I.
I need only close my eyes to see him before me as he appeared in life. I behold the cheerful smile with which he said "Good day" to a guest. I hear the roguish playfulness with which in lively conversation, almost in the style of Shakespeare's Mercutio, he clung to a merry pun. In the last years of his life a severe illness had broken his strength, and age had set its mark on his noble form. But I can see him in the freshness and healthful appearance of his robust years, as he was when I first became acquainted with him.
One August day, in 1863, I saw and spoke with him for the first time. On a pedestrian trip with a young relative of his, I came to Fredensborg, in Zealand, and with beating heart set foot on the threshold of his summer residence. Every poem he had written was familiar to me, and I experienced a sense of disquietude, mingled with rejoicing, at the thought of being so near the man whom I had so long admired in the distance. We waited a while in the rustic, modest room; I had just time to cast a glance at the unpretending household furniture, when the door of the adjoining room opened, and he whom we sought appeared, bidding us welcome in his singularly refined and impressive voice. An aristocratic face met my gaze, with features that might have been chiseled by an idealistic sculptor. The sensitive, quivering nostrils, and the deep, strong, handsome blue eyes, shaded by vigorous eyebrows, gave life to the face; a slight deafness, too, imparted to it a listening, attentive look. On his head Paludan-Müller wore a high, pointed cap, which was extremely becoming to him, and caused his noble face to resemble an old Florentine portrait. His finely shaped, sarcastic mouth was made doubly beautiful by the smile that hovered about it; his white necktie imparted a certain dignity to the poise of the head, and he looked equally distinguished and amiable.
After the first interchange of greetings, the conversation fell on the relation between the beautiful in nature and in art, and, zealous idealist as he was, he maintained that everything in nature must be called beautiful, or nothing. It was a sort of echo of the Hegelian doctrine of beauty as the work of man alone.
During this talk we had strolled out into the Fredensborg castle garden. Paludan-Müller sat down on the banks of Lake Esrom, and pointing with his stick to a monstrous toad, he said, "Voltaire was right when he made his toad exclaim, 'La beau idéal c'est ma crapaude.'"
He seemed to take a certain naïve pleasure in making use of terse, sportive sentences of this kind. There might also be detected in his conversation at times, an interesting antithesis; he would now employ certain abstract and solemn phrases that have become foreign to the younger generation; would speak, for instance, of the "worshippers of beauty," and more to like effect; and again, he would amuse himself by clothing his thoughts in some extravagantly cynical expression. This changeful attitude of tone may be recognized in his humoristic poetry. In his discourse it produced a peculiar effect, much as when a swan interrupts its calm, royal flight, to thrust its tail upward in the air. This, however, was only the first impression; it was entirely effaced by a more intimate acquaintance with him. To those who knew him well, it was very evident that the ermine-like purity of his nature and his aversion to the uncleanness and flatness of the daily life of the period, which had made him a hermit, found their complement in the witty, sportively polemic tendency of his mind, in his scorn for much that was excessively admired by others, and in the keen sense of the comic which had made him the poet of satire.
II.
He passed his summers in Fredensborg, and his winters in the "Ny-Adelgade" in Copenhagen, and it sometimes occurred to me that this double place of residence corresponded with the different phases of his character and his poetry. He was well adapted to his summer home. There was something in his nature that was akin to the slender, proud alleys, and the pure air and perfect order of the regularly laid out gardens. The white statues of the un-Grecian Greek gods and goddesses among the trees were reminders of his mythologic poems, and harmonized with the character of the poet who has so often surprised and portrayed Venus and Aurora at their morning toilets. With all his great and rare poetic gifts, Paludan-Müller, in his poetry, lacked naïveté; he was never, properly speaking, the poet of nature; and, therefore, a garden was much better adapted to his poetic mood than a forest. The little castle, of which the new royal family promptly took possession, was very dear to him. He was devoted to royalty, as were but few of his contemporaries; he was as loyal as a citizen of the days of Frederick VI. He was rejoiced and felt honored when he received an occasional visit from the young princesses, whose amiability and simple manners won his heart; he was put in an especially good humor one day when the Princess Dagmar[1] sent him her portrait with a few friendly lines. Finally, the spot suited his need of living in retirement. He went to Fredensborg long before the other guests from Copenhagen, and remained there long after they had all departed; he always left the city when the calendar promised spring, and did not return until the last leaves had fallen. Thus he had an opportunity of enjoying profound solitude in his favorite retreat.
Any one who visited him during the winter in Copenhagen, found him in very different surroundings. His street was in one of the worst and most notorious quarters of the city at that time. The fact that he was not in very affluent circumstances had evidently been the cause of his settling in a place of the kind. It was a singular coincidence that the pure and rigorous author of "Kalanus" could never step to his door of a winter evening without having before his eye abundant and loud testimony of human shame and misery. Many an evening I have seen him in the streets of this vicinity, leaning on his cane, and looking neither to the right nor to the left, while numerous rude and noisy couples drifted past him. I would then remember that the author of "Kalanus" was also the author of "Adam Homo"; and were not these the accessory figures of "Adam Homo," the original of the beautiful Lina and the swarthy Trina which the poet had before his eyes day after day? Thus it was not an altogether incongruous decree of fate that located Paludan-Müller in the midst of the most wretched and hideous vices of Copenhagen. When the threshold of his house was once crossed, however, the repulsive neighborhood was wholly forgotten. The door to the peaceful dwelling, where everything was animated by the good genius and good humor of the poet, was usually opened by a faithful old maid-servant who was thoroughly devoted to her employer, and with whose favor no guest could dispense, since, according to the playful assertion of the poet, she tyrannized over his home.