“It certainly contains several distinguished men,” answered Joachim; “but must one speak of the whole? Yes, you know I am not musical, and cannot therefore express myself in an artistical manner about music, but certain it is that something lay in my ear, in my feeling, which, in Paris, whispered to me, ‘That is excellent!’ Here, on the contrary, it cries, ‘With moderation! with moderation!’ The voice is the first; she is the lady; the instruments, on the contrary, are the cavaliers who shall conduct the former before the public. Gently they should take her by the hand; she must stand quite foremost; but here the instruments thrust her aside, and it is to me as if each instrument would have the first place, and constantly shouted, ‘Here am I! here am I!”
“That sounds very well!” said Sophie; “but one may not believe you! You have fallen in love with foreign countries, and, therefore, at home everything must be slighted.”
“By no means! The Danish ladies, for instance, appear the prettiest, the most modest whom I have known.”
“Appear?” repeated Otto.
“Joachim possesses eloquence,” said the lady of the house.
“That has developed itself abroad!” answered he: “here at home there are only two ways in which it can publicly develop itself—in the pulpit, and at a meeting in the shooting-house. Yet it is true that now we are going to have a Diet and a more political life. I feel already, in anticipation, the effect; we shall only live for this life, the newspapers will become merely political, the poets sing politics the painters choose scenes from political life. ‘C’est un Uebergang!’ as Madame La Flèche says. [Author’s Note: Holberg’s Jean de France.] Copenhagen is too small to be a great, and too great to be a small city. See, there lies the fault!”
Otto felt an irresistible desire to contradict him in most things which he said about home. But the cousin parried every bold blow with a joke.
“Copenhagen must be the Paris of the North,” said he, “and that it certainly would become in fifty, or twice that number of years. The situation was far more beautiful than that of the city of the Seine. The marble church must be elevated, and become a Pantheon, adorned with the works of Thorwaldsen and other artists; Christiansborg, a Louvre, whose gallery you visit; Öster Street and Pedermadsen’s passage, arcades such as are in Paris, covered with glass roofs and flagged, shops on both sides, and in the evening, when thousands of gas-lamps burnt, here should be the promenade; the esplanades would be the Champs Elysées, with swings and slides, music, and mâts de cocagne. [Author’s Note: High smooth poles, to the top of which victuals, clothes, or money are attached. People of the lower classes then try to climb up and seize the prizes. The best things are placed at the very top of the pole.] On the Peblinger Lake, as on the Seine, there should be festive water excursions made. Voilà!” exclaimed he, “that would be splendid!”
“That might be divine!” said Sophie.
Animation and thought lay in the cousin’s countenance; his fine features became striking from their expression. Thus did his image stamp itself in Otto’s soul, thus did it place itself beside Sophie’s image as she stood there, with her large brown eyes, round which played thought and smiles, whilst they rested on the cousin. The beautifully formed white hand, with its taper fingers, played with the curls which fell over her cheeks. Otto would not think of it.