Part 9

As the Head was a powerful, stout, handsome, distinguished-looking man with a certain stamp of joviality and innocent good-living about him, these malicious tongues, who led the rest, declared that he only lived for his stomach. In the next place, the old-fashioned punishment of caning, administered by the Head himself in his private room, gave some cause of offence. It was certainly only very lazy and obdurate boys who were thus punished; for others such methods were never even dreamt of. But when they were ordered to appear in his room after school-time, and the Head took them between his knees, thrashed them well and then afterwards caressed them, as though to console them, he created ill-feeling, and his dignity suffered. If there were some little sense in the disgust occasioned by this, there was certainly none at all in certain other grievances urged against him.

It was the ungraceful custom for the boys, on the first of the month, to bring their own school fees. In the middle of one of the lessons the Head would come into the schoolroom, take his seat at the desk, and jauntily and quickly sweep five-daler bills [Footnote: Five daler, a little over 11/--English money.] into his large, soft hat and thence into his pockets. One objection to this arrangement was that the few poor boys who went to school free were thus singled out to their schoolfellows, bringing no money, which they felt as a humiliation. In the next place, the sight of the supposed wealth that the Head thus became possessed of roused ill-feeling and derision. It became the fashion to call him boy-dealer, because the school, which in its palmy days had 550 scholars, was so well attended. This extraordinary influx, which in all common sense ought to have been regarded as a proof of the high reputation of the school, was considered a proof of the Head's avarice.

It must be added that there was in his bearing, which was evidently and with good reason, calculated to impress, something that might justly appear unnatural to keen-sighted boys. He always arrived with blustering suddenness; he always shouted in a stentorian voice, and, when he gave the elder boys a Latin lesson, he always appeared, probably from indolence, a good deal behind time, but to make up, and as though there were not a second to waste, began to hurl his questions at them the moment he arrived on the threshold. He liked the pathetic, and was certainly a man with a naturally warm heart. On a closer acquaintance, he would have won much affection, for he was a clever man and a gay, optimistic figure. As the number of his scholars was so great, he produced more effect at a distance.

XVI.

Neither he nor any of the other masters reproduced the atmosphere of the classical antiquity round which all the instruction of the Latin side centred. The master who taught Greek the last few years did so, not only with sternness, but with a distaste, in fact, a positive hatred for his class, which was simply disgusting.

The Head, who had the gift of oratory, communicated to us some idea of the beauty of Latin poetry, but the rest of the instruction in the dead languages was purely grammatical, competent and conscientious though the men who gave it might have been. Madvig's [Translator's note: Johan Nicolai Madvig (1804-1886), a very celebrated Danish philologist, for fifty years professor at the University of Copenhagen. He is especially noted for his editions of the ancient classics, with critical notes on the text, and for his Latin Grammar.] spirit brooded over the school. Still, there was no doubt in the Head's mind as to the greatness of Virgil or Horace, so that a boy with perception of stylistic emphasis and metre could not fail to be keenly interested in the poetry of these two men. Being the boy in the class of whom the Head entertained the greatest hopes, I began at once secretly to translate them. I made a Danish version of the second and fourth books of the Aeneid Danicised a good part of the Songs and Epistles of Horace in imperfect verse.

XVII.

Nothing was ever said at home about any religious creed. Neither of my parents was in any way associated with the Jewish religion, and neither of them ever went to the Synagogue. As in my maternal grandmother's house all the Jewish laws about eating and drinking were observed, and they had different plates and dishes for meat and butter and a special service for Easter, orthodox Judaism, to me, seemed to be a collection of old, whimsical, superstitious prejudices, which specially applied to food. The poetry of it was a sealed book to me. At school, where I was present at the religious instruction classes as an auditor only, I always heard Judaism alluded to as merely a preliminary stage of Christianity, and the Jews as the remnant of a people who, as a punishment for slaying the Saviour of the world, had been scattered all over the earth. The present-day Israelites were represented as people who, urged by a stiff-necked wilfulness and obstinacy and almost incomprehensible callousness, clung to the obsolete religious ideal of the stern God in opposition to the God of Love.

When I attempted to think the matter out for myself, it annoyed me that the Jews had not sided with Jesus, who yet so clearly betokened progress within the religion that He widened and unintentionally overthrew. The supernatural personality of Jesus did not seem credible to me. The demand made by faith, namely, that reason should be fettered, awakened a latent rebellious opposition, and this opposition was fostered by my mother's steady rationalism, her unconditional rejection of every miracle. When the time came for me to be confirmed, in accordance with the law, I had advanced so far that I looked down on what lay before me as a mere burdensome ceremony. The person of the Rabbi only inspired me with distaste; his German pronunciation of Danish was repulsive and ridiculous to me. The abominable Danish in which the lesson-book was couched offended me, as I had naturally a fine ear for Danish. Information about ancient Jewish customs and festivals was of no interest to me, with my modern upbringing. The confirmation, according to my mocking summary of the impression produced by it, consisted mainly in the hiring of a tall silk hat from the hat-maker, and the sending of it back next day, sanctified. The silly custom was at that time prevalent for boys to wear silk hats for the occasion, idiotic though they made them look. With these on their heads, they went, after examination, up the steps to a balustrade where a priest awaited, whispered a few affecting words in their ear about their parents or grandparents, and laid his hand in blessing upon the tall hat. When called upon to make my confession of faith with the others, I certainly joined my first "yes," this touching a belief in a God, to theirs, but remained silent at the question as to whether I believed that God had revealed Himself to Moses and spoken by His prophets. I did not believe it.

I was, for that matter, in a wavering frame of mind unable to arrive at any clear understanding. What confused me was the unveracious manner in which historical instruction, which was wholly theological, was given. The History masters, for instance, told us that when Julian the Apostate wanted to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem, flames had shot out of the earth, but they interpreted this as a miracle, expressing the Divine will. If this were true--and I was unable to refute it then--God had expressly taken part against Judaism and the Jews as a nation. The nation, in that case, seemed to be really cursed by Him. Still, Christianity fundamentally repelled me by its legends, its dogmatism, and its church rites. The Virgin birth, the three persons in the Trinity, and the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper in particular, seemed to me to be remnants of the basest barbarism of antiquity.

Under these circumstances, my young soul, feeling the need of something it could worship, fled from Asia's to Europe's divinities, from Palestine to Hellas, and clung with vivid enthusiasm to the Greek world of beauty and the legends of its Gods. From all the learned education I had had, I only extracted this one thing: an enthusiasm for ancient Hellas and her Gods; they were my Gods, as they had been those of Julian. Apollo and Artemis, Athene and Eros and Aphrodite grew to be powers that I believed in and rejoiced over in a very different sense from any God revealed on Sinai or in Emmaus. They were near to me.

And under these circumstances the Antiquities Room at Charlottenburg, where as a boy I had heard Höyen's lectures, grew to be a place that I entered with reverence, and Thorwaldsen's Museum my Temple, imperfectly though it reproduced the religious and heroic life and spirit of the Greeks. But at that time I knew no other, better door to the world of the Gods than the Museum offered, and Thorwaldsen and the Greeks, from fourteen to fifteen, were in my mind merged in one. Thorwaldsen's Museum was to me a brilliant illustration of Homer. There I found my Church, my Gods, my soul's true native land.

XVIII.

I had for several years been top of my class, when a boy was put in who was quite three years older than I, and with whom it was impossible for me to compete, so much greater were the newcomer's knowledge and maturity. It very soon became a settled thing for the new boy always to be top, and I invariably No. 2. However, this was not in the least vexatious to me; I was too much wrapped up in Sebastian for that. The admiration which as a child I had felt for boys who distinguished themselves by muscular strength was manifested now for superiority in knowledge or intelligence. Sebastian was tall, thin, somewhat disjointed in build, with large blue eyes, expressive of kindness, and intelligence; he was thoroughly well up in all the school subjects, and with the ripeness of the older boy, could infer the right thing even when he did not positively know it. The reason why he was placed at lessons so late was doubtless to be found in the narrow circumstances of his parents. They considered that they had not the means to allow him to follow the path towards which his talents pointed. But the Head, as could be seen on pay days, was now permitting him to come to school free. He went about among his jacketed schoolfellows in a long frock coat, the skirts of which flapped round his legs.

No. 2 could not help admiring No. 1 for the confidence with which he disported himself among the Greek aorists, in the labyrinths of which I myself often went astray, and for the knack he had of solving mathematical problems. He was, moreover, very widely read in belles lettres, and had almost a grown-up man's taste with regard to books at a time when I still continued to admire P.P.'s [Footnote: P.P. was a writer whose real name was Rumohr. He wrote a number of historical novels of a patriotic type, but which are only read by children up to 14.] novels, and was incapable of detecting the inartistic quality and unreality of his popular descriptions of the exploits of sailor heroes. As soon as my eyes were opened to the other's advanced acquirements, I opened my heart to him, gave him my entire confidence, and found in my friend a well of knowledge and superior development from which I felt a daily need to draw.

When at the end of the year the large number of newcomers made it desirable for the class to be divided, it was a positive blow to me that in the division, which was effected by separating the scholars according to their numbers, odd or even, Sebastian and I found ourselves in different classes. I even took the unusual step of appealing to the Head to be put in the same class as Sebastian, but was refused.

However, childhood so easily adapts itself to a fresh situation that during the ensuing year, in which I myself advanced right gaily, not only did I feel no lack, but I forgot my elder comrade. And at the commencement of the next school year, when the two parallel classes, through several boys leaving, were once more united, and I again found myself No. 2 by the side of my one-time friend, the relations between us were altogether altered, so thoroughly so, in fact, that our rôles were reversed. If formerly the younger had hung upon the elder's words, now it was the other way about. If formerly Sebastian had shown the interest in me that the half-grown man feels for a child, now I was too absorbed by my own interests to wish for anything but a listener in him when I unfolded the supposed wealth of my ideas and my soaring plans for the future, which betrayed a boundless ambition. I needed a friend at this stage only in the same sense as the hero in French tragedies requires a confidant, and if I attached myself as before, wholly and completely to him, it was for this reason. It is true that the other was still a good deal in front of me in actual knowledge, so that there was much I had to consult him about; otherwise our friendship would hardly have lasted; but the importance of this superiority was slight, inasmuch as Sebastian henceforward voluntarily subordinated himself to me altogether; indeed, by his ready recognition of my powers, contributed more than anyone else to make me conscious of these powers and to foster a self-esteem which gradually assumed extraordinary forms.

XIX.

This self-esteem, in its immaturity, was of a twofold character. It was not primarily a belief that I was endowed with unusual abilities, but a childish belief that I was one set apart, with whom, for mysterious reasons, everything must succeed. The belief in a personal God had gradually faded away from me, and there were times when, with the conviction of boyhood, I termed myself an atheist to my friend; my attitude towards the Greek gods had never been anything more than a personification of the ideal forces upon which I heaped my enthusiasm. But I believed in my star. And I hypnotised my friend into the same belief, infected him so that he talked as if he were consecrating his life to my service, and really, as far as was possible for a schoolboy, lived and breathed exclusively for me, I, for my part, being gratified at having, as my unreserved admirer and believer, the one whom, of all people I knew, I placed highest, the one whose horizon seemed to me the widest, and whose store of knowledge was the greatest; for in many subjects it surpassed even that of the masters in no mean degree.

Under such conditions, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I was deeply impressed by a book that one might think was infinitely beyond the understanding of my years, Lermontof's A Hero of Our Time, in Xavier Marmier's French translation. The subject of it would seem utterly unsuited to a schoolboy who had never experienced anything in the remotest degree resembling the experiences of a man of the world, at any rate those which produced the sentiments pervading this novel. Nevertheless, this book brought about a revolution in my ideas. For the first time I encountered in a book a chief character who was not a universal hero, a military or naval hero whom one had to admire and if possible imitate, but one in whom, with extreme emotion, I fancied that I recognised myself!

I had certainly never acted as Petsjórin did, and never been placed in such situations as Petsjórin. No woman had ever loved me, still less had I ever let a woman pay with suffering the penalty of her affection for me. Never had any old friend of mine come up to me, delighted to see me again, and been painfully reminded, by my coolness and indifference, how little he counted for in my life. Petsjórin had done with life; I had not even begun to live. Petsjórin had drained the cup of enjoyment; I had never tasted so much as a drop of it. Petsjórin was as blasé as a splendid Russian Officer of the Guards could be; I, as full of expectation as an insignificant Copenhagen schoolboy could be. Nevertheless, I had the perplexing feeling of having, for the first time in my life, seen my inmost nature, hitherto unknown even to myself, understood, interpreted, reproduced, magnified, in this unharmonious work of the Russian poet who was snatched away so young.

XX.

The first element whence the imaginary figure which I fancied I recognized again in Lermontof had its rise was doubtless to be found in the relations between my older friend and myself (in the reversal of our rôles, and my consequent new feeling of superiority over him). The essential point, however, was not the comparatively accidental shape in which I fancied I recognised myself, but that what was at that time termed reflection had awaked in me, introspection, self-consciousness, which after all had to awake some day, as all other impulses awake when their time comes. This introspection was not, however, by any means a natural or permanent quality in me, but on the contrary one which made me feel ill at ease and which I soon came to detest. During these transitional years, as my pondering over myself grew, I felt more and more unhappy and less and less sure of myself. The pondering reached its height, as was inevitable, when there arose the question of choosing a profession and of planning the future rather than of following a vocation. But as long as this introspection lasted, I had a torturing feeling that my own eye was watching me, as though I were a stranger, a feeling of being the spectator of my own actions, the auditor of my own words, a double personality who must nevertheless one day become one, should I live long enough. After having, with a friend, paid a visit to Kaalund, who was prison instructor at Vridslöselille at the time and showed us young fellows the prison and the cells, I used to picture my condition to myself as that of a prisoner enduring the torture of seeing a watchful eye behind the peep-hole in the door. I had noticed before, in the Malmö prison, how the prisoners tried to besmear this glass, or scratch on it, with a sort of fury, so that it was often impossible to see through it. My natural inclination was to act naïvely, without premeditation, and to put myself wholly into what I was doing. The cleavage that introspection implies, therefore, was a horror to me; all bisection, all dualism, was fundamentally repellent to me; and it was consequently no mere chance that my first appearance as a writer was made in an attack on a division and duality in life's philosophy, and that the very title of my first book was a branding and rejection of a Dualism. So that it was only when my self-contemplation, and with it the inward cleavage, had at length ceased, that I attained to quietude of mind.

XXI.

Thus violently absorbing though the mental condition here suggested was, it was not permanent. It was childish and child-like by virtue of my years; the riper expressions which I here make use of to describe it always seem on the verge of distorting its character. My faith in my lucky star barely persisted a few years unassailed. My childish idea had been very much strengthened when, at fifteen years of age, in the first part of my finishing examination, I received Distinction in all my subjects, and received a mighty blow when, at seventeen, I only had Very Good in five subjects, thus barely securing Distinction for the whole.

I ceased to preoccupy myself about my likeness to Petsjórin after having recovered from a half, or quarter, falling in love, an unharmonious affair, barren of results, which I had hashed up for myself through fanciful and affected reverie, and which made me realise the fundamental simplicity of my own nature,--and I then shook off the unnatural physiognomy like a mask. Belief in my own unbounded superiority and the absolutely unmeasured ambition in which this belief had vented itself, collapsed suddenly when at the age of eighteen, feeling my way independently for the first time, and mentally testing people, I learnt to recognise the real mental superiority great writers possess. It was chiefly my first reading of the principal works of Kierkegaard that marked this epoch in my life. I felt, face to face with the first great mind that, as it were, had personally confronted me, all my real insignificance, understood all at once that I had as yet neither lived nor suffered, felt nor thought, and that nothing was more uncertain than whether I might one day evince talent. The one certain thing was that my present status seemed to amount to nothing at all.

XXII.

In those boyhood's years, however, I revelled in ideas of greatness to come which had not so far received a shock. And I was in no doubt as to the domain in which when grown up I should distinguish myself. All my instincts drew me towards Literature. The Danish compositions which were set at school absorbed all my thoughts from week to week; I took the greatest pains with them, weighed the questions from as many sides as I could and endeavoured to give good form and style to my compositions. Unconsciously I tried to find expressions containing striking contrasts; I sought after descriptive words and euphonious constructions. Although not acquainted with the word style in any other sense than that it bears in the expression "style-book," the Danish equivalent for what in English is termed an "exercise-book," I tried to acquire a certain style, and was very near falling into mannerism, from sheer inexperience, when a sarcastic master, to my distress, reminded me one day of Heiberg's words: "The unguent of expression, smeared thickly over the thinness of thoughts."