Part 14

Next day, when I got out at Egebaek station on my way from Flensborg, intending to go to Idsted, it seemed that three other young men had had the same idea, so we all four walked together. They were young men of a type I had not met with before. The way they felt and spoke was new to me. They all talked in a very affectionate manner, betrayed at once that they worshipped one another, and seemed to have strong, open natures, much resembling each other. They were Ernst Trier, Nörregaard, and Baagöe, later the three well-known High School men.

The little band arrived at a quick pace on Idsted's beautiful heath, all tufts of ling, the red blossoms of which looked lovely in the light of the setting sun. We sat ourselves down on the hill where Baudissin and his staff had stood. Then Baagöe read aloud Hammerich's description of the battle of Idsted, while each of us in his mind's eye saw the seething masses of troops advance and fall upon one another, as they had done just ten years before.

Our time was short, if we wanted to get under a roof that night. At 9 o'clock we were still eight miles from Slesvig. We did the first four at a pace that was novel to me. Three-parts of the way we covered in forty-five minutes, the last two miles took us twenty. When we arrived at the hotel, there stood Madam Esselbach, of war renown, in the doorway, with her hands on her hips, as in her portrait; she summed up the arrivals with shrewd, sharp eyes, and exclaimed: "Das ist ja das junge Dänemark." Inside, officers were sitting, playing cards. Major Sommer promised us young men to show us Gottorp at 6 o'clock next morning; we should then get a view of the whole of the town from Hersterberg beforehand.

The Major, who was attacked in the newspapers after the war, and whose expression "my maiden sword," was made great fun of, showed us younger ones the magnificent church, and afterwards the castle, which, as a barracks, was quite spoilt. He acted as the father of the regiment, and, like Poul Möller's artist, encouraged the efficient, and said hard words to the slighty, praising or blaming unceasingly, chatted Danish to the soldiers, Low German to the cook, High German to the little housekeeper at the castle, and called the attention of his guests to the perfect order and cleanliness of the stables. He complained bitterly that a certain senior lieutenant he pointed out to us, who in 1848 had flung his cockade in the gutter and gone over to the Germans, had been reinstated in the regiment, and placed over the heads of brave second-lieutenants who had won their crosses in the war.

Here I parted with my Grundtvigian friends. When I spoke of them to Julius Lange on my return, he remarked: "They are a good sort, who wear their hearts in their buttonholes as decorations."

The society I fell in with for the rest of my journey was very droll. This consisted of Borup, later Mayor of Finance, and a journalist named Falkman (really Petersen), even at that time on the staff of The Dally Paper. I little guessed then that my somewhat vulgar travelling companion would develop into the Cato who wished Ibsen's Ghosts "might be thrust into the slime-pit, where such things belong," and would write articles by the hundred against me. Neither had I any suspicion, during my acquaintance with Topsöe, that the latter would one day be one of my most determined persecutors. Without exactly being strikingly youthful, the large, broad-shouldered Borup was still a young man. Falkman wrote good-humouredly long reports to Bille about Slesvig, which I corrected for him. Borup and Falkman generally exclaimed the moment I opened my mouth: "Not seraphic, now!"

We travelled together to Glücksborg, saw the camp there, and, as we had had nothing since our morning coffee at 5 o'clock, ate between the three of us a piece of roast meat six pounds weight. We spent the night at Flensborg and drove next day to Graasten along a lovely road with wooded banks on either side. It was pouring with rain, and we sat in dead silence, trying to roll ourselves up in horse-cloths. When in an hour's time the rain stopped, and we put up at an inn, our enforced silence gave place to the wildest merriment. We three young fellows--the future Finance Minister as well--danced into the parlour, hopped about like wild men, spilt milk over ourselves, the sofa, and the waitress; then sprang, waltzing and laughing, out through the door again and up into the carriage, after having heaped the girl with small copper coins.

From Graasten we proceeded to Sönderborg. The older men lay down and slept after the meal. I went up to Dybbölmölle. On the way back, I found on a hill looking out over Als a bench from which there was a beautiful view across to Slesvig. I lay down on the seat and gazed up at the sky and across the perfect country. The light fields, with their tall, dark hedges, which give the Slesvig scenery its peculiar stamp, from this high-lying position looked absolutely lovely.

XII.

I was not given to looking at life in a rosy light. My nature, one uninterrupted endeavour, was too tense for that. Although I occasionally felt the spontaneous enjoyments of breathing the fresh air, seeing the sun shine, and listening to the whistling of the wind, and always delighted in the fact that I was in the heyday of my youth, there was yet a considerable element of melancholy in my temperament, and I was so loth to abandon myself to any illusion that when I looked into my own heart and summed up my own life it seemed to me that I had never been happy for a day. I did not know what it was to be happy for a whole day at a time, scarcely for an hour. I had only known a moment's rapture in the companionship of my comrades at a merry-making, in intercourse with a friend, under the influence of the beauties of Nature, or the charm of women, or in delight at gaining intellectual riches--during the reading of a poem, the sight of a play, or when absorbed in a work of art.

Any feeling that I was enriching my mind from those surrounding me was unfortunately rare with me. Almost always, when talking to strangers, I felt the exact opposite, which annoyed me exceedingly, namely, that I was being intellectually sucked, squeezed like a lemon, and whereas I was never bored when alone, in the society of other people I suffered overwhelmingly from boredom. In fact, I was so bored by the visits heaped upon me by my comrades and acquaintances, who inconsiderately wasted my time, in order to kill a few hours, that I was almost driven to despair; I was too young obstinately to refuse to see them.

By degrees, the thought of the boredom that I suffered at almost all social functions dominated my mind to such an extent that I wrote a little fairy tale about boredom, by no means bad (but unfortunately lost), round an idea which I saw several years later treated in another way in Sibbern's well-known book of the year 2135. This fairy tale was read aloud to Nutzhorn's band and met with its approval.

But although I could thus by no means be called of a happy disposition, I was, by reason of my overflowing youth, in a constant state of elation, which, as soon as the company of others brought me out of my usual balance, acted like exuberant mirth and made me burst out laughing.

I was noted, among my comrades, and not always to my advantage, for my absolutely ungovernable risibility. I had an exceedingly keen eye for the ridiculous, and easily influenced as I still was, I could not content myself with a smile. Not infrequently, when walking about the town, I used to laugh the whole length of a street. There were times when I was quite incapable of controlling my laughter; I laughed like a child, and it was incomprehensible to me that people could go so soberly and solemnly about. If a person stared straight at me, it made me laugh. If a girl flirted a little with me, I laughed in her face. One day I went out and saw two drunken labourers, in a cab, each with a wreath on his knee; I was obliged to laugh; I met an old dandy whom I knew, with two coats on, one of which hung down below the other; I had to laugh at that, too. Sometimes, walking or standing, absorbed in thoughts, I was outwardly abstracted, and answered mechanically, or spoke in a manner unsuited to my words; if I noticed this myself, I could not refrain from laughing aloud at my own absent-mindedness. It occasionally happened that at an evening party, where I had been introduced by the son of the house to a stiff family to whom I was a stranger, and where the conversation at table was being carried on in laboured monosyllables, I would begin to laugh so unrestrainedly that every one stared at me in anger or amazement. And it occasionally happened that when some sad event, concerning people present, was being discussed, the recollection of something comical I had seen or heard the same day would crop up in my mind to the exclusion of all else, and I would be overtaken by fits of laughter that were both incomprehensible and wounding to those round me, but which it was impossible to me to repress. At funeral ceremonies, I was in such dread of bursting out laughing that my attention would involuntarily fix itself on everything it ought to avoid. This habit of mine was particularly trying when my laughter had a ruffling effect on others in a thing that I myself was anxious to carry through. Thus I spoilt the first rehearsals of Sophocles' Greek play Philoctetes, which a little group of students were preparing to act at the request of Julius Lange. Some of them pronounced the Greek in an unusual manner, others had forgotten their parts or acted badly--and that was quite enough to set me off in a fit of laughter which I had difficulty in stopping. Thus I often laughed, when I was tormented at being compelled to laugh, in reality feeling melancholy, and mentally worried; I used to think of Oechlenschläger's Oervarodd, who does not laugh when he is happy, but breaks into a guffaw when he is deeply affected.

These fits of laughter were in reality the outcome of sheer youthfulness; with all my musings and reflection, I was still in many ways a child; I laughed as boys and girls laugh, without being able to stop, and especially when they ought not. But this painful trait in myself directed my thoughts to the nature proper of laughter; I tried to sum up to myself why I laughed, and why people in general laughed, pondered, as well as I was capable of doing the question of what the comical consisted of, and then recorded the fruits of my reflections in my second long treatise, On Laughter, which has been lost.

As I approached my twentieth year, these fits of laughter stopped. "I have," wrote I at the time, "seen into that Realm of Sighs, on the threshold of which I--like Parmeniscus after consulting the Oracle of Trophonius--have suddenly forgotten how to laugh."

XIII.

Meanwhile I had completed my eighteenth year and had to make my choice of a profession. But what was I fitted for? My parents, and those other of my relations whose opinions I valued, wished me to take up the law; they thought that I might make a good barrister; but I myself held back, and during my first year of study did not attend a single law lecture. In July, 1860, after I had passed my philosophical examination (with Distinction in every subject), the question became urgent. Whether I was likely to exhibit any considerable talent as a writer, it was impossible for me to determine. There was only one thing that I felt clear about, and that was that I should never be contented with a subordinate position in the literary world; better a hundred times be a judge in a provincial town. I felt an inward conviction that I should make my way as a writer. It seemed to me that a deathlike stillness reigned for the time being over European literature, but that there were mighty forces working in the silence. I believed that a revival was imminent. In August, 1860, I wrote in my private papers: "We Danes, with our national culture and our knowledge of the literatures of other countries, will stand well equipped when the literary horn of the Gods resounds again through the world, calling fiery youth to battle. I am firmly convinced that that time will come and that I shall be, if not the one who evokes it in the North, at any rate one who will contribute greatly towards it."

One of the first books I had read as a student was Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, and this career had extraordinarily impressed me. In my childlike enthusiasm I determined to read all the books that Goethe says that he read as a boy, and thus commenced and finished Winckelmann's collected works, Lessing's Laocoon and other books of artistic and archaeological research; in other words, studied the history and philosophy of Art in the first instance under aspects which, from the point of view of subsequent research, were altogether antiquated, though in themselves, and in their day, valuable enough.

Goethe's life fascinated me for a time to such an extent that I found duplicates of the characters in the book everywhere. An old language master, to whom I went early in the morning, in order to acquire from him the knowledge of English which had not been taught me at school, reminded me vividly, for instance, of the old dancing master in Goethe, and my impression was borne out when I discovered that he, too, had two pretty daughters. A more important point was that the book awoke in me a restless thirst for knowledge, at the same time that I conceived a mental picture of Goethe's monumental personality and began to be influenced by the universality of his genius.

Meanwhile, circumstances at home forced me, without further vacillation, to take up some special branch of study. The prospects literature presented were too remote. For Physics I had no talent; the logical bent of my abilities seemed to point in the direction of the Law; so Jurisprudentia was selected and my studies commenced.

The University lectures, as given by Professors Aagesen and Gram, were appalling; they consisted of a slow, sleepy dictation. A death-like dreariness brooded always over the lecture halls. Aagesen was especially unendurable; there was no trace of anything human or living about his dictation. Gram had a kind, well-intentioned personality, but had barely reached his desk than it seemed as though he, too, were saying: "I am a human being, everything human is alien to me."

We consequently had to pursue our studies with the help of a coach, and the one whom I, together with Kappers, Ludvig David and a few others, had chosen, Otto Algreen-Ussing, was both a capable and a pleasant guide. Five years were yet to elapse before this man and his even more gifted brother, Frederik, on the formation of the Loyal and Conservative Society of August, were persecuted and ridiculed as reactionaries, by the editors of the ascendant Press, who, only a few years later, proved themselves to be ten times more reactionary themselves. Otto was positively enthusiastic over Law; he used to declare that a barrister "was the finest thing a man could be."

However, he did not succeed in infecting me with his enthusiasm. I took pains, but there was little in the subject that aroused my interest. Christian the Fifth's Danish Law attracted me exclusively on account of its language and the perspicuity and pithiness of the expressions occasionally made use of.

With this exception what impressed me most of all that I heard in the lessons was Anders Sandöe Oersted's Interpretation of the Law. When I had read and re-read a passage of law which seemed to me to be easily intelligible, and only capable of being understood in one way, how could I do other than marvel and be seized with admiration, when the coach read out Oersted's Interpretation, proving that the Law was miserably couched, and could be expounded in three or four different ways, all contradicting one another! But this Oersted very often did prove in an irrefutable manner.

In my lack of receptivity for legal details, and my want of interest in Positive Law, I flung myself with all the greater fervour into the study of what in olden times was called Natural Law, and plunged again and again into the study of Legal Philosophy.

XIV.

About the same time as my legal studies were thus beginning, I planned out a study of Philosophy and Aesthetics on a large scale as well. My day was systematically filled up from early morning till late at night, and there was time for everything, for ancient and modern languages, for law lessons with the coach, for the lectures in philosophy which Professors H. Bröchner and R. Nielsen were holding for more advanced students, and for independent reading of a literary, scientific and historic description.