Chapter 6

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."

XXIII.

Together with a practical training in the use of the language, the Danish lessons afforded a presentment of the history of our national literature, given intelligently and in a very instructive manner by a master named Driebein, who, though undoubtedly one of the many Heibergians of the time, did not in any way deviate from what might be termed the orthodoxy of literary history. Protestantism carried it against Roman Catholicism, the young Oehlenschläger against Baggesen, Romanticism against Rationalism; Oehlenschläger as the Northern poet of human nature against a certain Björnson, who, it was said, claimed to be more truly Norse than he. In Mr. Driebein's presentment, no recognised great name was ever attacked. And in his course, as in Thortsen's History of Literature, literature which might be regarded as historic stopped with the year 1814.

The order in which in my private reading I became acquainted with Danish authors was as follows: Ingemann, Oehlenschläger, Grundtvig, Poul Möller, many books by these authors having been given me at Christmas and on birthdays. At my grandfather's, I eagerly devoured Heiberg's vaudevilles as well. As a child, of course, I read uncritically, merely accepting and enjoying. But when I heard at school of Baggesen's treatment of Oehlenschläger, thus realising that there had been various tendencies in literature at that time, and various opinions as to which was preferable, I read with enthusiasm a volume of selected poems by Baggesen, which I had had one Christmas, and the treatment of language in it fascinated me exceedingly, with its gracefulness and light, conversational tone. Then, when Hertz's [Footnote: Henrik Hertz, a Danish poet (1797-1870), published "Ghost Letters" anonymously, and called them thus because in language and spirit they were a kind of continuation of the long-deceased Baggesen's rhymed contribution to a literary dispute of his day. Hertz, like the much greater Baggesen, laid great stress upon precise and elegant form.--[Translator's note.]] _Ghost Letters_ fell into my hands one day, and the diction of them appealed to me almost more, I felt myself, first secretly, afterwards more consciously, drawn towards the school of form in Danish literature, and rather enjoyed being a heretic on this point. For to entertain kindly sentiments for the man who had dared to profane Oehlenschläger was like siding with Loki against Thor. Poul Möller's Collected Works I had received at my confirmation, and read again and again with such enthusiasm that I almost wore the pages out, and did not skip a line, even of the philosophical parts, which I did not understand at all. But Hertz's Lyrical Poems, which I read in a borrowed copy, gave me as much pleasure as Poul Möller's Verses had done. And for a few years, grace and charm, and the perfect control of language and poetic form, were in my estimation the supreme thing until, on entering upon my eighteenth year, a violent reaction took place, and resonance, power and grandeur alone seemed to have value. From Hertz my sympathies went over to Christian Winther, from Baggesen to Homer, Aeschylus, the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe. One of the first things I did as a student was to read the Bible through in Danish and the Odyssey in Greek.

XXIV.

The years of approaching maturity were still distant, however, and my inner life was personal, not real, so that an element of fermentation was cast into my mind when a copy of Heine's _Buch der Lieder_ was one day lent to me. What took my fancy in it was, firstly, the combination of enthusiasm and wit, then its terse, pithy form, and after that the parts describing how the poet and his lady love, unable to overcome the shyness which binds their tongues, involuntarily play hide and seek with one another and lose each other; for I felt that I should be equally unable to find natural and simple expression for my feelings, should things ever come to such a pass with me. Of Heine's personality, of the poet's historic position, political tendencies or importance, I knew nothing; in these love-poems I looked more especially for those verses in which violent self-esteem and blasé superiority to every situation find expression, because this fell in with the Petsjórin note, which, since reading Lermontof's novel, was the dominant one in my mind. As was my habit in those years, when it was still out of the question for me to buy books that pleased me, I copied out of the _Buch der Lieder_ all that I liked best, that I might read it again.

XXV.

Of all this life of artistic desire and seeking, of external impressions, welcomed with all the freshness and impulsiveness of a boy's mind, but most of self-study and self-discovery, the elder of the two comrades was a most attentive spectator, more than a spectator. He made use of expressions and said things which rose to my head and made me conceited. Sebastian would make such a remark as: "It is not for your abilities that I appreciate you, it is for your enthusiasm. All other people I know are machines without souls, at their best full of affected, set phrases, such as one who has peeped behind the scenes laughs at; but in you there is a fulness of ideality too great for you ever to be happy." "Fulness of ideality" was the expression of the time for the supremest quality of intellectual equipment. No wonder, then, that I felt flattered.

And my older comrade united a perception of my mental condition, which unerringly perceived its immaturity, with a steadfast faith in a future for me which in spite of my arrogance, I thirsted to find in the one of all others who knew me best and was most plainly my superior in knowledge. One day, when I had informed him that I felt "more mature and clearer about myself," he replied, without a trace of indecision, that this was undoubtedly a very good thing, if it were true, but that he suspected I was laboring under a delusion. "I am none the less convinced," he added, "that you will soon reach a crisis, will overcome all obstacles and attain the nowadays almost giant's goal that you have set before you." This goal, for that matter, was very indefinite, and was to the general effect that I intended to make myself strongly felt, and bring about great changes in the intellectual world; of what kind, was uncertain.

Meanwhile, as the time drew near for us to enter the University, and I approached the years of manhood which the other, in spite of his modest position as schoolboy, had already long attained, Sebastian grew utterly miserable. He had, as he expressed it, made up his mind to be my _Melanchthon_. But through an inward collapse which I could not understand he now felt that the time in which he could be anything to me had gone by; it seemed to him that he had neglected to acquire the knowledge and the education necessary, and he reproached himself bitterly. "I have not been in the least what I might have been to you," he exclaimed one day, and without betraying it he endured torments of jealousy, and thought with vexation and anxiety of the time when a larger circle would be opened to me in the University, and he himself would become superfluous.

His fear was thus far unfounded, that, naïve in my selfishness, as in my reliance on him, I still continued to tell him everything, and in return constantly sought his help when philological or mathematical difficulties which I could not solve alone presented themselves to me.

But I had scarcely returned to Copenhagen, after my first journey abroad (a very enjoyable four weeks' visit to Göteborg), I had scarcely been a month a freshman, attending philosophical lectures and taking part in student life than the dreaded separation between us two so differently constituted friends came to pass. The provocation was trifling, in fact paltry. One day I was standing in the lecture-room with a few fellow-students before a lecture began, when a freshman hurried up to us and asked: "Is it true, what Sebastian says, that he is the person you think most of in the world?" My reply was: "Did he say that himself?" "Yes." And, disgusted that the other should have made such a remark in order to impress perfect strangers, though it might certainly very easily have escaped him in confidence, I said hastily: "Oh! he's mad!" which outburst, bearing in mind young people's use of the word "mad," was decidedly not to be taken literally, but was, it is quite true, ill-naturedly meant.

The same evening I received a short note from Sebastian in which, though in polite terms, he repudiated his allegiance and fidelity; the letter, in which the polite form _you_ was used instead of the accustomed _thou_, was signed: "Your 'mad' and 'foolish,' but respectful Sebastian."

The impression this produced upon me was exceedingly painful, but an early developed mental habit of always accepting a decision, and a vehement repugnance to renew any connection deliberately severed by another party, resulted in my never even for a moment thinking of shaking his resolution, and in my leaving the note unanswered. However, the matter was not done with, and the next few months brought me many insufferable moments, indeed hours, for Sebastian, whose existence had for so long centred round mine that he was evidently incapable of doing without me altogether, continually crossed my path, planted himself near me on every possible occasion, and one evening, at a students' gathering, even got a chair outside the row round the table, sat himself down just opposite to me, and spent a great part of the evening in staring fixedly into my face. As may be supposed, I felt exceedingly irritated.

Three months passed, when one day I received a letter from Sebastian, and at intervals of weeks or months several others followed. They were impressive letters, splendidly written, with a sort of grim humour about them, expressing his passionate affection and venting his despair. This was the first time that I had come in contact with passion, but it was a passion that without having any unnatural or sensual element in it, nevertheless, from a person of the same sex, excited a feeling of displeasure, and even disgust, in me.

Sebastian wrote: "I felt that it was cheating you to take so much without being able to give you anything in return; I thought it mean to associate with you; consequently, I believe that I did perfectly right to break with you. Still, it is true that I hardly needed to do it. Time and circumstances would have effected the breach." And feeling that our ways were now divided, he continued:

Hie locus est, partes ubi se via findit in ambas. Dextera, quae Ditis magni sub moenia tendit Hac iter Elysium nobis; at laeva malorum Exercet poenas et ad impia Tartara mittit.

"I cannot kill myself at present, but as soon as I feel able I shall do so."

Or he wrote: "Towards the end of the time when we were friends, I was not quite myself when talking to you; I was unbalanced; for I was convinced that you wasted your valuable time talking to me, and at the same time was oppressed with grief at the thought that we must part. Then I tried to make you angry by pretending to question your abilities, by affecting indifference and scorn; but it was the dog baying at the moon. I had to bring about the severance that I did. That I should be so childish as to be vexed about a slight from you, you cannot yourself believe. I cannot really regret it, for I could no longer be of use to you; you doubtless think the same yourself; but I cannot do without you; my affection for you is the only vital thing in me; your life throbbed in mine."

Sometimes the letters ended with an outburst of a sort of despairing humour, such as: "Vale! (Fanfare! somersaults by Pagliaccio.)" But whether Sebastian assumed a serious or a desperate tone, the renewal of our old companionship was equally impossible to me. I could not ignore what had happened, and I could not have a friend who was jealous if I talked to others. Since my intellectual entity had awakened, all jealousy had been an abomination to me, but jealousy in one man of another man positively revolted me. I recognised Sebastian's great merits, respected his character, admired his wide range of knowledge, but I could not associate with him again, could not even so much as walk down the street by his side. All his affectionate and beautiful letters glanced off ineffectual from this repugnance. Something in me had suddenly turned stony, like a plant plunged in petrifying water.

Six years passed before we saw each other again. We met then with simple and sincere affection. Sebastian's old passion had evaporated without leaving a trace; he himself could no longer understand it. And, though far apart, and with nothing to connect us closely, we continued to think kindly of one another and to exchange reflections, until, after a few years, Death carried him away, ere he had reached the years of real manhood, or fulfilled any of the promises of his gifted and industrious youth.

TRANSITIONAL YEARS

Schoolboy Fancies--Religion--Early Friends--_Daemonic_ Theory--A West Indian Friend--My Acquaintance Widens--Politics--The Reactionary Party--The David Family--A Student Society--An Excursion to Slesvig--Temperament--The Law--Hegel--Spinoza--Love for Humanity--A Religious Crisis--Doubt--Personal Immortality--Renunciation.

I.

My second schoolboy fancy dated from my last few months at school. It was a natural enough outcome of the attraction towards the other sex which, never yet encouraged, was lurking in my mind; but it was not otherwise remarkable for its naturalness. It had its origin partly in my love of adventure, partly in my propensity for trying my powers, but, as love, was without root, inasmuch as it was rooted neither in my heart nor in my senses.

The object of it was again a girl from another country. Her name and person had been well known to me since I was twelve years old. We had even exchanged compliments, been curious about one another, gone so far as to wish for a lock of each other's hair. There was consequently a romantic background to our first meeting. When I heard that she was coming to Denmark I was, as by chance, on the quay, and saw her arrive.

She was exactly the same age as I, and, without real beauty, was very good-looking and had unusually lovely eyes. I endeavoured to make her acquaintance through relatives of hers whom I knew, and had no difficulty in getting into touch with her. An offer to show her the museums and picture galleries in Copenhagen was accepted. Although I had very little time, just before my matriculation examination, my new acquaintance filled my thoughts to such an extent that I did not care how much of this valuable time I sacrificed to her. In the Summer, when the girl went out near Charlottenlund, whereas my parents were staying much nearer to the town, I went backwards and forwards to the woods nearly every day, in the uncertain but seldom disappointed hope of seeing her. Sometimes I rowed her about in the Sound.

Simple and straightforward though the attraction I felt might seem, the immature romance I built up on it was anything but simple.

It was, as stated, not my senses that drew me on. Split and divided up as I was just then, a merely intellectual love seemed to me quite natural; one might feel an attraction of the senses for an altogether different woman. I did not wish for a kiss, much less an embrace; in fact, was too much a child to think of anything of the sort.

But neither was it my heart that drew me on; I felt no tenderness, hardly any real affection, for this young girl whom I was so anxious to win. She only busied my brain.