Recollections of My Childhood and Youth Part 14

I followed up the streams in the wood to their sources. For a while a rivulet oozed slowly along. Then came a little fall, and it began to speak, to gurgle and murmur; but only at this one place, and here it seemed to me to be like a young man or woman of twenty. Now that I, who in my boyhood's days had gone for botanical excursions with my master and school-fellows, absorbed myself in every plant, from greatest to least, without wis.h.i.+ng to arrange or cla.s.sify any, it seemed as though an infinite wisdom in Nature were being revealed to me for the first time.

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

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

And as my habit was, I philosophised over what I saw and had made my own, and I strove to understand in what beauty consisted. I considered the relations between beauty and life; why was it that artificial flowers and the imitation of a nightingale's song were so far behind their originals in beauty? What was the difference between the beauty of the real, the artificial and the painted flower? Might not Herbart's Aesthetics be wrong, in their theory of form? The form itself might be the same in Nature and the imitation, in the rose made of velvet and the rose growing in the garden. And I reflected on the connection between the beauty of the species and that of the individual. Whether a lily be a beautiful flower, I can say without ever having seen lilies before, but whether it be a beautiful lily, I cannot. The individual can only be termed beautiful when more like than unlike to the ideal of the species.

And I mused over the translation of the idea of beauty into actions and intellectual conditions. Was not the death of Socrates more beautiful than his preservation of Alcibiades' life in battle?--though this was none the less a beautiful act.

XXI.

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

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

They perceived no heresy and felt themselves no less edified by the address than did the two young Copenhagen graduates.

XXII.

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

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

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

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

In September, 1865, the article on Aarestrup was finished. It was intended to be quickly followed up by others on the remaining Danish authors in A. But it was the only one that was written, for Algreen- Ussing's apparently so well planned undertaking was suddenly brought to a standstill. The proprietors of the National Liberal papers declared, as soon as they heard of the plan, that they would not on any account agree to its being carried out by a man who took up such a "reactionary"

position in Danish politics as Ussing, and in face of their threat to annihilate the undertaking, the publishers, who were altogether dependent on the att.i.tude of these papers, did not dare to defy them.

They explained to Algreen-Ussing that they felt obliged to break their contract with him, but were willing to pay him the compensation agreed upon beforehand for failure to carry it out. He fought long to get his project carried through, but his efforts proving fruitless, he refused, from pride, to accept any indemnity, and was thus compelled to see with bitterness many years' work and an infinite amount of trouble completely wasted. Shortly afterwards he succ.u.mbed to an attack of illness.

XXIII.

A young man who plunged into philosophical study at the beginning of the sixties in Denmark, and was specially engrossed by the boundary relations between Philosophy and Religion, could not but come to the conclusion that philosophical life would never flourish in Danish soil until a great intellectual battle had been set on foot, in the course of which conflicting opinions which had never yet been advanced in express terms should be made manifest and wrestle with one another, until it became clear which standpoints were untenable and which could be maintained. Although he cherished warm feelings of affection for both R.

Nielsen and Brochner the two professors of Philosophy, he could not help hoping for a discussion between them of the fundamental questions which were engaging his mind. As Brochner's pupil, I said a little of what was in my mind to him, but could not induce him to begin. Then I begged Gabriel Sibbern to furnish a thorough criticism of Nielsen's books, but he declined. I began to doubt whether I should be able to persuade the elder men to speak.

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

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

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

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

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

However, it had irrevocably disappeared.

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

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

But I had touched upon dogmatic Belief and that was enough.

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

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

When Ibsen's _Brand_ came out, creating an unusual sensation, I asked Ploug if I might review the book and received a definite "Yes"

from him. I then wrote my article, to which I devoted no little pains, but when I took it in it was met by him, to my astonishment, with the remark that the paper had now received another notice from their regular reviewer, whom he "could not very well kick aside." Ploug's promise had apparently been meaningless! I went my way with my article, firmly resolved never to go there again.

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

XXIV.

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

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

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

XXV.

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

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

There was an Art and Industrial Exhibition in Stockholm, that Summer, which C.N. David was anxious to see. As he did not care to go alone, he took me in his son's place. It was my first journey to a foreign capital, and as such both enjoyable and profitable. I no longer, it is true, had the same intense boyish impressionability as when I was in Sweden for the first time, seven years before. The most trifling thing then had been an experience. In Goteborg I had stayed with a friend of my mother's, whose twelve-year-old daughter, Bluma Alida, a wondrously charming little maiden, had jokingly been destined by the two mothers for my bride from the child's very birth. And at that time I had a.s.similated every impression of people or scenery with a voracious appet.i.te which rendered these impressions ineffaceable all my life long.

That Summer month, my fancy had transformed every meeting with a young girl into an adventure and fixed every landscape on my mental retina with an affection such as the landscape painter generally only feels for a place where he is specially at home. Then I had shared for a whole month Goteborg family and social life. Now I was merely travelling as a tourist, and as the companion of a highly respected old man.

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

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

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

One recollection from these weeks is a.s.sociated with a night when the sky was overcast. I had wandered round the town, before retiring to rest, and somewhere, in a large square, slipping my hand in my pocket, and feeling it full of bits of paper, could not remember how they got there, and threw them away. When I was nearly back at the hotel it flashed upon me that it had been small Swedish notes--all the money that I had changed for my stay in Stockholm--that I had been carrying loose in my pocket and had so thoughtlessly thrown away. With a great deal of trouble, I found the square again, but of course not a sign of the riches that in unpardonable forgetfulness I had scattered to the winds.

I was obliged to borrow six Rigsdaler (a sum of a little over thirteen s.h.i.+llings) from my old protector. That my requirements were modest is proved by the fact that this sum sufficed.

The Danish Amba.s.sador was absent from Stockholm just at this time, and the Charge d'Affaires at the Legation had to receive the Danish ex- Minister in his stead. He was very attentive to us, and took the travellers everywhere where C.N. David wished his arrival to be made known. He himself, however, was a most unfortunate specimen of Danish diplomacy, a man disintegrated by hideous debauchery, of coa.r.s.e conversation, and disposition so brutal that he kicked little children aside with his foot when they got in front of him in the street.

Abnormities of too great irregularity brought about, not long afterwards, his dismissal and his banishment to a little Danish island.

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

It produced an extremely painful impression upon me that not only the Danish Charge d'Affaires, but apparently several of these fine gentlemen, had determined on the additional amus.e.m.e.nt of making me drunk. Everybody at table vied one with the other to drink my health, and they informed me that etiquette demanded I should each time empty my gla.s.s to the bottom; the contrary would be a breach of good form. As I very quickly saw through their intention, I escaped from the difficulty by asking the waiter to bring me a very small gla.s.s. By emptying this I could, without my manners being affected, hold my own against them all.

But,--almost for the first time in my life,--when the company rose from table I felt that I had been in exceedingly bad company, and a disgust for the nominally highest circles, who were so little capable of acting in accordance with the reputation they enjoyed, and the polish imputed to them, remained with me for many years to come.