Part 28

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 11s. 3d.), 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 I7l. 12s. 6d. 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 (22s. 6d.) per sheet of sixteen pages. Very careful management was necessary.

IX.