XV.
Knowing this Armenian made me realise how restricted my own learning was, and what a very general field of knowledge I had chosen.
I wrote my newspaper articles and my essays, and I worked at my doctor's thesis on French Aesthetics, which cost me no little pains; it was my first attempt to construct a consecutive book, and it was only by a vigorous effort that I completed it at the end of 1869. But I had then been casting over in my mind for some years thoughts to which I never was able to give a final form, thoughts about the position of women in society, which would not let me rest.
A woman whose thought fired mine even further just about this time, a large-minded woman, who studied society with an uncompromising directness that was scarcely to be met with in any man of the time in Denmark, was the wife of the poet Carsten Hauch. When she spoke of Danish women, the stage of their development and their position in law, their apathy and the contemptibleness of the men, whether these latter were despots, pedants, or self-sufficient Christians, she made me a sharer of her point of view; our hearts glowed with the same flame.
Rinna Hauch was not, like certain old ladies of her circle, a "woman's movement" woman before the name was invented. She taught no doctrine, but she glowed with ardour for the cause of freedom and justice. She saw through the weak, petty men and women of her acquaintance and despised them. She too passionately desired a thorough revolution in modern society to be able to feel satisfied merely by an amelioration of the circumstances of women of the middle classes; and yet it was the condition of women, especially in the classes she knew well, that she thought most about.
She began to place some credence in me and cherished a hope that I should do my utmost to stir up the stagnation at home, and during the long conversations we had together, when, in the course of these Summers, I now and again spent a week at a time with the Hauchs at Hellebaek, she enflamed me with her ardour.
In September, 1868, after wandering with my old friend up and down the shore, under the pure, starlit heaven, and at last finding myself late at night in my room, I was unable to go to rest. All that had been talked of and discussed in the course of the day made my head hot and urged me to reflection and action. Often I seized a piece of paper and scribbled off, disconnectedly, in pencil, remarks corresponding to the internal agitation of my mind, jottings like the following, for example:
S.R., that restive fanatic, has a wife who cannot believe, and wishes for nothing but to be left in peace on religious matters. He forces her to go to Communion, though he knows the words of Scripture, that he who partakes unworthily eats and drinks to his own damnation.
There is not one sound, healthy sentiment in the whole of our religious state of being. You frequently hear it said: "Everyone can't be a hypocrite." True enough. But begin, in the middle classes, to deduct hypocrisy, and gross affectation and cowardly dread of Hell, and see what is left!
If we have young people worthy the name, I will tell them the truth; but this band of backboneless creatures blocks up the view.
Women whom Life has enlightened and whom it has disappointed! You I can help.
I see two lovers hand in hand, kissing the tears away from each other's eyes.
I can only rouse the wakeful. Nothing can be done with those who are incapable of feeling noble indignation.
I have known two women prefer death to the infamy of conjugal life.
Open the newspapers!--hardly a line that is not a lie.
And poets and speakers flatter a people like that.
Christianity and Humanity have long wished for divorce. Now this is an accomplished fact.
And the priests are honoured. They plume themselves on not having certain vices, for which they are too weak.
I know that I shall be stoned, that every boy has his balderdash ready against that to which the reflection of years and sleepless nights has given birth. But do you think I am afraid of anyone?
Stupidity was always the bodyguard of Lies.
A people who have put up with the Oldenborgs for four hundred years and made loyalty to them into a virtue!
They do not even understand that here there is no Antichrist but Common Sense.
Abandoned by all, except Unhappiness and me.
When did God become Man? When Nature reached the point in its development at which the first man made his appearance; when Nature became man, then God did.
Women say of the beloved one: "A bouquet he brings smells better than one another brings."
You are weak, dear one, God help you! And you help! and I help!
These thoughts have wrought a man of me, have finally wrought me to a man.
I procured all that was accessible to me in modern French and English literature on the woman subject.
In the year 1869 my thoughts on the subordinate position of women in society began to assume shape, and I attempted a connected record of them. I adopted as my starting point Sören Kierkegaard's altogether antiquated conception of woman and contested it at every point. But all that I had planned and drawn up was cast aside when in 1869 John Stuart Mill's book on the subject fell into my hands. I felt Mill's superiority to be so immense and regarded his book as so epoch-making that I necessarily had to reject my own draft and restrict myself to the translation and introduction of what he had said. In November, 1869, I published Mill's book in Danish and in this manner introduced the modern woman's movement into Denmark.
The translation was of this advantage to me that it brought me first into epistolary communication, and later into personal contact with one of the greatest men of the time.