The priest asked us two young men to go and hear his Sunday sermon, and promised that we should be pleased with it. We went to church somewhat expectant, and the sermon was certainly a most unusual one. It was delivered with great rapture, after the priest had bent his head in his hands for a time in silent reflection. With great earnestness he addressed himself to his congregation and demanded, after having put before them some of the cures in the New Testament, generally extolled as miracles, whether they dared maintain that these so-called miracles could not have taken place according to Nature's laws. And when he impressively called out: "Darest thou, with thy limited human intelligence, say, 'This cannot happen naturally?'" it was in the same tone and style in which another priest would have shouted out: "Darest thou, with thy limited human intelligence, deny the miracle?" The peasants, who, no doubt, understood his words quite in this latter sense, did not understand in the least the difference and the contrast, but judged much the same as a dog to whom one might talk angrily with caressing words or caressingly with abusive words, simply from the speaker's tone; and both his tone and facial expression were ecstatic. They perceived no heresy and felt themselves no less edified by the address than did the two young Copenhagen graduates.
XXII.
My first newspaper articles were printed in The Fatherland and the Illustrated Times; the very first was a notice of Paludan- Müller's Fountain of Youth, in which I had compressed matter for three or four lectures; a commissioned article on Dante was about the next, but this was of no value. But it was a great event to see one's name printed in a newspaper for the first time, and my mother saw it not without emotion.
About this time Henrik Ibsen's first books fell into my hands and attracted my attention towards this rising poet, who, among the leading Danish critics, encountered a reservation of appreciation that scarcely concealed ill-will. From Norway I procured Ibsen's oldest dramas, which had appeared there.
Frederik Algreen-Ussing asked me to contribute to a large biographical dictionary, which he had for a long time been planning and preparing, and which he had just concluded a contract for with the largest Danish publishing firm of the time. A young man who hated the August Association and all its deeds could not fail to feel scruples about engaging in any collaboration with its founder. But Algreen-Ussing knew how to vanquish all such scruples, inasmuch as he waived all rights of censorship, and left it to each author to write as he liked upon his own responsibility. And he was perfectly loyal to his promise. Moreover, the question here was one of literature only, and not politics.
As the Danish authors were to be dealt with in alphabetical order, the article that had to be set about at once was an account of the only Danish poet whose name began with Aa. Thus it was that Emil Aarestrup came to be the first Danish poet of the past of whom I chanced to write. I heard of the existence of a collection of unprinted letters from Aarestrup to his friend Petersen, the grocer, which were of very great advantage to my essay. A visit that I paid to the widow of the poet, on the other hand, led to no result whatever. It was strange to meet the lady so enthusiastically sung by Aarestrup in his young days, as a sulky and suspicious old woman without a trace of former beauty, who declared that she had no letters from her husband, and could not give me any information about him. It was only a generation later that his letters to her came into my hands.
In September, 1865, the article on Aarestrup was finished. It was intended to be quickly followed up by others on the remaining Danish authors in A. But it was the only one that was written, for Algreen- Ussing's apparently so well planned undertaking was suddenly brought to a standstill. The proprietors of the National Liberal papers declared, as soon as they heard of the plan, that they would not on any account agree to its being carried out by a man who took up such a "reactionary" position in Danish politics as Ussing, and in face of their threat to annihilate the undertaking, the publishers, who were altogether dependent on the attitude of these papers, did not dare to defy them. They explained to Algreen-Ussing that they felt obliged to break their contract with him, but were willing to pay him the compensation agreed upon beforehand for failure to carry it out. He fought long to get his project carried through, but his efforts proving fruitless, he refused, from pride, to accept any indemnity, and was thus compelled to see with bitterness many years' work and an infinite amount of trouble completely wasted. Shortly afterwards he succumbed to an attack of illness.
XXIII.
A young man who plunged into philosophical study at the beginning of the sixties in Denmark, and was specially engrossed by the boundary relations between Philosophy and Religion, could not but come to the conclusion that philosophical life would never flourish in Danish soil until a great intellectual battle had been set on foot, in the course of which conflicting opinions which had never yet been advanced in express terms should be made manifest and wrestle with one another, until it became clear which standpoints were untenable and which could be maintained. Although he cherished warm feelings of affection for both R. Nielsen and Bröchner the two professors of Philosophy, he could not help hoping for a discussion between them of the fundamental questions which were engaging his mind. As Bröchner's pupil, I said a little of what was in my mind to him, but could not induce him to begin. Then I begged Gabriel Sibbern to furnish a thorough criticism of Nielsen's books, but he declined. I began to doubt whether I should be able to persuade the elder men to speak. A review in The Fatherland of the first part of Nielsen's Logic of Fundamental Ideas roused my indignation. It was in diametric opposition to what I considered irrefutably true, and was written in the style, and with the metaphors, which the paper's literary criticisms had brought into fashion, a style that was repugnant to me with its sham poetical, or meaninglessly flat expressions ("Matter is the hammer-stroke that the Ideal requires"--"Spontaneity is like food that has once been eaten").
In an eleven-page letter to Bröchner I condensed all that I had thought about the philosophical study at the University during these first years of my youth, and proved to him, in the keenest terms I could think of, that it was his duty to the ideas whose spokesman he was, to come forward, and that it would be foolish, in fact wrong, to leave the matter alone. I knew well enough that I was jeopardising my precious friendship with Bröchner by my action, but I was willing to take the risk. I did not expect any immediate result of my letter, but thought to myself that it should ferment, and some time in the future might bear fruit. The outcome of it far exceeded my expectations, inasmuch as Bröchner was moved by my letter, and not only thanked me warmly for my daring words, but went without delay to Nielsen and told him that he intended to write a book on his entire philosophical activity and significance. Nielsen took his announcement with a good grace.