Part 40

On July 5th I saw John Stuart Mill for the first time. He had arrived in Paris the night before, passing through from Avignon, and paid a visit to me, unannounced, in my room in the Rue Mazarine; he stayed two hours and won my affections completely. I was a little ashamed to receive so great a man in so poor a place, but more proud of his thinking it worth his while to make my acquaintance. None of the French savants had ever had an opportunity of conversing with him; a few days before, Renan had lamented to me that he had never seen him. As Mill had no personal acquaintances in Paris, I was the only person he called upon.

To talk to him was a new experience. The first characteristic that struck me was that whereas the French writers were all assertive, he listened attentively to counter-arguments; it was only when his attitude in the woman question was broached that he would not brook contradiction and overwhelmed his adversaries with contempt.

At that time Mill was without any doubt, among Europe's distinguished men, the greatest admirer of French history and French intellectual life to be found outside of France; but he was of quite a different type from the French, even from those I esteemed most highly. The latter were comprehensive-minded men, bold and weighty, like Taine, or cold and agile like Renan, but they were men of intellect and thought, only having no connection with the practical side of life. They were not adapted to personal action, felt no inclination to direct interference.

Mill was different. Although he was more of a thinker than any of them, his boldness was not of the merely theoretic kind. He wished to interfere and re-model. None of those Frenchmen lacked firmness; if, from any consideration, they modified their utterances somewhat, their fundamental views, at any rate, were formed independently; but their firmness lay in defence, not in attack; they wished neither to rebuke nor to instigate; their place was the lecturer's platform, rather than the tribune. Mill's firmness was of another kind, hard as steel; both in character and expression he was relentless, and he went to work aggressively. He was armed, not with a cuirass, but a glaive.

Thus in him I met, for the first time in my life, a figure who was the incarnation of the ideal I had drawn for myself of the great man. This ideal had two sides; talent and character: great capacities and inflexibility. The men of great reputation whom I had met hitherto, artists and scientists, were certainly men richly endowed with talents; but I had never hitherto encountered a personality combining talents with gifts of character. Shortly before leaving home, I had concluded the preface to a collection of criticisms with these words: "My watchword has been: As flexible as possible, when it is a question of understanding, as inflexible as possible, when it is a question of speaking," and I had regarded this watchword as more than the motto of a little literary criticism. Now I had met a grand inflexibility of ideas in human form, and was impressed for my whole life long.

Unadapted though I was by nature to practical politics, or in fact to any activity save that of ideas, I was far from regarding myself as mere material for a scholar, an entertaining author, a literary historian, or the like. I thought myself naturally fitted to be a man of action. But the men of action I had hitherto met had repelled me by their lack of a leading principle. The so-called practical men at home, lawyers and parliamentarians, were not men who had made themselves masters of any fund of new thoughts that they wished to reduce to practical effect; they were dexterous people, well-informed of conditions at their elbow, not thinkers, and they only placed an immediate goal in front of themselves. In Mill I learnt at last to know a man in whom the power of action, disturbance, and accomplishment were devoted to the service of modern sociological thought.

He was then sixty-four years old, but his skin was as fresh and clear as a child's, his deep blue eyes young. He stammered a little, and nervous twitches frequently shot over his face; but there was a sublime nobility about him.

To prolong the conversation, I offered to accompany him to the Windsor Hotel, where he was staying, and we walked the distance. As I really had intended to go over to England at about that time, Mill proposed my crossing with him. I refused, being afraid of abusing his kindness, but was invited to visit him frequently when I was in England, which I did not fail to do. A few days afterwards I was in London.

XVII.

My French acquaintances all said the same thing, when I told them I wanted to go over to England: "What on earth do you want there?" Though only a few hours' journey from England, they had never felt the least curiosity to see the country. "And London! It was said to be a very dull city; it was certainly not worth putting one's self out to go there." Or else it was: "If you are going to London, be careful! London is full of thieves and rascals; look well to your pockets!"

Only a few days later, the Parisians were shaken out of their calm, without, however, being shaken out of their self-satisfaction. The Duc de Grammont's speech on the 6th of July, which amounted to the statement that France was not going to stand any Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain, made the people fancy themselves deeply offended by the King of Prussia, and a current of martial exasperation ran through the irritable and misled people, who for four years had felt themselves humiliated by Prussia's strong position. All said and believed that in a week there would be war, and on both sides everything was so ordered that there might be. There was still hope that common sense might get the better of warlike madness in the French Government; but this much was clear, there was going to be a sudden downfall of everything.

Between Dover and Calais the waves beat over the ship. From Dover, the train went at a speed of sixty miles an hour, and made one think him a great man who invented the locomotive, as great as Aristotle and Plato together. It seemed to me that John Stuart Mill was that kind of man. He opened, not roads, but railroads; his books were like iron rails, unadorned, but useful, leading to their goal. And what will there was in the English locomotive that drew our train,--like the driving instinct of England's character!

Two things struck me on my journey across, a type of mechanical Protestant religiosity which was new to me, and the knowledge of the two languages along the coasts. A pleasant English doctor with whom I got into conversation sat reading steadily in a little Gospel of St. John that he carried with him, yawning as he read. The seamen on the ship and the coast dwellers both in England and France spoke English and French with about equal ease. It is probably the same in all border countries, but it occurred to me that what came about here quite naturally will in time be a possibility all over the world, namely, the mastery of a second and common language, in addition to a people's own.

I drove into London through a sea of houses. When I had engaged a room, changed my clothes, and written a letter that I wanted to send off at once, the eighteen-year-old girl who waited on me informed me that no letters were accepted on Sundays. As I had some little difficulty in making out what she said, I supposed she had misunderstood my question and thought I wanted to speak to the post-official. For I could not help laughing at the idea that even the letterboxes had to enjoy their Sabbath rest. But I found she was right. At the post-office, even the letter-box was shut, as it was Sunday; I was obliged to put my letter in a pillar-box in the street.

In Paris the Summer heat had been oppressive. In London, to my surprise, the weather was fresh and cool, the air as light as it is in Denmark in Autumn. My first visit was to the Greek and Assyrian collections in the British Museum. In the Kensington Museum and the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, I added to my knowledge of Michael Angelo, to whom I felt drawn by a mighty affection. The admiration for his art which was to endure undiminished all my life was even then profound. I early felt that although Michael Angelo had his human weaknesses and limitations, intellectually and as an artist he is one of the five or six elect the world has produced, and scarcely any other great man has made such an impression on my inner life as he.

In the British Museum I was accosted by a young Dane with whom I had sometimes ridden out in the days of my riding lessons; this was Carl Bech, now a landed proprietor, and in his company I saw many of the sights of London and its environs. He knew more English than I, and could find his way anywhere. That the English are rigid in their conventions, he learnt one day to his discomfort; he had put on a pair of white trousers, and as this was opposed to the usual precedent and displeased, we were stared at by every man, woman and child we met, as if the young man had gone out in his underclothing. I had a similar experience one day as I was walking about the National Gallery with a young German lady whose acquaintance I had made. An Englishwoman stopped her in one of the rooms to ask:

"Was it you who gave up a check parasol downstairs?" and receiving an answer in the affirmative, she burst out laughing in her face and went off.

On July 16th came the great daily-expected news. War was declared, and in face of this astounding fact and all the possibilities it presented, people were struck dumb. The effect it had upon me personally was that I made up my mind to return as soon as possible to France, to watch the movement there. In London, where Napoleon III. was hated, and in a measure despised, France was included in the aversion felt for him. Everywhere, when I was asked on which side my sympathies were, they broke in at once: "We are all for Prussia."

XVIII.

As often as I could, I took the train to Blackheath to visit John Stuart Mill. He was good and great, and I felt myself exceedingly attracted by his greatness. There were fundamental features of his thought and mode of feeling that coincided with inclinations of my own; for instance, the Utilitarian theory, as founded by Bentham and his father and developed by him. I had written in 1868: "What we crave is no longer to flee from society and reality with our thoughts and desires. On the contrary, we wish to put our ideas into practice in society and life. That we may not become a nation of poetasters, we will simply strive towards actuality, the definite goal of Utility, which the past generation mocked at. Who would not be glad to be even so little useful?"

Thus I found myself mentally in a direction that led me towards Mill, and through many years' study of Comte and Littré, through an acquaintance with Mill's correspondence with Comte, I was prepared for philosophical conversations concerning the fundamental thoughts of empiric philosophy as opposed to speculative philosophy, conversations which, on Mill's part, tended to represent my entire University philosophical education at Copenhagen as valueless and wrong.

But what drew me the most strongly to Mill was not similarity of thought, but the feeling of an opposed relationship. All my life I had been afraid of going further in a direction towards which I inclined. I had always had a passionate desire to perfect my nature--to make good my defects. Julius Lange was so much to me because he was so unlike me. Now I endeavoured to understand Mill's nature and make it my own, because it was foreign to mine. By so doing I was only obeying an inner voice that perpetually urged me. When others about me had plunged into a subject, a language, a period, they continued to wrestle with it to all eternity, made the thing their speciality. That I had a horror of. I knew French well; but for fear of losing myself in French literature, which I could easily illustrate, I was always wrestling with English or German, which presented greater difficulties to me, but made it impossible for me to grow narrow. I had the advantage over the European reading world that I knew the Northern languages, but nothing was further from my thoughts than to limit myself to opening up Northern literature to Europe. Thus it came about that when the time in my life arrived that I felt compelled to settle outside Denmark I chose for my place of residence Berlin, the city with which I had fewest points in common, and where I could consequently learn most and develop myself without one-sidedness.

Mill's verbally expressed conviction that empiric philosophy was the only true philosophy, made a stronger impression upon me than any assertion of the kind that I had met with in printed books. The results of empiric philosophy seemed to me much more firmly based than those of the newer German philosophy. At variance with my teachers, I had come to see that Hume had been right rather than Kant. But I could not conform to the principle of empiric philosophy. After all, our knowledge is not ultimately based merely on experience, but on that which, prior to experience, alone renders experience possible. Otherwise not even the propositions of Mathematics can be universally applicable. In spite of my admiration for Mill's philosophical works, I was obliged to hold to the rationalistic theory of cognition; Mill obstinately held to the empiric. "Is not a reconciliation between the two possible?" I said. "I think that one must choose between the theories," replied Mill. I did not then know Herbert Spencer's profoundly thoughtful reconciliation of the teachings of the two opposing schools. He certainly maintains, as does the English school, that all our ideas have their root in experience, but he urges at the same time, with the Germans, that there are innate ideas. The conscious life of the individual, that cannot be understood from the experience of the individual, becomes explicable from the inherited experience of the race. Even the intellectual form which is the condition of the individual's apprehension is gradually made up out of the experience of the race, and consequently innate without for that reason being independent of foregoing experiences. But I determined at once, incited thereto by conversations with Mill, to study, not only his own works, but the writings of James Mill, Bain, and Herbert Spencer; I would endeavour to find out how much truth they contained, and introduce this truth into Denmark.

I was very much surprised when Mill informed me that he had not read a line of Hegel, either in the original or in translation, and regarded the entire Hegelian philosophy as sterile and empty sophistry. I mentally confronted this with the opinion of the man at the Copenhagen University who knew the history of philosophy best, my teacher, Hans Bröchner, who knew, so to speak, nothing of contemporary English and French philosophy, and did not think them worth studying. I came to the conclusion that here was a task for one who understood the thinkers of the two directions, who did not mutually understand one another.

I thought that in philosophy, too, I knew what I wanted, and saw a road open in front of me.

However, I never travelled it. The gift for abstract philosophical thought which I had possessed as a youth was never developed, but much like the tendency to verse-making which manifested itself even earlier, superseded by the historio-critical capacity, which grew strong in me. At that time I believed in my natural bent for philosophy, and did so even in July, 1872, when I sketched out and began a large book: "The Association of Ideas, conceived and put forward as the fundamental principle of human knowledge," but the book was never completed. The capacity for abstraction was too weak in me.

Still, if the capacity had no independent development, it had a subservient effect on all my criticism, and the conversations with Mill had a fertilising and helpful influence on my subsequent intellectual life.

XIX.