VIII.

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

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

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

IX.

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

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

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

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

X.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIII.

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

"He has signed! He has signed!"

He did not say: "The King."

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

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

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

XIV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, Jan. 17th. Received letter telling me I may fetch my leading question to-morrow at 5 o'clock.

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

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

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

Feb. 28th. Heard definitely to-day.—At half-past one this night finished my essay.

XV.

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

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

XVI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XVII.

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

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

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

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

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

XVIII.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIX.

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

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

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

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

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

XX.

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

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

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

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

XXI.

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

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

XXII.

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

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

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

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

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

XXIII.

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, it had irrevocably disappeared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXIV.

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

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

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

XXV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It produced an extremely painful impression upon me that not only the Danish Charge d'Affaires, but apparently several of these fine gentlemen, had determined on the additional amusement of making me drunk. Everybody at table vied one with the other to drink my health, and they informed me that etiquette demanded I should each time empty my glass 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 glass. 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.



FIRST LONG SOJOURN ABROAD

My Wish to See Paris—Dualism in our Modern Philosophy—A Journey—Impressions of Paris—Lessons in French—Mademoiselle Mathilde —Taine.

I.

I had wished for years to see Paris, the city that roused my most devout feelings. As a youth I had felt a kind of reverent awe for the French Revolution, which represented to me the beginning of human conditions for all those who were not of the favoured among men,—and Paris was the city of the Revolution. Moreover, it was the city of Napoleon, the only ruler since Caesar who had seriously fascinated me, though my feelings for him changed so much that now admiration, now aversion, got the upper hand. And Paris was the city, too, of the old culture, the city of Julian the Apostate, the city of the middle ages, that Victor Hugo had portrayed in Notre Dame de Paris—the first book I had read in French, difficult though it was with its many peculiar expressions for Gothic arches and buttresses—and it was the city where Alfred de Musset had written his poems and where Delacroix had painted. The Louvre and the Luxembourg, the Theatre Francais and the Gymnase were immense treasuries that tempted me. In the Autumn of 1866, when Gabriel Sibbern started to Paris, somewhat before I myself could get away, my last words to him: "Till we meet again in the Holy City!" were by no means a jest.

II.

Before I could start, I had to finish the pamphlet which, with Sibbern's help, I had written against Nielsen's adjustment of the split between Protestant orthodoxy and the scientific view of the universe, and which I had called Dualism in our Modern Philosophy. I was not troubled with any misgivings as to how I should get the book published. As long ago as 1864 a polite, smiling, kindly man, who introduced himself to me as Frederik Hegel, the bookseller, had knocked at the door of my little room and asked me to let him print the essay which I had written for my Master of Arts examination, and if possible he would also like the paper which had won the University gold medal; and in fact, anything else I might wish published. To my amazed reply that those essays were not worth publishing, and that in general I did not consider what I wrote sufficiently mature for publication, Hegel had first suggested that I should leave that question to the publisher, and then, when he saw that my refusal was honestly meant, had simply asked me to take my work to him when I myself considered that the moment had arrived. On this occasion, as on many others, the acute and daring publisher gave proof of the flair which made him the greatest in the North. He accepted the little book without raising any difficulties, merely remarking that it would have to be spread out a little in the printing, that it might not look too thin. Even before the pamphlet was mentioned in the Press, its author was on his way to foreign parts.

III.

On one of the first days of November, I journeyed, in a tremendous storm, to Luebeck, the characteristic buildings of which (the Church of Mary, the Exchange, the Town-hall), together with the remains of the old fortifications, aroused my keen interest. In this Hanse town, with its strongly individual stamp, I found myself carried back three hundred years.

I was amazed at the slave-like dress of the workmen, the pointed hats of the girls, and the wood pavements, which were new to me.

I travelled through Germany with a Portuguese, a little doctor from the University of Coimbra, in whose queer French fifteen was kouss and Goethe Shett. A practical American, wrapped up in a waterproof, took up three places to lie down in one evening, pretended to sleep, and never stirred all night, forcing his inexperienced fellow- travellers to crowd up into the corners of the carriage, and when the day broke, chatted with them as pleasantly as if they and he were the best friends in the world.

At Cologne, where I had stood, reverential, in the noble forest of pillars in the Cathedral, then afterwards, in my simplicity, allowed someone to foist a whole case of Eau de Cologne upon me, I shortened my stay, in my haste to see Paris. But, having by mistake taken a train which would necessitate my waiting several hours at Liege, I decided rather to continue my journey to Brussels and see that city too. The run through Belgium seemed to me heavenly, as for a time I happened to be quite alone in my compartment and I walked up and down, intoxicated with the joy of travelling.

Brussels was the first large French town I saw; it was a foretaste of Paris, and delighted me.

Never having been out in the world on my own account before, I was still as inexperienced and awkward as a child. It was not enough that I had got into the wrong train; I discovered, to my shame, that I had mislaid the key of my box, which made me think anxiously of the customs officials in Paris, and I was also so stupid as to ask the boots in the Brussels hotel for "a little room," so that they gave me a miserable little sleeping-place under the roof.

But at night, after I had rambled about the streets of Brussels, as I sat on a bench somewhere on a broad boulevard, an overwhelming, terrifying, transporting sense of my solitariness came over me. It seemed to me as though now, alone in a foreign land, at night time, in this human swarm, where no one knew me and I knew no one, where no one would look for me if anything were to happen to me, I was for the first time thrown entirely on my own resources, and I recognised in the heavens, with a feeling of reassurance, old friends among the stars.

With a guide, whom in my ignorance I thought necessary, I saw the sights of the town, and afterwards, for the first time, saw a French play. So little experience of the world had I, that, during the interval, I left my overcoat, which I had not given up to the attendant, lying on the seat in the pit, and my neighbour had to explain to me that such great confidence in my fellow-men was out of place.

Everything was new to me, everything fascinated me. I, who only knew "indulgence" from my history lessons at school, saw with keen interest the priest in a Brussels church dispense "indulgence pleniere," or, in Flemish, vollen aflaet. I was interested in the curious names of the ecclesiastical orders posted up in the churches, marvelled, for instance, at a brotherhood that was called "St. Andrew Avellin, patron saint against apoplexy, epilepsy and sudden death."

In the carriage from Brussels I had for travelling companion a pretty young Belgian girl named Marie Choteau, who was travelling with her father, but talked all the time to her foreign fellow-traveller, and in the course of conversation showed me a Belgian history and a Belgian geography, from which it appeared that Belgium was the centre of the globe, the world's most densely built over, most religious, and at the same time most enlightened country, the one which, in proportion to its size, had the most and largest industries. I gave her some of my bountiful supply of Eau de Cologne.

IV.

The tiring night-journey, with its full four hours' wait at Liege, was all pure enjoyment to me, and in a mood of mild ecstasy, at last, at half-past ten on the morning of November 11th 1866, I made my entry into Paris, and was received cordially by the proprietors of a modest but clean little hotel which is still standing, No. 20 Rue Notre Dame des Victoires, by the proprietors, two simple Lorrainers, Francois and Mueller, to whom Gabriel Sibbern, who was staying there, had announced my arrival. The same morning Sibbern guided my first steps to one of Pasdeloup's great classical popular concerts.

In the evening, in spite of my fatigue after travelling all night, I went to the Theatre Francais for the first time, and there, lost in admiration of the masterly ensemble and the natural yet passionate acting, with which I had hitherto seen nothing to compare, I saw Girardin's Le supplice d'une femme, and Beaumarchais' Le mariage de Figaro, in one evening making the acquaintance of such stars as Regnier, Madame Favart, Coquelin and the Sisters Brohan.

Regnier especially, in his simple dignity, was an unforgettable figure, being surrounded, moreover, in my eyes by the glory which the well-known little poem of Alfred de Musset, written to comfort the father's heart, had shed upon him. Of the two celebrated sisters, Augustine was all wit, Madeleine pure beauty and arch, melting grace.

These first days were rich days to me, and as they did not leave me any time for thinking over what I had seen, my impressions overwhelmed me at night, till sometimes I could not sleep for sheer happiness. This, to me, was happiness, an uninterrupted garnering of intellectual wealth in association with objects that all appealed to my sympathies, and I wrote home: "To be here, young, healthy, with alert senses, keen eyes and good ears, with all the curiosity, eagerness to know, love of learning, and susceptibility to every impression, that is youth's own prerogative, and to have no worries about home, all that is so great a happiness that I am sometimes tempted, like Polycrates, to fling the handsome ring I had from Christian Richardt in the gutter."

For the rest, I was too fond of characteristic architecture to feel attracted by the building art displayed in the long, regular streets of Napoleon III, and too permeated with national prejudices to be able at once to appreciate French sculpture. I was justified in feeling repelled by many empty allegorical pieces on public monuments, but during the first weeks I lacked perception for such good sculpture as is to be found in the foyer of the Theatre Francais. "You reel at every step," I wrote immediately after my arrival, "that France has never had a Thorwaldsen, and that Denmark possesses an indescribable treasure in him. We are and remain, in three or four directions, the first nation in Europe. This is pure and simple truth."

To my youthful ignorance it was the truth, but it hardly remained such after the first month.

Being anxious to see as much as possible and not let anything of interest escape me, I went late to bed, and yet got up early, and tried to regulate my time, as one does a blanket that is too short.

I was immensely interested in the art treasures from all over the world collected in the Louvre. Every single morning, after eating my modest breakfast at a cremerie near the chateau, I paid my vows in the Salon carre and then absorbed myself in the other halls. The gallery of the Louvre was the one to which I owe my initiation. Before, I had seen hardly any Italian art in the original, and no French at all. In Copenhagen I had been able to worship all the Dutch masters. Leonardo and the Venetians spoke to me here for the first time. French painting and sculpture, Puget and Houdon, Clouet and Delacroix, and the French art that was modern then, I learnt for the first time to love and appreciate at the Luxembourg.

I relished these works of art, and the old-time art of the Greeks and Egyptians which the Museum of the Louvre contained, in a mild intoxication of delight.

And I inbreathed Paris into my soul. When on the broad, handsome Place de la Concorde, I saw at the same time, with my bodily eyes, the beautifully impressive obelisk, and in my mind's eye the scaffold on which the royal pair met with their death in the Revolution; when in the Latin quarter I went upstairs to the house in which Charlotte Corday murdered Marat, or when, in the highest storey of the Louvre, I gazed at the little gray coat from Marengo and the three-cornered hat, or from the Arc de Triomphe let my glance roam over the city, the life that pulsated through my veins seemed stimulated tenfold by sight and visions.

Yet it was not only the city of Paris, its appearance, its art gems, that I eagerly made my own, and with them much that intellectually belonged to Italy or the Netherlands; it was French culture, the best that the French nature contains, the fragrance of her choicest flowers, that I inhaled.

And while thus for the first time learning to know French people, and French intellectual life, I was unexpectedly admitted to constant association with men and women of the other leading Romance races, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Brazilians.

Broechner had given me a letter of introduction to Costanza Testa, a friend of his youth, now married to Count Oreste Blanchetti and living in Paris, with her somewhat older sister Virginia, a kind-hearted and amiable woman of the world. The latter had married in Brazil, as her second husband, the Italian banker Pagella, and to their house came, not only Italians and other European Southerners, but members of the South American colony.

So warm a reception as I met with from the two sisters and their husbands I had never had anywhere before. After I had known the two families one hour, these people treated me as though I were their intimate friend; Costanza's younger brother, they called me. I had a seat in their carriage every day, when the ladies drove out in the Bois de Boulogne; they never had a box at the Italian opera, where Adelina Patti's first notes were delighting her countrymen, without sending me a seat. They expected me every evening, however late it often might be when I came from the theatre, in their drawing-room, where, according to the custom of their country, they always received the same circle of friends.

I was sincerely attached to the two sisters, and felt myself at ease in their house, although the conversation there was chiefly carried on in a language of which I understood but little, since French was spoken only on my account. The only shadow over my pleasure at spending my evenings in the Rue Valois du Roule was the fact that this necessitated my missing some acts at the Theatre Francais, for which the Danish Minister, through the Embassy, had procured me a free pass. Certainly no Dane was ever made so happy by the favour. They were enraptured hours that I spent evening after evening in the French national theatre, where I became thoroughly acquainted with the modern, as well as the classical, dramatic repertoire,—an acquaintance which was further fortified during my long stay in Paris in 1870.

I enjoyed the moderation of the best actors, their restraint, and subordination of self to the role and the general effect. It is true that the word genius could only be applied to a very few of the actors, and at that time I saw none who, in my opinion, could be compared with the great representatives of the Danish stage, such as Michael Wiehe, Johanne Luise Heiberg, or Phister. But I perceived at once that the mannerisms of these latter would not be tolerated here for a moment; here, under the influence of this artistic whole-harmony, they would never have been able to give free vent to individuality and peculiarity as they did at home.

I saw many hundred performances in these first years of my youth at the Theatre Francais, which was then at its zenith. There, if anywhere, I felt the silent march of the French muses through Time and Space.

V.

A capable journalist named Gregoire, a sickly, prematurely aged, limping fellow, with alert wits, an Alsatian, who knew Danish and regularly read Bille's Daily Paper, had in many ways taken me up almost from the first day of my sojourn on French soil. This man recommended me, on my expressing a wish to meet with a competent teacher, to take instruction in the language from a young girl, a friend of his sister, who was an orphan and lived with her aunt. She was of good family, the daughter of a colonel and the granddaughter of an admiral, but her own and her aunt's circumstances were narrow, and she was anxious to give lessons.

When I objected that such lessons could hardly be really instructive, I was told that she was not only in every way a nice but a very gifted and painstaking young girl.

The first time I entered the house, as a future pupil, I found the young lady, dressed in a plain black silk dress, surrounded by a circle of toddlers of both sexes, for whom she had a sort of school, and whom on my arrival she sent away. She had a pretty figure, a face that was attractive without being beautiful, a large mouth with good teeth, and dark brown hair. Her features were a little indefinite, her face rather broad than oval, her eyes brown and affectionate. She had at any rate the beauty that twenty years lends. We arranged for four lessons a week, to begin with.

The first dragged considerably. My teacher was to correct any mistakes in pronunciation and grammar that I made in conversation. But we could not get up any proper conversation. She was evidently bored by the lessons, which she had only undertaken for the sake of the fees. If I began to tell her anything, she only half listened, and yawned with all her might very often and very loudly, although she politely put her hand in front of her large mouth. There only came a little animation into her expression when I either pronounced as badly as I had been taught by my French master at school, or made some particularly ludicrous mistake, such as c'est tout egal for bien egal. At other times she was distracted, sleepy, her thoughts elsewhere.

After having tried vainly for a few times to interest the young lady by my communications, I grew tired of the lessons. Moreover, they were of very little advantage to me, for the simple reason that my youthful teacher had not the very slightest scientific or even grammatical knowledge of her own tongue, and consequently could never answer my questions as to why you had to pronounce in such and such a way, or by virtue of what rule you expressed yourself in such and such a manner. I began to neglect my lessons, sometimes made an excuse, but oftener remained away without offering any explanation.

On my arrival one afternoon, after having repeatedly stayed away, the young lady met me with some temper, and asked the reason of my failures to come, plainly enough irritated and alarmed at my indifference, which after all was only the reflection of her own. I promised politely to be more regular in future. To insure this, she involuntarily became more attentive.

She yawned no more. I did not stay away again.

She began to take an interest herself in this eldest pupil of hers, who at 24 years of age looked 20 and who was acquainted with all sorts of things about conditions, countries, and people of which she knew nothing.

She had been so strictly brought up that nearly all secular reading was forbidden to her, and she had never been to any theatre, not even the Theatre Francais. She had not read Victor Hugo, Lamartine, or Musset, had not even dared to read Paul et Virginie, only knew expurgated editions of Corneille, Racine and Moliere. She was sincerely clerical, had early been somewhat influenced by her cousin, later the well-known Roman Catholic author, Ernest Hello, and in our conversations was always ready to take the part of the Jesuits against Pascal; what the latter had attacked were some antiquated and long-abandoned doctrinal books; even if there were defects in the teaching of certain Catholic ecclesiastics, their lives at any rate were exemplary, whereas the contrary was the case with the free-thinking men of science; their teaching was sometimes unassailable, but the lives they led could not be taken seriously.

When we two young people got into a dispute, we gradually drew nearer to one another. Our remarks contradicted each other, but an understanding came about between our eyes. One day, as I was about to leave, she called me back from the staircase, and, very timidly, offered me an orange. The next time she blushed slightly when I came in. She frequently sent me cards of admission to the Athenee, a recently started institution, in which lectures were given by good speakers. She began to look pleased at my coming and to express regret at the thought of my departure.

On New Year's day, as a duty gift, I had sent her a bouquet of white flowers, and the next day she had tears in her eyes as she thanked me: "I ask you to believe that I highly appreciate your attention." From that time forth she spoke more and more often of how empty it would be for her when I was gone. I was not in love with her, but was too young for her feelings, so unreservedly expressed, to leave me unaffected, and likewise young enough to imagine that she expected me before long to ask for her hand. So I soon informed her that I did not feel so warmly towards her as she did towards me, and that I was not thinking of binding myself for the present.

"Do you think me so poor an observer?" she replied, amazed. "I have never made any claims upon you, even in my thoughts. But I owe you the happiest month of my life."

VI.

This was about the state of affairs between Mademoiselle Louise and me, when one evening, at Pagella's, where there were Southerners of various races present, I was introduced to a young lady, Mademoiselle Mathilde M., who at first sight made a powerful impression upon me.

She was a young Spanish Brazilian, tall of stature, a proud and dazzling racial beauty. The contours of her head were so impeccably perfect that one scarcely understood how Nature could have made such a being inadvertently, without design. The rosy hue of her complexion made the carnation even of a beautiful woman's face look chalky or crimson by the side of hers. At the same time there was a something in the colour of her skin that made me understand better the womanish appearance of Zurbaran and Ribera, a warm glow which I had never seen in Nature before. Her heavy, bluish-black hair hung down, after the fashion of the day, in little curls over her forehead and fell in thick ringlets upon her shoulders. Her eyebrows were exquisitely pencilled, arched and almost met over her delicate nose, her eyes were burning and a deep brown; they conquered, and smiled; her mouth was a little too small, with white teeth that were a little too large, her bust slender and full. Her manner was distinguished, her voice rich; but most marvellous of all was her hand, such a hand as Parmeggianino might have painted, all soul, branching off into five delightful fingers.

Mentally I unhesitatingly dubbed her the most marvelous feminine creature I had ever seen, and that less on account of her loveliness than the blending of the magnificence of her bearing with the ardour, and often the frolicsomeness, of her mode of expression.

She was always vigorous and sometimes daring in her statements, cared only for the unusual, loved only "the impossible," but nevertheless carefully observed every established custom of society. To my very first remark to her, to the effect that the weakness of women was mostly only an habitual phrase; they were not weak except when they wished to be, she replied: "Young as you are, you know women very well!" In that she was quite wrong.

Besides Spanish and Portuguese, she spoke French perfectly and English not badly, sang in a melodious contralto voice, drew well for an amateur, carved alabaster vases, and had all kinds of talents. She did not care to sing ballads, only cared for grand pathos.