Part 15

One of the masters who had taught me at school, a very erudite philologian, now Dr. Oscar Siesbye, offered me gratuitous instruction, and with his help several of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, various things of Plato's, and comedies by Plautus and Terence were carefully studied.

Frederik Nutzhorn read the Edda and the Niebelungenlied with me in the originals; with Jens Paludan-Müller I went through the New Testament in Greek, and with Julius Lange, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Horace and Ovid, and a little of Aristotle and Theocritus. Catullus, Martial and Caesar I read for myself.

But I did not find any positive inspiration in my studies until I approached my nineteenth year. In philosophy I had hitherto mastered only a few books by Sören Kierkegaard. But now I began a conscientious study of Heiberg's philosophical writings and honestly endeavoured to make myself familiar with his speculative logic. As Heiberg's Prose Writings came out, in the 1861 edition, they were studied with extreme care. Heiberg's death in 1860 was a great grief to me; as a thinker I had loved and revered him. The clearness of form and the internal obscurity of his adaptation of Hegel's Teachings, gave one a certain artistic satisfaction, at the same time that it provoked an effort really to understand.

But in the nature of things, Heiberg's philosophical life-work could not to a student be other than an admission into Hegel's train of thought, and an introduction to the master's own works. I was not aware that by 1860 Europe had long passed his works by in favour of more modern thinking. With a passionate desire to reach a comprehension of the truth, I grappled with the System, began with the Encyclopaedia, read the three volumes of Aesthetics, The Philosophy of Law, the Philosophy of History, the Phenomenology of the Mind, then the Philosophy of Law again, and finally the Logic, the Natural Philosophy and the Philosophy of the Mind in a veritable intoxication of comprehension and delight. One day, when a young girl towards whom I felt attracted had asked me to go and say good-bye to her before her departure, I forgot the time, her journey, and my promise to her, over my Hegel. As I walked up and down my room I chanced to pull my watch out of my pocket, and realised that I had missed my appointment and that the girl must have started long ago.

Hegel's Philosophy of Law had a charm for me as a legal student, partly on account of the superiority with which the substantial quality of Hegel's mind is there presented, and partly on account of the challenge in the attitude of the book to accepted opinions and expressions, "morality" here being almost the only thing Hegel objects to.

But it was the book on Aesthetics that charmed me most of all. It was easy to understand, and yet weighty, superabundantly rich.

Again and again while reading Hegel's works I felt carried away with delight at the new world of thought opening out before me. And when anything that for a long time had been incomprehensible to me, at last after tenacious reflection became clear, I felt what I myself called "an unspeakable bliss." Hegel's system of thought, anticipatory of experience, his German style, overburdened with arbitrarily constructed technical words from the year 1810, which one might think would daunt a young student of another country and another age, only meant to me difficulties which it was a pleasure to overcome. Sometimes it was not Hegelianism itself that seemed the main thing. The main thing was that I was learning to know a world-embracing mind; I was being initiated into an attempt to comprehend the universe which was half wisdom and half poetry; I was obtaining an insight into a method which, if scientifically unsatisfying, and on that ground already abandoned by investigators, was fruitful and based upon a clever, ingenuous, highly intellectual conception of the essence of truth; I felt myself put to school to a great intellectual leader, and in this school I learnt to think.

I might, it is true, have received my initiation in a school built up on more modern foundations; it is true that I should have saved much time, been spared many detours, and have reached my goal more directly had I been introduced to an empirical philosophy, or if Fate had placed me in a school in which historical sources were examined more critically, but not less intelligently, and in which respect for individuality was greater. But such as the school was, I derived from it all the benefit it could afford to my ego, and I perceived with delight that my intellectual progress was being much accelerated. Consequently it did not specially take from my feeling of having attained a measure of scientific insight, when I learnt--what I had not known at first--that my teachers, Hans Bröchner, as well as Rasmus Nielsen, were agreed not to remain satisfied with the conclusions of the German philosopher, had "got beyond Hegel." At the altitude to which the study of philosophy had now lifted me, I saw that the questions with which I had approached Science were incorrectly formulated, and they fell away of themselves, even without being answered. Words that had filled men's minds for thousands of years, God, Infinity, Thought, Nature and Mind, Freedom and Purpose, all these words acquired another and a deeper meaning, were stamped with a new character, acquired a new value, and the depurated ideas which they now expressed opposed each other, and combined with each other, until the universe was seen pierced by a plexus of thoughts, and resting calmly within it.

Viewed from these heights, the petty and the every-day matters which occupied the human herd seemed so contemptible. Of what account, for instance, was the wrangling in the Senate and the Parliament of a little country like Denmark compared with Hegel's vision of the mighty march, inevitable and determined by spiritual laws, of the idea of Freedom, through the world's History! And of what account was the daily gossip of the newspapers, compared with the possibility now thrown open of a life of eternal ideals, lived in and for them!

XV.

I had an even deeper perception of my initiation when I went back from Hegel to Spinoza and, filled with awe and enthusiasm, read the Ethica for the first time. Here I stood at the source of modern pantheistic Philosophy. Here Philosophy was even more distinctly Religion, since it took Religion's place. Though the method applied was very artificial, purely mathematical, at least Philosophy had here the attraction of a more original type of mind, the effect being much the same as that produced by primitive painting, compared with a more developed stage. His very expression, God or Nature, had a fascinating mysticism about it. The chapter in the book which is devoted to the Natural History of passions, surprised and enriched one by its simple, but profound, explanation of the conditions of the human soul. And although his fight against Superstition's views of life is conducted with a keenness that scouts discussion, whereas in modern Philosophy the contention is merely implied, it seemed as though his thoughts travelled along less stormy paths.

In Hegel, it had been exclusively the comprehensiveness of the thoughts and the mode of the thought's procedure that held my attention. With Spinoza it was different. It was his personality that attracted, the great man in him, one of the greatest that History has known. With him a new type had made its entrance into the world's History; he was the calm thinker, looking down from above on this earthly life, reminding one, by the purity and strength of his character, of Jesus, but a contrast to Jesus, inasmuch as he was a worshipper of Nature and Necessity, and a Pantheist. His teaching was the basis of the faith of the new age. He was a Saint and a Heathen, seditious and pious, at the same time.

XVI.

Still, while I was in this way making a purely mental endeavour to penetrate into as many intellectual domains as I could, and to become master of one subject after another, I was very far from being at peace with regard to my intellectual acquisitions, or from feeling myself in incontestable possession of them. While I was satisfying my desire for insight or knowledge and, by glimpses, felt my supremest happiness in the delight of comprehension, an ever more violent struggle was going on in my emotions.

As my being grew and developed within me and I slowly emerged from the double state of which I had been conscious, in other words, the more I became one and individual and strove to be honest and true, the less I felt myself to be a mere individual, the more I realised that I was bound up with humanity, one link in the chain, one organ belonging to the Universe. The philosophical Pantheism I was absorbed by, itself worked counter to the idea of individualism inherent in me, taught me and presented to me the union of all beings in Nature the All-Divine. But it was not from Pantheism that the crisis of my spiritual life proceeded; it was from the fountains of emotion which now shot up and filled my soul with their steady flow. A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilised the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion.

This gradually absorbed me till I could hardly bear the thought of the suffering, the poor, the oppressed, the victims of Injustice. I always saw them in my mind's eye, and it seemed to be my duty to work for them, and to be disgraceful of me to enjoy the good things of life while so many were being starved and tortured. Often as I walked along the streets at night I brooded over these ideas till I knew nothing of what was passing around me, but only felt how all the forces of my brain drew me towards those who suffered.

There were warm-hearted and benevolent men among my near relatives. The man whom my mother's younger sister had married had his heart in the right place, so much indeed that he no sooner saw or heard of distress than his hand was in his pocket, although he had little from which to give. My father's brother was a genuinely philanthropic man, who founded one beneficent institution or society after the other, had an unusual power of inducing his well-to-do fellow-townsmen to carry his schemes through, and in the elaboration of them showed a perception and practical sense that almost amounted to genius; this was the more surprising since his intelligence was not otherwise remarkable for its keenness and his reasoning methods were confused. But what I felt was quite different. My feelings were not so easily roused as those of the first-mentioned; I was not so good-natured or so quick to act as he. Neither did they resemble those of my other uncle, who merely represented compassion for those unfortunately situated, but was without the least vestige of rebellious feeling against the conditions or the people responsible for the misery; my uncle was always content with life as it was, saw the hand of a loving Providence everywhere and was fully and firmly convinced that he himself was led and helped by this same Providence, which specially watched over the launching of his projects for the welfare of mankind. No, my feeling was of quite another kind. Nothing was farther removed from me than this sometimes quite childish optimism. It was not enough for me to advertise the sufferings of a few individuals and, when possible, alleviate them; I sought the causes of them in brutality and injustice. Neither could I recognise the finger of a Universal Ruler in a confusion of coincidences, conversations, newspaper articles, and advice by prudent men, the outcome of all which was the founding of a society for seamstresses or the erection of a hospital to counteract the misery that the Controlling Power had Itself occasioned. I was a child no longer, and in that sense never had been childish. But my heart bled none the less with sympathy for society's unfortunates. I did not as yet perceive the necessity of that selfishness which is self-assertion, and I felt oppressed and tormented by all that I, in my comparatively advantageous position as a non-proletarian, enjoyed, while many others did not.

Then another mood, with other promptings, asserted itself. I felt an impulse to step forward as a preacher to the world around me, to the thoughtless and the hardhearted. Under the influence of strong emotion I wrote an edifying discourse, The Profitable Fear. I began to regard it as my duty, so soon as I was fitted for it, to go out into the town and preach at every street-corner, regardless of whether a lay preacher, like myself, should encounter indifference or harvest scorn.

This course attracted me because it presented itself to me under the guise of the most difficult thing, and, with the perversity of youth, I thought difficulty the only criterion of duty. I only needed to hit upon something that seemed to me to be the right thing and then say to myself: "You dare not do it!" for all the youthful strength and daring that was in me, all my deeper feelings of honour and of pride, all my love of grappling with the apparently insurmountable to unite, and in face of this You dare not, satisfy myself that I did dare.

As provisionally, self-abnegation, humility, and asceticism seemed to me to be the most difficult things, for a time my whole spiritual life was concentrated into an endeavour to attain them. Just at this time--I was nineteen--my family was in a rather difficult pecuniary position, and I, quite a poor student, was cast upon my own resources. I had consequently not much of this world's goods to renounce. From a comfortable residence in Crown Prince's Street, my parents had moved to a more modest flat in the exceedingly unaristocratic Salmon Street, where I had an attic of limited dimensions with outlook over roofs by day and a view of the stars by night. Quiet the nights were not, inasmuch as the neighbouring houses re-echoed with screams and shrieks from poor women, whom their late-returning husbands or lovers thrashed in their cups. But never had I felt myself so raised, so exhilarated, so blissfully happy, as in that room. My days slipped by in ecstasy; I felt myself consecrated a combatant in the service of the Highest. I used to test my body, in order to get it wholly under my control, ate as little as possible, slept as little as possible, lay many a night outside my bed on the bare floor, gradually to make myself as hardy as I required to be. I tried to crush the youthful sensuality that was awakening in me, and by degrees acquired complete mastery over myself, so that I could be what I wished to be, a strong and willing instrument in the fight for the victory of Truth. And I plunged afresh into study with a passion and a delight that prevented my perceiving any lack, but month after month carried me along, increasing in knowledge and in mental power, growing from day to day.

XVII.

This frame of mind, however, was crossed by another. The religious transformation in my mind could not remain clear and unmuddied, placed as I was in a society furrowed through and through by different religious currents, issued as I was from the European races that for thousands of years had been ploughed by religious ideas. All the atavism, all the spectral repetition of the thoughts and ideas of the past that can lie dormant in the mind of the individual, leaped to the reinforcement of the harrowing religious impressions which came to me from without.

It was not the attitude of my friends that impressed me. All my more intimate friends were orthodox Christians, but the attempts which various ones, amongst them Julius Lange, and Jens Paludan-Müller, had made to convert me had glanced off from my much more advanced thought without making any impression. I was made of much harder metal than they, and their attempts to alter my way of thinking did not penetrate beyond my hide. To set my mind in vibration, there was needed a brain that I felt superior to my own; and I did not find it in them. I found it in the philosophical and religious writings of Sören Kierkegaard, in such works, for instance, as Sickness unto Death.

The struggle within me began, faintly, as I approached my nineteenth year. My point of departure was this: one thing seemed to me requisite, to live in and for The Idea, as the expression for the highest at that time was. All that rose up inimical to The Idea or Ideal merited to be lashed with scorn or felled with indignation. And one day I penned this outburst: "Heine wept over Don Quixote. Yes, he was right. I could weep tears of blood when I think of the book." But the first thing needed was to acquire a clear conception of what must be understood by the Ideal. Heiberg had regarded the uneducated as those devoid of ideals. But I was quite sure myself that education afforded no criterion. And I could find no other criterion of devotion to the Ideal than a willingness to make sacrifices. If, I said, I prove myself less self-sacrificing than any one of the wretches I am fighting, I shall myself incur well-merited scorn. But if self-sacrifice were the criterion, then Jesus, according to the teachings of tradition, was the Ideal, for who as self-sacrificing as He?

This was an inclined plane leading to the Christian spiritual life, and a year later, when I was nearly twenty, I had proceeded so far on this plane that I felt myself in all essentials in agreement with the Christian mode of feeling, inasmuch as my life was ascetic, and my searching, striving, incessantly working mind, not only found repose, but rapture, in prayer, and was elated and fired at the idea of being protected and helped by "God."

But just as I was about to complete my twentieth year, the storm broke out over again, and during the whole of the ensuing six months raged with unintermittent violence. Was I, at this stage of my development, a Christian or not? And if not, was it my duty to become a Christian?

The first thought that arose was this: It is a great effort, a constant effort, sometimes a minutely recurring effort, to attain moral mastery over one's self, and though this certainly need not bring with it a feeling of self-satisfaction, much less ought to do so, it does bring with it a recognition of the value of this self-mastery. How strange, then, that Christianity, which commands its attainment, at the same time declares it to be a matter of indifference to the revealed God whether a man has lived morally or not, since Faith or lack of Faith is the one condition upon which so-called Salvation depends!

The next thought was this: It is only in the writings of Kierkegaard, in his teachings concerning paradox, that Christianity appears so definite that it cannot be confused with any other spiritual trend whatever. But when one has to make one's choice between Pantheism and Christianity, then the question arises, Are Kierkegaard's teachings really historic Christianity, and not rather a rational adaptation? And this question must be answered in the negative, since it is possible to assimilate it without touching upon the question of the revelation of the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove, to the Voice from the clouds, and the whole string of miracles and dogmas.