Almost reluctantly the poet seems to have attacked his task. As the realistic epoch was but of brief duration with him, he gives us the impression of having actually drawn close to reality merely in order to settle his account with it once for all, through his bitter derision and his scathing judgment, and then to forsake it again in the utmost haste. It seems as though he would say: "You have reproached me with having no eye for the home-life about me, you have always charged me with the foreign nature of my delineations; very well, I will make it right with you, I will single out one from your very midst and take him for my hero." About the same time Kierkegaard, who was also moved by a bitter scorn for his contemporaries, wrote in his "Stages on the Path of Life": "One step is yet to be taken, a veritable non plus ultra, since such a generation of pot-house politicians and life-insurers charge poesy with injustice because she does not select her heroes among its own worthy contemporaries. Surely this is doing poesy a wrong; but it would be well not to pursue her too long; otherwise she might end Aristophanes-like by seizing the first sausage-dealer that came in her way and making a hero of him." This step is actually taken in "Adam Homo." The naked reality, all that is ugly in the external world, the lack of ideality in social life, all the frailty, wretchedness, baseness, and despicableness in the inner life of humanity, is laid bare without reserve, without mercy. The poet's muse, which formerly, in his "Dancing-Girl," coquettishly veiled in crêpe and gauze, had sped lightly over the polished floor in dainty slippers, has now transformed itself into a Sister of Mercy, who, at once stem and gentle, ventures out in the worst weather, well shod in stout shoes. Fearless of misery wherever it may be found, not susceptible to any contagion whatever, she passes unharmed through the filthiest and most wretched streets, or she stands in the houses of the aristocrats, undazzled by their lustre and splendor, and penetrates all hearts with her sublime, superior gaze. She calls everything by its true name, the most delicate falsehood as well as the coarsest misery.
The poem was a bit of Denmark, a bit of history,—a bit of living web cut from the great loom of time. The metaphysical mirror of the humanity that the mythical poesies had produced was here supplanted by the psychological and ethical study of a single individual. The scene was no longer laid in a court in the land of romance, nor in an air-castle in the realm of ether; the action took place in Jütland, Zealand, and Fünen, and the period being neither the eternal moment nor the fantastic "Once upon a time," embraced the years 1830-48, the golden years of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe, and those in which it founded its dominion in Northern Europe. For the first time, space and time were recognized as significant powers by Paludan-Müller.
Yet while the poet's task had thus become individualized, and had acquired defined boundary lines in time and space, it none the less aimed at universality. Adam Homo—that was meant, as the title itself indicated, to represent man in general, and the hero was no less typical than the poet's previous mythical heroes. He is in the main a mythical form; his history is the mythical biography of the Danish bourgeoisie.
There was one expression that kept continually recurring in the discourse of Paludan-Müller when he spoke of science or art, and that expression was "great tasks." In these words were comprised his claims upon himself and his fellow-laborers. He himself always sought out great tasks, because it was his firm belief that they alone develop the powers and are worthy of an effort of strength, and he was continually encouraging us, his younger fellow-laborers, to set ourselves the task of dealing with great problems, because only through the solution of such could our work win a permanent place in literature. "There is," said he, "in all literatures more than enough that is scattered to the winds like chaff; make it your task to attempt something that will endure, something that has a future before it." The surest means of attaining this end was, in his estimation, in his own art, the endeavor to represent, in the characters and destinies of the individual personalities, the type of universal humanity. Those poets, in whose efforts the casual plays a certain rôle, will not attain so high a plane, it is true, yet will often acquire, by way of compensation, a more volatile, more sportive life, a more captivating charm; for the accidental in poetic art is synonymous with the bizarre, the gracefully surprising, the incalculable, and yet so natural irregularity. In the choice of his plots Paludan-Müller is to a rare degree the enemy of chance. His perception of what is fundamentally human, no less than his lack of original creative genius, prevented him from ever selecting psychologically singular subjects. The race of the normal homo sapiens, in its entire folly, was the sole material that possessed for him a thorough power of attraction.
In "Adam Homo," the task the poet set himself was to show how a man, taken from the masses, and equipped with neither the best nor the poorest endowments, from youth up, a man as full of ideal hopes and resolutions as his betters, can squander his entire intellectual fortune, and finally end as a spiritless, narrow-minded old fogy. At the same time he wished to portray how the hero for every degree he descended in the intellectual and moral scale, was compelled, of a necessity, to climb one round higher in the social ladder.
Paludan-Müller was little inclined to throw any light on the history of his works; but when once, without any preliminary, I asked, "What part of 'Adam Homo' did you write first?" he replied, unhesitatingly, "The epitaph,"—the only lines in the poem that are printed in italics.
"Here Adam Homo rests, a worthy soul and bright,
A Baron, Statesman, too, who wore the ribbon white."
Had his contemporaries possessed this elucidation, which did not surprise me in the least, they would not have fumbled about so blindly in their efforts to understand the first six cantos of the poem that appeared in 1841, and whose continuation and completion did not follow until seven years later. Even Heiberg, the foremost Danish critic of the day, after reading the first part, deemed it possible that the poet might intend to let Adam end as a happy married man, in an idyllic country parsonage. So far was the public at first removed from comprehending the wrathful pessimism and the well-considered irony from which the poetic work had proceeded. People had no idea that from the moment Paludan-Müller had put pen to paper, it had been his design to allow this representative of the Danish bourgeoisie, who began life with youthful amiability and youthful enthusiasm, gradually to give up all he had once believed in, and to betray the confidence of all those who believed in him. No one suspected that it was Adam Homo's destiny to come out as a popular man and a popular orator, only directly afterwards to alter his "ideal," and to drop the love of common people, to develop into a "polished man," to seek refuge amid courtiers and statesmen, and finally, covered with titles, and hung all over with orders, to be solemnly buried as a baron, a privy councillor, a chevalier, etc.
And if Heiberg had no conception of this, can we wonder that the public at first remained wholly without comprehension of the significance of the poem? The book met with no success, and was pronounced decidedly dull. The reading world, unaccustomed to such substantial food, and having been so often invited by Paludan-Müller to feast at the table of the gods on Olympus, found some passages offensive, others commonplace, and came to the conclusion that Paludan-Müller must this time have chosen a theme that lay quite beyond the province of his genius. And yet this so deliberately condemned "Adam Homo" was destined, when completed, not many years later, to take the rank of the most typical and most significant existing Danish work of the narrative kind.
Doctrinal æsthetics would naturally object not a little to an epos presenting a picture which, as a whole, is so little edifying, an epos whose prevailing mood presents so imperfect an atonement, indeed, properly speaking, only a theological atonement. Even from a non-doctrinal standpoint there is also a fundamental objection to be made. The great difficulty, based on the subject itself, was that Paludan-Müller did not aim, as such an infinite number of other authors have aimed, at portraying for the reader the narrow-minded, commonplace citizen in his foil glory, in order to submit him at once to sharp criticism. He on the contrary wanted to show how such strait-laced old fogies become what they are. Now most characters of the kind in poetry, as well as in real life, do not become what they are, or at least only become so to a trifling degree: they are born Philistines. In such forms the ugly element is resolved, without the slightest inharmonious echo, into the comical. The father of Adam Homo is one of these native-born Philistines, and is, therefore, thoroughly comical. But to delineate the gradual growth of the comic character is upon the whole a stumbling-block for modern poesy. Aristophanes would not attempt it; as the Greek tragedy began with the catastrophe, so Greek comedy began at once with the complete upheaval of the world. In "Adam Homo" the consequence of the hero becoming comical instead of being so from the beginning, is, in short, that at first he calls forth sympathy through his amiability, and that toward the end he arouses merriment through the ridiculousness that he manifests. But the transition itself, which consists in the gradual ruin of a well-endowed human being, is repulsively sorrowful, and yet it is the point of the whole.