Recollections of My Childhood and Youth

by Georg Brandes

It thus seemed as though many of the essential conditions of a tolerably permanent union between us were present. But during the first conversation in which he deigned to be interested in my views, there occurred in our friendship a little rift which widened to a chasm. Vilsing sprang back horrified when he heard how I, greenhorn though I was, regarded life and men and what I considered right. "You are in the clutches of Evil, and your desire is towards the Evil. I have not time or inclination to unfold an entire Christology now, but what you reject is the Ideal, and what you appraise is the Devil himself. God! God! How distressed I am for you! I would give my life to save you. But enough about it for the present; I have not time just now; I have to go out to dinner."

This was our last serious conversation. I was not saved. He did not give his life. He went for a vacation tour the following Summer holidays, avoided me on his return, and soon we saw no more of each other.

IV.

The theory, the intimation of which roused Vilsing to such a degree, bore in its form witness to such immaturity that it could only have made an impression on a youth whose immaturity, in spite of his age, was greater still. To present it with any degree of clearness is scarcely possible; it was not sufficiently clear in itself for that. But this was about what it amounted to:

The introspection and energetic self-absorption to which I had given myself up during my last few years at school became even more persistent on my release from the restraint of school and my free admission to the society of grown-up people.

I took advantage of my spare time in Copenhagen, and on the restricted travels that I was allowed to take, to slake my passionate thirst for life; firstly, by pondering ever and anon over past sensations, and secondly, by plunging into eager and careful reading of the light literature of all different countries and periods that I had heard about, but did not yet myself know at first hand.

Through all that I experienced and read, observed and made my own, my attitude towards myself was, that before all, I sought to become clear as to what manner of man I really, in my inmost being, was. I asked myself who I was. I endeavoured to discover the mysterious word that would break the charm of the mists in which I found myself and would answer my fundamental question, What was I? And then at last, my ponderings and my readings resulted in my finding the word that seemed to fit, although nowadays one can hardly hear it without a smile, the word Daemonic.

I was daemonic in giving myself this reply it seemed to me that I had solved the riddle of my nature. I meant thereby, as I then explained it to myself, that the choice between good and evil did not present itself to me, as to others, since evil did not interest me. For me, it was not a question of a choice, but of an unfolding of my ego, which had its justification in itself.

That which I called the daemonic I had encountered for the first time outside my own mind in Lermontof's hero. Petsjórin was compelled to act in pursuance of his natural bent, as though possessed by his own being. I felt myself in a similar manner possessed. I had met with the word Daimon and Daimones in Plato; Socrates urges that by daemons the Gods, or the children of the Gods, were meant. I felt as though I, too, were one of the children of the Gods. In all the great legendary figures of the middle ages I detected the feature of divine possession, especially in the two who had completely fascinated the poets of the nineteenth century, Don Juan and Faust. The first was the symbol of magic power over women, the second of the thirst for knowledge giving dominion over humanity and Nature. Among my comrades, in Vilsing, even in the hunch-backed fellow with the unsuccessful moustache, I had seen how the Don Juan type which had turned their heads still held sway over the minds of young people; I myself could quite well understand the magic which this beautiful ideal of elementary irresistibility must have; but the Faust type appealed to me, with my thirst for knowledge, very much more. Still, the main thing for me was that in the first great and wholly modern poets that I made acquaintance with, Byron and his intellectual successors, Lermontof and Heine, I recognised again the very fundamental trait that I termed daemonic, the worship of one's own originality, under the guise of an uncompromising love of liberty.

I was always brooding over this idea of the daemonic with which my mind was filled. I recorded my thoughts on the subject in my first long essay (lost, for that matter), On the Daemonic, as it Reveals Itself in the Human Character.