Chapter 5

It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to please than my mother. No one was more chary of praise than she, and she had a horror of all sentimentality. She met me with superior intelligence, corrected me, and brought me up by means of satire. It was possible to impress my aunts, but not her. The profound dread she had of betraying her feelings or talking about them, the shrewdness that dwelt behind that forehead of hers, her consistently critical and clear-sighted nature, the mocking spirit that was so conspicuous in her, especially in her younger days, gave me, with regard to her, a conviction that had a stimulating effect on my character--namely, that not only had she a mother's affection for me, but that the two shrewd and scrutinising eyes of a very clever head were looking down upon me. Rational as she was through and through, she met my visionary inclinations, both religious and philosophical, with unshaken common sense, and if I were sometimes tempted, by lesser people's over-estimating of my abilities, to over-estimate them myself, it was she who, with inflexible firmness, urged her conviction of the limitations of my nature. None of my weaknesses throve in my mother's neighbourhood.

This was the reason why, during the transitional years between boyhood and adolescence, the years in which a boy feels a greater need of sympathy than of criticism and of indulgence than of superiority, I looked for and found comprehension as much from a somewhat younger sister of my mother's as from the latter herself. This aunt was all heart. She had an ardent, enthusiastic brain, was full of tenderness and goodness and the keenest feeling for everything deserving of sympathy, not least for me, while she had not my mother's critical understanding. Her judgment might be obscured by passion; she sometimes allowed herself to be carried to imprudent extremes; she had neither Mother's equilibrium nor her satirical qualities. She was thus admirably adapted to be the confidant of a big boy whom she gave to understand that she regarded as extraordinarily gifted. When these transitional years were over, Mother resumed undisputed sway, and the relations between us remained in all essentials the same, even after I had become much her superior in knowledge and she in some things my pupil. So that it affected me very much when, many years after, my younger brother said to me somewhat sadly: "Has it struck you, too, that Mother is getting old?" "No, not at all," I replied. "What do you think a sign of it?" "I think, God help me, that she is beginning to admire us."

XIII.

My mind, like that of all other children, had been exercised by the great problem of the mystery of our coming into the world. I was no longer satisfied with the explanation that children were brought by the stork, or with that other, advanced with greater seriousness, that they drifted up in boxes, which were taken up out of Peblinge Lake. As a child I tormented my mother with questions as to how you could tell whom every box was for. That the boxes were numbered, did not make things much clearer. That they were provided with addresses, sounded very strange. Who had written the addresses? I then had to be content with the assurance that it was a thing that I was too small to understand; it should be explained to me when I was older.

My thoughts were not directed towards the other sex. I had no little girl playfellows, and as I had no sister, knew very few. When I was eight or nine years old, it is true, there was one rough and altogether depraved boy whose talk touched upon the sexual question in expressions that were coarse and in a spirit coarser still. I was scoffed at for not knowing how animals propagated themselves, and that human beings propagated themselves like animals.

I replied: "My parents, at any rate, never behaved in any such manner." Then, with the effrontery of childhood, my schoolfellows went on to the most shameless revelations, not only about a morbid development of natural instincts, but actual crimes against nature and against the elementary laws of society. In other words, I was shown the most repulsive, most agitating picture of everything touching the relations of the sexes and the propagation of the species.

It is probable that most boys in a big school have the great mystery of Nature sullied for them in their tender years by coarseness and depravity. Whereas, in ancient Greek times, the mystery was holy, and with a pious mind men worshipped the Force of Nature without exaggerated prudery and without shamelessness, such conditions are impossible in a society where for a thousand years Nature herself has been depreciated by Religion, associated with sin and the Devil, stamped as unmentionable and in preference denied, in which, for that very reason, brutality takes so much more terrible a satisfaction and revenge. As grown-up people never spoke of the forces of Nature in a pure and simple manner, it became to the children a concealed thing. Individual children, in whom the sexual impulse had awakened early, were taught its nature by bestial dispositions, and the knowledge was interpreted by them with childish shamelessness. These children then filled the ears of their comrades with filth.

In my case, the nastiness hit, and rebounded, without making any impression. I was only infected by the tone of the other scholars in so far as I learnt from them that it was manly to use certain ugly words. When I was twelve years old, my mother surprised me one day, when I was standing alone on the stairs, shouting these words out. I was reproved for it, and did not do it again.

XIV.

I hardly ever met little girls except at children's balls, and in my early childhood I did not think further of any of them. But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be for life--namely, Beauty.

It was revealed to me for the first time in the person of a slender, light-footed little girl, whose name and personality secretly haunted my brain for many a year.

One of my uncles was living that Summer in America Road, which at that time was quite in the country, and there was a beautiful walk thence across the fields to a spot called _The Signal_, where you could watch the trains go by from Copenhagen's oldest railway station, which was not situated on the western side of the town, where the present stations are. Near here lived a family whose youngest daughter used to run over almost every day to my uncle's country home, to play with the children.

She was ten years old, as brown as a gipsy, as agile as a roe, and from her childish face, from all the brown of her hair, eyes, and skin, from her smile and her speech, glowed, rang, and as it were, struck me, that overwhelming and hitherto unknown force, Beauty. I was twelve, she was ten. Our acquaintance consisted of playing touch, not even alone together, but with other children; I can see her now rushing away from me, her long plaits striking against her waist. But although this was all that passed between us, we both had a feeling as of a mysterious link connecting us. It was delightful to meet. She gave me a pink. She cut a Queen of Hearts out of a pack of cards, and gave it to me; I treasured it for the next five years like a sacred thing.

That was all that passed between us and more there never was, even when at twelve years of age, at a children's ball, she confessed to me that she had kept everything I had given her--gifts of the same order as her own. But the impression of her beauty filled my being.

Some one had made me a present of some stuffed humming-birds, perched on varnished twigs under a glass case. I always looked at them while I was reading in the nursery; they stood on the bookshelves which were my special property. These birds with their lovely, shining, gay-coloured plumage, conveyed to me my first impression of foreign or tropical vividness of colouring. All that I was destined to love for a long time had something of that about it, something foreign and afar off.

The girl was Danish as far as her speech was concerned, but not really Danish by descent, either on her father or her mother's side; her name, too, was un-Danish. She spoke English at home and was called Mary at my uncle's, though her parents called her by another name. All this combined to render her more distinctive.

Once a year I met her at a children's ball; then she had a white dress on, and was, in my eyes, essentially different from all the other little girls. One morning, after one of these balls, when I was fourteen, I felt in a most singular frame of mind, and with wonder and reverence at what I was about to do, regarding myself as dominated by a higher, incomprehensible force, I wrote the first poetry I ever composed.

There were several strophes of this heavenly poetry. Just because I so seldom met her, it was like a gentle earthquake in my life, when I did. I had accustomed myself to such a worship of her name that, for me, she hardly belonged to the world of reality at all. But when I was sixteen and I met her again, once more at a young people's ball, the glamour suddenly departed. Her appearance had altered and corresponded no longer to my imaginary picture of her. When we met in the dance she pressed my hand, which made me indignant, as though it were an immodest thing. She was no longer a fairy. She had broad shoulders, a budding bust, warm hands; there was youthful coquetry about her--something that, to me, seemed like erotic experience. I soon lost sight of her. But I retained a sentiment of gratitude towards her for what, as a ten-year-old child, she had afforded me, this naturally supernatural impression, my first revelation of Beauty.

XV.

The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster. To the very young ones, the Headmaster was merely powerful and paternal, up above everything. As soon as the critical instinct awoke, its utterances were specially directed, by the evil-disposed, at him, petty and malicious as they were, and were echoed slavishly by the rest.

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.