Recollections of My Childhood and Youth

by Georg Brandes

Still, I did not bear a grudge long, and the evening before I left we met once again, at her request, and then she gave me the first and only kiss, neither of us saying anything but the one word, "Good-bye."

I have never seen her since. I heard that she died twenty years ago in Brazil. But two years after this, when I was feeling my first schoolboy affection for an eleven-year-old girl, she silenced me at a children's ball with the scoffing remark: "Ah! it was you who let Henrietta K. thrash you under the May-tree at Farum." Yes, it was I. So cruel had my fair lady been that she had not even denied herself the pleasure of telling her friends of the ignominious treatment to which she had subjected a comrade who, from pure feeling of honour, had not struck back.

This was my first real experience of feminine nature.

VII.

For nearly ten years I went to one and the same school. I came to know the way there and back, to and from the three different places, all near together, where my parents lived during the time, as I knew no other. In that part of the town, all about the Round Tower, I knew, not only every house, but every archway, every door, every window, every Paving-stone. It all gradually imprinted itself so deeply upon me that in after years, when gazing on foreign sights and foreign towns, even after I had been living for a long time in the same place, I had a curious feeling that, however beautiful and fascinating it all might be, or perhaps for that very reason, it was dreamland, unreality, which would one day elude me and vanish; reality was the Round Tower in Copenhagen and all that lay about it. It was ugly, and altogether unattractive, but it was reality. That you always found again.

Similarly, though in a somewhat different sense, the wooded landscape in the neighbourhood of Copenhagen, to be exact, the view over the Hermitage Meadows down to the Sound, as it appears from the bench opposite the Slesvig Stone, the first and dearest type of landscape beauty with which I became acquainted, was endowed to me with an imprint of actuality which no other landscape since, be it never so lovely or never so imposing, has ever been able to acquire.

VIII.

The instruction at school was out of date, inasmuch as, in every branch, it lacked intelligibility. The masters were also necessarily, in some instances, anything but perfect, even when not lacking in knowledge of their subject. Nevertheless, the instruction as a whole, especially when one bears in mind how cheap it was, must be termed good, careful and comprehensive; as a rule it was given conscientiously. When as a grown up man I have cast my thoughts back, what has surprised me most is the variety of subjects that were instilled into a boy in ten years. There certainly were teachers so lacking in understanding of the proper way to communicate knowledge that the instruction they gave was altogether wasted. For instance, I learnt geometry for four or five years without grasping the simplest elements of the science. The principles of it remained so foreign to me that I did not even recognise a right-angled triangle, if the right angle were uppermost. It so happened that the year before I had to sit for my examinations, a young University student in his first year, who had been only one class in front of the rest of us, offered us afternoon instruction in trigonometry and spherical geometry gratis, and all who appreciated the help that was being offered to them streamed to his lessons. This young student, later Pastor Jörgen Lund, had a remarkable gift for mathematics, and gave his instruction with a lucidity, a fire, and a swing that carried his hearers with him. I, who had never before been able to understand a word of the subject, became keenly interested in it, and before many lessons were over was very well up in it. As Jörgen Lund taught mathematics, so all the other subjects ought to have been taught. We were obliged to be content with less.

Lessons might have been a pleasure. They never were, or rather, only the Danish ones. But in childhood's years, and during the first years of boyhood they were fertilising. As a boy they hung over me like a dread compulsion; yet the compulsion was beneficial. It was only when I was almost fourteen that I began inwardly to rebel against the time which was wasted, that the stupidest and laziest of the boys might be enabled to keep up with the industrious and intelligent. There was too much consideration shown towards those who would not work or could not understand. And from the time I was sixteen, school was my despair. I had done with it all, was beyond it all, was too matured to submit to the routine of lessons; my intellectual pulses no longer beat within the limits of school. What absorbed my interest was the endeavour to become master of the Danish language in prose and verse, and musings over the mystery of existence. In school I most often threw up the sponge entirely, and laid my head on my arms that I might neither see nor hear what was going on around me.

There was another reason, besides my weariness of it all, which at this latter period made my school-going a torture to me. I was by now sufficiently schooled for my sensible mother to think it would be good for me to make, if it were but a small beginning, towards earning my own living. Or rather, she wanted me to earn enough to pay for my amusements myself. So I tried, with success, to find pupils, and gave them lessons chiefly on Sunday mornings; but in order to secure them I had called myself Studiosus. Now it was an ever present terror with me lest I should meet any of my pupils as I went to school in the morning, or back at midday, with my books in a strap under my arm. Not to betray myself, I used to stuff these books in the most extraordinary places, inside the breast of my coat till it bulged, and in all my pockets till they burst.