for the first time, by feminine affection and by enthusiasm for a
woman. They influenced me the more strongly because they were Danish,
and because I, who loved everything Danish, from the language to the
monuments, had, since the war, felt something lacking in everyone, man
or woman, who was foreign to Denmark.

But in the midst of all these visitations of calf-love, and their
vibrations among undefined sensations, I was pulled back with a jerk,
as it were, to my earlier and deepest impression, that of the
loveliness and exalted person of the young Spaniard. Letters from Paris
furrowed my mind like steamers the waters of a lake, made it foam, and
the waves run high, left long streaks across its wake. Not that Mlle.
Mathilde sent letters to me herself, but her Italian lady and gentlemen
friends wrote for her, apparently in her name, loudly lamenting my
unreasonable departure, wishing and demanding my return, telling me how
she missed me, sometimes how angry she was.

I was too poor to be able to return at once. I did what I could to
procure money, wrote to those of my friends whom I thought could best
afford it and on whom I relied most, but met with refusals, which made
me think of the messages Timon of Athens received in response to
similar requests. Then I staked in the lottery and did not win.

Urged from France to return, and under the high pressure of my own
romantic imagination, it seemed clear to me all at once that I ought to
unite my lot for good to that of this rare and beautiful woman, whom,
it is true, I had never spoken to one minute alone, who, moreover, had
scarcely anything in common with me, but who, just by the dissimilarity
of her having been born of Spanish parents in Rio, and I of a Danish
father and mother in Copenhagen, seemed destined by Fate for me, as I
for her. The Palm and the Fir-tree had dreamed of one another, and
could never meet; but men and women could, however far apart they might
have been born. In the middle of the Summer of 1867 I was as though
possessed by the thought that she and I ought to be united.

The simplest objection of all, namely, that I, who was scarcely able to
support myself, could not possibly support a wife, seemed to me
altogether subordinate. My motives were purely chivalric; I could not
leave her in the lurch, as the miserable hero of Andersen's _Only a
Player_ did Noomi. And a vision of her compelling loveliness hovered
before my eyes.

The whole of the month of July and part of the month of August I was on
the rack, now passionately desiring a successful issue of my plans, now
hoping just as ardently that they would be stranded through the
opposition of the foreign family; for I was compelled to admit to
myself that the beautiful Spaniard would be very unsuited to
Copenhagen, would freeze there, mentally as well as literally. And I
said to myself every day that supposing the war expected in Denmark
were to break out again, and the young men were summoned to arms, the
most insignificant little Danish girl would make me a better Valkyrie;
all my feelings would be foreign to her, and possibly she would not
even be able to learn Danish. Any other woman would understand more of
my mind than she. And yet! Yet she was the only one for me.

Thus I was swayed by opposing wishes the whole of the long time during
which the matter was pending and uncertain. I was so exhausted by
suspense that I only kept up by taking cold baths twice a day and by
brisk rides. The mere sight of a postman made my heart beat fast. The
scorn heaped upon me in the Danish newspapers had a curious effect upon
me under these circumstances; it seemed to me to be strangely far away,
like blows at a person who is somewhere else.

I pondered all day on the painful dilemma in which I was placed; I
dreamt of my Dulcinea every night, and began to look as exhausted as I
felt. One day that I went to Fredensborg, in response to an invitation
from Frederik Paludan-Müller, the poet said to me: "Have you been ill
lately? You look so pale and shaken." I pretended not to care; whatever
I said or did in company was incessant acting.

I experienced revulsions of feeling similar to those that troubled Don
Quixote. Now I saw in my distant Spanish maiden the epitome of
perfection, now the picture melted away altogether; even my affection
for her then seemed small, artificial, whimsical, half-forgotten. And
then again she represented supreme happiness.

When the decision came, when,--as everyone with the least experience of
the world could have foretold,--all the beautiful dreams and audacious
plans collapsed suddenly, I felt as though this long crisis had thrown
me back indescribably; my intellectual development had been at a
standstill for months. It was such a feeling as when the death of some
loved person puts an end to the long, tormenting anxiety of the
foregoing illness. I, who had centred everything round one thought,
must now start joylessly along new paths. My outburst,--which
astonished myself,--was:

"How I wanted a heart!"

V.

I could not at once feel it a relief that my fancies had all been
dissipated into thin air. Physically I was much broken down, but, with
my natural elasticity, quickly recovered. Yet in my relations towards
the other sex I was torn as I had never been before. My soul, or more
exactly, that part of my psychical life bordering on the other sex, was
like a deep, unploughed field, waiting for seed.

It was not much more than a month before the field was sown. Amongst my
Danish acquaintances there was only one, a young and very beautiful
widow, upon whom, placed as I was with regard to Mile. Mathilde, I had
definitely counted. I should have taken the young Spaniard to her; she
alone would have understood her--they would have been friends.

There had for a long time been warm feelings of sympathy between her
and me. It so chanced that she drew much closer to me immediately after
the decisive word had been spoken. She became, consequently, the only
one to whom I touched upon the wild fancies to which I had given myself
up, and confided the dreams with which I had wasted my time. She
listened to me sympathetically, no little amazed at my being so devoid
of practical common sense. She stood with both feet on the earth; but
she had one capacity that I had not met with before in any young
woman--the capacity for enthusiasm. She had dark eyes, with something
melancholy in their depths; but when she spoke of anything that roused
her enthusiasm, her eyes shone like stars.

She pointed out how preposterous it was in me to wish to seek so far
away a happiness that perhaps was very close to me, and how even more
preposterous to neglect, as I had done, my studies and intellectual
aims for a fantastic love. And for the first time in my life, a young
woman spoke to me of my abilities and of the impression she had
received of them, partly through the reading of the trifles that I had
had printed, partly, and more particularly, through her long talks with
me. Neither the little French girl nor the young Spanish lady had ever
spoken to me of myself, my talents, or my future; this Danish woman
declared that she knew me through and through. And the new thing about
it all, the thing hitherto unparalleled in my experience, was that she
believed in me. More than that: she had the highest possible conception
of my abilities, asserted in contradiction to my own opinion, that I
was already a man of unusual mark, and was ardently ambitious for me.

Just at this moment, when so profoundly disheartened, and when in idle
hopes and plans I had lost sight of my higher goal, by her firm belief
in me she imparted to me augmented self-respect. Her confidence in me
gave me increasing confidence in myself, and a vehement gratitude awoke
in me for the good she thus did me.

Then it happened that one day, without preamble, she admitted that the
interest she felt in me was not merely an intellectual one; things had
now gone so far that she could think of nothing but me.

My whole nature was shaken to its foundations. Up to this time I had
only regarded her as my friend and comforter, had neither felt nor
fought against any personal attraction. But she had scarcely spoken,
before she was transformed in my eyes. The affection I had thirsted for
was offered to me here. The heart I had felt the need of was this
heart. And it was not only a heart that was offered me, but a passion
that scorned scruples.

In my austere youth hitherto, I had not really had erotic experiences
whatever. I had led the chaste life of the intellectual worker. My
thoughts had been the thoughts of a man; they had ascended high and had
delved deep, but my love affairs had been the enthusiasms and fancies
of a half-grown boy, chimeras and dreams. This young woman was my first
living erotic reality.

And suddenly, floodgates seemed to open within me. Streams of lava,
streams of molten fire, rushed out over my soul. I loved for the first
time like a man.

The next few days I went about as if lifted above the earth; in the
theatre, in the evening, I could not follow the performance, but sat in
the pit with my face in my hands, full of my new destiny, as though my
heart would burst.

And yet it was more a physical state, an almost mechanical outcome of
what to me was overwhelmingly new, association with a woman. It was not
because it was just this particular woman. For my emotional nature was
so composite that even in the first moment of my bliss I did not regard
this bliss as unmixed. From the very first hour, I felt a gnawing
regret that it was not I who had desired her, but she who had chosen
me, so that my love in my heart of hearts was only a reflection of hers.

VI.

About this time it so happened that another woman began to engage my
thoughts, but in an altogether different manner. Circumstances resulted
in my being taken into the secret of unhappy and disturbing domestic
relations in a well-to-do house to which I was frequently invited, and
where to all outward seeming all the necessary conditions of domestic
happiness were present.

The master of the house had in his younger days been a very handsome
man, lazy, not clever, and of an exceedingly passionate temper. He was
the son of a man rich, worthy and able, but of a very weak character,
and of a kept woman who had been the mistress of a royal personage.
Through no fault of his own, he had inherited his mother's professional
vices, persistent untruthfulness, a comedian's manner, prodigality, a
love of finery and display. He was quite without intellectual
interests, but had a distinguished bearing, a winning manner, and no
gross vices.

His wife, who, for family reasons, had been married to him much too
young, had never loved him, and never been suited to him. As an
innocent, ignorant girl, she had been placed in the arms of a man who
was much the worse for a reckless life, and suffering from an illness
that necessitated nursing, and made him repulsive to her. Every day
that passed she suffered more from being bound to a man whose slightest
movement was objectionable to her and whose every remark a torture. In
the second decade of her marriage the keenest marital repulsion had
developed in her; this was so strong that she sometimes had to pull
herself together in order, despite her maternal feelings, not to
transfer her dislike to the children, who were likewise his, and in
whom she dreaded to encounter his characteristics.

Towards her, the man was despotic and cunning, but not unkind, and in
so far excusable that, let him have done what he might, she could not
have got rid of the hatred that plagued him and consumed her. So
dissimilar were their two natures.

Her whole aim and aspiration was to get the bond that united them
dissolved. But this he would not hear of, for many reasons, and more
especially from dislike of scandal. He regarded himself, and according
to the usual conception of the words, justly so, as a good husband and
father. He asked for no impossible sacrifice from his wife, and he was
affectionate to his children. He could not help her detesting him, and
indeed, did not fully realise that she did. And yet, it was difficult
for him to misunderstand. For his wife scarcely restrained her aversion
even when there were guests in the house. If he told an untruth, she
kept silence with her lips, but scarcely with her expression. And she
would sometimes talk of the faults and vices that she most abhorred,
and then name his.

The incessant agitation in which she lived had made her nervous and
restless to excess. As the feminine craving to be able, in marriage, to
look up to the man, had never been satisfied, she only enacted the more
vehemently veracity, firmness and intellect in men. But undeveloped as
she was, and in despair over the dissatisfaction, the drowsiness, and
the darkness in which her days glided away, whatever invaded the
stagnation and lighted up the darkness: sparkle, liveliness, brilliance
and wit, were estimated by her more highly than they deserved to be.

At first when, in the desolation of her life, she made advances to me,
this repelled me somewhat. The equestrian performer in Heiberg's Madame
Voltisubito cannot sing unless she hears the crack of a whip. Thus it
seemed to me that her nature could not sing, save to the accompaniment
of all the cart, carriage and riding whips of the mind. But I saw how
unhappy she was, and that the intense strain of her manner was only an
expression of it.

She could not know the beauty of inward peace, and in spite of her
Protestant upbringing she had retained all the unaffectedness and
sincerity of the natural human being, all the obstinate love of
freedom, unmoved in the least by what men call discipline, ethics,
Christianity, convention. She did not believe in it all, she had seen
what it resulted in, and what it covered up, and she passed her life in
unmitigated despair, which was ordinarily calm to all appearance, but
in reality rebellious: what she was enduring was the attempted murder
of her soul.

To all that she suffered purely mentally from her life with her husband
in the home that was no home at all, there had of late been added
circumstances which likewise from a practical point of view made
interference and alteration necessary. Her lord and master had always
been a bad manager, in fact worse than that; in important matters,
thoroughly incapable and fatuous. That had not mattered much hitherto,
since others had looked after his affairs; but now the control of them
had fallen entirely into his own hands, and he managed them in such a
way that expenses increased at a terrific rate, while his income
diminished with equal rapidity, and the question of total ruin only
seemed a matter of time.

His wife had no outside support. She was an orphan and friendless. Her
husband's relations did not like her and did not understand her. And
yet just at this time she required as a friend a man who understood her
and could help her to save her own and the children's fortunes from the
shipwreck, before it was too late. She felt great confidence in me,
whom she had met, at intervals, from my boyhood, and she now opened her
heart to me in conversation more and more. She confided in me fully,
gave me a complete insight into the torture of her life, and implored
me to help her to acquire her freedom.

Thus it was that while still quite a young man a powerful,
never-to-be-effaced impression of the miseries of modern coercive
marriage was produced upon me. The impression was not merely powerful,
but it waked, like a cry of distress, both my thinking powers and my
energy. As through a chink in the smooth surface of society, I looked
down into the depths of horror. Behind the unhappiness of one, I
suspected that of a hundred thousand, knew that of a hundred thousand.
And I felt myself vehemently called upon, not only to name the horror
by its name, but to step in, as far as I was able, and prevent the
thing spreading unheeded.

Scales had fallen from my eyes. Under the semblance of affection and
peace, couples were lacerating one another by the thousand, swallowed
up by hatred and mutual aversion. The glitter of happiness among those
higher placed dazzled the thoughtless and the credulous. He who had
eyes to see, observed how the wretchedness due to the arrangement of
society, wound itself right up to its pinnacles.

The vices and paltrinesses of the individual could not be directly
remedied; inherited maladies and those brought upon one's self,
stupidity and folly, brutality and malice, undeniably existed. But the
institutions of society ought to be so planned as to render these
destructive forces inoperative, or at least diminish their harmfulness,
not so as to give them free scope and augment their terrors by securing
them victims.

In marriage, the position of the one bound against his or her will was
undignified, often desperate, but worst in the case of a woman. As a
mother she could be wounded in her most vulnerable spot, and what was
most outrageous of all, she could be made a mother against her will.
One single unhappy marriage had shown me, like a sudden revelation,
what marriage in countless cases is, and how far from free the position
of woman still was.

But that woman should be oppressed in modern society, that the one-half
of the human race could be legally deprived of their rights, revealed
that justice in society, as it at present stood, was in a sorry state.
In the relations between the strong and the weak, the rich and the
poor, the same legalised disproportion would necessarily prevail as
between man and woman.

My thought pierced down into the state of society that obtained and was
praised so highly, and with ever less surprise and ever greater
disquiet, found hollowness everywhere. And this called my will to
battle, armed it for the fight.

VII.

From this time forth I began to ponder quite as much over Life as over
Art, and to submit to criticism the conditions of existence in the same
way as I had formerly done with Faith and Law.

In matters concerning Life, as in things concerning Art, I was not a
predetermined Radical. There was a great deal of piety in my nature and
I was of a collecting, retentive disposition. Only gradually, and step
by step, was I led by my impressions, the incidents I encountered, and
my development, to break with many a tradition to which I had clung to
the last extremity.

It was in the spirit of the Aesthetics of the time, that, after having
been engaged upon the Tragic Idea, I plunged into researches on the
Comic, and by degrees, as the material ordered itself for me, I tried
to write a doctor's thesis upon it, Abstract researches were regarded
as much more valuable than historic investigation. In comic literature
Aristophanes in particular delighted me, and I was thinking of letting
my general definitions merge into a description of the greatness of the
Greek comedian; but as the thread broke for me, I did not get farther
than the theory of the Comic in general. It was not, like my previous
treatise on the Tragic, treated under three headings, according to the
Hegelian model, but written straight ahead, without any subdivision
into sections.

Whilst working at this paper I was, of course, obliged constantly to
consult the national comedies and lighter plays, till I knew them from
cover to cover. Consequently, when Gotfred Rode, the poet, who was
connected with a well-known educational establishment for girls, asked
me whether I would care to give a course of public lectures for ladies,
I chose as my subject _The Danish Comedy_. The lectures were attended
in force. The subject was supremely innocent, and it was treated in
quite a conservative manner. At that time I cherished a sincere
admiration, with only slight reservations, for Heiberg, Hertz, Hostrup
and many others as comic playwriters, and was not far short of
attributing to their works an importance equal to those of Holberg. And
yet I was unable to avoid giving offence. I had, it appears, about
Heiberg's _Klister and Malle_, an inseparable betrothed couple, used
what was, for that matter, an undoubtedly Kierkegaardian expression,
viz., _to beslobber a relation_. This expression was repeated
indignantly to the Headmistress, and the thoughtless lecturer was
requested to call upon the Principal of the college. When, after a long
wait, and little suspecting what was going to be said to me, I was
received in audience, it appeared that I had been summoned to receive a
polite but decided admonition against wounding the susceptibilities of
my listeners by expressions which were not "good form," and when I,
unconscious of wrongdoing, asked which expression she alluded to, the
unfortunate word "beslobber" was alleged; my young hearers were not
"'Arriets" for whom such expressions might be fitting.

I was not asked again to give lectures for young ladies.

VIII.

Hitherto, when I had appeared before the reading public, it had only
been as the author of shorter or longer contributions to the
philosophical discussion of the relations between Science and Faith;
when these had been accepted by a daily paper it had been as its
heaviest ballast. I had never yet written anything that the ordinary
reader could follow with pleasure, and I had likewise been obliged to
make use of a large number of abstruse philosophical words.

The proprietors of the _Illustrated Times_ offered me the reviewing of
the performances at the Royal Theatre in their paper, which had not
hitherto printed dramatic criticisms. I accepted the offer, because it
afforded me a wished-for opportunity of further shaking off the dust of
the schools. I could thus have practice with my pen, and get into touch
with a section of the reading public who, without caring for
philosophy, nevertheless had intellectual interests; and these articles
were in reality a vent for what I had at heart about this time touching
matters human and artistic. They were written in a more colloquial
style than anything I had written before, or than it was usual to write
in Denmark at that time, and they alternated sometimes with longer
essays, such as those on Andersen and Goldschmidt.

Regarded merely as dramatic criticisms, they were of little value. The
Royal Theatre, the period of whose zenith was nearly at an end, I cared
little for, and I was personally acquainted with next to none of the
actors, only meeting, at most, Phister and Adolf Rosenkilde and of
ladies, Södring in society.

I found it altogether impossible to brandish my cane over the
individual actor in his individual part. But the form of it was merely
a pretext. I wanted to show myself as I was, speak out about dramatic
and other literature, reveal how I felt, show what I thought about all
the conditions of life represented or touched upon on the stage.

My articles were read with so much interest that the editors of the
_Illustrated Times_ raised the writer's scale of remuneration to 10 Kr.
a column (about 11_s_. 3_d_.), which at that time was very respectable
pay. Unfortunately, however, I soon saw that even at that, if I wrote
in the paper all the year round, I could not bring up my yearly income
from this source to more than 320 kroner of our money, about I7_l_.
12_s_. 6_d_. in English money; so that, without a University bursary, I
should have come badly off, and even with it was not rolling in riches.

The first collection of my articles, which I published in 1868 under
the title of _Studies in Aesthetics_, augmented my income a little, it
is true, but for that, as for the next collection, _Criticisms and
Portraits_, I only received 20 kroner (22_s_. 6_d_.) per sheet of
sixteen pages. Very careful management was necessary.

IX.

With the first money I received for my books, I went in the middle of
the Summer of 1868 for a trip to Germany. I acquired some idea of
Berlin, which was then still only the capital of Prussia, and in
population corresponded to the Copenhagen of our day; I spent a few
weeks in Dresden, where I felt very much at home, delighted in the
exquisite art collection and derived no small pleasure from the
theatre, at that time an excellent one. I saw Prague for the first
time, worshipped Rubens in Munich, and, with him specially in my mind,
tried to realise how the greatest painters had regarded Life.
Switzerland added to my store of impressions with grand natural
spectacles. I saw the Alps, and a thunderstorm in the Alps, passed
starlit nights on the Swiss lakes, traced the courses of foaming
mountain streams such as the Tamina at Pfäffers, ascended the Rigi at a
silly forced march, and from the Kulm saw a procession of clouds that
gripped my fancy like the procession of the Vanir in Northern
mythology. Many years afterwards I described it in the Fourth volume of
_Main Currents_. From Interlaken I gazed on the whiteness of the
Jungfrau, but scarcely with greater emotion than once upon a time when
I had gazed at the white cliffs of Möen. On my homeward journey I saw
Heidelberg's lovely ruins, to which Charles V.'s castle, near the
Al-hambra, makes a marvellous pendant, Strassburg's grave Cathedral,
and Goethe's house at Frankfurt.

My travels were not long, but were extraordinarily instructive. I made
acquaintance with people from the most widely different countries, with
youthful frankness engaged in conversation with Germans and Frenchmen,
Englishmen and Americans, Poles and Russians, Dutchmen, Belgians and
Swiss, met them as travelling companions, and listened attentively to
what they narrated. They were, moreover, marvellously frank towards the
young man who, with the curiosity of his age, plied them with questions.

Young Dutchmen, studying music in Dresden, gave me some idea of the
ill-will felt in their country towards the Prussians, an ill-will not
unmingled with contempt. On the other hand, I was astonished, during a
half day's excursion on foot with a few Leipzig students, to learn how
strong was the feeling of the unity of Germany and of the necessity of
the supremacy of Prussia, even in the states which in the 1866 war had
been on the side of Austria. The students felt no grief over having
been defeated, the victors were Germans too; everything was all right
so long as the German Empire became one. These and similar
conversations, which finally brought me to the conclusion that the
whole of the bourgeoisie was satisfied with the dominance of Prussia,
had for result that in 1870 I did not for a moment share the opinion of
the Danes and the French, that the defeated German states would enter
into an alliance with France against Prussia.

English undergraduates told me what philosophical and historical works
were being most read in the universities of Great Britain; Bohemian
students explained to me that in the German philosophical world Kant
had quite outshone Hegel and put him in the background.

The lady members of an American family from Boston treated me quite
maternally; the wife suggested almost at once, in the railway-carriage,
that I should give her when we reached the hotel whatever linen or
clothes I had that wanted repairs; she would be very pleased to mend
them for me. The husband, who was very pious and good-natured, had all
his pockets full of little hymn-books and in his memorandum book a
quantity of newspaper cuttings of devotional verse, which he now and
then read aloud enthusiastically.

But I also met with Americans of quite a different cast. A young
student from Harvard University, who, for that matter, was not in love
with the Germans and declared that the United States could with
difficulty absorb and digest those who were settled there, surprised me
with his view that in the future Bismarck would come to be regarded as
no less a figure than Cavour. The admiration of contemporary educated
thought was then centred around Cavour, whereas Bismarck had hitherto
only encountered passionate aversion outside Germany, and even in
Germany was the object of much hatred. This student roused me into
thinking about Bismarck for myself.

Having lain down, all bathed in perspiration, during the ascent without
a guide of a mountain in Switzerland, I was accosted by a woman, who
feared I had come to some harm. I walked on up with her. She turned out
to be a young peasant woman from Normandy, who lived half-way up the
mountain. She had accompanied her husband to Switzerland, but cursed
her lot, and was always longing to be back in France. When I remarked
that it must be some consolation to live in so lovely a place, she
interrupted me with the most violent protests. A beautiful place! This!
The steep mountain, the bristly fir-trees and pine-trees, the snow on
the top and the lake deep down below--anything uglier it would be hard
to conceive. No fields, no pasture-land, no apple-trees! No indeed! If
she had to mention a country that really was beautiful, it was
Normandy. There was plenty of food for all there, you did not need to
go either up or down hill; there, thank God, it was flat. Did I think
stones beautiful, perhaps? She had not been down in the valley for five
months, and higher than her house she had never been and would never
go; no, thank you, not she! She let her husband fetch what they
required for the house; she herself sat and fretted all through the
Winter; life then was almost more than she could bear.

On one of the steamers on the Lake of Lucerne, I caught, for the first
time, a glimpse of Berthold Auerbach, who was very much admired by my
comrades in Copenhagen and by myself.

At the hotel table at Lucerne I made the acquaintance of a Dutch
captain from Batavia, an acquaintance productive of much pleasure to
me. Before the soup was brought round I had pulled out a letter I had
just received, opened it and begun to read it. A voice by my side said
in French:

"Happy man! You are reading a letter in a woman's writing!" With that
our acquaintance was made.

The captain was a man of forty, who in the course of an active life had
had many and varied experiences and met with prosperity, but was
suffering from a feeling of great void. His society was exceedingly
attractive to me, and he related to me the main events of his life; but
after one day's association only, we were obliged to part. All through
my trip I had a curious feeling of every farewell on the journey being
in all human probability a farewell for life, but had not realised it
painfully before. But when next day the brave captain, whose home was
far away in another quarter of the globe, held his hand out to say
good-bye, I was much affected. "Till we meet again" said the captain.

"And where?"

"Till we meet again all and everywhere, for we live an eternal life;
till we meet again in time and space, or outside time and space!"

I reflected sadly that I should never again see this man, who, the last
twenty-four hours had shown me, was in extraordinary sympathy and
agreement with me.

Separated from those dearest to me, the whole of the journey, for that
matter, was a sort of self-torment to me, even though a profitable one.
Like every other traveller, I had many a lonely hour, and plenty of
time to ponder over my position and vocation in life. I summed up my
impressions in the sentence: "The Powers have designated me the
champion of great ideas against great talents, unfortunately greater
than I."

X.

There was only one distinguished person outside my circle of
acquaintance to whom I wished to bring my first descriptive book, as a
mark of homage, Johanne Louise Heiberg, the actress. I had admired her
on the stage, even if not to the same extent as Michael Wiehe; but to
me she was the representative of the great time that would soon sink
into the grave. In addition, I ventured to hope that she, being a
friend of Frederik Paludan-Müller, Magdalene Thoresen and others who
wished me well, would be at any rate somewhat friendly inclined towards
me. A few years before, it had been rumoured in Copenhagen after the
publication of my little polemical pamphlet against Nielsen, that at a
dinner at the Heiberg's there had been a good deal of talk about me;
even Bishop Martensen had expressed himself favourably, and it also
attracted attention that a short time afterwards, in a note to his book
_On Knowledge and Faith_, he mentioned me not unapprovingly, and
contented himself with a reminder to me not to feel myself too soon
beyond being surprised. When the Bishop of Zealand, one of the
actress's most faithful adherents, had publicly spoken thus mildly of
the youthful heretic, there was some hope that the lady herself would
be free from prejudice. My friends also eagerly encouraged me to
venture upon a visit to her home.

I was admitted and asked to wait in a room through the glass doors of
which I was attentively observed for some time by the lady's adopted
children. Then she came in, in indoor dress, with a stocking in her
hand, at which she uninterruptedly continued to knit during the
following conversation: She said: "Well! So you have collected your
articles." I was simple enough to reply--as if that made any difference
to the lady--that the greater part of the book had not been printed
before. She turned the conversation upon Björnson's _Fisher Girl_,
which had just been published, and which had been reviewed by _The
Fatherland_ the evening before, declaring that she disagreed altogether
with the reviewer, who had admired in the _Fisher Girl_ a psychological
study of a scenic genius. "It is altogether a mistake," said Mrs.
Heiberg, absorbed in counting her stitches, "altogether a mistake that
genius is marked by restlessness, refractoriness, an irregular life, or
the like. That is all antiquated superstition. True genius has no
connection whatever with excesses and caprices, in fact, is impossible
without the strict fulfilment of one's duty. (Knitting furiously.)
Genius is simple, straightforward, domesticated, industrious."

When we began to speak of mutual acquaintances, amongst others,
Magdalene Thoresen, feeling very uncomfortable in the presence of the
lady, I blurted out most tactlessly that I was sure that lady was much
interested in me. It was a mere nothing, but at the moment sounded like
conceit and boasting. I realised it the moment the words were out of my
mouth, and instinctively felt that I had definitely displeased her. But
the conversational material was used up and I withdrew. I never saw
Johanne Louise Heiberg again; henceforth she thought anything but well
of me.

XI.

Magdalene Thoresen was spending that year in Copenhagen, and our
connection, which had been kept up by correspondence, brought with it a
lively mutual interchange of thoughts and impressions. Our natures, it
is true, were as much unlike as it was possible for them to be; but
Magdalene Thoresen's wealth of moods and the overflowing warmth of her
heart, the vivacity of her disposition, the tenderness that filled her
soul, and the incessant artistic exertion, which her exhausted body
could not stand, all this roused in me a sympathy that the mistiness of
her reasoning, and the over-excitement of her intellectual life, could
not diminish. Besides which, especially when she was away from
Copenhagen, but when she was there, too, she needed a literary
assistant who could look through her MSS. and negotiate over them with
the publishers of anthologies, year-books, and weekly papers, and for
this purpose she not infrequently seized upon me, innocently convinced,
like everybody else for that matter, that she was the only person who
made a similar demand upon me.

Still, it was rather trying that, when my verdict on her work did not
happen to be what she wished, she saw in what I said an unkindness, for
which she alleged reasons that had nothing whatever to do with Art.

Magdalene Thoresen could not be otherwise than fond of Rasmus Nielsen;
they were both lively, easily enraptured souls, who breathed most
freely in the fog. That, however, did not come between her and me, whom
she often thought in the right. With regard to my newspaper activity,
she merely urged the stereotyped but pertinent opinion, that I ought
not to write so many small things; my nature could not stand this
wasting, drop by drop.

I had myself felt for a long time that I ought to concentrate my forces
on larger undertakings.

XII.

There were not many of the upper middle class houses in Copenhagen at
that time, the hospitality of which a young man with intellectual
interests derived any advantage from accepting. One of these houses,
which was opened to me, and with which I was henceforward associated,
was that of Chief Physician Rudolph Bergh. His was the home of
intellectual freedom.

The master of the house was not only a prominent scientist and savant,
but, at a time when all kinds of prejudices ruled unassailed, a man who
had retained the uncompromising radicalism of the first half of the
century. The spirit of Knowledge was the Holy Spirit to him; the
profession of doctor had placed him in the service of humanity, and to
firmness of character he united pure philanthropy. The most despised
outcasts of society met with the same consideration and the same
kindness from him as its favoured ones.

His wife was well calculated, by her charm of manner, to be the centre
of the numerous circle of talented men who, both from Denmark and
abroad, frequented the house. There one met all the foreign natural
scientists who came to Copenhagen, all the esteemed personalities
Denmark had at the time, who might be considered as belonging to the
freer trend of thought, and many neutrals. Actors such as Höedt and
Phister went there, favourite narrators such as Bergsöe, painters like
Kröyer, distinguished scientists like J.C. Schiödte, the entomologist.
This last was an independent and intellectual man, somewhat touchy, and
domineering in his manner, a master of his subject, a man of learning,
besides, ceremonious, often cordial, ready to listen to anything worth
hearing that was said. He had weaknesses, never would admit that he had
made a mistake, and was even very unwilling to own he had not read a
book that was being spoken of. Besides which, he had spent too great a
part of his life in virulent polemics to be devoid of the narrowing of
the horizon which is the concomitant of always watching and being ready
to attack the same opponent. But he was in the grand style, which is
rare in Denmark, as elsewhere.

XIII.

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

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

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

XIV.

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

XV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And poets and speakers flatter a people like that.

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

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

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

  Stupidity was always the bodyguard of Lies.

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

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

  Abandoned by all, except Unhappiness and me.

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

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

  You are weak, dear one, God help you! And you help! and I help!

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

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

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

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

XVI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the addressee looked about to speak, he continued, drowning every
objection, "I know what you are going to say. That you are too young.
Youth is written in your face. But there is no question of seniority
here. I am accustomed to accomplish what I determine upon, and I shall
take no notice of objections. I know that you are able to give
lectures, you have recently given proof of it."

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

"But you are making a mistake, it is not I you mean. It must be my
elder brother."

"Oh! very likely. Where does your brother live?"

"Just underneath."

A minute later there was a knock at the third-storey door beneath; it
was opened, and without even stopping to sit down, the visitor began:

"You are Brandes? I am Lehmann. You recently gave some lectures on
Runeberg. Will you kindly repeat one of them before the People's
Society in the Casino's big room?"

"Won't you sit down? I thank you for your offer. But my lecture was not
good enough to be repeated before so large a gathering. I do not know
enough about Runeberg's life, and my voice, moreover, will not carry. I
should not dare, at my age, to speak in so large a room."

"I expected you to reply that you are too young. Your youth is written
in your face. But there is no question of seniority about it. I am
accustomed to carry through anything that I have determined upon, and I
take no notice of objections. What you do not know about Runeberg's
life, you can read up in a literary history. And if you can give a
successful lecture to a private audience, you can give one in a theatre
hall. I am interested in you, I am depending on you, I take your
promise with me. Good-bye!"

This so-called promise became a regular nightmare to me, young and
absolutely untried as I was. It did not even occur to me to work up and
improve my lecture on Runeberg, for the very thought of appearing
before a large audience alarmed me and was utterly intolerable to me.
During the whole of my first stay in Paris I was so tormented by the
consent that Orla Lehmann had extorted from me, that it was a shadow
over my pleasure. I would go happy to bed and wake up in the middle of
the night with the terror of a debtor over something far off, but
surely threatening, upon me, seek in my memory for what it was that was
troubling me, and find that this far-off, threatening thing was my
promise to Lehmann. It was only after my return home that I summoned up
courage to write to him, pleading my youth and unfitness, and begging
to be released from the honourable but distasteful duty. Orla Lehmann,
in the meantime, had in all probability not bestowed a thought on the
whole matter and long since forgotten all about it.

In any case he never referred to the subject again in after years, when
we frequently met.

Among Bröchner's private pupils was a young student. Kristian Möller,
by name, who devoted himself exclusively to philosophy, and of whom
Bröchner was particularly fond. He had an unusually keen intelligence,
inclined to critical and disintegrating research. His abilities were
very promising, inasmuch as it seemed that he might be able to
establish destructive verdicts upon much that was confused, or
self-contradicting, but nevertheless respected; in other respects he
had a strangely infertile brain. He had no sudden inspirations, no
imagination. It could not be expected that he would ever bring forward
any specially new thoughts, only that he would penetrate confusion,
think out errors to the bottom, and, with the years, carry out a
process of thorough cleansing.

But before he had accomplished any independent work his lungs became
affected. It was not at once perceived how serious the affection was,
and Orla Lehmann, who, with the large-mindedness and open-handedness of
a patriot, had taken him up, as well as sundry other young men who
promised well or were merely poor, not only invited him to his weekly
dinner-parties at Frederiksberg, but sent him to Upsala, that he might
study Swedish philosophy there. Möller himself was much inclined to
study Boströmianism and write a criticism of this philosophy, which was
at that time predominant in Sweden.

He ought to have been sent South, or rather to a sanatorium; Orla
Lehmann's Scandinavian sympathies, however, determined his stay in the
North, which proved fatal to his health.

In 1868 he returned to Copenhagen, pale, with hollow cheeks, and a
stern, grave face, that of a marked man, his health thoroughly
undermined. His friends soon learnt, and doubtless he understood
himself, that his condition was hopeless. The quite extraordinary
strength of character with which he submitted, good-temperedly and
without a murmur, to his fate, had for effect that all who knew him
vied with each other in trying to lessen the bitterness of his lot and
at any rate show him how much they cared for him. As he could not go
out, and as he soon grew incapable of connected work, his room became
an afternoon and evening meeting-place for many of his comrades, who
went there to distract him with whatever they could think of to
narrate, or discuss. If you found him alone, it was rarely long before
a second and a third visitor came, and the room filled up.

Orla Lehmann, his patron, was also one of Kristian Möller's frequent
visitors. But whenever he arrived, generally late and the last, the
result was always the same. The students and graduates, who had been
sitting in the room in lively converse, were struck dumb, awed by the
presence of the great man; after the lapse of a few minutes, one would
get up and say good-bye; immediately afterwards the next would remember
that he was engaged elsewhere just at that particular time; a moment
later the third would slip noiselessly out of the room, and it would be
empty.

There was one, however, who, under such circumstances, found it simply
impossible to go. I stayed, even if I had just been thinking of taking
my leave.

Under the autocracy, Orla Lehmann had been the lyrical figure of
Politics; he had voiced the popular hopes and the beauty of the
people's will, much more than the political poets did. They wrote
poetry; his nature was living poetry. The swing of his eloquence, which
so soon grew out of date, was the very swing of youth in men's souls
then. At the time I first knew him, he had long left the period of his
greatness behind him, but he was still a handsome, well set-up man,
and, at 58 years of age, had lost nothing of his intellectual vivacity.
He had lost his teeth and spoke indistinctly, but he was fond of
telling tales and told them well, and his enemies declared that as soon
as a witty thought struck him, he took a cab and drove round from house
to house to relate it.

Passionately patriotic though Orla Lehmann was, he was very far from
falling into the then usual error of overestimating Denmark's
historical exploits and present importance. He related one day that
when he was in Paris, as a young man, speaking under an impression very
frequent among his travelled compatriots, he had, in a conversation
with Sainte-Beuve, reproached the French with knowing so shamefully
little of the Danes. The great critic, as was his habit, laid his head
a little on one side, and with roguish impertinence replied: "_Eh!
bien, faites quelque chose! on parlera de vous_." He approved of the
reply. We younger ones looked upon him as belonging to another period
and living in another plane of ideas, although, being a liberal-minded
man, he was not far removed from us. He was supposed to be a
freethinker, and it was told of him that when his old housekeeper
repeatedly, and with increasing impatience, requested him to come to
table, he would reply, in the presence of students--a rallying allusion
to the lady's Christian disposition:

"Get help from Religion, little Bech, get help from Religion!"--a
remark that in those days would be regarded as wantonly irreligious!

People felt sorry for Lehmann because his politics had so wholly
miscarried, and somewhat sore against him because he wanted to lay all
the blame on the old despotism and the unfavourable circumstances of
the time. Take him altogether, to those who were not intimately
associated with him, and did not share the strong dislike felt against
him in certain circles, he was chiefly a handsome and attractive
antiquity.

Kristian Möller died in 1869, and his death was deeply lamented. He was
one of the few comrades admired by the younger ones alike for his gifts
and his stoicism. With his death my opportunities of frequently meeting
Orla Lehmann ceased. But that the latter had not quite lost sight of
me, he proved by appearing, at the end of February, 1870, at my
examination upon my doctor's thesis at the University. As on this
occasion Lehmann arrived a little late, he was placed on a chair in
front of all the other auditors, and very imposing he looked, in a
mighty fur coat which showed off his stately figure. He listened very
attentively to everything, and several times during the discussion
showed by a short laugh that some parrying reply had amused him.

Six months afterwards he was no more.

XVII.

During those years I came into very curious relations with another
celebrity of the time. This was M. Goldschmidt, the author, whose great
talent I had considerable difficulty in properly appreciating, so
repelled was I by his uncertain and calculating personality.

I saw Goldschmidt for the first time, when I was a young man, at a
large ball at a club in Copenhagen.

A man who had emigrated to England as a poor boy returned to Copenhagen
in the sixties at the age of fifty, after having acquired a
considerable fortune. He was uneducated, kind, impeccably honourable,
and was anxious to secure acquaintances and associates for his adopted
daughter, a delicate young girl, who was strange to Copenhagen. With
this object in view, he invited a large number of young people to a
ball in the rooms of the King's Club, provided good music and luxurious
refreshments. This man was a cousin of Goldschmidt's, and as he himself
was unable to make more of a speech than a short welcome to table, he
begged "his cousin, the poet," to be his spokesman on this occasion.

One would have thought that so polished a writer, such a master of
language, as Goldschmidt, would be able, with the greatest ease, to
make an after-dinner speech, especially when he had had plenty of time
to prepare himself; but the gift of speaking is, as everyone knows, a
gift in itself. And a more unfortunate speaker than Goldschmidt could
not be. He had not even the art of compelling silence while he spoke.

That evening he began rather tactlessly by telling the company that
their host, who was a rich man, had earned his money in a strictly
honourable manner; it was always a good thing to know "that one had
clear ground to dance upon"; then he dwelt on the Jewish origin of the
giver of the feast, and, starting from the assumption that the greater
number of the invited guests were young Jews and Jewesses, he
formulated his toast in praise of "the Jewish woman, who lights the
Sabbath candles." The young Jewesses called out all at once: "The
Danish woman I The Danish woman! We are Danish!" They were irritated at
the dead Romanticism into which Goldschmidt was trying to push them
back. They lighted no Sabbath candles! they did not feel themselves
Jewish either by religion or nationality. The day of Antisemitism had
not arrived. Consequently there was still no Zionist Movement. They had
also often felt vexed at the descriptions that Goldschmidt in his
novels frequently gave of modern Jews, whose manners and mode of
expression he screwed back fifty years.

These cries, which really had nothing offensive about them, made
Goldschmidt lose his temper to such an extent that he shouted, in great
exasperation: "Will you keep silence while I speak! What manners are
these! I will teach you to keep silence!" and so forth,--which evoked a
storm of laughter. He continued for some time to rebuke their exuberant
mirth in severe terms, but was so unsuccessful that he broke off his
speech and, very much out of humour, sat down.

Not long afterwards, perhaps in the year 1865, I came into contact with
Goldschmidt once only, when walking one evening with Magdalene
Thoresen. On meeting this lady, whom he knew, he turned round, walking
with her as far as her house on the shores of the Lakes, after which
his way led towards the town, as did mine. As long as Mrs. Thoresen was
present, he naturally addressed his conversation to her and expressed
himself, as his habit was, without much ceremony. For instance, he
said: "I don't as a rule care for women writers, not even for those we
have; but I will concede that, of all the ladies who write, you are the
freshest." When Mrs. Thoresen brought the conversation round to her
favourite subject, love, he said, banteringly: "My heart is like the
flags of the Zouave Regiments, so pierced with holes that it is almost
impossible to tell what the material originally looked like."

On the whole, he was animated and polite, but his glance was somewhat
stinging.

Goldschmidt had greater difficulty in hitting on the right manner to
adopt towards a much younger man. He used expressions which showed that
he was standing on his dignity, and was all the time conscious of his
own superiority. "People have spoken about you to me," he said, "and I
know you by name." The word here rendered _people_ had a strangely
foreign sound, as though translated, or affected.

"Have you read Taine's History of English Literature?" he asked.

"No, I don't know it."

"Ah, perhaps you are one of those who regard it as superfluous to learn
about anything foreign. We have enough of our own, is it not so? It is
a very widespread opinion, but it is a mistake."

"You judge too hastily; that is not my opinion."

"Oh,--ah. Yes. Good-bye."

And our ways parted.

I did not like Goldschmidt. He had dared to profane the great Sören
Kierkegaard, had pilloried him for the benefit of a second-rate public.
I disliked him on Kierkegaard's account. But I disliked him much more
actively on my master, Professor Bröchner's account.

Bröchner had an intense contempt for Goldschmidt; intellectually he
thought him of no weight, as a man he thought him conceited, and
consequently ridiculous. He had not the slightest perception of the
literary artist in him. The valuable and unusual qualities of his
descriptive talent he overlooked. But the ignorance Goldschmidt had
sometimes shown about philosophy, and the incapacity he had displayed
with regard to art, his change of political opinion, his sentimentality
as a wit, all the weaknesses that one Danish critic had mercilessly
dragged into the light, had inspired Bröchner with the strongest
aversion to Goldschmidt. Add to this the personal collisions between
the two men. At some public meeting Bröchner had gazed at Goldschmidt
with such an ironic smile that the latter had passionately called him
to account.

"Don't make a scene now!" replied Bröchner.

"I am ready to make a scene anywhere," the answer is reported to have
been.

"That I can believe; but keep calm now!"

Shortly afterwards, in _North and South_, Goldschmidt, on the occasion
of Bröchner's candidature for parliament, had written that the
well-known atheist, H. Bröchner, naturally, as contributor to _The
Fatherland_, was supported by the "Party." Now, there was nothing that
annoyed Bröchner so much as when anyone called him an atheist, and
tried to make him hated for that reason,--the word, it is true, had a
hundred times a worse sound then than now,--he always maintaining that
he and other so-called atheists were far more religious than their
assailants. And although Goldschmidt's sins against Bröchner were in
truth but small, although the latter, moreover--possibly
unjustifiably--had challenged him to the attack, Bröchner nevertheless
imbued me with such a dislike of Goldschmidt that I could not regard
him with quite unprejudiced eyes.

Goldschmidt tried to make personal advances to me during my first stay
in Paris in 1866.

Besides the maternal uncle settled in France, of whom I have already
spoken, I had still another uncle, my father's brother, who had gone to
France as a boy, had become naturalised, and had settled in Paris. He
was a little older than my father, a somewhat restless and fantastic
character, whom Goldschmidt frequently met at the houses of mutual
friends. He let me know through this man that he would like to make my
acquaintance, gave him his address and mentioned his receiving hours.
As I held back, he repeated the invitation, but in vain. Bröchner's
influence was too strong. A few years later, in some dramatic articles,
I had expressed myself in a somewhat satirical, offhand manner about
Goldschmidt, when one day an attempt was made to bring the poet and
myself into exceedingly close connection.

One Spring morning in 1869, a little man with blue spectacles came into
my room and introduced himself as Goldschmidt's publisher, Bookseller
Steen. He had come on a confidential errand from Goldschmidt, regarding
which he begged me to observe strict silence, whatever the outcome of
the matter might be.

Goldschmidt knew that, as a critic, I was not in sympathy with him, but
being very difficultly placed, he appealed to my chivalry. For reasons
which he did not wish to enter into, he would be obliged, that same
year, to sever his connection with Denmark and settle down permanently
in England. For the future he should write in English. But before he
left he wished to terminate his literary activity in his native country
by an edition of his collected works, or at any rate a very exhaustive
selection from them. He would not and could not direct so great an
undertaking himself, from another country; he only knew one man who was
capable of doing so, and him he requested to undertake the matter. He
had drawn up a plan of the edition, a sketch of the order in which the
writings were to come out, and what the volume was to contain, and he
placed it before me for approval or criticism. The edition was to be
preceded by an account of Goldschmidt as an author and of his artistic
development; if I would undertake to write this, I was asked to go to
see Goldschmidt, in order to hear what he himself regarded as the main
features and chief points of his literary career.

The draft of what the projected edition was to include made quite a
little parcel of papers; besides these, Steen gave me to read the
actual request to me to undertake the task, which was cautiously worded
as a letter, not to me, but to Bookseller Steen, and which Steen had
been expressly enjoined to bring back with him. Although I did not at
all like this last-mentioned item, and although this evidence of
distrust was in very conspicuous variance with the excessive and
unmerited confidence that was at the same time being shown me, this
same confidence impressed me greatly.

The information that Goldschmidt, undoubtedly the first prose writer in
the country, was about to break off his literary activity and
permanently leave Denmark, was in itself overwhelming and at once set
my imagination actively at work. What could the reason be? A crime?
That was out of the question. What else could there be but a love
affair, and that had my entire sympathy. It was well known that
Goldschmidt admired a very beautiful woman, who was watched the more
jealously by her husband, because the latter had for a great number of
years been paralysed. He would not allow her to go to the theatre to
sit anywhere but in the mirror box [Footnote: The mirror box was a box
in the first Royal Theatre, surrounded by mirrors and with a grating in
front, where the stage could be seen, reflected in the mirrors, but the
occupants were invisible. It was originally constructed to utilise a
space whence the performance could not otherwise be seen, and was
generally occupied by actresses, etc.], where she could not be seen by
the public. The husband met with no sympathy from the public; he had
always been a characterless and sterile writer, had published only two
books, written in a diametrically opposite spirit, flatly contradicting
one another. As long as he was able to go out he had dyed his red hair
black. He was an insignificant man in every way, and by his first
marriage with an ugly old maid had acquired the fortune which alone had
enabled him to pay court to the beautiful woman he subsequently won.

It had leaked out that she was the original of the beautiful woman in
The Inheritance, and that some of the letters that occur in it were
really notes from Goldschmidt to her.

What more likely than the assumption that the position of affairs had
at last become unbearable to Goldschmidt, and that he had determined on
an elopement to London? In a romantic purpose of the sort Goldschmidt
could count upon the sympathy of a hot-blooded young man. I
consequently declared myself quite willing to talk the matter over with
the poet and learn more particulars as to what was expected of me;
meanwhile, I thought I might promise my assistance. It was Easter week,
I believe Maunday Thursday; I promised to call upon Goldschmidt on one
of the holidays at a prearranged time.

Good Friday and Easter Sunday I was prevented from going to him, and I
had already made up my mind to pay my visit on Easter Monday when on
Monday morning I received a letter from Bookseller Steen which made me
exceedingly indignant. The letter, which exhibited, as I considered,
(incorrectly, as it turned out), unmistakably signs of having been
dictated to him, bore witness to the utmost impatience. Steen wrote
that after undertaking to pay a visit to Goldschmidt I had now let two
days elapse without fulfilling my promise. There was "no sense in
keeping a man waiting" day after day, on such important business; in
Steen's "personal opinion," it had not been at all polite of me, as the
younger author, not to inform Goldschmidt which day I would go to see
him.

I was very much cooled by reading this letter. I saw that I had wounded
Goldschmidt's vanity deeply by not going to him immediately upon
receipt of his communication; but my chief impression was one of
surprise that Goldschmidt should reveal himself such a poor
psychologist in my case. How could he believe that I would allow myself
to be terrified by rough treatment or won by tactless reprimands? How
could he think that I regarded the task he wished to allot me as such
an honour that for that reason I had not refused it? Could not
Goldschmidt understand that it was solely the appeal to my better
feelings from an opponent, struck by an untoward fate, that had
determined my attitude?

Simultaneously, though at first very faintly, a suspicion crossed my
mind. Was it possible that the whole touching story which had been
confided to me was a hoax calculated to disarm my antagonism, arouse my
sympathy and secure Goldschmidt a trumpeting herald? Was it possible
that the mysterious information about the flight to London was only an
untruth, the sole purpose of which was to get me into Goldschmidt's
service?

I dismissed the thought at once as too improbable, but it recurred, for
I had learnt from experience that even distinguished authors sometimes
did not shrink from very daring means of securing the services of a
critic. A critic is like the rich heiress, who is always afraid of not
being loved for herself alone. Even then, I was very loth to believe
that any recognised author, much less a writer whose position was a
vexed question, would make advances to me from pure benevolence, for
the sake of my beautiful eyes, as they say in French.

At any rate, I had now made up my mind not to have anything whatever to
do with the matter. I replied emphatically:

"Lessons in politeness I take from no one, consequently return you the
enclosed papers. Be kind enough to appeal to some one else."

This reply was evidently not the one the letter had been intended to
evoke. Steen rushed up to me at once to apologise, but I did not see
him. Twice afterwards he came with humble messages from Goldschmidt
asking me to "do him the honour" of paying him a visit. But my pride
was touchy, and my determination unwavering. Undoubtedly Steen's letter
was sent at Goldschmidt's wish, but it is equally undoubted that its
form had not been approved by him. That the alliance so cleverly led up
to came to nothing was evidently as unexpected by the poet as
unpalatable to him.

Not long afterwards, I accidentally had strong confirmation of my
suspicion that the story of a flight from Denmark was merely an
invention calculated to trap me, and after the lapse of some time I
could no longer harbour a doubt that Goldschmidt had merely wished to
disarm a critic and secure himself a public crier.

This did not make me feel any the more tenderly disposed towards
Goldschmidt, and my feeling lent a sharper tone than it would otherwise
have had to an essay I wrote shortly afterwards about him on the
production of his play _Rabbi and Knight_ at the Royal Theatre.

Three years passed before our paths crossed again and a short-lived
association came about between us.

XVIII.

In my public capacity about this time, I had many against me and no one
wholly for me, except my old protector Bröchner, who, for one thing,
was very ill, and for another, by reason of his ponderous language, was
unknown to the reading world at large. Among my personal friends there
was not one who shared my fundamental views; if they were fond of me,
it was in spite of my views. That in itself was a sufficient reason why
I could not expect them, in the intellectual feud in which I was still
engaged, to enter the lists on my behalf. I did not need any long
experience to perceive that complete and unmixed sympathy with my
endeavours was a thing I should not find. Such a sympathy I only met
with in reality from one of my comrades, Emil Petersen, a young private
individual with no connection whatever with literature, and without
influence in other directions.

Moreover, I had learnt long ago that, as a literary beginner in a
country on a Liliputian scale, I encountered prompt opposition at every
step, and that ill-will against me was always expressed much more
forcibly than good-will, was quickly, so to say, organised.

I had against me at once every literary or artistic critic who already
held an assured position, from the influential men who wrote in _The
Fatherland_ or the _Berlin Times_ to the small fry who snapped in the
lesser papers, and if they mentioned me at all it was with the utmost
contempt, or in some specially disparaging manner. It was the rival
that they fought against. Thus it has continued to be all my life.
Certain "critics," such as Falkman in Denmark and Wirsen in Sweden,
hardly ever put pen to paper for some forty years without bestowing an
affectionate thought upon me. (Later, in Norway, I became Collin's
_idée fixe_.)

Add to these all who feared and hated a train of thought which in their
opinion was dangerous to good old-fashioned faith and morality.

Definite as were the limits of my articles and longer contributions to
the dispute concerning Faith and Science, and although, strictly
speaking, they only hinged upon an obscure point in Rasmus Nielsen's
philosophy, they alarmed and excited a large section of the
ecclesiastics of the country. I had carefully avoided saying anything
against faith or piety; I knew that Orthodoxy was all-powerful in
Denmark. However, I did not meet with refutations, only with the
indignation of fanaticism. As far back as 1867 Björnson had come
forward in print against me, had reproached the Daily Paper with giving
my contributions a place in their columns, and reported their contents
to the Editor, who was away travelling, on the supposition that they
must have been accepted against his wishes; and although the article
did not bear Björnson's name, this attack was not without weight. The
innocent remark that Sören Kierkegaard was the Tycho Brahe of our
philosophy, as great as Tycho Brahe, but, like him, failing to place
the centre of our solar system in its Sun, gave Björnson an opportunity
for the statement,--a very dangerous one for a young author of foreign
origin to make,--that the man who could write like that "had no views
in common with other Danes, no Danish mind."

The year after I was astonished by inflammatory outbursts on the part
of the clergy. One day in 1868 the much-respected Pastor Hohlenberg
walked into my friend Benny Spang's house, reprimanded her severely for
receiving such an undoubted heretic and heathen under her roof, and
demanded that she should break off all association with me. As she
refused to do so and turned a deaf ear to his arguments, losing all
self-control, he flung his felt hat on the floor, continued to rage and
rail against me, and, no result coming of it, dashed at last, in a
towering passion, out through the door, which he slammed behind him.
There was a farcical ending to the scene, since he was obliged to ring
at the door again for his hat, which, in his exasperation, he had
forgotten. This was a kind of private prologue to the ecclesiastical
drama which from the year 1871 upwards was enacted in most of the
pulpits of the country. Only the parsons instead of flinging their hats
upon the floor, beat their hands against the pulpit.

But what surprised me, a literary beginner, still more, was the gift I
discovered in myself of hypnotising, by my mere existence, an
ever-increasing number of my contemporaries till they became as though
possessed by a hatred which lasted, sometimes a number of years,
sometimes a whole life long, and was the essential determining factor
in their careers and actions. By degrees, in this negative manner, I
succeeded in engaging the attentions of more than a score of persons.
For the time being, I encountered the phenomenon in the person of one
solitary genius-mad individual. For a failure of a poet and
philosopher, with whom I had nothing to do, and who did not interest me
in the least, I became the one enemy it was his business to attack.

Rudolf Schmidt, who was a passionate admirer of Rasmus Nielsen, in
whose examination lectures he coached freshmen, was enraged beyond
measure by the objections, perfectly respectful, for that matter, in
form, which I had raised against one of the main points in Nielsen's
philosophy. In 1866 he published a pamphlet on the subject; in 1867 a
second, which, so possessed was he by his fury against his opponent, he
signed with the latter's own initials, Gb. And from this time forth,
for at least a generation, it became this wretch's task in life to
persecute me under every possible pseudonym, and when his own powers
were not sufficient, to get up conspiracies against me. In particular,
he did all he could against me in Germany.

Meanwhile, he started a magazine in order to bring before the public
himself and the ideas he was more immediately serving, viz.: those of
R. Nielsen; and since this latter had of late drawn very much nearer to
the Grundtvigian way of thinking, partly also those of Grundtvig. The
magazine had three editors, amongst them R. Nielsen himself, and when
one of them, who was the critic of the _Fatherland_, suddenly left the
country, Björnstjerne Björnson took his place. The three names, R.
Nielsen, B. Björnson, and Rudolph Schmidt, formed a trinity whose
supremacy did not augur well for the success of a beginner in the paths
of literature, who had attacked the thinker among them for ideal
reasons, and who had been the object of violent attacks from the two
others. The magazine _Idea and Reality_, was, as might be expected,
sufficiently unfavourable to my cause.

The sudden disappearance of the critic of _The Fatherland_ from the
literary arena was, under the conditions of the time, an event. He had
no little talent, attracted by ideas and fancies that were sometimes
very telling, repelled by mannerisms and a curious, far-fetched style,
laid chief emphasis, in the spirit of the most modern Danish
philosophy, on the will, and always defended ethical standpoints. From
the time of Björnson's first appearance he had attached himself so
enthusiastically and inviolably to him that by the general public he
was almost regarded as Björnson's herald. At every opportunity he
emphatically laid down Björnson's importance and as a set-off fell upon
those who might be supposed to be his rivals. Ibsen, in particular,
received severe handling. His departure was thus a very hard blow for
Björnson, but for that matter, was also felt as a painful loss by those
he opposed.

XIX.

Not long after this departure, and immediately after the publication of
my long article on Goldschmidt, I received one day, to my surprise, a
letter of eight closely written pages from Björnstjerne Björnson, dated
April 15th, 1869.

What had called it forth was my remark, in that article, that Björnson,
like Goldschmidt, sometimes, when talent failed, pretended to have
attained the highest, pretended that obscurity was the equivalent of
profundity. When writing this, I was thinking of the obscure final
speech about God in Heaven in Björnson's _Mary Stuart_, which I still
regard as quite vague, pretentious though it be as it stands there;
however, it was an exaggeration to generalise the grievance, as I had
done, and Björnson was right to reply. He considered that I had accused
him of insincerity, though in this he was wrong; but for that matter,
with hot-tempered eloquence, he also denied my real contention. His
letter began:

  Although I seldom read your writings, so that possibly I risk speaking
  of something you have elsewhere developed more clearly, and thus making
  a mistake, I nevertheless wish to make a determined protest against its
  being called a characteristic of mine, in contrast to Oehlenschläger
  (and Hauch!!), to strain my powers to reach what I myself only perceive
  unclearly, and then intentionally to state it as though it were clear. I
  am quite sure that I resemble Oehlenschläger in one thing, namely, that
  the defects of my book are open to all, and are not glossed over with
  any sort or kind of lie; anything unclear must for the moment have
  seemed clear to me, as in his case. My motto has always been: "Be
  faithful in _small_ things, and God shall make you ruler over great
  things." And never, no, never, have I snatched after great material in
  order to seem great, or played with words in order to seem clever, or
  been silent, in order to appear deep. Never. The examples around me have
  been appalling to me, and I am sure that they have been so because I
  have from the very beginning been on my guard against lies. There are
  passages in every work which will not yield immediately what one
  impatiently demands of them;--and then I have always waited, never
  tried; the thing has had to come itself unforced, and it is possible
  that what I have received has been a deception; but I have believed in
  it; to me it has been no deception. Before I finally conclude, I always,
  it is true, go over again what I have written (as in the case of
  _Synnöve_, and _A Happy Boy, Between the Fights_, etc). I wish
  to have the advantage of a better perception. Thus far, in what I have
  gone through, I have seen weak places which I can no longer correct.
  Lies I have never found.

  Unfortunately one is often exposed to the danger of being untrue; but it
  is in moments of surprise and absolute passion, when something happens
  to one's eye or one's tongue, that one feels is half mad, but when the
  beast of prey within one, which shrinks at nothing, is the stronger.
  Untrue in one's beautiful, poetic calm, one's confessional silence, at
  one's work, I think very few are.

This summing up, which does honour to Björnson and is not only a
striking self-verdict, but a valuable contribution to poetic psychology
in general, in its indication of the strength of the creative
imagination and its possibilities of error, was followed by a
co-ordinate attempt at a characterisation and appreciation of
Goldschmidt:

  You are likewise unjust to Goldschmidt on this point, that I know with
  certainty. Goldschmidt is of a naïve disposition, susceptible of every
  noble emotion. It is true that he often stages these in a comic manner,
  and what you say about that is true; he does the same in private life,
  but you have not recognised the source of this. In the last instance, it
  is not a question of what we think, but of what we do. Just as this, on
  the whole, is an error that you fall persistently into, it is in
  particular an error here, where, for instance, his two brothers, with
  the same qualifications and with the same dual nature, have both
  developed into characters, the one indeed into a remarkable personality.
  But Goldschmidt began as a corsair captain at seventeen; his courage was
  the courage behind a pen that he fancied was feared, his happiness that
  of the flatterer, his dread that of being vapid; and there were many
  other unfavourable circumstances, for that matter.... He is now striving
  hard towards what he feels has, during his life, been wasted in his
  ability, both moral and intellectual qualities, and for my part, I
  respect this endeavour more than his decisive success within narrow
  limits.

In this passage the distinction and contrast between contemplative life
and actual existence was quite in the Rasmus Nielsen spirit; the use
that was made of it here was strange. One would suppose that the
example adduced established that similar natural qualifications,
similar family and other conditions, in other words, the actual
essential conditions of life, were of small importance compared with
one's mode of thought, since the brothers could be so different;
Björnson wished to establish, hereby, that the mode of life was more
important than the mode of thought, although the former must depend on
the latter. For the rest, he alluded to Goldschmidt's weak points, even
if in somewhat too superior a manner, and without laying stress upon
his great artistic importance, with leniency and good-will.

But if, in other things he touched upon, he had an eye for essentials,
this failed him sadly when the letter proceeded to a characterisation
of the addressee, in which he mixed up true and false in inextricable
confusion. Amongst other things, he wrote:

  Here, I doubtless touch upon a point that is distinctive of your
  criticism. It is an absolute beauty worship. With that you can quickly
  traverse our little literature and benefit no one greatly; for the poet
  is only benefited by the man who approaches him with affection and from
  his own standpoint; the other he does not understand, and the public
  will, likely enough, pass with you through this unravelling of the
  thousand threads, and believe they are growing; but no man or woman who
  is sound and good lays down a criticism of this nature without a feeling
  of emptiness.

  I chanced to read one of your travel descriptions which really became a
  pronouncement upon some of the greatest painters. It was their nature in
  their works (not their history or their lives so much as their natural
  dispositions) that you pointed out,--also the influence of their time
  upon them, but this only in passing; and you compared these painters,
  one with another. In itself, much of this mode of procedure is correct,
  but the result is merely racy. A single one of them, seized largely and
  affectionately, shown in such manner that the different paintings and
  figures became a description of himself, but were simultaneously the
  unfolding of a culture, would have been five times as understandable. A
  contrast can be drawn in when opportunity arises, but that is not the
  essential task. Yes, this is an illustration of the form of your
  criticism. It is an everlasting, and often very painful, juxtaposition
  of things appertaining and contrasting, but just as poetry itself is an
  absorption in the one thing that it has extracted from the many, so
  comprehension of it is dependent on the same conditions. The individual
  work or the individual author whom you have treated of, you have in the
  same way not brought together, but disintegrated, and the whole has
  become merely a piquant piece of effectiveness. Hitherto one might have
  said that it was at least good-natured; but of late there have
  supervened flippant expressions, paradoxical sentences, crude
  definitions, a definite contumacy and disgust, which is now and again
  succeeded by an outburst of delight over the thing that is peculiarly
  Danish, or peculiarly beautiful. I cannot help thinking of P.L. Möller,
  as I knew him in Paris.

  There are a thousand things between Heaven and Earth that you understand
  better than I. But for that very reason you can listen to me. It seems
  to me now as if the one half of your powers were undoing what the other
  half accomplishes. I, too, am a man with intellectual interests, but I
  feel no cooperation. Might there not be other tasks that you were more
  fitted for than that of criticism? I mean, that would be less of a
  temptation to you, and would _build_ up on your personality, at the
  same time as you yourself were building? It strikes me that even if you
  do choose criticism, it should be more strongly in the direction of our
  educating responsibilities and less as the arranger of technicalities,
  the spyer out of small things, the dragger together of all and
  everything which can be brought forward as a witness for or against the
  author, which is all frightfully welcome in a contemporary critical
  epidemic in Copenhagen, but, God help me, is nothing and accomplishes
  nothing.

This part of the letter irritated me intensely, partly by the mentor's
tone assumed in it, partly by a summing up of my critical methods which
was founded simply and solely on the reading of three or four articles,
more especially those on Rubens and Goldschmidt, and which quite missed
the point. I was far from feeling that I had been understood, and for
that reason warned against extremes; on the contrary, I saw myself only
caricatured, without even wit or humour, and could not forget that the
man who had sketched this picture of me had done his utmost to injure
me. And he compared me with P.L. Möller!

The fact that the conclusion of the letter contained much that was
conciliatory and beautiful consequently did not help matters. Björnson
wrote:

  When you write about the Jews, although I am not in agreement with you,
  _altogether_ in agreement, you yet seem to me to touch upon a
  domain where you might have much to offer us, many beautiful prospects
  to open to us. In the same way, when you interpret Shakespeare (not when
  you make poetry by the side of him), when you tranquilly expound, I seem
  to see the beginnings of greater works, in any case of powers which I
  could imagine essentially contributing to the introduction into our
  culture of greater breadth of view, greater moral responsibility, more
  affection.

When I now read these words, I am obliged to transport myself violently
back, into the feelings and to the intellectual standpoint that were
mine at the time, in order to understand how they could to such a pitch
incense me. It was not only that, like all young people of any account,
I was irritable, sensitive and proud, and unwilling to be treated as a
pupil; but more than that, as the way of youth is, I confused what I
knew myself capable of accomplishing with what I had already
accomplished; felt myself rich, exuberantly rich, already, and was
indignant at perceiving myself deemed still so small.

But the last straw was a sentence which followed:

  I should often have liked to talk all this over with you, when last I
  was in Copenhagen, but I noticed I was so pried after by gossips that I
  gave it up.

The last time Björnson was in Copenhagen he had written that article
against me. Besides, I had been told that some few times he had read my
first articles aloud in public in friends' houses, and made fun of
their forced and tyro-like wording. And now he wanted me to believe
that he had at that time been thinking of visiting me, in order to come
to an understanding with me. And worse still, the fear of gossip had
restrained him! This hero of will-power so afraid of a little gossip!
He might go on as he liked now, I had done with him. He did go on, both
cordially and gracefully, but condescendingly, quite incapable of
seeing how wounding the manner of his advances was. He wished to make
advances to me and yet maintain a humiliating attitude of condescension:

  There are not many of us in literature who are in earnest; the few who
  are ought not to be daunted by the accidental separation that opposed
  opinions can produce, when there is a large field for mutual
  understanding and co-operation. I sometimes get violently irate for a
  moment; if this in lesser men, in whom there really is something base,
  brings about a lifelong separation, it does not greatly afflict me. But
  I should be very sorry if it should influence the individuals in whom I
  feel there are both ability and will. And as far as you are concerned, I
  have such a strong feeling that you must be standing at a parting of the
  ways, that, by continuing your path further, you will go astray, that I
  want to talk to you, and consequently am speaking from my heart to you
  now. If you do not understand, I am sorry; that is all I can say.

  In the Summer I am going to Finmark, and involuntarily, as I write this,
  the thought occurs to me what a journey it would be for you; away from
  everything petty and artificial to a scenery which in its magnificent
  loneliness is without parallel in the world, and where the wealth of
  birds above us and fish beneath us (whales, and shoals of herrings, cod
  and capelans often so close together that you can take them up in your
  hands, or they press against the sides of the boat) are marvel upon
  marvel, in the light of a Sun that does not set, while human beings up
  there live quiet and cowed by Nature. If you will come with me, and meet
  me, say, at Trondhjem, I know that you would not regret it. And then I
  should get conversation again; here there are not many who hit upon just
  that which I should like them to. Think about it.

A paragraph relating to Magdalene Thoresen followed. But what is here
cited is the essential part of the letter. Had its recipient known
Björnson better, he would in this have found a foundation to build
upon. But as things were, I altogether overlooked the honestly meant
friendliness in it and merely seized upon the no small portion of it
that could not do other than wound. My reply, icy, sharp and in the
deeper sense of the word, worthless, was a refusal. I did not believe
in Björnson, saw in the letter nothing but an attempt to use me as a
critic, now that he had lost his former advocate in the Press. The
prospect of the journey to the North did not tempt me; in Björnson's
eyes it would have been Thor's journey with Loki, and I neither was
Loki nor wished to be.

But even had I been capable of rising to a more correct and a fuller
estimate of Björnson's character, there was too much dividing us at
this time for any real friendship to have been established. Björnson
was then still an Orthodox Protestant, and in many ways hampered by his
youthful impressions; I myself was still too brusque to be able to
adapt myself to so difficult and masterful a personality.

Eight years elapsed before the much that separated me from Björnson
crumbled away. But then, when of his own accord he expressed his regret
on a public occasion at the rupture between us, and spoke of me with
unprejudiced comprehension and good-will, I seized with warmth and
gratitude the hand stretched out to me. A hearty friendship, bringing
with it an active and confidential correspondence, was established
between us and remained unshaken for the next ten years, when it broke
down, this time through no fault of mine, but through distrust on
Björnson's part, just as our intimacy had been hindered the first time
through distrust on mine.

The year 1869 passed in steady hard work. Among the many smaller
articles I wrote, one with the title of _The Infinitely Small and the
Infinitely Great in Poetry_, starting with a representment of
Shakespeare's Harry Percy, contained a criticism of the hitherto
recognised tendency of Danish dramatic poetry and pointed out into the
future. The paper on H.C. Andersen, which came into being towards
midsummer, and was read aloud in a clover field to a solitary listener,
was representative of my critical abilities and aims at that date. I
had then known Andersen socially for a considerable time. My cordial
recognition of his genius drew us more closely together; he often came
to see me and was very ready to read his new works aloud to me. It is
hardly saying too much to declare that this paper secured me his
friendship.

The fundamental principles of the essay were influenced by Taine, the
art philosopher I had studied most deeply, and upon whom I had written
a book that was to be my doctor's thesis. Lightly and rapidly though my
shorter articles came into being, this larger task was very long in
hand. Not that I had little heart for my work; on the contrary, no
question interested me more than those on which my book hinged; but
there were only certain of them with which, as yet, I was equal to
dealing.

First and foremost came the question of the nature of the producing
mind, the possibility of showing a connection between its faculties and
deriving them from one solitary dominating faculty, which would thus
necessarily reveal itself in every aspect of the mind. It puzzled me,
for example, how I was to find the source whence Pascal's taste, both
for mathematics and religious philosophy, sprang. Next came the
question of the possibility of a universally applicable scientific
method of criticism, regarded as intellectual optics. If one were to
define the critic's task as that of understanding, through the
discovery and elucidation of the dependent and conditional
contingencies that occur in the intellectual world, then there was a
danger that he might approve everything, not only every form and
tendency of art that had arisen historically, but each separate work
within each artistic section. If it were no less the critic's task to
distinguish between the genuine and the spurious, he must at any rate
possess a technical standard by which to determine greater or lesser
value, or he must be so specially and extraordinarily gifted that his
instinct and tact estimate infallibly.

Further, there was the question of genius, the point on which Taine's
theory roused decisive opposition in me. He regarded genius as a
summing up, not as a new starting-point; according to him it was the
assemblage of the original aptitudes of a race and of the peculiarities
of a period in which these aptitudes were properly able to display
themselves. He overlooked the originality of the man of genius, which
could not be explained from his surroundings, the new element which, in
genius, was combined with the summarising of surrounding particles.
Before, when studying Hegel, I had been repelled by the suggestion that
what spoke to us through the artist was only the universally valid, the
universal mind, which, as it were, burnt out the originality of the
individual. In Taine's teaching, nation and period were the new
(although more concrete) abstractions in the place of the universally
valid; but here, too, the particularity of the individual was
immaterial. The kernel of my work was a protest against this theory.

I was even more actively interested in the fundamental question raised
by a scientific view of history. For some years I had been eagerly
searching Comte and Littré, Buckle, Mill and Taine for their opinions
on the philosophy of History. Here, too, though in another form, the
question of the importance of the individual versus the masses
presented itself. Statistics had proved to what extent conscious
actions were subordinated to uniform laws. We could foresee from one
year to another how many murders would be committed and how many with
each kind of instrument. The differences between men and men
neutralised each other, if we took the average of a very large number.
But this did not prove that the individual was not of considerable
importance. If the victory of Salamis depended on Themistocles, then
the entire civilisation of Europe henceforth depended on him.

Another aspect of the question was: Did the consistent determinism of
modern Science, the discovery of an unalterable interdependency in the
intellectual, as in the physical worlds, allow scope for actions
proceeding otherwise than merely illusorily from the free purpose or
determination of the individual? Very difficult the question was, and I
did not feel confident of solving it; but it was some consolation to
reflect that the doubt as to the possibility of demonstrating a full
application of the law in the domain in which chance has sway, and
Ethics its sphere, was comparatively infinitesimal in the case of those
domains in which men make themselves felt by virtue of genius or talent
as producers of literary and artistic works. Here, where natural gifts
and their necessary deployment were of such extraordinary weight, the
probability of a demonstration of natural laws was, of course, much
greater.

The general fundamental question was: Given a literature, a philosophy,
an art, or a branch of art, what is the attitude of mind that produces
it? What are its sufficing and necessary conditions? What, for
instance, causes England in the sixteenth century to acquire a dramatic
poetry of the first rank, or Holland in the seventeenth century a
painting art of the first rank, without any of the other branches of
art simultaneously bearing equally fine fruit in the same country?

My deliberations resulted, for the time being, in the conviction that
all profound historical research was psychical research.

That old piece of work, revised, as it now is, has certainly none but
historic interest; but for a doctor's thesis, it is still a tolerably
readable book and may, at any rate, introduce a beginner to reflection
upon great problems.

After the fundamental scientific questions that engaged my attention, I
was most interested in artistic style. There was, in modern Danish
prose, no author who unreservedly appealed to me; in German Heinrich
Kleist, and in French Mérimée, were the stylists whom I esteemed most.
The latter, in fact, it seemed to me was a stylist who, in unerring
sureness, terseness and plasticism, excelled all others. He had
certainly not much warmth or colour, but he had a sureness of line
equal to that of the greatest draughtsmen of Italian art. His aridity
was certainly not winning, and, in reading him, I frequently felt a
lack of breadth of view and horizon, but the compelling power of his
line-drawing captivated me. When my doctor's thesis was finished,
towards the middle of December, 1869, both it and the collection of
articles bearing the name _Criticisms and Portraits_ were placed in the
printer's hands. In the beginning of 1870 two hitherto unprinted pieces
were added, of which one was a paper written some time before on Kamma
Rahbek, which had been revised, the other, a new one on Mérimée, which
in general shows what at that time I admired in style.

It had long been settled that as soon as I had replied to the critics
of my thesis I should start on prolonged travels, the real educational
travels of a young man's life. I had a little money lying ready, a
small bursary, and a promise of a travelling allowance from the State,
which promise, however, was not kept. This journey had for a long time
been haunting my fancy. I cherished an ardent wish to see France again,
but even more especially to go to Italy and countries still farther
South. My hope of catching a glimpse of Northern Africa was only
fulfilled thirty-five years later; but I got as far as Italy, which was
the actual goal of my desires. I knew enough of the country, its
history from ancient days until then, and was sufficiently acquainted
with its Art from Roman times upwards and during the Renaissance, to be
regarded as passed for intellectual consecration in the South.

When the thesis was done with and the printing of the second book was
nearing completion, not anxiety to travel, but melancholy and
heavy-heartedness at the thought of my departure, gained the upper
hand. It had been decided that I was to remain away at least a year,
and it was less to myself than to others whom I must necessarily leave
behind, that the time seemed immeasurably long. Professor Schiödte
advised me rather to take several short journeys than one long one; but
that was impracticable. I wanted to get quite away from the home
atmosphere. As, however, there were some who thought of my journey with
disquiet and dread, and from whom it was difficult for me to tear
myself, I put off my departure as long as I could. At last the remnant
of work that still bound me to Copenhagen was finished, and then all
the new and enriching prospects my stay in foreign countries was to
bring me shone in a golden light. Full of undaunted hope, I set out on
my travels at the beginning of April, 1870.

SECOND LONGER STAY ABROAD

Hamburg--My Second Fatherland--Ernest Hello--_Le Docteur
Noir_--Taine--Renan--Marcelin--Gleyre--Taine's Friendship--Renan at
Home--Philarète Chasles' Reminiscences--_Le Théâtre
Français_--Coquelin--Bernhardt--Beginnings of _Main Currents_--The
Tuileries--John Stuart Mill--London--Philosophical Studies--London and
Paris Compared--Antonio Gallenga and His Wife--Don Juan Prim--Napoleon
III--London Theatres--Gladstone and Disraeli in Debate--Paris on the
Eve of War--First Reverses--Flight from Paris--Geneva,
Switzerland--Italy--Pasquale Villari--Vinnie Ream's Friendship--Roman
Fever--Henrik Ibsen's Influence--Scandinavians in Rome.

I.

The first thing that impressed me was Hamburg, and by that I mean the
European views prevalent there. At that time, doubtless mainly for
national reasons, Denmark hated Hamburg. Different Danish authors had
recently written about the town, and in as depreciatory a strain as
they could. The description of one amounted to an assertion that in
Hamburg people only talked of two things, money and women; that of
another commenced: "Of all the places I have ever seen in my life,
Hamburg is the most hideous."

The situation of the town could not be compared with that of
Copenhagen, but the Alster quarter was attractive, the architecture and
the street life not uninteresting. What decided me, however, was not
the externals of the town, but the spirit I noticed pervading the
conversation. The idea underlying things was that a young man must
first and foremost learn to keep himself well and comfortably; if he
could not do this in Hamburg, then as soon as possible he must set off
to some place across the sea, to Rio, or New York, to the Argentine, or
Cape Colony, and there make his way and earn a fortune. The sons of the
families I was invited to visit, or heard talked about, had long been
away; in the houses I went to, the head of the family had seen other
parts of the world. The contrast with Copenhagen was obvious; there the
young sons of the middle classes were a burden on their families
sometimes until they were thirty, had no enterprise, no money of their
own to dispose of, were often glued, as it were, to the one town, where
there was no promotion to look forward to and no wide prospect of any
sort.

It was a long time since I had been so much struck by anything as by an
expression that a Hamburg lady, who had been to Copenhagen and had
stayed there some time, used about the young Danish men, namely, that
they had _l'apparence chétive_. I tried to persuade her that life in
Copenhagen had only accidentally appeared so wretched to her; but I did
not convince her in the least. She demonstrated to me, by numerous
examples, to what an extent enterprise was lacking in Denmark, and I
was obliged to restrict myself to explaining that the tremendous
pressure of political pettiness and weakness had brought a general
slackness with it, without people feeling or suspecting it, and had
robbed nearly every one of daring and success. The result of the
conversation was that Denmark was shown to me in a fresh light.

A Hamburg merchant who had lived for a long time in Mexico invited me
to dinner, and at his house I had the same impression of apparent
happiness, comfort, enterprise and wide outlook, in contrast to the
cares and the narrowness at home, where only the few had travelled far
or collected material which might by comparison offer new points of
view and give one a comprehensive experience of life. My psychological
education in Danish literature, with its idolising of "thoroughness"
had imprinted on my mind that whoever thoroughly understood how to
observe a man, woman and child in a Copenhagen backyard had quite
sufficient material whence to brew a knowledge of human nature. It now
dawned upon me that comparative observation of a Mexican and a North
German family, together with their opinions and prejudices, might
nevertheless considerably advance one's knowledge of human nature,
should such comparisons constantly obtrude themselves upon one.

The same man let fall an observation which set me thinking. When the
conversation turned upon the strained relations between France and
Prussia since the battle of Königgratz, and I expressed myself
confident that, in the event of a war, France would be victorious, as
she generally was victorious everywhere, he expressed well-supported
doubts. Prussia was a comparatively young state, extremely well
organised and carefully prepared for war; antiquated routine held great
sway in the French army; the Emperor himself, the esteem in which he
was held, and his management were on the down grade. These were words
that I had never heard in Denmark. The possibility of France being
defeated in a war with Prussia was not even entertained there. This
merchant showed me an original photograph of the execution of the
Emperor Maximilian, taken on the spot a moment before the word to fire
was given, and a second taken immediately afterwards. The calm bearing
of the Emperor and the two generals compelled admiration. This was the
first time I had seen photography taken into the service of history.

In the Hamburg Zoological Gardens I was fascinated by the aquarium,
with its multitudes of aquatic animals and fish. There, for the first
time in my life, I saw an elephant, and did not tire of gazing at the
mighty beast. I was struck by the strange caprice with which the great
Being we call Nature goes to work, or, more correctly, by the contrast
between the human point of view and Nature's mode of operations. To us,
the elephant's trunk was burlesque, its walk risibly clumsy; the eagle
and the kite seemed to us, as they sat, to have a severe appearance and
a haughty glance; the apes, picking lice from one another and eating
the vermin, were, to our eyes, contemptible and ridiculous at the same
time; but Nature took everything equally seriously, neither sought nor
avoided beauty, and to her one being was not more central than another.
That must be deemed Nature's central point which is equidistant from
the lowest and from the highest being; it was not impossible, for
instance, that the _harefish_, a great, thick, odd-looking creature,
was the real centre of terrestrial existence, in the same way as our
celestial sphere has its centre, through which a line reaches the pole
of the zodiac in the constellation of the Dragon. And I smiled as I
thought of R. Nielsen and his pupils always speaking as if they stood
on the most intimate footing with the "central point" of existence, and
pouring contempt on others who, it was to be supposed, could not
approach it.

I was very unfavourably impressed in Hamburg by German drama and German
dramatic art.

At the town theatre, Hebbel's _Judith_ was being performed, with Clara
Ziegler in the leading part. At that time this lady enjoyed a
considerable reputation in Germany, and was, too, a tall,
splendid-looking female, with a powerful voice, a good mimic, and all
the rest of it, but a mere word-machine. The acting showed up the want
of taste in the piece. Holofernes weltered knee-deep in gore and
bragged incessantly; Judith fell in love with his "virility," and when
he had made her "the guardian of his slumbers" murdered him, from a
long disremembered loyalty to the God of Israel.

At the Thalia Theatre, Raupach's _The School of Life_ was being
produced, a lot of silly stuff, the theme of it, for that matter,
allied to the one dealt with later by Drachmann in _Once upon a Time_.
A Princess is hard-hearted and capricious. To punish her, the King, her
father, shuts a man into her bedroom, makes a feigned accusation
against her, and actually drives her out of the castle. She becomes a
waiting-maid, and passes through various stages of civil life. The King
of Navarra, whose suit she had haughtily rejected, disguised as a
goldsmith, marries her, then arrays himself in silks and velvets, to
tempt her to infidelity. When she refuses, he allows every possible
injustice to be heaped upon her, to try her, makes her believe that the
King, on a false accusation, has had her husband's eyes put out, and
then himself goes about with a bandage before his eyes, and lets her
beg. She believes everything and agrees to everything, until at last,
arrived at honour and glory, she learns that it has all been only
play-acting, trial, and education.

This nonsense was exactly on a par with taste in Germany at the time,
which was undeniably considerably below the level of that in France and
Denmark, and it was acted by a group of actors, some very competent, at
the chief theatre of Hamburg. Slowly though business life pulsated in
Denmark, we were superior to Germany in artistic perception.

The low stage of artistic development at which Hamburg had then arrived
could not, however, efface the impression its superiority over
Copenhagen in other respects had made upon me. Take it all together, my
few days in Hamburg were well spent.

II.

And then I set foot once more in the country which I regarded as my
second fatherland, and the overflowing happiness of once more feeling
French ground under my feet returned undiminished and unchanged. I had
had all my letters sent to Mlle. Louise's address, so fetched them
shortly after my arrival and saw the girl again. Her family invited me
to dinner several times during the very first week, and I was
associated with French men and women immediately upon my arrival.

They were well-brought-up, good-natured, hospitable bourgeois, very
narrow in their views. Not in the sense that they took no interest in
politics and literature, but in that questions for them were decided
once and for all in the clerical spirit. They did not regard this as a
party standpoint, did not look upon themselves as adherents of a party;
their way of thinking was the right one; those who did not agree with
them held opinions they ought to be ashamed of, and which they
probably, in private, were ashamed of holding and expressing.

Mlle. Louise had a cousin whom she used to speak of as a warm-hearted
man with peculiar opinions, eager and impetuous, who would like to make
the acquaintance of her friend from the North. The aunts called him a
passionate Catholic, and an energetic writer in the service of the
Church Militant. Shortly after my arrival, I met him at dinner. He was
a middle-aged, pale, carelessly dressed man with ugly, irregular
features, and a very excitable manner. With him came his wife, who
though pale and enthusiastic like himself, yet looked quite
terrestrial. He introduced himself as Ernest Hello, contributor to
Veuillot's then much talked of Romish paper, _L'Univers_, which, edited
with no small talent by a noted stylist, adopted all sorts of abusive
methods as weapons in every feud in which the honour of the Church was
involved. It was against Veuillot that Augier had just aimed the
introduction to his excellent comedy, _Le Fils de Giboyer_, and he made
no secret of the fact that in the Déodat mentioned in the piece he had
had this writer of holy abuse in his mind. Hello was in everything
Veuillot's vassal.

He was one of the martial believers who despised and hated the best
free research men, and who knew himself in a position to confute them.
He possessed some elements of culture, and had early had thoroughly
drilled into him what, in comparison with the views of later times on
History and Religion, was narrow and antiquated in Voltaire's
education, and for this reason regarded, not only Voltaire's attack on
the Church, but all subsequent philosophy inimical to the Church, as
belonging to a bygone age. He was a fanatic, and there was a sacristy
odour about all that he said. But there was in his disposition an
enthusiastic admiration for weakness in fighting against external
strength, and for courage that expressed itself in sheer defiance of
worldly prudence, that made him feel kindly towards the young Dane.
Denmark's taking up arms, with its two million inhabitants, against a
great power like Prussia, roused his enthusiasm. "It is great, it is
Spartan!" he exclaimed. It must certainly be admitted that this human
sympathy was not a prominent characteristic, and he wearied me with his
hateful verdicts over all those whom I, and by degrees, all Europe,
esteemed and admired in France.

As an instance of the paradoxicalness to which Huysmans many years
later became addicted, the latter tried to puff up Hello as being a man
of remarkable intellect; and an instance of the want of independence
with which the new Catholic movement was carried on in Denmark is to be
found in the fact that the organ of Young Denmark, _The Tower_, could
declare: "Hello is one of the few whom all men of the future are agreed
to bow before.... Hello was,--not only a Catholic burning with
religious ardour,--but a genius; these two things explain everything."

When Hello invited me to his house, I regarded it as my duty to go,
that I might learn as much as possible, and although his circle was
exceedingly antipathetic to me, I did not regret it; the spectacle was
highly instructive.

Next to Hello himself, who, despite his fanaticism and restlessness,
impressed one as very inoffensive at bottom, and not mischievous if one
steered clear of such names as Voltaire or Renan, the chief member of
his circle was the black doctor, (_le Docteur noir_,) so much talked of
in the last years of the Empire, and who is even alluded to in Taine's
_Graindorge_. His real name was Vries. He was a negro from the Dutch
West Indies, a veritable bull, with a huge body and a black, bald
physiognomy, made to stand outside a tent at a fair, and be his own
crier to the public. His conversation was one incessant brag, in
atrocious French. Although he had lived seventeen years in France, he
spoke almost unintelligibly.

He persuaded himself, or at least others, that he had discovered
perpetual motion, vowed that he had made a machine which, "by a simple
mechanism," could replace steam power and had been declared practicable
by the first engineers in Paris; but of course he declined to speak
freely about it. Columbus and Fulton only were his equals; he knew all
the secrets of Nature. He had been persecuted--in 1859 he had been
imprisoned for eleven months, on a charge of quackery--because all
great men were persecuted; remember our Lord Jesus Christ! He himself
was the greatest man living. _Moi vous dire le plus grand homme
d'universe_. Hello and the ladies smiled admiringly at him, and never
grew tired of listening to him. This encouraged him to monopolise the
conversation: He, Vries, was a man possessed of courage and wisdom; he
understood Phrenology, Allopathy, Homoeopathy, Engineering Science,
Metereology--like Molière's doctors and Holberg's Oldfux. His greatest
and most special gift was that of curing cancer. Like writing-masters,
who hang out specimens of how people wrote when they came to them, and
of their caligraphy after they had benefited by their instruction, he
had his cancer patients photographed before and after his treatment,
looking ghastly the first time, and as fresh as a flower the second,
and these pictures hung on view in his house. No wonder, therefore,
that Napoleon III--so Vries said--had his portrait in an album
containing, besides, only portraits of European sovereigns.

He pretended that he had made many important prophecies. This was a
bond between him and Hello, who claimed the same extraordinary power,
and had foretold all sorts of singular events. He performed miraculous
cures; this appealed to Hello, who was suspicious of all rational
Science and ready to believe any mortal thing. He could read
everybody's characters in their faces. This was a pretext for the most
barefaced flattery of Hello, his wife, and their friends of both sexes,
and of course everything was swallowed with alacrity. To me he said:
"Monsieur is gentle, very calm, very indulgent, and readily forgives an
injury."

Hideous though he was, his powerful brutality had a great effect on the
ladies of the circle. They literally hung upon his words. He seized
them by the wrists, and slid his black paws up their bare arms. The
married women whispered languishingly: "You have a marvellous power
over women." The husbands looked on smilingly.

Now when Hello and he and their friends and the ladies began to talk
about religious matters and got steam up, it was a veritable witches'
Sabbath, and no mistake, every voice being raised in virulent cheap
Jack denunciation of freedom, and common sense. Satan himself had
dictated Voltaire's works; now Voltaire was burning in everlasting
fire. Unbelievers ought to be exterminated; it would serve them right.
Renan ought to be hanged on the first tree that would bear him; the
Black Doctor even maintained that in Manila he would have been shot
long ago. It was always the Doctor who started the subject of the
persecution of heretics. Hello himself persecuted heretics with
patronising scorn, but was already ready to drop into a hymn of praise
to the Madonna.

I had then read two of Hello's books, _Le Style_ and _M. Renan,
L'Allemagne et l'Athéisme au 19me Siècle_. Such productions are called
books, because there is no other name for them. As a matter of fact,
idle talk and galimatias of the sort are in no wise literature. Hello
never wrote anything but Roman Catholic sermons, full of theological
sophistries and abuse of thinking men. In those years his books, with
their odour of incense, made the small, flat inhabitants of the
sacristy wainscotting venture out of their chinks in the wall in
delight; but they obtained no applause elsewhere.

It was only after his death that it could occur to a morbid seeker
after originality, with a bitter almond in place of a heart, like
Huysmans, to make his half-mad hero, Des Esseintes, who is terrified of
the light, find satisfaction in the challenges to common sense that
Hello wrote. Hello was a poor wretch who, in the insane conviction that
he himself was a genius, filled his writings with assertions concerning
the marvellous, incomprehensible nature of genius, and always took up
the cudgels on its behalf. During the Empire, his voice was drowned. It
was only a score of years later that the new Catholic reaction found it
to their advantage to take him at his word and see in him the genius
that he had given himself out to be. He was as much a genius as the
madman in the asylum is the Emperor.

III.

A few days after my arrival, I called upon Taine and was cordially
received. He presented me with one of his books and promised me his
great work, _De l'Intelligence_, which was to come out in a few days,
conversed with me for an hour, and invited me to tea the following
evening. He had been married since I had last been at his house, and
his wife, a young, clear-skinned lady with black plaits, brown eyes and
an extremely graceful figure, was as fresh as a rose, and talked with
the outspoken freedom of youth, though expressing herself in carefully
selected words.

After a few days, Taine, who was generally very formal with strangers,
treated me with conspicuous friendliness. He offered at once to
introduce me to Renan, and urgently advised me to remain six months in
Paris, in order to master the language thoroughly, so that I might
enlighten Frenchmen on the state of things in the North, as well as
picture the French to my fellow-countrymen. Why should I not make
French my auxiliary language, like Turgenieff and Hillebrandt!

Taine knew nothing of German belles lettres. As far as philosophy was
concerned, he despised German Aesthetics altogether, and laughed at me
for believing in "Aesthetics" at all, even one day introducing me to a
stranger as "A young Dane who does not believe in much, but is weak
enough to believe in Aesthetics." I was not precisely overburdened by
the belief. But a German Aesthetic, according to Taine's definition,
was a man absolutely devoid of artistic perception and sense of style,
who lived only in definitions. If you took him to the theatre to see a
sad piece, he would tear his hair with delight, and exclaim: "_Voilà
das Tragische!_"

Of the more modern German authors, Taine knew only Heine, of whom he
was a passionate admirer and whom, by reason of his intensity of
feeling, he compared with Dante. A poem like the _Pilgrimage to
Kevlaar_ roused his enthusiasm. Goethe's shorter poems, on the other
hand, he could not appreciate, chiefly no doubt because he did not know
German sufficiently well. He was not even acquainted with the very best
of Goethe's short things, and one day that I asked him to read one poem
aloud, the words in his mouth rang very French.

_Lieber dur Laydénn möcht ee mee schlag'e, als so feel Frödenn des
Laybengs airtrah'ge_, was intended to be--

    Lieber durch Leiden,
    Möcht ich mich schlagen
    Als so viel Freuden
    Des Lebens ertragen.

Goethe's prose he did not consider good, but heavy and prolix, and
lacking in descriptive power. He would praise Voltaire's prose at his
expense. "You perceive the figure and its movements far more clearly,"
he said. The German romanticists disgusted him; their style, also, was
too inartistic for him (_ils ne savent pas écrire, cela me dégoûte
d'eux_).

I frequently met friends at his house, amongst others, Marcelin, who