Part 34

The year after I was astonished by inflammatory outbursts on the part of the clergy. One day in 1868 the much-respected Pastor Hohlenberg walked into my friend Benny Spang's house, reprimanded her severely for receiving such an undoubted heretic and heathen under her roof, and demanded that she should break off all association with me. As she refused to do so and turned a deaf ear to his arguments, losing all self-control, he flung his felt hat on the floor, continued to rage and rail against me, and, no result coming of it, dashed at last, in a towering passion, out through the door, which he slammed behind him. There was a farcical ending to the scene, since he was obliged to ring at the door again for his hat, which, in his exasperation, he had forgotten. This was a kind of private prologue to the ecclesiastical drama which from the year 1871 upwards was enacted in most of the pulpits of the country. Only the parsons instead of flinging their hats upon the floor, beat their hands against the pulpit.

But what surprised me, a literary beginner, still more, was the gift I discovered in myself of hypnotising, by my mere existence, an ever-increasing number of my contemporaries till they became as though possessed by a hatred which lasted, sometimes a number of years, sometimes a whole life long, and was the essential determining factor in their careers and actions. By degrees, in this negative manner, I succeeded in engaging the attentions of more than a score of persons. For the time being, I encountered the phenomenon in the person of one solitary genius-mad individual. For a failure of a poet and philosopher, with whom I had nothing to do, and who did not interest me in the least, I became the one enemy it was his business to attack.

Rudolf Schmidt, who was a passionate admirer of Rasmus Nielsen, in whose examination lectures he coached freshmen, was enraged beyond measure by the objections, perfectly respectful, for that matter, in form, which I had raised against one of the main points in Nielsen's philosophy. In 1866 he published a pamphlet on the subject; in 1867 a second, which, so possessed was he by his fury against his opponent, he signed with the latter's own initials, Gb. And from this time forth, for at least a generation, it became this wretch's task in life to persecute me under every possible pseudonym, and when his own powers were not sufficient, to get up conspiracies against me. In particular, he did all he could against me in Germany.

Meanwhile, he started a magazine in order to bring before the public himself and the ideas he was more immediately serving, viz.: those of R. Nielsen; and since this latter had of late drawn very much nearer to the Grundtvigian way of thinking, partly also those of Grundtvig. The magazine had three editors, amongst them R. Nielsen himself, and when one of them, who was the critic of the Fatherland, suddenly left the country, Björnstjerne Björnson took his place. The three names, R. Nielsen, B. Björnson, and Rudolph Schmidt, formed a trinity whose supremacy did not augur well for the success of a beginner in the paths of literature, who had attacked the thinker among them for ideal reasons, and who had been the object of violent attacks from the two others. The magazine Idea and Reality, was, as might be expected, sufficiently unfavourable to my cause.

The sudden disappearance of the critic of The Fatherland from the literary arena was, under the conditions of the time, an event. He had no little talent, attracted by ideas and fancies that were sometimes very telling, repelled by mannerisms and a curious, far-fetched style, laid chief emphasis, in the spirit of the most modern Danish philosophy, on the will, and always defended ethical standpoints. From the time of Björnson's first appearance he had attached himself so enthusiastically and inviolably to him that by the general public he was almost regarded as Björnson's herald. At every opportunity he emphatically laid down Björnson's importance and as a set-off fell upon those who might be supposed to be his rivals. Ibsen, in particular, received severe handling. His departure was thus a very hard blow for Björnson, but for that matter, was also felt as a painful loss by those he opposed.

XIX.

Not long after this departure, and immediately after the publication of my long article on Goldschmidt, I received one day, to my surprise, a letter of eight closely written pages from Björnstjerne Björnson, dated April 15th, 1869.

What had called it forth was my remark, in that article, that Björnson, like Goldschmidt, sometimes, when talent failed, pretended to have attained the highest, pretended that obscurity was the equivalent of profundity. When writing this, I was thinking of the obscure final speech about God in Heaven in Björnson's Mary Stuart, which I still regard as quite vague, pretentious though it be as it stands there; however, it was an exaggeration to generalise the grievance, as I had done, and Björnson was right to reply. He considered that I had accused him of insincerity, though in this he was wrong; but for that matter, with hot-tempered eloquence, he also denied my real contention. His letter began:

Although I seldom read your writings, so that possibly I risk speaking of something you have elsewhere developed more clearly, and thus making a mistake, I nevertheless wish to make a determined protest against its being called a characteristic of mine, in contrast to Oehlenschläger (and Hauch!!), to strain my powers to reach what I myself only perceive unclearly, and then intentionally to state it as though it were clear. I am quite sure that I resemble Oehlenschläger in one thing, namely, that the defects of my book are open to all, and are not glossed over with any sort or kind of lie; anything unclear must for the moment have seemed clear to me, as in his case. My motto has always been: "Be faithful in small things, and God shall make you ruler over great things." And never, no, never, have I snatched after great material in order to seem great, or played with words in order to seem clever, or been silent, in order to appear deep. Never. The examples around me have been appalling to me, and I am sure that they have been so because I have from the very beginning been on my guard against lies. There are passages in every work which will not yield immediately what one impatiently demands of them;--and then I have always waited, never tried; the thing has had to come itself unforced, and it is possible that what I have received has been a deception; but I have believed in it; to me it has been no deception. Before I finally conclude, I always, it is true, go over again what I have written (as in the case of Synnöve, and A Happy Boy, Between the Fights, etc). I wish to have the advantage of a better perception. Thus far, in what I have gone through, I have seen weak places which I can no longer correct. Lies I have never found.

Unfortunately one is often exposed to the danger of being untrue; but it is in moments of surprise and absolute passion, when something happens to one's eye or one's tongue, that one feels is half mad, but when the beast of prey within one, which shrinks at nothing, is the stronger. Untrue in one's beautiful, poetic calm, one's confessional silence, at one's work, I think very few are.

This summing up, which does honour to Björnson and is not only a striking self-verdict, but a valuable contribution to poetic psychology in general, in its indication of the strength of the creative imagination and its possibilities of error, was followed by a co-ordinate attempt at a characterisation and appreciation of Goldschmidt:

You are likewise unjust to Goldschmidt on this point, that I know with certainty. Goldschmidt is of a naïve disposition, susceptible of every noble emotion. It is true that he often stages these in a comic manner, and what you say about that is true; he does the same in private life, but you have not recognised the source of this. In the last instance, it is not a question of what we think, but of what we do. Just as this, on the whole, is an error that you fall persistently into, it is in particular an error here, where, for instance, his two brothers, with the same qualifications and with the same dual nature, have both developed into characters, the one indeed into a remarkable personality. But Goldschmidt began as a corsair captain at seventeen; his courage was the courage behind a pen that he fancied was feared, his happiness that of the flatterer, his dread that of being vapid; and there were many other unfavourable circumstances, for that matter.... He is now striving hard towards what he feels has, during his life, been wasted in his ability, both moral and intellectual qualities, and for my part, I respect this endeavour more than his decisive success within narrow limits.

In this passage the distinction and contrast between contemplative life and actual existence was quite in the Rasmus Nielsen spirit; the use that was made of it here was strange. One would suppose that the example adduced established that similar natural qualifications, similar family and other conditions, in other words, the actual essential conditions of life, were of small importance compared with one's mode of thought, since the brothers could be so different; Björnson wished to establish, hereby, that the mode of life was more important than the mode of thought, although the former must depend on the latter. For the rest, he alluded to Goldschmidt's weak points, even if in somewhat too superior a manner, and without laying stress upon his great artistic importance, with leniency and good-will.

But if, in other things he touched upon, he had an eye for essentials, this failed him sadly when the letter proceeded to a characterisation of the addressee, in which he mixed up true and false in inextricable confusion. Amongst other things, he wrote:

Here, I doubtless touch upon a point that is distinctive of your criticism. It is an absolute beauty worship. With that you can quickly traverse our little literature and benefit no one greatly; for the poet is only benefited by the man who approaches him with affection and from his own standpoint; the other he does not understand, and the public will, likely enough, pass with you through this unravelling of the thousand threads, and believe they are growing; but no man or woman who is sound and good lays down a criticism of this nature without a feeling of emptiness.

I chanced to read one of your travel descriptions which really became a pronouncement upon some of the greatest painters. It was their nature in their works (not their history or their lives so much as their natural dispositions) that you pointed out,--also the influence of their time upon them, but this only in passing; and you compared these painters, one with another. In itself, much of this mode of procedure is correct, but the result is merely racy. A single one of them, seized largely and affectionately, shown in such manner that the different paintings and figures became a description of himself, but were simultaneously the unfolding of a culture, would have been five times as understandable. A contrast can be drawn in when opportunity arises, but that is not the essential task. Yes, this is an illustration of the form of your criticism. It is an everlasting, and often very painful, juxtaposition of things appertaining and contrasting, but just as poetry itself is an absorption in the one thing that it has extracted from the many, so comprehension of it is dependent on the same conditions. The individual work or the individual author whom you have treated of, you have in the same way not brought together, but disintegrated, and the whole has become merely a piquant piece of effectiveness. Hitherto one might have said that it was at least good-natured; but of late there have supervened flippant expressions, paradoxical sentences, crude definitions, a definite contumacy and disgust, which is now and again succeeded by an outburst of delight over the thing that is peculiarly Danish, or peculiarly beautiful. I cannot help thinking of P.L. Möller, as I knew him in Paris.

There are a thousand things between Heaven and Earth that you understand better than I. But for that very reason you can listen to me. It seems to me now as if the one half of your powers were undoing what the other half accomplishes. I, too, am a man with intellectual interests, but I feel no cooperation. Might there not be other tasks that you were more fitted for than that of criticism? I mean, that would be less of a temptation to you, and would build up on your personality, at the same time as you yourself were building? It strikes me that even if you do choose criticism, it should be more strongly in the direction of our educating responsibilities and less as the arranger of technicalities, the spyer out of small things, the dragger together of all and everything which can be brought forward as a witness for or against the author, which is all frightfully welcome in a contemporary critical epidemic in Copenhagen, but, God help me, is nothing and accomplishes nothing.

This part of the letter irritated me intensely, partly by the mentor's tone assumed in it, partly by a summing up of my critical methods which was founded simply and solely on the reading of three or four articles, more especially those on Rubens and Goldschmidt, and which quite missed the point. I was far from feeling that I had been understood, and for that reason warned against extremes; on the contrary, I saw myself only caricatured, without even wit or humour, and could not forget that the man who had sketched this picture of me had done his utmost to injure me. And he compared me with P.L. Möller!

The fact that the conclusion of the letter contained much that was conciliatory and beautiful consequently did not help matters. Björnson wrote:

When you write about the Jews, although I am not in agreement with you, altogether in agreement, you yet seem to me to touch upon a domain where you might have much to offer us, many beautiful prospects to open to us. In the same way, when you interpret Shakespeare (not when you make poetry by the side of him), when you tranquilly expound, I seem to see the beginnings of greater works, in any case of powers which I could imagine essentially contributing to the introduction into our culture of greater breadth of view, greater moral responsibility, more affection.

When I now read these words, I am obliged to transport myself violently back, into the feelings and to the intellectual standpoint that were mine at the time, in order to understand how they could to such a pitch incense me. It was not only that, like all young people of any account, I was irritable, sensitive and proud, and unwilling to be treated as a pupil; but more than that, as the way of youth is, I confused what I knew myself capable of accomplishing with what I had already accomplished; felt myself rich, exuberantly rich, already, and was indignant at perceiving myself deemed still so small.

But the last straw was a sentence which followed:

I should often have liked to talk all this over with you, when last I was in Copenhagen, but I noticed I was so pried after by gossips that I gave it up.

The last time Björnson was in Copenhagen he had written that article against me. Besides, I had been told that some few times he had read my first articles aloud in public in friends' houses, and made fun of their forced and tyro-like wording. And now he wanted me to believe that he had at that time been thinking of visiting me, in order to come to an understanding with me. And worse still, the fear of gossip had restrained him! This hero of will-power so afraid of a little gossip! He might go on as he liked now, I had done with him. He did go on, both cordially and gracefully, but condescendingly, quite incapable of seeing how wounding the manner of his advances was. He wished to make advances to me and yet maintain a humiliating attitude of condescension:

There are not many of us in literature who are in earnest; the few who are ought not to be daunted by the accidental separation that opposed opinions can produce, when there is a large field for mutual understanding and co-operation. I sometimes get violently irate for a moment; if this in lesser men, in whom there really is something base, brings about a lifelong separation, it does not greatly afflict me. But I should be very sorry if it should influence the individuals in whom I feel there are both ability and will. And as far as you are concerned, I have such a strong feeling that you must be standing at a parting of the ways, that, by continuing your path further, you will go astray, that I want to talk to you, and consequently am speaking from my heart to you now. If you do not understand, I am sorry; that is all I can say.

In the Summer I am going to Finmark, and involuntarily, as I write this, the thought occurs to me what a journey it would be for you; away from everything petty and artificial to a scenery which in its magnificent loneliness is without parallel in the world, and where the wealth of birds above us and fish beneath us (whales, and shoals of herrings, cod and capelans often so close together that you can take them up in your hands, or they press against the sides of the boat) are marvel upon marvel, in the light of a Sun that does not set, while human beings up there live quiet and cowed by Nature. If you will come with me, and meet me, say, at Trondhjem, I know that you would not regret it. And then I should get conversation again; here there are not many who hit upon just that which I should like them to. Think about it.

A paragraph relating to Magdalene Thoresen followed. But what is here cited is the essential part of the letter. Had its recipient known Björnson better, he would in this have found a foundation to build upon. But as things were, I altogether overlooked the honestly meant friendliness in it and merely seized upon the no small portion of it that could not do other than wound. My reply, icy, sharp and in the deeper sense of the word, worthless, was a refusal. I did not believe in Björnson, saw in the letter nothing but an attempt to use me as a critic, now that he had lost his former advocate in the Press. The prospect of the journey to the North did not tempt me; in Björnson's eyes it would have been Thor's journey with Loki, and I neither was Loki nor wished to be.

But even had I been capable of rising to a more correct and a fuller estimate of Björnson's character, there was too much dividing us at this time for any real friendship to have been established. Björnson was then still an Orthodox Protestant, and in many ways hampered by his youthful impressions; I myself was still too brusque to be able to adapt myself to so difficult and masterful a personality.