People might be revolters by instinct, but they did not believe in the transition form to a better social constitution, i.e. a republic. They had seen how two French republics had been followed by new monarchies. There were secret anarchists, but no republicans, and they had persuaded themselves that the monarchy offered no barrier to the progress of liberty.
These were the ideas of the younger men. The elder men with Blanche thought a republic the only means of social salvation and therefore in our days the old liberal school has become conservative-republican.
When the doctor saw that his wife's literary books threatened to encroach upon John's medical studies, he resolved to give him a glimpse into the secrets of his profession, and to allow him such a foretaste of real work as should entice him to overcome the tedious preliminary studies which he himself thought too extensive. John now knew more chemistry and physics than the doctor, and the latter thought it was merely malicious to hinder a rival's course by imposing too hard preliminary studies. Why should he not, as in America, commence dissection, which was a special branch of study? Now after the theoretical study of anatomy, he could begin practice as an assistant. That was a new life full of variety and reality. One went for instance into a dark alley and came into a porter's room, where a woman lay, sick of fever, surrounded by poor children, the grandmother and other relations, who stole about on tip-toe, awaiting the doctor's verdict. The malodorous ragged bed-cover would be lifted, a sunken heaving chest exposed to view, and a prescription written. Then one went to the Tvädgårdsgatan and was conducted over soft carpets through splendid rooms into a bed-chamber which looked liked a temple; one lifted a blue silk coverlet and put in splints the leg of an angelic-looking child, dressed in lace. On the way out one looked at a collection of paintings, and talked about artists. This was something novel and interesting, but what connection had it with Titus Livius and the history of philosophy?
But then came the details of surgery. One was roused at seven o'clock in the morning, came into the doctor's dark room, and manually assisted at the cauterising of a syphilitic sore. The room reeked of human flesh, and was repugnant to an empty stomach. Or he had to hold a patient's head and felt it twitch with pain while the doctor with a fork extracted glands from his throat.
"One soon gets accustomed to that," said the doctor, and that was true, but John's thoughts were busy with Goethe's Faust, Wieland's Epicurean romances, George Sand's social phantasies, Chateaubriand's soliloquies with nature, and Lessing's common-sense theories. His imagination was set in motion and his memory refused to work; the reality of cauterisations and flowing blood was ugly; æstheticism had laid hold of him, and actual life seemed to him tedious and repulsive. His intercourse with artists had opened his eyes to a new world, a free society within Society. They would come to a well-spread table where cultivated people were sitting with badly-fitting clothes, black nails, and dirty linen, as if they were not merely equal, but superior to the rest,—in what?
They could scarcely write their names, they borrowed money without repaying it, and their talk was coarse. Everything was permitted to them, which was not permitted to others. Why? They could paint. They studied at the Academy, and the Academy did not ask whether all who enrolled themselves as students were geniuses. How was it known that they were geniuses? Was painting greater than knowledge and science?
They also had, as was well recognised, a peculiar morality of their own. They opened studios, hired models, and boasted of their paramours, while other men were ashamed of theirs and incurred disapproval on account of them. They laughed at what were very serious matters for other men, nay, it seemed to be part of an artist's equipment to be a "scoundrel," as any one else would be called for similar conduct.
"That was a glad free world," thought John, and one in which he could thrive, without conventional fetters or social obligations, and above all, without contact with banal realities. But he was not a genius? How should he get the entrée to it? Should he learn to paint and so be initiated? No! that would not do; he had never thought of painting; that demanded a special vocation, he thought, and painting would not express all he had to say, when once he began to speak. If he had to find a medium for self-expression it would be the theatre. An actor could step forward, and say all kinds of truths, however bitter they might be, without being brought to book for them. That was certainly a tempting career.