I continued my legal studies with patient persistence, and gradually,
after having made myself master of Civil Proceedings, I worked my way
through the whole of the juridic system, Roman Law excluded. But the
industry devoted to this was purely mechanical. I pursued my other
studies, on the contrary, with delight, even tried to produce something
myself, and during the last months of 1862 elaborated a very long paper
on _Romeo and Juliet_, chiefly concerning itself with the fundamental
problems of the tragedy, as interpreted in the Aesthetics of the day;
it has been lost, like so much else that I wrote during those years. I
sent it to Professor Bröchner and asked his opinion of it.
Simultaneously I began to work upon a paper on the Idea of Fate in
Greek Tragedy, a response to the Prize question of the year 1862-1863,
and on December 31, 1862, had finished the Introduction, which was
published for the first time about six years later, under the title
_The Idea of Tragic Fate_. Appended to this was a laborious piece of
work dealing with the conceptions of Fate recorded in all the Greek
tragedies that have come down to us. This occupied the greater part of
the next six months.
The published Introduction gives a true picture of the stage of my
development then, partly because it shows the manner in which I had
worked together external influences, the Kierkegaardian thoughts and
the Hegelian method, partly because with no little definiteness it
reveals a fundamental characteristic of my nature and a fundamental
tendency of my mind, since it is, throughout, a protest against the
ethical conception of poetry and is a proof of how moral ideas, when
they become part of an artistic whole, lose their peculiar stamp and
assume another aspect.
In November, 1862, I joined a very large recently started
undergraduates' society, which met once a fortnight at Borch's College
to hear lectures and afterwards discuss them together. It numbered full
fifty members, amongst them most of the men of that generation who
afterwards distinguished themselves in Denmark. The later known
politician, Octavius Hansen, was Speaker of the Meetings, and even then
seemed made for the post. His parliamentary bearing was unrivalled. It
was not for nothing he was English on the mother's side. He looked
uncommonly handsome on the platform, with his unmoved face, his
beautiful eyes, and his brown beard, curled like that of Pericles in
the Greek busts. He was good-humoured, just, and well-informed. Of the
numerous members, Wilhelm Thomsen the philologist was certainly the
most prominent, and the only one whom I later on came to value, that
is, for purely personal reasons; in daily association it was only once
in a way that Thomsen could contribute anything from his special store
of knowledge. One day, when we had been discussing the study of
cuneiform inscriptions, the young philologist had said, half in jest,
half in earnest: "If a stone were to fall down from the Sun with an
inscription in unknown signs, in an unknown language, upon it, we
should be able to make it out,"--a remark which I called to mind many
years later when Thomsen deciphered the Ancient Turkish inscriptions in
the Mountains of Siberia.
A great many political lectures were given. I gave one on Heiberg's
Aesthetics.
On January 1, 1863, I received a New Year's letter from Bröchner, in
which he wrote that the essay on Romeo and Juliet had so impressed him
that, in his opinion, no one could dispute my fitness to fill the Chair
of Aesthetics, which in the nature of things would soon be vacant,
since Hauch, at his advanced age, could hardly continue to occupy it
very long.
Thus it was that my eager patron first introduced what became a
wearisome tangle, lasting a whole generation, concerning my claims to a
certain post, which gradually became in my life what the French call
_une scie_, an irritating puzzle, in which I myself took no part, but
which attached itself to my name.
That letter agitated me very much; not because at so young an age the
prospect of an honourable position in society was held out to me by a
man who was in a position to judge of my fitness for it, but because
this smiling prospect of an official post was in my eyes a snare which
might hold me so firmly that I should not be able to pursue the path of
renunciation that alone seemed to me to lead to my life's goal. I felt
myself an apostle, but an apostle and a professor were, very far apart.
I certainly remembered that the Apostle Paul had been a tent-maker. But
I feared that, once appointed, I should lose my ideal standard of life
and sink down into insipid mediocrity. If I once deviated from my path,
I might not so easily find it again. It was more difficult to resign a
professorship than never to accept it. And, once a professor, a man
soon got married and settled down as a citizen of the state, not in a
position to dare anything. To dispose of my life at Bröchner's request
would be like selling my soul to the Devil.
So I replied briefly that I was too much attached to Hauch to be able
or willing to speculate on his death. But to this Bröchner very
logically replied: "I am not speculating on his death, but on his life,
for the longer he lives, the better you will be prepared to be his
successor."
By the middle of June, 1863, the prize paper was copied out. In
September the verdict was announced; the gold medal was awarded to me
with a laudatory criticism. The gold medal was also won by my friend
Jens Paludan-Müller for a historic paper, and in October, at the annual
Ceremony at the University, we were presented with the thin medal
bearing the figure of Athene, which, for my part, being in need of a
Winter overcoat, I sold next day. Clausen, the Rector, a little man
with regular features, reserved face and smooth white hair, said to us
that he hoped this might prove the first fruits of a far-reaching
activity in the field of Danish literature. But what gave me much
greater pleasure was that I was shaken hands with by Monrad, who was
present as Minister for Education. Although Clausen was well known,
both as a theologian and an important National Liberal, I cared nothing
for him. But I was a little proud of Monrad's hand-pressure, for his
political liberality, and especially his tremendous capacity for work,
compelled respect, while from his handsome face with its thoughtful,
commanding forehead, there shone the evidence of transcendent ability.