Such people do not guide, but their instruction has a fullness, a copiousness, and a wobbly many-sidedness which, provided they do not utterly confuse a pupil, tend to develop his independence in a high degree, since they almost force him to make up his mind for himself. For children can never rest upon anything vague or indefinite; their very instinct of self-preservation demands a plain Yes or a plain No, a for or against, to show them where to turn with their hate and where with their love.
Hence there was no firm and immutable authority that might have guided Niels with its constant clinching of arguments and pointing of ways. He had taken the bit in his teeth, and plunged headlong on any path that opened before him, provided only that it led him away from what had been the home of his feelings and of his thoughts.
He felt a new sense of power in thus seeing with his own eyes and choosing with his own heart and forming himself by his own will. Many new things came to his mind; traits of his own nature that he had never thought of and that seemed unrelated one to the other, fitted themselves together wonderfully and were fused into a rational whole. It was a fascinating time of discovery. Little by little, in fear and uncertain exultation, in incredulous joy, he found himself. He began to realize that he was not like others, and a new spiritual modesty made him shy, awkward, and taciturn. He grew suspicious of questions, and imagined he found hints of his own most hidden thoughts in everything that was said. Having learned to read in his own heart, he supposed everybody else could read what was written there, and he shunned his elders, preferring to roam about alone. It seemed to him that people had suddenly become very intrusive; he developed a slightly hostile feeling toward them as to creatures of another race, and in his loneliness he began to hold them up for scrutiny and judgment. Formerly the names of father, mother, the pastor, the miller, sufficed to characterize, and the name had quite hidden the person from him. But now he saw that the pastor was a jolly little man, who made himself as meek and demure as he could at home to escape the notice of his wife, while abroad he tried to forget the domestic yoke by talking himself into a frenzy of rebellion and loud-voiced thirst for liberty. That was the pastor as he saw him now.
And Mr. Bigum?
He had seen him ready to throw everything overboard for Edele’s love, had heard him deny himself and the soul within him in that hour of passion in the garden, and now he was always talking about the philosopher rising in Olympic calm above the vague whirlwinds and mist-born rainbows of life. It roused a painful contempt in the lad and made his doubts sleep but lightly, ready to wake in a moment. For how could he know that the very things in human nature which Mr. Bigum called by belittling names were otherwise christened when they appeared in himself, and that his Olympic calm toward that which moves common mortals was but a Titan’s disdainful smile, quick with memories of a Titan’s longing and a Titan’s passions.
Chapter V
Six months had passed since Edele’s death, when one of Lyhne’s cousins, Mrs. Refstrup, became a widow. Her husband had been a potter, but the business had never been flourishing, and during his long illness it had quite run to seed, so there was scarcely anything between the widow and actual want. Seven children were more than she could provide for. The two youngest and also the oldest, who could help her in the factory, remained with her, but the others were distributed among the family. The Lyhnes took the second boy, Erik, who was fourteen, and had been studying at the Latin school in the nearest town, where he had free tuition. Now he was to share Mr. Bigum’s instruction with Niels and Frithjof Petersen, the pastor’s boy.
It was very much against his will that he was kept at his books, for he wanted to be a sculptor. His father had called this nonsense, but Lyhne had nothing against it; he said the boy had talent. Still he thought he ought to take his bachelor’s degree first, in order to have something to fall back upon; and besides a classical education was necessary to a sculptor, or was, at least, very desirable. That settled the matter for the time being. Erik had to console himself with the fairly large collection of good engravings and neat bronzes that Lönborggaard had to offer. This meant a great deal to one who had seen nothing but the rubbish bequeathed the local library by a bone-carver more freakish than artistic in taste, and Erik was soon busy with pencil and modelling-stick. No one attracted him as did Guido Reni, who in those days was more famous than Raphael and the greatest; nor is there anything that can open young eyes to the beauty of a work of art better than the certainty that their admiration is authorized up to the highest pinnacle. Andrea del Sarto, Parmigianino, and Luini, who were to mean so much to him later when he and his talent had found each other, left him quite indifferent, while the boldness of Tintoretto and the bitterness of Salvator Rosa and Caravaggio filled him with delight. For sweetness in art has no appeal for the very young; the daintiest of miniature painters begins his career in the footsteps of Buonarotti, and the pleasantest of lyrists sets out on his first voyage under the black sail of bloody tragedy.
Still Erik’s art was to him only a game, only a little better than other games, and he was no more proud of a well-modelled head or a cleverly carved horse than of hitting the weather vane on the church steeple with a stone, or of swimming out to Sönderhagen and back again without resting. These were the games in which he excelled, games requiring physical prowess, strength, endurance, a sure hand, and a practised eye. He cared nothing for the kind of sport Niels and Frithjof liked, where fancy plays the leading rôle, and all the events and triumphs are imagined. The result was that the other two soon left their old pastime to follow Erik’s lead. Their romance books were laid aside, and the interminable story came to a rather violent end one day at a secret session in the hayloft. Silence brooded over its newly filled grave. In fact, they shrank from mentioning it to Erik, for he had not been with them many days before they suspected that he would make fun of them and their story, that he would shame them and lower them in their own eyes. He had the power to do this because he himself was so free from all day-dreams and fancies and enthusiasms. His clear, boyish common sense was as merciless in its perfect healthfulness and as contemptuous of mental idiosyncrasies as children generally are of physical blemishes. For that reason Niels and Frithjof were afraid of him. They formed themselves after him, denied much and concealed more. Niels was especially quick to suppress in himself anything that was not of Erik’s world, and with the burning zeal of the renegade, he scoffed at Frithjof, whose slower, more faithful nature could not instantly throw over the old for the new. His unkind mockery really sprang from jealousy, for he had fallen in love with Erik on the very first day, while the latter, in shy aloofness, half reluctant, half supercilious, just barely and grudgingly allowed himself to be loved.