Part 22

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

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

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

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

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

XX.

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

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

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

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

XXI.

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

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

XXII.

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

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

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

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

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

XXIII.

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, it had irrevocably disappeared.

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