This was the society before which I read the treatise on The Daemonic, and it was Kappers who, with his well-developed intelligence, would not admit the existence of anything of the sort.
The regular meetings went on for six months only, the machinery being too large and heavy in comparison with the results attained. Kappers and his intimate friends, however, saw none the less of each other. The brilliant West Indian continued to pursue his legal studies and to carry on his merry life in Copenhagen for some eighteen months. But his studies gradually came to a standstill, while his gay life took up more and more of his time. He was now living alone in a flat which, to begin with, had been very elegantly furnished, but grew emptier and emptier by degrees, as his furniture was sold, or went to the pawnbroker's. His furniture was followed by his books, and when Schou's "Orders in Council" had also been turned into money, his legal studies ceased of themselves. When the bookshelves were empty it was the turn of the wardrobe and the linen drawers, till one Autumn day in 1861, an emissary of his father, who had been sent to Copenhagen to ascertain what the son was really about, found him in his shirt, without coat or trousers, wrapped up in his fur overcoat, sitting on the floor in his drawing- room, where there was not so much as a chair left. Asked how it was that things had come to such a pass with him, he replied: "It is the curse that follows the coloured race."
A suit of clothes was redeemed for Kappers junior, and he was hurried away as quickly as possible to the German town where his father lived, and where the son explained to everyone who would listen that he had been obliged to leave Copenhagen suddenly "on account of a duel with a gentleman in a very exalted position."
VI.
My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.
One of the members of Kappers' "literary and scientific" society, and the one whom the West Indian had genuinely cared most for, was a young fellow whose father was very much respected, and to whom attention was called for that reason; he was short, a little heavy on his feet, and a trifle indolent, had beautiful eyes, was warm-hearted and well educated, had good abilities without being specially original, and was somewhat careless in his dress, as in other things.
His father was C.N. David, well known in his younger days as a University professor and a liberal politician, who later became the Head of the Statistical Department and a Member of the Senate. He had been in his youth a friend of Johan Ludvig Heiberg, [Footnote: J.L. Heiberg, to whom such frequent allusion is made, was a well-known Danish author of the last century (1791-1860). Among many other things, he wrote a series of vaudevilles for the Royal Theatre at Copenhagen, Of which he was manager. In every piece he wrote there was a special part for his wife, Johanne Luise Heiberg, who was the greatest Danish actress of the 19th century.] and had been dramatic contributor to the latter's paper.
He was a very distinguished satirist and critic and his influence upon the taste and critical opinion of his day can only be compared with that of Holberg in the 18th century.
Now, in concert with Bluhme and a few other of the elder politicians, he had formed a Conservative Fronde, opposed to the policy of the National Liberals. One day as we two young men were sitting in his son's room, drafting the rules for the freshmen's society of five members, the old gentleman came through and asked us what we were writing. "Rules for a society; we want to get them done as quickly as we can." "That is right. That kind of constitution may very well be written out expeditiously. There has not been very much more trouble or forethought spent on the one we have in this country."
It was not, however, so much the internal policy of the National Liberals that he objected to--it was only the Election Law that he was dissatisfied with--as their attitude towards Germany. Whenever a step was taken in the direction of the incorporation of Slesvig, he would exclaim: "We are doing what we solemnly promised not to do. How can anyone be so childish as to believe that it will turn out well!"