The Meeting of Scandinavian students at Copenhagen in June, 1862, taught me what it meant to be a Scandinavian. Like all the other undergraduates, I was Scandinavian at heart, and the arrangements of the Meeting were well calculated to stir the emotions of youth. Although, an insignificant Danish student, I did not take part in the expedition to North Zealand specially arranged for our guests, consequently neither was present at the luncheon given by Frederik VII to the students at Fredensborg (which was interrupted by a heavy shower), I was nevertheless deeply impressed by the Meeting.
It was a fine sight to behold the students from the three other Scandinavian Universities come sailing across the Sound from Malmö to Copenhagen. The Norwegians were especially striking, tall and straight, with narrow faces under tasseled caps, like a wood of young fir trees; the national type was so marked that at first I could hardly see any difference between them.
For me, there were three perfect moments during the festivities. The first was at the meeting of all the students in the Square of Our Lady, after the arrival of the visitors, when the scholars of the Metropolitan School, crowding the windows of the building, greeted them with a shout of delight. There was such a freshness, such a childish enthusiasm about it, that some of us had wet eyes. It was as though the still distant future were acclaiming the young ones now advancing to the assault, and promising them sympathy and conquest.
The second was when the four new flags embroidered by Danish ladies for the students were consecrated and handed over. Clausen's speech was full of grandeur, and addressed, not to the recipients, but to the flags as living beings: "Thou wilt cross the Baltic to the sanctuary at Upsala. Thou wilt cross the Cattegat to the land of rocks...." and the address to each of the flags concluded: "Fortune and Honour attend thee!" The evening after the consecration of the flags, there was a special performance at the Royal Theatre for the members of the Meeting, at which Heiberg, radiant as she always was, and saluted with well-merited enthusiasm, played Sophie in the vaudeville "No," with a rosette of the Scandinavian colours at her waist. Then it was that Paludan-Müller's prologue, recited by our idolised actor, Michael Wiehe, caused me the third thrilling moment. Listening to the words of the poet from a bad place in the gallery, I was hardly the only one who felt strangely stirred, as Wiehe, letting his eyes roam round the theatre, said:
Oh! that the young of the North might one day worthily play
Their part! Oh that each one might do his best
For the party he has chosen! That never there be lack
Of industry, fidelity, strength and talents!
And may he firm step forth, the mighty genius
(Mayhap, known only to the secret power within him,
Seated amongst us now), the mighty genius,
Who, as Fate hath willed it, is to play
The mighty part and do the mighty things.
Involuntarily we looked round, seeking for the one to whom the poet's summons referred.
The general spirit of this Meeting has been called flat in comparison with that pervading former meetings. It did not strike the younger participants so. A breath of Scandinavianism swept over every heart; one felt borne along on a historic stream. It seemed like a bad dream that the peoples of the North had for so many centuries demolished and laid waste each other, tapped one another for blood and gold, rendered it impossible for the North to assert herself and spread her influence in Europe.
One could feel at the Meeting, though very faintly, that the Swedes and Norwegians took more actual pleasure in each other, and regarded themselves as to a greater extent united than either of them looked upon themselves as united with the Danes, who were outside the political Union. I was perhaps the only Dane present who fancied I detected this, but when I mentioned what I thought I observed to a gifted young Norwegian, so far was he from contradicting me that he merely replied: "Have you noticed that, too?"
Notwithstanding, during the whole of the Meeting, one constantly heard expressed on every hand the conviction that if Germany were shortly to declare war against Denmark--which no one doubted--the Swedes and Norwegians would most decidedly not leave the Danes in the lurch. The promise was given oftener than it was asked. Only, of course, it was childish on the part of those present at the Meeting to regard such promises, given by the leaders of the students, and by the students themselves in festive mood, as binding on the nations and their statesmen.
I did not make any intellectually inspiring acquaintances through the Meeting, although I was host to two Upsala students; neither of them, however, interested me. I got upon a friendly footing through mutual intellectual interests with Carl von Bergen, later so well known as an author, he, like myself, worshipping philosophy and hoping to contribute to intellectual progress. Carl von Bergen was a self-confident, ceremonious Swede, who had read a great many books. At that time he was a new Rationalist, which seemed to promise one point of interest in common; but he was a follower of the Boström philosophy, and as such an ardent Theist. At this point we came into collision, my researches and reflections constantly tending to remove me farther from a belief in any God outside the world, so that after the Meeting Carl von Bergen and I exchanged letters on Theism and Pantheism, which assumed the width and thickness of treatises. For very many years the Swedish essayist and I kept up a friendly, though intermittent intercourse. Meanwhile von Bergen, whose good qualities included neither character nor originality, inclined, as years went on, more and more towards Conservatism, and at forty years old he had attained to a worship of what he had detested, and a detestation of what he had worshipped. His vanity simultaneously assumed extraordinary proportions. In a popular Encyclopaedia, which he took over when the letter B was to be dealt with, and, curiously enough, disposed of shortly afterwards, von Bergen was treated no less in detail than Buonaparte. He did battle with some of the best men and women in Sweden, such as Ellen Key and Knut Wicksell, who did not fail to reply to him. When in 1889 his old friend from the Students' Meeting gave some lectures on Goethe in Stockholm, he immediately afterwards directed some poor opposition lectures against him, which neither deserved nor received any reply. It had indeed become a specialty of his to give "opposition lectures." When he died, some few years later, what he had written was promptly forgotten.