I was very much surprised when Mill informed me that he had not read a line of Hegel, either in the original or in translation, and regarded the entire Hegelian philosophy as sterile and empty sophistry. I mentally confronted this with the opinion of the man at the Copenhagen University who knew the history of philosophy best, my teacher, Hans Bröchner, who knew, so to speak, nothing of contemporary English and French philosophy, and did not think them worth studying. I came to the conclusion that here was a task for one who understood the thinkers of the two directions, who did not mutually understand one another.
I thought that in philosophy, too, I knew what I wanted, and saw a road open in front of me.
However, I never travelled it. The gift for abstract philosophical thought which I had possessed as a youth was never developed, but much like the tendency to verse-making which manifested itself even earlier, superseded by the historio-critical capacity, which grew strong in me. At that time I believed in my natural bent for philosophy, and did so even in July, 1872, when I sketched out and began a large book: "The Association of Ideas, conceived and put forward as the fundamental principle of human knowledge," but the book was never completed. The capacity for abstraction was too weak in me.
Still, if the capacity had no independent development, it had a subservient effect on all my criticism, and the conversations with Mill had a fertilising and helpful influence on my subsequent intellectual life.
XIX.
Some weeks passed in seeing the most important public buildings in London, revelling in the treasures of her museums and collections, and in making excursions to places in the neighbourhood and to Oxford. I was absorbed by St. Paul's, saw it from end to end, and from top to bottom, stood in the crypt, where Sir Christopher Wren lies buried,--Si monumentum requiris, circumspice--mentally compared Wellington's burial-place here with that of Napoleon on the other side of the Channel, then went up to the top of the building and looked out to every side over London, which I was already so well acquainted with that I could find my way everywhere alone, take the right omnibuses, and the right trains by the underground, without once asking my way. I spent blissful hours in the National Gallery. This choice collection of paintings, especially the Italian ones, afforded me the intense, overwhelming delight which poetry, the masterpieces of which I knew already, could no longer offer me. At the Crystal Palace I was fascinated by the tree-ferns, as tall as fruit-trees with us, and by the reproductions of the show buildings of the different countries, an Egyptian temple, a house from Pompeii, the Lions' den from the Alhambra. Here, as everywhere, I sought out the Zoological Gardens, where I lingered longest near the hippopotami, who were as curious to watch when swimming as when they were on dry land. Their clumsiness was almost captivating. They reminded me of some of my enemies at home.
Oxford, with the moss-grown, ivy-covered walls, with all the poetry of conservatism, fascinated me by its dignity and its country freshness; there the flower of the English nature was expressed in buildings and trees. The antiquated and non-popular instruction, however, repelled me. And the old classics were almost unrecognisable in English guise, for instance, the anglicised veni, vidi, vici, which was quoted by a student.
The contrast between the English and the French mind was presented to me in all its force when I compared Windsor Castle with Versailles. The former was an old Northern Hall, in which the last act of Oehlenschläger's Palnatoke would have been well staged.
I saw all that I could: the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Hall and Abbey, the Tower and the theatres, the Picture Gallery at Dulwich with Rembrandt's Girl at the Window, the one at Hampton Court, with the portrait of Loyola ascribed to Titian, sailed down the river to Greenwich and lingered in the lovely Gardens at Kew, which gave me a luxuriant impression of English scenery. I also saw the Queen's model farm. Every animal was as splendid a specimen as if it had been intended for an agricultural show, the dairy walls were tiled all over. The bailiff regretted that Prince Albert, who had himself made the drawings for a special kind of milk containers, had not lived to see them made. It was not without its comic aspect to hear him inform you sadly, concerning an old bullock, that the Queen herself had given it the name of Prince Albert.
For me, accustomed to the gay and grotesque life deployed in an evening at the dancing-place of the Parisian students in the Closerie des lilas, it was instructive to compare this with a low English dancing-house, the Holborn Casino, which was merely sad, stiff, and repulsive.