Recollections of My Childhood and Youth Part 19

His wife was well calculated, by her charm of manner, to be the centre of the numerous circle of talented men who, both from Denmark and abroad, frequented the house. There one met all the foreign natural scientists who came to Copenhagen, all the esteemed personalities Denmark had at the time, who might be considered as belonging to the freer trend of thought, and many neutrals. Actors such as Hoedt and Phister went there, favourite narrators such as Bergsoe, painters like Kroyer, distinguished scientists like J.C. Schiodte, the entomologist.

This last was an independent and intellectual man, somewhat touchy, and domineering in his manner, a master of his subject, a man of learning, besides, ceremonious, often cordial, ready to listen to anything worth hearing that was said. He had weaknesses, never would admit that he had made a mistake, and was even very unwilling to own he had not read a book that was being spoken of. Besides which, he had spent too great a part of his life in virulent polemics to be devoid of the narrowing of the horizon which is the concomitant of always watching and being ready to attack the same opponent. But he was in the grand style, which is rare in Denmark, as elsewhere.

XIII.

The house of the sisters Spang was a pleasant one to go to; they were two unmarried ladies who kept an excellent girls' school, at which Julius Lange taught drawing. Benny Spang, not a beautiful, but a brilliant girl, with exceptional brains, daughter of the well-known Pastor Spang, a friend of Soren Kierkegaard, adopted a tone of good- fellows.h.i.+p towards me that completely won my affection. She was cheerful, witty, sincere and considerate. Not long after we became acquainted she married a somewhat older man than herself, the gentle and refined landscape painter, Gotfred Rump. The latter made a very good sketch of me.

The poet Paludan-Muller and the Lange family visited at the house; so did the two young and marvellously beautiful girls, Alma Trepka and Clara Rothe, the former of whom was married later to Carl Bloch the painter, the other to her uncle, Mr. Falbe, the Danish Minister in London.

It was hard to say which of the two was the more beautiful. Both were unusually lovely. Alma Trepka was queenly, her movements sedate, her disposition calm and unclouded--Carl Bloch could paint a Madonna, or even a Christ, from her face without making any essential alteration in the oval of its contours. Clara Rothe's beauty was that of the white hart in the legend; her eyes like a deer's, large and shy, timid, and unself-conscious, her movements rapid, but so graceful that one was fascinated by the harmony of them.

XIV.

Just about this time a foreign element entered the circle of Copenhagen students to which I belonged. One day there came into my room a youth with a nut-brown face, short and compactly built, who after only a few weeks' stay in Copenhagen could speak Danish quite tolerably. He was a young Armenian, who had seen a great deal of the world and was of very mixed race. His father had married, at Ispahan, a lady of Dutch-German origin. Up to his seventh year he had lived in Batavia. When the family afterwards moved to Europe, he was placed at school in Geneva. He had there been brought up, in French, to trade, but as he revealed an extraordinary talent for languages, was sent, for a year or eighteen months at a time, to the four German universities of Halle, Erlangen, Gottingen and Leipzig. Now, at the age of 22, he had come to Copenhagen to copy Palahvi and Sanscrit ma.n.u.scripts that Rask and Westergaard had brought to Europe. He knew a great many languages, and was moreover very many-sided in his acquirements, sang German student songs charmingly, was introduced and invited everywhere, and with his foreign appearance and quick intelligence was a great success. He introduced new points of view, was full of information, and brought with him a breath from the great world outside. Industrious though he had been before, Copenhagen social life tempted him to idleness. His means came to an end; he said that the annual income he was in the habit of receiving by s.h.i.+p from India had this year, for some inexplicable reason, failed to arrive, dragged out a miserable existence for some time under great difficulties, starved, borrowed small sums, and disappeared as suddenly as he had come.

XV.

Knowing this Armenian made me realise how restricted my own learning was, and what a very general field of knowledge I had chosen.

I wrote my newspaper articles and my essays, and I worked at my doctor's thesis on French Aesthetics, which cost me no little pains; it was my first attempt to construct a consecutive book, and it was only by a vigorous effort that I completed it at the end of 1869. But I had then been casting over in my mind for some years thoughts to which I never was able to give a final form, thoughts about the position of women in society, which would not let me rest.

A woman whose thought fired mine even further just about this time, a large-minded woman, who studied society with an uncompromising directness that was scarcely to be met with in any man of the time in Denmark, was the wife of the poet Carsten Hauch. When she spoke of Danish women, the stage of their development and their position in law, their apathy and the contemptibleness of the men, whether these latter were despots, pedants, or self-sufficient Christians, she made me a sharer of her point of view; our hearts glowed with the same flame.

Rinna Hauch was not, like certain old ladies of her circle, a "woman's movement" woman before the name was invented. She taught no doctrine, but she glowed with ardour for the cause of freedom and justice. She saw through the weak, petty men and women of her acquaintance and despised them. She too pa.s.sionately desired a thorough revolution in modern society to be able to feel satisfied merely by an amelioration of the circ.u.mstances of women of the middle cla.s.ses; and yet it was the condition of women, especially in the cla.s.ses she knew well, that she thought most about.

She began to place some credence in me and cherished a hope that I should do my utmost to stir up the stagnation at home, and during the long conversations we had together, when, in the course of these Summers, I now and again spent a week at a time with the Hauchs at h.e.l.lebaek, she enflamed me with her ardour.

In September, 1868, after wandering with my old friend up and down the sh.o.r.e, under the pure, starlit heaven, and at last finding myself late at night in my room, I was unable to go to rest. All that had been talked of and discussed in the course of the day made my head hot and urged me to reflection and action. Often I seized a piece of paper and scribbled off, disconnectedly, in pencil, remarks corresponding to the internal agitation of my mind, jottings like the following, for example:

S.R., that restive fanatic, has a wife who cannot believe, and wishes for nothing but to be left in peace on religious matters. He _forces her_ to go to Communion, though he knows the words of Scripture, that he who partakes unworthily eats and drinks to his own d.a.m.nation.

There is not one sound, healthy sentiment in the whole of our religious state of being. You frequently hear it said: "Everyone can't be a hypocrite." True enough. But begin, in the middle cla.s.ses, to deduct hypocrisy, and gross affectation and cowardly dread of h.e.l.l, and see what is left!

If we have young people worthy the name, I will tell them the truth; but this band of backboneless creatures blocks up the view.

Women whom Life has enlightened and whom it has disappointed! You I can help.

I see two lovers hand in hand, kissing the tears away from each other's eyes.

I can only rouse the wakeful. Nothing can be done with those who are incapable of feeling n.o.ble indignation.

I have known two women prefer death to the infamy of conjugal life.

Open the newspapers!--hardly a line that is not a lie.

And poets and speakers flatter a people like that.

Christianity and Humanity have long wished for divorce. Now this is an accomplished fact.

And the priests are honoured. They plume themselves on not having certain vices, for which they are too weak.

I know that I shall be stoned, that every boy has his balderdash ready against that to which the reflection of years and sleepless nights has given birth. But do you think I am afraid of anyone?

Stupidity was always the bodyguard of Lies.

A people who have put up with the Oldenborgs for four hundred years and made loyalty to them into a virtue!

They do not even understand that here there is no Antichrist but Common Sense.

Abandoned by all, except Unhappiness and me.

When did G.o.d become Man? When Nature reached the point in its development at which the first man made his appearance; when Nature became man, then G.o.d did.

Women say of the beloved one: "A bouquet he brings smells better than one another brings."

You are weak, dear one, G.o.d help you! And you help! and I help!

These thoughts have wrought a man of me, have finally wrought me to a man.

I procured all that was accessible to me in modern French and English literature on the woman subject.

In the year 1869 my thoughts on the subordinate position of women in society began to a.s.sume shape, and I attempted a connected record of them. I adopted as my starting point Soren Kierkegaard's altogether antiquated conception of woman and contested it at every point. But all that I had planned and drawn up was cast aside when in 1869 John Stuart Mill's book on the subject fell into my hands. I felt Mill's superiority to be so immense and regarded his book as so epoch-making that I necessarily had to reject my own draft and restrict myself to the translation and introduction of what he had said. In November, 1869, I published Mill's book in Danish and in this manner introduced the modern woman's movement into Denmark.

The translation was of this advantage to me that it brought me first into epistolary communication, and later into personal contact with one of the greatest men of the time.

XVI.

There was one of the political figures of the time whom I often met during these years. This was the man most beloved of the previous generation, whose star had certainly declined since the war, but whose name was still one to conjure with, Orla Lehmann.

I had made his acquaintance when I was little more than a boy, in a very curious way.

In the year 1865 I had given a few lectures in C.N. David's house, on Runeberg, whom I had glorified exceedingly, and as the David and Lehmann houses, despite the political differences between them, were closely related one to the other, and intimately connected, Orla Lehmann had heard these lectures very warmly spoken of. At that time he had just founded a People's Society as a counterpoise to the supremely conservative Society of August, and, looking out for lecturers for it, hit upon the twenty-three-year-old speaker as upon a possibility.

I was then living in a little cupboard of a room on the third floor in Crystal Street, and over my room was one, in the attic, inhabited by my seventeen-year-old brother, who had not yet matriculated.

Orla Lehmann, who had been told that the person he was seeking lived high up, rapidly mounted the four storeys, and knocked, a little out of breath, at the schoolboy's door. When the door opened, he walked in, and said, still standing:

"You are Brandes? I am Lehmann." Without heeding the surprise he read in the young fellow's face, he went on:

"I have come to ask you to give a lecture to the People's Society in the Casino's big room."

As the addressee looked about to speak, he continued, drowning every objection, "I know what you are going to say. That you are too young.

Youth is written in your face. But there is no question of seniority here. I am accustomed to accomplish what I determine upon, and I shall take no notice of objections. I know that you are able to give lectures, you have recently given proof of it."

At last there was a minute's pause, permitting the younger one to interpose: