It was likewise through Frederik Nutzhorn that I, when a young beginner
in the difficult art of life, became acquainted with Madame Magdalene
Thoresen. Our first conversation took place in the open air one Summer
day, at the Klampenborg bathing establishment. Although Magdalene
Thoresen was at that time at least forty-six years old, her warm,
brownish complexion could well stand inspection in the strongest light.
Her head, with its heavy dark hair, was Southern in its beauty, her
mouth as fresh as a young girl's; she had brilliant and very striking
eyes. Her figure was inclined to be corpulent, her walk a trifle heavy,
her bearing and movements full of youth and life.
She was remarkably communicative, open and warmhearted, with a
propensity towards considerable extravagance of speech. Originally
incited thereto by Björnson's peasant stories, she had then published
her first tales, _The Student and Signe's Story_, which belonged, half
to Norwegian, half to Danish literature, and had been well received.
She was the daughter of a fisherman at Fredericia, and after having
known both the buffets and the smiles of Fortune, had come to be on
terms of friendship with many men and women of importance, now
belonging to the recognised personalities of the day. She was also very
well received and much appreciated in the Heiberg circle.
In comparison with her, a woman, I might have been called erudite and
well-informed. Her own knowledge was very desultory. She was interested
in me on account of my youth, and her warm interest attached me to her
for the next five years,--as long, that is, as she remained in Denmark.
She very soon began to confide in me, and although she scarcely did so
unreservedly, still, no woman, at least no mature and gifted woman, had
told me so much about herself before. She was a woman who had felt
strongly and thought much; she had lived a rich, and eventful life; but
all that had befallen her she romanticised. Her poetic tendency was
towards the sublime. She was absolutely veracious, and did not really
mean to adorn her tales, but partly from pride, partly from
whimsicality, she saw everything, from greatest to least, through
beautifully coloured magnifying-glasses, so that a translation of her
communications into every-day language became a very difficult matter,
and when an every-day occurrence was suspected through the narrative,
the same could not be reproduced in an every-day light, and according
to an every-day standard, without wounding the narrator to the quick.
For these reasons I never ventured to include among my Collected Essays
a little biographical sketch of her (written just as she herself had
idealised its events to me), one of the first articles I had printed.
She saw strong natures, rich and deep natures, in lives that were
meagre or unsuccessful. Again, from lack of perspicacity, she sometimes
saw nothing but inefficiency in people with wide intellectual gifts;
thus, she considered that her son-in-law, Henrik Ibsen, who at that
time had not become either known or celebrated, had very imperfect
poetic gifts. "What he writes is as flat as a drawing," she would say.
Or she would remark: "He ought to be more than a collaborator of
Kierkegaard." It was only much later that she discovered his genius.
Björnson, on the other hand, she worshipped with an enthusiastic love;
it was a trouble to her that just about this time he had become very
cool to her.
Vague feelings did not repel her, but all keen and pointed intelligence
did. She was wholly and entirely romantic. Gallicism she objected to;
the clarity of the French seemed to her superficial; she saw depth in
the reserved and taciturn Northern, particularly the Norwegian, nature.
She had groped her way forward for a long time without realising what
her gifts really were. Her husband, who had done all he could to assist
her education, had even for a time imagined, and perhaps persuaded her,
that her gifts lay in the direction of Baggesen's. Now, however, she
had found her vocation and her path in literature.
On all questions of thought, pure and simple, she was extremely vague.
She was a Christian and a Heathen with equal sincerity, a Christian
with her overflowing warm-heartedness, with her honest inclination to
believe, a Heathen in her averseness to any negation of either life or
Nature. She used to say that she loved Christ and Eros equally, or
rather, that to her, they both meant the same. To her, Christianity was
the new, the modern, in contrast to the rationalism of a past age, so
that Christianity and modern views of life in general merged in her
eyes into one unity.
Hers was a deeply feminine nature, and a productive nature. Her fertile
character was free from all taint of over-estimation of herself. She
only revealed a healthy and pleasing self-satisfaction when she
imagined that some person wished to set up himself or herself over her
and misjudge acts or events in her life with respect to which she
considered herself the only person qualified to judge. At such times
she would declare in strong terms that by her own unassisted strength
she had raised herself from a mean and unprotected position to the
level of the best men and women of her day. Herself overflowing with
emotion, and of a noble disposition, she craved affection and goodwill,
and gave back a hundredfold what she received. If she felt herself the
object of cold and piercing observation, she would be silent and
unhappy, but if she herself were at ease and encountered no coolness,
she was all geniality and enthusiasm, though not to such an extent that
her enthusiasm ceased to be critical.
She could over-value and under-value people, but was at the same time a
keen, in fact a marvellous psychologist, and sometimes astonished one
by the pertinent things she said, surprising one by her accurate
estimate of difficult psychological cases. For instance, she understood
as few others did the great artist, the clever coquette, and the old
maid in Heiberg's wife, the actress.
She had no moral prejudices, and had written _Signe's Story_ as a
protest against conventional morality; but she was none the less
thoroughly permeated by Christian and humane ideas of morality, and
there was no element of rebellion in her disposition.
On the whole, she was more a woman than an authoress. Her nature was
tropical in comparison with Mrs. Charite Paludan-Müller's North Pole
nature. She lived, not in a world of ideas remote from reality, but in
a world of feeling and passion, full of affection and admiration,
jealousy and dislike. Being a woman, she was happy at every expression
of pleasure over one of her books that she heard or read of, and liked
to fancy that the solitary young man who sent her an enthusiastic
letter of thanks was only one of hundreds who thought as he did. Like a
woman, also, she was hurt by indifference, which, however, her warm
heart rarely encountered.
This richly endowed woman made me appear quite new to myself, inasmuch
as, in conversations with my almost maternal friend, I began to think I
was of a somewhat cold nature, a nature which in comparison with hers
seemed rather dry, unproductive and unimaginative, a creature with
thoughts ground keen.
Magdalene Thoresen compared me one day to an unlighted glass
candelabra, hanging amid several others all lighted up, which had the
gleam of the fire on the countless facets of its crystals, but was
itself nothing but cold, smooth, polished, prisms.
Thus during my association with Magdalene Thoresen I came to regard
myself in a new light, when I saw myself with her eyes, and I was
struck more than ever by how different the verdicts over me would be
were my various friends and acquaintances each to describe me is I
appeared to them. To Magdalene Thoresen I was all mind, to others all
passion, to others again all will. At the Nutzhorns' I went by the name
of the modest B., elsewhere I was deemed conceitedly ambitious, some
people thought me of a mild temper, others saw in me a quarrelsome
unbeliever.
All this was a challenge to me to come to a clear understanding about
my real nature. The fruits of my work must show me what sort of man I
was.