Part 31

When did God become Man? When Nature reached the point in its development at which the first man made his appearance; when Nature became man, then God did.

Women say of the beloved one: "A bouquet he brings smells better than one another brings."

You are weak, dear one, God help you! And you help! and I help!

These thoughts have wrought a man of me, have finally wrought me to a man.

I procured all that was accessible to me in modern French and English literature on the woman subject.

In the year 1869 my thoughts on the subordinate position of women in society began to assume shape, and I attempted a connected record of them. I adopted as my starting point Sören Kierkegaard's altogether antiquated conception of woman and contested it at every point. But all that I had planned and drawn up was cast aside when in 1869 John Stuart Mill's book on the subject fell into my hands. I felt Mill's superiority to be so immense and regarded his book as so epoch-making that I necessarily had to reject my own draft and restrict myself to the translation and introduction of what he had said. In November, 1869, I published Mill's book in Danish and in this manner introduced the modern woman's movement into Denmark.

The translation was of this advantage to me that it brought me first into epistolary communication, and later into personal contact with one of the greatest men of the time.

XVI.

There was one of the political figures of the time whom I often met during these years. This was the man most beloved of the previous generation, whose star had certainly declined since the war, but whose name was still one to conjure with, Orla Lehmann.

I had made his acquaintance when I was little more than a boy, in a very curious way.

In the year 1865 I had given a few lectures in C.N. David's house, on Runeberg, whom I had glorified exceedingly, and as the David and Lehmann houses, despite the political differences between them, were closely related one to the other, and intimately connected, Orla Lehmann had heard these lectures very warmly spoken of. At that time he had just founded a People's Society as a counterpoise to the supremely conservative Society of August, and, looking out for lecturers for it, hit upon the twenty-three-year-old speaker as upon a possibility.

I was then living in a little cupboard of a room on the third floor in Crystal Street, and over my room was one, in the attic, inhabited by my seventeen-year-old brother, who had not yet matriculated.

Orla Lehmann, who had been told that the person he was seeking lived high up, rapidly mounted the four storeys, and knocked, a little out of breath, at the schoolboy's door. When the door opened, he walked in, and said, still standing:

"You are Brandes? I am Lehmann." Without heeding the surprise he read in the young fellow's face, he went on:

"I have come to ask you to give a lecture to the People's Society in the Casino's big room."

As the addressee looked about to speak, he continued, drowning every objection, "I know what you are going to say. That you are too young. Youth is written in your face. But there is no question of seniority here. I am accustomed to accomplish what I determine upon, and I shall take no notice of objections. I know that you are able to give lectures, you have recently given proof of it."

At last there was a minute's pause, permitting the younger one to interpose:

"But you are making a mistake, it is not I you mean. It must be my elder brother."

"Oh! very likely. Where does your brother live?"

"Just underneath."

A minute later there was a knock at the third-storey door beneath; it was opened, and without even stopping to sit down, the visitor began:

"You are Brandes? I am Lehmann. You recently gave some lectures on Runeberg. Will you kindly repeat one of them before the People's Society in the Casino's big room?"

"Won't you sit down? I thank you for your offer. But my lecture was not good enough to be repeated before so large a gathering. I do not know enough about Runeberg's life, and my voice, moreover, will not carry. I should not dare, at my age, to speak in so large a room."

"I expected you to reply that you are too young. Your youth is written in your face. But there is no question of seniority about it. I am accustomed to carry through anything that I have determined upon, and I take no notice of objections. What you do not know about Runeberg's life, you can read up in a literary history. And if you can give a successful lecture to a private audience, you can give one in a theatre hall. I am interested in you, I am depending on you, I take your promise with me. Good-bye!"

This so-called promise became a regular nightmare to me, young and absolutely untried as I was. It did not even occur to me to work up and improve my lecture on Runeberg, for the very thought of appearing before a large audience alarmed me and was utterly intolerable to me. During the whole of my first stay in Paris I was so tormented by the consent that Orla Lehmann had extorted from me, that it was a shadow over my pleasure. I would go happy to bed and wake up in the middle of the night with the terror of a debtor over something far off, but surely threatening, upon me, seek in my memory for what it was that was troubling me, and find that this far-off, threatening thing was my promise to Lehmann. It was only after my return home that I summoned up courage to write to him, pleading my youth and unfitness, and begging to be released from the honourable but distasteful duty. Orla Lehmann, in the meantime, had in all probability not bestowed a thought on the whole matter and long since forgotten all about it.

In any case he never referred to the subject again in after years, when we frequently met.

Among Bröchner's private pupils was a young student. Kristian Möller, by name, who devoted himself exclusively to philosophy, and of whom Bröchner was particularly fond. He had an unusually keen intelligence, inclined to critical and disintegrating research. His abilities were very promising, inasmuch as it seemed that he might be able to establish destructive verdicts upon much that was confused, or self-contradicting, but nevertheless respected; in other respects he had a strangely infertile brain. He had no sudden inspirations, no imagination. It could not be expected that he would ever bring forward any specially new thoughts, only that he would penetrate confusion, think out errors to the bottom, and, with the years, carry out a process of thorough cleansing.

But before he had accomplished any independent work his lungs became affected. It was not at once perceived how serious the affection was, and Orla Lehmann, who, with the large-mindedness and open-handedness of a patriot, had taken him up, as well as sundry other young men who promised well or were merely poor, not only invited him to his weekly dinner-parties at Frederiksberg, but sent him to Upsala, that he might study Swedish philosophy there. Möller himself was much inclined to study Boströmianism and write a criticism of this philosophy, which was at that time predominant in Sweden.