Six months afterwards he was no more.
XVII.
During those years I came into very curious relations with another celebrity of the time. This was M. Goldschmidt, the author, whose great talent I had considerable difficulty in properly appreciating, so repelled was I by his uncertain and calculating personality.
I saw Goldschmidt for the first time, when I was a young man, at a large ball at a club in Copenhagen.
A man who had emigrated to England as a poor boy returned to Copenhagen in the sixties at the age of fifty, after having acquired a considerable fortune. He was uneducated, kind, impeccably honourable, and was anxious to secure acquaintances and associates for his adopted daughter, a delicate young girl, who was strange to Copenhagen. With this object in view, he invited a large number of young people to a ball in the rooms of the King's Club, provided good music and luxurious refreshments. This man was a cousin of Goldschmidt's, and as he himself was unable to make more of a speech than a short welcome to table, he begged "his cousin, the poet," to be his spokesman on this occasion.
One would have thought that so polished a writer, such a master of language, as Goldschmidt, would be able, with the greatest ease, to make an after-dinner speech, especially when he had had plenty of time to prepare himself; but the gift of speaking is, as everyone knows, a gift in itself. And a more unfortunate speaker than Goldschmidt could not be. He had not even the art of compelling silence while he spoke.
That evening he began rather tactlessly by telling the company that their host, who was a rich man, had earned his money in a strictly honourable manner; it was always a good thing to know "that one had clear ground to dance upon"; then he dwelt on the Jewish origin of the giver of the feast, and, starting from the assumption that the greater number of the invited guests were young Jews and Jewesses, he formulated his toast in praise of "the Jewish woman, who lights the Sabbath candles." The young Jewesses called out all at once: "The Danish woman I The Danish woman! We are Danish!" They were irritated at the dead Romanticism into which Goldschmidt was trying to push them back. They lighted no Sabbath candles! they did not feel themselves Jewish either by religion or nationality. The day of Antisemitism had not arrived. Consequently there was still no Zionist Movement. They had also often felt vexed at the descriptions that Goldschmidt in his novels frequently gave of modern Jews, whose manners and mode of expression he screwed back fifty years.
These cries, which really had nothing offensive about them, made Goldschmidt lose his temper to such an extent that he shouted, in great exasperation: "Will you keep silence while I speak! What manners are these! I will teach you to keep silence!" and so forth,--which evoked a storm of laughter. He continued for some time to rebuke their exuberant mirth in severe terms, but was so unsuccessful that he broke off his speech and, very much out of humour, sat down.
Not long afterwards, perhaps in the year 1865, I came into contact with Goldschmidt once only, when walking one evening with Magdalene Thoresen. On meeting this lady, whom he knew, he turned round, walking with her as far as her house on the shores of the Lakes, after which his way led towards the town, as did mine. As long as Mrs. Thoresen was present, he naturally addressed his conversation to her and expressed himself, as his habit was, without much ceremony. For instance, he said: "I don't as a rule care for women writers, not even for those we have; but I will concede that, of all the ladies who write, you are the freshest." When Mrs. Thoresen brought the conversation round to her favourite subject, love, he said, banteringly: "My heart is like the flags of the Zouave Regiments, so pierced with holes that it is almost impossible to tell what the material originally looked like."
On the whole, he was animated and polite, but his glance was somewhat stinging.