Recollections of My Childhood and Youth Part 21

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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sumption 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 a.s.sistance. 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 att.i.tude?

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 pa.s.sed before our paths crossed again and a short-lived a.s.sociation 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 Brochner, 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 a.s.sured 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 Bjornson 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 Bjornson's name, this attack was not without weight. The innocent remark that Soren 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 Bjornson 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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sionate 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, Bjornstjerne Bjornson took his place. The three names, R.

Nielsen, B. Bjornson, 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 Bjornson's first appearance he had attached himself so enthusiastically and inviolably to him that by the general public he was almost regarded as Bjornson's herald. At every opportunity he emphatically laid down Bjornson'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 Bjornson, 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 Bjornstjerne Bjornson, dated April 15th, 1869.

What had called it forth was my remark, in that article, that Bjornson, 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 G.o.d in Heaven in Bjornson'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 Bjornson 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 Oehlenschlager (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 Oehlenschlager 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 G.o.d shall make you ruler over great things." And never, no, never, have I s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pa.s.sages 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 _Synnove_, 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 pa.s.sion, 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 Bjornson 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 nave disposition, susceptible of every n.o.ble 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sage 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; Bjornson 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 wors.h.i.+p. 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, pa.s.s 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 p.r.o.nouncement 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 pa.s.sing; 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 ill.u.s.tration 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. Moller, 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, G.o.d help me, is nothing and accomplishes nothing.

This part of the letter irritated me intensely, partly by the mentor's tone a.s.sumed 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. Moller!

The fact that the conclusion of the letter contained much that was conciliatory and beautiful consequently did not help matters. Bjornson 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 accomplis.h.i.+ng 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 Bjornson 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 att.i.tude of condescension: