Part 23

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

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

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

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

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

XXIV.

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

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

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

XXV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It produced an extremely painful impression upon me that not only the Danish Chargé d'Affaires, but apparently several of these fine gentlemen, had determined on the additional amusement of making me drunk. Everybody at table vied one with the other to drink my health, and they informed me that etiquette demanded I should each time empty my glass to the bottom; the contrary would be a breach of good form. As I very quickly saw through their intention, I escaped from the difficulty by asking the waiter to bring me a very small glass. By emptying this I could, without my manners being affected, hold my own against them all.

But,--almost for the first time in my life,--when the company rose from table I felt that I had been in exceedingly bad company, and a disgust for the nominally highest circles, who were so little capable of acting in accordance with the reputation they enjoyed, and the polish imputed to them, remained with me for many years to come.

FIRST LONG SOJOURN ABROAD

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

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

II.

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

III.

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