many distinguishing marks. It is, firstly, a _break with Graeco-Roman antiquity_. It therefore harks back to the Gallic, and to the Middle Ages. It is a resurrection of the poets of the sixteenth century. But the attempt is a failure, for Ronsard and the Pleiad [Footnote: The poets who formed the first and greater Pleiad were, besides Ronsard, Dubellay, Remi, Belleau, Jodelle, Dorat, Baif and Pontus de Thiard.] are also Greek-taught, are Anacreontics. If we except the _Chanson de Roland_, there is no original mediaeval literature that can be compared with the Icelandic. For that reason the choice of subjects is extended from the Middle Ages in France to the Middle Ages in other countries, for instance, Germany, whence Victor Hugo derives his drama _Les Burgraves_. The poets select foreign matter, Alfred de Vigny treats Chatterton and Musset Italian and Spanish themes. Merimee harks back to the French Middle Ages (The Peasant Rising), but as he there finds too little originality, he flees, as a poet, to less civilised nationalities, Spaniards, South Americans, Corsicans, Russians, etc. Romanticism becomes ethnographical.
Its second distinguishing mark is _tempestuous violence_. It is connected with the 1830 revolution. It attacks society and the conditions of property (Saint Simon, Fourier, Proudhon), attacks marriage and the official verdict upon sexual relations (Dumas) Antony Rousseau’s old doctrine that Nature is good, the natural state the right one, and that society alone has spoilt everything. George Sand in particular worships Rousseau, and writes in essential agreement with him.
In the later French literature the influence of Voltaire and that of Rousseau are alternately supreme. Voltaire rules until 1820, Rousseau again until 1850, then Voltaire takes the reins once more with About, Taine, and Sarcey. In Renan Voltaire is merged with Rousseau, and now, later still, Diderot has taken the place of both.
II. The _School of Common Sense_ (_l’ecole de bon sens_) follows upon Romanticism. As the latter worshipped passion, so the School of Common Sense pays homage to sound human intelligence. In certain individuals it is possible to trace the transition–Musset’s _Un Caprice_ in contrast with the wanton works of his youth. George Sand’s village novels, in contrast with her novels on Marriage. The popular tone and the landscape drawing here, which, for that matter, are all derived from Rousseau, lead on into a tranquil idyl. Works like Ponsard’s _Lucrece_ and Augier’s _Gabrielle_ show the reaction from Romanticism. In the tragedy it is Lucrece, in the modern play, Gabrielle, upon whom the action hinges. In Ponsard and Augier common sense, strict justice, and a conventional feeling of honour, are acclaimed. Marriage is glorified in all of Ponsard, Augier and Octave Feuillet’s dramas. Literature has no doubt been influenced in some degree by the ruling orders of the monarchy of July. Louis Philippe was the bourgeois King. An author like Scribe, who dominates the stages of Europe, is animated by the all-powerful bourgeois spirit, educated and circumscribed as it was. Cousin, in his first manner, revolutionary Schellingism, corresponded to romanticism; his eclecticism as a moralising philosopher corresponds to the School of Common Sense. The distinctive feature which they have in common becomes a so-called Idealism. Ponsard revives the classical traditions of the seventeenth century. In criticism this endeavour in the direction of the sensible and the classical, is represented by Nisard, Planche, and Sainte-Beuve in his second manner.
III. The third tendency of the century Is _Realistic Art_, with physiological characteristics. It finds its support in positivist philosophy; Herbart in Germany, Bentham and Mill in England, Comte and Littre in France. In criticism, Sainte-Beuve’s third manner. On the stage, the younger Dumas. In novels, the brothers Goncourt, and Flaubert. In Art, a certain brutality in the choice of subject, _Gerome and Regnault_. In politics, the accomplished fact (_le fait accompli_), the Empire, the brutal pressure from above and general levelling by universal suffrage from below. In lyric poetry, the strictly technical artists of form of the _Parnasse_, Coppee, who describes unvarnished reality, and the master workmen (_les maitres de la facture_), Leconte Delisle, Gautier and his pupils, who write better verse than Lamartine and Hugo, but have no new thoughts or feelings–the poetic language materialists.
In conclusion, a great many indistinct beginnings, of which it is as yet impossible to say whither they are tending.
This, my first attempt to formulate for myself a general survey of one of the great literatures of the nineteenth century, contained much that was true enough, but revealed very plainly the beginner’s lack of ability to estimate the importance of phenomena, an inclination to over- estimate purely evanescent apparitions, and a tendency to include that which was merely externally similar, under one heading. The insignificant School of Common Sense could not by any means be regarded as marking an epoch. Neither, with any justice, could men like Augier and Dumas be placed in different groups. The attempt to point out realism in the lyric art was likewise exceedingly audacious.
However, this division and grouping seemed to me at that time to be a great discovery, and great was my disappointment when one day I consulted Chasles on the subject and he thought it too forced, and another day submitted it to Renan, who restricted himself to the reply:
“No! no! Things do not proceed so systematically!”
As this survey of the literature of France was also intended to guide me with regard to the Danish, I groped my way forward in the following manner:
I. _Romanticism_. Oehlenschlaeger’s attitude towards the past corresponds exactly to Victor Hugo’s; only that the resurrection of the Middle Ages in poetry is much more successful (_Earl Hakon, The Gods of the North_), by reason of the fresh originality in Snorre and the _Edda_. Grundtvig’s _Scenes from the Lives of the Warriors of the North_ likewise owes all its value to the Edda and the Sagas. Oehlenschlaeger’s _Aladdin_ is the Northern pendant to Hugo’s _Les Orientales_. Gautier, as a poet, Delacroix as a painter, affect the East, as Oehlenschlaeger does in _Ali and Gulhyndi_. Steffens and Sibbern, as influenced by Schelling, correspond to Cousin. Hauch not infrequently seeks his poetic themes in Germany, as do Nodier and Gerard de Nerval. Ingemann’s weak historical novels correspond to the French imitations of Sir Walter Scott (Alfred de Vigny’s _Cinq-Mars_, Dumas’ _Musketeers_). Oehlenschlaeger’s tragedies correspond to the dramas of Victor Hugo. With the Danes, as with the French, hatred of intelligence, as cold; only that the Danes glorify imagination and enthusiasm, the French, passion. Romanticism lasts in Denmark (without Revolutions and Restorations) until about 1848, as in France.
II. The _School of Common Sense_ is in Denmark partly a worship of the sound sense of the people, partly a moralising tendency. Grundtvig, with his popular manner, his appreciation of the unsophisticated peasant nature, had points of contact with the pupils of Rousseau. Moralising works are Heiberg’s _A Soul after Death_, Paludan-Mueller’s _Adam Homo_, and Kierkegaard’s _Either-Or_. The funny thing about the defence of marriage contained in this last book is that it defends what no one in Denmark attacks. It can only be understood from the contemporary movement in the intellectual life of Europe, which is now asserting the universal validity of morality, as it formerly did the right of passion. Its defence of Protestantism corresponds to Octave Feuillet’s defence of Catholicism, only that Feuillet is conciliatory, Kierkegaard vehement. Bjoernson’s peasant novels, which are a continuation of Grundtvig and Blicher, are, by their harmony and their peaceable relations to all that is, an outcome of love of common sense; they have the same anti-Byronic stamp as the School of Common Sense. The movement comes to us ten years later. But Bjoernson has simultaneously something of Romanticism and something of Realism. We have not men to place separately in the various frames.
III. _Realistic Art_. There is so far only an attempt at a realistic art.
Thus, in Bjoernson’s _Arne_ and _Sigurd Slembe_. Note also an attempt in Bergsoee’s clumsy use of realistic features, and in his seeking after effect. Richardt corresponds in our lyric art as an artist in language to the poets of the _Parnasse_, while Heiberg’s philosophy and most of his poetry may be included in the School of Common Sense. Broechner’s _Ideal Realism_ forms the transitional stage to the philosophy of Reality. Ibsen’s attack upon the existing state of things corresponds to realism in the French drama. He is Dumas on Northern soil. In the _Love Comedy_, as a scoffer he is inharmonious. In _Peer Gynt_, he continues in the moralising tendency with an inclination to coarse and brutal realistic effects (relations with Anitra).
In Germany we find ourselves at the second stage still, sinking deeper and deeper into dialect and popular subjects (from Auerbach to Claus Groth and Fritz Reuter).
It is unnecessary to point out to readers of the present day how incomplete and arbitrary this attempt at a dissection of Danish literature was. I started from the conviction that modern intellectual life in Europe, in different countries, must necessarily in all essentials traverse the same stages, and as I was able to find various unimportant points of similarity in support of this view, I quite overlooked the fact that the counterbalancing weight of dissimilarities rendered the whole comparison futile.
IX.
As, during my first stay in Paris, I had frequently visited Madame Victorine, the widow of my deceased uncle, and her children, very cordial relations had since existed between us, especially after my uncle’s faithless friend had been compelled to disgorge the sums sent from Denmark for her support, which he had so high-handedly kept back. There were only faint traces left of the great beauty that had once been hers; life had dealt hardly with her. She was good and tender-hearted, an affectionate mother, but without other education than was usual in the Parisian small bourgeois class to which she belonged. All her opinions, her ideas of honour, of propriety, of comfort and happiness, were typical of her class.
Partly from economy, partly from a desire not to waste the precious time, I often, in those days, restricted my midday meal. I would buy myself, at a provision dealer’s, a large veal or ham pie and eat it in my room, instead of going out to a restaurant. One day Victorine surprised me at a meal of this sort, and exclaimed horrified: _”Comment? vous vous nourrissez si mal!”_ To her, it was about the same as if I had not had any dinner at all. To sit at home without a cloth on the table, and cut a pie in pieces with a paper knife, was to sink one’s dignity and drop to poor man’s fare.
Her thoughts, like those of most poor people in France and elsewhere, centred mostly on money and money anxieties, on getting on well in the world, or meeting with adversity, and on how much this man or the other could earn, or not earn, in the year. Her eldest son was in St. Petersburg, and he was doing right well; he was good and kind and sent his mother help when he had a little to spare. He had promised, too, to take charge of his next brother. But she had much anxiety about the little ones. One of them was not turning out all that he should be, and there were the two youngest to educate.
There was a charming celebration in the poor home when little Emma went to her first communion, dressed all in white, from head to foot, with a long white veil and white shoes, and several other little girls and boys came just as smartly dressed, and presents were given and good wishes offered. Little Henri looked more innocent than any of the little girls.
Victorine had a friend whom she deemed most happy; this was Jules Claretie’s mother, for, young though her son was, he wrote in the papers, wrote books, too, and earned money, so that he was able to maintain his mother altogether. He was a young man who ought to be held in high estimation, an author who was all that he should be. There was another author whom she detested, and that was P.L. Moeller, the Dane:
“Jacques, as you know, was always a faithful friend of Monsieur Moeller; he copied out a whole book for him, [Footnote: _The Modern Drama in France and Denmark_, which won the University Gold Medal for Moeller.] when he himself was very busy. But then when Jacques died–_pauvre homme!_–he came and paid visits much too often and always at more and more extraordinary times, so that I was obliged to forbid him the house.”
X.
In a students’ hotel near the Odeon, where a few Scandinavians lived, I became acquainted with two or three young lawyers and more young abbes and priests. If you went in when the company were at table in the dining room, the place rang again with their noisy altercations. The advocates discussed politics, literature and religion with such ardour that the air positively crackled. They were apparently practising to speak one day at the Bar or in the Chamber. It was from surroundings such as these that Gambetta emerged.
The young abbes and priests were very good fellows, earnest believers, but so simple that conversations with them were only interesting because of their ignorance and lack of understanding. Scandinavians in Paris who knew only Roman Catholic priests from _Tartufe_ at the theatre, had very incorrect conceptions regarding them. Bressant was the cold, elegant hypocrite, Lafontaine the base, coarse, but powerful cleric, Leroux the full-blooded, red-faced, voluptuary with fat cheeks and shaking hands, whose expression was now angry, now sickly sweet. Northern Protestants were very apt to classify the black-coated men whom they saw in the streets and in the churches, as belonging to one of these three types. But my ecclesiastical acquaintances were as free from hypocrisy as from fanaticism. They were good, honest children of the commonalty, with, not the cunning, but the stupidity, of peasants.
Many a day I spent exploring the surroundings of Paris in their company. We went to St. Cloud and Sevres, to Versailles and St. Germain, to Saint Denis, to Montmorency and Enghien, or to Monthlery, a village with an old tower from the thirteenth century, and then breakfasted at Longjumeau, celebrated for its postillion. There Abbe Leboulleux declared himself opposed to cremation, for the reason that it rendered the resurrection impossible, since God himself could not collect the bones again when the body had been burnt. It was all so amiable that one did not like to contradict him. At the same meal another was giving a sketch of the youth of Martin Luther; he left the church–_on se demande encore pourquoi_. In the innocence of his heart this abbe regarded the rebellion of Luther less as an unpermissible than as an inexplicable act.
XI.
The society of the Italian friends of my first visit gave me much pleasure. My first call at the Pagellas’ was a blank; at the next, I was received like a son of the house and heaped with reproaches for not having left my address; they had tried to find me at my former hotel, and endeavoured in vain to learn where I was staying from Scandinavians whom they knew by name; now I was to spend all the time I could with them, as I used to do in the old days. They were delighted to see me again, and when I wished to leave, drove me home in their carriage. I resumed my former habit of spending the greater part of my spare time with Southerners; once more I was transported to Southern Europe and South America. The very first day I dined at their house I met a jovial old Spaniard, a young Italian, who was settled in Egypt, and a very coquettish young Brazilian girl. The Spaniard, who had been born in Venezuela, was an engineer who had studied conditions in Panama for eleven years, and had a plan for the cutting of the isthmus. He talked a great deal about the project, which Lesseps took up many years afterwards.
Pagella, too, was busy with practical plans, setting himself technical problems, and solving them. Thus he had discovered a new method of constructing railway carriages on springs, with a mechanism to prevent collisions. He christened this the _Virginie-ressort_, after his wife, and had had offers for it from the Russian government.
An Italian engineer, named Casellini, who had carried out the construction for him, was one of the many bold adventurers that one met with among the Southerners in Paris. He had been sent to Spain the year before by Napoleon III to direct the counter-revolution there. Being an engineer, he knew the whole country, and had been in constant communication with Queen Isabella and the Spanish Court in Paris. He gave illuminating accounts of Spanish corruptibility. He had bribed the telegraph officials in the South of Spain, where he was, and saw all political telegrams before the Governor of the place. In Malaga, where he was leading the movement against the Government, he very narrowly escaped being shot; he had been arrested, his despatches intercepted and 1,500 rifles seized, but he bribed the officials to allow him to make selection from the despatches and destroy those that committed him. In Madrid he had had an audience of Serrano, after this latter had forbidden the transmission from the town of any telegrams that were not government telegrams; he had taken with him a telegram drawn up by the French party, which sounded like an ordinary business letter, and secured its being sent off together with the government despatches. Casellini had wished to pay for the telegram, but Serrano had dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his hand, rung a bell and given the telegram to a servant. It was just as in Scribe’s _Queen Marguerite’s Novels_, the commission was executed by the enemy himself.
Such romantic adventures did not seem to be rare in Spain. Prim himself had told the Pagellas how at the time of the failure of the first insurrection he had always, in his flight, (in spite of his defective education, he was more magnanimous and noble-minded than any king), provided for the soldiers who were sent out after him, ordered food and drink for them in every inn he vacated, and paid for everything beforehand, whereas the Government let their poor soldiers starve as soon as they were eight or ten miles from Madrid.
I often met a very queer, distinguished looking old Spaniard named Don Jose Guell y Rente, who had been married to a sister of King Francis, the husband of King Isabella, but had been separated from her after, as he declared, she had tried to cut his throat. As witness to his connubial difficulties, he showed a large scar across his throat. He was well-read and, amongst other things, enthusiastically admired Scandinavian literature because it had produced the world’s greatest poet, Ossian, with whom he had become acquainted in Cesarotti’s Italian translation. It was useless to attempt to explain to him the difference between Scandinavia and Scotland. They are both in the North, he would reply.
XII.
A young American named Olcott, who visited Chasles and occasionally looked me up, brought with him a breath from the universities of the great North American Republic. A young German, Dr. Goldschmidt, a distinguished Sanscrit scholar, a man of more means than I, who had a pretty flat with a view over the Place du Chatelet, and dined at good restaurants, came, as it were, athwart the many impressions I had received of Romance nature and Romance intellectual life, with his violent German national feeling and his thorough knowledge. As early as the Spring, he believed there would be war between Germany and France and wished in that event to be a soldier, as all other German students, so he declared, passionately wished. He was a powerfully built, energetic, well-informed man of the world, with something of the rich man’s habit of command. He seemed destined to long life and quite able to stand fatigue. Nevertheless, his life was short. He went through the whole of the war in France without a scratch, after the conclusion of peace was appointed professor of Sanscrit at the University of conquered Strasburg, but died of illness shortly afterwards.
A striking contrast to his reticent nature was afforded by the young Frenchmen of the same age whom I often met. A very rich and very enthusiastic young man, Marc de Rossieny, was a kind of leader to them; he had 200,000 francs a year, and with this money had founded a weekly publication called “_L’Impartial_,” as a common organ for the students of Brussels and Paris. The paper’s name, _L’Impartial_, must be understood in the sense that it admitted the expression of every opinion with the exception of defence of so-called revealed religion. The editorial staff was positivist, Michelet and Chasles were patrons of the paper, and behind the whole stood Victor Hugo as a kind of honorary director. The weekly preached hatred of the Empire and of theology, and seemed firmly established, yet was only one of the hundred ephemeral papers that are born and die every day in the Latin quarter. When it had been in existence a month, the war broke out and swept it away, like so many other and greater things.
XIII.
Of course I witnessed all that was accessible to me of Parisian public life. I fairly often found my way, as I had done in 1866, to the Palais de Justice to hear the great advocates plead. The man I enjoyed listening to most was Jules Favre, whose name was soon to be on every one’s lips. The younger generation admired in him the high-principled and steadfast opponent of the Empire in the Chamber, and he was regarded as well-nigh the most eloquent man in France. As an advocate, he was incomparable. His unusual handsomeness,–his beautiful face under a helmet of grey hair, and his upright carriage,–were great points in his favour. His eloquence was real, penetrating, convincing, inasmuch as he piled up fact upon fact, and was at the same time, as the French manner is, dramatic, with large gesticulations that made his gown flutter restlessly about him like the wings of a bat. It was a depressing fact that afterwards, as the Minister opposed to Bismarck, he was so unequal to his position.
I was present at the _Theatre Francais_ on the occasion of the unveiling of Ponsard’s bust. To the Romanticists, Ponsard was nothing less than the ass’s jawbone with which the Philistines attempted to slay Hugo. But Emile Chasles, a son of my old friend, gave a lecture upon him, and afterwards _Le lion amoureux_ was played, a very tolerable little piece from the Revolutionary period, in which, for one thing, Napoleon appears as a young man. There are some very fine revolutionary tirades in it, of which Princess Mathilde, after its first representation, said that they made her _Republican_ heart palpitate. The ceremony in honor of this little anti-pope to Victor Hugo was quite a pretty one.
Once, too, I received a ticket for a reception at the French Academy. The poet Auguste Barbier was being inaugurated and Silvestre de Sacy welcomed him, in academic fashion, in a fairly indiscreet speech. Barbier’s _Jamber_ was one of the books of poems that I had loved for years, and I knew many of the strophes by heart, for instance, the celebrated ones on Freedom and on Napoleon; I had also noticed how Barbier’s vigour had subsided in subsequent collections of poems; in reality, he was still living on his reputation from the year 1831, and without a doubt most people believed him to be dead. And now there he stood, a shrivelled old man in his Palm uniform, his speech revealing neither satiric power nor lofty intellect. It was undoubtedly owing to his detestation of Napoleon (_vide_ his poem _L’Idole_) that the Academy, who were always agitating against the Empire, had now, so late in the day, cast their eyes upon him. Bald little Silvestre de Sacy, the tiny son of an important father, reproached him for his verses on Freedom, as the bold woman of the people who was not afraid to shed blood.
“That is not Freedom as I understand it,” piped the little man,–and one believed him,–but could not refrain from murmuring with the poet:
C’est que la Liberte n’est pas une comtesse Du noble Faubourg St. Germain,
Une femme qu’un cri fait tomber en faiblesse, Qui met du blanc et du carmin;
C’est une forte femme.
XIV.
A very instructive resort, even for a layman, was the Record Office, for there one could run through the whole history of France in the most entertaining manner with the help of the manuscripts placed on view, from the most ancient papyrus rolls to the days of parchment and paper. You saw the documents of the Feudal Lords’ and Priests’ Conspiracies under the Merovingians and the Capets, the decree of divorce between Philip Augustus and Ingeborg, and letters from the most notable personages of the Middle Ages and the autocracy. The period of the Revolution and the First Empire came before one with especial vividness. There was Charlemagne’s monogram stencilled in tin, and that of Robert of Paris, reproduced in the same manner, those of Louis XIV. and Moliere, of Francis the Catholic and Mary Stuart. There were letters from Robespierre and Danton, requests for money and death-warrants from the Reign of Terror, Charlotte Corday’s last letters from prison and the original letters of Napoleon from St. Helena.
In June I saw the annual races at Longchamps for the first time. Great was the splendour. From two o’clock in the afternoon to six there was an uninterrupted stream of carriages, five or six abreast, along the Champs Elysees; there were thousands of _lorettes_ (as they were called at that time) in light silk gowns, covered with diamonds and precious stones, in carriages decorated with flowers. Coachmen and footmen wore powdered wigs, white or grey, silk stockings and knee-breeches and a flower in the buttonhole matching the colour of their livery and the flowers which hung about the horses’ ears. Some of the carriages had no coachman’s box or driver, but were harnessed to four horses ridden by postillions in green satin or scarlet velvet, with white feathers in their caps.
The only great _demi-mondaine_ of whom I had hitherto caught a glimpse was the renowned Madame de Paiva, who had a little palace by the side of the house in which Froelich the painter lived, in the Champs Elysees. Her connection with Count Henckel v. Donnersmark permitted her to surround herself with regal magnificence, and, to the indignation of Princess Mathilde, men like Gautier and Renan, Sainte-Beuve and Goncourt, Saint-Victor and Taine, sat at her table. The ladies here were younger and prettier, but socially of lower rank. The gentlemen went about among the carriages, said _tu_ without any preamble to the women, and squeezed their hands, while their men-servants sat stolid, like wood, seeming neither to hear nor see.
This race-day was the last under the Empire. It is the one described in Zola’s _Nana_. The prize for the third race was 100,000 francs. After English horses had been victorious for several years in succession, the prize was carried off in 1870–as in _Nana_–by a native-born horse, and the jubilation was great; it was a serious satisfaction to national vanity.
At that time, the Tuileries were still standing, and I was fond of walking about the gardens near closing time, when the guard beat the drums to turn the people out. It was pleasant to hear the rolling of the drums, which were beaten by two of the Grenadier Guard drummers and a Turco. Goldschmidt had already written his clever and linguistically very fine piece of prose about this rolling of the drums and what it possibly presaged: Napoleon’s own expulsion from the Tuileries and the humiliation of French grandeur before the Prussians, who might one day come and drum this grandeur out. But Goldschmidt had disfigured the pretty little piece somewhat by relating that one day when, for an experiment, he had tried to make his way into the gardens after the signal for closing had sounded, the Zouave had carelessly levelled his bayonet at him with the words: _”Ne faites pas des betises!”_ This levelling of the bayonet on such trivial provocation was too tremendous, so I made up my mind one evening to try myself. The soldier on guard merely remarked politely: “_Ferme, monsieur, on va sortir._”
I little dreamed that only a few months later the Empress would steal secretly out of the palace, having lost her crown, and still less that only six months afterwards, during the civil war, the Tuileries would be reduced to ashes, never to rise again.
XV.
At that time the eyes of the Danes were fixed upon France in hope and expectation that their national resuscitation would come from that quarter, and they made no distinction between France and the Empire. Although the shortest visit to Paris was sufficient to convince a foreigner not only that the personal popularity of the Emperor was long since at an end, but that the whole government was despised, in Denmark people did not, and would not, know it. In the Danish paper with the widest circulation, the Daily Paper, foreign affairs were dealt with by a man of the name of Prahl, a wildly enthusiastic admirer of the Empire, a pleasant man and a brainy, but who, on this vital point, seemed to have blinkers on. From all his numerous foreign papers, he deduced only the opinions that he held before, and his opinions were solely influenced by his wishes. He had never had any opportunity of procuring information at first hand. He said to me one day:
“I am accused of allowing my views to be influenced by the foreign diplomatists here, I, who have never spoken to one of them. I can honestly boast of being unacquainted with even the youngest attache of the Portuguese Ministry.” His remarks, which sufficiently revealed this fact, unfortunately struck the keynote of the talk of the political wiseacres in Denmark.
Though the Danes were so full of the French, it would be a pity to say that the latter returned the compliment. It struck me then, as it must have struck many others, how difficult it was to make people in France understand that Danes and Norsemen were not Germans. From the roughest to the most highly educated, they all looked upon it as an understood thing, and you could not persuade them of anything else. As soon as they had heard Northerners exchange a few words with each other and had picked up the frequently recurring _Ja_, they were sufficiently edified. Even many years after, I caught the most highly cultured Frenchmen (such as Edmond de Concourt), believing that, at any rate on the stage, people spoke German in Copenhagen.
One day in June I began chatting on an omnibus with a corporal of Grenadiers. When he heard that I was Danish, he remarked: “German, then.” I said: “No.” He persisted in his assertion, and asked, cunningly, what _oui_ was in Danish. When I told him he merely replied, philosophically, “Ah! then German is the mother tongue.” It is true that when Danes, Norwegians and Swedes met abroad they felt each other to be compatriots; but this did not prevent them all being classed together as Germans; that they were not Englishmen, you saw at a glance. Even when there were several of them together, they had difficulty in asserting themselves as different and independent; they were a Germanic race all the same, and people often added, “of second-class importance,” since the race had other more pronounced representatives.
The only strong expression of political opinion that was engineered in France then was the so-called plebiscite of May, 1870; the government challenged the verdict of the entire male population of France upon the policy of Napoleon III. during the past eighteen years, and did so with the intention, strangely enough not perceived by Prime Minister Ollivier, of re-converting the so-called constitutional Empire which had been in existence since January 1, 1870, into an autocracy. Sensible people saw that the plebiscite was only an objectionable comedy; a favourable reply would be obtained all over the country by means of pressure on the voters and falsification of votes; the oppositionist papers showed this up boldly in articles that were sheer gems of wit. Disturbances were expected in Paris on the 9th of May, and here and there troops were collected. But the Parisians, who saw through the farce, remained perfectly indifferent.
The decision turned out as had been expected; the huge majority in Paris was _against_, the provincial population voted _for_, the Emperor.
XVI.
On July 5th I saw John Stuart Mill for the first time. He had arrived in Paris the night before, passing through from Avignon, and paid a visit