Recollections of My Childhood and Youth Part 5

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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 grat.i.tude 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 bl.u.s.tering 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 cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.sics, 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.sociated 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 b.u.t.ter and a special service for Easter, orthodox Judaism, to me, seemed to be a collection of old, whimsical, superst.i.tious 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 cla.s.ses 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 G.o.d in opposition to the G.o.d 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 bal.u.s.trade 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 G.o.d, to theirs, but remained silent at the question as to whether I believed that G.o.d 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--G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances, my young soul, feeling the need of something it could worship, fled from Asia's to Europe's divinities, from Palestine to h.e.l.las, and clung with vivid enthusiasm to the Greek world of beauty and the legends of its G.o.ds. From all the learned education I had had, I only extracted this one thing: an enthusiasm for ancient h.e.l.las and her G.o.ds; they were my G.o.ds, 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 G.o.d revealed on Sinai or in Emmaus. They were near to me.

And under these circ.u.mstances the Antiquities Room at Charlottenburg, where as a boy I had heard Hoyen'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 G.o.ds 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 ill.u.s.tration of Homer. There I found my Church, my G.o.ds, my soul's true native land.

XVIII.

I had for several years been top of my cla.s.s, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses. I even took the unusual step of appealing to the Head to be put in the same cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses, 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 roles 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 a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude towards the Greek G.o.ds 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 surpa.s.sed 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 Petsjorin did, and never been placed in such situations as Petsjorin. 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. Petsjorin had done with life; I had not even begun to live. Petsjorin had drained the cup of enjoyment; I had never tasted so much as a drop of it. Petsjorin was as blase 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 roles, 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 Vridsloselille 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 Malmo prison, how the prisoners tried to besmear this gla.s.s, 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 navely, 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 t.i.tle 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 una.s.sailed. 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 Petsjorin 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 princ.i.p.al 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 Oehlenschlager against Baggesen, Romanticism against Rationalism; Oehlenschlager as the Northern poet of human nature against a certain Bjornson, 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, Oehlenschlager, Grundtvig, Poul Moller, 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 Oehlenschlager, 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.]]